The Last Watch:

  But there was nothing to be done about it now. There was no point in explaining to the boy that his first tutor had been a kind, sweet guy, but completely unprepared for real work. That was the whole problem – genuine battle magicians with the smell of blood and fire in their nostrils didn’t often go in for tutoring. The tutors were more often noble-minded theoreticians …

  ‘Garik, do you need me here?’ I asked. There was already a Dark One I didn’t know loitering about beside Garik and the colonel. Which was only to be expected. The Day Watch had dropped by to get their guy off the hook, if they could, and if they couldn’t, to find out how serious our losses were. Garik shook his head. I ignored the Dark One and walked off casually towards my car, which was parked right under a ‘No Parking’ sign. Anti-theft spells are used by all Others, but applying a spell that lets you be seen by everyone on the road and park wherever you like is a bit more complicated.

  Getting an impression of the vampire’s aura was a great stroke of luck. In a situation like that even experienced adult magicians lose their heads. But this kid had managed to do well. I was itching to get back to the office as quickly as possible and pass on the impression for the duty watchmen’s information – then everyone who went out on patrol could look for the bloodsucker. A Higher Vampire, unregistered … No, I couldn’t count on a coincidence like that.

  But it was a Higher Vampire!

  Trying to set aside my excessive hopes, I got into the driving seat and set off for the office.

  The city duty officer was Pavel. I flashed him the impression of the aura, and he was delighted to get it. It’s always a pleasure to hand the patrolmen something serious instead of highly relevant information such as: ‘At Chistye Prudy a wild vampire took out two of our side … His appearance? Male, kind of middle-aged …’

  I sat down in front of the computer in my office, looked at the screen and said:

  ‘This is plain crazy.’

  But I launched ‘Comparison’ anyway. The big problem with comparing auras is that you can’t let the system compare them automatically, like you can with fingerprints. The impression of the aura can be passed ‘from head to head’ but not ‘from head to computer’ – no computers like that exist. To get an aura into the database, we have an elderly artist who works with us, Leopold Surikov. Despite being the namesake of a famous Russian artist, Leopold had not been a great success as a painter. And he had turned out to be a pretty weak Other too. But he could receive an impression of an aura and then reproduce the intricate pattern in a drawing, working patiently and painstakingly in the manner of a Chinese or Japanese miniaturist. And then that drawing could be entered into the computer for safe keeping and comparison. All the other Watches who can afford to keep an artist Other on the books work in exactly the same way.

  Of course, it’s slow, laborious work. Two days for even the least intricate aura.

  But if the aura was already in the database, you could sidestep the long process, which was what I intended to do. Just to make sure I’d done everything possible – well, how would an unregistered vampire’s aura get into the database?

  A table appeared on the screen and I started clicking away with the mouse, constantly checking with the traces in my memory as I entered plus and minus signs.

  ‘Is there an upper arc?’

  Of course not. How could an undead vampire have an upper arc in his aura?

  The figure showing the number of registered auras was immediately cut by a factor of five. There were far fewer undead in the archive than live Others. Several lines also disappeared and the table immediately became shorter as it was targeted on vampires.

  ‘How marked is the first lateral barb?’

  I entered two plus signs. I could have entered three – the barb was right on the borderline.

  The questions followed each other. I answered about twenty of them before I let myself glance at the right upper corner of the table.

  I saw the figure 3 winking at me.

  I’d got a result after all. A small figure like that had to refer to a vampire and members of his clan, the ones he had initiated. There are certain differences between their auras, but they are absolutely minimal, it would take hundreds of questions to get a specific identification.

  But three candidates suited me just fine.

  I clicked on the figure 3.

  And I almost fell off my chair. There was Kostya Saushkin’s smiling face looking out at me, with the words LAID TO REST written across it in thick red letters.

  I stared dully at the screen for a few seconds, remembering the contents of the aluminium container that Gesar had shown me the previous week, after I had got back from Samarkand …

  And then I groaned out loud when it finally hit me.

