Twilight Watch (Watch #3)

Twilight Watch (Watch #3) Page 11

WHERE DO WE GET THE IDEA THAT MILK STRAIGHT FROM THE COW TASTES good?

It must be something we do in first grade. Some memorable phrase from the textbook Our Native Tongue, about how wonderfully tasty milk is straight from the cow. And the naive city kids believe it.

In fact milk straight from the cow tastes rather peculiar. But after it's been left to stand in the cellar for a day and cooled off¡ª now that's a different matter. Even those poor souls who lack the necessary digestive enzymes drink it. And there are plenty of them, by the way: As far as mother nature's concerned, grown-ups have no business drinking milk¡ªit's children who need it...

But people usually don't pay much attention to nature's opinion.

And Others pay even less.

I reached for the jug and poured myself another glass. Cold, with a smooth layer of cream... why does boiling make the cream so smooth, the tastiest part of milk? I took a large swallow. No more¡ªI had to leave some for Svetka and Nadiushka. The whole village¡ªit was quite a big one, with fifty houses¡ªhad only one cow. It was a good thing there was at least one... and I had a strong suspicion that the humble Raika had Svetlana to thank for her magnificent yields. Her owner, Granny Sasha, already an old woman at forty, had no real reason to feel proud. As well as Raika, she owned the pig Borka, the goat Mishka, and a gaggle of miscellaneous poultry without any names.

It was just that Svetlana wanted her daughter to drink genuine milk. That was why the cow never caught any illnesses. Granny Sasha could have fed her on sawdust and it wouldn't have changed a thing.

But genuine milk really is good. Never mind the characters in the ads¡ªthey can arrive in a village with their cartons of milk and that jolly gleam in their eyes and say "the real thing!" as often as they like. They're paid money to do that. And it makes things easier for the peasants, who were long ago broken of the habit of keeping any kind of livestock. They can just carry on abusing the politicians and the "city folk" and not worry about pasturing any cows.

I put down my empty glass and sprawled back in a hammock hung between two trees. The locals must have thought I was a real bourgeois. I arrived in a fancy car and brought my wife lots of funny foreign groceries, spent the whole day lounging in a hammock with a book... In a place where everybody else spent the whole day roaming about, searching for a drop of something to fix their hangovers...

"Hello, Anton Sergeevich," someone said over the top of the fence¡ªit was Kolya, a local alcoholic. He might have been reading my thoughts¡ªand how come he'd remembered my name?

"How was the drive?"

"Hello, Kolya," I greeted him in lordly fashion, not making the slightest attempt to get up out of the hammock. He wouldn't appreciate it in any case. That wasn't what he'd come for. "It was fine, thanks."

"Need any help with anything, around the house and the garden, or you know..." Kolya asked hopelessly. "I thought, you know, I'd just come and ask..."

I closed my eyes¡ªthe sun, already sinking toward the horizon, glowed blood-red through my eyelids.

There was nothing I could do. Not the slightest little thing. A sixth or seventh-level intervention would have been enough to free the poor devil Kolya from his hankering for alcohol, cure his cirrhosis and inspire him with a desire to work, instead of drinking vodka and thrashing his wife.

And what if I had defied all the stipulations of the Treaty and made that intervention in secret? A brief gesture of the hand... And then what? There wasn't any work in the village. And nobody in the city wanted Kolya, a former collective farm mechanic. Kolya didn't have any money to start 'his own business'. He couldn't even buy a piglet.

So he'd go off again to look for moonshine, getting by on money from odd jobs, and working off his anger on his wife, who drank as much as he did and was just as weary of everything. It wasn't the man I needed to heal¡ªit was the entire planet Earth.

Or at least this particular sixth part of the planet Earth. The part with the proud name of Russia.

"Anton Sergeevich, I'm desperate..." Kolya said pathetically.

Who needs a former alcoholic in a dying village where the collective farm has fallen apart and the only private farmer was burned out three times before he took the hint?

"Kolya," I said. "Didn't you have some kind of special trade in the army? A tank driver?"

Did we have any paid professional soldiers at all? It would be better if he went off to the Caucasus, instead of just dropping dead in a year's time from all that fake vodka...

"I wasn't in the army," Kolya said in a miserable voice. "They wouldn't take me. They were short of mechanics here back then. They kept giving me deferments, and then I got too old... Anton Sergeevich, if you want somebody's face smashed in, I can still do that all right. Don't you worry, I'll tear them to pieces!"

