Sixth Watch (2 page)

The driver eloquently explained 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.

The crotch of the jeans was clean, not stained. At least no one had raped her.

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

“YOU'VE BEEN STUCK THERE TOO LONG,” SAID GESAR.

“Where?” I inquired.

“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.

“What's happened, Boris Ignatievich?” I asked.

“Anton Gorodetsky,” the boss continued, still not looking up. “You've been in the training and education section ten years—a bit too long, don't you think?”

I started pondering.

This conversation reminded me of something.

“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 apart from 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.

“I also tolerate my boss, a Great Magician,” I replied in the same tone.

Gesar finally condescended to look up. He nodded.

“Yes, you tolerate me. And you'll go on tolerating me. Right, then, Anton Gorodetsky. There are unregistered vampires operating in the city. Seven attacks in a week.”

“Oho,” I said. “They gorge themselves every day, the perverts. What about our field operatives?”

Gesar seemed not to have heard me. He sorted through his papers.

“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 Rumiantseva. Nineteen years of age. A student at Moscow State University. Chertanovo district. The fourth, Oxana Elizeeva, fifty-two years of age. A cleaning woman. Mitino district. The fifth, Nina Andronnikova, a schoolgirl, ten years of age . . .”

“What a scumbag,” I blurted out.

“In broad daylight, Matveevsky district.”

“He's switched to women,” I said. “He's sampled them. And now he's started experimenting with age.”

“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 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 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.”