Not pig's blood, or cow's blood, but real human blood. Curse this hunt…

«You have to go through this,» the boss had said. «Five years in the analytical department's a bit too long, don't you think?» I don't know, maybe it is a bit too long, but I like it. And after all, the boss himself hasn't worked out in the field for more than a hundred years now. I ran past the bright shop windows with their displays of fake Gzhel ceramics and stage-set heaps of food. There were cars rushing past me along the avenue, a few pedestrians. That was all fake too, an illusion, just one facet of the world, the only one accessible to human beings. I was glad I wasn't one of them.

Without breaking my rapid stride, I summoned the Twilight.

The world sighed as it opened up. It was as if airport searchlights had suddenly come on behind me, casting a long, thin, sharp shadow. The shadow swirled up, acquiring volume; the shadow was drawing me into itself—into a dimension where there are no shadows. The shadow detached itself from the dirty asphalt surface, swirling and swaying like a column of heavy smoke. The shadow was running ahead of me…

Quickening my stride, I broke through the gray silhouette into the Twilight. The colors of the world dimmed and the cars on the avenue slowed, as if they were suddenly bogged down.

I was getting close to my goal.

As I dodged into the alleyway, I thought I would just catch the final scene. The boy's motionless, ravaged body, drained dry, the vampires disappearing.

But I wasn't too late after all.

The boy was standing in front of a girl-vampire who had already extended her fangs, slowly taking off his scarf. He was probably not afraid now—the Call completely numbs the conscious mind. More likely he was longing to feel the touch of those sharp, gleaming fangs.

There was a young male vampire standing beside them. I sensed immediately that he was the leader of the pair: He was the one who was initiating her, he was introducing her to the scent of blood. And the most sickening thing about it was that he had a Moscow registration tag. What a bastard!

But then, that only improved my chances…

The vampires turned toward me in confusion, not understanding what was going on. The boy was in their Twilight, I shouldn't have been able to see him… or them either.

Then the male vampire's face began to relax, he even smiled—a calm, friendly smile.

«Hi there…«

He'd taken me for one of his own. And he could hardly be blamed for his mistake: I really was one of them now. Almost. The week of preparation had not been wasted: I had begun to sense them… but I'd almost gone over to the Dark Side myself.

«Night Watch,» I said. I held my hand out, holding the amulet. It was discharged, but that's not so easy to sense at a distance. «Leave the Twilight!»

The young guy would probably have obeyed me, hoping that I didn't know about the trail of blood he'd left behind him, that the whole business could just be classified as «an attempt at unauthorized interaction with a human being.» But the girl lacked his self-control; she didn't understand.

«A-a-a-agh!» She threw herself at me with a long, drawn-out howl. It was a good thing she still hadn't sunk her teeth into the boy; she was out of her mind now, like a desperate junkie who's just stuck a needle in his vein only to have it jerked back out again, like a nymphomaniac after her man pulled out just a moment before orgasm.

Her lunge would have been too fast for any human being; no one could have parried it.

But I was in the same dimension of reality as the girl-vampire.

I threw up my arm and splashed the liquid out of the open bottle into the hideously transformed face.

Why do vampires tolerate alcohol so poorly?

The menacing scream changed to a shrill squeal. The girl-vampire began whirling around on the spot, beating her hands against her face as it shed layers of skin and grayish flesh. The male vampire swung round, all set to dart away.

This was going too easily altogether. A registered vampire isn't some casual visitor I have to fight on equal terms. I threw the bottle at the girl-vampire, reached out my hand and grabbed hold of the cord of his registration tag, which had unraveled on command. The vampire gave a hoarse croak and clutched at his throat.

«Leave the Twilight!» I shouted.

I think he realized things were looking really bad now. He flung himself toward me, trying to reduce the pressure from the cord, extending his fangs and transforming as he came.

If the amulet had been fully charged, I could have simply stunned him.

As it was, I had to kill him.

The tag—a seal on the vampire's chest that gave off a faint blue glow—made a crunching sound when I gave the silent order. The energy implanted in it by someone with far more skill than me flooded into the dead body. The vampire was still running. He was well-fed and strong; other people's lives were still nourishing his dead flesh. But he couldn't possibly resist such a powerful blow: His skin shriveled until it was stretched as taut as parchment over his bones; slime gushed out of his eye sockets. Then his spine shattered and the twitching remains collapsed at my feet.

