reading

The streets of Moscow aren’t safe. Vampires are attacking innocent people, and the names of the victims are spelling out a message: ANTON GORODETSKY.

Higher Light Magician Anton is one of the Others, possessed of magical powers and able to enter the Twilight, a shadowy world parallel to our own. Each Other must swear allegiance to one side: either the Light, or the Dark.

But who is after Anton and what do they want? Anton’s investigation leads him to a Prophet, an Other with the gift of seeing the future. Her horrifying vision heralds the end of all life at the hands of an ancient threat – unless Anton can reunite a mysterious organisation known only as the Sixth Watch, before it’s too late.

About the Author

Sergei Lukyanenko is the author of over twenty-five books. In Russia, all volumes of the Night Watch series have sold over two million hardcovers between them. The Night Watch and The Day Watch were both made into internationally successful films. Sergei Lukyanenko lives in Moscow.

Also by Sergei Lukyanenko

This text is mandatory reading for the forces of Light.

The Night Watch

This text is mandatory reading for the forces of Darkness.

The Day Watch

PROLOGUE

In fifteen years a man can be born, learn to walk, talk and use a computer; learn to read, count and use the toilet as well; and then, a lot later, learn to fight and fall in love. And sometimes, to round things off, he brings new people into the world or dispatches old ones into the darkness.

Over the course of fifteen years spent in prisons for especially dangerous criminals, murderers pass through all the circles of hell, and then go free. Sometimes without an iota of darkness in their souls. Sometimes without an iota of light.

In fifteen years even the most ordinary man can radically change his life several times. He leaves his family and starts a new one. He changes his job maybe three or four times. He makes a fortune and is reduced to poverty. He visits the Congo, where he smuggles diamonds, or settles down in a deserted little village in the Pskov Region and starts breeding goats. He takes to drink, acquires a second degree, becomes a Buddhist, starts taking drugs, learns to fly a plane, and goes to the Maidan in Kiev, where he gets a smack across the forehead with a truncheon, after which he enters a monastery.

…But if you happen to be a fifteen-year-old girl, you know for absolute certain that nothing interesting has ever happened to you.

If anyone could have had a heart-to-heart talk with Olya Yalova (five years ago her mother could have done it and three years ago her granny could have – but now no one could), she would have told that person three interesting things about herself.

When she was a kid, they teased her and called her Olya-Yalo, like the twin girls in that ancient children’s film The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors. But that wasn’t too bad. After all, it was a good film (in seven-year-old Olya’s opinion), and she even looked a bit like those twins. Olya-Yalo? So, fine.

But then in fourth year at school, when she was ten, a certain classmate of hers… Yeah, right, ‘a certain classmate…’ It’s great when at that age you’re already blond, handsome and top of the class, with rich parents who adore you and your surname is Sokolov (from ‘sokol’, meaning ‘falcon’)… well then, this ‘certain classmate’ of hers decided to look up what the other pupils’ names meant on the Internet…

And then you discover that ‘Yalova’ means nothing more than a cow with no calf. A barren cow. And so ‘barren cow’ becomes your nickname from ten to thirteen. Sometimes it’s abbreviated to just ‘cow’, sometimes even to ‘B.C.’ The humiliation of it and all the tears you cry make you start staying at home, reading books and guzzling tea with biscuits – until your figure really does look like a cow’s…

The second supremely important thing to have happened in the life of Olya Yalova (or Olya-Yalo, as even she thought of herself) was ice hockey. Genuine ice hockey with a puck. Women’s ice hockey – well, girls’. She joined the class entirely by chance, when one day she happened to have a dream about that villain Sokolov: for some reason she was standing there absolutely naked in front of him, and the handsome devil (at the age of thirteen Sokolov had developed into a tall and quite obscenely attractive boy) was wincing, covering his eyes with his hand and hissing through his teeth: ‘cow…’

Either simply her time had come, or ice hockey was precisely what was needed, but all the excess fat drained off Olya in six months, and a year later – at fourteen – she was the star of Russia’s national youth team.

