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goes, there’s probably not much difference.’

CHAPTER 2
    IT’S HARD TO get any pleasure out of flying these days. Boeing 737s and Tupolev 154s crashing, Swiss air-traffic controllers getting lost in thought and all sorts of Arab terrorists on the loose don’t exactly put you in the right mood to sit back in your comfortable seat and enjoy yourself. And although the duty-free cognac is cheap, the female flight attendant is attentive, and the food and wine are perfectly good, it’s not easy for a man to relax.
    Fortunately, I am not a man. The probability lines had been checked by Svetlana and Gesar. I can feel out the future for a few hours ahead myself if need be. We would get there with no problems, make a nice soft landing at Heathrow, and I would have time to make the connection for the plane to Edinburgh …
    So I could sit there calmly in my business-class seat (I didn’t believe that this was a sudden fit of generosity from my boss, there simply hadn’t been any other seats available), sip the decent Chilean wine and glance compassionately at the woman trying to look younger than her real age who was sitting across the aisle from me. She was very frightened. Every now and then she crossed herself and whispered a silent prayer.
    Eventually I couldn’t stand it any longer. I reached out to her through the Twilight – and stroked her head gently. Not with my hands, with my mind. With the kind of affection that only human mothers can provide, the affection that instantly removes all anxieties. I touched the hair that had been dyed so often.
    The woman relaxed and a minute later she fell sound asleep.
    The middle-aged man beside me was a lot calmer, and he was also pretty drunk. He briskly opened up the two little bottles of gin that the flight attendant had brought, mixed their contents with tonic in the harsh proportion of one to one, drank the result and then started dozing. He looked like a typical Bohemian – jeans, cotton sweater and a short beard. A writer? A musician? A theatre director? London is a magnet for everyone – from businessmen and politicians to Bohemians and rich playboys …
    I could relax too, look out of the window at the dark expanses of Poland and do a bit of thinking.
    Before Zabulon had shown up everything had seemed fairly simple. The boy Victor had run into a vampire who was either hungry or stupid (or both at the same time). He had been killed. Once the vampire had sated his hunger, he had realised exactly what he had done, and he had gone into hiding. Sooner or later, using the old tried and tested police methods, the Night Watch of Edinburgh would check all the local and visiting bloodsuckers, find out if they had alibis or not, put someone under surveillance and catch the killer. Gesar, suffering from some kind of guilt complex over Victor’s father, who had refused to become a Light Other, had decided to speed up the good work. And at the same time give me a chance to pick up some experience.
    Logical?
    Absolutely. Nothing odd about it.
    Then Zabulon turns up.
    And we are shown our noble Leonid Prokhorov, the might-have-been Light Magician, in a different light! It turns out that he is also a might-have-been Dark Magician! He has helped the Day Watch, and so Zabulon is burning with desire to punish his son’s killer!
    Did such things happen?
    Apparently they did. Apparently the man had decided to play for both teams at once. We Others cannot serve the Light and the Dark at the same time. But for people it’s simpler. That’s the way most of them live anyway.
    Then … then Victor’s killing might not be a coincidence. Zabulon could have found out that Prokhorov was helping us and taken his revenge by killing Prokhorov’s son. But not with his own hands, of course.
    Or the other way round. It was a sad thought, but Gesar could have given the order to eliminate Victor. Not for revenge, of course not! But the Great