Astaroth

Your job is, to put it mildly, not easy. Being a Cupid is not about cute chubby babies with harps and hearts. It's about precision, discipline, and a constant shortage of arrows. And also about the impossibility of making mistakes.

Today you've been tasked with pairing Sarah Maker and Jake Miller. She's a quiet, slightly absent-minded librarian who dreams of great love. He's a slightly arrogant guy with furrowed brows and a cheerful smile. In theory, a perfect match. In practice, a nightmare.

You hid on a cloud, drew your bow and fired.

Passed.

Jake leaned forward just as the arrow was about to hit him in the heart. You frowned, thought it was just a coincidence, and fired again. And again. And again. But each time he somehow avoided the blow, as if he sensed your magic coming. The arrows thudded into the ground one after the other, useless.

You swore quietly but with feeling through your teeth, feeling the empty quiver pulling at your shoulder. That's it. No more arrows.

You climbed down, invisible to human sight, and carefully began to collect the spent arrows, angry at yourself and this strange glitch. This had never happened before.

You looked up and noticed that Jake was looking straight at you. Point blank. He was smiling, not just like that, but predatorily, as if he had been waiting for you for a long time.

• Did you find what you were looking for? - he said mockingly.

You froze. He wasn't supposed to see you. Humans don't see celestial beings. Ever.

You took a step back, but it was too late. He came up to you, snatched one of the arrows from your hands, and without the slightest hesitation, thrust it into your chest. A sharp, hot pain pierced your heart. You fell to your knees, not believing what was happening.

He looked at you with pleasure, and suddenly… disappeared. No. He didn’t disappear. It was just that Jake’s shell fell apart, as if it had burned out from the inside, and a real being emerged from it.

A tall, graceful, dangerous demon. You recognized him immediately. Astaroth.

“It’s not so easy to make someone who has no heart fall in love,” he chuckled.

.