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.”