The Day Watch (16 page)

Nothing here… nothing here… but there was something here.

It was Natasha.

And her dream had been prompted by me.

Natasha was standing in a bathroom, naked and covered in soapy lather. She was holding a boy, about five or six years old, and hammering his head against the tiled wall, saying over and over again: ‘Are you going to peep again? Are you going to peep?”

The boy was dangling in her hands like a rag doll. His eyes were wide open in terror, but he didn’t say anything.

He seemed to be far more afraid of being punished by his parents than hurt by his sister.

But Natasha wasn’t feeling too good either. Her soul was filled with a mixture of furious anger at her insufferable brother, and fear that she would hit his head against the wall too hard, and shame, even though only very recently she and her brother had been given their baths together, and guilt… because she’d deliberately left the door unlocked in the expectation that her brother would try to peep in, driven by the natural urge of children to violate all prohibitions.

This was really something! Passions like that in someone who wasn’t even twelve yet!

Natasha gave a deep sigh, and in her dream she hit her brother’s head so hard against the wall that it started to bleed. I couldn’t see where the blood came from, but it suddenly covered the entire head.

I sucked in her dream.

Completely. The fury, the fear, the shame, the guilt, and the budding sensuality, still vague and ill-defined. But the dream didn’t end!

Natasha had just released her grip when she grabbed her brother again by the shoulders and, with the cold calculating movement of an executioner, forced his head into the bath water, which instantly turned pink. Even the clumps of foam on the surface of the water turned pink. The boy began twitching helplessly, struggling to pull his head out of the water.

I froze in surprise. A murder committed in a dream gives almost the same discharge of Power as a real one. Now I’d be able to fill the gap in my soul in a single moment!

All I had to do was draw Natasha’s newly awakened fear out of her, and…

But I didn’t do anything. I stood there, leaning down over the bed, watching another person’s dream as if it were a horror movie that was showing on TV instead of the children’s cartoons.

Natasha suddenly jerked her brother’s head out of the water and he gulped in air greedily. There was no blood on him any longer-he just had a small bruise under one eye. Dreams have their own laws.

“You’ll tell them you fell in the bath yourself and banged your head, all right?” Natasha hissed. The boy nodded in fright. Natasha quickly pushed him out of the bathroom and closed the door, then slowly got into the foamy water.

The nice, bright-pink water… I waited for another second or two and then drank in the remains of the dream.

Triumph, excitement, tran-quillity.

And the gaping wound in my soul was immediately half-filled.

I should have let Natasha kill her brother. I only needed to take away her fear, and she would have drowned her little brother like a kitten.

I was covered in perspiration. My hands were shaking. Who could ever have expected nightmares like that from such a rational little Miss Know-it-all?

All right. Slow and steady does it

I moved on.

By half past midnight I had absorbed another three dreams. They weren’t such sumptuous feasts, but they provided fine surges of Power. This was a good place for a vacation, if the girls accumulated that much energy.

I had almost completely restored the strength that I’d lost. The lion’s share, of course, had come from Natasha. I had the feeling that if I could just suck in one more dream, then I would be completely restored and become a normal Other. But nobody had any more dreams that were of use to me. There was one that simply repelled me: Gulnara was dreaming that she was taking care of her old grandfather. Dashing around the kitchen, pouring his tea, constantly asking him solicitous questions. Oh, how I hate that awful Eastern culture… Turkish delight laced with arsenic.

If it wasn’t for Igor…

I would only have had to wait half an hour, or an hour, and one of my eighteen donors would have had a frightening dream.

But…

I didn’t hesitate for long.

I would collect all the Power I needed, absolutely everything, the next night. But today I could relax and try out the role of an ordinary woman.

