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.
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.