Page 19

chapter seventeen

THE HUNT

By this point Walden had admitted to herself that a planar patrol was a genuinely good idea. And Mark was here and he did seem competent—overconfident, occasionally, perhaps, but competent. So if the patrol needed doing regularly, he might as well be the one doing it.

They walked the school boundaries, following the lines of hedgerows and ancient walls, and then spiralled in, sweeping through the site. It was impossible not to comment on what they saw. Everything on the original school grounds, on this side of the road, was dense and solid with the buildup of centuries of magic. From the outside, the school chapel was practically identical in the demonic plane to its mundane incarnation.

When they ducked through its great oak doors they were lashed with colour. The nave was thick with dream or memory or ghost of two hundred years of sunlight poured through dizzying stained glass. It went slipping and sliding across the flagstones in a brilliant kaleidoscope. Those dazzling windows had been smashed to fragments in the reign of Henry VIII, and light like this had not been seen here in the mundane world since.

Four demons in the chapel: one largeish imp that flew screeching overhead in the form of an eagle and then perched suspiciously in the arched ceiling and glared at them. Two fifth-order demons on either side of the sombre board of the war memorial with the long list of slaughtered alumni, posing in the shapes of gargoyles. In the vestry they found one archdemon, eighth order, roughly human in shape, faceless, gowned in something scarlet that oozed. That one was reasonably challenging to banish. Mark did the busywork of keeping it distracted while Walden drew an array to anchor her spell. It was harder to focus than it should have been. She was right-handed, and her right arm itched, from the wrist to the shoulder, the whole time the archdemon was there. Under her skin, something with coiling feathers was flexing and shifting, trying to come awake. To hunt.

Your assistance is not required, Walden thought firmly.

She nearly dropped her chalk when the Phoenix answered. They had been together for more than a decade and it had never spoken to her. Its voice in her head was a raptor’s cry, the slash of talons. Let me loose, let me strike, it meant. My prey is here; I am strong and fierce and hungry; let me fly!

“All right there?” called Mark from where he was wrestling the archdemon. “Don’t let me rush you—it’s only a skinner!”

“You’re fine,” answered Walden, shaking off the hunter’s song in her thoughts, gripping her chalk more firmly and returning to the detailed outlines of her array on the chapel wall. The stone here was as ancient and almost as solid as its mundane original. “I’ll be right with you.”

“Hopefully before it turns me inside out!” Mark called, but he was barely out of breath, and after patrolling with him for most of an hour, Walden did not actually think he was in trouble. He was no Laura Kenning—his spells did not have the speed or brusqueness of Marshal combat magic—but he was fine.

Banishment achieved; the skinner demon gathered its oozing scarlet cloak about it and tried to dash away. To Walden’s surprise, Mark killed it with another evocation spell: an explosive lob of percussive force, expanding inside the demon’s being into edged shards that sliced its selfhood apart. The skinner howled as it fell to pieces. Violet-edged wild magic surged through the chapel, and the dizzying kaleidoscope light from the long-vanished stained glass grew momentarily brighter.

“What was the point of that?” said Walden.

“One less demon,” Mark said. “Obviously.”

“All you’ve done is create more loose magic to attract others—” And as Walden said this, she realised why she was seeing so many imps around school lately. Old Faithful’s disintegration, like the carcass of a whale descending through the depths, hadn’t just created a void for a new apex predator. It had also summoned a whole ecosystem of lesser magical scavengers. “Well. Never mind.”

“Come on, no one likes skinners.”

The thought of a skinner demon lurking in the school’s magical shadow, as eager to strip the flesh and bones of a child as an adult, was certainly upsetting. “True. Shall we carry on?”

“Sure you’re all right to keep going? That last array seemed to take a bit longer than usual.”

Walden had no intention of discussing the Phoenix with Mark Daubery. She had not discussed it with anyone for many years, and there was no reason why that should change. She had already added an item to her mental to-do list: double-check all Phoenix spellwork. Just in case. It was odd that the demon should try to speak to her. It never had before; not even when she first summoned it as the culmination of her doctoral research. It had lived reified on her arm and barely even stirred in the many years since then. But the encounter with Old Faithful had clearly set off some reaction, and she urgently needed to understand it better.

None of that was Mark’s business. “Absolutely fine, thank you,” she said. “Let’s continue.”

