When Heaven Weeps by Ted Dekker Read Free Book Online Page B

been sucked from the courtyard as if by a vacuum. The children’s whimpers fell silent. The women froze in their tracks. Not an eye blinked.
    The girl spoke. “Father Michael has taught us that in the end only love matters. Love is giving, not taking. My friends were giving me gifts today because they love me. Now you’ve taken everything. Do you hate us?”
    The commander spit at her. “Shut up, you ugly little wench! You have no respect?”
    â€œI mean no disrespect, sir. But I can’t stand to see you hurt our village.”
    â€œPlease, Nadia,” Ivena said.
    The priest stood quivering, his face half off, his shoulders grotesquely slumped, staring at Nadia with his one good eye.
    Karadzic blinked. Nadia turned to face her mother and spoke very quietly. “I’m sorry, Mother.”
    She looked Karadzic in the eyes. “If you’re good, sir, why are you hurting us? Father Michael has taught us that religion without God is foolishness. And God is love. But how is this love? Love is—”
    â€œShut your hole!” Karadzic lifted a hand to strike her. “Shut your tiny hole, you insolent—”
    â€œStop! Please stop!” Ivena staggered forward three steps from the far side, uttering little panicky guttural sounds.
    Karadzic glared at Nadia, but he did not swing his hand.
    Nadia never took her round blue eyes off the commander. Her lower lip quivered for a moment. Tears leaked down her cheek in long, silent streams. “But sir, how can I shut up if you make my mother carry that load on her back? She has only so much strength. She will drop the cross and then you’ll beat her. I can’t stand to watch this.”
    Karadzic ignored the girl and looked around at the scattered women, bent, unmoving, staring at him. “March! Did I tell you to stop? March!”
    But they did not. Something had changed, Janjic thought. They looked at Karadzic, their gazes fixed. Except for Ivena. She was bent like a pack mule, shaking, but slowly, ever so slowly, she began to straighten with the cross on her back.
    Janjic wanted to scream out. Stop, woman! Stop, you fool! Stay down!
    Nadia spoke in a wavering tone now. “I beg you, sir. Please let these mothers put down their crosses. Please leave us. This would not please our Lord Jesus. It’s not his love.”
    â€œShut up!” Karadzic thundered. He took a step toward Nadia, grabbed one of her pigtails and yanked.
    She winced and stumbled after him, nearly falling except for his grip on her hair. Karadzic pulled the girl to the father, who looked on, tears running down his cheek now.
    Ivena’s cross slipped from her back then.
    Janjic alone watched it, and he felt its impact through his boot when it landed.
    Nadia’s mother ran for Karadzic. She’d already taken three long strides when the dull thump jerked the commander’s heads toward her. She took two more, half the distance to the commander, head bent and eyes fixed, before uttering a sound. And then her mouth snapped wide and she shrieked in fury. A full-throated roaring scream that met Janjic’s mind like a dentist’s drill meeting a raw nerve.
    Karadzic whipped the girl behind him like a rag doll. He stepped forward and met the rushing woman’s face with his fist. The blow sent her reeling, bleeding profusely from the nose. She slumped to her knees, silenced to a moan.
    And then another cross fell.
    And another, and another until they were slamming to the concrete in a rain of stone. The women struggled to stand tall, all of them.
    A streak of fear crossed Karadzic’s gray eyes, Janjic realized. But he wasn’t thinking too clearly just now. He was trembling under the weight of the atmosphere. A thick air of insanity laced by the crazy notion that he should stop this. That he should scream out in protest, or maybe put a bullet in Karadzic’s head— anything to end this madness.
    The commander jerked his