I had no idea why, but my new ability this time was immunity to the Call. I could hear it and understand it, but I remained entirely in control of myself. And of course, I screened my mind from the caller, so that he wouldn’t suspect his victim had been transformed from a sleepwalker into a hunter.
‘A hunter?’ I asked myself curiously. ‘Hmm …’
So I was going hunting. Well now, that was interesting.
The Call continued.
‘Well, well,’ I thought. ‘This is the headquarters of the Day Watch. Everything here is saturated with magic. The defences here are quite incredible. But the Call is still effective … was effective?’
The Light Ones had invested a lot of effort in this trick. And in concealing it. It was their good luck that the chief of the Day Watch was out of Moscow – the Light Ones would never have been able to trick him, no matter how hard they tried.
Meanwhile I calmly got dressed, thinking sadly that my dream of visiting a restaurant and grabbing a bowl of hot, spicy soup and a plate of something like duck in cherry sauce had to be put off again indefinitely I set two or three weak protective spells and left my suite … I mean, my apartment. If they called them apartments here, I might as well too. My minidisc player was on my belt; I pressed the earphones into my ears and pulled my cap down tight onto my head.
‘Why not set it to random?’ I thought. ‘Play a little game with fate.’
And again fate chose me a song from the Kipelov and Mavrin album. A different one this time.
Mm … well. A rather gloomy prediction. Just when was it that I burned my final bridge? Or maybe that was what I’d just left the apartment to do? Instead of going up to the next floor and asking what had happened to some extremely powerful Talon or other. But I was being urged to follow the Call by that same certain something that had been lying hidden somewhere deep inside me.
Kipelov’s voice was no less enchanting than the Call. It had a hypnotic resonance, as convincing as truth itself. And I suddenly realised I was listening to a Dark anthem. A hymn to their ideal of rebellious souls acknowledging no boundaries or rules:
Freedom. The only thing that genuinely interests us. Freedom from everything. Even from dominating the world, and it’s sad that the Light Ones simply can’t understand that or believe it; they just carry on with their interminable intrigues, and in order to maintain the status quo, we have no choice but to obstruct them.
The lift slid smoothly downward, past the Twilight floors and the ordinary ones. I’m free …
If Kipelov was an Other, he had to be Dark. No one else could sing about freedom like that. And only the Dark Ones would hear the song’s deeper, true meaning!
The two taciturn warlocks on watch below let me out without any trouble – Edgar had done me a favour in having the image of my registration seal entered in the operational database. I walked out onto Tverskaya Street, into the thickening dusk of another Moscow evening, and set out towards the Call, but free from it. And from everything in the world.
Who wanted me so badly? There are no vampires among the Light Ones – no ordinary vampires, that is. All Others are energy vampires, they can all draw power from people. From their fears, from their joys, from their sufferings. The only fundamental difference between us and the Twilight moss is that we’re able to think and move about. And we don’t use the accumulated power simply for nourishment.
The Call led me along Tverskaya Street, away from the Kremlin, towards the Belorussian railway station. I walked along, alone in the evening crowds, as if I’d been singled out, chosen. And I had been chosen – by the Call. No one saw me, no one noticed me. No one was interested in me – not the girls warming themselves in the cars, not their pimps, not the toughs in their foreign cars sitting at the kerb. Nobody.
Turn right. Onto Strastnoi Boulevard.
The Call was getting stronger. I could feel it – that meant the encounter would be soon.
Droves of cars raced through the driving, sticky snow, the fine snowflakes dancing erratically in the beams of their headlights.
Cold and dusk. Moscow in winter.
The snow settled evenly on the boulevard pavements, on the benches that were empty at this time of year, on the bushes, and on the railings between the road and the pedestrian park.
They tried to get me halfway towards Karetny Ryad.
The spell of isolation seemed to fall from the sky – ordinary people simply lost interest in what was about to happen on the boulevard, the cars carried on rushing past, minding their own business, the few pedestrians nearby faltered for a moment and then wandered off, even those who had been moving towards me.
The Light Ones slipped out of the Twilight one after another. Four of them. Two magicians and two shape-shifters, already in battle form. A massive polar bear as white as snow and a tigress with bright orange stripes.
I was almost flattened when all the magicians struck together, from both sides. But they had underestimated their quarry – the blow had been calculated for the old me, the one that would have submitted to the Call.
I had already become someone else.
Mentally drawing my hands apart, I stopped the walls that were about to come together and imprison me. I stopped them, drew in power and pressed them back. Not very hard.
I don’t know what a tsunami looks like, I’ve never seen one. But it was the first thing that came to mind when I examined the result.
The Light Magicians’ walls, which had appeared so monolithic and irrestible only a second earlier, crumpled as though they were made of rice-paper. Both magicians were thrown back, swept onto the snow and dragged about ten metres across the ground; only the park railings stopped them falling under the wheels of the cars. A cloud of powdery snow flew up into the air.
The Light Ones probably then realised that they couldn’t take me only with magic. So the shape-shifters came hurtling at me in their animal forms.