Oh no. Enough sacrifices. Down with prophecies. I put the chalice on the baking tray and went to get a bottle of lighter fluid. (I’d been using those cheap gas lighters for ages, but the bottle had been standing in the cupboard, waiting for its time to come.)

“May you rest easy in the Twilight, Erasmus,” I said, dousing the chalice generously with petrol.

The front door slammed.

“Daddy! I’m home!” Nadya shouted. “Anna Tikhonovna fell ill and let us off the last lesson!”

Sveta had been going to collect Nadya from school that day.

“Okay,” I shouted back, squatting down in front of the oven with a box of matches in my hand.

“I’ve brought visitors.”

“Yes?” I asked, looking round.

Nadya appeared in the doorway. Then Kesha appeared awkwardly behind her.

“Hi, Innokentii,” I said. For some reason I wasn’t surprised by his visit. “How are things?”

“Fine . . .” he said, and hesitated, not looking up. “The lessons are interesting.”

“That’s great,” I said in the vigorous tone that grown-ups use for talking to children.

“Kesha’s mum is working late,” Nadya explained. “I invited him over to our place. Mummy promised to take him home afterwards.”

“But where is Mummy?”

“She drove us to the entrance and then went to get some toilet paper,” Nadya said, with a giggle. There’s an age at which the very words “toilet paper” sound remarkably funny, especially if you say them in front of someone the same age as you.

“Yes, I forgot to buy any yesterday,” I said in a repentant voice.

Nadya looked round and shouted into the hallway: “No, those are Mummy’s slippers, the green ones are for visitors!”

“Have we got lots of visitors, then?” I asked, getting up.

“Not really lots,” said Nadya, slightly embarrassed. “Just Aunty Arina as well. We met her in the entrance. She was coming to see us.”

I took a couple of swift strides and positioned myself between the children and the hallway. My left hand was still holding the box of matches. But the fingers of my right hand were already folded into the Shield sign.

“Anton,” Arina shouted from the hallway. “Peace, friendship, chewing gum!”

She glanced in cautiously from the corridor.

“I come in peace!” she said, smiling broadly. “No evil here. You can see that the children are fine!”

Nadya seemed to have realized that she had acted rashly. She didn’t make a sound, but she grabbed hold of Kesha’s hand and dragged him in further behind me.

And I felt a bottomless well of Power seething and brimming over just a meter away from me.

“Nadya,” I said in a quiet voice. “You know perfectly well that you shouldn’t bring strange . . . people back home.”

“But she’s not an ordinary person,” said Nadya, trying to make excuses. “She’s an Other . . . a Light One.”