  I clicked again, and shuddered again when I saw Polina, Kostya’s mother. But it wasn’t the photograph that shocked me, it was the words written across it in red: LAID TO REST.

  I started running through her file from the top: ‘Born a human being, with no abilities as an Other. Initiated by her husband under paragraph 7 of the agreement, “The right to self-determination of an Other’s family …”’ A little further down I picked out the lines: ‘Refused to participate in the lottery, rewarded with a monthly supply of non-preserved donor blood, group 3, rhesus positive’. She was conservative in her feeding habits, did not hunt human beings, always took exactly the same type of fresh blood, unlike some vampires who, once they gave up hunting, started demanding ‘virgin’s blood, only group 1 or 2 – groups 3 and 4 give me indigestion’.

  The final lines made everything clear.

  ‘Voluntarily terminated her existence and laid herself to rest on 12.09.2003, shortly after the death of her son, Higher Vampire Konstantin Gennadievich Saushkin (case No. 9752150). Buried on 14.10.2003, at her own request, with the Christian rites of burial, carried out by the Light Other Father Aristarkh.’

  I knew Father Aristarkh – he was one of those very rare cases when an Orthodox priest managed to combine his life as an Other with his faith, and also tried to carry out some kind of missionary work among the Dark Ones. I had been speaking to him only a month earlier. Why hadn’t I known about Polina Saushkina’s suicide – for that was what it was, if you stripped away the shell of words.

  I hadn’t wanted to know, so I hadn’t. All very simple.

  A third click of the mouse – and a third file.

  Naturally.

  ‘Gennady Ivanovich Saushkin …’

  I groaned and clutched my head in my hands.

  Fool! Fool! Fool!

  It didn’t matter that, according to the file, Saushkin senior was a fourth-level vampire, that he didn’t hunt, was not a member of the Day Watch and had never been known to break the law.

  Edgar had never been listed as a Higher Other, either. But just look at the way he had managed to withstand the influence of four amulets and only tell me part of the truth.

  And I had understood the partial truth exactly the way that suited me. The way that suited my own complexes, fears and feelings.

  The boy Andrei, who had been fished out of the pond after his close encounter with Gennady Saushkin, was wrong to blame himself. He was not to blame for his teacher and fellow trainee being killed.

  I was to blame. I had got stuck on the name ‘Saushkin’, as if it was some kind of impassable barrier. And I hadn’t bothered to take even a single step sideways.

  I was just about to print out the page when I realised that I couldn’t even wait thirty seconds for the printer to purge its printing heads and make itself ready.

  I leapt out of my office and dashed up the stairs.

  But then I ran into a dead end – Gesar wasn’t in. Of course, I realised that he needed to rest sometimes too, but why did it have to be right now? This was really bad luck …

  ‘Hi, Anton,’ said Olga, coming out of the door of the office. ‘Why are you looking so … hyped-up?’

  ‘Where’s Gesar?’ I howled.

 
Olga looked at me thoughtfully for a second. Then she walked up to me, pressed her hand carefully against my lips and said:

  ‘Boris is sleeping. He hasn’t gone home even once since the day you got back from Uzbekistan. An hour ago I used all the female wiles in the book to get him to go to bed.’

  Olga was looking great. Her hair had obviously been worked on by a good stylist, her skin was covered with a wonderful gold tan, she was wearing a hint of make-up – just enough to emphasise the beautiful outline of her eyes and the sexy plumpness of her lips. And she smelled of something very expensive: spicy and floral, hot and seductive.

  She really had used all her female wiles.

  But then, I’d seen her when she looked quite different. And not only seen her – I’d actually been inside that magnificent body myself. The sensation had been instructive, but I couldn’t say that I really missed it all that much.

  ‘And if you, Anton, start yelling and phoning Boris and insisting that he has to come to work immediately, I’ll turn you into a bunny rabbit,’ Olga said. ‘I just haven’t decided yet if it should be a real one or a stuffed toy.’

  ‘An inflatable one from a sex shop,’ I said. ‘Don’t try to frighten me, it’s impossible anyway.’

