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Who’s she, the cat’s mother? Walden thought. Wearing her teacher outfits always made her own mental voice start to sound a bit like her grandmother. She took a note. Since she had nothing important to record yet, she wrote down what time it was.

Aneeta read it upside down. “We’re being timed!”

“I didn’t say that,” Walden said. “You have the whole double.”

“So… summoning circle, right? Salt, chalk,” said Will. “Let’s go.” He fetched supplies from the cupboard in the corner of the classroom, along with a metre ruler. “Big and central.” He got on his knees and started work on the pentagram.

“Shouldn’t we check the perimeter wards first?” said Aneeta.

“It’s a school lab, they’re fine,” Will said.

Walden said nothing.

Nikki said, “Aneeta’s right. Safety check first. Oi.” She scuffed her black school shoe across the chalk lines Will had drawn.

“Seriously?” said Will.

“North, south, east, west, windows, door, fire exit,” said Nikki. “Matty, you take this half of the room, I’ll do that half.”

The split ended up being one-third to two-thirds, because Nikki was a lot faster at spellreading. But Mathias was responsible for the fire exit which Walden had altered. She took care not to watch him any more than the others. Mathias was exquisitely sensitive to the attention of authority figures. He would notice, and panic.

“Done? Can we actually get on with this now?” said Will.

“This doesn’t look right,” Mathias mumbled.

“It’s a school lab, it’s fine.”

“It doesn’t.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“I dunno,” Mathias said. As usual, his instinct for magic was outstripping his grasp on theory. Reading the logic of someone else’s spell was not always easy, but they’d spent a long time on incursion wards last summer. Walden bit her tongue. Normally, she would have encouraged Mathias to at least try before he gave up; but the point of this exercise was to let the class figure things out by themselves.

Aneeta came and peered up at the ward next to Mathias. After a moment she gave a little screech. “Nikki!”

“What?” Nikki had moved on to ostentatiously checking on the fire extinguishers.

“Again, guys, school lab, school ward—” said Will.

“Oh shit,” said Nikki, staring at the streaks of black and yellow paint.

Will paused.

“Language,” said Aneeta, with a glance in Walden’s direction.

“Actually,” said Walden serenely, “‘Oh shit’ is the correct reaction to finding an error in an incursion ward.”

Will finally joined the other three, clustered around the fire exit. He frowned. “Is it—”

“It’s the location,” said Nikki. “It’s too vague.”

“‘This place,’” Will read, translating the loops and swirls of arcane notation on the wall.

“Could mean anything,” said Nikki. “This room, this building, this school, this whole country — Nice one, Matty.”

“Yeah, good shout,” Will said, and gave Mathias a hard slap on the shoulder. After three terms, Mathias seemed able to accept this as a gesture of friendship. At the start of sixth form, Walden was fairly sure he’d been terrified of Will.

“Was it a test?” said Aneeta, and then, watching Walden’s face, immediately decided: “It was a test.”

Walden inclined her head. “ Always start with the safety check,” she said. “Every time. Don’t count on me, don’t count on the school wards. Don’t count on anything. Mistakes happen. Check, then check again. What will you do now?”

“Fix it?” said Aneeta.

“Fix it,” said Nikki.

Nikki roughed out a correction to the incursion ward on the back of her homework. Spellwriting was a fiddly business of symbols and shorthands. Technically it was a form of instantiation, though only the handful of students in the Instantiation A-level set—Nikki among them—would do much original spellwriting in school. But you could not do invocation safely without learning how to adjust within the boundaries of someone else’s prewritten spell. The entire discipline depended on summoning arrays and their accompanying layers of wards. At the secondary level, that meant memorising a selection of the vast bank of designs which already existed.

Walden could create an accurate adjustment to an incursion ward without planning it out first, because she had years of experience, but she was pleased that the sixth formers didn’t risk a freehand change. They crowded around Nikki, peering. “Looks good,” was Will’s verdict. “Let me get the paint.”