Mark watched her, she thought, as they worked their way around the rest of the school. The ribbon of tarmac that was the main road separating the two halves of the school site manifested in the demonic plane as a grey riverine space, blurred and painfully empty. On the other side, after an initial boundary walk, they checked the school coach park. The humped forms of minibuses loomed through magical mist like a collection of ancient monoliths. Walden insisted on checking each one separately, and then sweeping the whole coach park in depth. A combustion engine was a terrible temptation to a demon, and few possessions were more potentially threatening to human life than the selfhood, power and completeness inherent in a vehicle.

Nothing. Not even an imp. “All right, that just leaves Scrubs and the Bursary building,” Walden said. “And the sports hall, of course.”

“It’ll be pitch dark by the time we get back,” said Mark. “At least we’re not getting rained on.”

“Where’s your umbrella?”

“Do you know, I’ve got no idea. Must have left it somewhere.”

Walden suppressed a sigh. “Well, let’s—”

The shriek in her thoughts was raptor-scream, demon-howl, a flash of lightning across her vision. Her arm burned. Walden shouted in pain. The Phoenix cried, Turn!

Walden turned, just in time. Her hands were moving before her thoughts did, so that as she lifted them a shining pale shield of magical force broke from her fingertips and pushed the attacker away. Mark was yelling something, but she could not hear it over the Phoenix’s clamour in her head. What am I looking at? she made herself think; Hush, you, let me work through it!

Let me hunt it, let me kill it, let me, let me, let me, I shall hunt and kill and feed, I am hungry, I am made of hunger—

“You,” said Walden, summoning all her professional authority, “shall wait to speak until it’s your turn . Thank you.”

The Phoenix subsided, muttering to itself. Walden’s shield shimmered and glowed as the coach park demon flung itself against the barrier. It was gigantic—physically gigantic, manifested in enormous blocky shapes, vaguely bipedal with a broad snout, angular thighs and calves, strangely regular curves adorning its massive torso. Seventh- or eighth-order archdemon, but that was not a demon’s natural shape, that was—

“It’s a bloody bus!” yelled Mark from where he crouched on the other side of the monster, projecting his own magical shield. Walden frowned. That shield was flickering and unsteady.

“Are you all right?” she called across the demon’s aggressive, clanking bellows.

“It got me in the arm!”

And he was an evoker by training and inclination. Physical injury would slow him down. He sounded afraid. Walden looked again at the demon. Yes, it was a school minibus, or rather, that was the form which was defining it right now. The curved decorations on its metallic torso were wheels. The smooth, blockish shapes of its arms and legs were the panels of a chassis, and its snout and glassy eyes were the minibus’s bonnet and windscreen. The school logo, red and white, was plastered along its arms and legs.

Kill kill kill kill kill, said the Phoenix eagerly.

“Put your hand up when you want to contribute,” muttered Walden, and then had to resist the sudden strong urge to raise her own right arm. “And when it’s appropriate, ” she added. Her fellow traveller subsided again, sulking.

The minibus demon was big and heavy-looking, but slow. It was certainly nowhere near as powerful or as clever as Old Faithful. Its best idea seemed to be to batter its huge form against Walden’s pale shield and hope that would wear her down. It hadn’t thought of turning around and going for Mark, who was probably an easier target right now. And, of course, it did not have the advantage of actually possessing two and a half tons of steel and aluminium. Here on the demonic plane, the minibus was only an idea, a potential self, a shape for a demon to dream about.

The fact that it had latched onto the idea was a bad sign, because it meant this demon was on the way to a possession. It needed only a brief surge of wild magic to slip through a temporary weakness in the fabric of reality and establish itself in the mundane shell it had chosen. Imps in photocopiers and security systems and vape alarms were nothing compared to the danger represented by an archdemon in a school bus. Possessed vehicles did not respond to the undignified demands of a steering wheel, and no demon in history had ever acquired a driving licence.

Bang, bang, clank: every time the minibus demon flung itself against Walden’s shield, there was a ringing clash of imaginary metal. Walden narrowed her eyes, trying to concentrate. She just needed an opening.

Slow! snapped the Phoenix, sounding as frustrated with Walden as Walden herself would have been with a very dim Year Eight. She felt a surge of firm agreement at the back of her skull. The Phoenix thought her an embarrassingly bad hunter with a dreadful eye for weakness. In fact, it informed her: Stupid!

