Page 11

chapter nine

CHARLIE

Walden looked at the boy in the threadbare jeans and said nothing.

“You got good! Like, really good! Congrats on the doctorate. Fancy.”

She took a breath, and raised one hand, and spoke the opening syllables of the strongest banishment she knew. Her hand was shaking. She tried to force it steady.

“Oh, come on,” said Old Faithful, unbothered, smiling. “Don’t waste your time. You can get out from here. I won’t pick a fight. But you’re not getting both of them past me. You know it, I know it. Which one are you leaving behind?”

“Neither,” said Walden.

“Why not?” said the demon. “You left me behind.”

“Dr Walden?” said Nikki.

“Don’t listen to anything it says,” said Walden.

“Yeah, you’ve done enough, Niks, haven’t you,” said Old Faithful. It put on a sonorous tone. “ I had your mother and father, girl, I licked your brother’s little bones clean, and if you desire vengeance then you know what you must do — Ha , can’t believe you fell for that! You must be pretty thick, huh? Or maybe you’ve just got a shit teacher.”

“Don’t listen,” said Walden.

“And you had to drag poor Matty into it,” Old Faithful said. “Matty thinks he has to please people or they’ll start hating him, just because his mum and dad did. Pretty sad, mate. And you took advantage, Nicola, so what does that make you? A bitch, right? Maybe it should be you who gets left behind.”

Walden said, in her most quelling voice, “That’s enough nonsense, thank you.”

“Oooooo,” said the demon. “Yes, miss.” It laughed. The laugh was easy and carefree, a schoolboy’s laugh.

“I know what you want,” Walden said.

“Yeah, I think I’ve been pretty clear,” said Old Faithful. “Lunch.” It slipped off the table and picked up Walden’s enamelled owl brooch. “I remember this. Wasn’t it your gran’s? Want it back?”

“I know what you want,” Walden said again. “And I know your power. If you really intended to consume my students, you could have done it an hour ago.”

The demon glanced up. In its eyes she saw a sharp, interested hunger. “Yeah?” it said. “But I didn’t, did I, Saffy? They’re only kids. Maybe I’m just nice. Maybe there’s something left in here that isn’t all demon. Did you think of that?”

Yes, Walden had thought of that. She had thought of it at once, and known it for pitiable wishful thinking. The demon smirked at her expression.

“Let’s make a deal,” Walden said. Deals with demons were her business. “First, you let both of them go.”

“Oh, I do, do I?” said Old Faithful. “What about my lunch?”

“You kept them alive this long,” Walden said. “They were never what you wanted. A pair of half-trained teenagers is barely even a light snack, for you.”

“Yeah?” said Old Faithful. Its voice had dropped to an eager whisper. “You know me so well, Saffy, huh? What’s my big plan, then?”

“The most powerful magician to step into your hunting grounds this century,” Walden said. “Me.”

She heard Mathias gasp. Old Faithful faked an unimpressed look, but she had its full attention, that was clear. “Sounds pretty noble!” it said. “The whole self-sacrifice! Making up for last time? Remember last time?”

Doubts, desires, insecurities: Walden shoved them away. Saffy, Saffy, the demon kept saying, but she was Dr Walden. She wore her adulthood like armour. “I have no intention of sacrificing anything,” she said. “Let me make my terms clear. We both know that I could easily force my way past you right now, taking one and possibly both of my pupils with me. I would then be out of your reach. My offer is this: if you let both of them go now, guaranteeing their safety by solemn oath, then I will stay here and fight you. If you win, you win. Lunch, as you say. If I win”—she paused—“I will kill you.”

Old Faithful licked its lips. Walden heard Nikki whisper, “How is it like—a person?” She held the dead boy’s gaze.

2003: the death of Charlie Green. A typical story of schoolboy hubris, Philomela had said, as if Charlie had been just any boy, an interchangeable boy, the Platonic ideal of adolescent foolishness—a concept, not a person. There was a photograph of him gathering dust in the school archives, a memorial plaque outside Scrubs, and a tree planted near the site of the old cricket pavilion that after twenty years no longer looked new.

Walden—Saffy—had been seventeen years old. The Marshals had dragged her away screaming, before they collapsed the incursion.

Charlie must have shielded himself through the detonation. He’d still been alive. He’d still been alive, the last time she saw him, before he was left behind for Old Faithful, alone.