And suddenly it turned out that all this time, hiding under those plump cheeks and fat thighs, was a tall (at fifteen Olya had outgrown everyone in her class and her trainer looked her up and down sombrely and said: ‘I won’t let you switch to basketball!’), strong (they were just joking about and this stupid quarrel started up… Olya herself didn’t even notice how she knocked down two of her male classmates – and they just sat there on the floor, gazing at her fearfully, afraid to get up) girl (very definitely a girl – when Olya walked out of the shower she cast a glance at herself in the mirror and smiled, because she knew that every single poor fool whose name she didn’t even want to know would narrow his eyes in lustful delight at the sight of her.)

And the third supremely important thing in Olya’s life was only just about to happen. With her hands stuffed in her pockets (it was frosty, but she didn’t feel like wearing gloves), Olya walked past the Olympic Stadium, with the still-incomplete minarets of the main municipal mosque towering up behind it, and then past a small Orthodox church. It was early evening – the street lamps were all glowing brightly – but there weren’t very many people out on the streets, even though this was the city centre. Moscow wasn’t used to genuinely frosty Russian weather any more – a mere minus fifteen Celsius was enough to make everyone go running off home or huddle up in their cars.

And now she went across the narrow little street and down into the pedestrian underpass to the other side of Peace Avenue. Then she was intending to go down a side street with trams clattering along their rails and into the high-rise apartment block set on a massive platform with a colonnade – a ‘stylobate’ (three years of compulsive reading had not gone to waste; it had left Olya’s head crammed with a whole slew of random words and haphazard bits and pieces of knowledge). This was the house where the villain Sokolov lived. The handsome devil Sokolov. No longer Oleg Sokolov now, but ‘Olezhka’ – who was hers and hers alone!

They’d been dating for six months already. Only no one knew about it. Neither at school nor at her ice hockey class. And her mother and granny didn’t know, either.

The feud between Olya Yalova and Oleg Sokolov had gone on for far too long. But now… no, not right now, but starting from tomorrow Olya wasn’t going to hide anything any longer. Tomorrow she and Oleg would arrive at school together.

Because today she was going to spend the night at his place. Oleg’s parents were away. Olya’s granny and mum thought she was going to stay overnight with a girlfriend after training.

They had already decided everything. Before this the most they had done was kiss… well… that evening in the back row of the cinema didn’t really count, even though Oleg had let his hands roam free…

Now it was all going to be serious. They were fifteen already: it was shameful to admit they hadn’t had sex yet. They’d be mocked to death! So maybe the girls on the team weren’t getting it, but they simply didn’t have the time, and they were too tired. And then, there were so many classes at school now… But in general, at the age of fifteen there were hardly any virgins left, boys or girls.

Olya knew that, because she’d read about it on the Internet, and the result of three years of obsessive reading was not merely superfluous knowledge but also excessive confidence in the printed word.

Somewhere in the depths of Olya’s soul (which was probably skulking in her stomach right now) there was a faint, cold pulse of fear. Or even doubt.

She liked Olezhka. Kissing with him was great. And hugging too. And… and she wanted more. She knew perfectly well how it all happened… how it was supposed to be… well, after all, it was on the Internet…

Only she couldn’t work out if she wanted it now or later. With Oleg or with someone else.

But she’d already promised to go. And Olya Yalova didn’t like to break her promises.

The side street greeted her with a cold wind blowing from the direction of the Three Stations on Komsomol Square – and with a sudden, surprising darkness. Surprising because the street lamps were on, the windows in the apartment blocks and the shop signs were glowing. But for some reason their glow failed to dispel the gloom: the tiny spots of light were suspended in the night, bright but powerless, like the distant stars in the sky.

What sort of nonsense was this? She’d be there in three minutes. One minute, if she ran. She was a hundred and seventy-five centimetres tall and she had better muscles than lots of young guys. She was in the centre of Moscow, it was seven o’clock in the evening, and there were plenty of people around, on their way back home.

She couldn’t even keep her promise. She’d promised too much, and now she’d got scared just like a little girl. But she was a grown woman… almost a grown-up already… almost a woman…

Olya adjusted her woolly hat with its pompom, arranged the sports bag on her shoulder more comfortably (towel, clean panties and a pack of panty-liners – Olya suspected that she would need them tomorrow) and quickened her stride.