“You don’t get anyone to improve that way, you know,” Walden muttered. The minibus demon roared, a sound with the rumble of shifting gears and growing acceleration buried in it. Walden needed to destabilise its link to the vehicle. It would have helped if she was more of a driver. The whole of Chetwood village was walkable, and yes, all right, she didn’t really leave the school site very much, she was far too busy. It was an easy shot down to London on the train, but she always just felt guilty that she wasn’t going to see her parents instead; and they were all the way down in Sussex, rather more of a trip and you had to deal with the faff of Victoria Station. It just seemed simpler, really, never to go anywhere—anyway, how exactly did you inconvenience a minibus? Reduced fuel? Flat tyre?

The archdemon swiped at her with a steel paw. Mark seemed to have gone useless in the crisis. Maybe his injury was serious—where had he gone, Walden couldn’t see him anywhere—“Mark?” she called, and got no answer.

How, said the Phoenix abruptly in the back of her skull.

“I beg your pardon?” said Walden. It was not exactly easy to carry on a conversation with one demon while feeding power back to her shields to hold off the brutal attacks of another.

How—the thing. The thing you do. How.

It took Walden a moment. “How do you get someone to improve ?”

The answer was not words but a surge of fiery emotion. The Phoenix gave Walden to understand that either she was going to get better at the extremely straightforward business of defending her territory from lower-order pests, right now, or it would burst its bonds and handle the business personally.

“Good grief,” Walden said, trying not to be terrified. “Well, to begin with, students almost never respond well to insults and threats . Calm down.”

Say how!!!

A howl over Walden’s head. The minibus demon was starting to look worryingly solid, much more so than the other misty humps of silent buses occupying the demonic plane’s echo of the school coach park. It brought its red-and-white fists together and hammered them down on the magical shield directly above Walden’s head. A shower of bright sparks flew off in all directions, and she smelled burning rubber. She had to get the Phoenix under control before she could deal with this. And then she was going to have to take the day out tomorrow—oh, the cover manager would be very annoyed having that dumped on her first thing Monday morning—and go over her leashing spellwork with a fine-tooth comb.

For now it just needed to be placated. With, apparently, a potted summary of the first three weeks of teacher training. “Students respond best to structure and clarity,” Walden said, dragging what had long since become professional instinct out of the back of her memories. “Break large tasks into smaller ones, and model the steps along the way. Control the environment, maintain a sense of purpose, provide space to fail safely; then, of course, provide clear, encouraging, and actionable feedback—”

The attacking archdemon backed off and flung itself flat on the ground. Parts of its steel frame shifted around. Before Walden’s horrified gaze, the huge tyres that had been decorating its torso moved back to their proper places. The shape of a school minibus rose like an animal gathering itself to spring. The grumble of the engine deepened. It was going to charge her. And yes, this was the demonic plane, there was no physical vehicle there, but there was still an archdemon about to accelerate into Walden’s shields at the best part of eighty miles an hour—

Model, said the Phoenix in Walden’s head, and it took control of her hands.

It could not hide its profound impatience as it went slowly through what it felt were a perfectly obvious set of steps. Connect : this was Walden’s territory, her place, where she belonged and where she controlled the boundaries. The spellwork on the back of her staff pass shimmered, and at the same moment she felt an answering shimmer on every other lanyard on the school site: Mark’s where he was crouched and breathing hard next to the misty shimmer of another minibus, Todd’s as he chugged down the drive on the green gardeners’ quadbike with a trailer full of bagged-up compost behind him, Lilly Tibbett on duty in Scrubs chatting with a Year Nine and shivering a little in the November chill, all the other teachers and assistants and cleaners and gardeners and kitchen staff and Annie in the office who really didn’t need to be in on a Sunday but she’d thought she’d just drop by and get a couple of things finished off…

Walden’s school. Her people. A deep well of magical potential.

You forgot the children, the Phoenix said, reaching with its power for the huddled teenagers in the dining hall, the Sunday clubs running in different classrooms and common rooms—all indoors today, thanks to the rain—and the rebellious handful of unsociable young people curled up in dormitories, watching videos on their phones or scrolling social media or playing games; even, in a few rare instances, actually studying. Walden blocked the greedy grasp of the Phoenix’s reach at once, and answered silently: Certainly not; when was the last time you completed child protection training?

Besides, it was done. A school was far more than its children. The institution, the rock-solid centuries-old stability of it, rested in the adults who kept it going; and Walden was connected, she had made her claim. The archdemon on the point of hurling itself at her at motorway speed hesitated, feeling the shadow of a larger and more dangerous predator dominating this space. What now?

