"You're a botanist," I said dejectedly.

"Correct!" Arina laughed. "Listen, are you sure you're not Roman's dad?"

"No I'm…" I hesitated for a moment, and then said the most convenient thing that came to mind: "I'm a friend of his mother's. Thank you very much for saving the children."

"Oh, sure, I really saved them!" Arina said and smiled again. She was standing with her back to me, sprinkling dry herbs into a teapot-a pinch of one, a tiny bit of another, a spoonful of a third… somehow my gaze automatically came to rest on the section of those worn jeans that outlined her firm butt. It was immediately clear that the butt was firm, without any sign of that favorite city lady's ailment-cellulite. "Ksyusha's a bright girl… they'd have found their own way out."

"What about the wolves?" I asked.

"What wolves, Anton?" Arina looked at me in amazement. "I explained that to them-it was a stray dog. Where would wolves come from in a little forest like this?"

"A stray dog, and with pups, is dangerous too," I observed.

"Well, maybe you're right." Arina sighed. "But even so, I don't think they would have attacked the children. An animal has to go completely crazy to do something like that. People are far more dangerous than animals…"

Well, I couldn't argue with that…

"Don't you find it boring out here in the wilderness?" I asked, changing the subject.

"I'm not stuck here all the time," Arina laughed. "I come for the summer. I'm writing a dissertation: 'The Ethnogenesis of Certain Species of Crucifers in the Central Region of Russia.'"

"For a doctorate?" I asked rather enviously. For some reason I still felt sad that I'd never finished writing mine… and I hadn't finished it because I'd become an Other, and all those scholarly games had suddenly seemed boring. The games were boring-but even so I felt sad about it.

"Postdoctoral," Arina replied with understandable pride. "I'm thinking of presenting it this winter…"

"Is that your research library you have with you?" I asked, nodding at the bookshelf.

"Yes," said Arina, noddng in reply. "It was a dumb thing to do, of course, drag all the books here. But I got a lift from… a friend. In a Jeep. So I took the opportunity and piled in my whole library."

I tried to imagine whether a Jeep could get through this forest. It looked as though there was a fairly wide track starting just at the back of the house… maybe it could get through…

I went over to the bookcase and inspected the books closely.

It really was a rich library for a botanical scholar. There were some old volumes from early last century, with forewords singing the praises of the Party, and Comrade Stalin in particular. And some even older ones, prerevolutionary. And lots of simple well-thumbed volumes published twenty or thirty years earlier.

"A lot of them are just lumber," Arina said without turning around. "The only place for them is in some bibliophile's collection. But somehow… I can't bring myself to sell them."

I nodded dejectedly, glancing at the bookcase through the Twilight. Nothing suspicious. No magic. Old books on botany.

Or an illusion created so artfully that I couldn't see through it.

"Sit down, the tea's ready," said Arina.

I sat down on a squeaky Viennese chair, picked up my cup of tea and sniffed at it.

The smell was glorious. It was a bit like ordinary good-quality tea, and a bit like citrus, and a little bit minty. But I could have bet my life the brew didn't contain any tea leaves, or citron, or plain ordinary mint.

"Well," Arina said with a smile. "Why don't you try it?"

She sat down facing me and leaned forward slightly. My gaze involuntarily slipped down to the open collar revealing her suntanned breasts. I wondered if "the friend with a Jeep" was her lover? Or simply a colleague, another botanist? Oh sure! A botanist with a Jeep…

What was wrong with me? Acting like I was just back from an uninhabited island and hadn't seen a woman for the last ten years.

"It's hot," I said, holding the cup in my hands. "Let it cool off a bit…"

Arina nodded.

"It's handy to have an electric kettle," I added. "It boils quickly. But where do you get your power from, Arina? I didn't notice any wires around the house."

Arina flinched.

"Maybe an underground cable?" she said plaintively.

"Oh no," I said, holding the hand with the cup away from me and carefully pouring the brew out onto the floor. "That answer won't do. Think again."

Arina tossed her head in annoyance. "What a disaster! And over such a little thing…"

"It's always the little things that give you away," I said sympathetically. I stood up. "Night Watch of the City of Moscow, Anton Gorodetsky. I demand that you immediately remove the illusion."

Arina didn't answer.

"Your refusal to cooperate will be interpreted as a violation of the Treaty," I reminded her.

Arina blinked. And disappeared.

So that was the way it was going to be…

I raised my shadow with a glance, reached toward it, and the cool Twilight embraced me.

The little house hadn't changed at all.

But Arina wasn't there.

I concentrated hard. It was too dim and gray in there to see my shadow, but I managed to find it. I stepped down to the second level of the Twilight.

The gray mist thickened and space was filled with a heady, distant drone. A cold shudder ran across my skin. This time the little house had changed-and radically. It had turned into an old peasant hut. The walls were bare logs, overgrown with moss. Instead of glass, there were sheets of semi-transparent mica in the windows. The furniture was cruder and older, the Viennese chair I was sitting on had turned into a sawn-off log. Only the distinguished scholarly bookcase hadn't changed. However, the books in it were rapidly changing their appearance, the false letters were dropping to the floor, the leatherette spines were changing to genuine leather…

Arina wasn't there. There was only a vague, dim silhouette, hovering somewhere close to the bookcase. A fleeting, transparent shadow… the witch had retreated to the third level of the Twilight.

In theory I could go there too.

Only in practice, I'd never tried. For a second-level magician, that meant straining his powers to the absolute extreme.

But right now I was too angry with the cunning witch to care. She had tried to enchant me, to put a love spell on me… the old hag.

I stood by the darkened window, catching the faint droplets of light that penetrated to the second level of the Twilight. And I found, or at least I thought I found, the faintest of shadows on the floor…

The hardest thing was spotting it. After that, the shadow did as I wanted, swirling up toward me and opening the way through.

I stepped down to the third level of the Twilight.

Into a strange sort of house, woven together out of the branches and thick trunks of trees.

There were no more books, and no furniture. Just a nest of branches.

And Arina, standing there facing me.

How old she was.

She wasn't hunched and crooked, like Baba Yaga in the fairytale. She was still tall and upright. But her skin was wrinkled like the bark of a tree and her eyes had sunk deep into her head. The only garment she was wearing was a dirty, shapeless sackcloth smock and her dried-out breasts dangled like empty little pouches behind its deep neckline. She was also bald, with just a single tress of hair jutting out from the crown of her head like an American Indian forelock.

"Night Watch," I repeated, the words emerging slowly and reluctantly from my mouth. "Leave the Twilight. This is your final warning!"

What could I have done to her, if she could dive to the third level of the Twilight so easily? I don't know. Maybe nothing…

But she didn't offer any more resistance. She took a step forward-and disappeared.