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  “The boss didn’t tell me that.”

  “Why should he? You did the right thing. Now at least there’s a chance.”

  “Olga, how old are you?” I asked. Between human beings the question might have been taken as an insult. But for us age doesn’t have any particular limits.

  “Very old, Anton. For instance, I can remember the uprising.”

  “The revolution?”

  “The uprising on Senate Square in 1825.” The owl chortled. I didn’t say anything. The owl could be even older than the boss.

  “What’s your rank, partner?”

  “I don’t have one. I was stripped of all rights.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No problem. I came to terms with it a long time ago.”

  Her voice was still cheerful, even mocking. But something told me Olga had never come to terms with it.

  “If you don’t mind me asking . . . Why did they shut you in that body?”

  “There was no other choice. Living in a wolf’s body is much harder.”

  “Wait . . .” I dropped the remains of the salad in a garbage can. I looked at my shoulder, but, of course, I didn’t see the owl—to do that I would have had to withdraw into the Twilight. “Who are you? If you’re a shape-shifter, then why are you with us? If you’re a magician, then why such a strange punishment?”

  “That’s got nothing to do with the job, Anton.” For just a moment here was a hint of steel in her voice. “But it all started with me compromising with the Dark Ones. Only a small compromise. I thought I’d calculated the consequences, but I was wrong.”

  So that was it . . .

  “Was that why you started talking? You wanted to warn me off, but you were too late?”

  No answer.

  As if Olga was already regretting being so frank.

  “Let’s get on with the job . . .” I said. And just then the phone squeaked in my pocket.

  It was Larissa. What was she doing working two straight shifts?

  “Anton, listen carefully . . . They’ve picked up that girl’s trail. Perovo station.”

  “Sugar,” was all I said. Working out in the dormitory suburbs was absolute hell.

  “Right,” Larissa agreed. She was no field operative . . . that was probably why she was sitting by the phone. But she was bright. “Anton, get across to Perovo. All our guys are being concentrated over there, they’re following the trail. And another thing . . . they’ve spotted the Day Watch there.”

  “I get the picture.” I folded my phone away.

  I didn’t get a thing. Did the Dark Ones already know about everything? Were they just yearning for the Inferno to erupt? Then maybe it was no accident that they’d stopped me?

  Nonsense. A major disaster in Moscow was not in the interests of Darkness. But of course, they wouldn’t try to stop the twister either: That would go against their nature.

  So I didn’t go into the metro after all. I stopped a car. It ought to save me a bit of time, even if not that much. I sat beside the driver, a swarthy, hook-nosed intellectual about forty years old. The car was new, and the driver himself gave the impression of doing very well for himself. It seemed a bit strange for him to be earning a bit on the side by offering a private taxi service.

  . . . Perovo. A large city district. Crowds of people. Light and Darkness, all twisted up together into a knot. And a few institutions, casting beams of Darkness and Light in all directions. Working there was going to be like trying to find a grain of sand on the floor of a crowded discotheque with the strobe lights on . . .

  I wouldn’t be much use to anyone, or actually, I wouldn’t be any use at all. But I’d been ordered to go, so I had to. Maybe they’d ask me to identify the girl.

  “For some reason I was sure we’d get lucky,” I whispered, gazing at the road ahead. We drove past Elk Island Park, a pretty grim place; the Dark Ones gather there for their sabbaths. And when they do, the rights of ordinary people aren’t always respected. Five nights a year we have to put up with anything. Well, almost anything.

  “I thought so too,” whispered Olga.

  “I can’t compete with the field agents,” I said, shaking my head.

  The driver squinted sideways at me; I’d accepted the price without haggling, and he’d seemed happy enough to go in our direction. But a man talking to himself always arouses suspicions.

  “I just blew this job,” I told the driver with a sigh. “That is, I completely screwed it up. I thought I could make up for it today, but they got along without me.”

