Last Watch

by Sergei Lukyanenko

  “I do. But if you really want to practice your battle magic that badly, I have someone you can use as a target.”

  “Who?”

  “A Higher Vampire. The one who’s been working with Edgar. The one who took out two Light Ones today at Chistye Prudy.”

  “Who?” Olga repeated insistently.

  “Saushkin.”

  A faint shadow ran across Olga’s face. She took me very gently by the elbow and said, “Anton, we all have tragedies in our lives. Sometimes we lose friends, and sometimes we lose enemies, but we still blame ourselves...”

  “Save the psychotherapy for Gesar!” I barked. “It’s Gennady Saushkin! Saushkin senior! Kostya’s father!”

  “We checked him, he’s fourth-level... ,” Olga said, and then stopped.

  “Do I have to explain to you how easy it is for a vampire to raise his level?” I asked.

  “From fourth-level to Higher... ,” she said. “But dozens of people would have disappeared, we ought to have noticed...”

  “Then we just didn’t!” I exclaimed, grabbing her by the hand. “Olga, it’s one chance in a thousand, but what if he’s still at home? What if we could take him by surprise?”

  “Let’s go,” Olga said with a nod. “I hope you can still remember your old address?”

  “Just the two of us?”

  “I think two Higher Light Ones can handle one vampire. Everyone in the office right now is too young. We don’t want to take cannon fodder with us, do we?”

  I looked into her eyes for a few seconds, watching the mischievous sparks dancing in them. Was Olga bored of sitting in the office and managing things, then?

  “Let’s go,” I said. “Just the two of us. Although it’s a bit too much like the beginning of a Hollywood action movie.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean there’ll be an ambush waiting for us. Or you’ll turn out to be the Light Other who’s helping Edgar and Gennady.”

  “Idiot,” said Olga, not even offended. But while we were walking downstairs, she said spitefully, “By the way, just to be sure, we checked out your Sveta.”

  “And what did you find?” I asked.

  “It’s not her.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “And have you been checked out?”

  “All Higher Light Ones have been checked. In Russia and Europe and the States. I don’t know who it was that Foma caught a glimpse of in the Twilight, but all the Higher Ones have hundred-percent alibis.”

  You should never go back to houses where you once used to live. Never, not for anything—not until you’re old and senile, and the sight of the sandbox in the courtyard of the building where you were born brings a sweet smile to your lips.

  As I looked at my old front entrance, I thought that not so many years had gone by... even by ordinary human standards. Eight years ago I had walked out of these very doors to set out on an ordinary vampire hunt. I didn’t know then that I would meet Svetlana, that she would become my wife, that I would become a Higher One...

  But I was already an Other. And I knew that there were Others living above me—a family of vampires. Good, law-abiding vampires with whom I managed to remain friends for quite a long time.

  Until I killed my first vampire.

  Well, there’s always a first time for everything.

  “Shall we go?” Olga asked.

  I was suddenly struck by another painful memory. The boy Egor, who at the time was younger than the trainee Andrei, had recorded an aura just as successfully and had also almost become a vampire’s victim. And Olga and I, working together for the first time, had set out on his trail.

  “Déja vu,” I said, snapping out of my trance.

  “What’s brought that on?” Olga asked absentmindedly. She had lived in the world for so long that she could easily have forgotten that adventure of ours... “Ah, you remembered ustracking Egor? By the way, I recently found out that he works in a circus, can you imagine? As an illusionist!”

  “Let’s go,” I urged her.

  Olga was right not to be afraid of the shadows of her past. If she did feel a little bit guilty about Egor, at least she was still keeping an eye on him.

  We got into the elevator and I pressed the button for the tenth floor. We rode up in complete silence. Olga was clearly psyching herself up, gathering Power. I examined my fingers. In the years since I’d left, the elevator had been changed, replaced by a ‘vandal-proof’ model with metal walls and buttons. Young punks could no longer burn the plastic buttons with cigarette lighters the way they used to, so the buttons were glued up with chewing gum instead.

