'I almost went over the edge,' I said. 'I was well on the way. Yesterday morning, on my way back from the hunt, I ran into the little girl from next door in the entrance. I didn't even dare say hello, my fangs had already sprouted. And last night, when I felt the Call summoning the boy ... I almost joined the vampires.'
The owl was looking into my eyes.
'Why do you think the boss gave me the job?'
A stuffed dummy. Clumps of dusty feathers stuffed with cotton wool.
'So I could see things through their eyes?'
The doorbell rang in the hallway. I sighed and shrugged: it was her own fault, after all, anyone would be better to talk to than this boring bird. I switched the light on as I walked to the door and opened it.
Standing there in the doorway was a vampire.
'Come in, Kostya,' I said, 'come in.'
He hesitated at the door, but then came in. He ran his hand through his hair – I noticed that his palms were sweaty and his eyes restless.
Kostya's only seventeen. He was born a vampire, a perfectly ordinary city vampire. It's really tough: with vampire parents a child has almost no chance of growing up human.
'I've brought back the CDs,' Kostya muttered. 'Here.'
I took the pile from the boy, not even surprised there were so many. I usually had to nag him for ages to bring them back: he was terribly absentminded.
'Did you listen to them all?' I asked. 'Did you copy any?'
'No ... I'll be going . . .'
'Wait.' I grabbed him by the shoulder and pushed him into the room. 'What's going on?'
He didn't answer.
'You already know?' I asked, beginning to catch on.
'There aren't many of us, Anton,' said Kostya, looking me in the eye. 'When one of us passes away, we sense it immediately.'
'Okay. Take your shoes off, let's go into the kitchen and have a serious talk.'
Kostya didn't argue. But I was desperately trying to figure out what to do. Five years earlier, when I became an Other and the Twilight side of the world was revealed to me, I'd made plenty of surprising discoveries. And one of the most shocking was the fact that a family of vampires was living right above my head.
I remember it like it was yesterday. I was on my way home from classes that seemed so ordinary, they reminded me of my old college. Three double lectures, a lecturer, heat that had the white coats glued to our bodies – we rented the lecture hall from a medical college. I was fooling around as I walked home, dropping into the Twilight in short bursts – I couldn't manage any longer back then. Then I began feeling out the people walking down the street, and at the entrance I ran into my neighbours.
They're really nice people. I wanted to borrow a drill from them once, and Kostya's father, Gennady, he's a builder, just came round and had some fun helping out with the concrete walls, demonstrating conclusively that the intelligentsia can't survive without the proletariat . . .
And now suddenly I could see they weren't humans at all.
It was terrifying. The brownish-grey auras, the hideous pressure. I stopped dead, staring at them in horror. Polina, Kostya's mother, looked surprised, the boy froze and turned his face away. But the head of the family walked towards me, moving deeper into the Twilight as he came, walking with the elegant stride that only vampires, alive and dead at the same time, have. The Twilight is their natural habitat.
'Hello, Anton,' he said.
The world around me was grey and dead. I'd dived into the Twilight after him without even noticing it.
'I knew you'd cross the barrier some day,' he said. 'Everything's okay.'
I took a step back – and Gennady's face quivered.
'Everything's okay,' he said. He opened his shirt and I saw the registration tag, a blue imprint on the grey skin. 'We're all registered. Polina! Kostya!'
His wife also crossed into the Twilight and unfastened her blouse. The boy didn't move and it took a stern glance from his father to get him to show his blue seal.
'I have to check,' I whispered. My passes were clumsy, I lost track twice and had to start again. Finally the seal responded. 'Permanent registration, no known violations . . .'
'Is everything okay?' asked Gennady. 'Can we go now?'
'I . . .'
'Don't worry about it. We knew you'd become an Other some day.'
'Go on,' I said. It was against the rules, but that was the last thing I was bothered about.
'Yes . . .' Gennady paused for a moment before he left the Twilight. 'I've been in your home . . . Anton, I return to you your invitation to enter . . .'
Everything was just as it should be.
They walked away and I sat down on a bench, beside an old granny warming herself in the sunshine. I lit a cigarette, trying to sort out my thoughts. The granny looked at me and said:
'Nice people, aren't they, Arkasha?'
She was always getting my name wrong. She only had two or three months left to live, I could see that quite clearly now.
'Not exactly . . .' I said. I smoked three cigarettes, then trudged off into the building. I stood in the doorway for a moment, watching the grey 'vampire's trail' fade away. I'd just learned how to see it that very day . . .
