When I reached the hotel, I immediately sensed that my room’s defences had been compromised. The defences had worked just as they were intended to do, and that was my main problem. Without looking at anyone, I went up to the sixth floor, walked to my suite, put the key in the lock and froze for a moment, looking at the door.
Okay, whatever was about to happen, I had to go through it.
He was lying in the middle of the lounge with his arms flung out to the sides. There was an expression of childish surprise and resentment on his face, as if he’d opened a wrapper and instead of the sweet he’d been hoping for he’d found an angry hornet that had instantly sunk its sting into his carelessly exposed finger.
He had stumbled into my Shahab’s Ring. Not complex magic, but very powerful. And, naturally, he hadn’t known the word that was needed. He was the unfortunate young detective, Andriukha Tiunnikov, a Light One from the Night Watch, who had been trying to prove that I’d murdered the girl on Saturday.
If he’d been more experienced, he would never have stuck his nose into the area enclosed by the Ring. I hadn’t even set it round the whole room – only the safe with the bag in it.
This was the very last thing I needed – the Light Ones regarded the deaths of ordinary people as poaching, but the killing of an Other was a different matter altogether. It already looked like a tribunal.
But I had simply closed off my own territory, closed it off in a way that Others understood. This is mine! Keep out! No entry!
Only he hadn’t kept out. And he’d met his end in the Twilight … The stupid kid. Had he been trying to impress his bosses?
I had to own up. Otherwise they’d ask in a way I couldn’t refuse to answer.
I reached for the phone – not my mobile, but the ordinary phone that was standing on the table. The number obligingly surfaced from my memory.
‘Night Watch? Vitaly Rogoza, Other, Dark. If I’m not mistaken, I have your employee Andrei Tiunnikov here. He’s dead. You’d better come. Hotel Cosmos, suite six twelve.’
Strangely enough, the Light Ones weren’t the first to arrive. The moment the first Others reached my floor – there were two of them – I felt as if I were suddenly flooded with energy from someone. The pair were Dark Magicians and they were both brimful of a Dark power that reminded me in some ways of the Twilight, except that it was even denser and darker. A long tongue of Twilight ran straight down through the floors of the hotel, gradually growing thinner as it approached the ground and seeming to run on beyond it, to somewhere deeper, somewhere underground.
There was a knock at the door, emphatically correct.
‘Yes, yes,’ I replied, without getting up out of my armchair. ‘It’s open, come in!’
They came in. My acquaintance from the apartment on Pervomaiskaya Street, Shagron. And another one, also a magician, as far as I could tell. A bit overweight, like Shagron, with dark hair. And powerful. More powerful than his partner. But even so, against my expectations, it was Shagron who started talking. It seemed as though it was the accepted thing among members of the Watches for the most powerful member of a team to keep quiet – Anton had preferred to listen too.
‘Good morning, colleague.’
‘What’s good about it? You must be joking, colleague.’
I deliberately pronounced the word ‘colleague’ in the same tone as Shagron. But he wasn’t so easily provoked, and that was where he had the advantage over me. In experience. All I had to rely on were cheap wisecracks like that, plus moments of sudden illumination and the mysterious stairway that obligingly offered me one step after another and then arranged a kick up the arse at the appropriate moment.
‘I’m not joking, colleague, simply greeting you. It’s a pity you didn’t wait for us back there … you know where I mean. I’d been counting on having a word with you.’
‘I didn’t want to get in your way,’ I confessed, and it was more than half true. A standard response from an Other – Dark or Light.
‘I was counting on help. Help from a brother-in-arms. But you chose to disappear.’
That ‘I’ was strictly a Dark way of speaking. In Shagron’s place, any Light One would definitely have said ‘We’, and been perfectly sincere. And he’d have meant exactly what Shagron had meant, no less sincerely, of course.
‘Okay Let me introduce you. This is Edgar, our colleague from Estonia, who’s recently became a member of the Moscow Watch. What have you got here?’
‘What I’ve got here is yet another body,’ I confessed. ‘A Light Other. A Watch member. But then you already know all about it, don’t you, colleague Edgar?’
‘There’s not much time? The Light Ones will be here any minute? Is that what you wanted to say?’ Edgar asked, abandoning diplomacy and addressing me familiarly. I realised there was no point in arguing with this dark-haired Estonian.
‘Last Saturday evening, when I’d just arrived, this Light One was in charge of the operation investigating a poaching vampire.’
‘A vampiress,’ Edgar corrected me with a frown. ‘And then?’
‘By sheer chance I just happened to be there beside the victim. They found me beside the corpse and recognised me as a Dark One. Clearly out of inexperience – I can’t see any other reason – Tiunnikov accused me of what the vampire – that is, the vampiress – had done. I put him in his place, and I admit I did it quite sharply, but he’d asked for it. And that’s really the whole story. When I left my room today, I left some protective spells. And when I came in, there he was. He was already beyond my help.’
The last sentence simply came out on its own, I hadn’t been planning to say it. I felt I was beginning to talk nonsense again.
‘This snot-nosed kid was in charge of the operation?’ Shagron asked incredulously. ‘When there were Light Ones with far more experience – the Tigress, the magicians …’
‘Tiunnikov was in training, that’s perfectly normal,’ Edgar barked at his partner and then suddenly glanced at me. ‘But you set up a Shahab’s Ring so strong that it killed the Light Ones’ trainee on the spot?’
The question was almost rhetorical. Apparently I’d cast a simple spell, but put too much power into it. Maybe …
I sensed the approach of the Light Ones at the same time as Edgar, just as they were nearing the hotel. A few seconds later Shagron picked them up too.
‘What did you tell them?’ Edgar asked, obviously in a hurry. ‘But keep it short.’
I sensed that he had covered us with a cowl of invisibility, and quite a powerful one too. Before I said a word, I added some power of my own to the cowl, drawn partly from somewhere inside myself, from my own mind, and partly from outside. It happened quite spontaneously, but I read the dumb astonishment in Edgar’s eyes.
‘I phoned and said there was a dead Light One in my room. And told them his name. That’s all.’
Edgar gave a barely perceptible nod and glanced significantly at Shagron, who gave the slightest of shrugs.
We waited for the knock at the door – a far less polite one this time – in silence.
The Light Ones didn’t wait to be invited. They just walked straight in.
There were five of them. Tolik, Anton and the girl shape-shifter could barely have had enough time to get from Pervomaiskaya Street to their office. Two more had come with them – a cultured-looking young guy wearing glasses with eighty-dollar frames and another with a suntanned face, as if it wasn’t winter in Moscow.
These last two and Tolik carefully examined, probed and scanned every centimetre of my suite. The walls here had probably never seen such intense magical activity.
Anton and the girl didn’t interfere, but I could clearly sense their aversion. Not even hatred – the Light Ones don’t really even know how to hate properly. More like a desire to pin me into a corner, to have me condemned and punished. Or simply to hit me with so much power that I’d be driven into the Twilight for ever.