He goosed the gas to squirt the Blackbird up a delivery ramp at the end of the dockside storefront, working through a crowd of over a hundred junior high students in dark, conservative uniforms who appeared to be on a field trip to the port. When he finally made it around the bus, he saw the woman running toward a group of schoolgirls. She held a short blade of her own and hacked her way through the terrified children. Two girls, neither over twelve, fell before the flashing blade. The others scattered, screaming at the sight of so much blood.
Quinn longed for a gun. Ayako, who’d been looking over his shoulder, shrank at the sight of such cruelty, pressing her face to his back.
The woman kept moving toward the water, a curtain of black hair hanging down over her eyes, swishing back and forth in her frenzied hacking.
Quinn crouched low over the handlebars, urging the bike through the milling crowd on the broad promenade along the pier. His first thought was to run into the murderous woman, but he realized he’d likely kill more kids with the heavy bike than she would with the blade. Five meters away, he abandoned the Blackbird and jumped to the ground, taking the short sword with him. Ayako fell in behind, close, but giving him enough space to work.
First attack was a tricky thing. It was all too easy to give up too much strategy by showing your hand early in the game. If the woman knew how badly he was injured, she’d know exactly where to attack him. But the adrenaline of the chase smoothed the ache in his bones and masked the pain in his back.
He gave a vicious war cry as he crashed in, extending the short sword over his head. Unlike the longer katana, the wakizashi was generally a one-handed weapon. What it lost in power, it gained in maneuverability.
Quinn brought the blade down almost, but not quite on top of the woman’s head. She countered, blocking his sword and bringing her own in a tight arc, slicing the air where his arms would have been had he fully committed to the strike.
The fighters parted as if pushed away from each other by some unseen force, circled slowly, and then came together in a clash of blades, repeating the action over and over in an attempt to gain the upper hand.
At length, their blades locked at the guards at belt level between the two fighters. It was an odd thing, Quinn thought, to look into the face of this young woman who had come so close to killing his little girl, to smell the odor of peppermint on her breath, and to see the map of practice scars that nicked her face and hands. Had he not been locked in battle, it would have been easy to feel pity for this girl who was barely old enough to be called a woman. He’d often feel pity for those he’d killed — after the fact.
Locked together, each pushed against the other, standing their ground. The first to pull away would be exposed to a rapid and surely fatal cut.
Grunting, the woman gave a toss of her head to get the hair out of her eyes. “You are better than I expected you to be.”
“I watched a lot of The Princess Bride.” Quinn smiled.
“What?”
Never in his life had he wanted so badly to cut someone down. In order to do that, he had to stay alive. In an unspoken, mutually agreed momentary truce, the fighters pushed apart, circling again for another attack.
Feinting, the woman drew Quinn out to block a blow from his left, forcing him to twist toward his injured kidney. He blocked the attack but stumbled slightly, allowing her blade to slice through the shoulder of his leather jacket.
A smile perked the corners of the woman’s lips. She circled, moving easily like a shark at the scent of blood.
“You are hurt.” She tipped her head toward his waist.
Quinn brushed the words aside as he would a blade, changing the subject while he caught his breath. In truth, the intense pain brought on by that simple twisting movement had nearly taken him to his knees.
He kept the tip of his sword high. “You’ve been after me since Colorado.”
The woman’s lips pulled back into a scornful laugh. Black eyes glared. “I watched you long before that, Jericho Quinn.”
“Did your father send you after me… Ran?” He used her given name, the one Miyagi had told him. It sounded more like Lon when he said it in Japanese.
The girl laughed, wagging her head derisively in spite of the situation. “Ohhh, you think you know so much.”
“I know your mother is named Emiko.” He circled, letting the tip of his blade drop so it pointed at her cold heart.
She rolled her eyes, stomping forward in a flurry of cuts that opened a flap of thick leather along his arm.
She stepped back to survey the damage. “You know nothing.”
“If your father is so great and powerful, why does he send females to do his heavy work?” Quinn’s words dripped with scorn but dizziness tugged at his brain. At any moment he would stumble an inch in the wrong direction. When he did, she would cut him down without a second thought.
“Do not flatter yourself.” The woman eyed him as if she had already won. “You are a passable warrior, Jericho Quinn.” She feinted right, then left, drawing him out again before her blade flashed in a diagonal line across the front of his jacket. The blade cut all the way through, slicing leather, armor, and then skin. Quinn felt the acid burn as the razor edge scraped a rib, but the jacket took the worst of the attack and he was able to step offline, keeping his feet — for the moment.
She backed up a half step, circling, preparing to strike again. “To you, the blade is only a pastime. The way of the sword has been my life.”
Badly wounded now, Quinn was vaguely aware of a flashing blur to his right. Knocked violently sideways, he heard Ayako’s anguished scream as she rushed past him, impaling her belly on the startled woman’s blade.
Ayako drove forward, grabbing the hilt with both hands and pushing the woman backward. Gasping, she whispered something that Quinn couldn’t make out before falling to the concrete, the stingray skin handle of the short sword sticking from her bleeding stomach.
The young woman’s face went pale at the sudden attack. Stunned by Ayako’s heroics, she backpedaled, scowling and cursing under her breath. Quinn raised his sword and advanced, but she turned and ran toward the pier to dive over the edge and disappear with a splash below.
Quinn fell to his knees beside a gasping Ayako. She lay on her side. Blood seeped through clenched fingers where they closed around the hilt. The blade had pierced her all the way through and the tip protruded out her back, tenting the cloth of her jacket.
“I am sorry, Quinn-san,” she whispered. A sheen of pink blood covered her teeth. Her lungs rattled with each labored breath.
“Shhh.” Quinn put a finger to her lips. “Listen,” he said. “Hear the sirens? Help is on the way.”
Tears pressed through the heavy makeup of Ayako’s clenched lashes. Wincing, she reached inside her shirt and retrieved the pink notebook. “Please,” she gasped, her voice barely audible. “Take… this.”
Her fingers left a red trail on the cover as she pressed it into his hand.
“I would have made a good wife,” she whispered.
“Yes, you would have,” Quinn said.
“I think this was my moment.” She coughed, beginning to shiver from shock and blood loss. She nodded toward the water. “Be careful of that one…” Ayako swallowed hard, gasping for air. “She is fierce, like her mother. .”
Her face went slack and her hands fell away from her belly.
Police and medical support squealed onto the scene. Quinn returned Fujin to the scabbard and shoved it down the back of the collar of his jacket so it ran along his spine. There were already people tending to the wounded children, so Quinn got on the Blackbird and rode to the edge of the pier, scanning for any sign of the woman.