  “So what’s your hurry?” the driver asked. He didn’t look like the talkative type, but he was interested enough.

  “I was ordered to go,” I said.

  I wondered who he thought I was.

  “So what do you do?”

  “I’m a programmer,” I answered. And I was telling the truth too.

  “Fantastic,” the driver commented, and laughed. What did he find so fantastic about it? “Do you make a living?”

  He didn’t really have to ask. After all, I wasn’t riding the metro. But I answered anyway:

  “I do ok.”

  “I wasn’t just asking out of curiosity,” my driver unexpectedly confided. “My system administrator’s leaving me . . .”

  My system administrator . . . I see!

  “I personally see the finger of fate in this. I give a man a lift and he turns out to be a programmer. I think you’re already doomed.”

  He laughed, like he was trying to make light of his excessive confidence.

  “Have you done any work with local networks?”

  “Yes.”

  “A network of fifty machines. It has to be maintained. We pay well.”

  I felt myself starting to smile. It was a good offer. A local network. Decent money. And no one sending you out at night to catch vampires, making you drink blood and sniff out trails on the frozen streets . . .

  “Shall I give you my card?” The man deftly slipped one hand into his jacket pocket. “Think about it . . .”

  “No thanks. I’m afraid no one just leaves my kind of work.”

  “KGB, is it?” the driver asked with a frown.

  “More serious than that,” I answered. “Much more serious. But something like it.”

  “Oh, well . . .” the driver said, and paused. “A pity. And I thought it was a sign from on high. Do you believe in fate?”

  He’d slipped into a familiar tone quite naturally. I liked that.

  “No.”

  “Why not?” asked the driver, genuinely surprised, as if he’d never met anyone but fatalists in his life.

  “There’s no such thing as fate. It’s been proved.”

  “By whom?”

  “In the place I work.”

  He laughed.

  “That’s great. So it’s not meant to be! Where shall I stop for you?”

  We were already driving down Zelyony Avenue.

  I peered hard through the layer of ordinary daily reality, into the Twilight. I couldn’t make anything out clearly; my powers weren’t strong enough. I sensed it rather than saw it—a cluster of dim lights in the gray gloom. Almost the entire central office was there.

  “Over there . . .”

  While I was still in ordinary reality I couldn’t see my colleagues. I walked over the gray city snow toward the little square buried under snowdrifts between the apartment blocks and the avenue. A few frozen little trees, a few lines of footsteps—either some kids had been having fun or a drunk had just walked straight across.

  “Wave to them; they’ve spotted you,” Olga advised me.

  I thought for a moment and followed her advice. Let them think I could see clearly from one reality into the other.

  “A meeting,” Olga said mockingly. “An emergency briefing.”

  I glanced around, just for form’s sake, then summoned the Twilight and stepped into it.

  The entire central office really was there. The whole Moscow department.

  Sta
nding in the middle was Boris Ignatievich. Lightly dressed, in a suit and a light fur cap, but wearing a scarf for some reason. I could just imagine him scrambling out of his BMW, surrounded by his bodyguards.

  The field operatives were standing beside him. Igor and Garik—they were the ones really suited to the role of front-line fighters. Thickset, stony faces, square shoulders—impervious. You can tell at a glance what kind of education they’d had: eight grades of school, technical college, and the special forces. And as far as Igor’s concerned that’s exactly right. But Garik has two full college degrees. The appearance is similar, the behavior’s almost identical, but the content’s absolutely different. By comparison with them, Ilya looked like a refined intellectual, but don’t be fooled by those round spectacles with the thin frames, that high forehead, and naïve expression. Semyon was another exaggerated character: short, stocky, with a cunning gleam in his eyes, in a cheap nylon baseball jacket. A provincial, come up to the big city. And he’d come from somewhere out of the ’60s, from the prizewinning collective farm Lenin’s Stride. Absolute opposites. But what Ilya and Semyon did have in common was their beautiful tans and dejected expressions. They’d been pulled out of Sri Lanka in mid-vacation, and they weren’t enjoying the Moscow winter too much. Ignat, Danila, and Farid weren’t there, although I could sense their fresh trails. But standing right behind the boss, not exactly like they were trying to hide, but not really noticeable unless you looked hard, were Bear and Tiger Cub. Those two gave me a jolt. They’re not ordinary front-line fighters; they’re really good, and they don’t let anything stand in their way.