The body—the corpse—that Old Faithful was wearing had not aged a day, of course. He probably even had his guitar calluses still. Walden remembered finding him fantastically fit. Impossible to see it now. Nothing had changed: he was still tall, blond, with the chin-length shaggy haircut that every teenage boy with pretensions to counterculture had worn in the noughties, but these were not the things that struck her now. Instead she could only see how his skinny height had not yet filled out in the shoulders and torso, how the last traces of childhood chubbiness lingered around his soft cheeks, how badly he’d shaved the erratic blond fluff on his chin and upper lip. You were so young, Walden thought. She could have wept. Oh, Charlie, you were so, so young.

“Did you miss me, Saffy?” Old Faithful said sweetly.

Walden had spent a considerable portion of the twenty years since Charlie was consumed by this monster becoming one of the world’s foremost experts on higher demons. She was not fooled. “No need for games, thank you. Just your answer. Now,” she said. “Do we have a deal or not?”

“But if I let them go,” the demon said, “what’s to stop you leaving too? I felt you punch that portal earlier.” It grinned at her—Charlie’s earnest, sideways grin, with Charlie’s wonky canines. It reached into the pocket of its jeans and pulled out a familiar penknife. “Give me a guarantee.”

Walden fumbled the catch, and had to stoop and pick up the penknife without taking her eyes off Old Faithful. She knew what it was asking for. Blood pacts with demons were an ancient practice—a largely obsolete practice, because the risk so reliably outweighed the reward. If you gave a demon a piece of your physical self, you were giving it an opening that would last as long as you lived. The profound stupidity of what Walden was about to do weighed on her. But she could not see another way to force it to let both Nikki and Mathias go.

Be realistic: if she won this fight, Old Faithful would be destroyed, and the blood pact would not matter. And if, as was infinitely more likely, she lost… well, then nothing would matter.

She rolled up her sleeve. It was something she would never normally do in front of students, but it was hardly worth worrying about now. Old Faithful raised its eyebrows at the stark colours of Walden’s tattoos. The lowest band of black-and-scarlet spellwriting circled her forearm a little way above her wrist. Walden wore long sleeves all year round to cover the designs, partly because the parents who sent their offspring to boarding school tended to be a conservative bunch, and partly because she had no interest in discussing them with children. She did not discuss them now.

“I give my solemn oath,” she said, “that if you let these two children, Nicola Conway and Mathias Wick, go freely and unmolested from your domain, and never again attempt to harm or distress them in any way, then I will remain here to face you in combat, the outcome to be freely determined between us. And I seal this oath,” she nicked her wrist and held it out, “with my own blood.”

Old Faithful came towards her. Its footsteps were light on the stone flags of the kitchen. It was wearing battered old Converse trainers, and one of its shoelaces was undone. Walden tried not to notice. She stared the demon down, and did not flinch when it grasped her hand, swiped chilly fingers across the cut at her wrist, and then stuck those fingers in its mouth. “Mmm,” it said, pulling them out again with a pop. “Deal. Off you go, kiddos. Door’s unlocked.” It stepped theatrically to one side. The kitchen door behind it swung open, revealing the front hall of School House and the doorframe at the far end. The view through the doorway was dark, but not the roiling dark of the demonic plane. It was nighttime out there, back in the world, the real world, where Walden would almost certainly never set foot again.

She was terrified. But she could not sound terrified. “Go on,” she said.

“Dr Walden—” said Nikki. Mathias gave her a big-eyed look. Neither of them moved.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be right along,” Walden lied ruthlessly, and when that didn’t seem to work, “You’ll only be in my way.”

Old Faithful chuckled.

“Go,” Walden said, putting all the authority she could muster into her voice. “Tell Marshal Kenning—”

But of course there was no need to tell Laura anything. She was good at her job. Walden’s plan for this fight was to spin it out as long as she could and pray her two hours ran out before Old Faithful managed to possess her. Incursion collapse would seal them both in here, and then it wouldn’t matter in the least who won. Walden had a pretty clear idea of the odds. Hopefully Nikki and Mathias coming out of the incursion with the story of what Walden had agreed to would prompt Laura to act sooner.

With a certain amount of chivvying, the sixth formers finally set off down the corridor. Walden watched them go with her heart in her mouth. If she’d made a mistake—if Old Faithful went back on the deal now —

“Don’t worry,” said the demon, who was standing unexpectedly at her elbow. Walden could not suppress a sudden, awful startle. “I don’t need them anymore. It’s you I want.”

