“Well, I’m bored,” said Old Faithful. “Let’s get this over with.”

It charged her.

Walden wasn’t expecting it at all. She had been thinking of this as a magical duel. But that wasn’t the deal, was it? She went down flat on her back with Charlie’s weight on top of her, skinning her elbow on the stone flags of the kitchen floor. He had been lanky, not fit, but that made very little difference given how much bigger than her he was. Walden yelled and writhed and did her best to knee him in the groin; her knee connected, but the demon only snarled. Spittle fell from its lips onto her face. It wrestled Walden flat, pinned both her wrists with one hand, and with the other brandished the penknife she’d used for the blood pact. Walden could somehow only see the hand, the nails untrimmed and grown too long, the knob of bone at the base of his thumb, the bumps of his knuckles, a perfectly normal teenage boy’s hand. She thought, Oh God, oh God, oh God.

Old Faithful dragged the knife down her left arm, a long shallow cut that sliced through every band of tattooed spellwork. It hurt. Walden shrieked. The demon stared down at her out of Charlie’s grey-green eyes. “These are different,” it said, touching the edge of the knife to the uppermost band on her right arm, just above the curling pattern of scarlet splashed there. “What do they do?”

Walden panted for breath. There were tears of pain and despair at the corners of her eyes. She swallowed hard. “Above your level,” she said. “Come back when you’ve got a degree.”

“I’m having your degree,” Old Faithful said, and it grabbed a handful of Walden’s short brown hair and twisted hard. “You lose, little witch. You should never have left me here.”

Walden couldn’t hold it back any longer. The sob that broke out of her felt like it had been building for years. Charlie’s eyes, Charlie’s hands, Charlie’s smile, Charlie’s memories somewhere behind that demonic snarl. She’d mourned him twenty years ago. He wasn’t any less dead because a monster was puppeting him now. But she wept and said, “Charlie,” and “I’m sorry,” and “I’m sorry.”

She saw the demon’s look of growing triumph. I was supposed to last longer, she thought. But maybe all her adult life had been leading her back here, to die the death she’d narrowly escaped as a schoolgirl. Maybe you never really stopped being that stupid, stupid child. Maybe this was what you deserved for getting away.

As she had this thought, a blast of white light, sizzling with power, lifted Old Faithful bodily off her and threw it across the kitchen. It slammed into the wall by the fridge and fell in a ragdoll heap.

Walden thought, What?