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chapter twenty-one

IMPULSE

The conversation in the pub moved on. No one, at least, was looking at the Phoenix anymore.

“You look like you could use some air,” said Mark. “Come on.”

December nights in Central London: freezing cold, full of movement, full of light. The Tube sign above Covent Garden station gleamed. There were elaborate Christmas displays in the windows of all the shops across the street. Black taxis and scarlet buses wove among the crowds of pedestrians all taking their lives in their own hands every time they crossed the road. Walden turned her face up when she felt something light and cold kiss her skin.

“How about that,” she said. “Snow.”

“It won’t settle,” said Mark.

They watched the snowflakes drift through the pools of red and gold and green from the Christmas displays. The yellow bulb of the nearest lamppost was flickering. Walden realised she’d left her jacket over the back of the booth, and in the same moment Mark took his wool coat off and swung it over her shoulders. The motion mysteriously ended with Mark’s fingers resting on Walden’s upper arm. The Phoenix’s sharp talons curled around the spot. Walden imagined she could feel it move, though she never had before—that it was magic, power, and threat that made her skin tingle just then. She looked up at him.

“How much harder do I have to work, Sapphire?” Mark said.

The plaintive tone didn’t ring true at all. Walden snorted. “Oh, please. I’m sure you’re really suffering.”

He grinned: Fair play to you, can’t blame me for trying. He gave her arm a firm squeeze and let go. “I’m wasting away. Look at me.”

“You seem fairly all there to me.”

“You know, if you just tell me you’re not interested, I’ll back off. I’m a bastard, I admit it freely, but I’m not a complete twat.”

Walden said nothing.

The grin widened. “Thought so.”

“ That is not attractive.”

“Confidence works for most people.”

“You’re not confident,” said Walden. “You’re smug.” And a little echo in her thoughts, Roz in California in the mid-2000s, You’re so fucking smug, when Saffy hadn’t really realised she was being condescending—even now, couldn’t remember what had actually annoyed Roz so much . Perhaps Mark had never grown out of being twentysomething and superior, sure the world would work for him, sure he would always get what he wanted in the end. Well, why would he need to? The world did, on the whole, work well for a Mark Daubery.

As it worked well for Sapphire Walden: Saffy, who’d left her high school boyfriend to die in horror and faced nothing worse than a stern talking-to afterwards, who’d still got her A-level grades and her Oxford place, who’d made new friends and had new loves and bought herself a little black dress to wear to parties. Ridiculous to dwell on any of it. All done decades ago. She was Dr Walden now. And yes, the world worked for her: she had success, status, a reasonable share of power, and the comfortable bank balance of a professional woman without dependants who didn’t even need to pay a mortgage. She lived in an unfair world where most of the unfairness had worked out in her favour. Looked at that way, she and Mark were two of a kind. So it was no wonder that despite herself, despite knowing exactly what kind of smug bastard he was, despite everything, she rather liked him.

“Shame to waste an atmosphere, you know,” said Mark, nodding out at the Christmas lights, the drifting snow.

“I bet you say that to all the girls,” said Walden.

“Can’t a chap appreciate a romantic night?”

“Are you trying to persuade me that you have hidden depths?”

“Of course I have hidden depths,” said Mark in a hurt way. “I know on the surface I seem like a self-involved arsehole. But under the surface, I’ve got finer feelings—sincerity, romance, a little real loneliness, a passion for magic, the soul of a poet. And then deep down, if you really go digging, all the way down at the bottom of my heart… eventually, you’ll find my true self.” A beat. “And it’s the same selfish arsehole you spotted in the first place.”

Walden started to laugh.

“I’m like a sandwich.”

“At least you’re honest.”

“To you, Sapphire, I wouldn’t dare to lie.”

“Oh, all right, ” Sapphire said, which was perhaps not the most romantic way to indicate willingness to be kissed, but Mark chuckled and took her up on it anyway.

