Sixth Watch Read online

  “The sixth victim, Gennady Davydov. Sixty years old. A retiree.”

  “Is there a pair of them carrying out the attacks, then?” I suggested.

  “Maybe it is a pair,” said Gesar. “But there’s definitely a female involved.”

  “Where’s the information from? Did someone survive and tell us?” I asked.

  Gesar ignored my question.

  “The seventh and, for the time being, the last victim: Olya Yalova, a schoolgirl, fifteen years old. By the way, say thank you to your old acquaintance Dmitry Pastukhov. He found her and delivered her to us quickly . . . which was very helpful.”

  Gesar gathered all his papers together, straightened up the edges with the palm of his hand, and put them in a folder.

  “So, one of the victims survived?” I asked hopefully.

  “Yes.” Gesar paused for a second, looking into my eyes. “They all survived.”

  “All of them?” I exclaimed, baffled. “But then . . . were they turned?”

  “No. Someone just fed on them. A little bit. They sucked on the last girl pretty seriously; the doctor says she lost at least a quart of blood. But that’s easily explained—the girl was on her way to see her boyfriend, and apparently they planned to have . . . er . . . intercourse . . . for the first time.”

  Strangely enough, Gesar got embarrassed when he mentioned it. And his embarrassment was clear in any case from the formal term that he used instead of “sex.”

  “I get it,” I said with a nod. “The girl was full of endorphins and hormones. The vampire, whatever gender it was, got drunk. It’s lucky he or she pulled away at all. I’ve got the whole picture, boss. I’ll put a team together straightaway and send them—”

  “It’s your case.” Gesar pushed the folder across the desk. “You’re the one who’s going to hunt this vampiress . . . or these vampires.”

  “Why?” I asked, astonished.

  “Because that’s the way she or they want it.”

  “Have they made any kind of demands? Passed on any message via the victims?”

  An impish smile appeared on Gesar’s face.

  “You could say that. Take the case and go. If you decide to work in classic style, you can get the blood from the stockroom. Oh yes . . . and give me a call when you figure it out.”

  “And you’ll tell me something smart,” I said morosely, getting up and taking the folder.

  “No, I simply had a bet with Olga on how long it would take you to solve it, Anton Gorodetsky. She said an hour, I said a quarter of an hour. See how much faith I have in you?”

  I walked out of Gesar’s office without saying goodbye.

  Half an hour later, after I had glanced through the documents, laid them out on my desk, and gazed at the lines of print for a while, I gave him a call.

  “Well?” Gesar asked.

  “Alexander. Nikolai. Tatyana. Oxana. Nina. Gennady. Olya. The next victim would be called Roman, for instance, or Rimma.”

  “I was closer to the truth, after all,” Gesar said smugly. “Half an hour.”

  “They’re certainly ingenious,” I remarked.

  “They?”

  “Yes, I think so. There are two of them, a guy and a girl.”

  “You’re probably right,” Gesar agreed. “But ingenious or not . . . it would be better if we didn’t let things get as far as the ‘T.’”

  I didn’t say anything. But Gesar didn’t hang up.

  And neither did I.

  “Something you want to ask?” Gesar said.

  “That vampire girl . . . fifteen years ago . . . the one who attacked the boy Egor. Was she definitely executed?”

  “She was laid to rest,” Gesar said frostily. “Yes. Quite definitely. For certain. I checked myself.”

  “When?”

  “This morning. It was the first thing that occurred to me too. Check out everything we have on whether the pseudorevitalization of vampires is possible.”

  And then Gesar hung up. Which meant that he’d told me everything.

  Everything I needed to know, of course. But not everything that might come in useful, or everything that he knew himself.

  Great Ones never tell you everything.

  And I’ve learned to do that myself. I hadn’t told Gesar everything either.

  Our hospital ward was located in the semibasement, on the same level as the guest rooms. Below that were the repositories, the jail cells, and other high-risk areas that needed to be guarded.

  No one ever formally stands guard over the hospital. In the first place, it’s usually empty. If a member of the Watch is injured, a healer will heal him in two or three hours. If the healer can’t heal him, then most likely the patient is already dead.