I swung around—the girl-vampire could have regenerated already. But there was no danger. She was running away across the yard between the buildings, taking huge bounds. She still hadn't left the Twilight, so I was the only one who could see this astounding sight. Apart from the dogs, of course. Somewhere off to one side a small canine broke into hysterical barking, trans-fixed simultaneously by hatred and fear and all the other feelings that dogs have felt for the living dead since time immemorial.

I didn't have enough strength left to chase the vampire. I straightened up and captured a 3-D image of her aura—gray, desiccated, rotten. We'd find her. There was nowhere she could hide now.

But where was the boy?

After he emerged from the Twilight created by the vampires, he could have fainted or fallen into a trance. But he wasn't in the alley. He couldn't have run past me… I bounded out of the alley into the yard and saw him. He was bolting, moving almost as fast as the vampire. Well, good for him! That was wonderful. No help required. It was bad that he would remember everything that had happened, but then who would believe a young boy? And before morning all his memories would fade and assume the less menacing features of a fantastic nightmare.

Or should I really go after the little guy?

«Anton!»

It was Igor and Garik, our inseparable duo of operatives, running down the alley from the avenue.

«The girl got away!» I shouted.

Garik kicked out at the vampire's shriveled corpse as he ran, sending a cloud of rotten dust flying up into the frosty air. He shouted:

«The image!»

I sent him the image of the girl-vampire running away. Garik frowned and started moving faster. Both operatives dashed off in pursuit. Igor shouted as he ran:

«Clear up the trash!»

I nodded, as if they needed an answer, and emerged from my own Twilight. The world blossomed. The operatives' silhouettes melted away, and their invisible feet even stopped leaving tracks in the snow lying in the human dimension of reality.

I sighed and walked over to their gray Volvo parked at the curb. There were a few primitive implements lying on the backseat: a heavy-duty plastic bag, a shovel, and a small sweeping brush. It took me about five minutes to scrape up the vampire's feather-light remains and put the bag in the trunk. I took some dirty snow from a decaying heap left by a careless yard-keeper, scattered it in the alley, and trampled it a bit, working the final dusty, rotten remains into the slush. No human burial for you, you're not human…

That was all.

I went back to the car, got into the driver's seat, and unbuttoned my jacket. I felt good, very good, in fact. The senior vampire was dead, the guys would pick up his girlfriend, and the boy was alive.

I could just imagine how delighted the boss would be!

«Sloppy work!»

I tried to say something, but the next remark stung like a slap to the cheek and shut me up.

«You screwed up!»

«But…«

«Do you at least understand your own mistakes?»

The boss had cooled off a bit, and I took the risk of raising my eyes from the floor and saying cautiously:

«It seems to me…«

I like being in that office. It stirs the kid in me to see all those amusing little trinkets standing on the shelves in the bulletproof glass cupboards, hanging all over the walls, tossed carelessly on the desk, jumbled up with the computer floppies and business papers. Every item there—from the old Japanese fan to the jagged piece of metal with a deer welded onto it, the symbol of some auto plant—had its own history. If you were lucky and the boss was in the mood you could hear some very, very interesting stories.

Only I don't seem to find him in that kind of mood too often.

«Okay.» The boss stopped striding round the office, sat down in a leather armchair, and lit up. «Let's hear it.»

His voice had turned businesslike, matching his appearance. To the human eye he looked about forty years old, and he belonged to that narrow circle of businessmen that the government likes to rely on so much.

«What do you want to hear?» I asked, at the risk of provoking yet another impartial assessment.

«The mistakes. Your mistakes.»

Right then… Okay.

«My first mistake, Boris Ignatievich,» I said with a perfectly innocent air, «was that I failed to understand the nature of the mission correctly.»

«Oh, really?» the boss replied.

«Well, I assumed my goal was to track down a vampire who had begun actively hunting in Moscow. To track him down and… er… neutralize him.»

«Go on, go on…« the boss encouraged me.

«In actual fact the basic purpose of the mission was to determine my suitability for operational activity, for field work. Starting with my incorrect understanding of the mission, that is, following the principle 'separate and protect'…«

The boss sighed and nodded. Anyone who didn't know him too well might even have thought he was ashamed.

«And did you contravene this principle in any way?»

«No, and that's why I botched the mission.»

«How did you botch it?»

«Right at the beginning…« I squinted sideways at a stuffed white polar owl standing on a shelf behind the glass. Had it really moved its head? «Right at the beginning I drained the amulet in a futile attempt to neutralize a black vortex…«

Boris Ignatievich frowned. He brushed his hair back with his hand.