Junior Police Lieutenant Dmitry Pastukhov wasn’t on duty. He wasn’t even in uniform when he raised his arm to stop a car on the corner of Protopopov Lane and Astrakhan Lane. The reasons why Dima Pastukhov was here at this hour of the day might upset his wife, so we won’t go into the details. All that can be said in Dima’s defence is that he was holding a plastic bag containing a box of Rafaello chocolates and a bouquet of flowers, both bought from a vending machine nearby, in the Billa supermarket.

Dima didn’t give his wife flowers and chocolates very often, only once or twice a year. Which in this particular case, strangely enough, is a mitigating factor.

‘What do you mean, five hundred?’ Dima haggled feistily. ‘Three hundred’s the top price at the outside!’

‘Have you any idea how much petrol costs?’ the dusky southern driver asked just as feistily from behind the wheel of his battered Ford. Despite his non-local appearance, he spoke perfect, cultured Russian. ‘Call an official taxi – no one will take you for less.’

‘That’s why I flagged down a private car,’ Dima explained. In his own mind he was basically prepared to pay five hundred – it was quite a distance – but force of habit made him haggle anyway.

‘Let’s go,’ said Dima, and glanced round the street, for no particular reason, before ducking into the car. The girl was standing only five steps away. Swaying and looking at Dima.

She was a tall girl with a curvaceous figure, and in the semi-darkness she could have passed for a grown woman. But right now the light from the street lamp was falling straight onto her face – and it was the face of a child.

The girl had no cap on her head, and her hair was tousled. Tears were pouring from her eyes. Her neck was bloody. Her nylon ski-jacket was clean, but there were streaks of blood on her light-blue jeans.

Dima put the plastic bag and the bouquet on the car seat and dashed over to the girl. Behind him the driver swore a convoluted oath when he spotted her.

‘What’s wrong?’ Pastukhov exclaimed, grabbing the girl by the shoulders. ‘Are you okay? Where is he?’

Somehow Pastukhov was quite sure that the girl would tell him immediately where ‘he’ was, and Pastukhov would overtake the scumbag and arrest ‘him’ and, if Pastukhov got lucky, some part of ‘him’ would get smashed or broken in the process.

‘Take me away from here – I’m cold,’ the girl said plaintively. ‘Please take me away.’

The rapist was nowhere nearby. The driver clambered out from behind the steering wheel and took out a baseball bat from somewhere (everyone knew that almost no one in Russia played baseball, but sales of bats were comparable with those in the US). A married couple strolling along Astrakhan Lane saw the girl, Pastukhov and the driver – and ducked into the supermarket. But a kid with a school satchel, moving along Protopopov Lane in the opposite direction, stopped and whooped in delight, so joyfully that Pastukhov immediately recalled the Bible’s enthusiasm for corporal punishment in the raising of children.

‘Let’s go,’ he declared and tugged the girl towards the car. She didn’t resist. It was as if, once she’d decided to trust him, she’d stopped thinking about anything at all.

‘Hey, she needs to go to the police,’ said the driver. ‘Or the hospital. The Sklifosovsky’s not far, hang on.’

‘I am the police,’ said Pastukhov, pulling his ID out of his pocket and sticking it under the driver’s nose. ‘No Sklif. Sokol Metro station, and step on it.’

‘That’s where the Night Watch office is,’ said Pastukhov, laying the girl in the back seat and thrusting her handbag under her head. He put the girl’s feet on his knees. Dirty melting snow dripped off her ‘winter’ trainers. But that way her neck didn’t bleed on him. It was a good thing that a vampire’s saliva stopped the blood flowing after it had fed.

‘What Night Watch?’ the driver asked, puzzled. ‘I’ve lived in Moscow for twenty years, and I don’t remember anything like that.’

And you won’t remember afterwards, either, thought Pastukhov, but he didn’t say it out loud. After all, when he himself had first paid a visit to the Others he hadn’t been completely certain they would leave him his memories, either.

The driver explained eloquently where Pastukhov could stick his thousand and stepped on the gas.

