Sixth Watch (25 page)

And all this time we were being passed from hand to hand by men and women in loose-fitting clothing, under which there was enough space for handguns and even machine guns. I didn't spot any magic on the people; they were evidently either mercenaries or were working for the promise of eternal life. Believe me, that's a very powerful stimulus—after all, only vampires and shape-shifters can pass
on their abilities to anyone who wants them. As far as I was aware, intelligent vampires didn't break their promises and occasionally, for special services rendered, one of their human servants was accorded the dubious honor of becoming a living corpse. Their comrades had to know that their master wasn't lying. So that they would fight to the end for this great happiness.

Eventually, after yet another flight of stairs and another corridor, we came out into a small lobby with broad windows offering a view of Manhattan on one side and tall, double wooden doors on the other. The two black guards with machine guns standing by one of the doors didn't even think it necessary to conceal their weapons.

“Wait here, I have to arrange things,” Ekaterina whispered, and walked quickly toward the door with the guards. They let her through without any questions, but they kept their eyes glued on us.

“Hey, bro!” I called cheerfully to one of the guards. “How you doin'?”

No reaction.

Slightly offended, I walked over to the other door, which was standing ajar, and glanced inside cautiously.

It was a spacious hall with numerous sofas, armchairs, and low tables set with bottles, plates, and warming trays heating food. People were wandering around the hall, talking, lounging on the sofas, and eating and drinking from the tables.

And there were quite a number of them. About fifty.

They were all different ages. I spotted a few handsome old men and several teenage boys and girls. The old men were watching CNN on a TV fixed to the wall; the teenagers were playing with game consoles of some kind.

But the general mass of them were twenty to twenty-five years old.

And all of them were beautiful or handsome, each in his or her own way. A tall, elegant black youth, a young girl in a white dress with her fair hair hanging loose, a statuesque woman with incredibly classical, regular facial features.

“What's in there?” Olga asked when I went back to her.

“The dining hall.”

Olga looked at me for a few moments, then nodded.

“I see.”

We didn't discuss anything else. We knew perfectly well that no vampire needed to feed every day. And certainly not on a live human being—in most cases packaged blood was enough for them.

Most vampires basically regard feeding as an intimate process and don't make a public display of it. At the very most, they make an exception for their clan.

But today there was a big gathering here. The global vampire lodge, represented by the most important Masters (currently there were forty-nine of those) simply had to arrange everything in what it regarded as appropriate style.

And that included the food. Most likely all the people gathered in the next hall were here voluntarily. Most likely they, like the security guards, had been promised that they would be turned into vampires—the beautiful, brilliant vampires eulogized by the deceitful books and the shameless movie industry.

And almost certainly no one would keep the promise that had been made to them. Licenses had been issued for them. They were food. The vampires could feed on them and let them go, or they could drink them dry.

“I wonder how Gesar's getting on.” Olga sighed. “What do you think? Will he manage to sweet-talk the Grandmothers?”

“He could sweet-talk grandmothers,” I said. “But those are witches.”

Ekaterina came back to the lobby, but not alone. She was with a middle-aged blond woman. Or more precisely, with a vampiress whose age, naturally, I didn't know.

“It's not normal,” the woman said after glancing at us.

“Greta, Vincello's sitting there in the hall with his own—”

“He was granted that right almost two centuries ago, and you know why,” the woman snapped. “Katya, what you're asking is unreasonable.”

“Everything has its price,” replied the Mistress of the Vampires of Moscow. “What's yours? You're the marshal of this gathering, you can do anything.”

The woman hesitated and glanced again at Olga and me. I suddenly thought that all the effort of masking our auras could come to nothing if Greta knew me by sight.

And she could. The vampires had heard about me.

“Have you got the belt with you?” the marshal suddenly asked, lowering her voice.

“Yes,” Ekaterina said in an icy tone.

“That's my price.”

Ekaterina glanced at us. Then she shook her head.

“No. You're out of your mind. That's completely out of the question.”

“For ten years,” said Greta.

“No.”

“For a year.”

What were they talking about? Yet again I regretted that somehow I managed to keep running into vampires all the time, but I knew so little about them. They were very secretive, of course, but a certain amount of information did exist . . .

“For a month,” said Ekaterina.

“For three,” Greta replied.

“Done.”

The female vampires smiled at each other and embraced.

“Come through in two or three minutes,” Greta said amiably. “Turn right straightaway and sit in the top row, so you won't stand out. And make sure your people sit quietly.”

Greta walked away with that smooth vampire glide. The black security guards at the door stared straight ahead with stony faces. But what were they thinking as they guarded a gathering of vampires and saw the people destined for slaughter in the next hall? Did they feel glad that they wouldn't be touched? Were they dreaming of becoming immortal bloodsuckers?

Or were they not thinking of anything at all, which is most often the way of things.

“What kind of belt is that?” I asked in a low voice, moving closer to Ekaterina.

“None of your business,” she replied, not looking at me.

“But really?”

“An artifact. An old magical object. A piece of scuffed pigskin with bronze clasps,” the Mistress of Vampires replied reluctantly.

“And what does it give you?”

Ekaterina glanced at me and laughed.

“A sense of taste. Once a day it gives you a sense of taste and you can eat ordinary food. Eat it and taste it, like a human. It's only an illusion and you still need blood anyway. But you can eat it, and you won't have the taste of wet cotton wool in your mouth, but of strawberries and whipped cream, jamón with a slice of melon, pasta with Parmesan, buckwheat porridge with milk.”

“Bloody steak,” Olga added.

Ekaterina answered her perfectly seriously.

