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chapter ten

PHOENIX

Walden had never before appreciated the motive force of a really good shout. She prided herself on being soft-spoken in the classroom. But the Chief Marshal’s roar triggered some hindbrain instinct that obeyed without thinking. Walden got up and dived for the cover of the kitchen table.

Laura let loose another blast of percussive magical force that drove Charlie’s body to its knees as it struggled to stand up. Then another. She was advancing with sword in hand, eyes narrowed. The blasts kept coming, each one dizzyingly bright and accompanied by a thundercrack of displaced air. Walden saw after a second what she was doing. Old Faithful might be possessing a human body, but it was not human, and all Laura’s spells were designed to hammer it right where a human’s physical senses would confuse it most: balance, vision, sound. It seemed to be working .

Oh, she was so, so good.

And she reached the kitchen table and scowled at Walden and said, “What are you doing? Run!” Old Faithful was up again now and casting; that thousand-knives blast, but Laura’s shield absorbed it without difficulty, the top layer flaking away and the next one coming smoothly up to take its place.

Walden said, “What are you doing? Laura, get out of here!”

Laura spared an instant to favour her with a speechless glare. She turned back towards Old Faithful and hurled another bombshell blast of combat magic towards it. Then she pivoted back again, grabbed a handful of Walden’s sensible October vest, and kissed her hard and fast on the mouth.

Walden spluttered. “Laura!”

“Busy,” snapped the Marshal, returning her focus to the demon. Charlie’s body was firmly back on its feet, face twisted in fury, demonic magic bubbling dangerously around him. “Doesn’t matter. Go.”

“I can’t,” Walden said. “I made a blood pact with it. If I don’t kill it here it can follow me anywhere—Laura, it’s no use, there’s nothing to be done—for God’s sake get out there and collapse the incursion— Did you just kiss me? ”

“You have to kill it?”

“It’s eleventh order!”

“Fine,” Laura said. “Then we kill it.” But Walden heard the grimness in her voice. She already knew that Laura’s next words would be— or die trying .

Then they had to stop talking, because Old Faithful was on them.

It had been holding back before. It had been playing with Walden like a cat playing with a mouse. Too big to be intimidated by her raw power, it had assessed her as an actual threat and concluded—correctly—that she wasn’t one. But the Marshal was a threat, and the demon was not playing now. For a confused three minutes or so, all Walden could do was frantically pour the last of her magical reserves into her shield, expanding it to cover both of them, and pray it was helping. Laura’s marathon-runner focus was not calm and easy now. But she did something—a dismissal, though not one Walden recognised at all—and Old Faithful backed off, retreating to the other side of the kitchen and watching them narrowly. Behind it, on the fridge, Ebele had stuck up some of her six-year-old foster son’s artwork with magnets shaped like colourful fish.

Walden had exactly one trick left. She’d thought she wouldn’t get a chance to use it. She probably still didn’t have a chance. The problem with academic magic was that doing it properly took such a bloody long time.

But Laura didn’t look like she was willing to walk away. So unless they were both doomed to die here, Walden had to make the attempt.

“Can you keep its attention off me for three minutes?” she said.

Laura could have asked why. She didn’t.

She said, “I can try.”

Old Faithful recovered its bearings and descended on them in a storm of demonic magic once more. Walden forced herself not to pay attention. She retreated further into a corner of the kitchen and turned away from the spectacle of Laura under the lash of its dreadfully powerful magic, turned away from Charlie’s puppeted body and its expression of inhuman, murderous glee.

The tattoos on Walden’s right arm were not spell-siphons. The bands of spellwriting had been done for her by the same San Francisco artist who’d handled the spellwork and florals of her other sleeve: a handsome trans man with a short beard and a flirtatious smile, whom Walden might have taken up on his offer of a coffee date, if she’d been single at the time. But the image underneath the bands of spellwork, spectacularly red and gold, taking up all of Walden’s upper arm and spreading down towards her wrist, had come later. It was not ink.

Walden worked slowly. The more complex an invocation was, the more important it was not to rush it. She tried not to notice the battle going on in the same room, tried not to see the splatter of blood across the kitchen table when one of Old Faithful’s knife-waves hit, tried not to hear Laura’s cry of pain. Each band of spellwriting had taken months of laborious development before she finalised the designs. They illuminated one after another. They did not burn as the siphons had; they were not affected by the strong magical currents of the demonic plane. They were, intentionally, as self-contained as it was possible for a work of magic to be. They depended on Walden and on Walden alone.