  I rubbed my fingers together to clean off the sticky muck of polyvinyl acetate, artificial flavors, and someone else’s spittle.

  I didn’t always manage to love people all the time.

  The lift stopped and I said apologetically, “Tenth floor. The Saushkins... Wait. Saushkin lives on the eleventh.”

  I glanced sideways at the door to my old apartment. They hadn’t changed the door... even the locks looked the same to me, except that the faceplates were a bit brighter and fresher. When we had walked up half a flight of steps, I looked back at my door again, and it opened, as if someone had been waiting for us to move away. A disheveled woman of uncertain age stuck her head out. Her face was swollen and she was wearing a dirty housecoat. She looked us up and down with a spiteful expression and started shrieking, “Have you pissed in the elevator again?”

  The accusation was so unexpected that I broke into laughter. But Olga pressed her lips together and took a step back down. The woman quickly half-closed the door, ready to slam it shut. Olga looked hard at the woman for a while and then said very quietly, “No. You imagined it.”

  “I imagined it,” the woman said in a thick, slow voice.

  “And your upstairs neighbor is flooding your apartment,” Olga went on. “Go upstairs and tell him what you think of him.”

  The woman beamed and leaped out onto the landing just as she was—in her filthy, soiled house coat and tattered slippers and no socks. She ran past us eagerly.

  “Why did you do that?” I asked Olga.

  “She asked for it,” Olga replied judgmentally. “Let her serve the cause of the Light. At least once in her life.”

  I thought that if there was really a Higher Vampire hiding in Saushkin’s apartment, this could actually be the last thing the woman ever did in her life. Vampires really dislike personal insults.

  But then, I didn’t find the woman at all likeable either.

  “Who did you sell the apartment to?” Olga asked. “Who is this mental patient?”

  “I sold it through an agency.”

  “And they’re not poor people, if they could buy an apartment,” Olga said with a shrug. “How can she neglect herself like that?”

  Apparently she was more offended by the woman’s dilapidated appearance than her rudeness. Olga was almost obsessively strict about such matters—no doubt as a result of the hardships of the war years and her subsequent imprisonment.

  The woman whom Olga had recruited so swiftly was already pounding on Saushkin’s door with her hands and feet and screeching, “Open up! Open up, you bloodsucker! You’ve flooded me out! You’ve filled my whole apartment with hot water, you bastard!”

  “I’m always touched by these accidental insights that human beings have,” Olga remarked. “Tell me, why does a neighbor who has flooded her apartment, even if it is with hot water, suddenly become a ‘bloodsucker’?”

  Meanwhile the woman upstairs had launched into a list of her property that had been soaked and ruined. The list was so colorful that I couldn’t help glancing around to make sure there was no steam actually escaping from the open door of the apartment.

  “A Czech piano, a Japanese television, an Ital
ian three-piece suit, a brown mink coat!”

  “A chestnut Arabian stallion,” Olga said derisively.

  “A chestnut Arabian stallion,” the woman shrieked obediently.

  A little girl slightly older than Nadya came out of my old apartment. Seven or eight years old, a pretty face, with a sad, frightened expression. Unlike her mother, she was dressed like a doll—in a smart dress, white socks, and shiny patent-leather shoes. She gave us a frightened glance, then looked at her mother with an expression of weary, exhausted sympathy.

  “Sweetie pie!” the woman exclaimed, jumping away from Saushkin’s door. With a panic-stricken glance at Olga, she went dashing down to her daughter—or perhaps back to her apartment. “Go home,” Olga said in a quiet voice. “There’s no more water flooding your apartment. We’ll deal with your neighbor. And tomorrow morning go to the hairdresser’s, have a manicure, and get your hair done.”

  The woman seized the girl by the hand and skipped in through the doorway with a frightened backward glance at us.