The girl lay with her eyes closed. Either she had fainted or she was in shock. Pastukhov cast a sideways glance at the driver – he had his eyes glued to the road. Then, feeling like a rapist and a pervert, Pastukhov cautiously parted the girl’s legs.

Although, to be blunt, from Pastukhov’s point of view sexual rape would have been the lesser evil by far. It would have been more normal.

Part One

MANDATORY ACTIONS

CHAPTER 1

‘Not “where”, but “on what”,’ the boss said, without looking up from his papers. ‘On your backside.’

If the boss started getting rude for no good reason, it meant he was seriously perplexed about something. He wasn’t in a temper – that always made him exquisitely polite. He wasn’t frightened – that always made him sad and lyrical. So he was preoccupied and perplexed.

‘Anton Gorodetsky,’ the boss continued, still not looking up. ‘You’ve been in the training-and-education section for ten years – a bit too long, don’t you think?’

‘Are there any complaints?’ I asked. ‘I reckon I do a pretty good job… and I don’t avoid work in the field.’

‘That is as well as saving the world every now and then, raising a daughter who’s an Absolute Enchantress and getting along well with your wife, who’s a Great Enchantress…’ the boss said sourly.

‘Yes, you tolerate me. And you’ll go on tolerating me. All right, then, Anton Gorodetsky: there are unregistered vampires operating in the city. Seven attacks in a week.’

‘Oh ho,’ I said. ‘They gorge themselves every day, the perverts… What about our field operatives?’

‘The first victim… Alexander Borisov. Twenty-three years of age. A salesman in a boutique… unmarried… blah, blah, blah… attacked in broad daylight in the Taganka district. The second victim – the next day. Nikolai Evgeniev. Forty-seven years of age. An engineer. The Preobrazhenka district. The third – Tatyana Rumyantseva. Nineteen years of age. A student at Moscow State University. Chertanovo district. The fourth – Oksana Eliseeva, fifty-two years of age. A cleaning woman. Mitino district. The fifth – Nastya Andronnikova, a schoolgirl, ten years of age…’

‘He’s switched to women,’ I said. ‘He’s sampled them. And now he’s started experimenting with age…’

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

‘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 hotfoot… 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.

‘Yes.’ Gesar paused for a second, looking into my eyes. ‘They all survived.’

‘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 litre of blood. But that’s easily explained – the girl was on her way to see her boyfriend… and, apparently, the plan was for them 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, nodding. ‘The girl was full of endorphins and hormones. The vampire, whatever gender it was, got drunk. It’s lucky that he or she pulled away at all. I’ve got the whole picture, boss. I’ll put a team together straight away 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.’

‘Have they made any kind of demands? Passed on any message via the victims?’

‘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 catch on.’

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

‘No, I simply had a bet with our dear colleague Olga on how long it would take you to catch on, Anton Gorodetsky. She said an hour, I said a quarter of an hour… See how much faith I have in you?’

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.

‘Alexander. Nikolai. Tatyana. Oksana. Nastya. Gennady. Olya. The next victim should be called Roman, for instance, or Rimma.’

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

‘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”.’

‘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 it myself.’

‘This morning. It was the first thing that occurred to me too. Check out everything we have on whether the pseudo–revitalisation of vampires is possible.’

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

Our hospital ward was located in the semi-basement, 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 stood guard over the hospital. In the first place, it was empty. If a member of the Watch was injured, a healer would heal him in two or three hours. If the healer couldn’t heal him, then most likely the patient was already dead.

And then, in the second place, any healer was also a highly qualified killer. Basically, all it took was to apply a healing spell ‘backwards’ and the result would be fatal. Our doctors didn’t need to be protected: they could protect anyone at all, including 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 started working in the Watch recently, had previously been a schoolteacher. And, exactly as his new colleagues had expected, he had claimed that hunting vampires was far easier than teaching physics in tenth class. 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 he had in his head about the correct dress code for a security guard, Arkady was wearing a formal blue suit (which was logical enough, in principle). He got up from behind his table (fortunately for the guards here, our paranoia hadn’t yet gone so far as to require them to stand in position, spells at the ready), and looked me over in the ordinary world and in the Twilight. Only then did he open the door.