  ‘You think so?’ she asked, narrowing her eyes.

  ‘I do. But if you really want to practise your battle magic that badly – I have someone you can use as a target.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A Higher Vampire. The one who’s been working with Edgar. The one who took out two Light Ones today at Chistye Prudy.’

  ‘Who?’ Olga repeated insistently.

  ‘Saushkin.’

  A faint shadow ran across Olga’s face. She took me very gently by the elbow and said:

  ‘Anton, we all have tragedies in our lives. Sometimes we lose friends, and sometimes we lose enemies, but we still blame ourselves …’

  ‘Save the psychotherapy for Gesar!’ I barked. ‘It’s Gennady Saushkin! Saushkin senior! Kostya’s father!’

  ‘We checked him, he’s fourth level …’ Olga said, and then stopped.

  ‘Do I have to explain to you how easy it is for a vampire to raise his level?’ I asked.

  ‘From fourth level to higher …’ she said. ‘But dozens of people would have disappeared; we ought to have noticed …’

  ‘Then we just didn’t!’ I exclaimed, grabbing her by the hand. ‘Olga, it’s one chance in a thousand, but what if he’s still at home? What if we could take him by surprise?’

  ‘Let’s go,’ Olga said, with a nod. ‘I hope you can still remember your old address?’

  ‘Just two of us?’

  ‘I think two Higher Light Ones can handle one vampire. Everyone in the office right now is too young. We don’t want to take cannon fodder with us, do we?’

  I looked into her eyes for a few seconds, watching the mischievous sparks dancing in them … was Olga bored of sitting in the office and managing things, then?

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘Just the two of us. Although it’s a bit too much like the beginning of a Hollywood action movie.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean there’ll be an ambush waiting for us. Or you’ll turn out to be the Light Other who’s helping Edgar and Gennady.’

  ‘Fool,’ said Olga, not even offended. But while we were walking downstairs, she said spitefully, ‘By the way, just to be sure we checked out your Sveta.’

  ‘And what did you find?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s not her.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said. ‘And have you been checked out?’

  ‘All Higher Light Ones have been checked. In Russia and Europe and the States. I don’t know who it was that Foma caught a glimpse of in the Twilight, but all the Higher Ones have hundred-per-cent alibis.’

  You should never go back to houses where you once used to live. Never, not for anything – not until you’re old and senile, and the sight of the sandpit in the courtyard of the building where you were born brings a sweet smile to your lips.

  As I looked at my old front entrance, I thought that not so many years had gone by … even by ordinary human standards. Eight years ago I had walked out of these doors to set out on just another vampire hunt. I hadn’t known then that I would meet Svetlana, that she would become my wife, that I would become a Higher One …

  But I was already an Other. And I knew that there were Others living above me – a family of vampires. Good, law-abiding vampires, with whom I managed to remain friends for quite a long time.

  Until I killed my first vampire.

  Well, there’s always a first time for everything.

  ‘Shall we go?’ Olga asked.

  I was suddenly struck by another painful memory. The boy Egor, who was younger than the trainee Andrei at the time, had copied an aura just as successfully and had also almost become a vampire’s victim. And Olga and I, working together for the first time, had set out on his trail … And Gesar had managed to have Olga released from her terrible punishment of being confined inside a stuffed owl …1

  ‘Déjà vu,’ I said.

  ‘What’s brought that on?’ Olga asked absent-mindedly. She had lived in the world for so long that she could easily have forgotten that adventure of ours … ‘Ah, you remembered us tracking Egor? By the way, I recently found out that he works in a circus, can you imagine? As an illusionist!’

  ‘Let’s go,’ I urged her.

  Olga was right not to be afraid of the shadows of her past. If she did feel a little bit guilty about Egor, at least she was still keeping an eye on him.

