"Not a good idea," I muttered.

We had a drink.

"You know, this is a pretty weird situation we're in here!" Las mused. "A huge empty building! Hundreds of apartments-and only nine people living in them… that's if we include you. The things you could get up to! It takes your breath away! And what a video you could shoot! Just imagine it-the luxurious interiors, empty restaurants, dead laundries, rusting exercise machines and cold saunas, empty swimming pools and casino tables wrapped in plastic sheeting. And a little girl wandering through it all. Wandering around and singing. It doesn't even matter what."

"Do you shoot videos?" I asked cautiously.

"Nah…" Las frowned. "Well… just the once I helped this punk band I know shoot one. They showed it on MTV, but then it was banned."

"What was so terrible about it?"

"Nothing really," said Las. "It was just a song, nothing offensive about it, in fact it was about love. The visuals were unusual. We shot them in a hospital for patients with motor function disorders. We set up a strobe light in a hall, put on the song 'Captain, Captain, Why Have You Left the Horse?' and invited the patients to dance. So they danced to the strobes. Or they tried to. And then we laid the new sound sequence over the visuals. The result was really stylish. But you really can't show it. It has a bad feel somehow."

I imagined the "visuals" and I squirmed.

"I'm no good as a video producer," Las admitted. "Or as a musician… they played a song of mine on the radio once, in the middle of the night, in a program for all sorts of hardcore weirdos. And what do you think? This well-known songwriter immediately called the radio station and said all his life in his songs he'd been teaching people about good, and about eternal values, but this one song had cancelled out his entire life's work… You must have heard one song, I think-did you think it was encouraging people to do bad things?"

"I think it made fun of bad attitudes," I said.

"Thank you," Las said sadly. "But that's exactly the problem- there are too many people who won't understand that. They'll think it's all for real."

"That's what the fools will think," I said, trying to console the unacknowledged bard.

"But there are more of them!" Las exclaimed. "And they haven't perfected head replacements yet…"

He reached for the bottle, poured the vodka and said, "You drop in any time you need to, no need to be shy. And later I'll get you a key for an apartment on the fifteenth floor. The apartment's empty, but it has a toilet."

"Won't the owner object?" I asked with a laugh.

"It's all the same to him now. And his heirs can't agree on how to share out the space."

I GOT BACK TO MY PLACE AT FOUR IN THE MORNING. SLIGHTLY DRUNK, but remarkably relaxed. After all, you don't often come across people who are so different. Working in the Watch encourages you to be too categorical. This guy doesn't smoke or drink-he's a good boy. This one swears like a trooper-he's a bad boy. And there's nothing to be done about it. Those are precisely the ones we're most interested in-the good ones as our support, the bad ones as a potential source of Dark Ones.

But somehow we tend to forget that there are all different sorts of people…

The bard with the bass guitar didn't know anything about the Others. I was sure of that. If only I could have sat up half the night with every one of Assol's inhabitants, I could have formed an accurate opinion of all of them.

But I wasn't entertaining any such illusions. Not everybody will ask you to come in, not everybody will start talking to you about obscure, abstract subjects. And apart from the ten or so residents, there were hundreds of service personnel-security guards, plumbers, laborers, bookkeepers. There was no way I could possibly check all of them in a reasonable amount of time.

I took a wash in the shower-I discovered a strange sort of hose in it that I could get a jet of water out of-and then walked out into my one and only room. I needed to get some sleep… and the next morning I'd try to come up with a new plan.

"Hi, Anton," a voice said from the window.

I recognized the voice. And I immediately felt sick at heart.

"Good morning, Kostya," I said. The words of greeting sounded inappropriate somehow, but to wish the vampire a bad morning would have been even more stupid.

"Can I come in?" Kostya asked.

I walked over to the window. Kostya was sitting on the outside sill with his back to me, dangling his legs. He was completely naked, as if to make obvious that he hadn't climbed up the wall, but flown to the window in the form of a gigantic bat.

A Higher Vampire. At not much more than twenty years old. A talented boy…

"I think not," I said.

Kostya nodded and didn't try to argue. "As I understand it, we're working on the same job?"

"Yes."

"That's good." Kostya turned around and flashed a gleaming white smile. "I like the idea of working with you. But are you really afraid of me?"

"No."

"I've learned a lot," Kostya boasted. Just like when he was a kid and he used to declare, "I'm a terrible vampire! I'm going to learn how to turn into a bat! I'm going to learn how to fly!"

"You haven't learned anything," I corrected him. "You've stolen a lot."

Kostya frowned. "Words. The usual Light word game. Your people allowed me to take it, so I did. So what's the problem?"

"Are we going to carry on sparring like this?" I asked. I raised my hand, folding the fingers into the sign of Aton, the negation of non-life. I'd been wanting for ages to find out if the ancient North African spells worked on modern Russian creatures of the Darkness.

Kostya glanced warily at the incomplete sign. Either he knew what it was, or he'd caught a whiff of Power. "Are you allowed to breach your disguise?"

I lowered my hand in annoyance. "No. But I might just risk it."

"No need. If you say so, I'll leave. But right now we're doing the same job… we have to talk."

"So talk," I said, dragging a stool over to the window.

"You won't let me in then?"

"I don't want to be all alone in the middle of the night with a naked man," I chuckled. "Who knows what people will think? Let's hear it."

"What do you make of the T-shirt collector?"

I looked at Kostya quizzically.

"The guy on the tenth floor. He collects funny T-shirts."

"He doesn't know anything," I said.

Kostya nodded. "That's what I think too. Eight of the apartments here are occupied. The owners of another six show up from time to time, but all the rest are very rarely here. I've already checked out all the permanent residents."

"And?"

"Nothing. They don't know anything about us."

I didn't ask how Kostya could be so sure. After all, he was a Higher Vampire. They can enter another person's mind as easily as an experienced magician.

"I'll deal with the other six in the morning," said Kostya. "But I'm not very hopeful."

"And do you have any suggestions?" I asked.

Kostya shrugged. "Anyone living here has enough money and influence to interest a vampire or a werewolf. A weak, hungry one… newly initiated. So the list of suspects is pretty long."

"How many newly initiated lower Dark Ones are there in Moscow now?" I asked. I was amazed at how easily the phrase "lower Dark Ones" slipped off my tongue.

I never used to call them that.

I used to feel sorry for them.

Kostya reacted calmly to the phrase. He really was a Higher Vampire. In control, confident of himself.

"Not many," he said evasively. "They're being checked, don't worry. Everybody's being checked. All the lower Others, and even magicians."

"Is Zabulon really concerned?" I asked.