When Walden had changed the ward, she had done it by the force of her magical intention alone. That skill too was the result of long experience. Paint was easier. Will painted up the correction and then went back to the large salt-and-chalk summoning array he was drawing on the floor. The others, by unspoken agreement, let him get on with it, while the three of them wrote out and then argued about the steps for a fourth-order summoning. Will’s unshakeable self-belief was his best asset. He was the fastest in the group—and the second most accurate—at arcane notation, because he never fell into the trap of hesitant sketching. Mathias and Aneeta both did that constantly, with tentative, wobbly spellwork as the result.

“Yeah, good,” said Nikki to the finished pentagram. “Go over the upper meridian again, maybe. What do you guys think?”

Walden made a note in the column she’d labelled TEAMWORK.

“If you’re both happy,” said Aneeta.

“Matty?”

Mathias shrugged.

“Seriously, mate, you spotted that bad ward,” said Will. “Hit me, I can take it.”

“It’s really good,” said Mathias.

“Okay,” Nikki said. “Then we’re ready. Positions, guys. Dr Walden, can we have the dagger?”

At this point Walden intervened to check their work, because there were limits to self-directed learning, and ‘actually summoning a demon’ was one of them. While she was making minor corrections to the sixth formers’ summoning array, Laura Kenning came in and took up a position in the corner of the lab, arms folded, silent. “Good morning, Marshal,” said Walden in a friendly way, because it was important to model professionalism and good manners in front of the children.

Kenning said, “Morning.” The sword on her hip caught the light from the window, a bright glint of silver. Her cropped blonde hair was a golden halo. She looked like she’d escaped from the school chapel’s stained glass, a butch take on an avenging angel.

The sixth formers gave her uneasy looks.

“All right!” said Walden, snatching back their attention. “Good work, everyone.”

“I have a question,” said Nikki. “What would we summon a fourth-order demon for? I mean, in the real world.”

Ah, the utilitarian question. All teachers got this sometimes, and the real answer— Education is more than a skills checklist for a job application— seldom satisfied most teenagers. Walden could have said: Not everything worthwhile in life is useful. She truly believed that. She could also have said: We are using this esoteric academic skill in the real world right now, and its purpose is to turn you into a person who is undaunted by complex, high-stakes, multistage brainwork. But that wouldn’t have been fair to the spirit of Nikki’s question, so she went for a less abstract answer.

“Nothing, I hope,” she said. “There is absolutely no piece of magic you can do by summoning a demon this size which you could not also do in some other, much safer way.” This was untrue, she realised as she spoke. Having Kenning in the room was putting her on edge. Never enjoyable to be observed teaching, and particularly unpleasant to be observed by a hostile person carrying a sharp object. “I beg your pardon, I misspoke. What I meant to say is: there is no piece of magic you should do which can only be done with the assistance of a demon. If you remember our magical ethics topic from last year.”

“There’s military stuff,” said Will. “My uncle does it.”

And absolutely should not have mentioned it to you, Walden thought, but she said, “Yes. There is, as you say, military stuff.”

Aneeta said, “Did you ever, like—do it?”

“I was approached by the Pentagon when I lived in the United States,” said Walden. “I told them no.”

She would not normally have shared this titbit with the group. She was immediately annoyed with herself, because she knew she’d said it to impress Kenning. Why did she need to impress Kenning? Kenning was just a rather difficult colleague. But Walden couldn’t resist glancing over, trying to gauge the effect of the boast: I am considerably more knowledgeable about demons than you, and I have the alarming job offer to prove it.

Kenning appeared to be looking out of the lab window. She probably wasn’t even listening.

But the sixth formers were. “Wow,” said Will.

It was too late to unsay it. Walden resigned herself. “Were they scary?” said Mathias, clearly envisioning some sort of gun-toting, sunglasses-wearing hit squad.

“Not at all. When Americans are trying to recruit you, they are extremely nice to you.” Walden remembered the recruiters—a man and a woman, both in conservatively cut suits—offering plums one after another: funding, unlimited; never worry about research grants again; lab space, state of the art; opportunities for promotion; no need to relocate, there’s a California campus; fieldwork, of course not, unless that’s a direction you’d like for your career; and then the final twist of whipped cream on the military-thaumaturgic trifle: Considering your relationship with Dr Chan —how pleased they’d been with their munificence, and their frightfully modern and relaxed attitude to lesbianism— eventually, we’re sure you’ll be thinking about citizenship.

