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professional would have caught that couple in a day . . .'
    I really wanted to know what Olga thought about all this. But the owl didn't make a sound.
    'What's more important for maintaining the balance?' I asked anyway. 'Giving me some operational experience or saving the lives of three innocent people?'
    The owl said nothing.
    'I couldn't sense the vampires with the usual methods,' I went on. 'I had to attune myself to them. I didn't drink human blood, though, I made do with pig's blood. And all those drugs . . . but then, you know all about those, I expect . . .'
    When I mentioned the drugs I got up, opened the little cupboard above the cooker and took out a glass jar with a tight-fitting ground-glass stopper. There was only a little bit of the lumpy brown powder left, it made no sense to hand it back in to the department. I tipped the powder into the sink and rinsed it away – the kitchen was filled with a pungent, dizzying odour. I rinsed out the jar and dropped it into the rubbish bin.
    '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