The Game of Love and Death (26 page)

F
OR
thousands of years, Love had filled the book. Death knew this, and yet she’d never been tempted to look inside for fear of what had been written about her. It was one thing to do what she had to do. It was another thing to see it on the page, especially through the eyes of her enemy.

“Where shall we sit?” She looked at Ethan’s bare wrist. She could make him feel better, temporarily and then permanently, with a touch. She ached to show him his life so that he could see the beauty in it.

“How about there?” Ethan interrupted her thoughts, gesturing toward a hand-carved love seat covered in crimson velvet, the one style of furniture she found amusing above all others. On more than one occasion, she’d turned one into a death seat.

“The perfect choice.” She fought her urge to kill Ethan on the spot. “And so cozy.”

Ethan helped her sit. He reached into his pocket and produced the book. It was a lovely object.

“Where did you get this?” She traced the intricate cover. Love had an eye for beauty and a way of transforming the simple into the spectacular.

Ethan faced her, the barest bit of moonlight on his face. In the long, silent war with time, his beauty would give way. His skin, now smooth, would pucker and sag. Dark spots would mottle its edges. His clear eyes would grow rheumy, as yellow tinged the whites and cataracts muddied his irises. Wouldn’t it be a gift to deliver his beauty whole, before time had done its damage?

He cleared his throat and looked away, the liar. “I — I found it.”

“On the street?”

“Something like that.” He blushed.

“And you haven’t looked inside? Perhaps the owner wrote his name. Or hers. This is a fairly feminine cover, don’t you think?” She took it from him.

“It is fancy. I wouldn’t say feminine.” Ethan swallowed. “I looked inside, but I didn’t see a name.”

“The curiosity is killing me.” Death opened the book. “Hmm.”

“What? What does it say?”

She’d only fed something to a mind a few times. And that was just a few memories, most recently the scene of Flora’s parents’ death. What would the entire book do? Possibly kill Ethan, or drive him mad. She closed her fingers around his wrist.

“Your fingernails. They’re red.” Ethan’s voice slurred. His eyes rolled back and his limbs jerked as she poured the contents of the book into his mind. He fought back, trying to peel her fingers away. But even this perfect human specimen could no sooner escape her than the earth could unhitch itself from the sun.

If he lived, the boy would know the entire futile, messy history of the Game. He would watch the asp sink its fangs into Cleopatra, the castration of Abelard, the slow death of Lancelot, the suicide of Juliet, players all. Certain things she would keep from him. Her own identity, for example. She would also conceal the fact that the Game would end in three days. Should he tell Henry and Flora, that knowledge might risk her victory. Everything else, he would learn. And he would understand her gift: deliverance from pain. Real love was death. If he withstood the learning, he would welcome the gift.

And yet she could not end his life. Not yet. Not when they were so alike, Ethan and she. So she released his hands. Left him gasping on the love seat as she walked slowly from the room, taking the book with her.

The earth turned, dragging tracings of starlight across the velvet sky. Ethan stumbled into the hall. He climbed the stairs, one slow step at a time until he was at the top. Helen’s room was near. He could hear her rustling about. What had happened? They’d sat down to read, and then she’d taken his hand, and then he knew all of these things that seemed impossible.

And yet, they explained so much. They explained the hold James had on Ethan. Why it felt like love when he’d first laid eyes on him, even if was he nothing more than a pawn.

Ethan closed his door. Looked at the space where he’d spent so much time: at his bed, at his desk, at the windows that looked out over the grounds below and gave a view of the booming finale of a fireworks display in the distance. If James Booth was someone else, someone who was not a human exactly … perhaps what Ethan had done with him didn’t count.

Perhaps he wasn’t one of
those
.

For a moment, Ethan felt relief so great he wanted to weep. To not be attracted to boys. He wanted this so much for himself. He’d spent hours in this room, trying to talk himself out of the wanting, the desire for Henry most of all.

And yet he could not continue to pretend. All of that attraction had happened before James. Even though he had never acted on it, it was who he was. There was no changing it. The Independence Day celebration outside had ended, and the open curtains revealed a crescent moon. Was it waxing or waning? He never could tell. But if it had a choice, would it shrink into complete darkness or make its journey bursting with reflected light?

Ethan picked up a pen and a sheet of paper. One slow letter, one hard-fought word at a time, he wrote to Henry, who needed to know what he and Flora were part of. Henry needed to know who James was, that he was an ally of sorts. Ethan wished he knew who Death was. One of the musicians? The person who had arrested Henry? That seemed the most likely thing of all.

He told Henry not to give up on Flora.
We do not choose whom we love
, he wrote.
We can only choose how well.

The handwriting was atrocious. Entire sentences had been crossed out. Ethan was sure he’d spelled half of the words wrong. It wasn’t good enough. He couldn’t send it. Tired as he was, he copied the words on a new sheet. He threw the draft away. He sealed the letter and addressed it. Then he wrote a shorter note to his parents, explaining that he would be enlisting in the navy in the morning. He slipped it under their door. Then he packed a bag, left Henry’s letter in the outgoing mail slot, and disappeared into the night. Ethan wanted to spend one last night as a free man, a free man who knew who he was and who he would never be. He wanted to watch the sun rise on that day his life began anew.

