“Oi-ya!” he added for effect.

It seemed to work: the four men stopped short. They hovered in a semicircle around him. Each glanced at the others, waiting for someone else to break the ring of fear.

The scarred man put his hands up humorously. With the blade at his throat, he grinned even wider. There was murderous rage in his small, damp eyes.

“There’s no need for all this,” he said. “Just a word in your ear, darling. That’s all I want.”

But the other four were edging, dodging around, seeking a chink in Bernard’s defenses. Bernard kept his arms in motion before him, kept his head and eyes swinging from this side to that.

“Go on, then!” said Harper—she barked it, too loudly, she was that scared. She cursed herself for a craven old crone. “Go on and say what you have to!”

The Frankenstin monster to Bernard’s left faked a lunge. Bernard shouted. This time, his shuto-uchi sliced the air so quickly it seemed to whistle. The monster dropped back.

“You’re outnumbered, you see,” said the scarred man in a shaky voice.

“The first one to reach me wins a wheelchair,” Bernard sang back at him over Harper’s shoulder.

The four thugs kept dancing, shuffling, feinting. One waggled a box-cutter. One swished a black, mean, flexible cosh. The Frankenstein just balled his fists. Bernard kept shifting, his back to Harper’s.

“The game’s not worth the candle,” said the scarred man. Tilting his head away from the pressing sword that held him at bay, he still managed to fix Harper with his furious, piggy eyes. “I wouldn’t kid you, it isn’t, I mean it. It’s just a small thread you’ve got hold of, darling. I’m just here to tell you to let it be. Let it be and we all go home happy.”

“A small thread,” she said to him. “But perhaps I’ll pull it and see what unravels.”

At which point, the four other thugs attacked.

The box-cutter flashed out, slashed past Bernard’s windbreaker as he drew back. Bernard trapped the attacker’s wrist, twisted it. Snap. The attacker howled, his cutter clattered to the blacktop; so did he. Now Bernard’s body slanted as he drove a kansetsu kick into the space just over Frankenstein’s shin. The enormous monster staggered, toppled onto his side while, at the same time, Bernard gave a lightning flick of his inverted fist—uraken—in the other direction. It drove a third attacker’s nose into his face with a splash of cartilage and blood.