Last Watch

by Сергей Лукьяненков

  The driver was an uninitiated Other, but he didn’t know it. Today his destiny could have taken an entirely new direction.

  But it hadn’t happened. He turned onto a side street, where he was almost immediately flagged down by a pushy young woman. They agreed on a price and set off to the southwest district.

  The tutor halted opposite the Rolan movie theater and lit a cigarette. He looked at Andrei, the trainee he felt the greatest liking for, and asked, “Have you read Denis’s Stories?”

  “Uh-huh,” the boy murmured. He was a well-read, bookish boy from a good family.

  “What do we learn from the story ‘The Grand Master’s Hat’?”

  “That little Denis Korablyov lived in a very prestigious neighborhood,” the boy replied.

  The young female trainee laughed. She hadn’t read Denis’s Stories, she had only seen the TV film a long time ago and then forgotten the moral, but she was amused at the facetious answer.

  “And what else?” the tutor asked with a smile. He never smoked as he walked along, because he had read in a fashionable magazine that it wasn’t a respectable thing to do. And now every time he inhaled, he brought his death closer-but it wasn’t the nicotine that was to blame.

  The boy thought about the question. He liked the young woman magician, and he also liked the semiconscious awareness that he was cleverer than she was.

  “We can also say that chess grand masters are very careless people. His hat was carried away by the wind and he didn’t notice.”

  “I suppose so,” the tutor agreed. “But for us Others, the main moral of this story is not to get involved in petty human problems. You are likely to be misunderstood or even become an object of aggression.”

  “But Denis made up with the grand master. When he offered to play him at chess.”

  “Which is another wise thought!” the tutor continued. “You don’t need any magic in order to establish relations with a human being. You don’t even need to try to help him or her. The important thing is to share the other individual’s interests.”

  They listened to the tutor attentively. He liked to take some fairy tale or children’s book as an example and draw lots of interesting comparisons. The trainees always found that amusing.

  Half a kilometer away from them the former taxi passenger was walking along Myasnitskaya Street. He stopped at a kiosk, found some change in his pocket, and bought the Pravda newspaper.

  The tutor looked around for the nearest trash bin. It was a long way away. He was about to throw his cigarette butt in the pond to delight the swans, but he caught Andrei’s eye and changed his mind. This was terrible: three whole years as a Light Other, and his nasty little human habits were still as strong as ever! The tutor walked briskly over to the bin, dropped his butt into it, and came back to the trainees.

  “Let’s move on now. And watch, watch, watch!”

  By now his death was almost inevitable.

  A middle-aged man holding a newspaper approached the Chistye Prudy metro station. He hesitated before walking down the steps. On the one hand, he was in a hurry. On the other, the day was much too fine. A clear sky, a warm breeze…the borderline between summer and autumn, that season of romantics and poets.

  The man strolled as far as the pond, sat on a bench, and opened his newspaper. He took a small flask out of the pocket of his jacket and sipped from it.

  A hobo carrying a plastic bag full of empty bottles stared at the man and licked his lips at the sight of that sip. Not expecting anything, but unable to overcome his habit of begging, he asked in a hoarse voice, “Will you give me a drop, brother?”

  “You wouldn’t like it,” the man replied calmly, without the slightest sign of malice or irritation. It was simply a statement.

  The homeless man hobbled on. Three more empty bottles, and he would be able to buy a full one. Number Nine. Strong, sweet, tasty Number Nine…damn all these bourgeois types with their newspapers, there were people here suffering from hangovers…

  That was the very day when the hobo’s cirrhosis of the liver would develop into cancer. He had less than three months left to live. But that had nothing to do with what was happening on the boulevard.

  “A man with a plastic bag, an ordinary human being,” said the woman trainee. “Andriusha, you have the keenest eyes here. Can you see anyone?”

  “I see a hobo…A Light Other by the metro!” the boy cried with a start. “Vadim Dmitrievich, there is a Light Other by the metro! A magician!”

  “I see him,” the tutor said. “Initiated ten years ago. A magician. Fifth-level. Not an active member of the Watch.”

