I could sense three of them. Not enough for a true raid, but maybe they couldn’t gather many with the guards around. Given that they were still carrying out their attack, they must have figured that as long as they caught us by surprise, that would be enough. They were wrong.
The door rattled. They were trying to pry the lock open, but it was holding firm. We’d had it custom-made by an expert locksmith, so they were having trouble with it. Rather than wait for them to destroy it, I just opened the door from the inside to greet the masked men.
“Hey.”
“Tsk!”
They turned and ran. It wasn’t a bad idea to simply flee the moment you were discovered. But they had come too close for safety, and the temporary sun was shining behind my back. I chased after them. I let them turn two corners, luring them toward a much less visible place. This would be their execution stand.
Once we were together in a narrow alley, I suddenly picked up speed. While they scrambled, I leaped over their heads, crushing one of their faces through the mask. Another one I punched in the chest so hard that it caved in. The last one I grabbed by the collar and lifted off the ground.
I could have simply broken his neck, but I had plenty of questions. However, as I strangled him, his head slumped. He had fallen unconscious. There was a way to wake them up by striking the back of the neck, but if I did it, the result was usually a broken neck and death. I tore off the mask to find he was surprisingly young, no older than Ralph.
Bradley could handle the bodies, but the question was how I would get information out of the boy I had taken alive. I would be happy to take him back to my secret lair for some enjoyable torture time, but I didn’t have the strength for it. The temporary sun was in an unstable state, and I didn’t want to overuse it. Plus, the girls were asleep at home. So I had a different plan in mind.
I rang a bell on my belt.
After a few moments, a covered wagon appeared at the opening to the alley. A woman about as tall as me got down from it.
“Hi, thanks for coming,” I said.
Her name was Chelsea, and she was a criminal courier known as a kite. They would take just about anything a person wanted to just about anywhere in town. If someone paid them, they would move a pile of literal shit. The only things they wouldn’t take were corpses. They had a business deal with Bradley about that.
Chelsea nodded broadly, then slowly lifted up the body of the formerly masked young man. I didn’t have to worry about her spilling secrets. She was a foreigner and didn’t understand the language. All she understood was money and simple instructions. Even the name Chelsea was an alias.
While she worked, Bradley appeared and took the dead bodies for me. Then I hopped into the wagon. They would carry people, too, for the right price.
“All right, this is where to take us,” I indicated.
She nodded slowly again, then got into the driver’s seat and spurred the horses on. We crossed Glowfly Lane and got to a ruined two-story building on a narrow street. This was one of my hideouts.
Once up the stairs, I had Chelsea unload the package in front of the door. She had helpfully tied up his hands and feet and gagged him, too—for a fee, of course.
After Chelsea was on her way, I opened the door with a spare key. There was a bed, a chair, a table, and nothing else. But that was all I needed.
Using my weight alone, I dragged the formerly masked man in the room and locked the door.
“Hi there,” I said.
He flinched. Poor guy. He was terrified. I felt sorry for him, so I wanted to get this over with. I straddled his chest, held a sharpened short sword to his throat, and undid the gag.
“So let’s get down to business. You’re going to tell me everything you know about what you thought you were doing and who was behind it. And I mean everything, aside from their bathroom, bathing, and sexual habits.”
The tip of the sword grazed his throat. Little orbs of blood appeared along the skin, creating a red line that dripped down toward his chest.
“And let me apologize up front: My questioning can be rather harsh. It’s not like the playtime you get with the guards and the Paladins.”
“I’ll talk. Please, just spare my life.”
He broke sooner than I expected. Young people these days have no backbone. He still had all his fingers left, and even one ball.
His name was Rob. He was a low-level thug at the very bottom of the Spotted Wolves’ hierarchy. They were one of the primary gangs in town.
“This,” Rob said, pulling out a drawing of April. It was quite accurate. Below it was the bounty placed on her head: Fifty gold to the one who brings her. That was quite a generous offer.
“The Devil’s Alliance is after the girl.”
The Devil’s Alliance was another major gang, a rival of the Spotted Wolves. They had the largest headcount.
“Why?” I demanded. The head of that group had a relationship with the old man. Whatever they really thought of each other, they seemed to have a good public rapport.
“You’re familiar with the fact that their lieutenant Heather died recently.”
Heather was a senior member of the Devil’s Alliance, something of a second-in-command type. Her actual age wasn’t known, but it was said to be over eighty. After the stampede ravaged the town, she’d been found dead in the bathroom. She already had a fatal disease and was living on borrowed time, but that wasn’t what killed her. There were signs she’d been partially eaten.
“She hated the stench her body made as it was slowly dying, so she wore all kinds of fancy perfumes. Led the monsters right to her. Pure stupidity.”
In fact, there had been reports of witch sightings in the courtyard of the mansion, as I understood it.
“There’d been rumors for a while that Heather was socking away a vast fortune. She’d been keeping it in secret with her own hired guard, hiding it from the boss. At least a million gold coins, supposedly.”
That would be quite a fortune. A person could buy ten brothels, employees included, and still have plenty to spare.