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 knew from my own wife, were 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 Two 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, greying a bit, with a short little beard, always in a white coat (even in his Twilight form) and with a stethoscope dangling on his chest. When children saw him they shouted out gleefully ‘Dr Dolittle!’, 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 got 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 ward’s entrance. ‘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 if I used magic so she wouldn’t notice.
‘Okay,’ I said.
Ivan loved to drink tea, and in its most ordinary form – black with sugar, very occasionally with a slice of lemon. But it was always delicious tea, the most unusual varieties and 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 realise 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, shrugging. ‘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 haemoplasty, 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 that 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 focused on just 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 Savushkin?’
I shuddered.
Well, of course… That business with the female vampire had been a long time ago, and it hadn’t created much of a sensation. Svetlana, the Higher Enchantress, had eclipsed that hapless pair of vampires and the young kid they’d 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.’
‘Which Mishka?’ I asked.
‘Why, Bulgakov, of course!’ Ivan said in a tone of voice that made it clear he was talking about someone he was very proud to have known.
But I hadn’t known that Ivan was close to the famous writer. Maybe he’d been responsible for Bulgakov starting to write all sorts of mystical and sci-fi stuff?
‘A good likeness?’
‘Yes, it definitely has something,’ Ivan said, taking me by surprise. ‘It’s quite enthralling, I never expected anything like that from the Brits. He was played by a young guy, a newcomer probably. But he gave it his best shot. I got a real kick out of remembering Mishka! And then I took a look at this other series too…’
He was in a mood to talk – and not about vampires. He obviously found his job boring.
Of course, there were all sorts of Other illnesses – from Twilight tonsillitis (don’t laugh, it really is very cold in there!) to post-incantational depression (caused by abrupt swings in an Other’s magical-energy level).
And then there were the ordinary human illnesses that he also treated.
But, even so, in our office there wasn’t all that much work for a second-level healer. And we didn’t visit the doctor very often of our own free will.
‘Sorry, got to go and pay the girl a visit,’ I said, getting up. ‘Thanks for the tea… So can I discharge her?’
‘Of course,’ Ivan said, nodding. ‘I’ll wipe her memory clean if you like.’
That was a friendly suggestion. A tremendous suggestion. Wiping someone’s memory clean, especially a young girl’s, was a shameful kind of business. Even if it was for her own sake. After all, we basically killed something in the person with a purge like that.