And really, wasn’t it better if he was actually good? Wasn’t that exactly the mistake Walden had made with Laura Kenning—assuming she was less than competent, and then letting that assumption poison their whole relationship, so that they’d barely had a chance to actually know each other before Laura was gone?

You’re being increasingly unprofessional about this, Walden told herself. It was one of the harshest pieces of self-criticism she could think of. This man is trying very hard to set up some kind of worthwhile working relationship. He has gone out of his way to acknowledge your seniority and your expertise, when the position the governors gave him meant he could simply overrule them both. Meanwhile, you are intentionally making the experience of working together as difficult and unpleasant as possible. Laura would have lost her temper by now, and you would deserve it.

And another, softer voice, somewhere in her heart: Admit it, Saffy, you mostly resent him because he’s not Laura.

“Very nice,” she made herself say, and winced: it had come out as if she was bestowing praise on a student, which of course sounded patronising in any other context. And she did not know Mark well enough to follow up with I’m afraid I don’t have normal conversations very often. His brows quirked in amusement, which was a better reaction than being offended. “Shall we?”

“Ladies first,” said Mark.

“How old-fashioned.”

“Self-interest. If something is waiting for us, you get eaten first.”

“Ah. I’m glad to know where you stand.”

“Safely behind you, Dr Walden.”

Walden shook her head and smiled. Basically an overgrown schoolboy, she reminded herself. Basically harmless. “Very well,” she said, and readied a neat gestural banishment charm—a variation on the basic one on the back of her risk assessment—before she stepped off the end of the jetty, through the portal and into the demonic plane.

On the other side: nothing.

A vast pastel nothingness, blurred and softly grey. There was no lake. The demonic plane was hostile to the physical fabric of the real world, and water could only exist here when it was safely contained and cohered within a system of selfhood—an animal, a human being. The nothingness rippled around Walden’s wellies. There were no demons waiting for her. She had not really expected them. There was nothing permanent, reliable, or persistent about a large body of water, not on the level that most demons could comprehend. There was nothing there to pin a sense of self to, unless you counted individual fish. A higher demon the size of the Phoenix might be able to develop a concept of ‘lake’ as a whole, and so tie its territory to a whole feature of the landscape. But why would a demon that strong waste itself on such a thin hunting ground, when the school was right next door?