Page 8

chapter six

ANEETA

Walden spent Saturday evening slogging through her marking and carefully scheduling several emails to send at 8 A.M . on Monday. Ten o’clock found her still dressed—not in ratty pyjamas tonight, thank you Marshal Kenning—and still at her desk, poking at the draft of Monday’s school assembly. Assemblies were a bit of a dark art; no tougher crowd than six hundred adolescents who had heard three of these a week for years—Monday, Wednesday, Friday—and would rather be asleep. Walden’s assembly-writing was further hindered by her distaste for the tried-and-true genre of ‘personal anecdote with an awkwardly forced moral.’ Halfway through writing she remembered with a groan that she’d also agreed to take next week’s non-denom assembly. Non-denom was the optional alternative assembly for the students who didn’t want to attend Wednesday morning chapel, which was most of them. More than a third of Chetwood’s pupils were Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Jain. Most of the rest were carol-service-only, which Walden couldn’t fault, since it had also been her approach to chapel when she was a student here. She attended most Sundays now, because the music was nice and Ezekiel was an excellent speaker, but she would not have described herself as religious.

The knock on the door was a surprise, but also a bit of a relief. Walden felt that she’d reached a détente with Laura Kenning today. Perhaps this encounter would be the next stage of their reset. And she wasn’t wearing pyjamas this time. “Come in!” she called.

It wasn’t Kenning.

Aneeta was in slippers, tracksuit bottoms, and a puffy pink outdoor coat. She must have walked across the road from Scrubs like that. Walden was shocked. She could not think of another time when a student had dared to disturb her after hours in her suite, which was tucked out of the way in Brewers and right next door to the extremely off-limits thaumic engines. She was not a housemistress or a form tutor—she was senior enough not to be really part of the pastoral structure at all—and while she always tried, on principle, to be kind and pay attention, she knew very well that she was not one of the approachable teachers. Walden had people skills, because you needed them to do the job well, but they were learned and practised. Warmth did not come naturally to her. Children with problems usually took those problems to someone else. Even after hours, there were always staff on duty in the boarding house: a night porter, Marshals on patrol, and several younger teachers who lived in the flats on the ground floor and could be woken up in emergencies.

Aneeta’s expression was a dreadful mixture of misery and embarrassment. She hovered in the doorway, cringing as if she expected to be shouted at. “Sorry” was the first thing she said.

“Aneeta?” said Walden. She bypassed This is not appropriate ; it wasn’t, but Aneeta clearly knew that, and had come looking for her anyway. “What’s wrong?”

“I promised not to tell.”

Walden stood up, really concerned, when she heard Aneeta’s voice wobble. Aneeta was, to her certain knowledge, both clever and sensible. She would not be here out of an ordinary fit of teenage hysterics. They told you in teacher training to listen to your instincts, and Walden’s were yelling at her right now. Something was badly wrong. “Come here, have a seat—have a tissue—what’s the matter?”

“It’s Nikki,” said Aneeta, and burst into tears, right there in the doorway.

“Aneeta!”

Walden went and took her by the shoulders of her puffy pink jacket, and steered her gently into a chair. Aneeta was crying too hard to speak. She took off her steamed-up glasses. Tissue, thought Walden, and gave her one. Glass of water —there was a jug on the desk, spare glasses on the side. A sensible, even-keeled seventeen-year-old in floods of tears, breaking a promise to a friend and coming to find a senior authority figure about it—there were a number of possibilities for what this could be, none of them good, some very bad indeed. Walden summoned up the calm and patience and authority of her teaching persona. Warmth was hard for her, but she could do reliable, she could do nonjudgemental, she could do trustworthy and confident and, most importantly of all, safe .

Make no assumptions, ask no leading questions. It took Aneeta a moment to be calm enough to talk. Walden let her wipe her eyes and drink from the glass of water and gather her dignity. No one that age wanted to cry hysterically in front of a teacher. “Can you tell me about it?” she asked, when Aneeta looked ready to talk.