Display, the Phoenix said, demonstrating a not-very-complex piece of evocation, a simple shower of light and noise—but then it didn’t need to be complex; any kind of organised spellwork was impressive to a mere archdemon, and light and noise might be ordinary in the mundane world but they were spectacular rarities in the demonic plane. The pests invading Walden’s territory were aware of their strength, aware too of their weakness. They took few risks. They were not hard to dissuade. A human thief looking for computer equipment was not rolling the dice on life and death, but an archdemon who lost a fight might lose all the pieces of self it had meticulously gathered over years or decades or centuries of struggle.

Struggle was not Walden’s thought. That was the Phoenix. What do you mean? Walden asked, and received no answer. Instead, her demonic passenger bared her teeth at the stalling form of the minibus and said, Now you make a way out.

Banishment, it meant, but banishment turned inside out from how Walden had always conceived it. She had thought of banishing a demon as thrusting it away . The Phoenix saw it from the opposite perspective, through the eyes of a being that had been defeated, banished, in its long history, more than once— How old are you? Walden wanted to ask suddenly. But she could tell it was not the time to interrupt. After all, this was a lesson.

Banishment, to the Phoenix, was building an escape route and pointing to it. Nothing that lived wanted to be trapped in an unwinnable fight. No one wanted to die. The Phoenix cast no spell. It did not even think of an array. It only lifted Walden’s right arm—her fingernails were glowing gold—and pointed; and where it pointed, a dark road seemed to appear in the fabric of the demonic plane, an obvious and unmistakeable path out of Walden’s—the Phoenix’s—solidly claimed territory.

Go, it said to the monstrous, deadly shape of the red-and-white minibus creature. Walden thought the words were more for her benefit than for the archdemon’s; it understood the Phoenix on a different and deeper level, the way a fox understood the cry of the hounds. No way to go on here. Turn back, try another life, be something else.

Before Walden’s eyes, the archdemon shrank. The steel-and-aluminium shape it longed to wear disintegrated into red mist. Underneath was something smaller, and more afraid, and—she could already tell—an order of magnitude less powerful. A sixth-order demon at most. The Phoenix turned Walden’s hand over and held it palm out. The gesture was not a command, but a magnanimous offer of mercy. The former archdemon fled along the dark road laid out by the Phoenix’s banishment, and Walden could already tell it would not be back.

And now we eat, the Phoenix finished—the final step of the lesson. The magic-siphoning spells on Walden’s other arm prickled briefly with heat. The ruddy mist left behind by the archdemon’s diminution faded, and she felt the warmth of new power settle into her bones.

It was over. Walden lowered her arm, rather shaken. The golden glow was already fading from her fingernails as the Phoenix resettled itself, sated.

“Mark?” she called. “Are you all right?”

“Over here!”

Mark had shielded himself, but the shield flickered out of existence as Walden got close. He’d peeled off his Barbour and there was a nasty, bloody gash through the expensive wool of his chunky jumper. His jaw was clenched tight with pain. “Oh my goodness,” Walden said, “I’ll call an ambulance.”

“Just a scratch,” said Mark, but his cheeriness had a taut edge to it. “That was a big bastard, wasn’t it? Sorry to be no use.”

Walden had a first aid qualification, though she didn’t use it often. “Let me see.”

Mark waved her away. “Really, it’s a scratch. Just needs disinfectant and a big plaster. Maybe a few stitches. I’ll get someone to drive me to A&E.”

That was the moment when Walden should have offered to do it, but she didn’t own a car. Mark grinned at her and then got to his feet with a theatrical ooough of pain. “Let’s get out of the demonic plane before I attract something else by bleeding all over the place,” he said. “Not that there’s anything to be scared of when I’m standing next to you. That was it, wasn’t it? The higher demon you’ve got leashed. Your Phoenix.”

“Er, yes,” Walden said, a little startled—and more than a little flattered—to be on the receiving end of such direct admiration. She knew the Phoenix was impressive. Most other people… well, either they didn’t know about it, or else they didn’t know enough about magic.

Mark knew. His knowledge lit up his face. His smile was not the charming mask but a grin of real enthusiasm, brilliant even as he clutched at his injured arm. “Spec-fucking-tacular,” he said. “Beautiful, beautiful magic. Bravo, Dr Walden.”