When the door closed behind him, Death slipped out of her room. She found the letter in the mail slot.

And then she burned it.

A
FTER
the whole sorry Ethan business, Love demanded a meeting. Death agreed, but insisted on choosing the location. When Love arrived in the Chinese room of the Smith Tower, a few floors down from where Henry’s father had jumped, Death was already there, lounging in a rosewood chair carved with a dragon and a phoenix. She faced a small table with a glass of red wine and a plate of escargots, and was tearing the snails out of their shells with a tiny fork.

Love settled on a plain mahogany chair. The space over his heart where the book had been felt empty. Nagging, like a missing memory.

Death demolished a snail shell between her teeth. “That one didn’t want to come out.” She spit the splintered remains into the dish. A shard clung to her lips, and Love wanted nothing more than to remove it.

“Soup?” she said, pointing to a tureen. “It’s turtle.”

Love declined.

“I don’t know how the girls stand this chair.” Her lips glistened with butter. “It’s uncomfortable.”

The Wishing Chair had been a gift of the Chinese empress. Any young woman who sat in it was guaranteed an engagement within a year. The chair might have been uncomfortable, but it worked as promised. He felt a stab of compassion for his opponent, who had no capacity to feel hope. He shrugged it off. This was not his sadness to carry. He wanted his book back. Ethan too. But that, he feared, was a heart he dared not call again.

Behind him, the city of Seattle reached toward the water’s edge. Electric lights burned in many of the buildings, hazing the bottom of the sky with their glow. Beside a nearly vanquished moon, stars hung overhead, the solitary recipients of infinite human wishes.

“You’ll have to ask nicely,” Death said. “I will also consider begging.”

Damn her and the way she invaded his mind. If that was how she wanted to play, fine. He sent her images of things he’d witnessed without her as he followed Henry about town.

Here, the image of Henry fastening his tie around his neck; there, Henry combing the unruly curls from his forehead; the shine of lamplight on his shoe as he polished it; the gray ribbon of sidewalk unrolling itself at his feet. Leaves full of sunlight. The world seen through the eyes of someone in love with a woman, in love with life.

It took most of Love’s concentration to send the images so purely, but he paused now and then to watch Death’s expression change. She grew impatient and pawed through the rest of the memories as quickly as he could form them: of stolen kisses and swift touches, and most of all Henry and Flora as they played “Someday,” every charged note of it, performance after performance ending with crashing waves of applause.

This magic had happened. Even if they never performed together again, they’d been altered by it. Irrevocably.

She pulled away, her eyes dark around the edges. He leaned in to dab her face with his handkerchief, but she grabbed his wrist. “Don’t.”

Then she shoved everything off the table — the wine, the empty snail shells, the soup. “And what of it? We have two days left in the Game, and still she refuses him.”

His wrist stung where she’d grabbed it. “How are you faring in your attempts to lure Henry away?”

She arranged herself carelessly in the chair, draping one hand over its back. “I have two ways to win. You have but one. History and the odds are on my side.”

Love could not argue either point.

But what were odds? The odds against any one human being born were tremendous. The chain of moments that led to it was long, a chain made of infinite human choices that each had to occur in sequence to lead to a particular birth. The odds of either Flora or Henry being here at all were one in four hundred trillion, give or take.

“Two days left.” She held up a pair of fingers. As if Love could forget or would not understand the words. She tossed the book back at him. He caught it and felt immediately soothed by its warmth and familiarity.

Then Death gave him her awful Helen smile and faded like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat. As she did, Love thought of something he hadn’t before. Where was the real Helen? The one Death was impersonating? It seemed a small matter, really. And yet, much could hinge on the minutiae. He sucked in his breath and stood, hoping there was still time.

It was the middle of the night when Love reached the human Helen. The place smelled of stale breath and antiseptic, and an acid light filled the hallways. The rooms, each a white rectangle behind a door with a square of reinforced glass in its middle, were for the most part dark. Almost all of their inhabitants were sleeping. Helen wasn’t, and Love was glad, for he hated to disturb the rest of someone who’d been so wounded.

He materialized in the room not as James Booth or any other human, but as a creature Helen would welcome: a wiggling cocker spaniel puppy whose breath smelled of hay and summertime. He whimpered, and she sat up, looking left and right. Then, in the gray light, she spotted him on the floor and lifted him in bed with her. Love felt her heart.
Please tell me this is not another hallucination. They say I went mad, but I know that I didn’t. I’ve forgotten, is all. I’ve just forgotten.

Love kissed Helen on the chin and she giggled. She curled around him in bed, her heart pressed to his rounded back. Love sensed the spot where Death had taken the girl’s memories. The edges around that hole in her mind were ragged, preventing her from reaching the ones that lay further back. Love repaired the tear. The form he’d chosen was perfect for this: soft, vulnerable, full of life and love.

Helen fell asleep around him as soon as he started. He was gone by the time she woke in the morning, and forever after, she thought of his visit as a dream, the sweetest of her life. The restoration of most of her memory caused great excitement with her physician, who telephoned her parents once he’d determined her recovery was indeed legitimate, that she was a person of consequence, and, most important, that someone would cover the bill for her care. By the time all of that was settled, Love had already returned to Seattle.