Only a handful of magicians in the world had ever summoned a demon above the ninth order.

Walden was one of that handful.

She had not chosen the form her fellow traveller took. She had been expecting it to be horrible; reified demons were usually horrible. But the image trapped under her tattoos was rather lovely, really: a coiling, long-winged firebird, feathered with rich red and golden plumes, a sharp raptor’s head with a wickedly hooked beak, two scaly feet spread wide, each adorned with a violently orange spur.

This demon was of the tenth order. It had not had a name when Walden first summoned it. So she called it Phoenix: because she’d met it in that high-security lab in the Arizona desert, and because it was glorious. It had been totally quiescent ever since Walden finished her dissertation defence. But as she went oh so slowly through the layers of spells that bound the demon to her skin, it woke.

She felt it first; the rich and sensual warmth of a suddenly enormous pool of magic at her disposal, like being presented unexpectedly with a marvellous hot bath. Only then did she see it move. The feathers under her epidermis ruffled. A scaled foot flexed open and closed. The firebird opened its eyes.

Out of pure curiosity, Walden had done this in front of a mirror once. So she knew that by now her hair and fingernails had taken on a flame-bright tone, and her eyes were a solid glowing gold.

Look at you, Old Faithful had said, eating magic like you’re one of us.

You have no idea, Walden thought.

And as demonic power spread its wings inside her, she turned back to the struggle that was Chetwood’s Chief Marshal losing and losing badly to Old Faithful. As she watched, Laura’s sword sliced deep into the demon’s upper arm. It did not react at all. Pain was not something it chose to feel.

When Walden spoke, she spoke softly. She had always prided herself on being able to control a classroom without raising her voice. “May I have your attention now, thank you,” she said. ‘Thank you,’ not ‘please’: a trick she’d picked up from her first teaching mentor. Don’t ask them politely to cooperate. Assume they already have, and thank them for it. Be courteous, be kind, let them feel good about it; but leave no openings. Your authority is not optional. It had made sense, and come naturally, to a magician who had been studying formal demonic invocation since she was fourteen.

And it worked. Charlie’s body looked up sharply.

Walden let the Phoenix take over.

This was not, now, a fight between a higher demon and two outmatched humans. It was a fight between two higher demons. One of them was older and stronger, but it had trapped itself in the body and brain of a schoolboy who had never even finished his A-levels. The Phoenix was much younger but only a little smaller, and it had a tremendously unfair advantage. It had Walden, and Walden’s expertise, and Walden’s self-discipline, and Walden’s years of experience in outwitting schoolchildren.

Walden was the fellow traveller now. She watched her own hands casting spell upon spell with some wonder. She recognised all the pieces that went into the Phoenix’s use of magic, but not the way they were being used. The higher demon regarded Walden’s knowledge of the limits of spellwork as a collection of flimsy little birdcages, meaningless at the best of times, utterly laughable in the demonic plane. It knotted together disparate strands of invocation and evocation and instantiation into effortless, fluid expressions of will and power. Microsummoning, thought Walden, recognising that some of its spells were being powered by imps who appeared and disappeared in mere heartbeats, far faster than any human could have worked through an invocation. Molecular instantiation, as the Phoenix discovered with satisfaction the lithium batteries of an abandoned toy car on the kitchen counter and blazed through them in seconds, leaving dust in its wake and a great wash of power in its hands. Classical evocation—Did Walden have any idea how much power she was carrying around in her great sack of water and meat, the hidden potential of her blood and bones, the coiled kinesis lying in wait in her muscles?

Watch out, I’m not—!

The Phoenix, outraged, was discovering the displeasure of a pulled muscle. It did not speak—not in words—but Walden felt its disapproval at the waste of such a fine natural advantage. It was the first time a demon had ever told her she ought to be stretching daily.

Quiescent, but not numb; bound, but not imprisoned; the Phoenix had dwelt in Walden’s flesh for years, and neither of them had wasted the time. It had her understanding of magic. It was sophisticated, technically fluent, and as up to date as any magician could be who was not actively part of a research institution. And along with that expertise, it had its own nature, which was to be magic, and come from magic, and eat magic. The siphons on Walden’s left arm were burning again, though bearably now. The Phoenix could handle the raw power of the demonic plane much better than she could. It was having, in fact, a perfectly wonderful time. Like Walden, it enjoyed success.

Old Faithful was outmatched.

Walden saw the moment when it realised. It braced itself to flee. “No,” she said, and the Phoenix, with its hunter’s intelligence, its predatory instinct for the kill, agreed with her.