"Kolya," I asked him, "would you take a look at the engine in my car? I thought it was knocking a bit yesterday..."

"Sure, I'll take a look!" said Kolya, brightening up. "You know, I..."

"Take the keys." I tossed him the bunch. "And I owe you a bottle."

Kolya broke into a happy smile. "Would you like me to wash your car too? It must have cost a lot... and these roads of ours..."

"Thanks," I said. "I'd be very grateful."

"Only I don't want any vodka," Kolya suddenly said, and I started in surprise. What was this, had the world turned upside down? "It's got no taste to it... now a little bottle of homebrew..."

"Done," I said. Delighted, Kolya opened the gate and set off toward the small barn I'd driven the car into the evening before.

And then Svetlana came out of the house¡ªI didn't see her, but I sensed her. That meant Nadiushka had settled down and was enjoying a sweet after-lunch nap... Sveta came over, stood at the head of the hammock and paused for a moment, then she put her cool hand on my forehead.

"Bored?"

"Uh huh," I mumbled. "Svetka, there's nothing I can do. Not a single thing. How can you stand it here?"

"I've been coming to this village since I was a child," Svetlana said. "I remember Uncle Kolya when he was still all right. Young and happy. He used to give me rides on his tractor when I was still a little snot-nose. He was sober. He used to sing songs. Can you imagine that?"

"Were things better before?" I asked.

"People drank less," Svetlana replied laconically. "Anton, why didn't you remoralize him? You were going to¡ªI felt a tremor run through the Twilight. There aren't Watch members here... apart from you."

"Give a dog a bone and how long does it last?" I answered churlishly. "I'm sorry... Uncle Kolya's not where we need to start."

"No, he's not," Svetlana agreed. "But any intervention in the activities of the authorities is prohibited by the Treaty. 'Humans deal with their own affairs, Others deal with theirs...'"

I didn't say anything. Yes, it was prohibited. Because it was the simplest and surest way of directing the mass of humanity toward Good or Evil. Which was a violation of the equilibrium. There had been kings and presidents in history who were Others. And it had always ended in appalling wars...

"You'll just be miserable here, Anton..." said Svetlana. "Let's go back to town."

"But Nadiushka loves it here," I objected. "And you wanted to stay here another week, didn't you?"

"But you're fretting... Why don't you go on your own? You'll feel happier in town."

"Anybody would think you wanted to get rid of me," I growled. "That you had a lover here."

Svetlana snorted. "Can you suggest a single candidate?"

"No," I said, after a moment's reflection. "Except maybe one of the vacationers..."

"This is a kingdom of women," Svetlana retorted. "Either single mothers, or their husbands are slaving away and the women are here to give the children some fresh air and exercise... That reminds me, Anton. There was one strange thing that happened here..."

"Yes?" I asked, intrigued. If Svetlana called something "strange"...

"You remember Anna Viktorovna came over to see me yesterday?"

"The teacher?" I laughed. Anna Viktorovna was such a typical school marm, she should have been in the film The Muddle. "I thought she came over to see your mother."

"My mother and me, too. She has two kids¡ªa little boy, Romka, he's five, and Ksyusha¡ªshe's ten."

"Good," I said, giving Anna Viktorovna my approval.

"Don't try to be funny. Two days ago the children got lost in the forest."

My drowsiness suddenly evaporated and I sat up in the hammock, holding onto a tree with one hand. I looked at Svetlana. "Why didn't you tell me straight away? The Treaty's all very well, but..."

"Don't worry, they got lost, but then they turned up again. They came home in the evening on their own."

"Well, that's really unusual," I couldn't resist saying. "Children who stayed in the forest for an extra couple of hours. Don't tell me they actually like wild strawberries?"

"When their mother started scolding them, they started telling her they got lost," Svetlana went on imperturbably. "And they met a wolf. The wolf drove them through the forest¡ªand straight to some wolf cubs..."

"I see..." I muttered. I felt a vague flutter of alarm in my chest.

"Anyway, the kids were in a real panic. But then this woman appeared and recited some lines of verse to the wolf, and it ran away. The woman took the kids to her little house, gave them some tea, and showed them to the edge of the forest. She said she was a botanist and she knew special herbs that wolves are afraid of..."

"Childish fantasies," I snapped. "Are the kids all right?"

"Absolutely."

"And here I was expecting some kind of foul play," I said, and lay back down in the hammock. "Did you check them for magic?"

"They're absolutely clean," said Svetlana. "Not the slightest trace."

