Page 22 of The Hawk and the Nightingale

Hawk grunted. “I suppose, since you’ve made a name for yourself by ripping out throats and defeating warlords, I shouldn’t argue with you.”

Amalie stood on her toes, and slid her hands onto Hawk’s shoulders. “Hawk, you have nothing to fear from me. Not ever.”

He rested his forehead against hers. “I know, my beauty. Let’s get this bastard out of my club.”

Of course, they needed to find a way to move Marek while simultaneously concealing his burned body. After much trial and error, they rolled him up in an old rug and carried him out on their shoulders.

“Such a cliché,” Amalie lamented, as they hauled their gruesome cargo down the narrow streets and toward the Vltava, the wide river that ran through Prague.

“We could have chopped him up and stuffed him in garbage bags,” Hawk said. Even though he brought up the rear of the rug, Amalie held up the bulk of Marek’s weight. “Would he regenerate from that?”

“Perhaps, in time,” Amalie said. “And only if the pieces weren’t too small.”

“Next time, we chop,” Hawk grunted. “I’ll have my butcher knife ready.”

“I am sure you will.” They stepped onto the shore, and Amalie’s boots made a sucking sound against the mud. “Careful. It’s slippery.”

“It would be tragic if I dropped Marek and he broke his neck.”

“Hawk!”

They left Marek at the very edge of the river, still loosely rolled up in the carpet. Amalie looked across the wide expanse of water, and sighed. “When I was young, we called this the wild waters.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Long enough.” She nudged the carpet onto the rockier part of the foreshore with her boot. While she wanted Marek to survive this latest ordeal, she did not want him to be comfortable. “Let’s go to the bridge, and watch.”

As the river lapped at Marek tight in his rug, Amalie led Hawk to the Charles Bridge. As ever, it was packed with tourists. They chose a spot alongside one of the grand old statues that lined either side of the bridge, and watched the carpet as it lay on the foreshore. From that distance it looked like nothing more than a cast off bit of rubbish, not the body of the once-fierce vampire warlord that held all of Eastern Europe in check.

“Will his people find him before the tide comes in?” Hawk asked.

Amalie shrugged. “They will, or they won’t. If he drowns, so be it. I won’t miss him.”

“Did you ever love him?”

“No,” she replied without hesitation. “I loved the idea of leaving my boring village behind, and I loved the idea of being a powerful queen. But while Marek did take me from my home, I was never more than a plaything to him. I was a shiny bauble in a court already packed with shiny baubles. While I was with him, I was nothing.”

Hawk brought her hand to his mouth and kissed her knuckles. “Amalie, you were never nothing.”

She smiled at him, this mortal man she’d wanted nothing to do with and had avoided at all costs. And yet, Hawk had pushed his way into her life, and even though they’d only shared a handful of days together Amalie couldn’t imagine her life without him. She wondered how long he would be willing to put up with a vampire.

Maybe not forever, but for a good while?

Amalie moved closer to him, intending to tell Hawk how she felt but not having the slightest idea how to begin, when he jerked his chin toward the riverbank.

“They found him.”

With one graceful movement Amalie got on top of the stone wall, her black hair streaming in the wind behind her. She observed as Marek’s soldiers first unrolled him from the sodden, filthy carpet, and then as they began opening their wrists and dripping blood into his mouth to try and revive him.

“Do they know you’re here?” Hawk asked.

“They know.”

She’d no sooner said the words when one of the soldiers looked up, and saw Amalie standing on the bridge’s side wall. He alerted the rest of the soldiers, and they momentarily stopped tending to Marek as they stared incredulously at the small, lowborn woman who had bested the legendary warlord two times now. Three times, if you counted Varushka’s death.

Amalie counted it. She still remembered the warm spray of Varushka’s blood on her face, and the weak, stuttering heartbeats as her life slipped away. Amalie would never forget the slow, messy death of her worst enemy.

Now Amalie stood tall on the Charles Bridge, and lifted her chin as Marek’s soldiers stood on the banks of the Vltava. There were five soldiers clustered around Marek, and if they attacked now neither she nor Hawk would stand a chance. But the soldiers didn’t know that. All they knew was that Marek lay at their feet, very, very close to death, while an apparently uninjured Amalie watched them from above.

Hesitantly, the soldier that first noticed her bowed. The other four followed suit, their stiff movements telling Amalie that they didn’t know if they would survive the night if they were seen rescuing Marek. She nodded to the five, and watched as they straightened, then gathered up Marek and carried him away. None of the soldiers dared meet her gaze again.

“That was stressful,” Hawk grumbled, shattering the tense mood. “Are all you vampires so dramatic?”

Amalie laughed, and let him help her down from the wall and into his arms. “We are. Think you can handle it?”

“For you, I can handle anything.”

>>

---