Free Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) by Jon Evans Page B

bad. This is really fucking bad. All those men last night, all your new best friends? They’re monsters. Don’t think of them as people. Think of them as demons in human form. I’m not exaggerating, not one fucking bit, if you heard the stories she told me…God. Crucifixions, old men and boys crucified alive, live impalings, locking children into houses and setting them on fire, shooting pregnant woman in the belly, stopping buses and picking out girls to drag outside and rape in front of their families, war or no war, and it wasn’t a war, it’s fucking unspeakable what they did, and I don’t care that half the rest of the country was doing the same kind of thing, they’re still monsters. It’s like Saskia was kidnapped by orcs eight years ago and they kept making her send letters saying she was OK. Except they didn’t make her. She just didn’t want to trouble me. If she’d only told me, if she’d just called or written and told me…Fuck. It makes me want to scream. I guess she didn’t get email until a few years ago anyway and by then he’d already kicked all the good sense out of her.”
   “You don’t need to worry about me,” I said defensively. “They were already definitely not my new best friends.”
   “That’s not what Josip said you told the NATO troops.”
   “I was trying to mediate. That’s all. Defusing the situation. Come on, Talena, you know me, do you really think I was male bonding with those animals? I was just trying to be polite and friendly so that you wouldn’t be pissed off at me for ruining your reunion. If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t have stayed at that party more than ten minutes.”
   “That’s why you told them that you were one of their blood brothers? That’s why you told NATO to go fuck themselves and dared them to arrest you? To be polite?”
   “Blood brothers?” I asked, incredulous. “I told NATO
what?
”
   “Well…that’s the story he told me this morning,” Talena said, seeing from my reaction that the tale had grown considerably in the telling. “That you’re the new local hero who told NATO to piss off, and because it was you, for once they actually did. Usually three or four of them wind up spending a night or two in jail.”
   “Usually? There’s a usually?” That made the whole encounter retrospectively even weirder. “Jesus Christ, this town is fucked up.”
   “Tell me about it.”
   “There any water left in your bottle?”
   Talena dug out her half-full liter bottle and passed it to me. I emptied it.
   “Dragan wants to drive you out somewhere as soon as you’re up,” she said. “His big business opportunity. He’s very excited, he was almost going to tell me all about it but then he remembered that he was talking to a woman. After that he probably wanted to break my nose just to keep in practice. That fucker.”
   “What are you going to do?” I asked.
   “I’m going to cut his tongue out, and break all his fucking fingers one at a time,” Talena said fiercely, and for a moment I feared she meant it. But then she sighed, and said in a slightly more sane tone, “I’m going to get her out of here.”
   “How?”
   “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I want her to come back to Sarajevo with us. That’ll be a start.”
   “She won’t come,” I said. “She’s afraid they’ll kill her. She won’t come unless we can get her an American visa. These days that could take months. If we could do it at all.”
   Talena stared at me, amazed.
   “What?” I asked.
   “How do you know?”
   I realized that Talena had not spoken to Saskia this morning, at least not in private, and did not know about my conversation earlier this morning. “I talked to her. This morning.”
   “You…how? When?”
   I explained. Talena listened intently.
   “I didn’t see her bruises,” she said quietly when I finished, no longer angry at me. She brought her knees up