but absorb it.
He didn’t. Instead, the next time she came at him, he gathered the air beneath him and took flight, lifting off the cobbles and out of her reach. “I just want to talk to you,” he said from above her.
She threw her head back and looked up to where he hovered in the air. The draft of his wingbeats whipped her hair around her face in wild blue tendrils.
She smiled, savage, and sank into a crouch. “So talk,” she said, and sprang into the air to meet him.
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
