God, how that would feel. To walk into this incursion looking for three lost children, and come out with four. But the Phoenix’s scorn for Old Faithful had been well founded. Walden shook her head. She reached for the cut in Charlie’s checkered shirt where Laura’s sword had gone into his arm, and held it open. The injury underneath was deeper than she’d thought. Down past the layers of blackened, bloodless flesh, Walden could see bone.

“It’s all that’s holding his body together,” she said. “Exorcism wouldn’t change anything now. It would just make it harder to kill.”

Laura had her sword in hand. “Then let me.”

Walden looked down at the face of the boy in her arms. He was so young.

Look at us now, Charlie, she thought. Look at me.

Look at me, with my hair dyed back to brown, long sleeves over my tattoos, cosplaying my own grandmother most of the time; look at me, nearly forty, not speaking their language, not getting their jokes—oh, you would laugh. But you should have been here too. You should have travelled like you wanted to, you should have visited me in California, you should have kept making music. Maybe it would have worked out, maybe not. Maybe by now you’d be married with children, losing your hair and putting on weight and playing guitar at the weekends and you’d have learned what I’ve learned, that there’s joy in finding good work to do and doing it, there’s joy in looking back along the path you walked and knowing you wouldn’t change it. Oh, we wouldn’t have believed it, and you never got the chance to find out, but Charlie, Charlie, it feels so good to grow up.

She saw his fingers twitch. Old Faithful was trying to regain control. It was down, but not defeated. Not yet.

Charlie’s body was cold. She stroked his shaggy hair. She looked up at Laura.

“Go on,” she said.

Laura brought her sword down squarely through Charlie’s chest. There was a blaze of glittering silver in the strike, and each rune along the length of the bright sword illuminated. The whole body convulsed as if struck by lightning.

Old Faithful died.

Walden gritted her teeth through the thaumic reverberations as its death poured past her, a wave of suddenly undirected wild magic washing away in all directions. Charlie was withering in her arms, becoming a shrunken mummified husk, still dressed in old jeans and band T-shirt and chequered shirt. When Laura withdrew the sword from his chest, still shining bright and totally clean, nothing changed. It was over. More than twenty years later, it was all over.

Walden carefully closed the dead boy’s eyes and laid him down on the stone kitchen floor. She folded his hands over his chest.

“It’s done,” she said.