“The demon,” said Aneeta. “The one from last week, the big one, the one that talked. Nikki, she—she—” A gulp. “—she said she knew it.”

It took every inch of Walden’s professionalism not to turn white as she immediately saw the shape of the problem. Aneeta was still talking. “—and it talked to me too, it said… but I thought, ‘That’s not true, that’s just something I’m scared about, so it’s up to something,’ and then I thought, ‘Aren’t demons too stupid to lie,’ so I looked it up and it would have to be a big—like a really big—but Nikki—”

“Did Nikki tell you what the demon said to her?” said Walden, very, very calmly.

“It’s the one that… the one…” Aneeta swallowed. “She said, it’s the one that killed her mum and dad. That’s what it told her. She told me today.”

“I see,” said Walden. She understood now why Aneeta had bypassed housemasters and tutors and come straight to the school’s Director of Magic. Doubts, desires, insecurities: Who had more of those than a teenager? Their unwelcome visitor hadn’t been able to get a grip on Walden’s own mind during that summoning gone wrong, but she had not stamped hard enough on Aneeta’s question about its whispers. In a class with Mathias in it, it was easy to forget that all of them were vulnerable. She needed to set up a one-to-one meeting with Nikki in the morning—probably she needed to telephone School House tonight, in fact; Ebele would still be up—best to check in on Mathias too—even Will—

“And she said I mustn’t tell,” said Aneeta, “and she wouldn’t talk to me anymore, but,” and she pulled from the pocket of her puffy pink coat a dog-eared, ancient paperback, now decorated with dozens of pink Post-it notes.

Nielle’s Arrays. Walden’s undergrad copy. She reached out and Aneeta passed it to her with rapid gratitude, as if she was handing off a large spider. Walden opened at the first pink Post-it. Chapter eleven, triple arrays, meant for summoning archdemons. Nikki’s familiar looping handwriting on the Post-it said, CHECK how big is big enough???

“She left it on the table at lunch,” Aneeta said. “I don’t think she knows I’ve got it. But I looked at her notes and… she wouldn’t, but what if…”

What if. Nikki had been asking aggressive, high-level theory questions all week. She had tried repeatedly to go off topic in lessons and pick Walden’s brain on advanced summoning. She had been acting differently, in a way that Walden had not perceived as worrying because it was consistent with what she already expected from her best student. She hadn’t said Why are you asking, Nikki? She’d given her a book of advanced summoning arrays.

Walden closed Nielle’s Arrays carefully. She couldn’t let Aneeta see how frightened she was.

“I’ve been thinking about it all day,” Aneeta said. “Maybe I’m just being silly, but—I went to bed and I was lying in bed thinking and then I read the book some more and I looked at her notes and—I know Nikki’s loads better than me, but I’m not bad at invocation. I think I know what she’s— And then I texted her. And she didn’t text back.”

Walden knew she hadn’t fully controlled her expression this time. She said, “Thank you, Aneeta.” You should have come to find me hours ago, but there was no use telling her that now, when she was already here and already in tears. Walden picked up the office phone and dialled the extension for School House.

No answer.

She tried again. She felt herself willing Ebele or Ezekiel to pick up.

This time the phone didn’t ring.

Walden put the handset down. Aneeta was staring at her, still crumpled and wet-eyed though she’d cleaned her glasses and put them back on. Walden forced herself to step back into her teacher persona. Dr Walden was calm. Dr Walden was certain. Dr Walden always knew what to do.

Her first responsibility was the child in front of her. She could not send Aneeta back across the road to Scrubs now. Safest to assume the worst-case scenario. Nikki was no match for Old Faithful. If a wild incursion started on the school grounds, a student wandering around by themselves would be a juicy snack for anything that came through. She could not leave Aneeta alone in her office, with its filing cabinets of confidential student information. The rest of the Victorian suite was Walden’s private refuge. Living in a boarding school could send you mad if you did not carve out a space to be a real adult human being. No student—and very few colleagues—had ever been permitted to cross the holy threshold between Walden’s office and her sitting room.

