The Game of Love and Death(68)

He put the napkin down. “I don’t know. Making an ark?”

Miss Hattie returned with their coffee. “What’s it gonna be?”

“Two eggs,” Flora said. “Side by side. And two pieces of toast.”

Henry scanned the menu, looking for something that could build on Flora’s ark joke, but he couldn’t find anything. “Eggs, scrambled, with sausage and a biscuit.”

“Fine,” Miss Hattie said. “Anything else?”

“No, thank you, ma’am,” Flora said.

Miss Hattie sighed and headed for the kitchen.

“I think you meant Noah thanks,” Henry joked.

Flora rolled her eyes over the top of her coffee mug.

“See, we’re finding a place,” he said.

“One of us might be,” she said. “I’ll never belong in your world.”

“Flora.” Henry’s voice caught in his throat. “You are my world.” He wrapped his hands around his cup of coffee, wishing its warmth would reach the rest of him.

Miss Hattie returned with their food.

As she ate, Flora looked at him with pitying eyes. “I like you. Against my better judgment, I do. The way you play music. Your decency. Even your stupid jokes. But I want other things. If I do what Amelia Earhart is doing, but faster —”

Henry interrupted. “I get it.” His eggs tasted like paste. He pushed the plate away. If she didn’t want him, what else could he do?

Flora lowered her voice. “For now, can’t we just focus on the music? Everything else can wait.”

They sat in silence as the rest of the customers cleared out. Hattie, looking exhausted, leaned against a wall and closed her eyes. Eventually, the first rays of morning sun began to bend through the foggy windows. Henry’s clothes had dried, and he felt a rumpled and weary mess.

“I don’t understand,” he said, trying to choose his words carefully, knowing his exhaustion made him likely to say the wrong thing. “I don’t see how we could go from everything good that’s happened to this.”

“It’s safer this way,” Flora said. “Trust me.”


Henry reached across the table, but Flora wouldn’t take his hand.

“What do you dream of?” Henry said. “What do you dream of if it isn’t this? You, me, music. We could build a life out of that. I know it.”

“Look at your fingers,” she said. “Covered in ink.”

“Please don’t change the subject,” Henry said. “But it’s not just ink.” He turned his left palm up and showed her the fingertips he’d played to shreds. “See? Blood.”

“Ink by day, blood by night. Days of ink, nights of blood,” she said. “Sounds like a song.”

“You should write it,” he said.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m not the one being ridiculous,” he said.

“Henry.”

“Look how far we’ve come. I don’t want to give up. Not now. Because someday —”

She yawned and rubbed her temples, as though her head ached. “We can think about that sort of thing another day. But not now.”

Miss Hattie shuffled to their table. “Heat up your coffee?”

Henry glanced at his empty cup. “No, thank you.”

“Then you’ll be wanting to settle the check,” Miss Hattie said.

Henry took the hint. He pulled out one of the bills Doc had paid him the previous night and laid it on the table.

“Keep the change.” It was twice the money he needed to leave. But he wasn’t above buying an ally.

“Flora?” He held out his arm.

She hesitated. “We should walk away from it now, before it gets worse. It’s what Captain Girard says about flying. ‘Only a fool goes into a storm.’ ”

“The rain has stopped,” he said.

“You know what I mean. This won’t end well.”

“Who says it has to end at all?” he said.

She took his arm at last, and together, they walked out into the fragile morning light.





DEATH wished she needed to sleep. How fortunate humans were, to spend a third of their lives unaware. She never had a moment to forget who she was. Never a moment to pretend she was anything but a scourge. It felt better to glean souls as she did it. But then afterward, the pain, the hunger for more, was worse.

Death wrapped herself in a silk robe. She inserted her pale, soft feet into slippers. Surely Ethan was asleep. Surely she could be quiet enough…

She blinked and rematerialized in his room, not wanting to chance that someone else in the house was awake. His breathing was slow and warm and even. Through a gap in his curtains, light from the nearly full moon seeped in. She inched toward him. He lay on his back, one arm flung over his head while the other clutched his sheets, his skin indigo in moonlight. She knew exactly how his life would taste. She leaned in and inhaled his skin. His heat warmed her lips. She willed him to remain still. And then she whispered soft things into his ear, words to shape his dreams.

When morning came, he would rise full of urgent desire. Not for Love, but for what Love kept tucked in a pocket over his heart. The book. The book and its secrets. In its pages, Ethan would learn he was a pawn, and that Henry was in even more danger. However he dealt with that information, she’d have the advantage. And all of it was in accordance with the rules.