  We got into the lift, I pressed the button for the tenth floor and we rode up in complete silence. Olga was clearly psyching herself up, gathering Power. I examined my fingers. In the years since I’d left the lift had been changed, replaced by a ‘vandal-proof’ model with metal walls and buttons. Young punks could no longer burn the plastic buttons with cigarette lighters the way they used to, so the buttons were glued up with chewing gum instead.

  I rubbed my fingers together to clean off the sticky muck of polyvinyl acetate, artificial flavours and someone else’s spittle.

  I didn’t always manage to love people all the time.

  The lift stopped and I said apologetically:

  ‘Tenth floor. The Saushkins … Saushkin lives on the eleventh.’

  I glanced sideways at the door of my old apartment. They hadn’t changed the door … even the locks looked the same to me, except that the faceplates were a bit brighter and fresher. When we had walked up half a flight of steps I looked back at my door again, and it opened, as if someone had been waiting for us to move away. A dishevelled woman of an uncertain age stuck her head out. Her face was swollen and she was wearing a dirty housecoat. She looked us up and down with a spiteful expression on her face and started shrieking:

  ‘Have you pissed in the lift again?’

  The accusation was so unexpected that I broke into laughter. But Olga pressed her lips together and took a step back down. The woman quickly half closed the door, ready to slam it shut. Olga looked hard at the woman for a while and then said very quietly:

  ‘No. You imagined it.’

  ‘I imagined it,’ the woman said in a thick, slow voice.

  ‘And your upstairs neighbour is flooding your apartment,’ Olga went on. ‘Go upstairs and tell him what you think of him.’

  The woman beamed and leapt out onto the landing just as she was – in her filthy, soiled housecoat and tattered slippers with no socks. She ran past us eagerly.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ I asked Olga.

  ‘She asked for it,’ Olga replied fastidiously. ‘Let her serve the cause of the Light. At least once in her life.’

  I thought that if there was really a Higher Vampire hiding in Saushkin’s apartment, this could actually be the last thing the woman ever did in her life. Vampires really dislike personal insults.

  But then, I didn’t find the woman at all likeable either.

  ??
?Who did you sell the apartment to?’ Olga asked. ‘Who is this mental patient?’

  ‘I sold it through an agency.’

  ‘And they’re not poor people, not if they could buy an apartment,’ Olga said, with a shrug. ‘How can she neglect herself like that?’

  Apparently she was more offended by the woman’s dilapidated appearance than by her rudeness. Olga was almost obsessively strict about such matters, no doubt as a result of the hardships of the war years and her subsequent imprisonment.

  The woman whom Olga had recruited so swiftly was already pounding on Saushkin’s door with her hands and feet and screeching:

  ‘Open up! Open up, you bloodsucker! You’ve flooded me out! You’ve filled my whole apartment with hot water, you bastard!’

  ‘I’m always touched by these accidental insights that human beings have,’ Olga remarked. ‘Tell me, why does a neighbour who has flooded her apartment, even if it is with hot water, suddenly become a bloodsucker?’

  Meanwhile the woman upstairs had launched into a list of her property that had be soaked and ruined. The list was so colourful that I couldn’t help glancing round to make sure there was no steam escaping from the open door of the apartment.

  ‘A Czech piano, a Japanese television, an Italian three-piece suite, a brown mink coat!’

  ‘A chestnut Arab stallion,’ Olga said derisively.

  ‘A chestnut Arab stallion,’ the woman shrieked obediently.

  A little girl slightly older than Nadya came out of my old apartment. Seven or eight years old, a pretty face, with a sad, frightened expression. Unlike her mother, she was dressed like a doll – in a smart dress, white socks and shiny lacquered shoes. She gave us a frightened glance, and looked at her mother with an expression of weary, exhausted sympathy.

  ‘Sweety pie!’ the woman exclaimed, jumping away from Saushkin’s door. With a panic-stricken glance at Olga, she went dashing down to her daughter, or perhaps back to her apartment, ‘Go home,’ Olga said in a quiet voice. ‘There’s no more water flooding your apartment. We’ll deal with your neighbour. And tomorrow morning go to the hairdresser’s, have a manicure and get your hair done.’