  There were lots of workers from the office there too.

  The analytical section, all five of them. The research team—everyone except Yulia, but that wasn’t surprising; she’s only thirteen years old. The only ones missing were the archive group.

  “Hi,” I said.

  Some nodded, some smiled. But I could see they all had more important things to worry about. Boris Ignatievich gestured for me to come closer and then continued:

  “Not in their interest, and we welcome that. We won’t get any help from them . . . well fine, that’s just great . . .”

  Clear enough. He meant the Day Watch.

  “We can search for the girl without anybody interfering, and Danila and Farid are already getting close. I’d say, another five or six minutes . . . But we’ve still been given an ultimatum.”

  I caught Tiger Cub’s eye. Oh, that was her ominous smile. That’s right, her smile. Tiger Cub’s a woman, but there was just no way the name “Tigress” would stick.

  Our agents don’t much like the word “ultimatum”!

  “We don’t keep the Black Magician,” the boss said, looking around at everyone with a dissatisfied expression. “Got that? We’ll have to find him in order to disarm the vortex. But after that we hand the magician over to the Dark Ones.”

  “We hand him over?” Ilya queried.

  The boss thought for a second.

  “Yes, that’s a fair point. We don’t eliminate him and we don’t prevent him from contacting the Dark Ones. As far as I’ve been able to tell, they don’t know who he is either.”

  The operatives’ faces were turning sourer by the moment. Any new magician on the territory they monitored was a big headache. Even if he was registered and observed the terms of the Treaty. But a magician this powerful . . .

  “I’d prefer a slightly different scenario,” Tiger Cub said quietly. “Boris Ignatievich, in the course of our work, situations can crop up over which we have no control . . .”

  “I’m sorry, but we can’t allow any such situations to arise,” the boss snapped. But his irritation was fleeting, he did not press too hard; he’d always been fond of Tiger Cub. She backed off immediately.

  I’d have done the same.

  “Well, that’s about it . . .” The boss glanced at me. “I’m glad you got here, Anton. There’s something I especially wanted you to hear . . .”

  I automatically tensed up.

  “You did a good job yesterday. Yes, it’s true, the reason I sent you out to look for the vampires was to test you. And not just to see how good an operative you are, either . . . you’ve been in a difficult situation for a very long time, Anton. Killing a vampire is a lot harder for you than for anyone else here.”

  “That’s just where you’re wrong, boss,” I said.

  “I’m glad if I’m mistaken. I want to thank you on behalf of the entire Night Watch. You destroyed one vampire and captured the image of the female vampire’s trail. Captured it very accurately. You still don’t have enough experience for investigative work. But you know how to record information clearly. The same thing goes for this girl. It was a completely non-standard situation, but you made a humane decision . . . and that’s gained us some time. The image of her aura was magnificent. I knew right away where to look for her.”

  That really stung. No one was smiling or laughing, no one was smirking at me, but I still felt humiliated all the same. The white owl, whom nobody had seen yet, twitched on my shoulder. I took a deep breath of the Twilight air, that cold, tasteless air that isn’t air at all. I asked:

  “Boris Ignatievich, then what was the reason for sending me around the circle line if you already knew the right district?”

  “I could have been wrong,” the boss replied with a note of surprise in his voice. “That’s another thing . . . you have to understand that when you’re working out in the field, you can’t afford to rely on any opinion, no matter how high up it comes from. One man in a field is a warrior—if he knows he’s alone.”