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 knew from my own wife, were 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 Two 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, greying a bit, with a short little beard, always in a white coat (even in his Twilight form) and with a stethoscope dangling on his chest. When children saw him they shouted out gleefully ‘Dr Dolittle!’, 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 got 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 ward’s entrance. ‘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 feeling… ‘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 if I used magic so she wouldn’t notice.

Ivan loved to drink tea, and in its most ordinary form – black with sugar, very occasionally with a slice of lemon. But it was always delicious tea, the most unusual varieties and 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 realise what I was thinking about. ‘It was disgusting muck. And what’s more, those petals were slowly poisoning him.’

‘He died,’ the healer said, shrugging. ‘Knocked down by a car. Did you want to ask me about the girl?’

‘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 haemoplasty, gave her a glucose drip, applied a calming spell and gave her some valerian with motherwort.’

‘Well, she had had a very bad fright,’ said Ivan, permitting himself a smile. ‘For your information, most people that 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!’

For a couple of minutes we focused on just 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.’

Well, of course… That business with the female vampire had been a long time ago, and it hadn’t created much of a sensation. Svetlana, the Higher Enchantress, had eclipsed that hapless pair of vampires and the young kid they’d 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?’

‘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.’

‘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?

‘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 were all sorts of Other illnesses – from Twilight tonsillitis (don’t laugh, it really is very cold in there!) to post-incantational depression (caused by abrupt swings in an Other’s magical-energy level).

But, even so, in our office there wasn’t all that much work for a second-level healer. And we didn’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, nodding. ‘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, was a shameful kind of business. Even if it was for her own sake. After all, we basically killed something in the person with a purge like that.

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

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.

‘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 pyjamas that are a little bit too big for her.

‘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.

‘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…’

Usually a vampire victim who has survived would remember the attack itself but have absolutely no memory of the attacker. Not even of the attacker’s sex. It’s some kind of defence mechanism that 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 become intoxicated and tend to lose control of themselves.

‘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.

‘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 me 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 wasn’t a woman, and not a man. She wasn’t 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. ‘Now will you make me forget it all?’

‘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.’

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

‘Then it’s better if I forget everything,’ the girl said decisively. ‘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…’

‘Thank you, you’ve been really helpful,’ I said. ‘All right. Now tell me how you want it all to have happened.’

‘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 towards 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.’

Her frankness was simply astounding. The kind you sometimes saw on a train, when total strangers who had been brought together for a day or two on their journey got absolutely plastered, knowing that they’d never see each other again. And people were equally frank when they knew they didn’t have long left to live.

But, strictly speaking, that was how things stood here too. The present Olya Yalova would disappear for ever – after all, twelve hours of her life would be wiped out. And a new Olya Yalova would appear. Version 1.1. Updated and debugged.

I didn’t say anything. It was a good thing the girl had told me about the boy. That meant I would have to—

‘Don’t forget to wipe his memory clean,’ the girl went on. ‘Make him forget we had feelings for each other. And I want to forget that, too.’

‘He ran away. Do you understand that? He abandoned me! Left me to that monster!’

‘Olya,’ I said, taking hold of her hand and hoping the gesture looked friendly, or fatherly, and not flirtatious. ‘A vampire’s call, and its glance and smell, affects everybody, even the very strongest person. You couldn’t help going to her. Your friend couldn’t help running away. She ordered him to run – and he ran. To be quite honest, I don’t think this is the love of your life, but don’t be too hard on the boy.’

‘All right. Then let him think he was frightened away by a gang of hooligans. And let me think the same thing. That we both ran off, only in different directions. Let him feel ashamed anyway, and let me be a bit angry with him. Say just for a week or two…’

‘What guileful creatures you women really are!’ I couldn’t help exclaiming. ‘More cunning than any vampire!’

I left Olya, snuffling peacefully on the bed, to Ivan’s care. He could tidy her up, dress her, put her in a taxi and send her home. He was a doctor, after all. I also told him about young Oleg, whom Olya had been on her way to meet – the authority of a Fourth-Level Other was adequate to dispatch a patrol to find the boy and wipe his memory clean.

