And then Mark had made a big deal out of his evocation bona fides, passing himself off as sporty—oh, he was authentically sporty—but fading, the forty-something clinging to the athlete-magician he’d been. But that had been a lie too. This sort of subtle, understated spellwork, rooted in the physical environment, layered and bound into an object—this was instantiation. It was perhaps the most flexible discipline of magic. It was certainly the hardest to detect. You had to have a frankly dire enthusiasm for stuff to be really good at it. The original builders of the thaumic engine would have been state-of-their-art instantiation scholars.

Walden was thinking about the ward because the rest of the curse on the ruined umbrella was much harder to think about. She couldn’t actually see what it was doing. But she could feel it. It shone in the demonic plane like a lantern on a foggy night.

Here. Come here. Come here.

She remembered the minibus demon revving up to charge at her. Had Mark actually been trying to get her killed? Surely not. Surely not. After all, he’d had full access to her report on Old Faithful. He must have already known that Walden could call on the Phoenix for magical assistance in a crisis.

Here, come here, sang the luring curse, calling to any demon in range.

The demon closest by said sniffily, I am here already. Then it snapped the umbrella in half.

It used Walden’s bare hands to do it. Walden cried out in pain as the plastic spines dug into her palms. The Phoenix said, Encroaching pest. We should kill him and eat him.

“Good God,” said Walden. “Let me think, you bloodthirsty monster.”

But she was thinking about—London. A London night, snow falling and not settling, and a sudden wild incursion. Chief Ramamurthy looking at her suspiciously, because when you had a demon problem and a powerful magician standing right next to it, you ought to be suspicious.

It just made no sense. It made no sense. Her brain kept nagging round and round the problem no matter how she tried to shove it into His reasons are not my job. She thought she knew Mark quite well. She liked Mark, in the way one liked an extra glass of wine or an entire tub of ice cream or intentionally not going to the gym after you’d nobly set the evening aside for it. Or in the way you liked good sex with an attractive person who made no emotional demands on you whatsoever: the simplest kind of guilty pleasure. But she also quite liked him, at this point, as a colleague: all his little jokes and intentional overgrown-schoolboy affect and reasonably helpful planar patrols. She’d seen him as someone fairly amusing, fairly reliable, fairly straightforward to deal with. Something familiar. A normal person.