“He’ll come to see you today,” I said. “A good healer. Believe me.”

“What’s wrong with him?” the woman asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“It’s like he’s lost his soul,” said the woman.

“Wait for the healer,” I told her.

We walked out of the flat. I looked into the Twilight—the blue moss had crept even further away from the door. It didn’t like what was going on in there.

“Come on, Las,” I said. “We’ve got to see Gesar, and quick.”

But we had to stop for a minute outside the building. Standing in front of the entrance was a young couple—a girl with an expression of simultaneous fury and bewilderment on her face and a young man who was declaring enthusiastically: “And I only kissed your sister, and that was when I was drunk. But I slept with Lenka once, she came round when you were out . . .”

“We have to tidy things up here,” I decided. “I’ll deal with the girl, and you remove the Socrates from the guy and make him forget everything.”

“Do we really have to?” Las asked pensively. “It’s his own fault—let him take the consequences.”

“Mistakes have to be corrected,” I said. “At least, those that can be corrected.”

Las obviously thinks that I already understand something and the reason we’re in such a rush to get back to Gesar is because he definitely understands everything—who this tiger is, why a living man has no aura (and at the same time has lost all interest in life), why spells aimed at him pass straight through him. But in actual fact, I don’t understand a thing. And I expect Gesar will be just as dumbfounded as I am.

Just what is an aura, if you think about it?

It’s Power. The same Power that people produce all the time, but can’t use. The Power flows out of them into space and blankets the whole Earth. We Others produce far less of it—which means we can absorb it from the ambient environment. (The blue moss does pretty much the same thing, only we’re far more efficient—and we can think too!) If there’s no aura, it means there’s no Power . . . no life energy . . . the man or Other is already dead.

No, what kind of nonsense is this I’m thinking? No aura? Vampires are dead, they’re in a state of “afterlife,” but they have an aura. Their own special vampire aura, but they have it. And my Nadiushka—an absolute enchantress with a “zero magical temperature”—she has an aura, too, and boy, what an aura that is!