Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) Read Free

following them, but they didn’t.
   The taxi driver turned to me and said something I didn’t understand, and just then the boy finally began to cry, to bawl really, the floodgates opened and he sobbed and shrieked with a voice incredibly loud for someone so small.
   “Where we go?” the taxi driver shouted over the howling child.
   I looked at him. Then I took a mental step back and looked at myself. Ten minutes ago I had been walking back to our hostel. Now I was in a taxi I couldn’t afford, accompanied by a shrieking five-year-old boy I had just met, following armed criminals and a family of refugees to God only knows where.
   “Beats the hell outta me,” I assured the driver.
   “I no – sorry,” the driver said carefully, “I don’t understand. Where do you want to go today?”
  
Great
, I thought.
Here I am adopting children and chasing gangsters and my driver is quoting Microsoft ads
. I was saved from having to answer by the Mitsubishi’s squealing brakes. The pickup made a sudden left turn onto a gravel road it almost overshot, changing course so suddenly that my taxi flew right past before I could tell the driver to stop.
   “There!” I said excitedly. “There! Turn around!” I mimed a U-turn.
   The driver looked dubious. I saw his point. The winding road had narrowed to typical Bosnian size, much too skinny for a U-turn, with a ditch on one side and a steep hill on the other. If a car piloted by your typical Bosnian driver came from either direction while we were in the middle of the eleven-point turn probably required to reverse our course, we would all become footnotes in tomorrow’s Sarajevo obituaries.
   “Wait,” the driver decided.
   We drove for another minute until he found another offshoot road and used that to turn around. The boy’s howling tantrum had begun to dissipate and by the time we turned onto the gravel road it had diminished to coughing and soft, pitiful sobs. I ignored him. Under other circumstances I might have tried being fatherly and sympathetic, but I had begun to unfairly blame the kid for getting me into this mess in the first place.
   The gravel road went downhill, through shoulder-high bushes and across disturbingly jittery bridges that spanned little streams, presumably tributaries of the Miljacka. Out here there were no street lights and the darkness on either side of the taxi was so thick it seemed solid. The driver glanced back at me nervously. I didn’t feel too confident either. The situation seemed to be deteriorating with every passing minute.
   I looked at the child and wondered what would have happened to him if I hadn’t grabbed him and hailed the taxi. Maybe nothing. Maybe the family would find a translator at the pickup’s destination, and after a quick explanation the Mitsubishi would have returned and retrieved the boy. Possible. But it didn’t seem likely.
   Maybe a neighbour would have discovered him in a yard and adopted him. Bosnians, like all the denizens of the Balkans, were famous for their hospitality. Maybe he would have grown up here, learned the language, only vaguely remembered his early childhood, and one day ten years from now one of his elder sisters, by now a doctor in London, would have tracked him down for a tearful and joyous reunion.
   Or maybe he would have been abandoned, ignored, turned over to the rough shelters and violent tutors one finds on the streets of Sarajevo. That seemed a lot more likely. Bosnians were also famous for their racism.
   I could have taken him back to our hostel and tomorrow turned him over to the police. I still could. What would happen next was hard to imagine, the Bosnian government was as minimal as possible and I doubted they had procedures in place for alien children who showed up out of nowhere. But surely some well-meaning NGO would take him in and try to find his family, or put him in an orphanage here, wouldn’t they? Though I couldn’t imagine