“I’m going to nip over to School House and check everything is all right,” she said. “I’d like you to stay here, please, Aneeta. Not in the office—through here.”

It could not have taken more than a few moments to ensconce Aneeta on Walden’s elderly sofa and grant her permission to watch TV and to help herself to anything she liked in the kitchen. Walden’s personal laptop was on the side, already signed into her work email; she sent a quick email to the Scrubs night-duty address, letting them know where their missing sixth former was—perhaps another thirty seconds of work. It all felt like hours too long.

Walden left Aneeta there sitting on the sofa and clinging to her phone. She kept thinking about the dial tone when she’d tried to call School House. Back in her office, something occurred to her. She turned to the possessed wall clock. “Hey, you.”

The clock’s resident demon—a second-order imp—manifested its eldritch cuckoo obediently. Walden breathed a sigh of relief. If something big had crossed over from the demonic plane to the mundane world, its presence would create a thaumic vacuum, hoovering up the wild magic that sustained lesser possessions like this one.

And then her relief shattered as the imp evaporated.

“Fuck,” said Dr Walden, and started running.

Her senses were thrown open as she pelted down the stairs and weaved through the corridors—out of Brewers Hall and in through the back of New House, round the shortcut by Modern Foreign Languages and past the locked doors of the arcane labs, out the other side to the colonnade of the main school building. She felt the imp in the staffroom photocopier go, and the haunted radiator in a third-floor Maths classroom, and the peculiar being that made its home in the chapel organ and could sometimes be heard singing windily to itself on moonless nights. One by one they were swallowed up, the canaries in Walden’s personal coal mine. The incursion wards that were all over the school—painted over doors and printed out on posters and carved into the fourteenth-century masonry of the Old Refectory—groaned and began to glow under the strain. A fire alarm started ringing. Walden met a Marshal—not Kenning, one of her squad—standing around uselessly in the colonnade. “Bar the road!” she snarled at him, and kept running.

The tarmac expanse of the main road was a natural barrier, but not much of one. If the incursion jumped across it, there were four hundred children asleep in Scrubs.

Walden stumbled to a halt outside School House. She had already had no doubt. But the sight of the red-brick building swathed in shifting curtains of purplish light confirmed it. An incursion ward was incorporated into the design of the stained glass above the front door. It glowed white, but it was holding.

Gathered in a huddle on the grass outside: Ebele Nwosu, in a dressing gown and bonnet, and four children. Walden slowed as she reached them, counting. There were seven children currently fostered in School House: she could see four. A Year Eight, two Year Nines, a Year Eleven. Ebele grabbed Walden’s arm. “He went back in,” she said.

“Get further back,” said Walden.

“Saffy—”

The door of School House burst off its hinges. The incursion was worse inside, much worse, but the ward over the door hung on; raw magic boiled against the opening and did not get through. Out of the shadows came Ezekiel, right fist closed as he maintained a precisely spherical magician’s shield of pale, silvery light. Over his left shoulder he had the fifth of School House’s seven young sorcerers: a six-year-old boy.

Ebele flew to them. Ezekiel embraced her and handed her the little boy in the same movement. Then he turned to Walden.

“I couldn’t get near the tower,” he said. “Nicola and Mathias both have bedrooms up there.”

Walden looked up at the building. Other people were gathering. The fire alarm had woken everyone up. The tower was a black blotch against the night sky, shrouded in a dull glow of deadly violet. Walden exchanged a look with Ezekiel and saw in his eyes the same grim calculation she was making.

Two fully trained magicians on the spot. One of them a married man, father of three and foster father of seven. The other was Walden, who was single and unattached and hadn’t spoken to most of her family since last Christmas.

She had a momentary vision of her own memorial plaque in the chapel, a shiny brass record underneath the unfortunate Headmaster from 1926. DOCTOR S. WALDEN, 1986 – 2025 , ALUMNA & DIRECTOR OF MAGIC, REQUIESCAT IN PACE.

She was the most senior person present. This was her school, and Nikki and Mathias were her students.

