. . .

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 >>