BLOODFIRE

Trea’s head was pounding, and all the bouncing and shaking that was going on wasn’t helping in the least. She opened her eyes and saw a chubby man sitting across from her. He was wearing a guards uniform. Through the haze that blurred her vision she tried to focus on his badge.

“Not-Not Ralaugh.” She groaned.

The guard across from her chuckled, “So, you’re finally awake eh? I was almost afraid I had killed you. You’re right though, you’re not in Ralaugh. You’re in Entara. Are you wanted in Ralaugh too? I wonder if I can collect both bounties on you.”

“Wanted? Bounty?” Trea still hadn’t quite taken in her situation. She tried to put her hands up to rub her headache away, but found them cuffed. This snapped her back into reality. Her eyes widened and she looked around. She was in the back of a police truck, cuffed. But what had happened? Why was she being arrested? The reason was there, buried in the fog that clouded her mind still, she could just barely make it out. She managed to cup her hands just enough to rest her head and rub her eyes with the heels of her palms. What was she forgetting?

“Yeah, five thousand gold for your arrest. I’d have to say, it was pretty ballsy of you to try to pull off that heist before dark. Even in all that black you stand out.”

Heist? “Shit!” she thought, “Shit! Shit! SHIT!” She remembered now, though a part of her wished she hadn’t. If she couldn’t remember, then she could at least claim she had been coerced into her crimes; not that she expected that would have gotten her any leniency, but it would have been better than nothing.

Since they had opened their security and bounty hunting business over a year ago, things had been slow for Trea and Kalwren. Not that it bothered Kalwren in the least, he was simply biding his time until his father retired and passed the family business on to him. Having clients was not an issue to him, it simply meant less paper work and that he could live with. Things went this way for a while, until Kal’s younger sister, Mercy, put it into their father’s mind that he could use Kalwren’s business as a sort of barometer to measure how well he would do with the family business, and that the best way to judge it was to cut off his monthly allowance that Kal used to keep up with bills. This sent Kal into a panic. To be cut off meant he would eventually go broke, or worse, he’d have to give up his regular indulgences. Kal began accepting any job that was put his way, this included several jewelry heists.

That is how she ended up in cuffs. Kal, ever the coward, had left her at the shop at the first sign of trouble. She probably could have escaped, but the officer that sat across from her now had hit her across the head with a small club. She hadn’t even gotten the merchandise they were after. She knew the job was a bad idea. Hitting the same place twice in a month was just dumb, but Kal insisted that they had to do it for that month’s rent.

“Shit!” she yelled and stomped her foot. Then she heard a distinctive, yet very unexpected, sound. Wood. Splintering wood. She looked at the floor. It was wood. As were the walls of the police truck. Only the roof and doors were metal and they were a thin, cheap metal at that. “God bless the Arch-Duke for being a penny pinching miser of a bastard.” She thought as she began to think of how to get out of this bind. Soon she felt the truck begin to slow and she began doing thankfulness prayers in her head.

The guard banged on the wall separating them from the driver. “What’s going on up there!” He barked.

“Th-There’s an accident of some sort. Everyone’s backed up. I can’t get around.”

“Then back up!”

“I-I can’t…sir. We’re blocked in.”

The guard moved back over to the middle of the bench he was on muttering something about how the goddammed people of this goddammed town needed to show the police some goddammed respect. He looked at Trea, as though just remembering she was there. “We’re gonna be here a while.”

Trea smiled. This was her chance. “Got a smoke?”

The guard looked at her cautiously. “What for?”

“Well we’re gonna be here for a while, I may as well enjoy one last smoke before I get to jail.” Having spent all that time in Marco’s pub, she learned to soften herself enough to seem harmless to any man by watching other women do it. Trea was putting her education to good use as she made an effort to seem complacent about her arrest.

This answer seemed to please the guard enough. He moved over to her side of the truck, pulled out a cigarette, lit it and reached to put it in her mouth. As soon as he was close enough, Trea hit him with a hard headbutt, knocking him out cold. The blow slightly stunned her, but she shook her head and recovered. She stared at the guard and grimaced, “Yeah it sucks when someone sneaks a blow to your head, doesn’t it?” She sucked on the cigarette and frowned even harder, “And your smokes suck.” She dropped the cigarette and stomped it out.

Trea grabbed the keys to her handcuffs and managed to get herself loose, bruising her wrists in the process. She cleared her throat, banged on the front end of the truck the way the guard had and did her best to imitate him. “Hey idiot! Get back here, there’s something wrong with the prisoner.”

“O-OK.” the driver responded.

When Trea heard the driver’s door open and shut, she positioned herself right behind the door. As the driver opened the back doors, she let loose a kick sending him flying back five feet. She hopped out the truck, and looked at the driver. The man couldn’t have been more than 25. “Sorry there chappy, but I seriously doubt you’d have let me just walk out of there.”

Some time after sundown, Trea walked through the door to their office. Kal was at the desk smoking a cigarette through one of his favorite long, ivory filters. Trea rolled her eyes.

“I was expecting you to call. How did you make bail?” Kal asked.

“Bail? I didn’t make bail. I knocked out the guards who arrested me and escaped. No thanks to you. What the hell happened back there? You’re the get away car, that means you want for me before you get away.”

Kal shrugged, “Well I heard the sirens and thought I should probably leave. Our clients weren’t going to bail us out, so it didn’t make sense for both of us to get arrested.”

Trea reached over the desk and lifted Kal by his collar, “If you ever do that again,” she said through clenched teeth, “I will nail you to the bottom of the car, find the bumpiest road I can and drive down it at top speed. Got it?”

