. . .

It takes a while for them to sort everybody out. Linus is bleeding pretty badly, because there was a lot of holiness in that boom. Tom used a science escape, of course, but he’s still got some serious being dizzy going on. It isn’t until they’re all there with Mouser curled up on Jane’s stomach muttering mews that she sits up and she realizes, “Edmund! My God, Edmund! Did he get out?”

“It’s OK, Jane,” says Edmund.

He crosses his legs. He sits down beside her. He gives her the kind of look that only somebody whose heart is in a wooden box can give.

“I ate the death,” he says. “I ate the holiness. I bound myself a little tighter to the wolf, and the wolf to me; and now I am hungrier, now I want to eat you all, I mean, just a little. But I won’t. Because eating people is wrong.”

He hiccups just a tiny bit of the sacredness of death; and somewhere in the waft of it is the sound of an angel’s trump.

“Oh, Edmund.”

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