Sweat poured down Ash’s chest as he sat up and tried to clear his brain from the image in his mind.

Those eyes. Why did he never dream of anything else? Humans got to see bucolic settings or the face of loved ones when they slept. All he saw was a child’s face, with eyes that burned him down to the very core.

Nightmares. This kind of dream was called a nightmare.

He needed to give up this idiotic habit. Technically, angels didn’t require sleep. He’d taken up the practice to blend in during his long years of exile. Now sleeping was so engrained he didn’t know how to stop—but it was long past time he made the effort.

Why the hell was he suddenly having this nightmare again? It was understandable years ago, right after he encountered the child, but it had thankfully stopped after a few months. Now it was starting again.

The meaning was obvious. Over the years, there had been hundreds of casualties of Amducious’ curse—or tens of thousands if the collateral damage from a building collapse or explosion was counted. Because that was what the Firehorse curse did. It was a spell of ruination and death, one manifested through a single person.

Named after an Asiatic legend by an unknown soldier, the Firehorse curse was pernicious and unpredictable. A man or woman would be perfectly ordinary one day, and then the next—boom! Out of nowhere, it would strike. Those afflicted instantly became walking, talking magnets for disaster. Everywhere they went, destruction followed…until they were killed. Then another Firehorse would rise, and the cycle would begin anew.

The curse blighted the land, touching every citizen in Bastille. But the child was the victim who haunted Ash.

The little girl had been the youngest Firehorse in history, no more than five years old. She was the youngest person he’d ever killed.

Despite the circumstances, Ash had never attempted to deny responsibility for her death. He might not have murdered her himself, but she was still dead because of what he’d done…

It would have been kinder to strangle the life from her little body.

He squeezed his eyes shut tight, and focused on his breathing. The twin weights of guilt and regret pinned him to the earth, the bonds invisible but no less effective than adamantine chains. But Ash didn’t try to block out the child’s face. There would be no point to such a futile effort.

Denial was a luxury only humans could afford. Instead, he went deeper, focusing his photographic memory on the lines of her face and the colors of her eyes. The hazy image from his dream sharpened in his mind until it was like she was standing in front of him. Then he began to pray for his soul and for hers.

He didn’t know anything about her beyond her name, but Ash would never forget her. To even try was sacrilege.

When he was done, he rose and bathed, dressing in his armor by rote. He had to get moving. Marcus was expecting him. His wartime aide continued to serve as his right hand. Today, they were overseeing the final construction phased of the Eastern aqueduct, the largest engineering works attempted in Bastille since the erection of the demon tower.

Amducious had intended the tower to be the last new building in Bastille. He’d built it using human slaves, mixing their bones into the walls when they died from exhaustion, and, as he’d described to Raphael years ago, painting the exterior with their blood.

The king had cast the Firehorse curse from the turreted altar room at the very top of the structure. No doubt he’d looked down from that room’s windows, gloating over his own magnificence. From that moment the Paris Ash had known was dead, never to return. The curse would ensure it would never rise again.

But now the demon was gone, and Ash had to carry on. He had no choice.

After he killed Amducious, Ash had waited for God’s light to shine on him. He fully expected the gates of Heaven to open and welcome him home. That hadn’t happened. The skies had remained silent.

At first, he was furious with Raphael. Ash had been convinced the Seraph had lied to him, making promises he couldn’t keep without His knowledge.

Then there had been a flood, followed by an unlikely fire that had wiped out an entire neighborhood in District Six along the banks of the Seine. That was when Ash realized the curse had not been broken. Overthrowing Amducious hadn’t ended it. In fact, with the demon king gone, his chances of breaking it had dwindled to almost nothing.

Ash was still searching for a way.

If only I hadn’t been so stupid, he thought, second-guessing himself for the thousandth time. He should have taken Amducious prisoner instead of killing him—not that the king had given Ash a choice. In that final moment, there had only been one option.

The king was dead, but the curse lived on.

In the beginning, it hadn’t seemed so bad. During the years of demon rule, it had been only natural that death and destruction be the order of the day. The famines, earthquakes, and building collapses had all seemed par for the course when a horde of demons was in charge.

But in today’s Bastille, the demons were all but extinct. Ash and his band had wiped most of them out. And still, the havoc continued. The curse was too strong. Its malevolence was soaked into the soil and into the air they breathed. It undermined everything they did, knocking down whatever innovation or stride they made to improve their lives.

If they made one step forward, the Firehorse would rise to send them reeling back.

Enough feeling sorry for yourself. Focus on the rebuilding. The routine kept him going. As of today, the curse hadn’t struck in seven months, almost eight. With luck, he could finish the canal and aqueduct project before it did.

The people whispered that Amducious’ gift, as the curse was sometimes perversely called, was beginning to wane. That perhaps without the energy of the demon king to keep it going, it would wind down on its own.

Ash wanted to rail at these fools. Though he’d never found the details of how the curse had been cast, he knew enough about Amducious to guess the demon would never make things so easy.

* * *

Ash waved Marcus and his team over to him at the edge of the construction zone.

“Get those supports ready to brace the structure while we pour the concrete,” he ordered the group. “We have everything we need to complete this in a few days. Only use the materials I’ve marked as safe. Don’t leave the curse a foothold to undermine our efforts here.”

The four men Marcus had chosen as overseers for the aqueduct project agreed with deferential murmurs before scattering to carry out their orders. Ash’s aide stayed behind.

“Do you think we have enough blessed sand?” Marcus asked, taking a pencil from behind his ear and jotting down a few notes on a clipboard he’d made from the hood of a rusted car.

