I heard him shout:
‘No!’
And I heard my own voice shout:
‘Don’t!’
The very first thought that came into my head proved to be wrong. No, Igor hadn’t been working against me, playing out some insidious plan of the Night Watch. He had lost his power – exactly as I had. He hadn’t seen my aura, he couldn’t have had any idea that he was looking at a witch.
He had fallen in love with me. With his eyes closed. Exactly as I had with him.
The world is grey and dreary, it is the cold world of the Twilight that makes us what we are, power-hungry, but also helps us to find that power. No sounds, no colours. The leaves frozen still on the trees, the frozen figures of the two boys, the guitar suspended in midair – Igor had let go of it as he entered the Twilight. Thousands of icy little needles pricked my skin, drawing out of me the energy I had only just acquired, drawing me down into the Twilight for ever … but I was an Other again and I could draw power from the world around me. I reached forward and scraped out everything Dark that there was in the fat boy. I no longer had any problems absorbing power. I no longer had to focus on what I was doing and how. It was all easy and familiar.
And Igor did the same thing with Alyoshka. Maybe a bit less skilfully – the Light Ones only rarely harvest power from others directly they’re shackled by their own stupid limitations, but he drank in all of the boy’s joy and I felt an unnatural joy for my beloved, for my enemy, for a Light Other who had just acquired power.
‘Alisa …’
‘Igor …’
He was suffering. It was far harder for him than for me. The Light Ones spend all their lives chasing illusions, they’re filled with false hopes and don’t know how to survive a heavy blow, but he was handling it … and I was handling it too … I was … I was …
‘How absurd,’ he whispered and shook his head sharply – a strange gesture in this gloomy haze, in the Twilight. ‘You … you’re a witch …’
I felt him reach out to my mind – not deep into it, just to the very surface, simply trying to make sure … or hoping to be proved wrong … and I didn’t try to resist. I just reached out in reply.
And I laughed – at the unbearable pain.
South Butovo.
Edgar standing against the Light Magicians.
We were feeding Edgar with power, and the Light Ones were being fed by the magicians in their second line.
Including Igor.
I recognised his aura, remembered his power profile. Things like that are never forgotten.
And he recognised me.
Of course, I didn’t know him by sight and I’d never heard his name. But why should an ordinary patrol witch know all one thousand agents of the Moscow Night Watch? All those magicians, wizards, enchanters, shape-shifters. When we needed to know, they gave us a specific briefing. The way they had for Anton Gorodetsky, when we’d followed him on Zabulon’s secret instructions a year and a half earlier and managed to catch him committing an illegal intervention. And there were some you just couldn’t help remembering, like Tiger Cub, for instance.
But I’d never known about Igor.
A third-grade Light Magician. Probably a bit more powerful than me, although it was hard to compare the powers of a natural magician and a witch.
My beloved, my lover, my enemy.
My fate.
‘What made you do it?’ Igor asked. ‘Alisa … why did you do it?’
‘What do you mean why?’ I almost cried out, but I stopped myself because I realised he wouldn’t believe me. He would never believe that what had happened was mere coincidence – just a stupid and tragic accident – that there hadn’t been any evil intent in what had happened, that a cruel twist of fate had brought us together in the moment of our weakness, when we could not recognise each other, could not sense our enemy … at the very moment when all we could do and all we wanted to do was to love.
How can we say ‘why’ anything in this world happens? Why am I a Dark One? Why is he a Light One? After all, both of these are mixed together in all of us – at the beginning.
Igor could have been my friend and colleague, a Dark One.
And I … probably … could have become a Light One. And then I wouldn’t have been taught by a wise witch, but a wise enchantress, and I wouldn’t have paid my enemies back in kind, but sentimentally set them on ‘the true road’ … by turning the other cheek … and I would have delighted in every pompous piece of their stupid nonsense.
I only realised that I was crying when the world started spinning around me. You must never cry in the Twilight – everybody knows that. The more emotion we allow ourselves to show, the more eagerly the Twilight drains our power.
And to lose your powers in the Twilight means to stay in it for ever.
I tried to draw power from my donor, the fat boy but he was already drained; I reached towards Alyoshka, but he was absolutely neutral, squeezed dry by Igor. I couldn’t draw energy from Igor and I didn’t want to anyway, and everyone else was too far away, and the world was spinning … how stupid …
My knees struck the ground and I even had the foolish thought that I would stain my skirt, although no dirt from the Twilight ever stays with us in the real world.
An instant later Igor hurled a charge of energy at me.
No, not to finish me off. To save me.
It was alien, Light power. But passed through him and then given to me.
And power is always power.
I stood up, breathing heavily, as exhausted as during that night of our senseless, impossible love. Igor had helped me to hold out in the Twilight, but he didn’t reach out his hand.
He was crying now. He was in a bad way too.
‘How could you do it?’ he whispered.
‘It was an accident, Igor.’ I took a step towards him and held out my arms, as if I could hope for something. ‘Igor, it was an accident!’
He jumped away from me as if I was a leper, with the light, elegant movement of a magician who is used to working in the Twilight.
Fighting in the Twilight. Killing in the Twilight.
‘Accidents like that don’t happen,’ he said, spitting the words out. ‘You’re – you’re filthy scum – you witch …’
He froze as he absorbed the remaining traces of my magic.
‘You take power from children!’ I couldn’t stop myself from answering: ‘And you, what are you doing here, Light One?’ My tongue almost refused to obey me, it was impossible, unthinkable to call him that, but he really was a Light One, and the abuse had become a simple statement of fact. ‘What are you doing here if not grazing on little human children?’
‘Light cannot be removed.’ He shook his head. ‘What is taken returns a hundredfold. You take Dark, and the Dark grows. I take Light and it comes again.’
‘Tell that to the boy Alyosha, who’ll be miserable the whole evening!’ I shouted. ‘Make him feel better by saying his joy will return!’
‘I shall have other things to do, witch! Saving the children you have driven into the Dark!’
‘Console them,’ I said indifferently. Everything in the world seemed to be covered with a crust of ice. ‘That’s your job … my darling.’
What am I doing?
He’ll only be convinced that I knew everything in advance, that the Day Watch planned a cunning operation, that he has been cruelly mocked and deceived, that everything that has happened between us was only a cunning pretence.
‘Witch,’ Igor said contemptuously. ‘You will leave this place. Do you understand?’
I very nearly answered him: ‘Gladly!’ After all, what joy was there left for me in this summer, this sea, this abundance of power? I could restore myself little by little, the important part of the work was already done.