“Aneeta?” said Walden. She bypassed This is not appropriate; it wasn’t, but Aneeta clearly knew that, and had come looking for her anyway. “What’s wrong?”

“I promised not to tell.”

Walden stood up, really concerned, when she heard Aneeta’s voice wobble. Aneeta was, to her certain knowledge, both clever and sensible. She would not be here out of an ordinary fit of teenage hysterics. They told you in teacher training to listen to your instincts, and Walden’s were yelling at her right now. Something was badly wrong. “Come here, have a seat—have a tissue—what’s the matter?”

“It’s Nikki,” said Aneeta, and burst into tears, right there in the doorway.

“Aneeta!”

Walden went and took her by the shoulders of her puffy pink jacket, and steered her gently into a chair. Aneeta was crying too hard to speak. She took off her steamed-up glasses. Tissue, thought Walden, and gave her one. Glass of water—there was a jug on the desk, spare glasses on the side. A sensible, even-keeled seventeen-year-old in floods of tears, breaking a promise to a friend and coming to find a senior authority figure about it—there were a number of possibilities for what this could be, none of them good, some very bad indeed. Walden summoned up the calm and patience and authority of her teaching persona. Warmth was hard for her, but she could do reliable, she could do nonjudgemental, she could do trustworthy and confident and, most importantly of all, safe.

Make no assumptions, ask no leading questions. It took Aneeta a moment to be calm enough to talk. Walden let her wipe her eyes and drink from the glass of water and gather her dignity. No one that age wanted to cry hysterically in front of a teacher. “Can you tell me about it?” she asked, when Aneeta looked ready to talk.

“The demon,” said Aneeta. “The one from last week, the big one, the one that talked. Nikki, she—she—” A gulp. “—she said she knew it.”

It took every inch of Walden’s professionalism not to turn white as she immediately saw the shape of the problem. Aneeta was still talking. “—and it talked to me too, it said … but I thought, ‘That’s not true, that’s just something I’m scared about, so it’s up to something,’ and then I thought, ‘Aren’t demons too stupid to lie,’ so I looked it up and it would have to be a big—like a really big—but Nikki—”

“Did Nikki tell you what the demon said to her?” said Walden, very, very calmly.

“It’s the one that … the one…” Aneeta swallowed. “She said, it’s the one that killed her mum and dad. That’s what it told her. She told me today.”