I moped into the evening. I leafed through my notes, which meant I had to withdraw into the Twilight. In the ordinary world, the pages of those standard exercise books were a pure, unsullied white. I wanted to call our group's supervisor or the boss himself – I was his personal responsibility. But I felt I had to make the decision myself.
When it was dark I couldn't stand it any longer. I went up to the next floor and rang the bell. When Kostya opened the door, he shuddered. But he actually looked perfectly ordinary, like all of his family . . .
'Call your parents, will you?' I asked.
'What for?' he muttered.
'I want to invite you all for tea.'
Gennady appeared behind his son's back, out of nowhere, he was far more skilful than me, the newly fledged adept of the Light.
'Are you sure, Anton?' he asked doubtfully. 'There's no need. Everything's okay.' 'I'm sure.'
He paused and then shrugged.
'We'll come round tomorrow. If you invite us. Don't rush things.'
By midnight I was feeling absolutely delighted they'd refused. At three I tried to get to sleep, reassured in the knowledge that they couldn't enter my home and never would be able to.
In the morning, still not having slept a wink, I stood at the window, looking out at the city. There weren't many vampires. Very few, in fact. There wasn't another within a radius of two or three kilometres.
How did it feel to be an outcast? To be punished, not for committing a crime, but for the potential ability to commit it? And how did it feel for them to live . . . well, not live, some other word was required here . . . alongside their own guard?
On the way back from classes I bought a cake for tea.
And now here was Kostya, a fine, intelligent young man, a physics student at Moscow University, who had the misfortune to have been born a living corpse, sitting beside me and raking the spoon around in the sugar bowl like he was too shy to take any. What could have made him so bashful?
At first he used to call round almost every day. I was his direct opposite, I was on the side of the Light. But I let him into my home, and he didn't have to pretend with me. He could simply sit and talk, or he could plunge into the Twilight and boast about the new abilities he'd developed. 'Anton, I actually transformed!' – 'And now my fangs have started to grow, r-r-r-r!'
And the strange thing was, it all felt entirely normal. I laughed as I watched the young vampire's attempts to transform himself into a bat – that's a trick for a top-flight vampire, but he's not one of them and, may the Light grant, he never will be. Just sometimes I would scold him: 'Kostya . . . you mustn't ever do that. Do you understand?' And that felt entirely normal too.
'Kostya, I was only doing my job.'
'You shouldn't have.'
'They were breaking the law. Do you understand? Not just our law, mind you. It's not just the Light Ones who have accepted it, all the Others have. That vampire—'
'I knew him,' Kostya suddenly said. 'He was a laugh. Did he suffer?'
'No.' I shook my head. 'The seal kills instantaneously.'
Kostya shuddered and squinted down at his own chest for a second. If you enter the Twilight, you can see the seal even through a vampire's clothes, and if you don't, you'll never find it. I don't think he actually moved across. But how should I know what the seal feels like to a vampire?
'What was I supposed to do?' I asked. 'He'd already killed. Killed innocent people, who had absolutely no defence against him. He initiated a girl ... by crude force – she should never have become a vampire. Yesterday he almost killed a boy. Just for the sake of it. Not because he was hungry.'
'Do you know what our hunger's like?' Kostya asked after a pause.
He was growing up. Right in front of my eyes.
'Yes. Yesterday I . . . almost became a vampire.'
Just a moment's silence.
'I know. I could feel it ... I was hoping.'
Damn. While I was conducting my hunt, they'd been hunting me too. Or rather, lying in ambush for me, hoping the hunter would turn into the hunted beast.
'No,' I said. 'Sorry, no way.'
'Okay, so he was guilty,' Kostya went on stubbornly. 'But why did you have to kill him? He should have been tried. A tribunal, a lawyer, a proper charge, the way the law says things should be done . . .'
'The law says that humans mustn't be involved in our business!' I roared. And for the first time that tone of voice failed to make any impression on Kostya.
'You were human for too long,' he said.
'And I don't regret it for a moment.'
'Why did you kill him?'
'If I hadn't, he would have killed me!'
'Initiated you.'
'That's even worse.'
Kostya didn't answer. He put down his tea and stood up. A perfectly ordinary, slightly insolent and morally pained young man.
Except that he was a vampire.
'Wait.' I stepped across to the fridge. 'Take this, they issued it to me, but I didn't need it.'
I pulled out the two-hundred-gram bottles of donor's blood from between the bottles of Borzhomi mineral water.
'No thanks.'
'Kostya, I know this is always a problem for you. It's no use to me. Take it.'
'Are you trying to bribe me?'
