«They didn't bother to wait for us,» Ilya said indignantly. «They're already partying, getting it on while the best people in the Watch are still bouncing over the country roads.»
He switched off the motor and Yulia immediately screeched in delight:
«Tiger Cub!»
She scrambled straight over me, opened the door, and jumped out of the car.
Semyon swore and followed her out, moving incredibly fast. Just in time.
I don't know where those dogs had been hiding. In any case, they were still camouflaged until the moment Yulia got out of the car. But the moment her feet touched the ground, the light-brown shadows closed in on her from all sides.
The young girl shrieked. She was more than powerful enough to deal with a pack of wolves, never mind five or six dogs, but she'd never actually been in a genuine fight, and she lost her head. To be quite honest, even I hadn't been expecting an attack—not here. And especially not this kind. Dogs never attack Others. They're afraid of the Dark Ones. They like the Light Ones. You have to train an animal really long and hard in order to suppress its natural fear of a walking source of magic.
Svetlana, Ilya, and I scrambled out of the car. But Semyon beat us all to the punch. He grabbed hold of the girl with one hand and made a pass in the air with the other. I thought he would use fright magic, or withdraw into the twilight, or reduce the dogs to dust on the spot. A reflex response usually relies on the simplest spells.
But Semyon used the temporal freeze. He caught two of the dogs in the air: Their bodies were left hanging there, enveloped in a blue glow, with their narrow, snarling muzzles reaching forward, the drops of saliva falling from their fangs like gleaming blue hail.
The three dogs who'd been frozen on the ground weren't quite so impressive.
Tiger Cub came running over to us. Her face was white and her eyes were wide open. She looked at Yulia for a moment. The girl was still whining, but she was getting quieter, through sheer inertia.
«Everyone okay?» she asked eventually.
«Fortunately,» mumbled Ilya, lowering his wand. «What kind of animals are you keeping here?»
«They wouldn't have done anything,» Tiger Cub said guiltily.
«Oh yeah?» Semyon took Yulia out from under his arm and set her down on the ground. He ran one finger thoughtfully over the bared fang of a dog hanging in mid-air. The film of the time freeze was springy and elastic under his hand.
«I swear!» said Tiger Cub, pressing her hand to her heart. «Guys, Sveta, Yulia, I'm sorry. I didn't have a chance to stop them. The dogs are trained to knock strangers down and restrain them.»
«Even Others?»
«Yes.»
«Even Light Ones?» There was a note of dubious admiration in Semyon's voice.
Tiger Cub dropped her eyes and nodded.
Yulia went over, snuggled up to her, and said in a more or less calm voice:
«I wasn't frightened. Just taken by surprise, that's all.»
«It's a good thing I was slow to react too,» Ilya commented gloomily, putting his weapon away. «Roast dog's too exotic a dish for me. But your dogs know me, Tiger Cub!»
«They wouldn't have touched you.»
The tension slowly eased. Of course, nothing too serious would have happened; we know how to heal each other, but it would have put a damper on the picnic.
«I'm sorry,» Tiger Cub repeated. She looked at us all imploringly.
«But listen, why do you need all this?» asked Sveta, with a glance at the dogs. «Can you explain that to me? Your powers are strong enough to beat off a platoon of Green Berets. What do you need rotweilers for?»
«They're not rotweilers; they're Staffordshire bull terriers.»
«What difference does that make?»
«They caught a burglar once. I'm only here two days a week, I can't go back and forth to town all the time.»
The explanation wasn't all that convincing. A simple frightening spell would have kept any normal people from coming anywhere near the place. But no one got a chance to say it—Tiger Cub got in first:
«It's just the way I am, okay.»
«How long are the dogs going to stay hanging there like that?» asked Yulia, snuggling up against Tiger Cub again. «I want to make friends with them. Otherwise I'll be left with a latent psychological complex that's bound to have an effect on my personality and my sexual preferences.»
Semyon snorted. Yulia's crack had finally defused the conflict—but it was anybody's guess how spontaneous or how calculated it had been.
«They'll start moving again before the evening. Well, hostess, are you going to invite us in?»
We left the dogs hanging and standing around the car and walked toward the house.
«What a great place you have, Tiger Cub!» said Yulia. She was ignoring the rest of us completely now, clinging to the young woman. As if the sorceress were her idol and she could be forgiven for anything, even over-vigilant guard dogs.
Why is it that the powers we can't develop are always the ones that obsess us?
Yulia's a magnificent analytical sorceress. She can untangle the threads of reality and reveal the concealed magical causes of events that seem ordinary. She's really smart, and everyone in the department loves her, not just as a cute little girl, but as a comrade-in-arms, a valued and sometimes quite irreplaceable colleague. But her idol is Tiger Cub, a shape-shifting sorceress, a combat magician. Why couldn't she decide to imitate good-hearted old Polina Vasilievna, who worked in the analytical department half-time, or fall in love with the head of the department, the impressive, middle-aged lady-killer Edik.
But no, she'd chosen Tiger Cub as her idol.
I started whistling a tune, as I walked along at the back of the procession. I caught Svetlana's eye and gave her a quick nod. Everything was fine. We had whole days of doing nothing ahead of us. No Dark Ones or Light Ones, no intrigues and plots, no confrontations. Just swimming in the lake, sunbathing, eating kebabs from the barbecue, and washing them down with red wine. And in the evening—the bathhouse. A big house like this had to have a good bathhouse. And then Semyon and I could take a couple of bottles of vodka and a jar of pickled mushrooms, get as far away as possible from the rest of the crowd, and drink ourselves stupid, gazing up at the stars and making philosophical conversation.
Great.
I want to be a human being. For at least twenty-four hours.
Semyon stopped and nodded to me.
«Let's take two bottles. Three, even. Someone else might decide to join us.»
«It's a deal,» I said with a nod. He hadn't been reading my thoughts, it was just that he had so much more experience of life than I did.
«It's easier for you,» Semyon added. «I almost never get the chance to be a human being.»
«Do you need to?» Tiger Cub asked, halting by the door.
Semyon shrugged:
«Of course not. But I kind of like the idea.»
We went into the house.
Twenty guests were a bit too much even for this house. If we'd been ordinary people, it would have been different. But we made too much noise. Try bringing together twenty kids who've been studying hard for months, give them the free run of a well-stocked toy shop, let them do anything they like, and see what you end up with.
Sveta and I were just about the only ones not really caught up in the noisy fun and games. We grabbed a glass of wine each off the buffet table and settled down on a leather couch in the corner of the living room.