“Believe me, bloody steak is one thing we don't miss. But we could easily rip someone's throat out for a plate of semolina pudding with cherry jam.”

“You should tell that to your . . . servants,” I said, nodding toward the black enforcers. “So they wouldn't be so keen for promotion.”

“They're warned, but they don't believe it,” Ekaterina said dryly. “That's all now, let's go.”

We followed her past the security guards.

The hall where the vampires were gathering looked like a university lecture theater—a semicircular amphitheater, rising up from a podium at the bottom. It could probably have accommodated a hundred or more people quite comfortably.

Or Others, of course.

We walked in through the upper entrance, beside the top row. We turned right and followed Ekaterina quickly in order to take
our seats. The hall was in semidarkness; only the stage was brightly illuminated. There was a lectern with no one standing at it, but sitting at a small table beside the lectern were Greta, a handsome, youthful-looking individual, and a skinny, frail-looking old man. All vampires, naturally.

“Your attention for a moment, please,” Greta announced.

Her voice was quiet, but the audience was already focused on business, and in any case vampires know how to speak so that you hear them, even if you don't want to.

“For worthy reasons,” Greta continued, “Mistress Ekaterina of Moscow is accompanied by her attendants.”

The audience looked around at us. But not all of them and only briefly. I was moving along beside the long bench with my head lowered, hoping that no one would get the idea of looking at the pitiful human being through the Twilight. Who was interested in me anyway? After all, we don't peek into the sandwich bag of the person sitting next to us on the commuter train . . .

They didn't look closely at me. And there were other humans in the auditorium apart from us. We reached the middle of the bench and sat down. I glanced around discreetly.

Delightful girls nestling against imposing-looking men. Handsome young men who couldn't take their eyes off their dead mistresses. Teenagers of both sexes—I had heard that in these cases it wasn't even a matter of perversion, but the strange urge felt by ancient vampires to create the illusion of a family for themselves. Vampires couldn't have children and, as far as I knew, for them sex had certain peculiarities. But some of them created surrogate families, adopting and raising children—basically leading some kind of simulacrum of a human life.

I remembered the mysterious “belt” that Ekaterina had loaned out for three months in order to get us into the session of the lodge. What a bad time they had of it, after all. How cold and joyless their life was!

Even though they were lucky, and didn't have to have semolina pudding with cherry jam. The vampires still showed no sign of get
ting started. They were clearly waiting for someone. I took out my earphones, leaned back on the bench, switched on the MP3 player, and it came up with “Picnic”:

        
Nostradamus had his fill of pain and grief

        
And brought his visions forth into the light.

        
Had he but known that within easy reach

        
A world is hid that has no future time.

        
The world is but a hall of phantoms,

        
Learn to disappear.

        
Where, breathing in the gelid, peaceful air,

        
Time's serpent by the chains of sleep is bound

        
And cruel letters cannot be assembled into words

        
By the deliberate, unhasting hand.

        
The world is but a hall of phantoms,

        
Learn to disappear . . .

The door opened again and a slim little girl of about twelve walked in, wearing a checkered shirt that was one size larger than necessary, tattered jeans one size smaller than they should be, and with bare feet.

“Glad to see you, Ellie, but this is the third time we've had to wait just for you.”

“Oh, I'm really sorry,” Ellie replied in that sickly sweet teenage voice that drives adults into a frenzy. She sat down at the end of our bench and waved to Ekaterina, who nodded coldly. Ellie wasn't upset; she took a stick of gum out of her pocket, tossed it into her mouth, and started chewing. Pure swagger—she couldn't taste a thing . . .

It looked as if the underage vampire wasn't very popular around here—and she was used to that. I closed my eyes, remembering . . .

Aha. The Mistress of Stockholm. Yes indeed, an ancient and unsavory individual in a child's body.

“In my role as the marshal for today, I declare the meeting open,” said Greta. “The Darkness, the Light, and the Twilight hear us.”

“The Darkness, the Light, and the Twilight hear us . . .” all the Masters repeated in close chorus. Even the insolent “little girl,” Ellie, who had already put her feet up on the long desktop and blown a bubble of gum, repeated it.

“By the Ancient Covenant, by the Ancient Law,” Greta continued.

“By the Ancient Covenant, by the Ancient Law” the audience echoed.

“By Blood, Life, and Death,” said Greta.

“By Blood, Life, and Death,” the hall concluded.

Silence fell.

“Everyone knows the agenda,” said Greta. “Since we are gathered here, I respectfully offer the floor first of all to Master Jack.”

A black man got up out of the front row and walked toward the podium at a leisurely pace. He looked so much like the security guards at the door that I glanced in surprise at Olga. She shrugged, evidently having guessed what I was thinking.

But dammit, they didn't reproduce!

Then how . . .

Ah, but then, they might not be his children at all. They could be his great-great-great-grandchildren. His descendants from children conceived when he was still human. That was entirely possible.

“Brothers and sisters . . .” Master Jack began, spreading his arms out wide. He was wearing a sleek, imposing, snow-white suit. I could just imagine him in a normal human church, singing psalms or quoting the Bible. “I'm delighted to see you here! I've just called to mind a story that happened to a friend of mine in Texas, in the middle of the last century. He just happened to get all his teeth smashed out in a certain eatery down there! And they broke them out real good, so it would take more than a day to grow them back!
And then this acquaintance of his turned up at his place and said: ‘Let's go to the dance, we'll pick up a few girls, have a dance and a good suck . . .'”

I sat there absolutely dumbstruck, with my jaw almost hanging open, listening to an ancient American vampire, addressing us in the finest traditions of Public Speaking for Beginners and telling us a vampire joke that was as old as smilodon shit.