. . .
Alerts travel up their hierarchy. A response organizes. Soldiers prepare themselves tensely. Jane reads the sun-eating wolf a story, but she isn’t happy about it. She plays tug-of-war with the sun-eating wolf over a bit of knotted rope that is also on fire. She scolds Skoll for being Skoll and gives Skoll a treat for being Skoll and is in general very bad at providing a nurturing home environment. Then she goes to bed. Agency social workers strike!
They raid Jane’s home in the middle of the night. They seize Jane about the waist. They carry her off.
“What?” says Jane. “What?”
She stretches her arms towards the house. She yells, as if in slow motion, “Rose-bud . . .”
This is because she has not quite grasped yet that this is not a game.
Hiring clowns to impersonate activist social workers and raid their house in the middle of the night is just exactly the kind of thing that Martin would probably do.
Skoll twitches an ear.
. . .
Jane struggles. She kicks an Agency social worker. The social worker drops her in a sack. Jane gapes, outraged. The social workers push Jane’s head down deeper in the sack. They tie the sack. They carry her off at a run.
Jane shrieks, “Skoll!”
The sun-eating wolf bursts through the wall and into a hail of bullets. Three bullets lead the pack; they are in a cluster; they are aimed straight between the Skoll-wolf’s eyes. They should have known better. In the wild, bullets don’t dare trouble sun-eating wolves like this. It is only tame bullets, domestic human bullets, that would even consider the attempt.
Skoll snaps them out of the air in mid-motion. He swallows them. He shakes his head. He ravens. He seems to grow.
He tracks the sack of captive girl like she were bright with sun.
He howls. He surges.
. . .
A wire made with stolen svart-alfar technology catches around his leg. Skoll trips. Skoll stumbles. The sacked Jane reaches a van. She’s thrown in. They start the engine.
It is bad, incidentally, to nuke picturesque British communities.
Skoll tears the other end of the wire, and the concrete block that anchors it, out of the earth.
They’re throwing golden nets over the wolf now, and the hail of gunfire does not stop. The Agency is one of the few British organizations fully empowered to use heavy weaponry to subdue possible sun-eating wolves. They also sometimes arrange adoptions.
Skoll writhes in the layered nets.
The adoption van tears screaming out of Bibury.
The light of the moon is not Skoll’s proper prey, but it is sunlight of a sort; and the light of stars; and the fire in the bullets; and the gleam of the agents’ eyes. Skoll twists in an un-wolf-like fashion, makes its skin and fur into white wolf-gold, devours through that skin the nets, and bounds up burning with moon-fire, star-fire, and gun-fire to stand on a nearby roof.
They launch canisters of gas. Skoll bites them. His stomach bulges. His eyes roll back.
They bring him down.
They tame him. They bind him —
They do not.
The Agency’s Choice
Skoll moves in that fashion that wolves ought not to move. He rises in that fashion that wolves ought not to rise. He is all searing flame, and poisonous gasses and thrashing wires. He is a wolf of many parts and awfulness, and the eyes that he turns upon the agents burn an awful, killing orange: he breathes the light of suns.
Bibury is consigned to darkness. It is written off in the Agency’s books.
Oh, Agency!
It is bad!
Eldri, torn from his sleep by a sudden premonition, drags himself and a handful of his robots to the shelter underneath his house. He doesn’t get all of them. He doesn’t have the time.
He is blown down the stairs, as it is, by a wave of shock and fire; he is caught by his ultimate Frisbee-playing robot, even though it wasn’t there; staggers back with it and slams a lower door; and up above, as the explosion spreads through Bibury in a wave of white light and heat, as it melts away, as it blackens and burns, as the pattern of it is disrupted, a certain robot realizes at the last, and at the first, that it has lost the Game.
. . .
The social workers make a brief opening in the sack. They listen to Jane’s strangled yells. They adjust the sack so it is not strangling her. A female social worker explains, with gentleness and compassion, “He wasn’t providing a good home situation for you.”
Jane tries to bite her.
“You were living with a giant sun-eating wolf,” the social worker says, holding Jane’s shoulders to keep clear of her gnashing teeth. “You were going to destroy the world!”
Jane’s face sags with reasonableness.
“That was actually my potato pancake,” she explains.
. . .
It doesn’t help.
They push her back down into the sack. They tie it shut again. They drive. They drive her to Amelia Friedman’s house. They open up the sack. They dump her out. They give her a few moments to make herself presentable again — this mostly involves brushing off her dress with all the frantic dignity of a cat cleaning itself after an accidental fall, but they also provide her with a pretty red ribbon for her hair — and then they ring the doorbell.
She stands there, trying desperately not to cry. She has no idea where she is. She has no idea what has happened to her wolf.
She tries to explain that to them. “I don’t know what happened to the wolf,” she says. “Martin will kill me if anything bad has happened to the wolf.”
