“Stop!”
I froze in place and so did the guards. The ones to my left turned and began to make way for Lord Barkley to come through.
He walked toward me slowly, flanked by four guards that were larger and nastier than the rest. If I had to guess, these were his personal guards, the ones that protected him rather than the estate.
He stopped around fifteen feet from me and said, “Mr. Dreadstone, you are severely outnumbered here. Give up, now.” There was venom in his voice and fire in his eyes.
I dropped my fists and hobbled over to the window. I leaned against the frame and took a deep breath.
“Well?” he asked impatiently.
“I’m thinking,” I hissed. “Let me think.”
I scratched my chin and ran a hand through my hair. The entire time, I felt Barkley’s gaze on me, boring holes through my head. My back still hurt, though Barkley’s annoyance was helping soothe that pain.
“You said I’m severely outnumbered,” I asked. “How severely?”
Barkley blinked and spat, “What?”
“How severely?” I gestured to the guards in the hall. There were about twenty in total. “By my estimations, it would take about a dozen to patrol this estate. It’s a big place. Plus, your four personal guards. That makes sixteen. But you wouldn’t want the bare minimum, no, you’ve got more than that. Let’s say, double that. That’s just over thirty. How am I doing?”
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I glanced at Barkley. He didn’t say anything, he just continued glowering at me.
“I’m guessing I’m spot on so far. Now, that’s thirty guards usually. But tonight is a special occasion. Most people would hire outside help, just for tonight, but you strike me as the paranoid type. So you kept the guards all in house—no outside help. Am I right?”
Again, Barkley just stared at me, trying to bore holes through my skull with his gaze.
“So, there’s probably, I don’t know, a maximum of ten or fifteen more of your thugs I haven’t seen. And they aren’t here because you don’t want to arouse suspicion with the guests. I can take that. I like my odds. In fact, I really like my odds.”
For a second, Barley didn’t say anything, and I thought he was just going to sick his men on me. In truth, I wasn’t super confident that I could fight through fifteen more guards. I was sore all over, exhausted, and probably suffering from minor blood loss. But Barkley didn’t know that. He only knew I was a Hunter, a force of destruction that could bring down his entire mansion.
“You’ve just made one miscalculation, Mr. Dreadstone,” Barkley said. “After your little performance against my minotaur, I’m not the only one looking for you.”
The group of guards parted again and four Hunters stepped through. I didn’t recognize them personally, but I knew what they were. Every Hunter worth their salt would have.
They were all young women in their late twenties, but I didn’t doubt their combat ability. They all had the same empty look in their eyes and were all wearing identical black jumpsuits with no markings. Those jumpsuits were the unofficial uniform of Guild fixers: Hunters that did the bidding of top brass. Fixers took on the more unsavory jobs that regular Hunters weren’t cut out for. And ‘more unsavory’ by Guild standards meant some pretty demented shit.
The fixers were formed after the Last War, in part because of the mass desertion and dereliction of duty by Hunters. The Guild realized that regular Hunters weren’t prepared to kill humans quite so readily. So they came up with the fixers. As the rumors went, fixers were raised from birth to be a Hunter and to be loyal to the Guild. They were an open secret, a boogeyman that the Guild sicced on their enemies.
Apparently, I was one of those enemies now.