It was a sentiment that Wendy fervently shared, but right now she had another priority: “Two bank robberies at once is a bit of a coincidence isn’t it, gentlemen? You’re under arrest.”
“You don’t want to do this.” Not-his-husband focussed on her, and the ward she wore under her collar grew hot.
“Stop that shit if you want to get out of here alive,” she said evenly as she raised her hands and summoned her katana into existence. “What are you after?” Not-husband—the movie impresario, bloke-in-a-hat—flinched. Not-Harris gave the game away by glancing guiltily at the letter on the desk. “That? Right, I’m impounding it as evidence.” She grabbed the letter left-handed, shoving it inside her jacket. “It’s probably what our tooled up playmates are after so how about we—”
The door opened and she turned. “No!” screamed Imp as her sword began to move.
She froze with her blade hanging over the neck of a frightened Chinese kid, who crouched on his hands and knees across the threshold.
“Del’s bringing the car round,” gasped the kid, ignoring her: “ninety seconds.” Another gasp, then, “They’ll kill us if they find us—”
Her arrestees were unarmed, unlike the gang of heavies shooting up the front of the branch. She made a snap decision. “Follow me,” she said, and stepped outside just in time to hear a hollow boom as the door at the front end of the corridor sprang open. (Evidently the shotgun-toting heavy had given up on subtlety and loaded a breaching round.)
Wendy let go of her sword—it evaporated, barely a wisp of vapor surviving to reach the floor—and raised her arms into a new position. She summoned, drew, and let fly an arrow in one smooth motion. She took a long step backwards, away from the front door, drawing and loosing again and again. The compound bow she’d trained herself to summon and shoot was compact but packed a punch: her arrows evaporated after a second, but that was plenty long enough to put a hole in the torso of anyone stupid enough to get in her way. Wendy had studied the Russian kinzhalnaya technique—very rapid fire using a short bow at close range—and could manifest a fresh arrow between her fingertips as fast as she could draw. And she could draw forty times in a minute, if she didn’t mind wearing her arm in a sling the next day.
Fire: step back: fire: step back. The gunman (or gunmen) wasn’t stupid—Wendy had at best seconds before he (or they) emptied a magazine down the passage—but the storm of arrows hissing past the broken door would give them pause. Fire: step backwards. She felt something cold and hard against her spine and shoved herself against the fire bar.
The alarm screeched as the door swung open and Wendy tumbled onto the grimy tarmac in the alleyway, rolling out of the line of fire just as a shooter unloaded his magazine down the corridor. The shots stopped abruptly. Wendy cast around for cover, but the exit from the alleyway was at least ten meters away. Surely the raiders would have backup watching the escape route—
The sound of footsteps coming towards her was partially muffled by the ringing in her ears. She rolled onto her back, bow drawn and aiming between her toes, but it was just her two perps and their teenage sidekick. They walked like cats on black ice, tiptoeing backwards away from the fire exit as if they had to maintain eye contact with the gunmen in the bank.
“—Will he stay down?” not-husband asked not-Bernard.
“Depends if he decides to suck off his own AK instead of signing up for CBT. I hit him with all the fear and loathing in Islington. He’ll be in therapy for years—”
“Where’s Del?”
“She should be—hey!”
The kid had half-turned and spotted Wendy. She gave him a feral grin as she sat up and took aim at his chest. “Hello again! Hands up, no sudden movements.”
Sirens rose and fell in the near distance, bouncing between the brick walls. Wendy’s pulse hammered a manic counterpoint. The kid narrowed his eyes at her, somehow managing to look utterly freaked out and supremely bored simultaneously. “Nope, not playing that game.”
What? Wendy glared. The kid was the stunt artist, wasn’t he? The one who’d played Robin in the Hamleys heist, neutralizing the guards with their own gear. “Neither am I,” she told him. “I know what you are and I’ve got what you want.” She scrambled to her feet. Step back. Step back. The end of the alley was just a short sprint away.
A big black SUV turned the corner and roared towards her, then rocked to a sharp standstill just as she tensed for the moment of impact. Doors popped open: “All aboard!” shouted the gorgeous black woman behind the wheel. “Last train to trancentral leaving now!” She smirked at Wendy from behind her windscreen: “Aww, isn’t she cute?”
Wendy evaporated her arrow just long enough to give Getaway Woman a two-fingered salute, the traditional insult started by the English archers at Agincourt. In an argument between an SUV and a shortbow, the one with the two-ton pedestrian masher was inevitably going to win; but once she moved … “I’ve got what you want,” she taunted as the three miscreants trotted past her. “How about we go somewhere quiet and talk about how you’re going to surrender?”
“Yeah nope—” The impresario scampered past her. “She’s warded,” he called to someone just out of sight.
“On it,” said a voice behind her back.
Wendy let go of her bow as she turned, bringing her riot baton to the ready, but something tugged at her collar and then a bleak tide of depression washed over her. It felt like she’d jumped in a river of regrets, her pockets stuffed with cobblestones. It came to her distantly that she could barely muster the energy to breathe—in fact, begrudged herself every successive moment of mindlessly prolonged life. The kid slithered behind her, clutching her ward in his hand, its broken cord trailing.
