“I was being sincere,” said Walden. “I do know academic magic isn’t the only way to do things.” During their brief shared life as postdocs at Stanford, Roz Chan had taught an undergraduate course on non-elite and non-Western magical traditions, shared with a junior professor from the Anthropology Department. It was interesting stuff, and the lecture hall had always been packed to the gills even though Roz had been objectively—Walden could think it without unkindness now—a pretty bad teacher.

The Marshal shield really was lovely. She said, “How do the layers”—and seeing Kenning’s closed expression—“never mind.”

They were advancing as she spoke, along School House’s front hall. Walden probably shouldn’t have been talking, but few things were as ghostly and unnerving as dead silence in a school building. Through the swirls of shadow and the dull purple gleam of loose magic, she glimpsed coat hooks, a jumble of black school shoes in various sizes, family photographs of Ebele and Ezekiel with their children and foster children in assorted combinations, and a child’s bicycle. No demons here. No sign of Will.

He hadn’t got far. They found him in the kitchen.

Also in the kitchen was a seventh-order archdemon. In this place, as the demonic plane and mundane world overlapped and blurred together, it had assumed a physical form without difficulty: a ghastly collection of sucking toothless mouths and fleshy tentacles. Will was unconscious, his head under the kitchen table. Walden rather thought he’d run straight in without any defences up and hit the wall of malevolence the archdemon was throwing off. It was giving her a headache even through Kenning’s shield.

“Leave the hostile to me,” Kenning said.

Walden was not an expert on magical combat per se, so she was perfectly happy to do so. She cast her own shield, since Kenning presumably needed all her focus for the fight—she used the traditional one she knew, which manifested as an upturned bowl of white light—and went to her knees next to Will. Blood in his curly chestnut hair meant a head wound. Not the demon’s work—it would have taken his head off completely. He’d hit the table on his way down, and the kitchen floor was stone flags.

He was still breathing. He was still alive. The main reason he was still alive was that the archdemon was big enough—just—to be contemplating a possession, and not quite big enough to have forced it already. Anything smaller would have started eating Will by now. Anything bigger would already be settling down to a comfortable new home inside him.

“You have a charmed life, William Daubery,” Walden told the unconscious boy softly. “You have no idea how lucky you just were.”