  The trainees looked at their tutor admiringly. Then Andrei turned his head back and blurted out gleefully, “Oh! On the bench! A Dark Other! Undead! A vampire! A Higher Vampire! Not registered…”

  The boy had begun lowering his voice at the word “undead,” and he had pronounced the words “not registered” almost in a whisper.

  But the vampire had heard. He folded his newspaper and stood up. He looked at the boy and shook his head.

  “Go,” said the tutor, tugging Andrei by the sleeve and dragging him behind himself. “Everybody go, quickly!”

  The vampire walked toward him, taking long steps, reaching out his right hand as if in greeting.

  One of the male trainees took out a phone and pressed the emergency contact button. The vampire growled and started walking faster.

  “Halt! Night Watch!” said Vadim Dmitrievich, raising his hand and creating the Magician’s Shield. “Stop, you are under arrest!”

  The vampire’s silhouette blurred as if from rapid movement. The young woman trainee screamed as she tried to erect her Shield, but she couldn’t manage it. The tutor turned to look at her, and at that instant something struck him in the chest, tightened into a hot, prickly fist-and ripped out his heart. The useless Shield fizzled out, dissipating into space. The tutor swayed, not falling yet, but staring helplessly at the bloody, beating lump of flesh lying at his feet. Then he started leaning down, as if to pick up his heart and stuff it back into the ragged, gaping hole in his chest. The world around him turned dark, the asphalt leaped up toward him, and he fell, clutching his own heart in his hand. His teaching career had not been a very long one.

  The young woman squealed when the blow descended on her and she was tossed between the trees to the very edge of the roadway. She lay there across the curb, still squealing and watching a car the same color as the dirty asphalt driving straight at her.

  The car managed to brake in time.

  The young woman squealed again as she tried to get up, and only then felt the terrible pain in her lower back. She lost consciousness.

  Andrei was suddenly jerked up into the air, as if someone wanted to look him in the eyes or sink their teeth into his throat. A voice whispered, “Why did you have to see me, A-student?”

  The boy screamed and began struggling in those invisible hands. He could feel a shameful damp patch spreading across his jeans.

  “Have you been taught to record auras?” the voice asked out of thin air. “Remember, I can sense a lie.”

  “No!” Andrei shouted, squirming. The invisible vampire’s grip slackened slightly.

  And just at that moment the boy’s eyes were blinded by a bright flash. One of the male trainees had managed to gather enough Power for a battle spell after all. Naturally it wasn’t only young kids who liked to peep into the next sections of the textbook…

  Andrei was jerked through the air, the world spun around him-and he landed with a splash right in the middle of the pond, frightening the fat, lazy swans and the sly, brazen ducks. From there he saw the trainee who had thrown the Shock spell fall, and the other trainee, who was making a phone call, take to his heels.

  Andrei swam to the little house that had been built for the swans and scrambled up on to the wooden platform. The little house smelled of bird droppings. But the boy still preferred to sit there in the middle of the pond until the operations group arrived
. The following day his action was described by Gesar as the only correct thing to do in the given situation, and the boy was unofficially requested to think about working in the Watch. As Vadim Dmitrievich used to say to his students when he was alive, “Dead heroes serve in a different place.”

  Considering the nature of the situation, there weren’t many casualties. Only the tutor and one of the trainees-a mathematician by education. Perhaps he didn’t have enough time to calculate what kind of opposition an untrained fifth-level magician could offer against a Higher Vampire.

  Or perhaps he simply hadn’t bothered to calculate anything.

  Chapter 1

  I SAID HELLO TO GARIK, WHO WAS DISCUSSING SOMETHING WITH A colonel of the militia. The colonel was an ordinary man, but he was involved in our work; he knew something about the Watches and helped us cover up incidents like this one. The bodies had already been taken away, our specialists had finished fiddling about with auras and traces of magic, and now the forensic experts from the militia had started their work.

  “In the Gazelle,” Garik told me with a nod. I walked across to our operational vehicle and got in.

  A young lad wrapped in a blanket and drinking hot tea from a mug gave me a frightened look.