I closed the door firmly and slipped out into the summer night. The camp was sleeping. There were lamps lit here and there on the pathways and an almost full moon hung in the sky. Nights like this are great for the werewolves: They’re at the peak of their powers, they can transform easily and at will, they’re full of high spirits, the thirst for life, and the urge to hunt, to tear living flesh to pieces, to stalk and pounce on their prey. Of course, the vampires and the shape-shifters are the very lowest caste of the Dark Ones. And most of them are simply stupid and primitive. But… on nights like this I envied them just a little bit. I envied them the primitive power that comes from the deepest animal depths of their nature. The ability to transform into a beast-and get rid of all those stupid human feelings.

I started laughing and set off along the path at a run, flinging my arms out and throwing my head back to look up at the sky. I might not have the powers of an Other yet, but my blood was seething with fresh Power, and I didn’t stumble even once or hesitate for a moment in my choice of direction. It was like just before my initiation, when

“mother’s old friend” Irina Alexandrovna had arrived at our apartment unexpectedly. I could sense that my parents were behaving oddly, awkwardly, and every now and then Irina Alexandrovna would look at me in a strange way, as if she were evaluating me, with a gentle, condescending smile. And then my parents suddenly decided to go out somewhere in a great hurry, leaving me alone for the entire evening with “the old friend.” And my future mentor told me everything. She said this was the first time she had ever seen my parents, that she had simply put a spell on them. She told me about the Others, and about the Twilight that gives them miraculous powers and said that the first time I entered the Twilight would determine who I would be, a Light One or a Dark One… She said I was a future Other. That I had been noticed by a certain “very, very powerful magician.” Later I wondered if it could have been Zabulon himself, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask…

Back then I hesitated for a long time… I was a little fool. I didn’t like the words “Dark Ones.” In the fairy tales and films the Dark Ones were always bad. They had power over the entire world, ruled countries and commanded armies, but at the same time they ate all sorts of disgusting things, spoke in horrible, repulsive voices, and betrayed everyone whenever they got the chance. And, in the end, they always lost.

Irina Alexandrovna laughed for a long time when I told her all that. She admitted that all the fairy tales were invented by the Light Ones. The Dark Ones didn’t usually bother with that kind of nonsense. She said what the Dark Ones really wanted was freedom and independence. They didn’t strive for power, they didn’t impose their own foolish desires oh others. She demonstrated some of her abilities to me-and I learned that my mom had

been unfaithful to my dad for a long time already, and my dad wasn’t nearly as courageous as I thought, and that my best friend Vika told people all sorts of horrible things about me…

I knew about my mom already, even at the age of ten. I tried not to think about her and Uncle Vitya. I felt so hurt for my dad. But when I heard about Vika, I got really furious and I realized that I wanted to get even with her. It seems funny to me now, but when I was ten, to learn that my friend had told our classmate Romka my most terrible secret-that I used to wet the bed until I was in second grade-was really horrible! I’d been wondering why he smirked in that disgusting way when I gave him a card and some colored pens for Army Day on the twenty-third of February…

Irina helped me to enter the Twilight for the first time. She said while I was there I would decide for myself who I would be. The

Twilight would see straight through my soul and make the most appropriate choice.

After that my friend Vika started getting bad marks all the time and swearing at all the teachers, even the head teacher. Then they took her out of our school; I heard she spent a long time in a children’s psychiatric hospital being treated for a rare condition, Tourette’s syndrome. The handsome Romka pissed his pants in the middle of Russian dictation and had to live with the nickname “Pisser” for two years afterward, until he and his parents moved to a different district.

Uncle Vitya drowned while he was swimming in the shallow pond at the dacha, but that wasn’t until three years later. That’s quite a difficult task for a child, after all. And it still makes me feel sick to remember the way I managed to get hold of a lock of his hair…

I didn’t regret my choice the tiniest bit.

There are some who think that we Dark Ones are evil. But that’s not true at all. We’re simply just. Proud, independent, and just.

And we decide things for ourselves.

The beach at night is filled with a wistful enchantment. Like a park in autumn, or a concert hall after a premiere.

