Page 17

chapter fifteen

VAPE

Walden taught the rest of the lesson, ignoring the atmosphere that lingered over the other three students. She went back to the infirmary at break time, but Nikki was no longer there. The door of Ebele’s office was shut. Perhaps they were still talking; or perhaps Ebele was already caught up in the next crisis. There was always another crisis.

There was always another lesson; there was always another meeting; there was always another bell ringing, and this was one of the great comforts of school. Hour to hour the majestic machinery of the timetable moved hundreds of people around the corridors and offices and classrooms. You never had time to stop and worry. You did the job to the best of your ability, which meant you did what you could and moved on. When the problem of Nikki Conway came back in front of Walden, Walden would focus on it again. Until then, she had work to do.

Five o’clock, well after sunset at this time of year: now the end of Prep, and the double bell for after-school period, when the boarding pupils were shepherded to what the timetable called Enhancement Activities and the students called, obscurely, Trimmers. The day pupils who were not signed up to clubs streamed out of the school’s front gates and into the shiny cars—BMWs, Land Rovers, Teslas—of waiting parents, or waiting au pairs. Headlights blazed through the gloom. The twenty minutes it took to clear them all off the school site were some of the most tightly orchestrated of the day.

Walden, as senior staff, was on sweep duty through the sports hall’s basement locker rooms. Nothing the maintenance team could do would ever change the fact that this cramped underground maze of narrow wire lockers was where every teenager in the school dumped their sweat-soaked sports kit after Games. It smelled atrocious. She discovered a pair of malingering boarders, two fourteen-year-old girls, in the back corner of one of the girls’ locker rooms. She gave them a mild look. They stuttered with unconvincing innocence and fled.

Walden glanced up at the vape detector on the low basement ceiling and frowned. There were chalk marks around it. She was tired enough that she did not bother with either word or gesture. She just folded her arms and glared.

The being that emerged from the detector as a little wisp of cherry-flavoured smoke was so minuscule it barely counted as a demon at all. It was just a puff of power and intention, given life force by the system it inhabited, and bribed to keep the alarm from going off with offerings of flavoured smoke. Honestly, quite clever work by whoever had done it. It was amazing how creative teenagers could be when they’d thought of something that you really did not want them to do.

“Get gone, you,” Walden said, and the imp’s fragile grip on the material plane disintegrated. As the red smoke dissipated she looked around and spotted in the corner, jammed between two wire lockers, a plastic classroom chair. Someone must have dragged it down here to stand on, reach the ceiling, and draw their little summoning array.

Walden had a board pen in her skirt pocket. She could follow health and safety regulations and fetch a stepladder and a second person to watch her standing on it, or she could just get the job done.

She was tired. It was November. She dragged the chair over and stood on it. She still had to go on tiptoe to reach the detector. Eight clean, firm strokes of the board pen—it was a green one, why did she have that, she didn’t even like the green ones—and the vape detector was warded. The outline of the ward shimmered, green and gold-flecked, and then settled. It would hold for a few weeks, until Walden had time to come down here and paint up something more emphatic.

“Very nice,” said a voice behind her, and Walden startled and fell off the chair.

‘Fell’ was not the word; she stumbled, the flimsy chair went one way and she went another. The heel of one of her neat black court shoes got caught in the back of the chair. It came off her foot, and Walden went sideways. She had just enough time to think in horror, If this ends up as a broken ankle—

There was a gust of wind—leaf-scented, outdoorsy, a welcome relief from the foul fug of the basement—and Walden, rescued just in time by someone else’s spell, landed untidily and embarrassingly, princess-style, in Mark Daubery’s arms.

He grinned down at her. “You know, Sapphire,” he said, “we can’t keep meeting like this.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Walden.

Instant change of tack: Mark’s grin went from boyishly charming to collegially good-humoured, a change as subtle as it was obviously intentional. He set her politely back on her feet and then went to one knee on the basement floor in his good suit to rescue her shoe from the corner it had fallen into. “Sorry, sorry about that, completely my fault,” he said, “like the Americans say— my bad! Annie in the office said I’d probably find you down here at this time of day. She also said I should just put a meeting in your calendar, but I thought I’d try my luck. Everything all right?”

Walden slipped her shoe back on and straightened her blazer. “Fine, thank you,” she said crisply. “Did you need me for something?”

Like it or not, she had to work with this man. The princess catch and the cheesy line were outrageous behaviour, but it wasn’t a crime to be flirtatious, or outrageous; given how he looked and sounded, both of those probably worked for him as often as not. Easiest to think of him as a forty-something variant on his nephew Will: basically unmalicious, basically selfish, basically manageable. To have one’s career overseen by a smiling consultant was perhaps not that dissimilar to finding a demon in a vape detector. Yes, it was irritating. But Walden could handle it.

“Let’s walk and talk,” said Mark. “Or have you got a club to run now? Year Eight rugby? Year Ten knit and natter?” Two different feints, joke-shaped but not joking: Not a team player, are you, he was saying, not the motherly type either; what are you?

“Year Thirteen Oxbridge interview prep, usually,” said Walden, “but in the magical faculty we rotate it among the Heads of Department. So I have half an hour, if you’d like to meet.” She smiled at him. I’m extremely good, you wanker, was the answer, and he returned her smile with genuine enjoyment, understanding perfectly.