And it turned out you didn’t grow out of fireworks, you didn’t grow out of shivers, you didn’t get too old for sexy to be sexy—certainly not when you were only thirty-eight—and Mark could kiss . The most recent time she had been kissed was… Laura, in the middle of Old Faithful’s incursion, a shocking collision of mouths like a declaration of war, not exactly erotic. Before that it had been years. A few fizzling dead-end relationships after she’d come back to the UK. Roz, so sharp and uncompromising, with her beautiful magic; that was the last time she had really managed anything like a capital- R Relationship. Uni boyfriends and girlfriends, none of them serious. Charlie, eager, doomed, and twenty years dead.

All long ago and far away. They tucked themselves back against the wall of the pub and Mark kissed with the attention and confidence that belonged to experience: not pushy, not slobbery, not tentative either, firm and warm and taking his cues from her responses. Extremely nice stuff, the kind of snogging that might send a stupider woman than Sapphire head over heels into an endorphin-fuelled haze very quickly. Luckily, she thought, she was very clever and experienced and not bothered about that sort of thing. He put his arms around her, which as well as being appropriate for the moment was also delightfully warm. The Phoenix stirred and murmured indistinctly in the back of her thoughts. Oh, shut up, she thought at it.

The murmuring got louder instead. “What’s wrong?” said Mark. Walden winced and shook her head hard as if she could shake away the sound that was not sound. Danger, wailed the Phoenix, in a cry that was nearly its wordless hunting scream. Danger!

The bloody demon was so demanding, so self-absorbed, and so oblivious to how actual adult humans behaved, that she might as well have been carting one of her teenage students around with her everywhere she went. “Shut up,” Sapphire said out loud, ignoring Mark’s raised eyebrows, and that was when the incursion began.

Half a dozen lines of dull purplish light erupted in the wintry London street, the nearest only narrowly missing a shocked pedestrian. The Phoenix was screaming in Walden’s thoughts. Suddenly she saw her own fingernails glow dimly with gold. Her demonic fellow traveller had given up on trying to talk to her; it wanted to fight and it needed her body.

“No, you don’t!” said Walden sharply, and got a howl of mental frustration back. The splitting purple lines of incursion were widening; what was happening; where had this come from—

“Is it a Christmas thing?” she heard a passing tourist say, and that made her focus. A random demonic incursion opening through a living person would probably kill them. “Everyone get back!” she yelled.

To no effect. She was a woman off her home ground and out of her armour: a London partygoer, not a schoolmistress, without authority over the night. She did not have time to try again. Dark shapes were moving in the shadows of the demonic plane. Bubbles of raw and deadly power were pressing up against the fabric of the real world. Something—several somethings—were coming. The Phoenix still wanted to take charge. Walden was not about to hand it power over her body for anything less than an Old Faithful—not when it had just tried to seize control on its own, and had almost, terrifyingly, succeeded.

“GET BACK,” shouted another, much louder voice, “IT’S AN EMERGENCY!”

And oh, of course people listened to bloody Mark . Well, if it worked. Walden had no time to worry about him. He was all right when he wasn’t surprised, but he’d been fairly useless when they went up against that minibus demon in the school car park. She could perceive the dim figures slipping through the gaps in the world, not with her eyes but with the well-honed thaumic awareness of the magician. Demons, none reified yet, so none visible to the layperson—which was a nightmare, because the street was now full of panicking people fleeing from the obvious wild magic of the opening incursion, and the majority of them couldn’t see the real danger. Four, five, six demons, all of a good size, sixth order perhaps. All likely to become larger and more dangerous than that fairly soon, because they were actively seeking out an incursion—which meant they were on the hunt—and this was central London, absolutely chock-a-block with systems and selves and stuff . There was an Apple store with a gleaming display of white Christmas lights and brightly lit phones and tablets just on the corner of this street, well within range. Any one of these demons could swell up to eighth or ninth order just by ripping through the contents of its stock room.

