The Game of Love and Death(59)

“I’m sure you’ve considered the cost,” Helen said. “How much it could hurt him.”

“I wouldn’t dream of hurting him.”

“But” — Helen paused, as if she were choosing her words carefully — “would you choose him if you could?”

“Choose him for what?”

“I think you know,” Helen said.

“And I think you know this is none of your concern.”

“Come now. Don’t look so angry. In different circumstances, we might have been friends. There isn’t so very much that separates you and me.”

“Everything separates us,” Flora said. “You can go where you want. Do what you want. Eat where you want. The world belongs to you and yours. My kind, we’re here to be your mules. Your world rests on our backs. We even have to pay you off for the privilege of entertaining you. And then you arrest us anyway.”

“So bitter,” Helen said. “And I love it.”

“We’re finished here,” Flora said.

“Here, perhaps,” Helen said.



Flora had made it halfway up the precinct stairs when Henry walked through the door, his bruised face downcast, flanked on either side by two distraught-looking white people. The woman wore a fur coat and hat; the man, a forehead-splitting scowl.

“Henry,” Flora said. “I’m sorry. I came as quickly as I could.” She’d come in such a rush she’d left her gloves and his hat behind. This, she realized as she noticed his uncovered curls.

Henry looked up, his eyes wide.

“Who might this be?” the woman asked, looking horrified. “How does she know your name? Is she the reason you were in this place? Is she — tell me she’s not — someone you hired?” She began to weep.

The man pulled Henry down the stairs past Flora, who had to take a step backward to let them by. Flora dropped her pocketbook, and its flimsy clasp popped open. The bills she’d gathered fluttered out.

The hungry children in ratty clothes who’d been skulking against the side of the building rushed forward and snatched most of it up before she could, but Flora didn’t have the strength to care. Henry’s guardians shoved him into the back of the car, which pulled away from the sidewalk with an angry squeal.





DEATH watched Flora leave the Domino, no doubt headed to the jail with her sad little wad of bills in hand. She drove a short distance away from the club and parked. It was late afternoon, a virtual dead zone for the neighborhood. No one was there to watch the intense, dark-eyed girl in the red dress walk up to the club and slip inside its locked door, which she opened with a single touch. Thus unobserved, she hastened down the stairs, knowing exactly where she’d start, hoping that the end would be as she intended: to take the last thing from Flora that was keeping her in Seattle.

Death lit a candle and placed it on the bar, inhaling the scent of burning wax as the glow of the lone flame found the edges of the room. Grady’s bass, still tinged with the essence of Henry’s touch, lay in the shadows. Though it was the size of a grown man, the instrument felt light in her arms as she moved it offstage, across the floor, and onto the bar. She placed it on its back, an echo of human sacrifices that had occurred over the millennia, gifts offered in the name of various gods, and every one a death that seeped into her endless hollows instead.

She materialized on the other side of the bar, filling her arms with clinking bottles: rum, vodka, bourbon, Scotch. Death set each one down. She uncapped the first of the bottles and emptied it over the instrument as one would anoint a corpse. Then the second and the third and the fourth. The wood groaned at the assault. Its pores drank in the booze; puddles of ruin trickled into the F-shaped holes on its face, drumming its back, scenting the air with dust and spirits.

She rested her hands on top of the bar, remembering the life she’d pulled from the wood the night she’d taken Flora’s parents. There was even less life remaining, less to fight the flames. The sight would be spectacular. She took the candle and held it inside the curved opening.

A claw of smoke rose; the edges of the wood reddened, then charred. And then, as if the fire had discovered its own thirst, the wood exploded into flame. It lapped up the ooze of liquor that had leaked down the countertop. It flowed like a red river over the edges of the bar, finding places to bite the floor, the shelves, the velvet curtains.

Death picked up the gloves she’d once left in the small green house. They were hers, after all, and she always took what was hers. Then she turned to leave, feeling the smoke and the heat on her back, knowing it was true what Love said about fire. This one was its own sort of creature, a singular soul.

Long may it burn.





FLORA left the jail and headed to the Domino, where she intended to finish with the food preparations as best she could before the show. She’d retrieve her gloves and set Henry’s hat aside. She’d find a way to get it to him later, and then leave him to his life.

In the distance, a dark finger of smoke touched the sky. She wanted to believe it was not her club in flames, not her livelihood being consumed, but she could feel the ruin of it in her depths, as if a part of her very self was being reduced to ash.

She stopped the car a short distance away and ran toward the burning building. The heat pressed against her face and arms, and the smoke smelled oily and toxic, no doubt fed by the well-stocked bar and kitchen, the curtains, the wooden stairs … everything familiar to her, the last bits of her parents’ legacy. The painting of them. When she realized that was lost too, along with the gloves she’d treasured, she could not hold back the tears. She stopped running.