Daughter of Smoke and Bone

28 ATTITUDE OF PRAYER

In her hiding place, the vampire Svetla momentarily forgot how to breathe.

Down the alley at the junction with Karlova, a small tour group rounded the corner and came to a shocked halt. Gum fell from slack mouths. Kaz, sporting a top hat and carrying a wooden stake jauntily under one arm, perceived that his ex-girlfriend was in midair.

Honestly, he wasn’t that surprised. There was something about Karou that activated an unusual credulity. Things you wouldn’t dream of believing of others seemed, where Karou was concerned, not such a stretch. Karou, flying? Well, why not?

What Kaz felt wasn’t surprise. It was jealousy. Karou was flying, sure, but she was not flying alone. She was with a man, a man who even Kaz — who claimed it was “gay” to recognize the attractiveness of other men — had to admit to himself was beautiful to the point of absurdity. Beautiful to the point of completely overdoing it.

Uncool, he thought, crossing his arms.

It couldn’t exactly be described as flying, what the two were doing. They were up even with the roofline, but they were barely moving — circling like cats, staring at each other with extraordinary intensity. The air fairly throbbed between them, and Kaz felt it like a punch in the gut.

Then Karou attacked the guy, and he felt much better.

Later he would claim the airborne fight was part of his tour, and he’d rake in record tips. He’d refer to Karou as his girlfriend, infuriating Svetla, who would stalk home to glare at her eyebrows — still caterpillar-fat — in the mirror. But for now, they all just gawked at the two beautiful creatures fighting in the air with the rooftops of Prague behind them.

Well, Karou was fighting, anyway. Her opponent only dodged, with great grace and a strange kind of… gentleness?… and he seemed to shy away from her and flinch as if struck even when she hadn’t touched him.

It went on like that for a few minutes as the crowd thickened on the ground, and then it happened that when she came at him, the guy seized her hands so she dropped her knife — it fell a long way and landed point down between cobblestones and stuck there — and he held her. It was strange: He held her palms pressed together in an attitude of prayer. She struggled, but he was clearly much stronger and held her with ease, his hands pressed over hers, like he was forcing her to pray.

He spoke to her and his words drifted down to the onlookers, foreign and richly tonal, rough and somehow a little… animal. Whatever he said to her, she gradually stopped struggling. Still, he kept her hands folded in his own for a long moment. Over in Old Town Square, the bells of Týn Church tolled nine, and it was only when the ninth hour echoed into silence that he released her and sculled backward in the air, tense and watchful, like one who has released a wild thing from a cage and doesn’t know if it’s going to turn on him.

Karou didn’t turn on him. She drew away. The two spoke, gestured. Karou’s movements in the air were languid, her long legs curled up beneath her, arms moving with a tidal rhythm, as if she were keeping herself afloat. It all looked so effortless — so possible — that several tourists cautiously tested the air with their own arms, wondering if they hadn’t strayed into some pocket of the world where… well, where people could fly.

And then, just when they were becoming accustomed to the startling sight of the blue-haired girl and black-haired man floating overhead like a piece of magnificent performance art, the girl made a sudden move. The man sagged in the air and started to fall in fits and starts, struggling to stay aloft.

He lost the struggle and went limp. His head rolled back, loose on his neck, and, in a sizzle of sparks that gave the brief impression of the tail of a comet, he plunged to earth.