"Fantasies. Or maybe they did get a fright from someone... maybe even a wolf. And some woman led them out of the forest. The kids were lucky, but a good belt..."

"The young one, Romka, used to stammer. Quite badly. Now he speaks without the slightest problem. He rattles on, recites pieces of poetry..."

I thought for a moment.

"Can stammering be cured? By suggestion, you know, hypnosis... or what else is there?"

"There is no cure for it. Like the common cold. And any doctor who promises to stop you stammering with hypnosis is a charlatan. Of course, if it were some kind of reactive neurosis, then..."

"Spare me the terminology," I asked her. "So there is no cure. What about folk medicine?"

"Nothing, except maybe some wild Others... Can you cure stammering?"

"Even bedwetting," I growled. "And incontinence. But Sveta, you didn't sense any magic, did you?"

"But the stammer's gone."

"That can only mean one thing..." I said reluctantly. I sighed and got up out of the hammock after all. "Sveta this is not good. A witch. With Power greater than yours. And you're first level."

Svetlana nodded. I didn't often mention the fact that her Power exceeded my own. It was the main thing that came between us... that could come between us some day.

And in any case, Svetlana had deliberately withdrawn from the Night Watch. Otherwise... otherwise she would already have been an enchantress beyond classification.

"But nothing happened to the children," I went on. "No odious wizard pawed the little girl, no evil witch made soup out of the little boy... No, if this is a witch, why such kindness?"

"Witches don't have any compulsion to indulge in cannibalism or sexual aggression," Svetlana said pompously, as if she were giving a lecture. "All their actions are determined by plain, ordinary egotism. If a witch were really hungry, she might eat a human being. For the simple reason that she doesn't think of herself as human. But otherwise... why not help the children? It didn't cost her anything. She led them out of the forest and cured the little boy's stammer as well. After all, she probably has children of her own. You'd feed a homeless puppy, wouldn't you?"

"I don't like it," I confessed. "A witch as powerful as that? They don't often reach first level, do they?"

"Very rarely." Svetlana gave me a quizzical look. "Anton, do you have a clear idea of the difference between a witch and an enchantress?"

"I've worked with them," I said curtly. "I know."

But Svetlana wasn't satisfied with that.

"An enchantress works with the Twilight directly and draws Power from it. A witch uses accessories, material objects charged with a greater or lesser degree of Power. All the magical artifacts that exist in the world were created by witches or warlocks¡ªyou could call them their artificial limbs. Artifacts can be things or cornified elements of the body¡ªhairs, long fingernails... That's why a witch is harmless if you undress her and shave her, but you have to gag an enchantress and tie her hands."

"For sure nobody's ever going to gag you," I laughed. "Sveta, why are you lecturing me like this? I'm not a Great Magician, but I know the elementary facts. I don't need reminding..."

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you," Svetlana apologized quickly.

I looked at her and saw the pain in her eyes.

What a brute I was. How long could I go on taking out my complexes on the woman I loved? I was worse than any Dark One...

"Svetka, forgive me..." I whispered and touched her hand. "Forgive a stupid fool."

"I'm no better myself," Svetlana admitted. "Really, why am I lecturing you on the basics? You deal with witches every day in the Watch..."

Peace had been restored, and I was quick to say, "With ones as powerful as this? Come on, in the whole of Moscow there's only one first-level witch, and she retired ages ago... What are we going to do, Sveta?"

"There is no actual reason to interfere," Sveta said thoughtfully. "The children are all right, the boy's even better off than he was before. But there are still two questions that need to be answered. First, where did the strange wolf that drove the children toward the cubs come from?"

"That's if it was a wolf," I remarked.

"If it was," Svetlana agreed. "But the children's story hangs together very well... And the second question is¡ªis the witch registered in this locality, and what's her record like?"

"We'll soon find out," I said, taking out my cell phone.

Five minutes later I had the answer. There was nothing in the Night Watch records about any witches in the area and there shouldn't be any.

Ten minutes after that I walked out of the yard, armed with instructions and advice from my wife¡ªin her capacity as a potential Great Enchantress. On my way past the barn, I glanced in through the open doors¡ªKolya was hovering over the open hood of the car, and there were some parts lying on a newspaper spread out on the ground. Holy Moses... all I'd done was mention a knocking sound in the engine!

And Uncle Kolya was singing too, crooning quietly to himself:

We're not stokers and not carpenters either, But we're not bitter, we have no regrets!

