The Day Watch Read Online Free PDF Page B

sniveling and trying to catch Zabulon’s eye again. He hadn’t spoken to me since the hurricane last year-the one that had hit on the day when I was captured so shamefully. And he wouldn’t speak to me for the next hundred years. I was sure of it.
    A car moving slowly along the curb stopped with a quiet rustle of tires. It was a decent car, a Volvo, and it hadn’t come from the junkyard. A jerk with a shaven head stuck his smug face out of the window, looked me up and down, and broke into a satisfied smile. Then he hissed.
    “How much?”
    I was dumbstruck.
    “For two hours-how much?” the idiot with the shaved head asked more specifically.
    I looked at the number plate-it wasn’t from Moscow. So that was it.
    “The prostitutes are farther down, you halfwit,” I said amiably. “Get lost.”
    “Anyone would think you didn’t screw,” the disappointed idiot said, trying to save face. “Think it over, I’m feeling generous today.”
    “You hold onto your capital,” I advised him and clicked my fingers. “You’ll need it to fix your car.”
    I turned my back to him and walked toward the building. My palm was aching slightly from the recoil. The
    “gremlin” isn’t a very complicated spell, but I’d cast it in too much of a hurry. I’d left the Volvo with an incorporeal creature fiddling about under its hood-not even a creature really, but a bundle of energy with an obsessive passion for destroying technology.
    If he was lucky, his engine was finished. If he was unlucky, then his fancy bourgeois electronics would blow-the carburetors, the ventilators, all those gearwheels and drive-belts that the car was crammed full of. I’d never taken any interest in the insides of an automobile except in the most general terms. But I had a very clear i.e. of the result of using the “gremlin.”
    The disappointed man drove off without wasting too much time arguing. I wondered if he’d remember what I’d said when his car started going haywire. He was bound to. He’d shout, “She hexed it, the witch!” And he wouldn’t even know just how right he was.
    The thought amused me, but nonetheless, the day had been hopelessly spoiled.
    I was five minutes late for work, and there was that quarrel with my mother, and that idiot in the Volvo…
    With these thoughts in my head I walked past the magnificent, gleaming shop windows, raised my shadow from the ground without even thinking about it, and entered the building through a door that ordinary people can’t see.
    The headquarters of the Light Ones, near the Sokol metro station, is disguised as an ordinary office. We have a more respectable location and our camouflage is a lot more fun. This building, with seven floors of apartments above shops that are luxurious even by Moscow standards, has three more floors than everyone thinks. It was specially built that way as the Day Watch residence, and the spells that disguise the building’s true appearance are incorporated into the very bricks and stone of the walls. The people living in the building, who are mostly perfectly ordinary, probably feel a strange sensation whenever they ride the elevator up-as if it takes too long to get from the first floor to the second…
    The elevator does take longer than it should because the second floor is actually the third, and the real second
     
    floor is invisible-it houses our duty offices, armaments room, and technical services. Our other two floors are on the top of the building, and not a single human being knows about them either. But any Other who is powerful enough can look through the Twilight and see the severe black granite walls and the window arches that are almost always covered with thick, heavy curtains. Ten years ago they installed air-conditioners-that’s when the clumsy boxes of the split systems appeared on the walls. Before that the internal climate was regulated by magic-but why waste it like that, when electricity is far cheaper?
    I once saw a photograph of our