Mark admired her office. “You can feel the history, can’t you?” He admired her big, old-fashioned, green-leather-topped desk. He peered at the antique wall clock. “I’m surprised it’s not possessed,” he said. “These old magicians’ clocks usually are, you know.”

“It was,” said Walden.

“Ah,” Mark said. “Thaumic vacuum when the big one made its move?”

Oh, so he did know something. Walden supposed you could not get away with acting as a magical consultant to the government if you were a complete fake. “Thaumic vacuum, extremely rapid,” she said. “Straight through two layers of defences. The major incursion wards held on in this half of the building, but the demon just went under them.”

“You must have been spitting nails.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, I would be,” Mark said. “I don’t know, I always like these little old possessions. Imp in a clock, imp in a rotary telephone. Ghost singing Vera Lynn out of an ancient radio. We had a lot of them in the house when I was growing up. Maybe you’re the zero-tolerance type, but I never saw any harm in them. Sad, losing them all at once.”

“That one manifested as a demon cuckoo,” Walden said. “A lot of chiming and shrieking when it got annoyed. I confess I was quite fond of it.”

Mark laughed. “Not that zero-tolerance, I take it. I think we can get on, then, don’t you?”

“Do you chime and shriek?”

“Only on special occasions.”

Walden, annoyed, saw that he’d somehow steered the conversation round to being flirtatious again. Had she not stamped on it obviously enough the first time? He took a seat in the chair in front of the desk that Laura Kenning had always ignored, and leaned forward. The smile, the open body language, the casual confidence—Walden hadn’t the slightest doubt it was all intentionally aimed at lowering her guard, but she could still feel it working. If Laura had been this good at making herself charming, Walden might have understood her sooner. “Is there anything in particular you wanted to cover in the next half hour?” she said. “I have quite a lot to do.”

“Well, let’s cut to it, then,” said Mark. “Dave and the governors are expecting a nice tidy report from me. I’ll be having chats with as many teachers as I can—maybe some of the sixth form, too, what do you think?”

“That depends on what you’re trying to achieve.”

“A holistic picture of the school’s readiness to handle a major incursion, likely points of failure, and an elegant, inexpensive set of evidence-based solutions—you know the guff.” Walden tried not to be too obviously disgusted. Mark’s grin said he knew, but what could you do, you had to talk the talk. “Come on, you’re the boss on this stuff. Who do I actually need to talk to?”

“The Marshals,” said Walden. “And Todd Cartwright.”

“Todd the caretaker? He’s still around?” Mark laughed incredulously. “He was here when I was a kid!”

“The Keymaster. He knows the site extremely well, and I find his perspective valuable. And, yes, teaching staff and students. I recommend speaking to a cross-section, not just the sixth form. You’ll find that the GCSE years and the middle school are every bit as involved in the issue. This is a magical school.”

“Was it a kid who summoned an imp into that smoke alarm you were warding?”

“Of course. I don’t know who yet,” said Walden. The truth was she was unlikely to find out, unless someone developed a strong enough guilty conscience or a stupid enough urge to boast. “But most likely a Year Nine or Ten.”

“Sixth form all too goody-two-shoes to vape in the locker rooms?”

“Sixth form have off-site sign-out privileges,” said Walden drily, “and so they go and vape in the woods on the other side of the rugby pitches.”

“Tut, tut. Kids these days. We just did cigs and White Lightning.”

Walden remembered, suddenly and with extraordinary clarity, the taste of the cheap cider Charlie had got hold of one half term—using his last exeat card to catch the train to Luton, flashing his unconvincing fake ID at a corner-shop clerk who almost certainly hadn’t cared in the least, sneaking the big blue plastic bottles back to school and hiding them in a hollow tree stump in, yes, the glade in the bluebell woods on the far side of the school sports fields. White Lightning! It tasted like bad apple juice and adolescent stupidity. The vividness of the taste-memory was a shock. “They don’t sell it anymore, you know,” she said, to chase the thought away.

“What, White Lightning? Really?”

“Discontinued in 2009. Because of,” she allowed herself a thin smile, “the strong association with underage drinking.”

“And just like that, I’m an old man!” said Mark. “I can hear my joints creaking already. Well, listen. I’m not just here to write a report for the governors. Though I’ll do that, and you can think of it as me making your life easier, because it’ll get them off your back. But I’m not planning to spend all my time sitting around taking up office space. Do you do a regular planar patrol here?”

A planar patrol involved creating a temporary portal to the demonic plane and sweeping the area clear of medium-sized demons. It was a lot of power expended for, in Walden’s experience, not very much useful effect. But when Mark said it she saw, irritated, that now Old Faithful was gone—and who-knows-what would be starting to move into its abandoned territory—it was probably a good idea. With any luck, it would prevent nasty surprises entirely. “Not regular, no,” she said, “but I agree that it would be worthwhile to add it to our system, for the time being.” Part of her was already groaning. Planar patrols could not be dumped off on junior Evocation teachers. Adding it to the system meant adding it to Walden’s own overloaded plate.

“Not much of a delegator, are you?” said Mark. “I just told you I’m not here to sit on my backside. Look, is it that you don’t trust me?”

A beat. “Well, I didn’t hire you,” said Walden.

Mark laughed. “Need to see me in action? All right. Are you free Sunday afternoon?”