  “What is it that makes people the way they are?” Olga asked thoughtfully as she looked at the mother and daughter.

  As she closed the door, the woman yapped, “And don’t you... pee in the elevator anymore! I’ll call the militia!”

  The word “pee,” softened from “piss” for the daughter’s sake, somehow seemed especially horrible—as if there were switches inside the woman’s head, clicking away as they tried to return her thoughts to normal.

  “Is she sick?” I asked Olga.

  “That’s just it, she isn’t,” Olga said in annoyance. “She’s psychologically healthy! Let’s go on through the Twilight...”

  I glanced down, found my shadow, and stepped into it.

  Olga appeared beside me.

  We looked around and I couldn’t help whistling.

  The entire stairway was overgrown with lumpy blue garbage. The moss was dangling from the ceiling and the banisters like an ultramarine beard, it was spread out across the floor in a cerulean carpet, and around the lightbulbs it was woven into honeycombed, sky-blue balls that could have inspired any designer to invent a new style of lampshade.

  “The staircase has been neglected,” Olga said, vaguely surprised. “But then, a rabid vampire and a hysterical woman...”

  We walked up to the door. I pushed on it—it was locked, of course. Even weak Others know how to lock their doors on the first level of the Twilight. I asked, “Shall we go deeper?”

  Instead of answering, Olga took a step back, twisted around, and kicked the door hard just beside the lock. It swung open.

  “Why do things the hard way?” Olga laughed. “I’ve been wanting to try out that kick for a long time.”

  I didn’t ask who had taught her to break down doors like that. Despite Olga’s confidence, I was by no means certain that the apartment was empty. We went into the entrance hall (the blue moss was still there all around us) and both spontaneously left the Twilight.

  It was such a long time since I had been here...

  And it was a long time since anyone had been here. The apartment was full of that heavy, musty smell that you only find in rooms that have been closed up and abandoned. You’d think that even though no one had been breathing there, fresh air would at least enter through the ventilation system and the small cracks, but no. The air dies anyway, turning sour, like yesterday’s tea.

  “There’s no smell,” Olga said with relief.

  I understood what she meant. There were smells, of course—smells of musty damp and accumulated dust. But there wasn’t that smell we had been expecting, the one we had been afraid to find—the sickly sweet smell of bodies that had been drained of blood by a vampire.

  “Nobody’s lived here for at least a month,” I agreed. I looked at the coatrack—a winter jacket, a fur cap... a pair of dirty, heavy, fur-lined boots on the floor. It wasn’t just a month, it was a lot longer than that. The owner of the flat had been missing since winter at least. I didn’t remove the defensive spells that I had applied to myself in the car, but I relaxed. “Right, then, let’s see how he lived... so to speak.”

  We started our inspection in the kitchen. Like the rest of the apartment, the windows in there were covered with heavy curtains. The tulle that was now gray with dust was no doubt supposed to have given the apartment a cozy atmosphere. It hadn’t been washed for perhaps two years—ever since Polina died.

  Behind my back Olga clicked a light switch, making me jump. She said, “Why are we walking around in the dark, like Scully and Mulder?... Check the refrigerator.”

  I was already opening the door of the refrigerator that was churning away smugly to itself. Kitchen technology is the kind that gets along best without any human supervision. But a computer left unattended for six months will very often start to malfunction. I don’t know what the reason for that is, but it isn’t magic, that’s for sure. There isn’t any magic in hardware.

  There was nothing horrible in the refrigerator, either. Well, nothing criminal. That was something I had hardly dared to hope for. A suspicious-looking three-liter glass jar covered with white mold contained sour tomato juice—you could have made moonshine out of it. Of course, it wasn’t good that the tomatoes had been allowed to go to waste, but the Tomato Watch from Greenpeace could deal with that particular crime. There were two-hundred-and five-hundred-gram bottles of thick glass standing in the door of the refrigerator. Each bottle had a Night Watch mark that glowed feebly through the Twilight—it was licensed donor blood.

