The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [178]
Reynard took him with His two big hands, around the chest, like a doll, and threw him up against the ceiling, thirty feet up. He hit hard—maybe Reynard was trying to make him stick—but he was probably still alive when his head clipped the table on the way down. His skull burst like a cantaloupe, spilling a fan of bloody slurry across the smooth parquet. Julia thought of all the metamagical secrets that must have been locked in that orderly brain, now catastrophically, irreversibly disordered.
It was all over now. All ruined. Julia was ready to die now, she just hoped it wouldn’t hurt too much. Reynard squatted and put His hands in the blood and whatever else and smeared it sensually on His luxurious fox-fur chest, matting it. You couldn’t tell if He was grinning like a mad thing or if that’s just how foxes’ mouths looked.
Two minutes after the fox-god arrived Pouncy, Asmodeus, and Julia were the last of the Murs magicians, the cream of the safe-house scene, left alive on the planet. For a moment Julia felt her feet leave the floor—it must have been Pouncy, trying to buy them a minute by taking them up to that high ceiling, but Reynard cut the spell off when they were only a couple of feet off the floor, and they dropped back down hard. He picked up the heavy silver bowl, dumping out the rainwater, and threw it at Pouncy like a discus. Just as He did, Asmodeus finished up something she’d been working on since the god arrived, a Maximal Dismissal maybe, with a little something extra on it, something sharp that actually tweaked Reynard’s attention.
It didn’t hurt Him, but He felt it. You could see His big pointy ears twitch with annoyance. The cup struck Pouncy hard, but off-center. It crunched his left hip and went rocketing away. Pouncy groaned and folded in two.
“Stop!” Julia said. “Stop it!”
Fear: Julia was all out of it. A dead woman didn’t feel fear. And she was all out of magic too. She was going to say some regular words for a change, non-magic words. She was going to talk to this asshole.
“You took our sacrifice,” she said. She swallowed. “Now give us what we paid for.”
It felt like she was trying to breathe at thirty thousand feet. The fox looked down His narrow muzzle at her. With His doggy head and human body He looked like the Egyptian death-god Anubis.
“Give it to us!” Julia shouted. “You owe it to us!”
Asmo watched her from the other side of the room, frozen. All her knowing, savvy Asmo attitude had fallen away. She looked about ten years old.
Reynard gave a loud bark before He spoke.
“A sacrifice is not to be taken,” He said, in a deep, reasonable voice, with only a very slight French accent. “A sacrifice is to be freely given. I took their lives. They did not offer them to me.” It was like He couldn’t believe the rudeness of it. “I had to take them.”
Pouncy had pushed himself up into a sitting position against the wall. The pain must have been appalling. Sweat stood out all over his face.
“Take my life. I’m giving it to you. Take it.”
Reynard cocked His head. Fantastic Mr. Fox. He fingered His whiskers.
“You are dying. You will be dead soon. It is not the same.”
“You can have mine,” Julia said. “I’m giving it to you. If you let the others live.”
Reynard groomed Himself, licking blood and brains off the back of His paw-hand.
“Do you know what you have done here?” He said. “I am just the beginning. When you call on a god, all gods hear. Did you know that? And no human has called down a god in two thousand years. The old gods will have heard too, you know. Better to be dead when they come back. Better never to have lived, when the old gods return.”
“Take me!” Pouncy moaned. He gasped as something inside him gave way, and he whispered the rest. “Take me. I’m giving you my life.”
“You are dying,” Reynard said again, dismissively.
He paused. Pouncy