Day Watch

I felt as if I could overturn mountains.

"When are you pla

"When everyone wakes up, we'll warm up the pilaff, take another shot of vodka to warm ourselves up and then we'll move on. Why? Are you in a hurry?"

"I probably ought to get going soon," I said vaguely.

"Well, if you're in a hurry, go. Keep the jacket… I'll give you Styopa's address, you can take it around sometime."

If only you knew who you're helping, human…

"Matvei," I said in a low voice, "I seriously doubt that I'll have a chance to go looking for Styopa. Thanks, but I won't freeze."

"Don't be silly," said Matvei, straightening up and holding the ax out in his hand. "If you don't give it back, you don't. Your health's more important."

I tried to make my smile look wise and sad.

"Matvei… it's a good thing there's nobody else here. You know, I'm not actually human."

Matvei's eyes immediately glazed over in boredom. He'd probably decided I was some kind of crazy psychic charlatan. Well… I'd just have to prove it to him.

Both dogs instantly lost their joyful bounce, started whining, and huddled down at Matvei's feet. I raised my barely visible morning shadow from the snow and slipped into the Twilight.

Matvei's reaction was fu

Matvei couldn't see me. But he wasn't supposed to see me.

I pulled off the jacket; Matvei wouldn't be able to see it either, until I threw it out of the Twilight. I felt for some money in my shirt pocket and stuck two hundred-dollar bills in the pocket of the jacket. Then I tossed it at Matvei.

Matvei shuddered and caught the jacket awkwardly when, as far as he could tell, it suddenly appeared out of thin air. He looked around and, to be quite honest, he looked rather pitiful, but I could tell that without this kind of demonstration there was no way I could ever convince him.

I didn't want to take anything belonging to anyone else away with me, not even a lousy jacket. If people ask no questions and help a stranger who comes wandering up to their camp-fire out of the forest, you shouldn't take anything from them if you can avoid it. The jacket was comfortable and obviously not cheap. I didn't want it. I'm a Dark One. I don't need other people's things.

I emerged from the Twilight behind Matvei's back. He carried on staring wildly into empty space.

"Here I am," I said, and Matvei swung around abruptly. His eyes were completely crazy now.

"A-a-a-a…" he murmured and fell silent.

"Thanks, I really will get by without the jacket."

Matvei nodded. He obviously didn't feel like objecting anymore. I think he was seriously concerned that he'd spent the night in a tent with some kind of monster who could disappear in front of his eyes. And who knew what he might be capable of apart from that?

"Just tell me one thing: How do I get away from here?"

"That way," said Matvei, waving his hand in the direction of the path I'd followed to get there. "The trains are already ru

"And is there a highway over there? I'd rather hitch a ride."

"There's a highway. Right behind the railroad."

"Excellent," I said in delight. "Okay, be seeing you! Thanks again. Give the birthday girl my congratulations… and I tell you what… give her this…"

It was remarkable how easily I managed the simple, but unfamiliar spell. I put my hand behind my back, touched a frozen twig, broke it off… and held out a living rose, only just cut from the bush. There were drops of dew glistening on the small green leaves and the petals were flame-red. A fresh rose looks very beautiful in a snowy forest.

"A-a-a…" Matvei mumbled as he automatically took the rose. I wondered if he'd give it to the birthday girl or just bury it in a snowdrift to avoid the hassle of having to give long, awkward explanations.

But I didn't ask. I withdrew into the Twilight again. I certainly didn't want to drag myself over the frozen snow again. And what had been good for the previous day, when I thought I was ru

There was something else I'd forgotten… Ah, yes! The hat. That wasn't mine either, and I was still wearing it. I tossed it onto the jacket… and set off.

I moved in leaps of a hundred or two hundred meters, opening weak little portals at the limit of my visibility and stepping through them, eating up the distance like a giant.

By day the clearing looked perfectly ordinary. All of its magical charm had completely disappeared. It was obviously no accident that the genuine romantics and lovers of freedom-the Dark Ones-had chosen the night as their time, and not the day, when all the dirt and garbage of the world assaults your eyes, when you can see how unattractive and cluttered our cities are, when the streets are full of stupid people and the roads are full of stinking automobiles. Day is the time of bonds and chains, of duty and rules, but Night is the time of Freedom.

And for a genuine Other, nothing can take the place of that Freedom. Neither ephemeral Duty, nor service to cheap, fuzzy ideals invented by someone long before you were even born. That's all a myth, a fiction, ucho od sledzia-ear of the fish-as our Slav brothers, the Poles, say. There is only Freedom, for everybody alike, and there is only one limitation: No one has the right to limit the Freedom of others. And let the cu

I had to use my Other powers to stop a car-for some reason no one wanted to pick up a man without any jacket or coat. I had to touch the mind of one of the drivers in his dolled-up Zhiguli 9, the color of wet asphalt.

Naturally, he stopped.

The driver was a young guy of about twenty-five with short-cropped hair and absolutely no neck. His head was just attached in a very natural way directly to his body and his eyes were blank. But his reflexes turned out to be quite fantastic. I seriously suspected that he could have driven the car even if he was unconscious.

"Eh?" he said to me when I'd made myself comfortable in the back, beside his huge leather jacket.

"Drive on, drive on. To Moscow. You'll let me out on Tverskaya Street."

And I touched him gently again through the Twilight.

"Ah…" the young guy said, and set his Zhiguli moving. Despite the slippery road and the trance he'd been put in, he drove at over a hundred kilometers an hour. The car held the road so magnificently, I wondered if he had special tires on it.

We drove into Moscow from the northwest side after turning onto the Volokolamsk Highway, which meant we sliced through half of the megalopolis very quickly, driving in a straight line almost the whole time, straight to the Day Watch office on Tverskaya Street.

I was lucky to have found such a remarkable driver, and the highway encouraged him to put his foot down to the floor. Plus, we rode a wave of green lights.

As we were driving past the Sokol metro station, I realized they'd spotted me.

Me and the Talon.

But in the middle of Moscow it's almost impossible to catch a Zhiguli 9 hurtling along in a straight line without changing lanes.

I got out on Tverskaya Street and handed the neckless driver a hundred. Rubles, not dollars.

"Eh?" he gasped out and started gazing around. Of course, he didn't remember a thing, and now he was straining his meager intellect to solve the almost insoluble puzzle of how he'd got from a suburban Moscow highway to the very center of the city.