  And then, in the second place, any healer is also a highly qualified killer. Basically, all it takes is to apply a healing spell “backward,” and the result will be fatal. Our doctors don’t need to be protected, they can protect anyone you like themselves. What was it that belligerent, drunk doctor said in the old Soviet comedy movie? “I’m a doctor. I can fix it, and I can break it.”

  Now, however, when there was a patient in the hospital, and that patient was a human being who had been attacked by a Dark One, they’d put a guard on the door. Arkady, who had only recently started working in the Watch, used to be a schoolteacher. And, exactly as his new colleagues expected, he claimed that hunting vampires was far easier than teaching physics in tenth grade. I knew him, of course, just as I knew everyone who had trained in the Night Watch in recent years. And he certainly knew me.

  But I halted at the entrance to the hospital suite, as regulations required. Following some ideas Arkady had about the correct dress code for a security guard, he was wearing a formal blue suit (which is logical enough, in principle). He got up from behind his table (fortunately for the guards here, our paranoia hasn’t yet gone so far as to require them to stand in position, spells at the ready), looked me over in the ordinary world and in the Twilight, and only then did he open the door.

  All according to instructions. I would have acted the same way five years ago.

  “Who’s in there with the girl?” I asked

  “Ivan. As usual.”

  I liked Ivan. He wasn’t just a healer, he was a doctor as well. In general, the human professions of Others and their magical vocations don’t often coincide. For instance, military men almost never become battle magicians. But healers, as I know from my own wife, are mostly doctors too.

  And he was a good doctor. He started as a rural district doctor in the late nineteenth century, working somewhere in the province of Smolensk. He was initiated there too, and became a Light One, but he never abandoned his profession as a doctor. He had been in the Smolensk Watch, and the Perm Watch, and the Magadan Watch—life had jerked him about a bit. After World War II, he ended up in Austria and lived there for ten years—also working as a doctor—and after that he lived in Zaire (now the DRC), New Zealand, and Canada. Then he came back to Russia and joined the Moscow Watch.

  Basically he had a huge amount of experience—of life in general and of work as a doctor. And he looked the way a doctor is supposed to look—thickset, about forty-five or fifty, graying a bit, with a short little beard, always in a white coat (even in his Twilight form) and a stethoscope dangling on his chest. When children saw him they shouted out gleefully, “Dr. Doolittle!” and grown-ups started reciting their medical history frankly, holding nothing back.

  The one thing he didn’t like was to be addressed formally by his name and patronymic. Maybe because he’d gotten used to responding simply to “Ivan” when he was abroad—or maybe there was some other reason.

  “Glad to see you, Anton,” the healer greeted me, emerging from his room at the entrance to the ward. “Have you been given the case?”

  “Yes, Ivan,” I replied, with the fleeting thought that our conversation was somehow very formal, as if it were a scene from a bad novel or some abominable TV series. Now I had to ask how the girl was feelin
g . . .

  “How’s the girl feeling?”

  “Not too bad.” Ivan sighed. “Why don’t we go in and have a glass of tea? She’s sleeping at the moment.”

  I glanced in through the door. The girl really was lying there under the blanket with her eyes closed, either sleeping or pretending to sleep. It didn’t seem right to check—not even using magic, so she wouldn’t notice.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Ivan loved to drink tea, and in its most mundane form—black with sugar, only occasionally with a slice of lemon. But it was always delicious tea, the most unusual and unfamiliar varieties, only without any of the herbs that elderly people so often like to sprinkle into their beverage.

  “I once met a man who mixed geranium petals into his tea,” said Ivan, pouring the strong brew before diluting it with hot water. He wasn’t reading my thoughts, he was simply old enough and experienced enough to realize what I was thinking about. “It was disgusting muck. And what’s more, those petals were slowly poisoning him.”

  “So how did it end?” I asked.

  “He died,” the healer said with a shrug. “Knocked down by a car. Did you want to ask me about the girl?”

  “Yes, how is she?”