The tired crowd goes away for a while to gather its strength for new insanities; the sea licks its wounds and throws the melon rinds, sodden chocolate wrappers, corn cobs, and other human rubbish up onto the beach; the cool, wet sand covers over the tracks of the seagulls and the crows.

I heard Igor when I was still approaching the beach. First his guitar and then his voice.

As he sang, I suddenly realized with piercing clarity that nothing was going to happen. There was a group of people sitting over there on the sand, enjoying themselves with a bottle or two and some bread rolls stolen from the supper table to go with them. And the most that I could count on, stupid fool that I was, was an invitation to spend the rest of the night in his room…

But even so I walked toward the sound. Just to make certain…

You say there’s no such thing as love,

There’s nothing but the carrot and the stick,

But I say flowers bloom

Because they don’t believe in death.

You tell me that you never want

To be a slave to anyone at all.

I say that means the slave will be

Whoever you have by your side.

I never liked that song. I don’t like the group Nautilus Pompilius in general-their songs sound almost as if they were ours, but there’s something subtly different about them. No wonder the Light Ones are so fond of them.

But I particularly disliked that song.

I was only two or three steps away from Igor when I realized that he was there on the beach alone. Igor noticed me too-he raised his head and smiled, still singing:

Maybe I am wrong,

Maybe you are right.

But I have seen with my own eyes

The grass reaching for the sky.

Why should we argue all night long

And lie sleepless till the dawn?

Maybe I am wrong,

Maybe you are right.

What good is arguing to us,

The day will come and then

You’ll see for yourself

If there’s a bottom to the sky

And why

The grass reaches up to it…

I sat down beside him on a large fluffy towel spread out on the sand and waited patiently for the song to end.

When Igor finally put down his guitar, I asked him: “Playing for the waves and the sand?”

“For the stars and the wind,” he corrected me. “I thought it would be hard for you to find me in the dark. And I didn’t like the
i.e.
of bringing a tape deck.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “Surely you can feel it? This is a time for living sound.”

Igor was right. Maybe I didn’t agree with his choice of song, but I was all for the
i.e.
of living sound…

I looked him over without saying anything-or rather, I tried to look him over in the darkness. He was barefoot, dressed in nothing but his shorts. His hair had a wet gleam to it-he must have been in the sea already. He reminded me of someone at that moment… someone from one of the old fairy tales, either a jolly troubadour or a prince dressed up as a troubadour…

“The water’s warm,” Igor said. “Shall we go in?”

That was when I realized I’d been in too much of a hurry to get to the beach.

“Igor… you’ll laugh at me… I can’t go swimming. I forgot my bathing costume.”

He thought for a moment and then asked very calmly, “Are you shy? Or are you afraid I’ll think you did it deliberately?”

“I’m not afraid, but I don’t want you to think that.”

“I don’t think that at all,” Igor said and stood up. “I’ll go into the water and you come and join me.”

He took off his shorts right at the water’s edge, started to run, and dived almost immediately. I didn’t hesitate for long. I hadn’t even thought about seducing Igor in such a primitive way-I really had forgotten my bathing costume in my room. But there was no way I was going to feel shy, especially in front of an ordinary human being.

The water was warm and the waves caressed me like a lover’s hands. I swam after Igor, and the shoreline receded and blurred until only the lighted lamps marked Artek out in the night. We swam far beyond the buoy, probably a kilometer from the shore. I caught up with Igor, and then we were swimming beside each other in silence, not saying a single word. Not competing with each other, moving in the same rhythm.

Finally he stopped, looked at me, and said, “That’s enough.”

“Are you tired?” I asked, a little surprised. It had seemed to me that he could go on swimming forever… and I-well, I could have swum across the Black Sea and got out in Turkey.

“No, I’m not tired. But the night is deceptive, Alisa. This is the maximum distance I could pull you to the shore if anything happened.”

I remembered what Natasha had said about him being “reliable.” Looking into his face, I realized it wasn’t bravado and he wasn’t joking. He really was in control of the situation at every moment. And he was ready to save me.