Fight them? No, not six on one. Walden wasn’t a magical combat specialist. Contain them, that was the key, until the Marshals got here. And close those inexplicable wild incursions behind them—nothing like that should be possible, not in the middle of London. This wasn’t Chetwood, where centuries of wild magic had soaked into the stonework. Yes, there would be some loose magical power around in a place with this many people, but there were also extensive legally mandated wardings all over the place, slammed on anything government-run—the sewers, to start with, and the Tube—and London was one place where the budget and trained magicians were always found to keep the wards checked and renewed.

Six good-sized demons, entering the world through four separate dull-gleaming cracks in reality. There was no helping it. She had to draw on the Phoenix. Even at the height of her academic practice, when she’d been pushing herself to the very limits of her own ability every day in the lab, she wouldn’t have been able to handle this much magic without summoning something to assist her.

It got easier every time to call the power of the Phoenix forth. In Old Faithful’s incursion it had taken her nearly three minutes of focused attention to the original binding spells. Now it was barely more than thirty seconds. To onlookers, Walden must seem to be standing frozen, but she was actually concentrating intensely. The corners of her vision lit with a tracery of gold as the blood vessels in her own eyes illuminated with power that was not hers. The frustrated howl in the back of her thoughts settled into focused silence. We keep the area clear, Walden told it.

The Phoenix didn’t mind that; if the pedestrians weren’t part of Walden’s own territory, then they were just in the way. However—it made an interested magical lunge in the direction of a passing bus.

No vehicles! Walden thought at it, in rather the tone you might say No ice cream! to a demanding group of children on a school trip.

The demon was disappointed, but resigned. It helped Walden to set up multiple circles of warding perimeters, cutting the danger area off from the rest of the street, dividing the separate incursions from each other and from the smorgasbord of shop displays before the invading demons realised what was happening. One or two hostile demons at a time would be much easier for the Marshals to cope with than six at once. Walden insisted that they make the perimeter visible to humans. It flared up in scarlet and gold, firebird colours, warning colours. Now to collapse those incursions—a shame she couldn’t push the demons back through them first, but at least there wouldn’t be more. It was complex, intricate work. A wild incursion was not nearly so neat and manageable as one created in a lab. Sweat was starting on her forehead and arms despite the chill of the winter evening, and she hadn’t the faintest idea where Mark had got to. Calling for help, hopefully.

“Dr Walden,” said someone crisply at her shoulder. “Which one’s the worst?”

Walden had to close her eyes to keep her focus on managing the Phoenix, holding the multiple perimeter circles, squeezing the fabric of reality back into place around the bulging holes, and talking to someone at the same time. She’d only seen a brief glimpse of Laura’s white Marshal jacket. “Back left sector,” she managed. “Closest to the big technology display.” That incursion was already shut, but there were two demons left in the sector where it had been, one fifth order, one sixth, both of them well aware of the feast of power just within their grasp. Walden, with her eyes still closed, added: “If there’s anyone from school still in the pub and sober enough, have them go and shore up the wards on the shop. They’re shaky.” She could feel the shoddiness of it, someone’s end-of-the-week rush job to comply with health and safety regulations—not the only one on this street either. You didn’t get serious demon problems in London. There were so many wardings about—some of them still powered by the gigantic installations of magical defences laid down during the Blitz—that surely someone else’s protective spell would catch a problem if yours weren’t quite good enough. But that didn’t work if everyone skimped.

She couldn’t turn her head to see what Laura was doing. But she knew, she knew, that Laura was extremely good. So she wasn’t surprised when the alarming sense of shoddiness in the nearest set of wards began to ease. In a crowded area, defence before attack was common sense, and anyone with a tertiary degree in magic should know how to fix a bad incursion ward. There had been half a dozen magician teachers still at the afterparty, not all of them drunk.

And then she wasn’t surprised, not at all, when Laura stepped into the danger sector, facing one fifth-order demon and one sixth, shortsword shining, power gathering around her solid, muscular form. Danger, murmured the Phoenix, the first thing it had said in a while.

