for Geser!' 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 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 mischiev ous sparks dancing in them... was Olga bored of sitting in the office and managing things, then?
'Lets go,' I said. 'Just the two of us. Although its 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'
'Fool,' 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-per-cent 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 sandpit 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 doors to set out on just another vampire hunt. I hadn't known 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 was younger than the trainee Andrei at the time, had copied 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... And Geser had managed to have Olga released from her terrible punishment of being confined inside a stuffed owl... *
( * This story is told in the first part of the book The Night Watch.)
'Deja vu,' I said.
'What's brought that on?' Olga asked absent-mindedly. She had lived in the world for so long that she could easily have forgotten that adventure of ours... 'Ah, you remembered us tracking 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 shadow's 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 lift, I pressed the button for the tenth floor and 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 lift 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 flavours 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... Saushkin lives on the eleventh.'
I glanced