But the sad, withered corpse of Charlie Green is not much of a system by itself. The curled-up claw hands are wrapped around another body. It is technically a living body. It has been in full magical stasis for six months, bound by your rapidly adapted array. This could have any number of horrible side effects. Walden doesn’t know. Neither do you. No one has ever done this to a person before.

Mark Daubery’s expensive trainers still have smears of January mud on them. His eyes are open.)

You have braced yourself now, recentred yourself in the world, and you have no attention to spare for anything but the disaster about to befall Chetwood School. There is a distant up-and-down cry of sirens like some other hunter’s cry, but no outsider can reach the crisis now; those police cars and ambulances are not even in the same reality. The handful of magician teachers on site are throwing up protections as fast as they can around the school hall, where four hundred children huddle in growing terror. The Marshal squad cannot spare a moment to come looking for the heart of the trouble, not with hosts of demons smelling blood, smelling weakness, hungry and advancing.

You have to save this place. You chose it. It’s good. It’s precious. It’s yours.

…

(Walden is the most viscerally horrified she has ever been in her life. She can remember now, just vaguely, the way Mark started screaming as the Phoenix went to work on him. He was overconfident. She cannot judge him for that; so was she. She can judge him for quite a lot of other things, but none of them merit this.

What has been done to him is more monstrous by far than anything she has ever seen or heard of a demon doing. Demons are magical predators. They eat to live, they live to eat. Very few of them think. Very few of them plan. Only something like the Phoenix—fascinated with human magic, equipped with Walden’s human brain—could possibly have come up with something this drawn-out, this ugly, this cruel.)

No human magician could do what needs to be done.

Only a monstrous chimera could do what you have done.

Your present self is a complex construction. Now it shudders along its fault lines, hammered by your desperation and her horror.

Just for an instant, you lose control.

“Laura!” cried Walden. “Laura, for God’s sake, now!”

“What—”

Walden thrust her right arm out. Her blouse was the half-transparent one that she had always regretted buying because the fit was off, but the Phoenix’s stupid exercise regime had made it work. Magic blazed under her sleeve. The curling lines of tattooed spells were smudged and fading under her skin, and the sprawling image of the red-gold firebird occupied almost the entire space from mid-bicep down to the tips of her fingers.

Laura stared. “Saffy, is that you?”