Those were clearly the only lines his memory had retained. And he kept repeating them nonstop as he rummaged enthusiastically in the engine:

We're not stokers and not carpenters either, But we're not bitter, we have no regrets!

When he spotted me, Uncle Kolya called out happily, "This is going to cost you more than half a liter, Antosha! Those Japanese have completely lost it. The things they've done to the diesel engine, I can hardly bear to look."

"They're not Japanese, they're Germans," I corrected him.

"Germans?" Uncle Kolya said. "Ah, right, it's a BMW, and I've only fixed Subarus before... I was wondering why everything was done different... Never mind, I'll put it back together. Only my head's humming, the son of a bitch..."

"Look in to Sveta. She'll pour you a drop," I said, accepting the inevitable.

"No." Uncle Kolya shook his head. "Not while I'm working, no way... Our first farm chairman taught me that¡ªwhile you're messing with the metal, not a single drop. You go on, go on. I've got enough here to keep me busy till the evening."

Bidding a mental farewell to the car, I walked out into the dusty, hot street.

Little Romka was absolutely delighted at my visit. I walked in just as Anna Viktorovna was about to suffer ignominious defeat in the battle of the afternoon nap. Romka, a skinny, suntanned little kid, was bouncing up and down on the springy bed and yelling ecstatically.

"I don't want to sleep by the wall! My knees get all bent!"

"What can I do with him?" asked Anna Viktorovna, very glad to see me. "Hello, Anton. Tell me, does your Nadyenka behave like this?"

"No," I lied.

Romka stopped jumping up and down and pricked up his ears.

"Why don't you take him and keep him?" Anna Viktorovna suggested craftily. "What do I want with a silly dunce like him? You're a strict man. You'll teach him how to behave. He can look after Nadyenka, wash her nappies, wash the floors for you, put the garbage out..."

As she said all this Anna Viktorovna kept winking at me emphatically, as if I really might take her suggestion seriously and carry off little Romka as an underage slave.

"I'll think about it," I said, to support her pedagogical efforts. "If he just won't do anything he's told, we'll take him for reeducation. We've had worse cases, and they turned out as meek as lambs."

"No, you won't take me!" Romka said boldly, but he stopped bouncing, sat down on the bed and pulled the blanket up over his legs. "What would he want with a silly dunce like me?"

"Then I'll put you in a boarding school," Anna Viktorovna threatened.

"Only heartless people put children in boarding schools," said Romka, clearly repeating a phrase he'd heard somewhere. "But you're not heartless."

"What can I do with him?" Anna Viktorovna repeated rhetorically. "Can I offer you some cold kvass?"

"Me too, me too!" Romka squealed, but a stern glance from his mother shut him up.

"Thank you," I said with a nod. "Actually, it was this silly dunce that I came to see you about..."

"What has he been up to?" asked Anna Viktorovna, taking a businesslike approach.

"It's just that Sveta told me about their adventures... about the wolf. I'm a hunter, and the thing is.. ."

A minute later I was already sitting at the table with a glass of cold kvass, the center of attention.

"Yes, I know what they say, but I'm a teacher," Anna Viktorovna was saying. "They say wolves help clean up the forest... only it's not true, of course, a wolf doesn't just kill sick animals. It kills any animals it can get... But it's still a living creature. A wolf's not to blame for being a wolf... But here¡ªright next to the village. Chasing children! It drove them toward the cubs. Do you realize what that means?"

I nodded.

"It was teaching the cubs to hunt." Anna Viktorovna's eyes lit up, either with fear or that mother's fury that sends wolves and bears running for the bushes. "What was it¡ªa man-eater?"

"It couldn't have been," I said. "There haven't been any cases of wolves attacking people around here. There haven't been any wolves at all left in these parts for a long time... most likely it was a feral dog. But I want to check."

"Yes, check," Anna Viktorovna said firmly. "And if... even if it's a dog. If the children didn't imagine the whole thing..."

I nodded again.

"Shoot it," Anna Viktorovna asked me. And then she added in a whisper, "I can't sleep at night... for imagining... what could have happened."

"It was a doggy!" Romka piped up from the bed.

"Hush!" Anna Viktorovna shouted at him. "All right then, come here. Tell the nice man what happened."

Romka didn't need to be asked twice. He got down off the bed, came over to us, clambered up onto my knees with a very serious air and looked into my eyes searchingly.

I ruffled up his coarse, sun-bleached hair.

"So this is what happened..." Romka began contentedly.