Its tone was almost appreciative. Laura Kenning was an interesting kind of dangerous.

Walden did not relax, but there was a real difference between the terror of finding yourself unexpectedly facing a throng of demons and the healthy, intelligent fear you felt when the crisis wasn’t over but you knew you had good people on your side. It was truly a pleasure to watch Laura at work. It had only been two months since Walden had seen her try to take on Old Faithful, but she had noticeably improved. Her use of magical force had already been crisp and expert: Marshal-style combat spells at their best, underpinned by Laura’s own athleticism. To that she’d added something Walden didn’t expect at all, an edge of grace and precision that you never saw in a— hedge witch, said Mark’s voice in the back of her head; Walden was disappointed to hear it from herself; non-academic magical practitioner, she corrected her own thought.

Words, selves, the Phoenix murmured, selves and words.

Laura, already a very good demon hunter, had responded to losing her job at Chetwood by deciding to get better. Two months of focused work could make a huge difference to someone’s skills when they were eighteen, but you didn’t often see it happen to a person over thirty. Not because adults were incapable of learning—of course not. They were just usually a lot worse at it.

Not Laura.

Walden, after a few moments watching her demolish two substantial demons at once, hadn’t the slightest doubt. She’d been taking magic lessons: serious, academic, theory-focused lessons, with a good teacher—someone strict on form, with double expertise in invocation and evocation. Roger Rollins at Goldsmiths, maybe, elderly now but a very good magician indeed, one of the last mighty-bearded Communists left in British academic magic; he’d briefly supervised Walden as an undergrad, before he decided Oxford was still too bourgeois for him.

Of course, anyone could learn Walden’s style of magic, if they really wanted to. It was just hard work. Hard work for a child whose only actual job was going to school and learning things, and even harder work for an adult who had to fit the reading and lab time into evening and weekend classes around their day job. And expensive too, unless Laura had got the Order to fund it as prof dev somehow, which Walden doubted, because the Order of Marshals would not be nearly so eager to rent out its members as private school security if it was running a budget surplus.

Focus, whispered the Phoenix, which had learned patience for the peculiar wanderings and curlings-about of Walden’s funny little water-and-meat brain, but only to a point. It comes.

“Oh dear,” said Walden.

The sixth-order demon in the nearest sector of her elaborate perimeter had finally finished thinking through its situation and realised that Walden was the person stopping it from enjoying its night out in London. It had been in the real world for long enough that it was starting to reify spontaneously. When it drew towards her, it appeared to be a ghostly figure outlined in a blurred pale drift of snowflakes. Meltwater dripped in its wake. Pedestrians stopped, pointed, aimed phones to take video—phones? Were they crazy?—and Walden readied a banishment. What had happened to Mark? A little of the competence he displayed on their planar patrols would be really very useful right about now.

No mercy, the Phoenix whispered.

Walden cast.

Nothing complicated. Complicated had to be saved for the perimeters she was still maintaining. A straightforward banishment like a blast of strong wind. Another. It’s weak, murmured the Phoenix. It doesn’t know what to be. Melting snowflakes dripped from the demon’s inchoate, half-real shape. Somewhere behind Walden there were sirens shrilling, a long rising wail that joined the growing hunt-song in her thoughts. It does not see me yet, the Phoenix crooned, exultant. It will not flee in time.

Kill it. Eat it.

Walden’s next spell was not a banishment, but a slash of golden claws.

The demon disintegrated. Immediately, without pause for thought, Walden activated the siphoning spells in her other set of tattoos, the ones on her left arm.

A swirl of snowflakes and shadow. The lines of spellwriting among the tattooed flowers on her left arm prickled, but did not burn. She tasted chill at the back of her throat, as if she’d suddenly swallowed an ice cube. The demon was gone, disintegrated into raw magic; and the magic was gone, because Walden had consumed it. The Phoenix luxuriated, triumphant, in power possessed for its own.

Then the Marshals arrived.