CHAPTER 1

WHERE DO WE get the idea that milk straight from the cow tastes good?

It must be something we learn in junior school. Some memorable phrase from the textbook Our Native Tongue, about how wonderful milk tastes, straight from the cow. And the naïve 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 – 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, adults have no business drinking milk, it'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 – the best part of milk – so smooth? I took a big gulp. No more, I had to leave some for Sveta and Nadiushka. The whole village – it was quite big, with fifty houses – had just 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, also owned the pig Borka, the goat Mishka and a gaggle of miscellaneous, nameless poultry, but she had no real reason to feel proud. Svetlana just wanted her daughter to drink genuine milk. That was why the cow was never ill. Granny Sasha could have fed her sawdust and it wouldn't have changed a thing.

But genuine milk really is good. Never mind the characters in the ads – they 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 stopped keeping any kind of livestock themselves long ago. They can just carry on slagging off the 'democrats' and the 'city folk' and not worry about raising cows any more.

I put down my empty glass and sprawled back in a hammock hanging between two trees. The locals must have thought I was a real bourgeois. Arriving in a fancy car, bringing my wife lots of strange foreign groceries, spending the whole day lounging in a hammock with a book . . . In a place where everybody generally 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 – it was Kolya, a local drunk. He might as well have been reading my thoughts – and how had he 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 garden?' Kolya asked vaguely. 'I thought, you know, I'd just come and ask . . .'

I closed my eyes – the sun, already sinking towards the horizon, glowed blood-red through my eyelids.

There was nothing I could do. Not the slightest thing. A sixth-or seventh-degree 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.

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 slope 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, it was the entire planet.

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

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

Who needs a cured 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 to the Caucasus, rather than just dropping dead in a year's time from all that cheap moonshine . . .

'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 deferrals, 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 my car's engine? 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 it 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 gone mad? 'It's got no taste to it . . . now a little bottle of homebrew . . .'

'Done,' I said. Delighted, Kolya opened the gate and set off towards the small barn in which I'd parked the car the evening before.

And then Svetlana came out of the house – I 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 and asked:

'Bored?'

'Uhuh,' I mumbled. 'Sveta, 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 remoralise him? You were going to – I felt a tremor run through the Twilight. There aren't any Watch members here . . . except 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 then 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 towards 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 holidaymakers . . .'

'This is a kingdom of women,' Svetlana retorted. 'They're either single mothers, or they're here to give the children some fresh air and exercise while their husbands are slaving away. 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 called to see me yesterday?'

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

'Both of us. She has two kids – a little boy, Romka, he's five, and Ksyusha, who's ten.'

'Good,' I said, giving Anna Viktorovna my seal of 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, grasping 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 on their own in the evening.'

'Well, that's strange,' 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 giving them what for, they told her they got lost,' Svetlana went on, ignoring me. 'And they met a wolf. The wolf drove them through the forest – and straight to some wolf cubs . . .'

'I see . . .' I murmured. I felt a vague flutter of alarm in my chest.

'Anyway, the children were in a real panic. But then a woman appeared and recited some lines of verse to the wolf, and it ran away. The woman took them to her 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 there I was, expecting foul play,' I said, and lay back down. 'Did you check them for magic?'

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

'Fantasies. Maybe they did get a fright from someone . . . perhaps even a wolf. And some woman did lead them out of the forest. The kids were lucky, but take a belt to them . . .'

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

I thought for a moment. Then I asked:

'Can stammering be cured? By suggestion, you know, hypnosis? . . . Or some other way?'

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

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

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

'Even bedwetting,' I muttered. '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. 'Sveta, this is not good. A witch. With power even greater than yours. And you're first-grade!'

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 really come between us some day.

And in any case, Svetlana had deliberately withdrawn from the Night Watch. 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 was giving a lecture. 'All their actions are determined by plain egotism. If a witch was 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-grade, 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 artefacts that exist in the world were created by witches or warlocks – you could call them their artificial limbs. Artefacts can be things or elements of the body that are dead – hair, long fingernails . . . That's why a witch is harmless if you undress her and shave off all her hair, 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 no Great Magician, but I know the elementary facts, I don't need reminding.'

'I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you,' Svetlana apologised 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 insecurities on the woman I loved? I was worse than any Dark One . . .

'Sveta, 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 reply:

'With ones as powerful as this? Come on, in the whole of Moscow there's only one first-grade witch, and she retired ages ago . . . What are we going to do, Sveta?'

'There is no actual reason to interfere,' she replied 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 towards 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 well . . . The second question is whether the witch is registered in this locality or not, and what her record is like . . .'

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

Five minutes later I had the answer. There was nothing in the Night Watch records about any witches in the area.

