Free Last of the Mighty by Phineas Foxx Page A

hand.
    He swung.
    My adrenaline spiked, the familiar blood-rush roaring in my head, and I grinned as the world went slo-mo.
    I ducked under Chool’s roundhouse and pitched the firebomb at Shemja-za’s feet. You know the plan, always take out the biggest guy first.
    The grenade exploded, on target, a wall of flames vaulting to his waist.
    My only aim was to distract him. It worked.
    While Shemja was frantically stamping out the blaze, I blasted a foot at him.
    My heel hit the bull’s-eye, Shem’s wineglass. A shower of glassy thorns rained onto his face and eyes. Cabernet dripped from his cheeks.
    He staggered back, and I rifled a second kick to the knee—one of the body’s weakest points.
    That should have turned his leg into water.
    Nothing.
    The guy was granite.
    I sent a knife-hand to his throat.
    Blocked. By that sturdy, gold forearm thing. Can’t tell you how nice that felt. But, with his arm raised, Shem’s armpit was open.
    I took advantage. With my teeth.
    I bit down, hard, on the muscle and tendon that connected the upper back to the armpit. I ripped at it, shaking my face like a Great White. May have even growled.
    Shemja-za yelped. Just a little.
    With my teeth burrowing deeper, I hammered a fist into the back of his neck.
    Someone did the same to me.
    Chool had joined the party.
    Tucker, too, was on his way.
    I snapped out a blind back-kick and found a gut. Heard a grunt of pain and the wheezing outflow of breath, followed by a panicked in-suck of mouth and lung scrabbling for air.
    Teeth still in the Watcher, I gnashed and chomped, but no blood came. Either his shirt was too thick or his skin was made of rhino. Nonetheless, Shem was reeling. A bucking bull trying to throw its rider. He slapped at me, clawed, grabbed at me—missing. My fist dropped bomb after bomb on his neck in search of the carotid artery. If I could find it, compress that vessel even for a second, Shemja-za would black out.
    That was, if Watchers even had carotid arteries. How was I to know?
    I was closing in on the blackout artery when an anchor dropped from a hundred stories and pounded into my ear. The world went white. Gray. Then pitch. My jaw, slack. My body, dust. I sifted to the floor.
    An explosion in my hip—Tucker’s steel-toe boot. Like a wrecking ball.
    I regained my sight to see Chool, airborne, a second before his knees slammed into my chest. My turn for the wheezing outflow of breath and the begging in-suck for air that wasn’t there.
    Another steel kick. Two busted ribs as Smiler and Knock worked their way up to my face.
    Shemja’s boulder fist was cocked and ready to drive my nose through the back of my skull.
    A bright flash. Lightning. In my head or in the room, I couldn’t tell.
    â€œSHEMJA-ZA!” An earth-shaking voice.
    Lights blinked. Windows shivered. A hurricane gust whipped at the walls and lashed the fire till every flame extinguished.
    Shemja-za froze, mid-punch.
    So did Chool and Tucker.
    â€œWatcher!” The voice was deep, resonant. “Withdraw from the boy at once.” Chinnggg! A sword came free of its scabbard. “Lest my blade send you to Pit faster than a viper’s strike.”
    Shemja rose from off of me, slow and cautious, eyes wide, hands up like a criminal. “Phaeus,” he said as he backed away. “To what do we owe the honor of—”
    â€œSILENCE!”
    The white-winged angel advanced on him, bronze breastplate shining, sword at arm’s length.
    He was radiant. A sunbeam. Over a foot taller than Shem. His weapon glowed, some kind of fire dancing within the blade. When it moved to the Watcher’s neck, a trail of flames followed behind it.
    Shemja-za gulped, his chin rising to ease the pressure of the sword’s tip at his throat.
    They stared at each other a while before the swordsman shifted to Chool. “And you, you filthy Half-Soul,” Phaeus circled him, “will be severed into thirds at