Even with her back to the mask, Sloane could feel it waiting for her.
She really had no business going back to the Mardi Gras. She needed to sleep. She needed to be well-rested and alert. She should never have forced her mother to hire a nurse. It was Sloane’s responsibility to wheel her to the bathroom, wash her, dress her, read to her. However tired she was.
Whenever Sloane talked to her mother or Odessa about the first terrible year after the Flood, she would ask where they had found the strength to go on, with sickness in the streets and madness spreading by contagion, and worst of all the terrible weight of loss, of families drowned beneath the magic’s tide. They both gave the same non-answer: “You do what you have to do.”
When the choking weight of the Gardner name fell on her, presumably she would find the strength to bear it. If her mother’s life wasn’t the one Sloane wanted to lead—well, Jane Gardner hadn’t asked for her burdens either, had she? Before the Flood she had been a successful young lawyer with a handsome husband and a condo on the beach. If Jane could lose her world and still persist, it was little enough to ask Sloane to give up her freedom.
One of the hardest lessons we all have to learn is how few choices life gives to a civilized woman with any conscience at all.
The Rolex ticked in exact accord with the blue Dresden clock on Sloane’s dresser. She had taken to wearing the watch to bed and even in the shower. With Momus maybe watching her, she didn’t feel safe taking off her most powerful charm anymore, although she had come to hate its maddening tick, tick, tick as she tossed and turned, trying to sleep through the long, hot, Texas nights.
Perhaps, Sloane thought, the time she had spent in Mardi Gras over the past week had been a hidden blessing. Maybe it had been wrong of her to be gone so much, but the nurse was a brisk, efficient professional. Now that she was here, it was ridiculous for Sloane to feel guilty about letting her do her job. Sloane and Jane both felt the humiliation of Jane’s weakness too keenly. Neither of them could smile or joke about Sloane pulling up her mother’s underwear after a trip to the toilet.
Maybe Momus was cheating her, the bastard. Maybe he would keep Jane alive but never better than she was right now. A useless cripple. The moon god would probably find that cruelly diverting. Or maybe Odessa was right, maybe it was Sloane who would die first. That would take care of the question of which kingdom, exactly, she was supposed to inherit: Galveston, Mardi Gras, or Odessa’s twilight territory in between.
Did any of them seriously expect her to succeed them? Sloane who could barely function as her mother’s assistant? Sloane who didn’t have the courage or strength of purpose to face Momus a second time and undo her previous mistake? I just can’t stand to see her die. The stupidity of it made her want to scream. She who thought of herself as the cunning one, the one who had grown up with gods and witches and was supposed to understand them.
No, she had to go back. She had to confront Momus again. Not because she was brave. Because she was too much a coward to bear going through more days like this one. Too weak to bear the disappointment in her mother’s eyes as Jane Gardner saw, more clearly every day, that her daughter would not be able to maintain what she had built.
The funniest thing, she thought, is that Mom would like Sly better than me. Sly didn’t sit in the corner of the room and pretend to be interested in the potted plants; she joked, she wheedled, she bullied and coaxed. She was more rakish, perhaps, than the Gardners allowed themselves to be, but Sly would enjoy Jane’s job—at least the parties and the politics of it. In a way, it wasn’t a bad thing she had spent so much of the last week being Sly. Sloane had a lot to learn from her. Really, she would make a better heir for her mother once she had mastered the skills Sly had to teach her.
And black is white and chickens are pigs. I sure am using a lot of energy to get in bed with myself, she thought sourly. She groaned and rubbed her face with her hands. She felt wide awake but fragile. It was hot and humid and she was never going to get back to sleep.
Clocks ticked. Downstairs the piano tinkled a ragtime tune.
Sloane closed her shutters and turned up the gas lamp over the vanity. She went to her closet and picked out an ensemble calculated to make her mother’s eyes roll, featuring a short-sleeved cotton dress, fitted snug around her breasts and hips. She chose a pair of diamond studs to match her Rolex. She finished the outfit with her best shoes, the brown cloth ones with the copper buckles, and a silk scarf looped around her throat, a present from Odessa. Sly never wore a veil. She hurried over to the night table to get the mask. This really will be the absolutely last time, she thought. The sound of the piano came to her more clearly as she touched the leather, and she felt her mouth tightening into a smile. Yeah, right.
