Walden had to climb out there and patch the school wards herself, which meant per Todd’s insistence that she had to kit up in full PPE and listen to a firm lecture on how not to fall off scaffolding. He took his responsibilities just as seriously as she did. She was out there in a borrowed hard hat and high-vis jacket until well after dark, Todd standing by with a thousand-lumen torch. Year Nine’s curfew got pushed back half an hour. Lilly volunteered to sit up in Brewers supervising them. David, as Head, was in there too, and so was Ebele, and the tough Maths teacher who doubled up as Head of Year Nine.

“Let’s discuss,” said David, once the breach was fixed, Year Nine had been put to bed, and lights out sternly enforced. Not many of them would sleep properly after all this excitement. Ebele had already sent out an email warning staff to expect the worst from the year group tomorrow.

So they went to the Headmaster’s office—David, Walden, and Todd as site manager—and had a meeting, though it was getting on for eleven at night. “I need to be on cover for the first half of next week,” was the first thing Walden said. “And I won’t be at the SLT meeting on Monday.” Thank God it was Saturday and no one needed to cover for her tomorrow. Her plan was to get six hours’ sleep, eat breakfast, fill a flask with coffee, and then work until she physically couldn’t anymore.

David raised his brows. Walden, exhausted, remembered that his background was Geography and she actually had to explain what was going on.

So she did: today’s possession disaster was inexplicable. It should not have been possible. No one had summoned those demons. No one had invited them in. An imp in a gaming system, fine—it was impossible to build a magical protection system that was truly impregnable to demons of every size, and there was a lot of wild magic generated on the school site. But a third-order demon should not be able to break through Chetwood’s general wardings and enter the real world spontaneously, any more than a leopard could fit itself through the crack under a door. And neither of them should have had the initiative or power to hide themselves inside human hosts unnoticed until Lilly, thank heaven, had listened to her bad gut feeling.

All of which meant that somewhere in the vast, elaborate, ancient, impossibly complex system of wards that was Walden’s chief responsibility, something had failed.