Olechka held her breath for a moment. I even felt afraid that she might fall into a coma – it’s rare, but it sometimes happens to people when you draw power from them too suddenly.
But she started breathing again.
I got up off my knees. I’d even broken into a sweat myself. I could feel that a bundle of energy had fallen into the empty gap left by my usual power. No, it still hadn’t filled it, not by a long way … and I’d acted hastily, for some reason …
But I was recovering.
Again – the gentle touches, the soft hair, the lips parted in sleep, the relaxed fingers …
Nothing here … nothing here … but there was something here.
It was Natasha.
And her dream had been prompted by me.
Natasha was standing in a bathroom. Naked and covered in soapy lather. She was holding a boy about five or six years old and hammering his head against the tiled wall, saying over and over again: ‘Are you going to peep again? Are you going to peep?’
The boy was dangling in her hands like a rag doll. His eyes were wide open in terror, but he didn’t say anything. He seemed to be far more afraid of being punished by his parents than hurt by his sister.
But Natasha wasn’t feeling too good either. Her soul was filled with a mixture of furious anger at her insufferable brother, fear that she would hit his head against the wall too hard, shame, even though until only very recently she and her brother had taken baths together, and guilt … because she’d deliberately left the door unlocked in the expectation that her brother would try to peep in, driven by the natural urge of children to violate all prohibitions.
This was really something. Passions like that in someone who wasn’t even twelve yet.
Natasha gave a deep sigh, and in her dream she hit her brother’s head especially hard against the wall, so that it started to bleed. I couldn’t see where the blood came from, but it suddenly covered his entire head.
I sucked in her dream.
Completely. The fury, the fear, the shame, the guilt and the budding sensuality, still vague and ill-defined.
But the dream didn’t end.
Natasha had just released her grip when she grabbed her brother again by the shoulders and, with the cold calculating movement of an executioner, forced his head into the water in the bath, which instantly turned pink. Even the clumps of foam on the surface of the water turned pink. The boy began twitching helplessly, struggling to pull his head out of the water.
I froze in surprise. A murder committed in a dream gives almost the same discharge of power as a real one. Now I’d be able to fill the gap in my soul in a single moment!
All I had to do was draw Natasha’s newly awakened fear out of her, and …
But I didn’t do anything. I stood there, leaning down over the bed, watching another person’s dream as if it was a horror film that was showing on TV instead of the children’s cartoons.
Natasha suddenly jerked her brother’s head out of the water and he gulped in air greedily. There was no blood on him any longer, he just had a small bruise under one eye. Dreams have their own laws.
‘You tell them you fell in the bath yourself and banged your head, all right?’ Natasha hissed. The boy nodded in fright. Natasha quickly pushed him out of the bathroom and closed the door – then slowly got into the foamy water. The nice, bright-pink water …
I waited for another second or two and then drank in the remains of the dream. Triumph, excitement, tranquillity.
And the gaping wound in my soul was immediately half-filled.
I should have let Natasha kill her brother. I only needed to take away her fear, and she would have drowned her little brother like a kitten.
I was covered in perspiration. My hands were shaking. Who could ever have expected nightmares like that from such a rational little miss know-it-all?
All right. Slow and steady does it.
I moved on.
By half past twelve that night I had absorbed another three dreams. They weren’t so satisfying, but they provided fine surges of power. This was a good place for a holiday, if the girls accumulated that much energy.
I had almost completely restored the strength that I’d lost. The lion’s share, of course, had come from Natasha. I even had the feeling that if I could just suck in one more dream, then I would be completely restored and become a normal Other. But nobody had any more dreams that were any use to me. There was one that simply repelled me: Gulnara was dreaming that she was taking care of her old grandfather. Dashing around the kitchen, pouring his tea, constantly asking him solicitous questions. Oh, how I hate that awful eastern culture … Turkish delight laced with arsenic.
If it wasn’t for Igor …
I would only have to wait half an hour, or an hour, and one of my eighteen donors would have a frightening dream.
But …
I didn’t hesitate for long.
I would collect all the power I needed, absolutely everything, the following night. But today I could relax and try out the role of an ordinary woman.
I closed the door firmly and slipped out into the summer night. The camp was sleeping. There were lamps lit here and there on the pathways and an almost full moon hung in the sky.
Nights like this are great for the werewolves. They’re at the peak of their powers, they can transform easily and at will, they’re full of high spirits, the thirst for life and the urge to hunt, to tear living flesh to pieces, to stalk and pounce on their prey. Of course, the vampires and the shape-shifters are the very lowest caste of the Dark Ones. And most of them are simply stupid and primitive. But … on nights like this I envied them just a little. I envied them the primitive power that comes from the deepest animal depths of their nature. The ability to transform into an animal – and get rid of all those stupid human feelings.
I started to laugh and set off along the path at a run, flinging my arms out and throwing my head back to look up at the sky. I might not have the powers of an Other yet, but my blood was seething with fresh power, and I didn’t stumble even once or hesitate for a moment in my choice of direction. It was like just before my initiation, when ‘mother’s old friend’ Irina Andreevna had arrived at our apartment unexpectedly. I could sense that my parents were behaving strangely, awkwardly, and every now and then Irina Andreevna would look at me in a strange way, as if she was evaluating me, with a gentle, condescending smile. And then my parents suddenly decided to go out somewhere in a great hurry, leaving me alone for the entire evening with the ‘old friend’. And my future mentor told me everything. She said this was the first time she had ever seen my parents, that she had simply put a spell on them. She told me about the Others, and about the Twilight that gives them miraculous powers and said that the first time I entered the Twilight would determine who I would be, a Light One or a Dark One … She said I was a future Other. That I had been noticed by a certain ‘very very powerful magician’. Later I wondered if it could have been Zabulon himself, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask.
Back then I hesitated for a long time. I was a little fool. I didn’t like the words ‘Dark Ones’. In fairy tales and films the Dark Ones were always bad. They had power over the entire world, ruled countries and commanded armies, but at the same time they ate all sorts of disgusting things, spoke in horrible, repellent voices and betrayed everyone whenever they got the chance. And on top of all that – in the end they always lost.
Irina Andreevna laughed for a long time when I told her all that. And she admitted that all the fairy tales were invented by the Light Ones. The Dark Ones didn’t usually bother with that kind of nonsense. She said what the Dark Ones really wanted was freedom and independence, they didn’t strive for power, they didn’t impose their own foolish desires on others. She demonstrated some of her abilities to me – and I learned that my mum had been unfaithful to my dad for a long time already, and my dad wasn’t anything like as brave as I thought, and that my best friend Vika told people all sorts of nasty things about me.