  “She’s fine now. The situation wasn’t critical; they got her here in time. She’s a young girl, strong. So I didn’t go for a blood transfusion. I stimulated her hemoplasty, gave her a glucose drip, applied a calming spell, and gave her some valerian with motherwort.”

  “Why both?”

  “Well, she had had a very bad fright,” said Ivan, permitting himself a smile. “For your information, most people vampires feed on get frightened . . . But the basic danger was the loss of blood, the shock, and the frosty weather. She could have lost consciousness, collapsed in some dark entranceway, and frozen to death. It’s fortunate that she came out to find someone. And it’s fortunate she was brought to us—less mopping-up work to do. But anyway, she’s a strong, healthy girl.”

  “Be polite with the polizei,” I told him. “He’s our polizei. A good guy!”

  “I know. I wiped the driver’s memory clean.”

  “The driver’s a different matter . . .”

  For a couple of minutes we just focused on drinking our tea. Then Ivan asked, “What’s bothering you? It’s an ordinary enough incident. A vampire’s gone off the rails. But at least he isn’t killing anyone.”

  “There’s one thing about it that’s strange,” I said evasively. “Without going into details—I have reason to believe that this is a vampire I know.”

  Ivan frowned.

  Then he asked: “Would that be Konstantin Saushkin?”

  I shuddered.

  Well, of course . . . That business with the female vampire was a long time ago, and it didn’t create much of a sensation. Svetlana, the Higher Enchantress, had eclipsed that hapless pair of vampires and the young kid they almost devoured.

  But every Other knew about Konstantin—my friend Kostya—who became a Higher Vampire and almost turned everyone in the world into Others.

  “No, Ivan. Kostya was killed. He burned up. This is a completely different story. A different vampire . . . a vampiress. Tell me, have you ever heard of vampires coming back to life?”

  “Vampires are just corpses who’ve come back to life anyway.”

  “Well yes. To a certain extent. But I mean when a vampire was laid to rest—but then came back to life.”

  Ivan thought. “I think I have heard something about that,” he admitted reluctantly. “Ask a few questions in the archive, maybe something like that has happened in the past . . . And talking about the past. I’ve been watching this series about a colleague of mine. Mishka.”

  “Which Mishka?” I asked.

  “Why, Bulgakov, of course!” Ivan said in a tone of voice that made it clear he was talking about someone he was very proud to have known.

  But I hadn’t known that Ivan was close to the famous writer. Maybe he’d been responsible for Bulgakov starting to write all sorts of mystical and sci-fi stuff?

  “A good likeness?”

  “Yes, it definitely has something,” Ivan said, taking me by surprise. “It’s quite enthralling, I never expected anything like that from the Brits. He was played by a young guy, a newcomer probably. But he gave it his best shot. I got a real kick out of remembering Mishka! And then I took a look at this other series too . . .”

  He was in a mood to talk—and not about vampires. He obviously found his job boring.

  Of course, there are all sorts of Other illnesses—from Twilight tonsillitis (don’t laugh, it really is very cold in there!) to postincantational depression (caused by abrupt swings in an Other’s magical energy level).

  And then there are the ordinary human illnesses that he also treated.

  But even so, in our office there isn’t all that much work for a second-level healer. And we don’t visit the doctor very often of our own free will.

  “Sorry, got to go and pay the girl a visit,” I said, getting up. “Thanks for the tea . . . So can I discharge her?”

  “Of course,” Ivan said with a nod. “I’ll wipe her memory clean if you like.”

  That was a friendly suggestion. A tremendous suggestion. Wiping someone’s memory clean, especially a young girl’s, is a shameful kind of business. Even if it’s for her own sake. After all, we basically kill something in the person with a purge like that.

  “Thanks, Ivan,” I said, nodding. “But I’ll probably do it myself. I won’t shift the burden onto you . . .”

  He nodded.

  He understood everything.

  I left Ivan in his office (or what do they call what doctors have? A reception area? A duty room?) and walked into the ward.

  The girl, Olya Yalova, wasn’t asleep. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed and watching the door, as if waiting to see who would come in. It looked so much like clairvoyant prescience that I felt wary and took a look at her aura.

