The young woman squealed when the blow descended on her and she was tossed between the trees to the very edge of the roadway. She lay there across the curb, still squealing and watching a car the same color as the dirty asphalt driving straight at her.

The car managed to brake in time.

The young woman squealed again as she tried to get up, and only then felt the terrible pain in her lower back. She lost consciousness.

Andrei was suddenly jerked up into the air, as if someone wanted to look him in the eyes or sink their teeth into his throat. A voice whispered, “Why did you have to see me, A-student?”

The boy screamed and began struggling in those invisible hands. He could feel a shameful damp patch spreading across his jeans.

“Have you been taught to record auras?” the voice asked out of thin air. “Remember, I can sense a lie.”

“No!” Andrei shouted, squirming. The invisible vampire’s grip slackened slightly.

And just at that moment the boy’s eyes were blinded by a bright flash. One of the male trainees had managed to gather enough Power for a battle spell after all. Naturally it wasn’t only young kids who liked to peep into the next sections of the textbook…

Andrei was jerked through the air, the world spun around him-and he landed with a splash right in the middle of the pond, frightening the fat, lazy swans and the sly, brazen ducks. From there he saw the trainee who had thrown the Shock spell fall, and the other trainee, who was making a phone call, take to his heels.

Andrei swam to the little house that had been built for the swans and scrambled up on to the wooden platform. The little house smelled of bird droppings. But the boy still preferred to sit there in the middle of the pond until the operations group arrived. The following day his action was described by Gesar as the only correct thing to do in the given situation, and the boy was unofficially requested to think about working in the Watch. As Vadim Dmitrievich used to say to his students when he was alive, “Dead heroes serve in a different place.”

Considering the nature of the situation, there weren’t many casualties. Only the tutor and one of the trainees-a mathematician by education. Perhaps he didn’t have enough time to calculate what kind of opposition an untrained fifth-level magician could offer against a Higher Vampire.

Or perhaps he simply hadn’t bothered to calculate anything.

Chapter 1

I SAID HELLO TO GARIK, WHO WAS DISCUSSING SOMETHING WITH A colonel of the militia. The colonel was an ordinary man, but he was involved in our work; he knew something about the Watches and helped us cover up incidents like this one. The bodies had already been taken away, our specialists had finished fiddling about with auras and traces of magic, and now the forensic experts from the militia had started their work.

“In the Gazelle,” Garik told me with a nod. I walked across to our operational vehicle and got in.

A young lad wrapped in a blanket and drinking hot tea from a mug gave me a frightened look.

“My name’s Anton Gorodetsky,” I said. “You’re Andrei, right?”

The boy nodded. “I…,” the boy began in a remorseful voice. “I didn’t know…”

“Calm down. You’re not to blame for anything. Nobody could have foreseen the appearance of a wild vampire in the center of Moscow in broad daylight,” I said. In fact, I thought to myself that if the lad had such a natural ability for reading auras, this sort of thing actually ought to have been foreseen. But I didn’t want to criticize the dead tutor. Someday this incident would go into the teacher training manuals-on the pages printed in red to indicate that the knowledge had been paid for in blood.

“But I shouldn’t have shouted like that,” the boy said. He put down the mug of tea. The blanket slid off his shoulders and I saw a massive bruise on his chest. The vampire had hit him really hard. “If he hadn’t heard me…”

“He would still have sensed your fright and confusion. Calm down. The most important thing now is to catch this undead monster.”

“And lay him to rest,” the boy said in a firm voice.

“Right. And lay him to rest. Have you been studying with us for long?”

“Three weeks.”

I shook my head. He was a talented young boy, no doubt about it. I just hoped that what had happened wouldn’t sour him on the idea of working in the Watch.

“Have you been taught how to record auras?”

“No,” the boy admitted. And he shuddered, as if at some unpleasant memory.

“Then describe the vampire as precisely as you can.”

The boy hesitated and then said, “We haven’t been taught. But I’ve tried studying it. It’s the fourth chapter in the textbook…Recording, Copying, and Transmitting an Aura.”

“And you studied the subject?”

“Yes.”

“Can you transmit the vampire’s aura to me?”

The boy thought for a moment and nodded. “I can try.”

“Go on. I’m opening myself up.” I closed my eyes and relaxed. OK, come on, young talent…

At first there was a faint sensation of warmth-like a hair dryer blowing into my face from a distance. And then I sensed a clumsy, rather confused transmission. I locked onto it and took a close look. The boy was trying with all his might, transmitting the aura again and again. Gradually I began building up a complete picture out of the isolated fragments.

“Just a little bit more,” I said. “Repeat that…”

The colored threads flared up more brightly and arranged themselves into an intricate pattern. The basic colors, of course, were black and red-nonlife and death, the standard vampire aura. In addition to the overall color scheme, which is constantly changing and can be very different at different times, there are fundamental features such as the subtle pattern of Power-as individual as fingerprints or the pattern of blood vessels in the iris of the eye.

“Well done,” I said, pleased. “Thank you. It’s a very good impression.”

“Will you be able to find him?” the teenager asked.

“Definitely,” I assured him. “You’ve been a great help. And don’t be upset. Don’t punish yourself…your tutor died a hero.”

That was a lie, of course. In the first place, heroes don’t die. Heroes don’t protect themselves with the Magician’s Shield when they see a vampire attacking, they strike to stun him. An ordinary Gray Prayer would have slowed the vampire down and stopped him, at least for a while. Long enough for the trainees to scatter and run, and the tutor could have gathered his thoughts and erected a decent defense.

But there was nothing to be done about it now. There was no point in explaining to the boy that his first tutor was a kind, sweet guy, but completely unprepared for real work. That was the whole problem: Genuine Battle Magicians with the smell of blood and fire in their nostrils didn’t often go into tutoring. The tutors were more often noble-minded theoreticians…

“Garik, do you need me here?” I asked. There was already a Dark One I didn’t know loitering around near Garik and the colonel. Which was only to be expected. The Day Watch had dropped by to get their guy off the hook, if they could, and if they couldn’t, to find out how serious our losses were. Garik shook his head. I ignored the Dark One and walked off casually toward my car, which was parked right under a No Parking sign. Antitheft spells are used by all Others, but applying a spell that lets you be seen by everyone on the road and park wherever you like is a bit more complicated.

Getting an impression of the vampire’s aura was a great stroke of luck. In a situation like that, even experienced adult magicians lose their heads. But this kid had managed to do well. I was itching to get back to the office as quickly as possible and pass on the impression for the duty watchmen’s information-then everyone who went out on patrol could look for the bloodsucker. A Higher Vampire, unregistered…No, I couldn’t really count on a coincidence like that.