“Yes, yes, I don’t like her either,” Walden said, and picked up her pen for the next bullet point. DEMONIC INCURSION, she wrote. In the risk mitigation column, she put: ME.

chapter two UPPER SIXTH INVOCATION

“Photocopier’s on strike,” said the Head of History to Walden when she walked into the staffroom.

“Thanks, Marie,” said Walden. She would have guessed anyway, just from the harassed expressions of several hovering teachers clutching textbooks and printed worksheets. Chetwood had been founded as a school of pure magic, turning out fully trained magicians who were masters of all the arcane disciplines—invocation, evocation, instantiation, and the long-since discredited fourth school, divination—and, as a bonus, could usually add, subtract, and write their own names. But all that was back in the fourteenth century, some six hundred years before the advent of the National Curriculum and OFSTED’s private-sector shadow, the Independent Schools Inspectorate. These days Chetwood School was a specialist foundation, like a technical or musical college, with a full complement of academic teaching staff alongside the magicians. Walden, who was an alumna, remembered an uneasy rivalry between the magical teachers and the academic side back in her own school days. The current Head had stamped on it hard. Good teachers knew that in a school there was only really room for two sides: Us, and Them.

The photocopier was a hulking grey beast looming in the corner of the staffroom. On the noticeboard behind it was pinned a laminated A4 sign: DO NOT EXORCISE. Walden navigated her way through the hovering crowd with polite good-mornings to her colleagues and opened the maintenance panel. “What’s the matter with you?”

Two fiery purple eyes peered up at Walden from the dark, unknowable depths of the multipurpose tray. Strike! squeaked the demon possessing the photocopier.

It was only a minor imp, of the first order. Walden knew it quite well at this point. Demons were attracted to complexity and to personhood. Laypeople assumed that this meant every magician was on the brink of getting possessed all the time, but really demons entering the mundane plane moved into complex and person-shaped spaces, like hermit crabs moving into shells. That could mean a human being, but it took a very strong demon to do it by force. If you were unlucky enough to meet a magician with a demon looking out from behind their eyes, you could usually assume they’d invited it in.