Walden had said she would think about the offer. And then she had booked a flight back to the UK. Her relationship with Rosalind Chan had been dying already; doomed, really, since the day Roz said to her, Honestly, Saffy, I think babysitting is beneath you. You’re too good to waste on high schoolers—and what’s a schoolteacher anyway but a failed academic?

Back at home, the Ministry of Defence had never approached Walden, though she’d been half expecting it. Presumably the MOD had a plentiful supply of people like Will’s uncle. Or perhaps they’d just found out that she’d said no to the Americans, and felt they couldn’t top that offer on a civil service budget.

“All right, that’s enough of that,” she said, before the class could dive any further down this particular personal history rabbit hole. “Let’s summon a demon, everyone.”

They took up positions around the five-pointed array—pentagrams were a classic for a reason, one of the safest and simplest of all the summoning forms. Walden joined them, placing herself at the northern point of the pentagram so that she would be able to anchor the students if necessary. “I’ll demonstrate good form for you again, and then we’ll go one at a time,” she said. “Everyone ready?”

Nods, mumbles; a clear “Sure!” from Nikki. In the corner of the room, Kenning shifted position subtly, though her arms stayed folded.

“On my count. Three—two—one—”

Walden nicked the tip of her left index finger and let a drop of blood fall towards the pentagram. The first layer of protections written into the summoning array went into action as it hit the ground, and the blood drop fizzled out of existence. Just the scent of it, the promise of human power and human vulnerability that it represented, would be enough to tempt a demon closer. Walden felt the inhabitants of the demonic plane notice what was happening and turn their attention to the classroom.

And then she summoned a demon of the fourth order.

She hardly needed the pooled power of the four students to support the invocation. She pulled some magic down from them through the array anyway, so they would know what it felt like, but fourth-order summoning was well within her capabilities. Demonic size in theory kept going forever in exponential progression, but in practice no one had ever found one bigger than the twelfth order. Only a handful of magicians in the world had ever summoned anything above the ninth.

Walden didn’t mention it often—after all, it was hardly relevant to a schoolteacher’s career—but she was, in fact, one of that handful.

She had to send her power diving through the demonic plane like a hook to scoop up a demon small enough for this pentagram. She felt the others scattering away from her in fear. In the real world Walden was a short thirty-eight-year-old white woman with mouse-brown hair in a neat bob. On the demonic plane she was a swaggering giant.

YOU, she said to her captured demon. COME.

The air over the pentagram boiled and split, glowing with the dull purplish light of a controlled demonic incursion. It was considerably more exciting-looking in the ultraviolet spectrum. The demon manifested, and as Walden moved power through the summoning array it began to shape itself not to the contours of possession but in a form of its own choosing. Reification, this was called. Not hugely attractive, it had to be said: the demon was about four feet high and consisted of an inkblot collection of wobbling black shapes, some of which might have been limbs. Halfway up there was a mouth, which opened to show serrated rows of needle teeth.

Query. Walden asked, “What is your name?”

The mouth let out a furious shriek, and the demon said, Vazirikal! Vazirikal!

Demon names were attached to them by humans and usually made useful handles to control them. “Thank you,” Walden said. With a hard downward slash of a hand gesture, she dismissed it. The inkblot shapes disintegrated. The purplish glow of incursion faded. The arcane lab was quiet. Walden’s students wore solemn expressions. Walden resisted the urge to glance over her shoulder at Kenning again.

“All right! And that’s how it’s done,” she said. “And now you know its name, which should make things a little easier. Will, you first.” She passed him the dagger. “Off you go.”

One by one, the sixth formers summoned a demon.

Walden had picked Will to go first because she judged him least likely to get nervous. He rushed it—she had to sharply remind him to slow down as he chanted the words of invocation—but he got Vazirikal back, managed to compel it down to a convincing reification although the teeth were less distinct, and asked it what was for lunch in the school canteen that day. Chips! howled the demon.

“Nice,” said Will, and dismissed it, fairly neatly. Then he glanced across the pentagram at Nikki. “Beat that, Conway.”

Nikki rolled her eyes.

“Very well done, Will,” said Walden, in a no-nonsense tone. “Aneeta, your turn.”