Chapter Seven
THIRD STREET
THE moment Sloane put on her mask she felt much, much better.
Downstairs the piano tinkled and juked. Glasses clinked amid a dull roar of conversation. Gusts of laughter floated in from the garden outside. Sloane opened the French doors and stepped out on her balcony. This Galveston was ablaze with lights: tall streetlamps, lit windows in houses and office buildings, headlights from moving cars, and over everything the white stare of a full moon. There was a crowd milling around the grounds of Ashton Villa. Someone let off a Roman candle, sending pulses of golden fire into the night sky. Down on the ground a man in a gangster suit and a domino mask caught sight of her and whistled. She waved back.
She felt good. She knew, in a detached way, that she was a bad person for feeling happy, but the guilt that pressed on her all the time had suddenly receded. In the real Galveston it was a constant, pushing pain. Here—an annoyance. A mosquito bite.
SLOANE gasped and pulled the mask down her face so her eyes peeked over the top. Mardi Gras vanished, replaced by the dreary, drought-stricken city she would face again in the morning. Her hands were shaking like a junkie’s, and she found she was listening for the faintest sound, as if she had woken from a nightmare. You are not making this trip to have fun. You are going to see Momus. You are going to do your duty.
She stared down at her trembling hands. Her panic contracted into fury. “The hell with it,” she whispered, and she pushed the mask back on.
DOWNSTAIRS the Gold Room was packed. Uniformed staff passed through Ashton Villa bearing an incredible variety of food. And the drinks! Exotic juices made from fruits that only existed for Sloane in stories: apples and cranberries and lemons. There was alcohol of every description, and cream-topped pastries made from something far nicer than dry, flaky rice flour. A tray of crackers went by. She didn’t even recognize half the toppings, like the purple vegetable embedded in an exotic cheese sauce, or the odd relish that smelled of basil and roasted garlic.
She could only imagine what Josh Cane would think of this breathtaking display of casual waste. You’d think the little runt would have bigger shoulders, with all the chips he carries around on them, she thought.
Moralizing bored Sly.
As she wandered out of the Gold Room, Sloane caught sight of a familiar figure. Ladybird Trube was down on all fours in front of the grandfather clock in the hallway. She had the case open and was groping around inside it, interfering with the pendulum. “Ladybird?”
The Trube heiress jumped and looked back over her shoulder. She had lost her tortoiseshell combs and her hair hung raggedly before her eyes. The hem of her evening dress was dirty and raveling. She attempted a smile. “Oh, hello,” she said. “Do you happen to know the time?”
“What are you doing down there?”
“Clock’s stopped. I thought I’d wind the old boy up, but I can’t seem to…” She turned back, searching more desperately inside the mechanism. “Can’t seem to find the goddamn key!”
“Ladybird? Do you know me?” Sloane said from behind her mask. She realized she wanted very badly for Ladybird not to recognize her. She wanted to be Sly here, not Sloane. She would be so ashamed to be seen.
“Don??
?t believe we’ve had the pleasure.” Ladybird stared into the clock case. Her shoulders slumped. Suddenly she slammed her head against the wooden frame of the clock, sickeningly hard. If the glass front had been closed she would have shattered it. “I just want…” SLAM “to know…” SLAM “the time.” She slammed her head again and dropped to the carpet, sobbing.
Sloane crossed the foyer. “Now, honey,” she remarked in Sly’s careless voice. “You’ll get bloodstains on that dress.”
Ladybird was too busy sobbing to notice her. Thank God. There would have been a scene of the sort that doughy, dutiful old Sloane would have felt compelled to wallow in. Bound to dampen one’s evening of fun. All in all, a narrow escape.
There was a card game running at the round table in the dining room. “Ante up, ladies and gentlemen!” the dealer said. He was sitting in the very spot where, sixteen hours before, Jane Gardner had nearly died. Only that had happened back in the boring, dowdy Galveston. In this much more pleasant city, Jane wasn’t even in danger.