A huge section of our documents and the information accumulated by the Watch had been transferred to electronic form. Of course, it could only be accessed on the internal computer network – there wasn’t even an inkling of any access to the Internet.

But by far the greater part of the documents and information remained in paper form.

Gesar once told me this was a matter of security – it was far simpler to put protective spells on physical items than on – how can I put it? – on gigabytes and terabytes of information. But I think that was just doubletalk.

Most of this information couldn’t have been transferred into electronic form anyway. Or at least it would have been incredibly difficult to do.

Take, for instance, the Witches’ Spell Book. Written in children’s blood on pages made from the skin of virgins. A revolting thing, I quite agree. But you had to know your enemy…

The children’s blood, we discovered, could be replaced by old people’s blood. Or adults’ blood. Or pigs’ blood. It made no difference.

But if you wrote the spells in the blood of an Other, they’d stop working when you read them. And the same thing happened with dogs’ or cows’ blood too.

And what’s more, the skin of virgins was not necessary at all: it could be replaced by any kind of skin, any kind of parchment, or any kind of paper. Even toilet paper or emery paper. Witches had so many recipes with blood, skin, tears and parts of virgins’ bodies because most witches were old and hideous. Rejuvenating spells didn’t work on them, only the camouflaging ones did. That was why witches hated beautiful young girls and did abominable things to them whenever they got a chance. Hang-ups…

But blood really was necessary. How and why was something scientists hadn’t completely figured out yet. But uploading a book like that onto a computer was pointless: it wouldn’t work. You couldn’t learn any spells from it!

Or take the healers’ recipes. Light magic, no horror involved… as a general rule. Let’s take the popular recipe for a migraine elixir, and we’d discover that five of the seven ingredients were not written down but were denoted by smells! That is, you’d have to sniff the pages of the book!

And yes, you’re quite right – if you wrote in ‘vanilla’, ‘chestnut honey’ or ‘rye bread’ instead of the smells, the elixir wouldn’t work.

The healer had to sniff the ingredients as he made up the recipe. Even ‘powdered chalk’, which didn’t smell of anything much. Even ‘spring water’, which didn’t have any kind of odour at all!

And by the way, on this point the scientists were almost unanimous: the smell stimulated the Other’s hippocampus and the cortex of the temporal regions – and this influenced the spell in some way.

And what can we say about magical objects? Or the methods that required tactile contact? They could be described, of course, but the value of the description would only be approximate at best.

So on the computer (which, of course, was where I started) there was only a brief information bar:

VAMPIRES, REANIMATION (incorrect, the correct term is RENEWED PSEUDO-VITALISATION) – the process of restoring the pseudo-vital functions of vampires after ultimate dispersal (see DISPERSAL), final laying to rest (see LAYING TO REST) or total physical destruction.

Described by Csaba Orosz (C. Orosz, 1732–1867) index no. 097635249843, Amanda Randy Grew Kaspersen (A.R.G. Kaspersen, born 1881) index no. 325768653166.

I took this printout and went down to Floor -6, where, after passing the security post (a bit more serious than the security for the infirmary – two Others), I was finally allowed into the premises of the archive.

Helen Killoran was Irish – a rare thing for the Moscow Night Watch. Of course we had heaps and heaps of immigrants from all the republics of the former Soviet Union. We also had a Pole. And a Korean. And the interns on experience-exchange programmes came from all over the place. But they didn’t come here for long.

One day, about ten years ago, Killoran came to Moscow too. Black-haired, easygoing, punctual, bashful, a non-drinker – basically, nothing at all like an Irish woman as popular culture portrayed them. She was a Fifth-Level Other, which didn’t embarrass or bother her in the least. Her passion was the past and ancient times. If she hadn’t been an Other, she would still have spent her whole life in archives, and to her mind magic was merely the icing on the cake of old documents and artefacts.

Helen Killoran adored systematising. And for her Moscow became a paradise that had long ago become unattainable in Europe.

Yes, we had good archives. Nothing there disappeared. Everything lay there safe and sound.