Aneeta wore an expression of grim concentration as she ran through the invocation. She could not get Vazirikal’s form pinned down to more than a vague conglomeration of shadows, but Walden was pleased with her control otherwise. For her query, she rattled off an equation Walden did not recognise. The demon spat an answer, and Aneeta dismissed it with a little gasp of effort.

“Good work. Though I’m afraid I have no idea if that was correct,” Walden said.

“I’ll check it,” said Aneeta. “It’s from my Chemistry homework.”

Walden gave an assessing glance to the two remaining. Mathias was wearing a familiar strained expression: Please don’t pick me! Walden had mercy on him. “Nikki,” she said.

Nikki did the summoning perfectly: steady pace, tight control, an elegant and precise reification. She asked Vazirikal what she ought to give Matron for her birthday. The demon said, Knit!

Nikki dismissed the demon and said, “I’ll make her a scarf.” Walden caught her smug glance at Will and hid a smile. A little competition could go a long way in a classroom setting. “Excellent work, Nikki,” she said. “I couldn’t have done it better myself. Mathias, your turn. Stay calm, take it slowly.”

Mathias looked a little sick. But he needed this practical, and Walden did not want to humiliate him in front of his peers by not even letting him try. She thought he could do it. She was sure he could do it.

He put too much power into the invocation. Mathias never quite believed how strong he was. Walden felt the blowback hit her through the pentagram, and watched the rest of the class wince. Will said, “Oof, Matty.”

Walden saw Mathias’s focus slip.

The roar of power in Mathias’s invocation did not have the cold and dangerous edge of Walden’s long experience. In the demonic plane her magic said, Watch out, here comes a predator .

Mathias’s said, I’m big and slow, come eat me.

Enormous interest suddenly surrounded their pentagram and its little scissor-slice incursion. Vazirikal got eaten even as Mathias was groping for it. Walden said calmly, “I’m taking control of the summoning. Mathias, on three.”

Mathias didn’t seem to hear her. He was still trying to summon Vazirikal; except that what was left of Vazirikal had been incorporated into a seventh-order archdemon. It would burst the boundaries of their fourth-order array without difficulty if it managed to get a foothold, and he was blindly offering it one. “Mathias,” said Walden sharply, and then she didn’t bother with the count or being gentle. She shoved all four children out of the magical working and took sole control as she threw her own power between the assembly of demons and her students. There were gasps and shouts as the four sixth formers flew backwards and either sat down hard or thumped into the white walls of the arcane lab.

In the demonic plane, most of the descending scavengers scattered. The archdemon, not yet reified, was imperceptible by sight, but Walden could feel the spiked weight of magical distortion it gave off. It gave her the equivalent of a considering look, trying to decide whether a delicious meal of teenage magician was worth the risk of taking her on. Walden returned her best cold schoolmistress stare: Do you really think it’s a good idea to try me, kid? The demon couldn’t actually see her expression any more than she could see it, but part of being a magician was knowing the relationship between your solid, mundane human body and the magic it performed. If you wanted your presence in the demonic plane to be frightening, it helped to be a good actor. This performance of inarguable authority was more or less the skillset you needed to manage a roomful of teenagers anyway, so Walden got plenty of practice.

The archdemon seemed convinced. It wavered.

Then it reared back in alarm.

Walden was startled until she realised that Kenning had jumped into the pentagram, shortsword drawn. This was reification in reverse, the mundane world brought into the demonic plane. The magical weapon manifested as a glowing blade of white light. Kenning herself was also projecting into the demonic plane, much harder than Walden, the avenging angel manifest as a stalwart figure of muscle and defensive magic. Oh, thought Walden, she’s actually quite good. She had assumed—well, talented demon hunters tended not to end up as school security.

She also thought, as a minor corollary: Oh, she’s gorgeous.

An awkward thing to notice about a difficult colleague in the middle of facing down an archdemon. But the archdemon had already decided they were too much trouble and was slouching away. Kenning spoke a rapid four-syllable banishment—Marshal spells were so fast —to give it a good kick in the behind as it went. Walden waited for her to pull out of the pentagram so that she could begin the dismissal sequence and close the incursion.

The archdemon disintegrated.

Kenning said, “What did you—”

“Laura, get out of there, ” snapped Walden.

But it was too late.