Walden backed away from it. Her wrist still hurt where she’d nicked it. She started unbuttoning her blouse. “Oh, wow,” said Old Faithful. “This is sudden, Saffy. Can’t we make out first?” Again Charlie’s engaging grin. “I didn’t want to die a virgin. It just happened.”

Walden finished with her blouse and shrugged it aside. Underneath, because it was October, she was wearing a sensible vest. The demon’s eyes moved over the tattoos on her arms; bands of spellwork on both, creeping florals woven around them on the left, the exuberant reds and oranges splashed across Walden’s right bicep. “Those are new,” it said.

“Not really,” said Walden.

“Sure we can’t kiss? For old times’ sake?”

“I am thirty-eight years old,” Walden said flatly. “I have no interest in being pawed by a monster wearing the corpse of a child.”

“You really are no fun at all,” said Old Faithful.

“I’m a teacher, Charlie,” Walden said. “I’m the opposite of fun.”

The demon smiled at her. Walden heard her own slip a moment late: Charlie . This wasn’t Charlie, had never been Charlie.

“When I’m you,” Old Faithful said, “I’m going to walk out there and they won’t know.”

Walden said nothing.

“I’m not some pathetic little imp who hides in a photocopier and eats biscuits. I can think . I can lie, ” the demon said. “And I’ll know everything you know, because I’ll have your brain. It’ll be my brain. Your doctorate will be my doctorate. Your office will be my office. And I’ll call the naughty children into my office, and I’ll have a little snack.” Charlie’s crooked grin got broader. “Just a little snack. A little here, a little there. I won’t get caught. I’ll get stronger and stronger. And there’s nothing you can do.”

Old Faithful had agreed to fight. It hadn’t agreed to fight fair. This was no different than what it had done to Nikki when it pretended to be the demon that killed her family. It was looking for weaknesses, because Walden frightened and distracted would be a lot easier to take down. But she was frightened, she was distracted. Her body, her expertise, and her career as tools for this ruthless predator: it was an awful picture.

“Ready?” said Old Faithful.

“Yes,” Walden said.

It pounced.

Not physically. Charlie’s body stayed where it was, grinning. But Walden went to one knee under the force of a solid wave of magic that roared across the airy kitchen towards her. It went through her shield like tissue paper. She recast it, frantically fast, and felt only the aftereffect of whatever that attack had been, like the prickling of a thousand tiny knives. Very nasty.

Magical combat was simply not Walden’s area of expertise. It was what Marshals did, with their shining swords and their rune-marked vambraces, or else it was a personal enthusiasm pursued by academic specialists in evocation. Walden’s style of doing magic was almost exactly opposite. Invocation, in its purest form, was meticulous and elegant and beautiful and slow . It was worked out at a desk beforehand, or memorised as a series of complex, overlapping annotated diagrams. It was satisfying, challenging, intellectual, and totally unhelpful when a giant demon was trying to stab you with thousands of sorcerous knives.

She had already tired herself out shutting down Nikki’s pentagram and getting the two sixth formers out of that trap. She regretted, now, levitating Will earlier; she should have let Laura carry him. She had not reached this far into her own reserves in years. A schoolteacher—even a schoolteacher teaching A-level Invocation—just did not need to use this much power this fast. No point trying to get fancy. Walden struggled upright from her half-kneeling crouch and spoke a banishment, one she’d written herself, years ago now. The syllables echoed off her tongue and took on shuddering form in the air of the demonic plane, each a solid little ball of magical force.

Old Faithful took them all to the face and shoulders and then shook itself hard. Walden had seen Charlie react that way to getting caught coatless in February sleet: Ooh, ow, feck, and then shaking himself like a dog when they got indoors, breaking into laughter. There was no laughter now, but no caution either. That banishment really hadn’t bothered the demon at all. Walden revised her estimate of its size upwards: she’d assumed tenth order, but this was eleventh, definitely, and maybe tending towards the twelfth. She knew that spell would have a destabilising effect on a tenth-order demon. She’d developed it for exactly that purpose.

Old Faithful sent another overwhelming wave of knife-sharp magic towards Walden. She managed to break the worst of it on a counterspell like a flood barrier before it hit her, but the hem of her smart John Lewis skirt turned abruptly into unravelling rags, and when Walden conjured her pale shield back into existence, she could not get it wider than the three feet around her. It kept trying to shrink further down. At this rate she was not going to last out the rest of her two hours.