A little hit of guilt passed through Sloane, like a wave of nausea. Not that she wasn’t going to find Momus. She was.
There were five players in the game. The dealer was a thin, balding, Asian man wearing a pair of round spectacles and sporting an enormously long mustache. On second glance Sloane saw that the mustache wasn’t made from hair at all, but long red tendrils like shrimp’s feelers that drooped down below the edge of the table.
Sloane recognized the player next to him instantly: it was Miss Bettie herself, and in her prime, looking just as she did in the portrait that still hung in the Gold Room. She was a strong-featured woman just Sloane’s age who had traveled by camel across the Sahara with thirteen giant cedar trunks in tow. She wore a purple evening gown and a feather boa that made a joke of its own extravagance. She was one of the few people Sloane had seen who wasn’t wearing a mask. Of course, Miss Bettie had been a part of Galveston’s magic long before the Flood rolled over the Island.
Next to Miss Bettie, a tall, angular woman dug her ante out of a silk clutch purse and tossed it into the middle of the table. Her fingers were dark and hard like talons. She was wearing a white evening gown and a very good bird mask on which perched a pair of opera glasses. No, on second thought it wasn’t a mask. She had the head of an egret: white face, long straight bill, small yellow eyes, and a ragged fringe of white feathers where her hairline ought to be.
A gigantic man sat across from the dealer. He had a narrow waist but enormous, rounded shoulders, broader than Ham’s. He smelled like a wild animal and radiated a barely contained ferocity. In one hairy fist he clutched a stick on which was pasted a papier-mâché half-mask of a meek, middle-aged man. Below the inoffensive mask, black hairs as thick as wire sprang up from a jutting muzzle, and two boar’s fangs curled up from a wide-lipped mouth.
The last player was a cat-headed woman in gypsy skirts.
The shrimp-whiskered man looked up at Sloane and smiled. “Care to play? We lost our sixth.”
The dealer is Vincent Tranh! She was sure of it. Of course he would be in Mardi Gras. Moping gutless Sloane had sent him there. Guilt, embarrassment, more guilt: yawn.
She tried to say his name but the words died in her mouth, killed by Odessa’s enchantment. “Call me Sly,” she said. “I’d love to play, but I’m afraid I don’t know how.”
Shrimp-whiskered Vincent Tranh, gone to Krewes so long ago, pulled out a chair for her. “A pretty woman can always find help.” Vince spotted a thin man leaning in the shadows by the portieres that led into the parlor. “Ace? Ace! Come over here and advise the young lady, would you?” He winked at Sloane. “Best damn card player I ever knew. Take his advice and you’ll do fine.”
The lean man came slowly to the table. He must have been handsome once, but now he was emaciated to the point of starvation, revealing too much of the skull beneath his skin. His left ear had been cut off, leaving only little nubs of scar tissue around the ear hole. If Sloane hadn’t been wearing her mask, she would have been shocked and stammering.
The bland human mask in front of the beast-man’s face trembled, threatening to slip. “I don’t want his luck at the table,” he snarled.
Vincent waved him off. “We won’t be dealing Ace any cards, Rake. Just let him give her some pointers.”
Sloane curled up one corner of her mouth in a lazy smile that felt very comfortable to Sly. “Don’t worry. I hardly ever take good advice.”
The player called Rake flexed his hairy fingers around the stick of his mask, making it tremble again. He spat on the floor. “First sign of cheating, he’s a dead man.”
Sloane smiled and held out her hand for Ace to kiss. He bent and brushed the back of her knuckles with his lips. “Charmed,” he said, and he took up position behind her chair.
“Have you got the stakes?” asked the heron-headed woman. “We’re playing fifty-one hundred, with a ten-dollar ante.”
Ah. A problem. Of course stupid Sloane hadn’t thought to bring money with her. “How about this?” she said, taking the Rolex off her wrist. “The diamonds are real.”
“That’s a fine piece you have there,” said Miss Bettie. She gave Sloane a long look. “Are you quite sure you want to part with it?”
She recognizes me, Sloane thought, dismayed. Miss Bettie wasn’t fooled by the mask. She knew poor dutiful Sloane was hiding behind Sly’s hard smile. Well, it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. After all, they had lived in the same house for twenty-three years now.
