. . .

Jane vacuums the floor in dismal dolor. She makes herself breakfasts. She eats more sugary cereal than Martin would ever let her eat but after a while it palls and melts into a mass of sugary color in the milk. She droops, and her face falls, and she gets milk and cereal all over it.

“You are not a substitute,” she says to Skoll, who eats two glowflies and an accidental moth.

Now and then Skoll sneaks out of the house. He sniffs the air. He is looking for Fenris, who used to be part of the same eolith. However his sense of smell is way too attuned to smelling sunlight and he cannot track his way to Edmund Gulley and his wolf.

That is why Skoll stays and raises Jane, or, possibly, the other way around.

“You have to study geometry with me,” declares Jane. This thing they do, but they do not do it well.

The sun-eating wolf perverts her notions.

Afterwards, if anything, Jane is even less confident of her Euclidian geometry than before.

“Honestly,” she says, “You’d think you were a hound of Tindalos.”

Skoll yips, shrugs in a wolfish fashion, and wanders off to lick himself in a fashion we will not otherwise discuss.

Agency spies watch this from afar. They use spyglasses. They become concerned.

“Isn’t that . . . ?” one agent asks another.

“It is!”

That is a wolf that is going to eat the sun!

<< . . .

. . . >>