“I believe so, but—”

“Bring more for you to bless just in case,” his aide interrupted with a smile. “Consider it done, my lord.”

“Redundancy—”

“Is next to godliness,” Marcus finished for him.

It was Ash’s favorite refrain on the job.

He snorted and waved the man on, deciding against yet another reminder not to call him a lord. It never made a difference anyway. His human couldn’t seem to break the habit.

He watched Marcus wander down the hill to tell the wagon drivers to bring more sand to the site, and sighed. Was that a bit of grey in his aide’s hair? Humans aged so quickly…

Trying not to be downcast, Ash took a position at the top of the hill to survey the work.

Be satisfied the aqueduct will stand. It was the best he could do.

Water had been a scarcity in the days of demon rule. Most of the waterworks and purification plants had been destroyed years ago, first by the horde and later by the Firehorse curse.

When Ash overthrew the demon king, he was left in charge of a starving city with few resources. The little infrastructure that remained the pre-Collision era couldn’t sustain the population.

He’d done the only thing he could. With Marcus’ help, Ash organized a system to divide resources as fairly as possible. However, emergency rationing would only get them so far.

Rebuilding the city’s infrastructure became his priority. The humans of Bastille needed food and clean water. Even the sewage systems of old Paris, once a model for the modern metropolis, needed to be rebuilt and reinforced.

To that end, he left governance to the council elders of the city. Each represented one of the old Parisian arrondissements, although only thirteen were populated enough to warrant a representative. The councilmen were mostly volunteers. A few had served in the ranks of his army as youths, but most were local leaders who’d managed to survive Amducious’ rule with some influence intact.

The system worked as well as it could given the circumstances. Day to day governance in the arrondissements was handled by the council, whereas Ash oversaw the city as a whole.

After the horde was gone, he’d cleaned out the city center, making it habitable again. Reclamation of pre-Collision technology had also helped improve their circumstances. Though anything high-tech had been intentionally destroyed by the horde, a few engines and power generators had survived. Exhaustive tinkering had been necessary to make them run on steam power now that gasoline and oil were no longer plentiful.

One of the happiest days of Ash’s post-Collision life had been the day he set up a small generator at the old Radio Notre Dame office. The station wasn’t broadcasting yet, but with luck it would soon.

By focusing on reclaiming those hallmarks of modern civilization, Ash was able to glean a little satisfaction from his life. He was still barred from Heaven, but maybe his cell phone would work again someday.

The aqueduct he was overseeing was the third of four planned. This one lay on the east side of Bastille. The source was the springs of Marne-Chalons, the same waterway that had supplied old Paris with water. It had been believed the springs had been obliterated by the Great Collision. There was no trace of them aboveground anymore, nothing beyond a few trickles of tainted liquid that flowed in from the wasteland.

Hydrological inspection had saved them. The curse could ravage civilization, but nature was resilient. The springs hadn’t been destroyed—they’d been driven underground. Wells had been dug to tap them again, but with the effort required to transport the water to the city, they were insufficient to serve the city’s population.

After much debate with Marcus and consultation with the city’s few engineers, Ash had implemented a rebuilding program based on a fluidity and reproducibility. To survive Amducious’ gift, construction had to be modular and easily duplicated.

The aqueduct was an example of this. A lightweight mesh frame was encased in concrete to shape a hollow rectangular block. These connected to form a channel that ran along the hills leading into the city. They were easily patched and too heavy for floods to displace. If an earthquake destroyed a section, it was simply replaced with another standard-sized unit, one usually made on the spot.

Though the design was rudimentary by his standards, its very impermanence was its cloak of protection. And hopefully, with four geographically distinct channels, Bastille would still have water if the curse took one or more out.

Though there wasn’t much of it yet, all new housing in Bastille was built along this same principle. Ash and his team drew inspiration from nature. All new homes and work spaces were built from hexagonal metal or wood frames shaped like the individual cell of a bee’s honeycomb. If one or more cells was damaged or burned down, it could be replaced with another one. Ash also took the extra step of blessing every load of timber that was cut down and steel that was smelted before construction began. He did the same for all building materials reclaimed from pre-Collision structures.

One notable exception was Montmeurtre.

The watchtower was a ruin now. The much-despised monument of demon rule had been shunned for months after their victory, up until the point reconstruction began.

The tower had seemed like an obvious resource. But the cursed stone was uncooperative. Anything that used material from the ruin—whether it had been blessed by him or not—did not make it out of the first stages of construction. He stopped using reclaimed stones, leaving them in piles around the tower until the day came when he could have them carted to the wasteland or destroyed.

Ash also distributed knowledge equilaterally among the humans whenever he could. When one person could be placed in charge of a certain project or trained in a specific technique, he and Marcus chose four instead. It was Ash’s way of ensuring expertise was not lost should the worst happen and one of the men or women fell ill or died.

Deaths by disease were thankfully less frequent. Urban farming and proper sanitation had cut down on the baseline death toll. A consistent supply of clean water would help reduce it further.

Ash continued to give out orders, pitching in and helping his team get a section of the aqueduct in place. When a few ropes snapped, the disruption was minor and quickly resolved.

Once that was done, he flew up high, checking their progress from a distance. He traced the line of the aqueduct taking shape as it snaked over the last ridge between the grassy fields east and the city’s populated neighborhoods.

As if sensing his satisfaction, the mocking clang of the emergency klaxon sounded. Shouting to Marcus to stay and keep the workers going, Ash pumped his wings, following the sound. It led him to the center of the city where another disaster awaited.

A Firehorse had risen.