  “My name’s Anton Gorodetsky,” I said. “You’re Andrei, right?”

  The boy nodded. “I…,” the boy began in a remorseful voice. “I didn’t know…”

  “Calm down. You’re not to blame for anything. Nobody could have foreseen the appearance of a wild vampire in the center of Moscow in broad daylight,” I said. In fact, I thought to myself that if the lad had such a natural ability for reading auras, this sort of thing actually ought to have been foreseen. But I didn’t want to criticize the dead tutor. Someday this incident would go into the teacher training manuals-on the pages printed in red to indicate that the knowledge had been paid for in blood.

  “But I shouldn’t have shouted like that,” the boy said. He put down the mug of tea. The blanket slid off his shoulders and I saw a massive bruise on his chest. The vampire had hit him really hard. “If he hadn’t heard me…”

  “He would still have sensed your fright and confusion. Calm down. The most important thing now is to catch this undead monster.”

  “And lay him to rest,” the boy said in a firm voice.

  “Right. And lay him to rest. Have you been studying with us for long?”

  “Three weeks.”

  I shook my head. He was a talented young boy, no doubt about it. I just hoped that what had happened wouldn’t sour him on the idea of working in the Watch.

  “Have you been taught how to record auras?”

  “No,” the boy admitted. And he shuddered, as if at some unpleasant memory.

  “Then describe the vampire as precisely as you can.”

  The boy hesitated and then said, “We haven’t been taught. But I’ve tried studying it. It’s the fourth chapter in the textbook…Recording, Copying, and Transmitting an Aura.”

  “And you studied the subject?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you transmit the vampire’s aura to me?”

  The boy thought for a moment and nodded. “I can try.”

  “Go on. I’m opening myself up.” I closed my eyes and relaxed. OK, come on, young talent…

  At first there was a faint sensation of warmth-like a hair dryer blowing into my face from a distance. And then I sensed a clumsy, rather confused transmission. I locked onto it and took a close look. The boy was trying with all his might, transmitting the aura again and again. Gradually I began building up a complete picture out of the isolated fragments.

  “Just a little bit more,” I said. “Repeat that…”

  The colored threads flared up more brightly and arranged themselves into an intricate pattern. The basic colors, of course, were black and red-nonlife and death, the standard vampire aura. In addition to the overall color scheme, which is constantly changing and can be very different at different times, there are fundamental features such as the subtle pattern of Power-as individual as fingerprints or the pattern of blood vessels in the iris of the eye.

  “Well done,” I said, pleased. “Thank you. It’s a very good impression.”

  “Will you be able to find him?” the teenager asked.

  “Definitely,” I assured him. “You’ve been a great help. And don’t be upset. Don’t punish yourself…your tutor died a hero.”

  That was a lie, of course. In the first place, heroes don’t die. Heroes don’t protect themselves with the Magician’s Shield when they see a vampire attacking, they strike to stun him. An ordinary Gray Prayer would have slowed the vampire down and stopped him, at least for a while. Long enough for the trainees to scatter and run, and the tutor could have gathered his thoughts and erected a decent defense.

  But there was nothing to be done about it now. There was no point in explaining to the boy that his first tutor was 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 into 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 around near 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 toward my car, which was parked right under a No Parking sign. Antitheft 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 really count on a coincidence like that.

  But it was a Higher Vampire!

  Trying to set aside my excessive hopes that there was a connection to my case, I got into the driver’s 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 uninformative information such as, “At Chistye Prudy a wild vampire took out two on 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 the Comparison program anyway. The big problem with comparing auras is that you can’t let the system compare them automatically, the way 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, our 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 safekeeping and comparison. All the other Watches who can afford to keep an artist Other on the books do it 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. But the question remained: How would an unregistered vampire’s aura get into the database?

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

  “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 rows also disappeared and the table immediately became shorter as it was focused on vampires.

  “How prominent is the first lateral barb?”

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

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

  I saw the figure 3 winking at me.

  I’d gotten 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 back 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 aluminum container that Gesar had shown me a week earlier, after I got back from Samarkand.

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

  I clicked again and shuddered 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.