Stop being Dr Walden for one night and try turning back into a human being, whispered a voice in her heart. It was not the Phoenix, but someone nearly as dangerous: the girl who’d bought this dress, eighteen-year-old Saffy Walden, a bleach-blonde adolescent waif, all intellectual arrogance and pretensions of punk. She’d been about as punk rock as an upmarket gastropub—she’d been to boarding school, she studied at Oxford, her parents lived in Windsor—but she’d had a lot of fun. Walden crouched to reach decisively into the back of her bottom dresser drawer, and brought out tangled fistfuls of jewellery she never wore now. Most of it was awful plasticky tat, what a student could afford, but there were a few good pieces. Walden picked out a chunky necklace that Roz had given to her, glamorous rather than tasteful, and a set of big opal earrings. She went back to her makeup bag and decisively upped the amount of eyeliner; she’d developed a perfect, steady hand in the mid-2000s, and it hadn’t abandoned her yet. Then she frowned at her suddenly unfamiliar reflection. The Saffy in the mirror looked both older and younger than Walden felt. Had it really been so long?

“Fuck it,” she muttered aloud, and took off the smart black cardigan. The Phoenix curled and flexed its way up her right arm as she watched, and its wicked golden head watched her reflection too, hooked beak nearly at her shoulder. Was she too obviously hoping for more out of her night than an ordinary work social? Was she embarrassing herself? Was she overthinking this?

She was absolutely overthinking this.

Yes, she usually kept her spellwriting tattoos hidden, out of deference to the school’s image, the traditional and conservative idyllic-country-house feeling that was as much a part of Chetwood’s branding as the shield logo. But they weren’t secret. Plenty of Walden’s colleagues had seen Walden’s bare and colourful arms on the night Old Faithful made its move. And those inked spells were a part of who she was. They represented years of work, work she was proud of, work very few people could do, work that Mark at least thought was spectacular. She wasn’t going to be judged. People ought to be impressed, if they knew anything about magic—and if they didn’t know anything, that was their problem. Thirty-eight might be too old for boyfriends, but it was also too old to worry yourself to death about what other people thought about you.

Walden left the cardigan across the foot of her bed, swung on her coat and her nicest scarf, and headed out into the cold December night to catch the London train.

CHRISTMAS

chapter twenty LONDON