Pryce moved, a blur of motion, pulling her into him and turning his back to take the hit.
The chain wrapped around his shoulders, biting deep through the duster and into the new muscle beneath.
A grunt of pain escaped him—from the sheer, unadulterated annoyance more than the injury itself.
He couldn't dodge. He couldn't evade. He had to become a wall.
"Stay behind me, shortstack, no matter what," he growled, grabbing the chain.
The puller, a brute of a kid, yanked back, trying to off-balance him.
Instead, Pryce planted his feet, and with a roar that seemed to shake the very rubble around them, he heaved. The chain-holder flew forward, propelled by his own momentum and Pryce's impossible strength, slamming face-first into the concrete pillar behind.
There was a wet, final-sounding crack.
This left the leader. Scar-nose stared, his bravado was evaporating as he saw two of his crew out of commission. He hesitated, then desperation won. He charged swinging the rusty pipe like a madman.
Pryce met him head-on, ducking under the first wild swing as the pipe whistled overhead, and drove a fist into the leader's stomach with a wet sounding punch.
The kid folded like wet paper, gasping for air that wouldn't come. Even as he went down, his leg lashed out in a cheap, dirty move that caught Pryce in the shin.
Pain flared, and for a split second, Pryce stumbled.
That was the opening they needed. The kid with the broken hand, sobbing in rage, grabbed a chunk of rock and hurled it at Lulu. Pryce saw it coming in slow-motion nightmare clarity. He threw himself sideways, knocking her to the ground and covering her with his body.
The rock slammed into his back between the shoulder blades, a sickening thud that stole his breath and sent a firestorm of agony through him.
He coughed, a spray of blood dotting the dusty ground.
The fight wasn't over. It had just graduated from a street brawl to a lesson in pain.
Pryce pushed himself up, spitting another glob of blood onto the ground. Every breath was a knife in his back. The kid with the broken hand was scrambling for another weapon, and the leader was already on his knees, sucking in ragged gasps of air with murder in his eyes.
"You're... dead," the leader wheezed, trying to stand.
Pryce just laughed, a harsh, broken sound that was more cough than mirth. "Dead? Buddy, I got resurrected by a celestial lingerie model. Your amateur-hour attempt at a skull-bashing is like a tickle fight with a footless chicken. You're not even on the roster." He straightened up, a grin stretching across his face that was all teeth and no humor.
"You think a little bonk on the head is enough to keep this glorious guy down?
He shot a glance at Lulu, who was staring up at him, her one good eye wide with terror and something that looked suspiciously like awe. "Stay down, Lu. The grown-ups are playing."
He turned back just as the broken-hand kid came at him with a piece of shattered glass. Pryce sidestepped, his movements a fluid, brutal dance honed in a hundred back-alley scraps.
He grabbed the kid's wrist, twisted, and the glass clattered to the ground.
But the leader was up now, and he swung the pipe, this time connecting with Pryce's side. A sharp crack of bone, and Pryce staggered, a white-hot flare of agony telling him a rib was definitely fractured.
He bit back a scream, turning the pain into pure, incandescent rage.
He slammed an elbow backward into the leader's face, feeling cartilage give way under the impact. Then, with a surge of that new, terrifying strength, he hoisted the broken-hand kid bodily off the ground and threw him into the leader.
They went down in a heap of groans and shattered limbs.
Pryce stood over them, breathing heavily, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth and staining the back of his stolen duster. He was a mess of fresh bruises and aching bones, but he was standing.
They weren't.
They didn't get run away though like he'd expected.
That would have required intelligence, and intelligence was clearly the one currency this particular crew had been born bankrupt of. Instead, the leader spat a tooth into the dust, his shattered nose blooming red across the lower half of his face like a particularly ambitious flower, and reached into his waistband.
The pistol was old, the grip wrapped in fraying tape, the kind of relic that looked just as likely to take its owner's hand off as hit anything it was pointed at—but Pryce had learned the hard way that even a dying god could put a hole in a man.
"Oh, come on," Pryce groaned, the way another man might complain about traffic. "A gun? Really? After all that artisanal effort with the chains and the pipes? That's just lazy, my guy. Where's your craft? Where's your passion?"
The leader's finger found the trigger.
Pryce moved.
Not toward the gun—away from Lulu, drawing the barrel with him as he hurled himself sideways into a tumble that lit every cracked rib in his torso with a fresh, screaming chorus.
The first shot punched a chunk out of the pillar where his head had been a heartbeat earlier, sending a spray of concrete dust across his shoulders like dirty snow. The second went wide, ricocheting off a dumpster with a metallic whine that sounded almost embarrassed on the gun's behalf.
There wasn't going to be a third.
Pryce came out of the roll low and fast, scooping up the discarded length of chain in one bloodied fist, and whipped it overhand in a vicious, singing arc. The end caught the leader across the wrist with a sound like a wet branch snapping.
The pistol spun away into the rubble.
The leader howled—a high, ragged, unmanly sound that Pryce filed away for latermockery—and then Pryce was on him, closing the distance before the howl had finished crawling out of his throat.
He drove the heel of his palm up under the leader's jaw, and the kid's head snapped back hard enough that Pryce heard teeth clack like dice in a cup. He followed it with a knee to the gut, then a sweeping kick to the side of the knee that folded the leader's leg the wrong way with a crunch that made even Pryce wince in professional sympathy.
"That," Pryce muttered, "was for the gun."
The broken-hand kid was crawling, actually crawling, toward where the pistol had landed.
Pryce watched him for a long, almost philosophical moment, the way a man might watch a beetle attempt to climb a wineglass.
Then he strolled over, calm as a Sunday morning, and brought his boot down on the back of the kid's outstretched fingers. The scream this time was operatic.
Pryce considered giving it a score out of ten and decided to be generous.
"And that," he said, leaning down so the kid could see his bloodied grin, "was for throwing rocks at little girls. We have rules in this town. Apparently, I'm the one who enforces them now. Surprise."
He kicked the pistol into a storm drain with the casual precision of a man returning a stray football, then turned back to where Lulu still crouched in the rubble, her one good eye enormous, her thin shoulders trembling under the oversized rags she wore.
He spread his arms wide, presenting the carnage like a maître d' showing off the evening's specials, and offered her his bloodiest, most reassuring smile.
"Right then, shortstack. I believe I owe you a milkshake."
"You see, Lulu?" he flashed them a grin. "This is what happens when you skip leg day. You end up as a projectile." He nudged the leader with his foot. "Now, about that heartfelt'fuck you'..."
He leaned down, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. "Get lost. And if I ever see you again, I'll use your own ribcage as a xylophone to play a jaunty tune about the perils of bothering my sister."