It had been holding back before. It had been playing with Walden like a cat playing with a mouse. Too big to be intimidated by her raw power, it had assessed her as an actual threat and concluded—correctly—that she wasn’t one. But the Marshal was a threat, and the demon was not playing now. For a confused three minutes or so, all Walden could do was frantically pour the last of her magical reserves into her shield, expanding it to cover both of them, and pray it was helping. Laura’s marathon-runner focus was not calm and easy now. But she did something—a dismissal, though not one Walden recognised at all—and Old Faithful backed off, retreating to the other side of the kitchen and watching them narrowly. Behind it, on the fridge, Ebele had stuck up some of her six-year-old foster son’s artwork with magnets shaped like colourful fish.

Walden had exactly one trick left. She’d thought she wouldn’t get a chance to use it. She probably still didn’t have a chance. The problem with academic magic was that doing it properly took such a bloody long time.

But Laura didn’t look like she was willing to walk away. So unless they were both doomed to die here, Walden had to make the attempt.

“Can you keep its attention off me for three minutes?” she said.

Laura could have asked why. She didn’t.

She said, “I can try.”

Old Faithful recovered its bearings and descended on them in a storm of demonic magic once more. Walden forced herself not to pay attention. She retreated further into a corner of the kitchen and turned away from the spectacle of Laura under the lash of its dreadfully powerful magic, turned away from Charlie’s puppeted body and its expression of inhuman, murderous glee.

The tattoos on Walden’s right arm were not spell-siphons. The bands of spellwriting had been done for her by the same San Francisco artist who’d handled the spellwork and florals of her other sleeve: a handsome trans man with a short beard and a flirtatious smile, whom Walden might have taken up on his offer of a coffee date, if she’d been single at the time. But the image underneath the bands of spellwork, spectacularly red and gold, taking up all of Walden’s upper arm and spreading down towards her wrist, had come later. It was not ink.