Ten minutes later I walked out of the garden, armed with instructions and advice from my wife – in her capacity as a potential Great Enchantress. On my way past the barn, I glanced in through the open doors – Kolya was hovering over the open bonnet 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, 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 he could remember. He kept repeating them as he rummaged around 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, he called out happily:

'This is going to cost you more than half a litre, Antosha! Those Japs 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?' 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 right! Only my head's humming, the son of a bitch . . .'

'Look in on Sveta, she'll pour you a drop,' I said, accepting the inevitable.

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

Mentally bidding 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 am I supposed to do with him?' asked Anna Viktorovna, glad to see me. 'Hello, Anton. Tell me, does your Nadienka 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 seem like a strict man, you'll teach him how to behave. He can look after Nadienka, wash her nappies, wash the floors for you, put the rubbish 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 educational 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 am I supposed to 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 sitting at the table with a glass of cold kvass, the centre 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 that'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 – right next to the village! Chasing children! It drove them towards the cubs, do you realise 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 – a man-eater?'

'It couldn't have been,' I said. 'There haven't been any cases of wolves attacking people round here. There haven't even been any reports of wolves living 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 requested. 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 children's father that I couldn't understand. All sorts of things can happen. So they were separated. But how could anyone just cancel his children out of his life and be happy just to pay maintenance?

'We walked and walked, you know, we were out for a walk,' Romka told us with agonising 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 imagined. But the child was speaking perfectly clearly, except for repeating a few words, which was usual for a child 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-grade 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 small, and the wolf was big. And I didn't have a stick. 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 put me off. 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 kilometres from Moscow. Had they been counting on the fact that there was no Night Watch in the village? Even then, the district office checked every missing person case. They had a very skilful, specialised magician for that. From the normal human viewpoint what he did was pure charlatanism – he 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 swing into action, drive out to the country, find the signs . . . and the signs would be terrible, but we're used to that. Then the werewolves would probably resist arrest, and someone – it could easily be me – would wave his hand. And a jangling grey haze would go creeping through the Twilight . . .

We rarely took their 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 a-way, witch!' Romka said, trying in vain to imitate a hoarse bass voice.

Right. Now I could 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 children, there was a witch there too.

A powerful witch.

Very powerful.

She hadn't just driven away the werewolf – she'd tidied up the children's 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 – there 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?' he 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, one for me, one for Ksyusha!'

'Roman!' Anna Viktorovna snapped in a voice of iron.

 

I found Ksyusha at the pond, as her mother said I would. A covey of girls was sunbathing beside a pack of boys, and the gibes were flying in both directions. The boy sunbathers were old enough not to pull the girls' plaits any more, but they still didn't understand what girls were any good for.

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

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

The 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?' Ksyusha asked suspiciously.

'Nadya.'

'Yes, I know,' she said with a nod, getting up off the sand. 'You want to talk about the wolves, right?'

I smiled.

'That's right.'

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

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

He looked round proudly at his friends.

'We can talk here,' I said to reassure the children. It was terrible, of course, to see normal kids living in normal families being so cautious.

But it was better that they were.

'We went for a walk in the forest,' Ksyusha began, standing to attention in front of me. I thought for a moment and sat down on the sand – then 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 Ksyusha was probably the most popular girl with the boys in first class.

In principle she 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 any of the book titles?' I asked.

Ksyusha shook her head.

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

The shadow rose up obediently to meet me.

And the cool, grey Twilight accepted me.

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

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

I apologised mentally to the kids – after all, they hadn't asked me to do what I was going to do. And I ran the lightest possible, imperceptible touch across them. Just to remove the slight traces of Evil that had already stuck to them.

And then I stroked Ksyusha's hair and whispered:

'Remember, little girl . . .'

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!' Ksyusha 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, it was particularly heinous. It even had a few vile uses for dandelions.

'And Kassagar Garsarra,' Ksyusha continued.

Some of the children giggled. But uncertainly.

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

'No, in Russian,' she replied. '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, the magic of the spells wouldn't be preserved. It could only be copied out by hand. And only in blood. Not the blood of a virgin or a young innocent, those were erroneous beliefs introduced later, and modern copies like that were no use at all. The Kassagar Garsarra was still believed to exist only in Arabic, Spanish, Latin and Old German. A magician who rewrote the book had to use his own blood – a 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 did you say? Fuaran?'

'Yes, Fuaran,' Ksyusha repeated.

There wasn't really anything too horrible in that book. But in all the textbooks it was mentioned as an imaginary invention. According to legend, it 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?' Ksyusha asked.

'Yes,' 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 around here! Right here, just outside Moscow, a powerful witch sitting in the dark depths of the forest . . . though hardly – 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. But books like that were supposed to be registered on a special list – kept by both Watches and the Inquisition. Because the Power that stood behind them was immense, and dangerous.

'I owe you a chocolate bar,' I told the girl. 'You told me your story really well.'

Ksyusha didn't make any fuss, she just said 'thank you'. 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.