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

When he emerged from the shop, his tongue buzzing with salt and wine, the sun was low on the horizon, pulling with it all the color and warmth from the world. Fearing Death would not join him after all, Love vanished and rematerialized inside a glossy black gondola, much to the surprise of the man who'd just dropped off his last passenger of the day. The gondolier had intended to roll a cigarette and stare at the heavens a few moments before he returned his boat to the yard. And yet, here was a new fare, already making himself comfortable on a black-and-gold bench.

The man sighed and spoke. "Solo voi due?"

Just the two of you?

Too late, Love caught a whiff of something sweet over the fetid odor of the canal. Lilies. The hairs on the back of his neck rose.

"Sì, solo noi due," Love agreed. She descended the crooked set of wooden steps leading down to the gondola, looking like an angel in a long coat of winter-white wool. Her gloves and boots, made of lambskin, were the same hue. A lone spot of color hung around her neck: a red cashmere scarf. His heart sank at the sight of her in this shade.

"Hello, old friend," she said.

Love helped her into the gondola. Judging her age to be about seventeen this time, he resolved to adjust his own appearance to match. His decision to travel in the guise of someone middle-aged had been a reflection of the weariness he felt with his lot. To spend an eternity losing was enough to make anyone feel damaged by time. But the younger he felt, the more he believed Death was beatable. He would have to remember that.

"Mind if I smoke?" the gondolier asked, a skinny hand-rolled cigarette already between his lips.

Death answered, "Please do."

And there it was, her Mona Lisa smile, the one that had been the model for the artist. Then came the hiss of flame, the sour whiff of burning tobacco, the dull sizzle of the match as it sank into the canal, one more light, unlike any other, forever gone from the world.

The gondolier, now lost in smoke and thought, eased his craft from the dock and steered them from the Grand Canal through the quiet and picturesque privacy of the narrow water lanes snaking through the quarter.

A hopeless city," she said.

Death knew he loved Venice. To deprive her of the satisfaction of wounding him, Love altered his guise so he was wearing a swooping handlebar mustache. Death sprouted a drooping Fu Manchu, but did not crack a smile. Love acknowledged the win, and both their mustaches vanished.

"You don't have to be embarrassed," she said in a language known only to the two of them. "It's appealing, your commitment to the doomed."

"Perhaps I see things you don't," he said.

"Perhaps that is true." She removed a glove and dipped a knuckle into the water.

"They're ready," he said, thinking of his player in the city far away, a city with a model of Venice's Campanile built at its train station.

"If you say so," Death said.

The sun and all its light were gone. It would rise again, creating the illusion that the world had been remade, that the cycle was starting anew. But time was not a circle. It moved in one direction only, onward into the dark unknown. Feeling his spirits teeter, Love focused on the sound the water made as the boat sliced through it. A series of small kisses.

He looked into the heart of the gondolier and discovered the woman the man loved most. He cast that image overhead so that it might settle over the boat like a soft blanket. Surely Death would not object to that small comfort. The gondolier extinguished his cigarette in the canal and opened his mouth to sing. " 'O Sole Mio." My sun.

Love's light spread overhead, and the darkening sky revealed a moon whittled to near nothingness. Reflections of human-made lights stretched across the water, beautiful fingers that stroked the slender boat as it passed, its captain singing of the glow of his heart's sun on his lover's face.

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.