I vaguely recalled that before Killoran the archive had been supervised by a jolly, affable man, who had one shortcoming – he couldn’t find anything. Except by accident. And so the most a visitor could hope for was an open door and a powerful torch, because the wiring was always on the blink and you could be left in total darkness in the centre of a huge hall at any moment.

Helen had spent one year putting the archive in order – or rather, in what we were willing to acknowledge as order. Then she had catalogued and classified everything, including the unsorted materials – which turned to be about ninety per cent of the archive. After that she informed Gesar that there was enough work there for forty or fifty years, so she would take Russian citizenship and sign a contract with the Night Watch. Gesar gaped at her and said that as a bonus the Night Watch would buy her an apartment near the office. Helen was embarrassed and said there was no need to buy anything, just paying the rent would be enough. Gesar explained reasonably that over fifty years the cost of renting would be enough for several apartments, after which he attached me to Helen – to help her clear all the bureaucratic hurdles.

In my opinion, Helen shouldn’t have bothered with any of the formalities. Neither the citizenship nor the apartment. She practically lived in our archive anyway, only getting out once or twice a week – the archive had been thoughtfully equipped with a small bedsit plus bathroom. But I dutifully helped her deal with the Moscow bureaucracy, after which we became friends (as far as it was possible to be a friend of Helen’s if you weren’t an ancient manuscript).

I opened the door of the archive and walked into a huge, dark hall lined with shelving all the way from the floor right up to the immensely high ceiling. There were several dozen halls like this in the basement, but Helen always worked in the first one; even she felt lonely down here. Clearing my throat to announce my presence, I moved through the semi-darkness towards a blinding cone of light at the centre of the hall. Helen was sitting at a desk that had an immense cardboard box from an old Horizon-112 TV set towering above it, and she was sorting through the school exercise books packed into the box. A solitary powerful lamp in a metal shade was burning above the archivist’s head. Helen was wearing old jeans and a warm knitted jacket – the heating system couldn’t cope with the immense basement.

Helen was genuinely delighted to see me. I was offered tea (and politely refused it – which, however, made no difference: Helen insisted) and any help I required. By way of reciprocal politeness, I chatted with Helen about the work of Constable and Turner (my entire contribution to the mini-lecture was to listen attentively and to make encouraging noises) and I drank half a mug of tea.

I made a mental note to myself that we should arrange archive and infirmary duty for our colleagues. They could call in occasionally with their questions and their work concerns to visit their colleagues who were dug so deep in their lairs. There were probably others, apart from the doctor and the archivist. The scientists in the science section. The armourers… although, come to think of it, maybe not: colleagues called in to see them frequently and quite willingly. But I myself hadn’t visited Killoran for heaven only knew how long – it could have been a year, or even more…

We really ought to send the young people to visit our hermits, I thought. It would brighten things up for them and be good for the novice Others.

‘Why do you want such rare information, Anton?’ Helen asked, glancing through my request. Then she immediately checked herself. ‘If it’s not a secret, of course.’

My rank in the Watch allowed me, in principle, to request any information at all without any kind of explanation. But I couldn’t see anything wrong with consulting Helen.

‘There’s been a series of attacks on people,’ I said. ‘The victims are all alive.’

‘Alexander Borisov,’ I said, starting to list them. ‘Nikolai Evgeniev. Tatyana Rumyantseva. Oksana Eliseeva. Nastya Andronnikova. Gennady Davydov. Olya Yalova.’

‘You’ve given me the first names and surnames,’ Helen said thoughtfully. ‘You haven’t given me their age, what they do, the circumstances of the attack. That’s the first strange thing. The victims include men and women, although the bloodsuckers usually specialise… there’s a strong sexual side to vampirism. That’s the second strange thing. All the victims are alive, which means the vampire has good self-control. But in that case, how did the Watch find out about the attacks? It’s easy enough to conceal the crime, if the victim is still alive! Simply wipe someone’s memory clean, and they’ll think up some explanation for the weakness… like flu… And that’s the third strange thing.’

Contents

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Sergei Lukyanenko

PROLOGUE

Part One

MANDATORY ACTIONS

CHAPTER 1