That damned habit of trying to calculate everything in advance! The field operatives had it beaten out of them by the very nature of their work. Their work was all instant response to danger, battle, victory, or defeat.
Ilya had taken out his magic wand. Its pale-lilac glow was too bright for a third-grade magician and too steady for me to believe he could have charged it. The boss had probably charged it himself.
So he must have been expecting something?
He must have been expecting someone to turn up with powers that matched his own?
Neither Tiger Cub nor Bear changed their form. Their magic didn't require any external devices, and certainly not human bodies. Bear kept his eyes fixed on the vampire, totally ignoring Zabulon. Tiger Cub stood beside me. Semyon walked slowly around the vampire, rubbing his waist and deliberately making sure she saw him. He left the Dark Magician to us too.
«They?» Tiger Cub growled.
It took me a moment to realize what was bothering her.
«They are under my protection,» Zabulon repeated. The magician was wrapped in a shapeless black coat, and his head was covered with a crumpled black beret of dark fur. He had his hands in his pockets, but somehow I was certain there was nothing there, no amulets, no pistols.
«Who are you?» screeched the girl-vampire. «Who are you?»
«Your protector and mentor,» said Zabulon, looking at me. Not even straight at me, more a casual glance past me. «Your master.»
Had he gone insane? The girl-vampire had no idea of the balance of forces here. She was wound up, ready to blow. She had been prepared to die… to end her existence. Now she suddenly had a chance to survive, but the way he spoke…
«I have no masters!» The girl whose life depended on other peoples' death laughed. «Whoever you are—from the Light, or from the Darkness—remember that! I have no masters and never will!»
She began backing away toward the edge of the roof, dragging Egor after her. Still clutching him with one arm, holding the other hand at his throat. A hostage… a good move against the forces of Light.
And maybe against the forces of Darkness too?
«Zabulon, we accept,» I said, laying my hand on the tense muscles of Tiger Cub's back. «She is yours. Take her—until the trial. We honor the Treaty.»
«I am taking them ,» said Zabulon, gazing forward blindly. The wind was lashing into his face, but the magician's unblinking eyes remained wide open, as if they were made of glass. «The woman and the boy are ours.»
«No. Only the vampire.»
He finally deigned to look at me.
«Agent of the Light, I am only taking what is mine. I honor the Great Treaty. The woman and the boy are ours.»
«You are stronger than any of us,» I said, «but you are alone, Zabulon.»
The Dark Magician shook his head and smiled in mournful sympathy.
«No, Anton Gorodetsky.»
They came out from behind the lift shaft, a young man and young woman. I knew them. Oh yes, I knew them.
Alisa and Pyotr. The witch and the warlock from Day Watch.
«Egor!» Zabulon said in a quiet voice. «Have you understood the difference between us? Which side do you prefer?»
The boy didn't answer. But perhaps only because the vampire's claws were pressed against his neck.
«Have we got a problem here?» Tiger Cub asked in a purring voice.
«Uh-huh,» I confirmed.
«Your decision?» asked Zabulon. His Watch agents weren't saying anything as yet, keeping out of things…
«I don't like this,» said Tiger Cub. She edged a little closer to Zabulon, and her tail lashed me mercilessly across one knee. «I don't like the Day Watch's view of what's going on here… not one little bit.»
Bear obviously shared her opinion: When they worked as a pair, one of them spoke for both. I looked at Ilya: He was twirling the wand in his fingers, smiling darkly as if he were thinking. Like a child who's brought a loaded Uzi to a party instead of a plastic machine gun. Semyon was obviously up for anything. He didn't give a damn about the petty details. He'd spent seventy years running over rooftops.
«Zabulon, do you speak for the Day Watch?» I asked.
I saw a brief flicker of doubt in the Dark Magician's eyes.
What was going on? Why had Zabulon left our headquarters, abandoning the opportunity to track down an unknown magician of monstrous power and enlist him in the Day Watch? You didn't just abandon an opportunity like that, not even for a girl-vampire and a kid with potentially great powers. Why was Zabulon determined to go head to head?
And why on earth was he so reluctant—I could sense it, there was no doubt about it!—to speak in the name of the Day Watch?
«I speak as a private individual,» said Zabulon.
«Then we have a few little personal disagreements,» I answered.
«Yes.»
He didn't want to involve the two Watches. Right now we were just Others. We might be on duty, we might be on official assignments, but Zabulon preferred not to raise the conflict to the level of an official confrontation. Why? Was he so very confident of his own powers, or was he afraid the boss might turn up?
I didn't understand a thing.
And the most important question of all was why he'd left our headquarters and abandoned the hunt for the sorcerer who'd put the curse on Svetlana. The Dark Ones had insisted that the sorcerer must be handed over to them. Why would he abandon that claim so easily?
What did Zabulon know that we didn't?
«You're pitiful…« the Dark Magician began. But before he could finish, the hostage made his move.
I heard Bear's puzzled growl of confusion and looked around.
After playing the part of a hostage in the vampire's clutches for the last half hour, Egor was dissolving, disappearing.
The kid was withdrawing deeper into the Twilight.
The vampire squeezed her arms together in an attempt to keep hold of him or kill him. The sweeping movement of the clawed hand was swift, but it met no living flesh. The vampire struck herself under her left breast, in the heart.
What a pity she wasn't alive!
Like a snowdrift suddenly springing into life, Bear pounced, streaking through the empty air where Egor had just been standing and felling the vampire. The twitching body was completely covered by his massive carcass, with just one clawed hand protruding from under his shaggy side and twitching spasmodically.
In the same instant Ilya raised the wand. The lilac glow dimmed slightly, and then the wand exploded into a column of white flame. The field agent looked as if he were holding a beam of light torn out of the lamp of a lighthouse. It was blinding; I could almost feel its weight. With a visible effort, Ilya swung his arms, scraping the gray sky with a beam of light brighter than any seen in Moscow since the war, and swung the gigantic club down on Zabulon's head.
The Dark Magician screamed.
He fell, pinned down onto the roof, and the column of light tore itself out of Ilya's hands, moving of its own accord. It was no longer a beam of light, but a white snake, sprouting silvery scales as it coiled and writhed. The end of the gigantic body flattened out into a hood and a blunt head protruded from under it, with unblinking eyes the size of truck wheels. The slim, forked tongue flickered, blazing like a gas burner.
I jumped back as the tail almost caught me. The fiery cobra coiled itself into a ball and fell on Zabulon, rapidly winding the coils of its body around his head. And on the far side of the blazing coils there were three shadows thrashing away at each other, their rapid movements blurred into dim streaks. I hadn't noticed when Tiger Cub leapt on the witch and the warlock.