Slow! snapped the Phoenix, sounding as frustrated with Walden as Walden herself would have been with a very dim Year Eight. She felt a surge of firm agreement at the back of her skull. The Phoenix thought her an embarrassingly bad hunter with a dreadful eye for weakness. In fact, it informed her: Stupid!

“You don’t get anyone to improve that way, you know,” Walden muttered. The minibus demon roared, a sound with the rumble of shifting gears and growing acceleration buried in it. Walden needed to destabilise its link to the vehicle. It would have helped if she was more of a driver. The whole of Chetwood village was walkable, and yes, all right, she didn’t really leave the school site very much, she was far too busy. It was an easy shot down to London on the train, but she always just felt guilty that she wasn’t going to see her parents instead; and they were all the way down in Sussex, rather more of a trip and you had to deal with the faff of Victoria Station. It just seemed simpler, really, never to go anywhere—anyway, how exactly did you inconvenience a minibus? Reduced fuel? Flat tyre?

The archdemon swiped at her with a steel paw. Mark seemed to have gone useless in the crisis. Maybe his injury was serious—where had he gone, Walden couldn’t see him anywhere—“Mark?” she called, and got no answer.

How, said the Phoenix abruptly in the back of her skull.

“I beg your pardon?” said Walden. It was not exactly easy to carry on a conversation with one demon while feeding power back to her shields to hold off the brutal attacks of another.

How—the thing. The thing you do. How.

It took Walden a moment. “How do you get someone to improve?”

The answer was not words but a surge of fiery emotion. The Phoenix gave Walden to understand that either she was going to get better at the extremely straightforward business of defending her territory from lower-order pests, right now, or it would burst its bonds and handle the business personally.

“Good grief,” Walden said, trying not to be terrified. “Well, to begin with, students almost never respond well to insults and threats. Calm down.”

Say how!!!