They caught it the same way Laura had tried to, with a flurry of physical spells that targeted the exploitable weaknesses of a human body. What about the strengths—the power of blood and bone— What blood, said the Phoenix, when the fool killed its host years ago? Blind, dizzy, deafened, Charlie’s lanky figure stumbled over its own feet and then collapsed and did not get up again.

The Phoenix was delighted. It was a demon. It had won a fight. Now it wanted to feed. It wanted to grow : to gorge itself on Old Faithful’s centuries of power and become bigger, stronger, cleverer, deadlier than Old Faithful had ever been.

Walden’s spell-tattoos had been designed with very precise tolerances. The Phoenix nearly doubling in size would overwhelm them. She would be possessed at once—if she did not simply burn alive, releasing a new monster into Chetwood’s magical environment in the process. “No,” she said firmly, and activated the leashing element written into every strand of the spell. Her body, her power, her authority. She left no openings.

Not fair! howled the demonic firebird as its cage slammed closed, and perhaps it wasn’t. But Walden had seen its mental picture of taking chunks out of Charlie’s helpless body with Walden’s nails and teeth, and her stomach was already turning at the thought. No, thank you. The red and golden feathers splashed across her arm went still. Walden went to her knees beside the body and turned it over.

She did nothing else for a moment or two. Just looked at him.

A shadow fell over her. Walden had somehow forgotten all about Laura Kenning.

“We could try an exorcism,” Laura said. “Drag it out of him, cut it into pieces, banish the remains. It’s been done. Not on anything this big, but it’s been done.”

God, how that would feel. To walk into this incursion looking for three lost children, and come out with four. But the Phoenix’s scorn for Old Faithful had been well founded. Walden shook her head. She reached for the cut in Charlie’s checkered shirt where Laura’s sword had gone into his arm, and held it open. The injury underneath was deeper than she’d thought. Down past the layers of blackened, bloodless flesh, Walden could see bone.

“It’s all that’s holding his body together,” she said. “Exorcism wouldn’t change anything now. It would just make it harder to kill.”

Laura had her sword in hand. “Then let me.”

Walden looked down at the face of the boy in her arms. He was so young.

Look at us now, Charlie, she thought. Look at me.

Look at me, with my hair dyed back to brown, long sleeves over my tattoos, cosplaying my own grandmother most of the time; look at me, nearly forty, not speaking their language, not getting their jokes—oh, you would laugh. But you should have been here too. You should have travelled like you wanted to, you should have visited me in California, you should have kept making music. Maybe it would have worked out, maybe not. Maybe by now you’d be married with children, losing your hair and putting on weight and playing guitar at the weekends and you’d have learned what I’ve learned, that there’s joy in finding good work to do and doing it, there’s joy in looking back along the path you walked and knowing you wouldn’t change it. Oh, we wouldn’t have believed it, and you never got the chance to find out, but Charlie, Charlie, it feels so good to grow up.

She saw his fingers twitch. Old Faithful was trying to regain control. It was down, but not defeated. Not yet.

Charlie’s body was cold. She stroked his shaggy hair. She looked up at Laura.

“Go on,” she said.

Laura brought her sword down squarely through Charlie’s chest. There was a blaze of glittering silver in the strike, and each rune along the length of the bright sword illuminated. The whole body convulsed as if struck by lightning.

Old Faithful died.

Walden gritted her teeth through the thaumic reverberations as its death poured past her, a wave of suddenly undirected wild magic washing away in all directions. Charlie was withering in her arms, becoming a shrunken mummified husk, still dressed in old jeans and band T-shirt and chequered shirt. When Laura withdrew the sword from his chest, still shining bright and totally clean, nothing changed. It was over. More than twenty years later, it was all over.

Walden carefully closed the dead boy’s eyes and laid him down on the stone kitchen floor. She folded his hands over his chest.

“It’s done,” she said.

Well. There was no point sitting around feeling sad. Walden stood up, stretched with a wince—the Phoenix had used her body hard in that fight, everything ached—and tried to gather some professional detachment. “The incursion should shut itself down, now, I think,” she said, “without that monster holding it open. It’s much too big to self-sustain. Shall we?”

Silence.

“Laura?” Walden said.

She turned towards the Chief Marshal and found herself staring down the length of a silver shortsword. The tip was at her breast.

“Ah.”

“You’re possessed,” said Laura.

She’d seen Walden wake the Phoenix, of course. And she was a Marshal.