  “But I wasn’t alone,” I said. “And this assignment is absolutely crucial for my partner; you know that better than I do. By sending us to check districts you knew were empty . . . you deprived her of a chance to redeem herself.”

  The boss’s face is made of stone; you can’t read anything in it if he doesn’t want you to.

  But even so, I felt like I’d hit the target.

  “Your assignment isn’t over yet, Anton and Olga,” he replied. “There’s still the girl-vampire, who has to be neutralized. No one has any right to interfere with us there: She violated the terms of the Treaty. And there’s still the boy who showed such exceptional resistance to magic. He has to be found and turned to the side of the Light. Plenty to be getting on with.”

  “And this young woman?”

  “Already detected. Our specialists will now try to neutralize the vortex. If that doesn’t work, which it won’t, we’ll have to figure out who cast the curse. Ignat, that’s your job!”

  I turned around. Yes, there was Ignat standing not far away. Tall, well-built, and handsome, with blond hair, the figure of Apollo and the face of a movie star. He moved without making a sound, but even so in ordinary reality he couldn’t escape excessive attention from women.

  Really excessive attention.

  “That’s not my way of working,” Ignat said gloomily. “Not an M.O. I’m particularly fond of.”

  “You can choose who you sleep with on your own time,” the boss barked. “But when you’re working, I make all your decisions for you. Even when you go to the john.”

  Ignat shrugged. He glanced at me and growled to himself:

  “It’s discrimination . . .”

  “You’re not in the States,” the boss said, and his voice turned dangerously polite. “Yes, it’s discrimination. Making use of the most appropriate available member of staff without taking his personal inclinations into account.”

  “Couldn’t I take that assignment?” Garik asked in a quiet little voice.

  That released the tension immediately. Garik’s incredibly bad luck in affairs of the heart was no secret to anyone. Someone laughed.

  “Igor and Garik, you carry on with the search for the girl-vampire.” The boss almost seemed to have taken the suggestion seriously. “She needs blood. She was stopped at the final moment; now she’s going insane from hunger and frustration. Expect new victims at an
y moment! Anton, you and Olga look for the boy.”

  Clear enough.

  The most pointless and least important assignment again.

  Somewhere in the city there was an Inferno just waiting to erupt; somewhere in the city there was a wild, hungry female vampire, and I had to go looking for a kid who might, potentially, possess great magical powers.

  “Permission to proceed?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course,” said the boss, ignoring my quiet hint of revolt. “Proceed.”

  I swung around and left the Twilight as a sign of protest. The world flickered as it filled up with colors and sounds. I was left standing there on my own in the middle of the small square. To any outsider watching it would have looked really crazy. And then there were no footprints . . . I was standing in a snowdrift, surrounded by a shroud of virgin snow.

  That’s how myths are born. Out of our carelessness, out of our tattered nerves, out of jokes that go wrong and flashy gestures.

  “It’s okay,” I said, and set off in a straight line for the street.

  “Thank you . . .” a quiet voice whispered affectionately in my ear.

  “For what, Olga?”

  “For not forgetting about me.”

  “It really is that important to you to succeed in this mission, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is,” the bird answered after a pause.

  “Then we’ll try really hard.”

  I skipped over the snowdrifts and some stones or other—a glacier must have passed that way, or maybe someone had been playing Zen gardens—and came out onto the avenue.

  “Have you got any cognac?” asked Olga.

  “Cognac . . . why? Yes.”

  “Good cognac?”

  “It’s never bad. If it’s really cognac, that is.”

  Olga sniffed scornfully.

  “Then why don’t you offer a lady coffee with cognac?”

  I pictured to myself an owl drinking cognac out of a saucer and almost laughed out loud.

  “Certainly. Shall we take a taxi?”

  “It was an old line straight out of Twelve Chairs by Ilf and Petrov.”

  “Don’t push it, kid!”

  Hmm. Just when had she been locked into that bird’s body? Or maybe it didn’t stop her reading books?