“An inflatable one from a sex shop,” I said. “Don’t try to frighten me, it’s impossible anyway.”

“You think so?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

“I do. But if you really want to practice your battle magic that badly, I have someone you can use as a target.”

“Who?”

“A Higher Vampire. The one who’s been working with Edgar. The one who took out two Light Ones today at Chistye Prudy.”

“Who?” Olga repeated insistently.

“Saushkin.”

A faint shadow ran across Olga’s face. She took me very gently by the elbow and said, “Anton, we all have tragedies in our lives. Sometimes we lose friends, and sometimes we lose enemies, but we still blame ourselves…”

“Save the psychotherapy for Gesar!” I barked. “It’s Gennady Saushkin! Saushkin senior! Kostya’s father!”

“We checked him, he’s fourth-level…,” Olga said, and then stopped.

“Do I have to explain to you how easy it is for a vampire to raise his level?” I asked.

“From fourth-level to Higher…,” she said. “But dozens of people would have disappeared, we ought to have noticed…”

“Then we just didn’t!” I exclaimed, grabbing her by the hand. “Olga, it’s one chance in a thousand, but what if he’s still at home? What if we could take him by surprise?”

“Let’s go,” Olga said with a nod. “I hope you can still remember your old address?”

“Just the two of us?”

“I think two Higher Light Ones can handle one vampire. Everyone in the office right now is too young. We don’t want to take cannon fodder with us, do we?”

I looked into her eyes for a few seconds, watching the mischievous sparks dancing in them. Was Olga bored of sitting in the office and managing things, then?

“Let’s go,” I said. “Just the two of us. Although it’s a bit too much like the beginning of a Hollywood action movie.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean there’ll be an ambush waiting for us. Or you’ll turn out to be the Light Other who’s helping Edgar and Gennady.”

“Idiot,” said Olga, not even offended. But while we were walking downstairs, she said spitefully, “By the way, just to be sure, we checked out your Sveta.”

“And what did you find?” I asked.

“It’s not her.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “And have you been checked out?”

“All Higher Light Ones have been checked. In Russia and Europe and the States. I don’t know who it was that Foma caught a glimpse of in the Twilight, but all the Higher Ones have hundred-percent alibis.”

You should never go back to houses where you once used to live. Never, not for anything-not until you’re old and senile, and the sight of the sandbox in the courtyard of the building where you were born brings a sweet smile to your lips.

As I looked at my old front entrance, I thought that not so many years had gone by…even by ordinary human standards. Eight years ago I had walked out of these very doors to set out on an ordinary vampire hunt. I didn’t know then that I would meet Svetlana, that she would become my wife, that I would become a Higher One…

But I was already an Other. And I knew that there were Others living above me-a family of vampires. Good, law-abiding vampires with whom I managed to remain friends for quite a long time.

Until I killed my first vampire.

Well, there’s always a first time for everything.

“Shall we go?” Olga asked.

I was suddenly struck by another painful memory. The boy Egor, who at the time was younger than the trainee Andrei, had recorded an aura just as successfully and had also almost become a vampire’s victim. And Olga and I, working together for the first time, had set out on his trail.

“Deja vu,” I said, snapping out of my trance.

“What’s brought that on?” Olga asked absentmindedly. She had lived in the world for so long that she could easily have forgotten that adventure of ours… “Ah, you remembered ustracking Egor? By the way, I recently found out that he works in a circus, can you imagine? As an illusionist!”

“Let’s go,” I urged her.

Olga was right not to be afraid of the shadows of her past. If she did feel a little bit guilty about Egor, at least she was still keeping an eye on him.

We got into the elevator and I pressed the button for the tenth floor. We rode up in complete silence. Olga was clearly psyching herself up, gathering Power. I examined my fingers. In the years since I’d left, the elevator had been changed, replaced by a “vandal-proof” model with metal walls and buttons. Young punks could no longer burn the plastic buttons with cigarette lighters the way they used to, so the buttons were glued up with chewing gum instead.

I rubbed my fingers together to clean off the sticky muck of polyvinyl acetate, artificial flavors, and someone else’s spittle.

I didn’t always manage to love people all the time.

The lift stopped and I said apologetically, “Tenth floor. The Saushkins…Wait. Saushkin lives on the eleventh.”

I glanced sideways at the door to my old apartment. They hadn’t changed the door…even the locks looked the same to me, except that the faceplates were a bit brighter and fresher. When we had walked up half a flight of steps, I looked back at my door again, and it opened, as if someone had been waiting for us to move away. A disheveled woman of uncertain age stuck her head out. Her face was swollen and she was wearing a dirty housecoat. She looked us up and down with a spiteful expression and started shrieking, “Have you pissed in the elevator again?”

The accusation was so unexpected that I broke into laughter. But Olga pressed her lips together and took a step back down. The woman quickly half-closed the door, ready to slam it shut. Olga looked hard at the woman for a while and then said very quietly, “No. You imagined it.”

“I imagined it,” the woman said in a thick, slow voice.

“And your upstairs neighbor is flooding your apartment,” Olga went on. “Go upstairs and tell him what you think of him.”

The woman beamed and leaped out onto the landing just as she was-in her filthy, soiled house coat and tattered slippers and no socks. She ran past us eagerly.

“Why did you do that?” I asked Olga.

“She asked for it,” Olga replied judgmentally. “Let her serve the cause of the Light. At least once in her life.”

I thought that if there was really a Higher Vampire hiding in Saushkin’s apartment, this could actually be the last thing the woman ever did in her life. Vampires really dislike personal insults.

But then, I didn’t find the woman at all likeable either.

“Who did you sell the apartment to?” Olga asked. “Who is this mental patient?”

“I sold it through an agency.”

“And they’re not poor people, if they could buy an apartment,” Olga said with a shrug. “How can she neglect herself like that?”

Apparently she was more offended by the woman’s dilapidated appearance than her rudeness. Olga was almost obsessively strict about such matters-no doubt as a result of the hardships of the war years and her subsequent imprisonment.

The woman whom Olga had recruited so swiftly was already pounding on Saushkin’s door with her hands and feet and screeching, “Open up! Open up, you bloodsucker! You’ve flooded me out! You’ve filled my whole apartment with hot water, you bastard!”

“I’m always touched by these accidental insights that human beings have,” Olga remarked. “Tell me, why does a neighbor who has flooded her apartment, even if it is with hot water, suddenly become a ‘bloodsucker’?”

Meanwhile the woman upstairs had launched into a list of her property that had been soaked and ruined. The list was so colorful that I couldn’t help glancing around to make sure there was no steam actually escaping from the open door of the apartment.

“A Czech piano, a Japanese television, an Italian three-piece suit, a brown mink coat!”

“A chestnut Arabian stallion,” Olga said derisively.