This argument does not convince the activist social workers affiliated with a shadowy government Agency that does adoptions and kills giant monsters that Jane has had a wholesome, balanced, and nourishing home environment. It is, for this purpose, malapropos. The door bangs open. The social workers run away. Tom stands there looking at her from the door.
“Well,” says Tom. “This is a disappointment.”
It is the last straw. Jane sniffles. The tears leak out.
. . .
“Good lord,” says Tom. He smacks his forehead. “So pathetic! Come in!”
In fairness, he himself has only been dropped in a sack and carted off anywhere once, himself, and that was by Martians, so he doesn’t really have a basis by which to judge.
Jane squints at him. She shakes off tears.
She straightens.
“I was going to come in, anyway,” she says. “Also, I shall be filing a quite serious complaint.”
“Yes, yes,” says Tom.
She walks in. She looks around. She frowns back over her shoulder.
“Are you going to eat me?” she wonders.
“What have you heard about ophidian planet-inheritors?” asks Tom. Then he waves it off. “Don’t answer that,” he says. “On your right, antichrist.”
Linus waves from the staircase.
“On your left,” says Tom, “bathroom. Do you need to use the facilities? I don’t know how your puny human bladder works.”
“Some sort of hydraulics,” says Jane, distractedly.
“Well, yes,” says Tom, then blinks. “Oh.”
Jane slips ahead a few steps and opens a door marked with a “Do Not Open” sign. She frowns at the evil mannequins inside.
“Cursed,” says Tom. “Now you’ll probably get killed by a space princess.”
“No way,” says Jane, carefully closing the door.
“Better you than me.”
. . .
“I have a brother already,” says Jane, “so don’t even try to be mean.”
“And here,” says Tom, completely ignoring her, and sweeping open the study door with a flourish, “is your new mother!”
Jane gasps.
“My God!”
The black dog pants.
. . .
“Move, you,” says Tom, to the dog.
The dog, reluctantly, vanishes.
“Your new mother!” says Tom.
Amelia stops frantically decorating her study with glitter and unicorns. She puts on a desperately charming smile.
She turns!
Jane gasps again. “It’s a renegade alchemist!” she posits.
“No!” exposits Tom. “She’s a renegade alchem— wait.”
“It’s the malignant residue of a glowering toad,” Jane says. “You can always tell!”
. . .
Jane wanders forward. She examines Amelia Friedman closely from every side. Amelia Friedman, who has opened her mouth to say something, shuts it again in pensive amusement — or pensusement!
“Well,” Jane says, after due inspection of Amelia’s sleeves, “she’s aces as a mother.”
Amelia beams.
“But I’ve got to say,” Jane continues, “that it’s not worth getting thrown in a sack and carted over Hell and gone for! I was perfectly happy in Bibury.”
. . .
“Well, I wasn’t happy with you in Bibury,” says Amelia, who has resolved not to tell Jane how narrowly she’d escaped Agency execution. “So now you’ll live here, with Tom and me and the antichrist! Isn’t that nice?”
“I want my brother,” sulks Jane.
She goes. She sits in the corner. She glowers at Amelia. At first this prompts unpleasant memories, and then giggles, and finally a kind of pleasant nostalgia that makes Amelia pick Jane up and swing her around and around until Jane finally gives in and smiles.
– 8 –
“This is Edmund,” says Tom. He points out Edmund to Jane. “He is an actual world-killing threat, unlike some people.”
Edmund Gulley takes Jane’s hand. He doesn’t kiss it, but he doesn’t really shake it either.
“Charmed,” he says.
“Hi,” says Jane. She flares her nostrils. She sniffs. “You smell of wolf.”
“I was raised by a wolf and a businessman,” young Edmund concedes. “But they’re really quite mannerly creatures.”
Jane’s eyes brighten.
“Can you do the Tarzan yell?”
Edmund shakes his head.
Jane sighs.
. . .
“Sometimes I eat things,” Edmund says. “But I never spit them up again. And every time I eat things, I get a little bit hungrier. One day, if I live long enough, I’ll be so hungry I’ll eat everything and anything even if I don’t let go of the wolf.”
“That’s not as good as the Tarzan yell,” Jane says sourly.
“I’ll try to do better,” Edmund says.
“See that you do,” she says, but she beams. Then she frowns. She counts. “Wait,” she says. “I thought Tom was going to kill the world. I thought he said something.”
“We are all . . .” Edmund starts.
Then he gestures, vaguely.
He shrugs. He pushes his hair away from his eye. “We are all that way.”
. . .
“We’re the Doom Team,” Linus explains.
“Pardon?”
“Tom says,” Linus says, and hides behind Tom from Jane’s inquisitiveness.
He’s such a shy antichrist!
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