Chapter 15

chapter fifteen you have my powers. Ghazt sails over my friends and his paws punch me square in the chest. I tumble down the gangplank, hands scraping the metal grating, barely hanging on. Ghazt stalks toward me. "Would you believe me if I told you I don't know what you're talking about?" I try. "My power is inside your blade," he says. "It is rightfully MINE." I've never seen Ghazt so animalistic—monstrously menacing. Slobbery saliva splashes with each sharp- toothed snarl. His whiskers are rigid and as pointy as razors. "I will have it back!" Ghazt roars.

I'm guessing that now is when the arm-chomping happens. Ghazt's mouth opens impossibly wide and he pounces! I've got no choice but to draw the Louisville Slicer. I'm whipping the blade out of its sheath, swinging it up, just as Ghazt is chomping down, and— I feel pain, but it's not the sharpness of his fangs— it's an electric shock that reverberates through the blade, through the Cosmic Hand, through my entire body. There is a sound like lightning splitting a great oak tree—and just as quickly as Ghazt's jaws came snapping down, they explode open again. Ghazt is blasted off his feet, flung fully backward—

Ghazt slams to the gangplank floor, stopping just short of my friends. I gasp. The Slicer. The Cosmic Hand. Together, they rejected him. Ghazt's head shakes sharply and he rises unsteadily. His eyes blink with confusion—then narrow as he looks first at the blade and then at the Cosmic Hand. "That thing..." he growls. "It is more strange and more mysterious than I knew."

Yeah, I think. I'm starting to realize that, too. "Y'know, this is maybe a discussion best had back indoors," I say, throwing a quick glance over the side. Ground rushes past, nearly fifty feet below. "Instead of out here, where—y'know.... falling is a very distinct possibility." Ghazt's face twists into a mask of resigned frustration as he eyes the blade and the Cosmic Hand. "I cannot retrieve it. The power you stole from me. I... I cannot take it back." He steps forward—and the words that follow chill me to the bone. "But I can still take your life..." Just then, my friends jump in, leaping to my aid!

"Show some respect for your Grand Protector!" Evie shouts, leaping into the fray. She's on Dirk's back, clawing at him, trying to pull him off Ghazt. "REAAARGH!" Ghazt goes into pure special-attack mode—a Tasmanian-devil whirling dervish! Dirk, Quint, and June are flung from his body, hurled back up the gangplank. And Evie is hurled into me.

The air explodes out of my lungs as she hits me square in the chest. Then we're both tumbling, out of control, end over end down the gangplank. One flip and my back slams into metal. Another and Evie's elbow jabs me hard in the side. One last flip and this time we hit nothing but empty air...