At 18, I made a deal with a crossroads demon: my soul in exchange for absolute, unbreakable immortality. The demon just laughed, signed the contract, and disappeared. For eighty years, I lived recklessly\u2014jumping out of planes, diving into volcanoes, surviving the unsurvivable. I never aged a single day. I thought I had tricked the devil. But this morning, I woke up with a gray hair and a sharp, terrifying pain in my chest. Panicking, I checked my secure server where I kept the digitized copy of the contract. The file had been replaced by a video message from the demon. He looked battered and terrified. “Listen to me,” he whispered, looking over his shoulder. “I didn’t take your soul. I sold it to…”<\/p>\n
“…Death herself.”<\/p>\n
The demon coughed, a thick, black ichor spilling over his chin. The background behind him wasn’t the fiery pits of Hell, but a sterile, white void that seemed to be actively erasing him.<\/p>\n
“You think you\u2019re so clever, kid?” the demon wheezed, his red eyes wide with a frantic, animalistic panic. “You think Hell cares about one arrogant teenager\u2019s soul? Death… she hates a cheater. She bought your contract the second I filed it. She didn’t void your immortality. She just changed the definition of it.”<\/p>\n
Another spike of pain hit my chest. I doubled over, gripping the edge of my mahogany desk. It wasn’t just a random ache; it was a highly specific, tearing agony. It felt exactly like a memory\u2014the 9mm hollow-point bullet I took to the heart during a cartel shootout in 1998. The bullet I had laughed off before healing in seconds.<\/p>\n
“Your immortality wasn’t a shield,” the demon on the screen continued, his voice dropping to a desperate rasp as the white void began to consume his shoulders. “It was a dam. Every time you died\u2014every crushed skull, every incinerated lung, every drop of poison\u2014the damage didn’t disappear. The contract just held it back. It pooled up behind the dam, waiting.”<\/p>\n
I stumbled backward, knocking my chair to the floor. The skin on my left forearm suddenly blistered, turning an angry, charred black. The smell of roasting flesh filled my penthouse office. The active volcano in Hawaii. 2012. “She used your soul as the mortar to hold that dam together,” the demon cried out, only his face remaining on the screen now. “But souls aren’t infinite. They wear down under pressure. Eighty years of fatal injuries… the mortar is crumbling. The dam is breaking. She’s coming to collect the debt, and she\u2019s bringing all your deaths with her!”<\/p>\n
The screen went black.<\/p>\n
I fell to my knees as a chorus of overlapping agonies erupted across my body. My femurs snapped with a sickening crunch\u2014the failed parachute in ’85. My lungs filled with an invisible, suffocating fluid\u2014the Mariana Trench dive in ’04. I couldn’t scream; my throat felt like it had been crushed by the steering wheel of the Formula One car I flipped in Monaco.<\/p>\n
Through the tear-blurred, bloodshot vision of my rapidly failing eyes, I saw the temperature in the room plummet. The frost crept up the glass windows of my penthouse, obscuring the morning sun.<\/p>\n
From the shadows in the corner of my office, a figure stepped forward. She didn’t carry a scythe, nor did she wear a cloak. She wore a tailored black suit and a polite, chilling smile, holding a clipboard stacked thick with eighty years of receipts.<\/p>\n
“Mr. Vance,” Death said, her voice the sound of a closing casket. “I see you’ve finally started feeling your age. Shall we go over the itemized bill?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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