Excerpt from The Game of Love and Death by Martha Brockenbrough, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She exhaled. The sky was hers. Hers alone. And it was forever, and when she was in it, she was part of something infinite and immortal. As long as she took care of the plane, it would take care of her. It was nothing like the jazz music she performed at night, which was never the same thing twice: sometimes wonderful, sometimes agonizing, always dependent on the moods and whims of others, influenced by the appetites of the audience.

She didn't care for this dependence. Other people were for-ever grating her nerves or letting her down, or just plain leaving, sometimes for good. She trusted the Staggerwing as if it were her own body. Even the drone of the engine pleased her. As dissonant as it was to her musician's ears, the steadiness of it freed her mind from heavy thoughts.

But today, she would not fly for long. A change shuddered across the sky. The engine rattled. A quick thing, as subtle as a pair of thrown dice. Then the rain. One drop, then another, and another hit the windshield until water trails streaked the glass. And while it was unlikely that this would turn into a thunder-storm, Flora knew she had to take the plane down. Thunder and ice were her enemies in the air.

She radioed her intentions and piloted back toward the airfield. As she surrendered altitude, her stomach went momentarily weight-less. The runway rushed into view. She set the front two wheels down first, then the tail wheel, a more difficult kind of landing than touching all three tires down at once, but a safer and more controlled one, which she executed perfectly. She stepped out of the plane as the sky began to dump in earnest, almost as if it were over-come with the same sadness she felt returning to the earth.

Chapter 4

Not long before Flora's flight, Love has materialized in Venice, a city made more beautiful by the fact that it was doomed. He stood in Piazza San Marco, in front of an ornate church named for the man who'd run naked from the garden of Gethsemane after Jesus was sentenced to death. Mark's bones had been smuggled there in a barrel of salted pork — a strange way to keep a man and his memory alive. But what was humanity if not deeply strange?

It was from similar human bones that they'd fashioned the dice for the Game. Two of them, carved and smoothed to perfection, their dots painted in a wine-dark mix of Love's blood and Death's tears. These, Love carried with him always. They rattled in his pocket as he strolled toward the Campanile, with its bell that rang periodically to summon politicians, announce midday, and herald executions.

The bell chimed noon as he passed, his shoes tapping the stones loudly enough to rouse a flock of pigeons. Up they rose into the silvery sky, cooing and beating their wings.

Love spent a pleasant if chilly afternoon in the misty, labyrinthine alleys of the Accademia quarter, half expecting to see his opponent around every corner. At a milliner's, he purchased a handmade bowler, leaving his old hat on the head of a skinny Romany boy who would grow up to be a legendary seducer of women and men. For years afterward, Love regretted not giving the boy his pants.

At the stationer's next door, he bought a small bottle of cerulean ink because it reminded him of the shade Napoleon had used in his letters to Josephine. Love would record notes with it in the small book he always carried; perhaps it would improve his luck. Perhaps this time, unlike all the other times, he would win.

Wondering whether she had forsaken him, he stopped at a café for a snack of paper-thin prosciutto paired with a mild, milky cheese, washing both down with a glass of sparkling wine. Although his immortal body required neither food nor drink, he liked to pause for such simple pleasures. The appetite was a fundamentally human thing, and it served him to feel it, to understand it.

Excerpted from The Game of Love and Death by Martha Brockenbrough. Copyright © 2015 by Martha Brockenbrough. Excerpted by permission of Arthur A. Levine Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.