Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

mortar scars, or apartment towers blasted into gargantuan Swiss cheese. The signs of war were still easy to find, in this city overflowing with angry ghosts.
   The convenience store was a reassuring island of bright lights, modern technology, and Western brand names. I bought a pack of Marlboro Lights and a box of matches. I walked back to the Pansione, unwrapped the pack, and lit my first cigarette in two years. I choked a little on the first few puffs, but old habits kicked in and I was soon smoking like I had never stopped.
   I still wasn’t tired. Far from it. I was electrically awake. I hadn’t experienced tonight’s kind of adrenaline rush, or anything even close to it, for a long, long time. I felt like I had woken up from a long, deep sleep. From a coma.
   I thought of the last time I had faced down a loaded gun. The smell and taste of smoke reminded me of how I and my friends had smoked our way through a pack of cheap Moroccan cigarettes on our way back to our hotel, that day more than two years ago. I hadn’t thought about that night in ages. I hadn’t thought about anything outside the bleak rut of my day-to-day life in ages. It had hurt too much, remembering how good my life had been.
   Once upon a time I was a man who had adventures, who travelled several months a year, crossed oceans and continents on a whim, who had friends around the globe who would risk their lives for me and I for them, who had a beautiful girlfriend who I loved and who loved me, who was happy. Once upon a time I had money. Once upon a time my skills were in demand and I was able to get a well-paid job whenever I wanted one. Those two things hadn’t seemed so important. How wrong I had been.
   I still had Talena, but, I told myself, finally able to articulate it because it had moved from fear to certainty, not for much longer. I still had those friends, but most were oceans away, and I wasn’t likely to have enough money to cross oceans again anytime soon. I didn’t have much else. Two years ago, I had everything. Now I was running out of things to lose.
   At the party that night, I had watched Talena laughing with one of her old rediscovered friends, a tall easygoing model-handsome man with chiseled muscles and designer clothes, trading jokes in a language I did not understand, and for the first time I had thought:
She doesn’t belong with me. I wish she did, how I wish she did, but she doesn’t. She belongs with someone better.

   The troll woman said something. I started out of my reverie and looked at her. She reached for the Marlboros with bony claw fingers and looked at me for approval. I nodded. She coaxed a cigarette from the pack, lit it, and sucked at it like it was the source of life. I wondered how old she was. She looked about seventy, but Bosnians, like all residents of recent war zones, usually looked older than they were. Maybe sixty. I wondered where I would be when I was sixty, if I might be alone in a room like this, bumming cigarettes from strangers. Just then it seemed like a terrifyingly plausible future.
   I lit up another cigarette and contemplated myself and my prospects. I hadn’t done so for a long time. Eighteen months of poverty and boredom and rejection, of living off handouts from my parents and Talena, of being an unemployed bum with fuck-all to do, had shrunk my life to a barren rut from which I dared not lift my head. For a long time now the mental subjects of
me
and
the future
had been too repellent to dwell on. But tonight, being in Sarajevo, carrying that little boy back to his family, staring down the smugglers’ guns, tonight seemed to have jolted me out of my lethargy and depression, for a little while at least. Tonight I could look at myself without cringing.
   I stayed up all night, smoking and thinking, sometimes sitting in that common room, sometimes wandering the deserted streets, until my throat was raw and my mind was numb and the sky above Sarajevo had