Old Faithful sent another overwhelming wave of knife-sharp magic towards Walden. She managed to break the worst of it on a counterspell like a flood barrier before it hit her, but the hem of her smart John Lewis skirt turned abruptly into unravelling rags, and when Walden conjured her pale shield back into existence, she could not get it wider than the three feet around her. It kept trying to shrink further down. At this rate she was not going to last out the rest of her two hours.

Walden bit her lip and called down power through the bands of spellwriting tattooed among the flowers on her left arm.

Years since she’d used this. It hurt worse than she remembered. The spellwork illuminated with ruddy golden light and did what it was designed to do, siphoning ambient power from the environment around them, turning it into something Walden could use. This was the demonic plane: there was a lot of ambient power. Walden let out a gasp of pain and then shoved all of it into her shield, just as Old Faithful frowned and sent out another hammering wave of malevolence in her direction. This time it shattered against Walden’s shield, washed away undirected, and then got picked up by the power-siphons tattooed on Walden’s left arm and chanelled back to her.

It was agony. Walden had to shut the tattooed spellwriting down again even as she gratefully poured more magic into her defences. She could feel the lines of pain on her arm still, and smell the faintest hint of roasting meat.

So. She couldn’t risk too much of that.

“Cool,” said Old Faithful. “Look at you, eating magic like you’re one of us. Can’t wait to try those.”

It was an ancient horror, not a teenage boy, but it certainly tried to wind you up like a teenager would. Charlie’s memories were in there. But Walden was used to children needling her for reactions, and she refused to give this thing the satisfaction. She cast another banishment, a drifting, elegant, sideways creation that wasn’t hers. It belonged to her ex-girlfriend Dr Roz Chan, who had also worked on higher demons. For years now Walden hadn’t spoken to her beyond the occasional polite Facebook exchange, but she had fallen in love with Roz’s beautiful magic once.

The spell managed to tangle Old Faithful up a little—Yes, Roz, thought Walden—and gave her an opening for a binding, which she took. Charlie’s face twisted in irritation as she narrowed down the demon’s field of play. It could still hit her, but it wouldn’t be able to cast any more of those overwhelming waves of destruction without leaving itself wide open to a counter. “Think you’re pretty clever, don’t you?” said the demon.

“I am pretty clever, thank you, yes,” Walden said.