Anna Viktorovna looked at him in a very sad sort of way. I could understand her. It was these little kids' father that I couldn't understand. All sorts of things can happen... okay, so they were separated... but after that, how could anyone just cancel his own children out of his life, and do nothing but pay the alimony?

"We walked and walked, you know, we were out for a walk," Romka told us with agonizing slowness. "And after we walked for a while we reached the forest. And then Ksyusha started telling me scary stories..."

I listened to his story very carefully. Well, the "scary stories" might be one more reason to believe the whole business was just imagination, but there was the child speaking perfectly clearly. Save for repeating a few words in the usual way for his age, there was nothing to find fault with.

Just to be on the safe side, I scanned the boy's aura. A little human being. A good little human being, and I wanted to believe he would grow up into a good adult. Not the slightest sign of any Other potential. And no traces of magical influence.

But then, if Svetlana hadn't spotted anything, what could I expect, with my second-level abilities...

"And then the wolf laughed out loud!" Romka exclaimed, throwing his hands up in the air in glee.

"Weren't you frightened?" I asked.

To my surprise, Romka thought about that for a long time.

Then he said, "Yes, I was. I'm little, and the wolf was big. And I didn't have a stick¡ªwhere would I get a stick from in the forest? And then I stopped being afraid."

"So you're not afraid of the wolf now?" I asked. After an adventure like that, any normal child would have developed a stammer, but Romka had lost his.

"Not a bit," said the boy. "Oh, now you've gotten me lost! What part did I get to?"

"The part where the wolf laughed," I said with a smile.

"Just exactly like a man," said Romka.

So that was it. It was a long time since I'd had any dealings with werewolves. Especially werewolves as brazen as this... hunting children, only a hundred kilometers from Moscow. Had they been counting on the fact that there was no Night Watch in the little village? But then, the district office checked every case when someone went missing. They had a very skillful, specialized magician for that. From the normal human viewpoint what he did was pure charlatanism¡ªhe looked at photographs, and then either put them aside or phoned the operations office and said in an embarrassed voice, "I think I've got something here... I'm not quite sure what..."

And then we would have swung into action, driven out into the country, found the signs... and the signs would have been terrible, but we were used to that. Then the werewolves would probably have resisted arrest. And someone¡ªit could easily have been me¡ªwould have waved his hand. Then a jangling gray haze would have gone creeping through the Twilight...

We rarely took that kind alive. But this time I really wanted to.

"And what I think as well," Romka said thoughtfully, "is that the wolf said something. I think so, I think so... Only he didn't talk. I know wolves don't talk, do they? But I dream that he did talk."

"And what did he say?" I asked cautiously.

"Go away, witch!" Romka said, trying in vain to imitate a hoarse bass voice.

Right. I could already issue the warrant for a search. Or at least request help from Moscow. It was a werewolf, no doubt about it. But fortunately for the little kids, there was a witch there too.

A powerful witch.

Very powerful.

She hadn't just driven away the werewolf¡ªshe'd tidied up the kids' memories without leaving any trace. Only she hadn't gone in deep. She hadn't expected there would be a vigilant watchman in the village... The boy didn't remember anything when he was awake, but in his dream¡ªthere it was. "Go away, witch!"

How very interesting.

"Thank you, Romka." I held out my hand to him. "I'll go to the forest and take a look."

"But aren't you afraid? Have you got a gun?" Romka asked eagerly.

"Yes."

"Show it to me."

"It's at home," Anna Viktorovna said strictly. "And guns aren't toys for children."

Romka sighed and asked plaintively, "Only don't shoot the cubs, all right? Better bring me one and I'll train it as a dog. Or two¡ªone for me, one for Ksyusha!"

"Roman." Anna Viktorovna snapped in a voice of iron.

I found Ksyusha at the pond, as her mother had said I would. A flock of little girls was sunbathing beside a pack of little boys, and the gibes were flying thick in both directions. The male sun-bathers were old enough not to pull the girls' braids anymore, but they still didn't understand what girls were any good for.

When I turned up everyone stopped talking and stared at me warily. I hadn't put in an appearance in the village before.

"Oksana?" I asked the little girl I thought I'd seen in the street with Romka.

The very serious girl in a dark blue swimsuit looked at me, nodded, and said politely, "Hi... hello."

"Hello. I'm Anton, Svetlana Nazarova's husband. Do you know her?" I asked.

"What's your daughter's name?" Oksana asked suspiciously.

"Nadya."

