Excerpts from
The Unbreakable Curse of RafXeX García

There once was a young man who dreamed of faraway lands, and so he went to see them.

He did not get very far.

His journey began in Paris’s Gare de l’Est, on a platform filled with steam and brass-latched luggage. The Orient Express wasn’t the type of train that would suffer a forged ticket or even one purchased with dirty money. Its compartments were too gleaming for a runaway gangster with a tear inked under his eye. But he figured he’d see the same sights from the baggage car. Vineyards and castles and olive groves. Europe’s holy buildings—cathedrals that would shift into the mosques featured on the travel posters. He sketched as much as he could: Strasbourg, Munich, Vienna, Budapest.

That was the end of the line.

Not for the train itself—that kept chugging onward, toward Constantinople’s shiny spires, but only after a porter discovered the stowaway camped among the Louis Vuitton suitcases. The Ls and Vs were stained with charcoal marks. The offending artist was tossed out into a strange city with bone-colored stones and roofs as red as blood. Buildings that turned to bodies of work in his sketchbook.

He drew quite a few, before a devil found him.

He was too focused on the saints of Saint Stephen’s Basilica to see the shadow fall over his sketchbook pages, to turn around and find that no one was casting it. A no one who preyed on other no ones—drifters and runaways, the types of people other people would not go looking for. Forgotten even before they were fed on, drained to the very dregs of themselves.

A person’s life is made of many things: blood, yes, but memories too. Power is threaded through the tiniest moments, such as when your name first leaves your mother’s lips. Rafael Martín García. This devil started there. He swallowed a vowel, savoring the flavor of the a while he sifted through other memories. Migas for breakfast—not with tortas, but croissants. Strange. The name tasted Spanish, but there was something distinctly French about this artist’s childhood. He’d never felt fully at home on Paris’s streets, which was why he’d so often wandered to their edges, pulling down travel posters from train stations’ walls. It was a petty crime compared to some of the others that unfolded around him. Attacks in alleyways. Money laundered like clothes. Murders ordered by a man with a silver ring. It was a vicious cycle—around and around and around—and the artist thought he’d finally escaped it by coming here.

This thought was too hopeful for the devil’s taste.

Too much like a dream.

He spit it back out and swallowed an l instead. Shadows began to merge on the plaza’s concentric stones—around and around and around—one life draining into another. RafXeX García did not notice the way his own silhouette flinched. It was only when he went to sign the sketch of the church that he understood he was losing himself.

Raf—

His pen paused.

The devil over his shoulder paused too—looking more closely at a memory of his victim’s studio. Those weren’t paintings drying on the drawing table, but banknotes.

Monsieur García wasn’t just some struggling artist.

He was a forger.

He was exactly what no one had been looking for.

Most people think working for the devil is a choice.

Would you call it a choice to keep your heart beating? To stop yourself from being unmade? Monsieur García could not say no. His sketchbook had fallen to the plaza stones when he finally saw the extra shadow stretching out from his feet, when he followed its twisting lines to the willowy man. They were bound together already. RafXeX could see scenes from his childhood knotting the air between them—like some oily umbilical cord. Later, he would learn that this comparison was not correct at all. It was more like a noose. Or a leash. Depending on how he answered this devil’s deal.

Steal me dreams, he’d said. Serve me, and I will give you the rest of your life.

RafXeX had laughed. “What? No kingdom to go with it? You should work on your pitch—” The pitch of his own voice cinched tight then. His throat closed in on itself. He felt his mind going blank, blank like the sketchbook pages blowing across the square. None of the passersby stopped to pick them up. No one stopped for the artist either as he fell to his knees, seeing stars that spelled out his immediate future.

Dying without living. He was only nineteen, and, like any other nineteen-year-old, he’d thought his horizons were endless. There would always be another train to catch or another border to cross. There would always be another day to sit down and try to draw what he really felt inside him—soaring skies and snow-gripped mountains and sunlight as potent as wine. He’d never quite been able to capture that magic on a page, but that failure hadn’t frightened him.

Until now.

Darkness closed in, turning that vast yearning into a void, showing RafXeX just how much more this devil could take from him.

Everything he was, is and, could ever be.

“You’d prefer a more biblical proposition?” The Sanct relaxed the shadow between them. RafXeX gasped. “Become my disciple, and I can show you the way to life everlasting. You don’t have to die here, Monsieur García. In fact, you do not have to die at all. As for kingdoms… some of my followers control empires. Serve me well, and you’ll have your pick of palaces. Palais du Luxembourg. Palais de la Cité. Palais de L’Élysée…”

All in Paris.

RafXeX shook his head. He couldn’t care less about those castles—he’d seen most of them before.

“What do you want, then?” the devil asked.

He wanted to go. He wanted to get away from this predator, but the thought only made the shadow around his neck grow tighter. “My name…” RafXeX gasped.

“That’s it?” the devil scoffed. “Two letters?”

Yet it felt like so much more was missing… RafXeX didn’t quite understand what, only that when he reached inside himself, he felt… hollow. Husked. The towering mountains were no more. He didn’t even want to draw the steeples of Saint Stephen’s. He couldn’t think of a prayer, though there was one inscribed on the building: ego sum veritas et vita. He figured it was a prayer, anyway, or some sort of smart saying, smarter than anything he could dredge up at the moment.

So he turned to an old quote from his father instead: “All a man’s got is his name.”

“That’s not true,” the devil said. “I don’t have a name.”

“You’re not a man.”

This got him a laugh. “I was, once, but then I became more. Do you know what I could do with those letters I took? I could make the sun go dark at midday. I could drag someone into sleep for a decade. I could turn my shadow into wings. I could teach you to do these things too. I can show you the world as it truly is: without end.”

A slightly better pitch—but it still reminded RafXeX of a sermon he’d heard once when his mother had dragged him to mass. Hadn’t Jesus chosen to starve in the desert instead of accept Satan’s offer? What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet loses his soul?

What should a man do if his soul was already lost?

He could feel himself hanging from his bones like a half-gnawed chicken leg. Cut into pieces in the exact sharp shape of the devil’s teeth. White teeth. Too white. His smile turned everything upside down.

RafXeX smiled too, even though he did not want to.

It was like looking into a warped mirror.

In the end, the devil did not have to force him to kneel. Despite all the Bible verses he was now remembering, RafXeX García was no saint.