The Trouble with Soulmates

Ace of Hearts

Angel made Heaven out of three blocks of Hell.

    Heaven ran on a stretch of street between a liquor store and a sex shop. Heaven held a very red lounge, proud of its wine, with candles in the center of its tables. The demon who ran it must've been beautiful topside and cared about being beautiful, given the warts and wrinkles covering her face now. There was a classic dive bar, pool tables and dart boards and all. A greasy two-faced demon owned this one, Angel was pretty sure he'd been a conman in life, not a sexy conman, a used-car conman. Then there was the club, a club with black curtains on its walls and circling its booths. You pulled the curtains shut around the booths, or tangled yourself in the curtains on the walls, so long as you were never doing it alone. This one sat beneath a crumbling mostly empty apartment building and the demon who owned it had no face at all. Angel never could guess what they'd done to earn that, but they were the only one he ever felt sorry for.

    They all served the same purpose: get you drunk, get you high, get you sex, but every one of them promised to do it differently while surrounding you with different people. Heaven shuffled its sinners night after night and the only card always in the deck was Angel.

    He lived as the sole resident in the building above the club. No landlord to bother him since the extermination ten years back and Angel hadn't been paying his rent in cash for five years before that. With him gone, Angel moved into his "penthouse" on the top floor and that was the day he started calling these three blocks Heaven. It'd been there before, sure, but he's the one who turned it into Heaven. It all belonged to him. He didn't know if anyone else called it Heaven. He didn't know if anyone else knew it all belonged to him. But he knew. He spent his days leaning out of his splintered window, smoking above his crooked kingdom, and knowing he was the richest soul to ever exist.

    He spent his nights ruling that kingdom.

He split his time between the lounge, the bar, and the club. Meticulously. He had to be rare at each, so just seeing him got people excited, but not so rare they gave up looking. A rumor. A rumor of a sinner who called himself "Angel" who lurked around some seedy street between the third and fourth points of the pentagram. Rumor has it he likes this lounge, or this bar, or this club, point is you find him, you pay him full price upfront, and he fucks you so good you swear you can see Heaven.

It took him twenty years to get it all together. Twenty years to drag himself out of the pit. Goddammit, he did it. It'd been hard work, but he liked his work, and he was fucking good at it.

Tonight, he haunted the club.

He didn't just lurk, he listened too. He knew who was coming into his turf. Where they were going. If they were worth catching. A web, sort of, but he hated thinking of it like that.

He'd heard of an up-and-coming big shot poking around his paradise. First caught wind of him at the lounge, then heard he'd just missed him at the bar, and that meant tonight, if this big shot meant business, he'd be waiting for him in the club.

And he was. Of course, he was. Angel had seen a hundred like him before. Sinners who've managed to find themselves known, but not quite important, and certainly not powerful, but they all carried themselves like they knew they would be. They never were.

This one was no different. A bit more well-dressed but no different. What made these types worth going after was their money. They always had money. Money didn't mean power down here, not like it did up there, but it never hurt. So, Angel had curled up in his lap and talked with him and drank the drinks he bought him. All things he had done a thousand times with a thousand clients like him.

This one managed to surprise him when he asked what it was like to be an overlord.

"Oh, no, no darlin', I ain't an overlord. That's cheap shit."