The billiards room was in the basement of the sports building. Eight professional tables under hanging lights that left the rest of the room in shadows. It smelled of new felt, chalk, and polished wood.
Adrián stopped at the door and took a deep breath.
This was the only place in the world where his brain shut up.
"Vega?"
A short, pot-bellied, bald man with a graying mustache and a university polo shirt walked over, leaning on a cue stick like it was a cane. Coach Ramirez. Adrián recognized him from the Zoom calls.
"Coach."
"You’re early. Good. I expected you in an hour."
"Wanted to check out the tables."
Ramirez looked at him with that expression of "I know exactly what kind of idiot you are" that only old coaches can pull off.
"Kid, I already know you’re not playing competitively this semester."
"Coach, I—"
"Don’t interrupt. I know. We talked about it. You’re here for other reasons. That’s fine. But as long as you’re using these tables, you’re going to train. Even if it’s just an hour a day. Understood?"
Adrián nodded.
"Understood."
"Good. Table four is yours whenever you want it. Tell Beto to save it for you. And Vega."
"Yeah?"
"I know about your sister."
Adrián went very still.
Ramirez looked him straight in the eye. No pity. No awkwardness of people trying to be kind about someone else’s grief. He just looked at him.
"If you need to hit balls until your hands hurt at three in the morning, the room stays open. Beto gives you the key. That’s all I’m gonna say."
He turned around and walked away.
Adrián stood there longer than he would have liked to admit.
Then he walked over to table four. Took his cue out of its case. Placed a white ball on the green felt.
Closed one eye. Lined up the shot.
Struck.
The ball bounced off the rails three times at an angle that shouldn’t have existed, and dropped cleanly into the opposite pocket.
Adrián frowned. Looked at the cue. Looked at the table.
"Lucky shot," he muttered.
It’s always luck.
---
Back in the alleyway.
"...what a waste of a pretty face."
The voice came from somewhere above him, and for a moment Adrián didn’t know if it was real or if his dying brain was making things up to keep him company during the final stretch.
But then he heard the heels.
Heels on wet concrete. On his blood.
Adrián opened his eyes, or tried to. The sky was much darker than before. The edges of his vision were black as spilled ink, and in the center, blurred, was a figure.
A woman.
She crouched down beside him, and the hem of a deep wine-colored dress dragged through the puddle of blood without her seeming to notice or care.
Wine-red hair, long, wavy, falling over one shoulder.
Eyes the color of molten gold.
Porcelain skin with a small mole beneath her right eye.
And a smile that wasn’t exactly kind, but wasn’t cruel either. It was the smile of someone who’d seen a lot of things and found Adrián, specifically, mildly entertaining.
"Still conscious?" she asked. Her voice was low, smooth, with an accent Adrián couldn’t place. "Blink if you can hear me."
Adrián blinked. It took more effort than expected.
"Good."
She reached out a gloved hand and held his chin with two fingers, tilting his face slightly to examine him better. The glove was black leather and smelled vaguely of something floral and wine-like.
"Hmm," she said, appraising him. "Symmetric. Decent bone structure. Interesting eyes, though they’re a little..." she looked closer. "Dying. Yes. Definitely dying."
Thanks for the diagnosis, Adrián thought. Very helpful.
"Listen to me, human," she said, and her tone shifted. Became more serious, more direct. "I don’t have much time before that body of yours decides to give up completely, so I’ll be brief. I can save you. I can give you back everything you’re about to lose. And more. But not for free."
Adrián looked at her.
"In exchange," she continued, "you’re going to belong to me. Not as a slave—before your brain gets dramatic. As a..." she searched for the word. "Familiar. Subordinate. You’ll serve me, you’ll obey me, and you’ll do what I say when I say it. In exchange, you’ll get power. The kind of power most humans don’t even know exists. And a long life. Very long."
She leaned in closer. Adrián could smell the wine on her breath. And something else, something ancient, like incense burned in a church a long time ago.
"Do you accept?"
Adrián opened his mouth. Coughed up blood.
She sighed and wiped the corner of his lip with her gloved thumb, with a delicacy almost maternal that didn’t fit with anything else happening.
"Blink once for yes. Twice for no. And choose quickly, sweetheart—I’ve got a dinner reservation at nine."
A dinner reservation.
I’m dying and she has a dinner reservation.
Adrián laughed internally. Or tried to. It came out more like a chest spasm.
And then he thought, with the last clarity he had left:
If I accept, I stay alive. If I stay alive, I can keep looking for Elena.
If I stay alive, that piece-of-shit angel with black wings and that ’sorry-not-sorry’ face exists. And if she exists, others like her exist. And if others like her exist...
...then the one who took my sister exists.
And I’m going to find them.
He blinked.
Once.
The woman smiled. And this time the smile did reach her golden eyes, and Adrián thought, with what little consciousness he had left, that it was a dangerous smile. The smile of someone who’d just won a bet she’d been losing for a long time.
"Excellent choice."
She straightened up. From inside her dress sleeve she pulled out something small, flat, the size of a playing card.
A tarot card.
The back was black with a gold pattern of intertwined serpents. She turned it over with two fingers, almost dismissively.
Adrián managed to see the image before the darkness swallowed him completely.
A young man, walking cheerfully toward the edge of a cliff, with a small white dog jumping at his side. In one hand he carried a rose. In the other, a staff with a satchel hanging from it. He wasn’t looking at the abyss. He was looking up, at the sky, smiling like an idiot.
And at the bottom of the card, in elegant black letters:
0 — THE FOOL.
The woman clicked her tongue, like she’d just remembered something unpleasant.
"Ah. Right. This was the only one I had left."
She raised the card over Adrián’s chest.
"Welcome to the family, human. Sorry you got stuck with the worst one."
The card fell.
And Adrián ceased to exist.
Or so he thought.
---
The first thing he felt when he woke up was the weight.
Something heavy, warm, stretched across his chest, rising and falling with slow, steady breathing.
The second thing was the smell. Red wine. Something floral, dark. Expensive perfume.
The third thing was the hand—a hand, specifically—that was resting very close to a place where absolutely no stranger’s hand had any business being, especially considering the last time he’d been conscious, he’d been dying in an alleyway.
Adrián opened his eyes.
The ceiling was high. Very high. With dark wooden beams and a crystal chandelier hanging in the center that probably cost more than the entire apartment he’d rented.
He lowered his gaze, slowly.
Wine-red hair, spread across his chest like a sea of spilled wine.
A woman, asleep, half-draped on top of him.
And—this was important—he wasn’t wearing a shirt.
And—this was even more important—he wasn’t wearing pants either.
Adrián went very, very still.
His brain processed the information in the following order:
One: I’m alive.
Two: why am I alive?
Three: WHERE ARE MY CLOTHES?
Four: ...she doesn’t have much on either.
Five: shut up, Adrián. Shut up shut up shut up.
Very slowly, with the care of someone defusing a bomb, he tried to shift away.
The woman—Adrián recognized the hair, the perfume, the mole beneath her right eye now perfectly visible ten centimeters from his face—mumbled something in her sleep, moved, and threw a leg over him.
A long leg. With nothing on it but a thin black stocking.
Adrián stopped breathing for approximately four seconds.
Then, in the absolute silence of the room, a cheerful, high-pitched voice cut through the air from somewhere near the door:
"Sisterrrrr! Your new package woke up! Can I come in? Can I come in? I’m coming in!"
The door burst open.
And Adrián Vega, recently deceased human, newly born demon, possessor of the most despised card in the deck, decided in that exact moment that dying in that alleyway would have been much, much simpler.
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