How appropriate. The song was bang on.
But it was a bad omen.
I jumped in through the closing doors and froze, concentrating on what I could feel. Had I guessed right or wrong? I still couldn’t get a visual fix on the target …
I’d guessed right.
The train hurtled on round the circle line. My instincts were raging, calling to me: ‘Right here! Beside you!’
Maybe I’d even got the right carriage.
I gave my fellow passengers a surreptitious looking-over and dropped the idea. There was no one here worth taking any interest in.
I’d just have to wait, then …
At Marx Prospect I sensed the target moving away from me. I jumped from the carriage and set off toward the other line. Right here, somewhere right beside me …
At the radial line station the feeling of the target became almost unbearably strong. I’d already picked out a few likely prospects: two girls, a young guy, a boy. They were all potential targets, but which one of them was it?
My four candidates got into the same carriage. That was a stroke of luck at last. I followed them in and waited.
One girl got out at Rizhskaya station.
The feeling of the target didn’t get any weaker.
The young guy got out at Alekseevskaya.
Great. Was it the girl or the boy?
I risked a stealthy glance at both. The girl was plump and pink-cheeked, she was absorbed in reading her MK newspaper, showing no signs of any kind of agitation. The boy, in contrast, was skinny and frail, standing by the door and tracing his finger across the glass.
In my opinion the girl was a lot more … tempting. Two to one it was her.
But then, in judgements like that the question of sex decides pretty much everything.
I’d already begun hearing the Call. Still not verbalised yet, just a slow, gentle melody. I immediately stopped hearing the sound from my earphones. The Call easily drowned out any other music.
Neither the girl nor the boy showed any signs of alarm. The target either had a very high threshold of resistance or had simply succumbed straight away.
The train stopped at Exhibition. The boy took his hand away from the glass, stepped out on to the platform and marched off rapidly towards the old exit. The girl stayed on the train.
Damn!
They were both still too close to me, I couldn’t tell which one I was sensing.
And then the music of the Call soared triumphantly and words began to insinuate themselves into it.
A female voice!
I jumped out between the closing doors, and hurried after the boy.
The hunt was nearing its end at last.
But how was I going to handle things with no charge on my amulet? I didn’t have a clue.
Only a few people had left the train and there were five of us on the up escalator. The boy at the front, a woman with a small child behind him, then me, followed by an ageing, seedy-looking army colonel. The colonel’s aura was beautiful, a glittering mass of steel grey and light blue tones. I thought with weary humour that I could call on him to help. Even these days people like that still believe in the idea of ‘officer’s honour’.
Except that any help I could get from the colonel would be about as much use as a fly-swat on an elephant hunt.
I dropped the stupid idea and took another look at the boy. With my eyes closed, observing his aura.
The result was disheartening.
He was surrounded by a shimmering, semi-transparent glow. Sometimes it was tinged with red, sometimes it was flooded with a dense green and sometimes it flared up in dark blue tones.
This was a rare case. A destiny still undefined. Undifferentiated potential. This boy could grow up to be a great villain, he could become a good and just person, or he could turn out to be a nobody, an empty space, which is actually what most people are anyway. It was all still ahead of him, as they say. Auras like that are normal for children up to the age of two or three, but they disappear almost completely as people get older.
Now I could see why he was the one the Call was addressed to. There was no denying it – he was a real delicacy.
I felt my mouth starting to fill up again with saliva.
This had all been going on for too long, far too long … I looked at the boy, at the thin neck beneath his scarf, and I cursed my boss and the traditions, the rituals – everything that went to make up my job. My gums itched, my throat was parched.
Blood has a bitter, salty taste, but this thirst can’t be quenched by anything else.
The boy hopped off the escalator, ran across the lobby and out through the glass doors. Just for a moment I felt relieved. I slowed down as I followed him out, and just caught a sense of movement out of the corner of my eye as he ducked down into an underpass. He was already running, physically drawn by the lure of the Call.
Faster!
I ran over to a kiosk and said, trying not to show my teeth:
‘The stuff that’s six roubles, with the ring pull.’
The young guy with a pimply face handed me the quarter-litre bottle with a slow, sluggish movement – as though he’d been taking a drop himself to keep warm on the job. He warned me candidly:
‘It’s not great vodka. Not gut-rot, of course, it’s Dorokhov, but, you know …’
‘Got to look after my health, anyway,’ I joked. The vodka was obviously fake, but right now that was okay by me. With one hand I tore off the cap with the ring pull and with the other I took out my phone and switched it to repeat dial. The young salesman stared – he must have been shocked that someone who could afford a mobile phone would buy such bad vodka. I took a swallow as I walked along – the vodka stank like kerosene and tasted even worse, it was definitely moonshine, bottled in the back of someone’s garage – and ran to the underpass.
‘Hello.’
Larissa wasn’t there any more. Pavel’s usually on night duty.
‘This is Anton. It’s somewhere near the Cosmos hotel, in the back alleys. I’m in pursuit.’
‘You want the team?’ The voice was beginning to sound interested.
‘Yes. I’ve already discharged the amulet.’
‘What happened?’
A street bum bedded down halfway along the underpass reached out a hand as if he was hoping I’d give him the bottle I’d just started. I ran on past him.
‘Something else came up … Make it quick, Pavel.’
‘The guys are already on their way.’
I suddenly felt as if a red-hot wire had been stuck through my jaws. Hell and damnation …
‘Pasha, I can’t answer for myself,’ I said quickly and rang off I pulled up short, facing a police patrol.
Isn’t that always the way? Why do the human guardians of law and order always turn up at the most inappropriate moments?
‘Sergeant Kampinsky,’ a young policeman announced briskly. ‘Your papers …’
I wondered what they were planning to pin on me. Being drunk in a public place? That was probably it.
I put my hand into my pocket and touched the amulet. Just barely warm. But this wouldn’t take a lot.
‘I’m not here,’ I said.
The four eyes that had been probing me in anticipation of easy pickings went blank as the last spark of reason in them died.