Really, what she should do was keep the watch, leave the table, go find Momus, go be brave. Or just take off the mask. Go back to the real Galveston, the one that mattered, the one where her mother was dying. The one she was supposed to inherit.
But the whole point of the mask was to create a tougher Sloane, a smarter, harder, more cunning woman to meet Momus. Someone who stood a chance. The last thing she could afford was to let the old, weak, mewling Sloane muddy the waters. It was Sly she had to count on, wasn’t it? She had spent twenty-three years being Sloane, and look what it had made of her: a prisoner of everybody else’s expectations. One who never lived up to them, at that.
Sloane found herself reaching across the table. Sly had taken off the watch and was holding it up for sale. “Will anyone give me three thousand?”
“I’ll give you two,” said the heron-headed woman.
“Done—”
“Make it twenty-five hundred,” Miss Bettie said. “It will go so nicely with the diamond pendant Emperor Franz Josef gave to me. What a lovely man—and could he waltz!” As Miss Bettie pulled a wad of bills out of a sequined clutch purse, Sly tossed the Rolex across the table. She felt wonderfully lighter without it.
Vincent dealt out the first three cards of a round of stud. Sloane got a six and a three in the hole, with another six showing: a pair already. “Low card must open the ante, that’s dealer with a deuce showing,” Vincent said, putting in another ten dollars. “Any other bets on Third Street? Fifty dollars to play.”
Sloane pulled out three twenty-dollar bills. “I’ll see your ten and raise fif—” She felt a slight pressure as Ace pushed ever so slightly on her shoulder. She glanced back at him, surprised.
“Throw ’em.”
“By Momus’s moon-sized balls, why would I do that?”
“Advice,” the Rake growled. “No explanations.” His lips pulled back, showing yellow fangs bedded in bloody pink gums.
Ace stood still and silent.
Sloane tossed her sixty dollars in the pot and smiled at the Rake. “I promised you I wouldn’t do as I was told.”
Miss Bettie folded. The Rake reraised with a queen showing, and the Heron called, with a ten of diamonds. The cat-faced woman, whose name was Lianna, folded, along with Vincent.
“My odds are improving,” Sloane said, but knowing Ace disapproved of her play she didn’t raise on her next three cards, just called the Rake, who raised at every card. The Heron seemed to be building a diamond flush, but her fi
fth and sixth cards were both spades and when the Rake raised again she folded, too. Sloane had been tempted to do the same, seeing the fury with which the Rake bet, but her sixth card was another three, giving her two pair. She decided to stay for the showdown. Every bet on the fourth, fifth, and sixth cards had been for a hundred dollars, leaving thirteen hundred and twenty dollars in the middle of the table when she called the Rake’s last bet. “Show me what you’ve got.”
“Queens and fours,” he snarled.
Sloane winced and started to lay down her two smaller pair, but Ace swiftly took her hand and placed her cards facedown on the table. “Shh.” He looked at the Rake. “You win.”
Sloane counted her money. She had lost five hundred and sixty dollars, more than a fifth of her stake, in one hand. She glanced at Ace. “Guess I should have folded.”
“Yep.”
On his advice she immediately folded the next three hands, won a small pot on the fourth, and folded again on the fifth card of the next, just before the raising started in earnest. The hand after, it was Miss Bettie who had the low card and the first bet. The Rake and the cat-faced woman folded. The Heron and Vincent called. Sloane had a ten and ace down with a king showing and no chance of a flush. She started to close up her hand when she felt Ace’s bony fingers on her shoulder again. “Raise,” he said.
“Just what I was thinking,” she said, and she threw sixty more dollars into the middle of the table. Ten minutes later she won a sixteen-hundred-dollar pot with three tens.
The Rake growled, a low, savage rumbling in the back of his throat. “I told you we shouldn’t play with him.” He threw back a long shot of bourbon. “I didn’t sit down to be cheated.”
“Nobody’s cheating, nobody’s cheating!” Vincent said, shaking his head quickly so the long fronds of his feelers swished against the table’s edge.
“Beginner’s luck,” Sloane added brightly. She glanced back at her advisor.