"Yes, I know," Oksana said with a nod and got up off the sand. "You want to talk about the wolves, right?"

I smiled. "That's right."

Oksana glanced at the boys. The boys, not the girls.

"Uh huh, that's Nadya's dad," said a freckle-faced kid who was somehow obviously from the village. "My dad's fixing your car right now."

He looked around proudly at his friends.

"We can talk here," I said to reassure the children. It was terrible, of course, that at that age normal kids living in families were already in the habit of being so cautious.

But it was better that they were.

"We went for a walk in the forest," Oksana began, standing at attention in front of me. I thought for a moment and sat down on the sand¡ªthen the girl sat down too. Anna Viktorovna certainly knew how to bring up her children. "It was my fault we got lost..."

One of the village kids giggled. But quietly. After the business with the wolves Oksana was probably the most popular girl with the boys in the junior grades.

In principle Oksana didn't tell me anything new. And there were no traces of magic on her either. Only the mention of a bookcase "with old books" made me prick up my ears.

"Do you remember what they were called?" I asked.

Oksana shook her head.

"Try to remember," I asked her. I looked down at my feet¡ª at my long, irregular shadow.

The shadow obediently rose up to meet me.

And the cool, gray Twilight accepted me.

It's always a pleasure to look at kids from the Twilight.

Even the most intimidated and unhappy of them still have auras without any of the malice and bitterness that grown-ups are shrouded in.

I mentally apologized to the kids¡ªafter all, they hadn't asked me to do what I was going to do. I ran the lightest possible, imperceptible touch across them. Just to remove the drops of evil that had already been poured onto them.

And then I stroked Oksana's hair and whispered, "Remember, little girl..."

No, I wouldn't be able to remove the block put in place by the witch if she was more powerful than me, or at least equal in power. But fortunately for me, the witch had been very gentle with their minds.

I emerged from the Twilight and the air hit me like a blast from a stove. The summer had really turned out hot.

"I remember!" Oksana said triumphantly. "One book was called Aliada Ansata."

I frowned.

That book wasn't a herbarium... or at least it wasn't an ordinary witch's herbarium¡ªit was particularly heinous. It even had a few vile uses for dandelions.

"And Kassagar Garsarra," said Oksana.

Some of the children giggled, but uncertainly.

"How was it written?" I asked. "In Latin letters? You know, like English?"

"No, in Russian," Oksana said. "In really funny, old letters."

I'd never heard of a Russian translation of that manuscript, which was extremely rare, even among the Dark Ones. It couldn't be printed¡ªthe magic of the spells would be erased. It could only be copied out by hand. And only in blood. Not the blood of a virgin or innocent victims¡ªthose were erroneous beliefs introduced later, and modern copies like that were no use at all. The Kassagar Garsarra was still believed only to exist in Arabic, Spanish, Latin, and Old German. A magician who rewrote the book had to use his own blood¡ªa separate jab for every spell. And it was a thick book...

And Power was lost with the blood.

It was enough to make me feel proud of Russian witches for producing even one fanatic like that.

"Is that all?" I asked.

"Fuaran."

"There's no such book, it's an invention..." I replied automatically. "What? Fuaran?"

"Yes, Fuaran," Oksana repeated.

No, there was really nothing so horrible in that book. But in all the textbooks it was mentioned as an imaginary invention. Because according to legend, that book contained instructions on how to turn a human child into a witch or a warlock. Detailed instructions that supposedly worked.

But that was impossible!

Wasn't it, Gesar?

"Wonderful books," I said.

"They're books on botany, are they?" Oksnana asked.

"Uh huh," I confirmed. "Like catalogues, kind of. Aliada Ansata tells you where to look for various kinds of herbs... and so on. Well, thank you, Ksyusha."

There were interesting things going on in our forest. Right there, just outside Moscow, a powerful witch sitting in the dark depths of the forest... no, what dark depths? It was only a small stretch of forest... with a library of extremely rare books on Dark magic. And sometimes she saved children from dim-witted werewolves, for which I was very grateful to her. But books like that were supposed to be registered on a special list¡ª in both Watches and the Inquisition. Because the Power that stood behind them was immense, and dangerous.

"I owe you a chocolate bar," I told Oksana. "You told me your story really well."

Oksana didn't make any fuss. She just said "thank you," and then she seemed to lose all interest in the conversation.

Since the little girl was older, the witch had obviously brainwashed her more thoroughly. Only she'd forgotten about the books the witch had seen.

And that made me feel a bit less worried.