“Get someone to call the Headmaster if they haven’t already,” she said. “And don’t let it cross the road.”

Ezekiel nodded gravely.

“Are you planning to go in there?”

When had Kenning shown up? Walden had no idea. “That’s correct, Marshal,” she said.

“Are you out of your mind ?”

“We can discuss it later,” said Walden, an automatic sentence out of her teacher phrasebook, and then she had to stifle a laugh. “If you’ll excuse me.”

She was not expecting Kenning to grab her by the shoulder. The Marshal had a strong grip. “Absolutely not,” she said. “Demonic incursions are a Marshal matter, Dr Walden. The Marshals will deal with it.”

Walden shook her off. “Then where are they?”

Kenning said nothing.

“Chetwood School employs six Marshals full time in case of magical emergency,” Walden said. “Two of them are supposed to be on patrol at all times. Where are they, Chief Marshal Kenning? Where’s your squad? The last one I saw was dithering until I gave him an excuse to run in the opposite direction.” Kenning still didn’t answer. Walden lost patience entirely. “Let’s face it, Laura. If a person is any good at demon hunting, then they don’t apply for the job where the most difficult thing they have to do on a daily basis is intimidate children . You say this is a Marshal matter? The Marshals aren’t here. I am.”

“We should still wait for support,” Kenning said. “You can’t send someone into a wild demonic incursion solo. It’s madness. It’s suicide.”

“Wait how long? If it takes much longer for help to get here, there’ll be nothing to do but force an incursion collapse from the outside. Now kindly stop wasting my time.”

Kenning opened her mouth to say something else, but she was interrupted. Out of the worried little crowd clustered on the lawn emerged someone who should definitely not have been there. He’d thrown on a hoodie with the school crest on it, and he was holding his phone.

Will.

Walden had a sudden mental flash of Aneeta, still tearful and frightened, alone in an unfamiliar place with no way to know what was going on, clinging to her phone. Texting a friend for support. I keep making mistakes.

“You’re going to collapse the incursion?” Will demanded. His expression was wild. “If you collapse it with Nikki and Matty in there they’ll die .”

“Will”— what the hell are you doing here —“get back,” Walden said.

Will ignored her. “What the fuck are you doing!” he yelled at Kenning. “What’s the point of you people if you don’t even do your job and fight demons?”

This was more or less what Walden had just been saying, but that didn’t mean she was happy to hear a student shouting it at the school’s Chief Marshal. “William!” she snapped.

Will rounded on her. “You can’t just leave Nikki to die!” he said, and then his expression settled into determined lines. Walden saw what he was going to do the instant before he did it. She grabbed hold of him.

A spell, she thought afterwards. I should have used a spell . But when you saw them every day, when you were treated to a front-row seat for all their tantrums and absurdities and interpersonal melodrama, you knew they were children. And so it was possible to forget that a person who was seventeen was also very nearly an adult. It was possible to forget that they could, and would, make decisions without you. It was possible to forget that they were bigger than you.

The contest of strength—a short thirty-eight-year-old woman who hadn’t darkened the door of a gym in months, versus a tall seventeen-year-old boy who went rowing four mornings a week—went predictably. Will shoved Walden away. She fell on her backside into the grass. He dashed up the steps and through the violet magical maw that was the front door of School House.

“Will!” Walden shouted uselessly after him. Kenning helped her to her feet.

“Right,” said Walden. “Now there’s three of them in there. I hope you’re done arguing. Give me two hours. If I don’t come out, collapse the incursion.” She unpinned the owl brooch she was wearing from her blazer and slipped it into her skirt pocket. The blazer would restrict her arms too much if she had to cast a spell in a hurry, so she left it in a pile on the grass. She didn’t look back.

Kenning caught up with her on the steps. “What,” said Walden, exasperated.

“A demonic incursion is still a Marshal matter,” said Kenning. Her shortsword gleamed in her hand. Violet light danced, reflected, from the line of silver runes that ran down the blade. “You can’t go in solo. I’m coming with you.”