  “He didn’t even drink his allowance,” I said.

  There were also sausages, eggs, and salami in the fridge, and in the freezer compartment there was a piece of meat (beef) and pelmeni (mostly soya). Basically the usual range of foods for a man living on his own. Only the vodka was missing, but that was inevitable. All vampires are nondrinkers by necessity: Alcohol immediately disrupts their strange metabolism—it’s a powerful poison for them.

  After the kitchen I glanced into the toilet. The water in the toilet bowl had almost completely evaporated and there was quite a smell from the drains. I flushed the toilet and walked out.

  “A good time to choose for that,” said Olga. I stared at her in confusion, then I realized that she was joking. The Great Enchantress was smiling. She had been expecting to see something terrible too, but now she had relaxed.

  “Anytime’s good for that,” I replied. “It stank in there, so I flushed the toilet.”

  “Yes, I realized.”

  When I opened the bathroom door, I discovered that the lightbulb had burned out. Maybe he had left it switched on when he left. I couldn’t be bothered to search my pockets for a flashlight, so I called on the Primordial Power and lit up a magical light above my head. What I saw made me shudder.

  No, it wasn’t any kind of horror scene. There was a bath, a sink, a tap slowly dripping, towels, soap, a toothbrush, toothpaste...

  “Look,” I said, making the light brighter.

  Olga walked up and glanced over my shoulder. She said thoughtfully, “That is curious.”

  There was writing on the mirror. Not in blood, but in tri-colored toothpaste, so that the words actually reminded me of the Russian flag. Someone’s finger—and somehow I was sure it was Gennady Saushkin’s—had traced out three words in large capital letters on the glass surface of the mirror:

  THE LAST WATCH

  “No mystery story ever manages without words on the walls or the mirror,” said Olga. “Although, the writing ought to be in blood, of course...”

  “This toothpaste suits the purpose too,” I replied. “Red, blue, and white. The traditional colors of the Inquisition are gray and blue.”

  “I know,” Olga said thoughtfully. “Do you think it was deliberate? Vampire, Inquisitor, Healer?”

  “I can’t see the line between del
iberate intention and coincidence,” I admitted.

  I walked along the short corridor and glanced into the sitting room. The light worked there.

  “It’s very nice,” said Olga. “The house is so run-down, but they did a nice repair job in here.”

  “Gennady’s a builder by profession,” I explained. “He did everything at home himself, and he helped me out once... Well, I didn’t know who he was then. He was very well thought of at work.”

  “Of course he was, as a nondrinker,” Olga agreed, and walked into the bedroom.

  “He’s a perfectionist too,” I said, continuing to praise Gennady as if we hadn’t come here to lay the vampire to rest, as if I was recommending him to Olga to refurbish her apartment.

  I heard a muffled sound behind me and turned around.

  Olga was being sick. She was slumped against the doorpost, with her face turned away from the bedroom, and puking straight onto the wall. Then she looked up at me, wiped her mouth with her hand, and said, “A perfectionist... Yes, so I just saw.”

  I definitely didn’t want to see what Olga had taken such a violent dislike to. But I walked over to the door of the bedroom anyway, on legs that had turned to rubber in advance.

  “Wait, I’ll get out of the way,” Olga muttered, moving aside for me.

  I glanced into the bedroom. It took me several seconds to make sense of what I saw.

  Olga needn’t have bothered to move. I didn’t even have time to turn around, I just puked up my lunch straight into the bedroom, through the doorway. If shaking hands through a doorway is bad luck, then what about puking through one?

  .

  .

  A COMMON DESTINY

  Chapter 2

  Gesar was standing at the window, watching the city deck itself out in its evening lights. He was standing there silently, hands clasped behind his back, shuffling his fingers as if he were weaving some kind of cunning spell.

  Olga and I didn’t say anything either. Anyone might have thought that it was all our fault...