Kal was unfazed, he blew the smoke he had in his lungs out the side of his mouth. “Sure, sure,” he said, unrolling Trea’s fingers from his shirt, he frowned when he saw her grip had left wrinkles, “I get it.”

Trea straightened up, sat down in one of the chairs facing Kal and propped her feet on the desk. She lit a cigarette and pulled on it hard. The blast of smoke she let out made her resemble a steam whistle. “So what are you going to tell the clients?”

“That we were not able to finish the job we were hired for.”

“And they’ll just accept that?”

“Mmmm…probably not.”

“So…?”

“So what? You’re the thief, you got caught not me.”

“I wouldn’t have gotten caught if you had let me do it at night like I originally planned.”

“Yes but then that would have interfered with my plans.” Kal whined.

“Your plans? What plans do you have besides going to Ms. Broudeaux’s brothel?”

Kal’s eyes widened, but in a split second he regained his composure, “I planned to meet with some friends.” He said, forcing calm into his voice.

Trea’s lips curled into a cruel smile, “Friends? Really? Which one tonight? Troy? Basil? Or maybe the new boy, Pasquale. You seem to have taken a liking to him. Though I can certainly see why, he is quite beautiful. Young, limber. And that dark hair with those pale blue eyes. He makes a striking image doesn’t he? An angel in the devil’s boudoir.”

Kal began to shake nervously, “What do you know about this?”

Trea’s eyes sparkled like a cat ready to pounce, “Come on now Kal. We’ve been working together for almost two years now, don’t you think that I would have checked on you? Especially since you were in Marco’s pub the night he died. I followed you for weeks before I agreed to be your partner.”

“You thought I killed Marco?!?” Kal’s voice rose and cracked, “How-How could you?”

“Don’t get so upset. I followed everyone who was there that night who may have had a reason to kill him. I even managed to get that loud fellow to stop blubbering long enough to exonerate him. Though the chances of him killing Marco and burning the pub were slim. After they bandaged his arms they had him committed. Apparently they thought the shock of his arms being broken drove him to madness. The guard described me and said he claimed I broke his arms, everyone agreed there was no way I could have done it. When Marco was killed, he was drugged, and in a cell by himself.”

“Even so,” Kal said with a pout, “I am far from the murderous type.”

“Well, I know that now, but I didn’t know back then you were such a coward.”

“Coward! I am no such thing. I’m just…cautious.”

Trea scoffed.

“Anyway, I don’t just keep company with the young men at Ms. Broudeaux’s. I like women too.”

“Oh yes, I know that also. You like them lusciously curvy. And the more exotic the better.”

Kal’s face turned a deep red. He could feel the heat of his embarrassment burning through him. Trea laughed and rolled her eyes.

“I know more about you than you thought, eh? Don’t worry, I have no reason to spill your naughty secrets to the world, and Madame Broudeaux is on your father’s payroll-yes, I know about that too-so she’s certainly not going to say anything.”

Kal sat back in his chair, attempting to regain his composure. He normally kept his cool under all sorts of conditions, but he never expected anyone to know what he did in the backroom of the brothel. The backrooms were saved for the more deviant acts of carnal shame. The things no self-respecting, upright man or woman would admit to doing, but fantasized about often. It was not at all unheard of to find a cleric rushing from the backrooms, muttering blessings and prayers of forgiveness quickly under their breaths, guilt smeared on their face like the incense ashes. If asked they would always use “saving the soul of these hapless sinners” as their go-to excuse for being there.

Madame Broudeaux’s brothel housed some of the most beautiful men and women, of all ages, from all three regions. Some were captured in wartime, others were slaves traded and sold. Madame Broudeaux got the first pick of them all. Having been the King’s concubine before the birth of the Princes and Princess afforded her privilages others could only dream about. Trea was quite right on all points. Madame Broudeaux extorted some of her richer clients to maintain their secrets, and it was said that she kept books with trusted people so that should she ever turn up murdered the wives of all the society elites would know how their husbands fouled their flesh.

Kal inhaled deeply, then exhaled slowly. His cigarette was near the tip of the ivory filter, so he gingerly plucked it out and extinguished it. His heart had slowed to it’s normal steady beat, his mind had stopped spinning. He looked at Trea, who had started in on her second cigarette. “What are you going to do about the bounty they’re going to put on you for knocking out two guards?”

Trea raised her eyebrows in surprise. It felt like an eternity had passed since she revealed Kal’s secrets, and in that time he became as cool as ever. She pulled the cigarette from her mouth and blew the smoke upwards. “Well, there was already a five thousand gold bounty from the first job.”

Now it was Kal’s turn to look surprised, “So, what are you going to do about it? If we need to go back to Entara we can’t have your face plastered on every wall with a bounty under it.”

“I have a friend. He’ll take care of it.”

“A friend?”

“Yes. A friend. He has some influence.”

“Well if this friend should fall through, I’m certain a bribe to the Arch-Duke will clear things up nicely.”

“Yeah, but the Arch-Duke is a greedy fucker. The police truck was a plain wood cart with some flimsey metal over it. I wouldn’t put it past him to hold that bribe over our heads for as long as he can milk it. Even you Meadowharts don’t have enough to keep him quiet forever.”

Kal stood and threw his heavy cloak over his shoulders. It was autumn and there was a chill in the air. He walked around the desk and past Trea. As he reached for the door he stopped. Without looking back at her he said, “I trust you Trea.” Then he opened the door and left.

A friend