At this stage, Walden had more or less come around to Mark. His report for the governors showed no sign of materialising. He was, he said, information gathering. Walden was annoyed enough by how lazy he was being about it that she offered to set up interviews with students for him. “Or a survey, if you like,” she said. “We can frame it as a student voice issue. It is a student voice issue.”

“But then I’d have to read the surveys,” said Mark.

Unfortunately, Walden had already convinced herself. They sent the survey round at form time the following week, and got an unsurprising litany of complaints back. Bring back Marshal Kenning was the big one. Walden hadn’t realised how popular Laura was. It wasn’t as if she was friendly with the students. The Marshals did safety talks with different year groups at different times through the year, and that was about all Laura had ever had by way of formal contact. But apparently being tough and cool and photogenic and very visibly there was also reassuring.

I wish we could, she thought, and set the surveys aside with a sigh. Children bounced back quickly, but a critical incursion by a higher demon was not a small matter, and one side effect of all the arcane safety refreshers Walden insisted on was that Chetwood’s students knew very well just how much danger they had been in. Though few people were as shaken as Nikki and Mathias—Nikki visibly, Mathias shielding hard but his academics noticeably slipping—Ebele reported wobbles all across the school. Walden herself had been asked far more questions than usual by her latest Year Seven carousel group. And the influx of low-level possessions by imps had not slowed down, despite the planar patrols; the children had all noticed that too. The school, coming up to Christmas, was tired, unhappy, and on edge. You felt it in the corridors. It sizzled in the staffroom. The atmosphere every Monday-morning assembly was not just sleepy but sullen.

The Phoenix, rustling on the edge of Walden’s thoughts as it so often did now, said: Your place, your place; make it good again.

What do you propose? Walden asked it tiredly. Nine P.M., still at her desk. The next task was slogging through the marking for a practice exam which Aneeta, unusually, had bombed. Walden could really have done without her perpetual companion. She missed the Phoenix being quiet. She’d spent some time going over the spellwork which leashed it, and confirmed to her own satisfaction that everything was still effective, unchanged, well within design tolerance. But she had never bothered creating a shut up spell, and there was no safe way to incorporate one into the tattooed designs now.