And it turned out you didn’t grow out of fireworks, you didn’t grow out of shivers, you didn’t get too old for sexy to be sexy—certainly not when you were only thirty-eight—and Mark could kiss. The most recent time she had been kissed was … Laura, in the middle of Old Faithful’s incursion, a shocking collision of mouths like a declaration of war, not exactly erotic. Before that it had been years. A few fizzling dead-end relationships after she’d come back to the UK. Roz, so sharp and uncompromising, with her beautiful magic; that was the last time she had really managed anything like a capital-R Relationship. Uni boyfriends and girlfriends, none of them serious. Charlie, eager, doomed, and twenty years dead.

All long ago and far away. They tucked themselves back against the wall of the pub and Mark kissed with the attention and confidence that belonged to experience: not pushy, not slobbery, not tentative either, firm and warm and taking his cues from her responses. Extremely nice stuff, the kind of snogging that might send a stupider woman than Sapphire head over heels into an endorphin-fuelled haze very quickly. Luckily, she thought, she was very clever and experienced and not bothered about that sort of thing. He put his arms around her, which as well as being appropriate for the moment was also delightfully warm. The Phoenix stirred and murmured indistinctly in the back of her thoughts. Oh, shut up, she thought at it.

The murmuring got louder instead. “What’s wrong?” said Mark. Walden winced and shook her head hard as if she could shake away the sound that was not sound. Danger, wailed the Phoenix, in a cry that was nearly its wordless hunting scream. Danger!

The bloody demon was so demanding, so self-absorbed, and so oblivious to how actual adult humans behaved, that she might as well have been carting one of her teenage students around with her everywhere she went. “Shut up,” Sapphire said out loud, ignoring Mark’s raised eyebrows, and that was when the incursion began.

Half a dozen lines of dull purplish light erupted in the wintry London street, the nearest only narrowly missing a shocked pedestrian. The Phoenix was screaming in Walden’s thoughts. Suddenly she saw her own fingernails glow dimly with gold. Her demonic fellow traveller had given up on trying to talk to her; it wanted to fight and it needed her body.

“No, you don’t!” said Walden sharply, and got a howl of mental frustration back. The splitting purple lines of incursion were widening; what was happening; where had this come from—

“Is it a Christmas thing?” she heard a passing tourist say, and that made her focus. A random demonic incursion opening through a living person would probably kill them. “Everyone get back!” she yelled.