us to cover up incidents like this one. The bodies had already been taken away, our specialists had finished fiddling about with auras and traces of magic, and now the forensic experts from the militia had started their work.
'In the Gazelle,' Garik told me, with a nod. I walked across to our operational vehicle and got in.
A young lad wrapped in a blanket and drinking hot tea from a mug gave me a frightened look.
'My name's Anton Gorodetsky,' I said. 'You're Andrei, right?'
The boy nodded.
'I...' the boy began in a remorseful voice. 'I didn't know...'
'Calm down. You're not to blame for anything. Nobody could have foreseen the appearance of a wild vampire in the centre of Moscow in broad daylight,' I said. But I thought to myself that if the lad had such a natural ability for reading auras, then this sort of thing ought to have been foreseen. But I didn't want to criti cise the dead tutor. Some day this incident would go into the teacher-training manuals, on the pages printed in red to indicate that the knowledge in them had been paid for in blood.
'But I shouldn't have shouted like that,' the boy said. He put down the mug of tea. The blanket slid off his shoulder and I saw a massive bruise on his chest. The vampire had hit him really hard. 'If he hadn't heard me...'
'He would still have sensed your fright and confusion. Calm down. The most important thing now is to catch this undead monster.'
'And lay him to rest,' the boy said in a firm voice.
'Right. And lay him to rest. Have you been studying with us for long?'
'Three weeks.'
I shook my head. He was a talented young boy, no doubt about it. I just hoped that what had happened wouldn't put him off working in the Watch ...
'Have you been taught how to record auras?'
'No,' the boy admitted. And he shuddered, as if at some unpleasant memory.
'Then describe the vampire as precisely as you can.'
The boy hesitated and then said:
'We haven't been taught. But I've tried studying it. It's the fourth paragraph in the textbook... recording, copying and transmitting an aura.'
'And you studied the subject?'
'Yes.'
'Can you transmit the vampire's aura to me?'
The boy thought for a moment and nodded.
'I can try'
'Go on. I'm opening myself up.' I closed my eyes and relaxed. Okay, come on, young talent...
At first there was a faint sensation of warmth ?like a hairdryer into my face from a distance. And then I sensed a clumsy, rather confused transmission. I locked onto it and took a close look. The boy was trying with all his might, transmitting the aura again and again. Gradually I began building up a complete picture out of the isolated fragments.
Just a little bit more,' I said. 'Repeat that...'
The coloured threads flared up more brightly and arranged them selves into an intricate pattern. The basic colours, of course, were black and red, non-life and death, the standard vampire aura. In addition to the colour scheme, which was constantly changing and could be very different at different times, there were fundamental features: the subtle pattern of Power, as individual as fingerprints or the pattern of blood vessels in the iris of the eye.
'Well done,' I said, pleased. 'Thank you. It's a very good impression.'
'Will you be able to find him?' the teenager asked.
'Definitely,' I assured him. 'You've been a great help. And don't be upset. Don't punish yourself... your tutor died a hero.'
That was a lie, of course. In the first place, heroes don't die. Heroes don't protect themselves with the Magician's Shield when they see a vampire attacking, they strike to stun him. An ordinary Grey Prayer would have slowed the vampire down and stopped him, at least for a while. Long enough for the trainees to scatter and run, and the tutor could have gathered his thoughts and erected a decent defence.
But there was nothing to be done about it now. There was no point in explaining to the boy that his first tutor had been a kind, sweet guy, but completely unprepared for real work. That was the whole problem ?genuine battle magicians with the smell of blood and fire in their nostrils didn't often go in for tutoring. The tutors were more often noble-minded theoreticians...
'Garik, do you need me here?' I asked. There was already a Dark One I didn't know loitering about beside Garik and the colonel. Which was only to be expected. The Day Watch had dropped by to