Walden met her eyes steadily. “Other way round, actually,” she said. “I possess.”

“I’m supposed to believe that?”

“I still have my doctoral thesis somewhere if you’d like to read it.”

“Dr Walden,” said Laura unhappily.

“I really don’t know what I can do to prove it to you,” Walden said. “If I am possessed, then I have been for years, and it hasn’t caused any problems yet. But, if you’ll forgive my pulling rank on this one—I am an expert on demons. More than you. And I feel quite confident that the Phoenix is under my control, and harmless.”

“You think you’re the first magician to say that about a demon?”

“Well, no, of course not,” Walden admitted. “The difference is, I’m right.”

“I have a duty,” said Laura. “I swore an oath of service. I can’t let a higher demon walk around loose in the mundane world.”

“It’s not loose, it’s extremely carefully caged,” Walden said. “But I do see your point.” God, she was tired. How on earth to get Laura to leave her alone about this?

Then a sudden inspiration. “Would you care to swear an oath about it?”

Laura stared at her. “A what?”

“An oath,” said Walden. “A geas, you know, that sort of thing. I understand, Marshal Kenning. The Phoenix is potentially quite dangerous, yes. But I can give you the power to sort it out in a pinch, if you really don’t feel you can trust me.”

The shortsword finally wavered, before Laura’s wrist stiffened and she brought it back to its threatening position at Walden’s breast. Walden thought, for a moment, about the kind of courage it took to watch something take down an eleventh-order demon, and then decide it was your duty to fight it.

She took the tip of the silver sword between thumb and forefinger. “I give my solemn vow,” she said, “that the demon named Phoenix presents no threat to anyone or anything in the mundane world; that all my skill and all my power are at work in maintaining this state of affairs; and that if I fail, I submit myself at once to the judgement of the Order of Marshals and especially to the Chief Marshal Laura Kenning. By this oath I lay my fate in her hands. If the Phoenix wakes, she shall know of it, and she shall be granted all power to act.” Magic curled around Walden’s fingers and the sword as she spoke. She was being intentionally vague with the wording—too vague, if she’d been dealing with a demon. But Laura was human and Walden was not afraid of her. The whole thing was just a formality really. The Phoenix had been living quietly on Walden’s arm for so long that most of the time even Walden forgot it was there. But for Laura’s peace of mind, she finished, “And I seal this oath with my own blood.”

She turned her fingers over and nicked them on the sword’s sharp edge. Then she offered them to Laura.

Laura let the sword fall and took her hand in an abrupt motion. She brought Walden’s bloody fingers to her face, hesitated, and then kissed them awkwardly. Then she let go at once. Walden breathed out, feeling the pact take hold. She’d never made any kind of binding magical contract with a human being before. The underlying principle was the same as in any invocation, but the sensation was very peculiar. Laura’s magical essence was so much smaller and stranger and more complicated than the glowing presence of a demon.

“That’s that. And now please let’s go,” she said. She carefully didn’t glance down at Charlie’s shrivelled corpse by her feet. Now was not a good time to burst into tears. “I don’t think I can bear to be here another moment.”

The purplish shimmer of wild magic grew thinner and brighter, reinforced by the remnants of Old Faithful, as they walked together towards the broken front door of School House. The fog of the incursion was starting to lift. Laura tripped over the child’s bicycle in the hallway and swore.

In the absence of the great lurking threat, smaller demons were already creeping back. More will come, said some part of Walden that was forever a professional. We are going to have a problem soon. But then she forgot again, because a pair of apparitions, imps latched onto memories of emotion, were kissing by the coat hooks. She held up a hand, Wait .

Laura said, “But it’s dead .”

“That’s not Old Faithful,” said Walden.

Charlie as she’d known him, bright eyes and crooked smile, grinning down at his girlfriend, who was a desperately tiny waif with violently bleach-blonde hair. “Oh,” Laura said behind her. Walden remembered that dye job, done herself in a Scrubs bathroom while a friend kept watch for patrolling teachers. She watched her teenage self—had she really looked that young?—go up on tiptoe to say something in Charlie’s ear. She couldn’t remember what she’d said, but whatever it was, it made him laugh. Teenage Saffy was laughing too. Then the two of them went on, hand in hand down the hallway, past Walden and Laura as if they were not there and further into the depths of School House: a pair of giggling children who had never met a consequence that mattered.

It was amazing how stupid teenagers could be, Walden thought, with enormous, grieving fondness. She knew she wouldn’t change them for the world.