  No. Unfortunately not! A human being. Not even the slightest Other potential.

  “Hello, Olya,” I said, pulling up a chair and sitting down in front of her.

  “Hello,” she said politely. I could tell that she was tense, but trying to look as calm as she could.

  In principle, nothing looks more disarming than a young girl dressed in pajamas that are a little bit too big.

  Right, let’s repeat mentally to ourselves that she’s fifteen years old . . .

  “I’m a friend,” I told her. “You’ve got nothing at all to worry about. In half an hour I’ll put you in a taxi and send you home.”

  “I’m not worried,” the girl said, relaxing. She was only a year older than Nadiushka, at the most, but it was the year that transforms a child into an adult.

  Well, okay, not into an adult. Into a nonchild.

  “Do you remember anything about yesterday evening?” I asked.

  The girl thought for a moment. Then she nodded.

  “Yes. I was going”—the pause was almost imperceptible—“to visit someone. And suddenly I heard . . . this sound. Kind of like a song . . .” Her eyes misted over slightly. “I went . . . there’s a narrow little street there, with a shop on one side and a yard behind a fence on the other . . . and standing there . . . she was standing there . . .”

  “A girl?” I prompted.

  Usually a vampire victim who has survived remembers the attack itself, but has absolutely no memory of the attacker. Not even the attacker’s sex. It’s some kind of defense mechanism the bloodsuckers have developed in thousands of years of hunting people.

  But in Olya’s case there was a special nuance—the vampire (vampiress, if I was right) had fed for too long. In that condition vampires tend to lose control of themselves.

  The girl paused for a moment and then nodded.

  “Yes. A girl . . . I don’t remember the face clearly. It was thin, with high cheekbones . . . I think she was young. With short, dark hair and sunken eyes. I walked up to her as if I was dreaming
. She waved her hand and I took off my scarf. Then she”—Olya gulped—“she was right there beside me. All of a sudden. And . . .”

  She stopped talking. But I kept on asking questions. I wanted to know the details.

  The devil is in the details, everyone knows that.

  “She bit me on the neck and started drinking my blood,” said Olya. “She drank for a long time. She kept twitching and groaning . . . and . . .” The girl hesitated for a moment. “And pawing my breasts. Not like a boy . . . but even more disgusting. A girlfriend and I fooled around once at training camp . . . Well, I even quite liked it. I’m not a lesbo, don’t think that. We were just fooling around. But this was really repulsive. She’s not a woman, and not a man. She’s not a human being at all, a vampire . . .”

  The little-girl/young-woman Olya looked into my eyes very seriously.

  “She’s dead, right?”

  “Yes,” I said, nodding. “It’s a special kind of death. Not final. Don’t be upset, you won’t turn into a vampire.”

  “The doctor told me that yesterday,” Olya said with a nod. “Now will you make me forget it all?”

  I didn’t lie to her. I nodded.

  “I suppose I could ask you to let me keep my memory,” Olya said pensively. “But . . . but I won’t. In the first place, you’re not likely to agree. And in the second place, I don’t want to remember this. I don’t want to know there are vampires in the world.”

  “And there are others who catch them too,” I said.

  “That’s good,” the girl said with a nod. “But all the same, I don’t want to remember this. I can’t become one of you, can I?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then it’s better if I forget everything,” the girl decided. “Let me think I spent the time at my girlfriend’s place.”

  “Just let me ask one more question,” I said. “Was the girl vampire definitely alone? Or was there a male vampire there with her? Maybe he didn’t attack, just stood somewhere nearby . . .”

  She shook her head.

  “Thank you, you’ve been really helpful,” I said. “All right. Now tell me the way everything should be.”

  “I was going to see a boy, you see,” Olya continued. “We were supposed to have sex. The first time. He came out to meet me. And he found me. And when I started walking toward the vampire, he walked beside me and kept asking what I was doing, where I was going . . . And then . . . when he saw her . . . She smiled at Olezhka, and her fangs glinted. And he turned around. And ran away.”