Walden bit her lip and called down power through the bands of spellwriting tattooed among the flowers on her left arm.

Years since she’d used this. It hurt worse than she remembered. The spellwork illuminated with ruddy golden light and did what it was designed to do, siphoning ambient power from the environment around them, turning it into something Walden could use. This was the demonic plane: there was a lot of ambient power. Walden let out a gasp of pain and then shoved all of it into her shield, just as Old Faithful frowned and sent out another hammering wave of malevolence in her direction. This time it shattered against Walden’s shield, washed away undirected, and then got picked up by the power-siphons tattooed on Walden’s left arm and chanelled back to her.

It was agony. Walden had to shut the tattooed spellwriting down again even as she gratefully poured more magic into her defences. She could feel the lines of pain on her arm still, and smell the faintest hint of roasting meat.

So. She couldn’t risk too much of that .

“Cool,” said Old Faithful. “Look at you, eating magic like you’re one of us. Can’t wait to try those.”

It was an ancient horror, not a teenage boy, but it certainly tried to wind you up like a teenager would. Charlie’s memories were in there. But Walden was used to children needling her for reactions, and she refused to give this thing the satisfaction. She cast another banishment, a drifting, elegant, sideways creation that wasn’t hers. It belonged to her ex-girlfriend Dr Roz Chan, who had also worked on higher demons. For years now Walden hadn’t spoken to her beyond the occasional polite Facebook exchange, but she had fallen in love with Roz’s beautiful magic once.

The spell managed to tangle Old Faithful up a little— Yes, Roz, thought Walden—and gave her an opening for a binding, which she took. Charlie’s face twisted in irritation as she narrowed down the demon’s field of play. It could still hit her, but it wouldn’t be able to cast any more of those overwhelming waves of destruction without leaving itself wide open to a counter. “Think you’re pretty clever, don’t you?” said the demon.

“I am pretty clever, thank you, yes,” Walden said.

“Well, I’m bored, ” said Old Faithful. “Let’s get this over with.”

It charged her.

Walden wasn’t expecting it at all. She had been thinking of this as a magical duel. But that wasn’t the deal, was it? She went down flat on her back with Charlie’s weight on top of her, skinning her elbow on the stone flags of the kitchen floor. He had been lanky, not fit, but that made very little difference given how much bigger than her he was. Walden yelled and writhed and did her best to knee him in the groin; her knee connected, but the demon only snarled. Spittle fell from its lips onto her face. It wrestled Walden flat, pinned both her wrists with one hand, and with the other brandished the penknife she’d used for the blood pact. Walden could somehow only see the hand, the nails untrimmed and grown too long, the knob of bone at the base of his thumb, the bumps of his knuckles, a perfectly normal teenage boy’s hand. She thought, Oh God, oh God, oh God.

Old Faithful dragged the knife down her left arm, a long shallow cut that sliced through every band of tattooed spellwork. It hurt. Walden shrieked. The demon stared down at her out of Charlie’s grey-green eyes. “These are different,” it said, touching the edge of the knife to the uppermost band on her right arm, just above the curling pattern of scarlet splashed there. “What do they do?”

Walden panted for breath. There were tears of pain and despair at the corners of her eyes. She swallowed hard. “Above your level,” she said. “Come back when you’ve got a degree.”

“I’m having your degree,” Old Faithful said, and it grabbed a handful of Walden’s short brown hair and twisted hard. “You lose, little witch. You should never have left me here .”

Walden couldn’t hold it back any longer. The sob that broke out of her felt like it had been building for years. Charlie’s eyes, Charlie’s hands, Charlie’s smile, Charlie’s memories somewhere behind that demonic snarl. She’d mourned him twenty years ago. He wasn’t any less dead because a monster was puppeting him now. But she wept and said, “Charlie,” and “I’m sorry,” and “I’m sorry .”

She saw the demon’s look of growing triumph. I was supposed to last longer, she thought. But maybe all her adult life had been leading her back here, to die the death she’d narrowly escaped as a schoolgirl. Maybe you never really stopped being that stupid, stupid child. Maybe this was what you deserved for getting away.

As she had this thought, a blast of white light, sizzling with power, lifted Old Faithful bodily off her and threw it across the kitchen. It slammed into the wall by the fridge and fell in a ragdoll heap.

Walden thought, What?

“GET UP,” bellowed Laura Kenning, framed in the kitchen doorway, “AND GET OUT OF MY WAY!”