Imagine this.

You deserve to die. And you’re gonna. And now you are. You’ve felt the knife slicing your trachea. The blood is flowing. Your eyes see a blur of light and dark. There’s no turning back. But in that last second, they give you one last thing. They give you a dream.

In the dream everything goes differently, from the very beginning. Your first memory is a cool wind on your face and a red maple in a blue sky and someone singing to you, Ob-la-dee, ob-la-dah, life goes on, yeah… It keeps on like that all the way to the end. Some bad things happen, but nothing really worse than the leaves falling off that maple in the winter. Some good things happen, but nothing really better than the fact that you are now here, in a world where someone sings to you.

Then you wake up.

***

I lied about the doctors releasing my dad. The truth is, they wanted to keep him six more hours, for observation. "Some funny infections can crop up with that particular bloodline," the human one with a ruddy neck said.

"Just as well," I said to my folks. "Mr. Angel asked me to have lunch in his office. He said he has some other things he wants to explain to me—about, uh, watching out for myself and avoiding Goth biker gangs from now on." Then I found the elevator again. I hit the L button and walked through the sun-glaring marble lobby and out the double doors.

Don’t get the wrong idea. When it’s time, I’ll pick up my folks and take them home. After that, this place may never see my face again.

The last time I saw this building, this plaza, the sky was black and the only people out were derelicts, scuttling to find a place indoors. It had already started—the darkness— and people had the sense not to mill around in open spaces. This is not the case today.

I just walk.

The girl at the Espresso Express stand catches my eye. I talked to her yesterday when I went to buy a nonfat mocha for my mom and a macchiato with vanilla for my dad and a regular for me. We were just about to go into the building. "I like your tattoo," I said. It was a red image on the back of her hand of the symbol for biocontamination. "Where’re you from?" she asked, somehow knowing I didn’t belong, and I said, "From the mountains. Up near Santa Barbara. It snows there."

She recognizes me, I think. She smiles and waves the first two fingers of her left hand. I look away. I walk past.

Then I change my mind. I go back. She scowls as if she’s mad at me, then smiles—just kidding. I ask, "Did there use to be a mall around here?"

The mall is full of wavering light and tinkly sounds. Music from stores. Skylights. Fountains. Moms in white pumps or expensive running shoes; kids in Lakers shirts and hightops jostling for a place at the water fountain. Receipt-printers clicking. Babies shrieking.

I walk. I sit on a bench. I walk again.

I see the awning. I see the wrap-around mezzanine and the skis and surfboards and the mural depicting a bright sunny day in the Rockies. The same cathedral ceiling and windows that white light floods through. I don’t think it has changed. Not in a year, give or take a few months.

I see no need to go in.

***

Have you ever been in a situation where you didn’t know what was the right thing to do, so you just did what you thought people wanted from you? Played along?

Have you ever done something especially bad when you were playing along? Even though you knew better?

One time I was in my senior U.S. history class. My teacher showed us a movie called Night and Fog. It was the Holocaust as documented by concentration-camp guards with movie cameras, recording their deeds for posterity. So they could watch it at home with their kids, maybe. Anyway, there were a lot of things in this movie that made me want to squirm in my chair and look down at my desk. And suddenly there on the screen was this barrel of heads. This barrel sitting there with these severed heads piled on top of each other, spilling out. Dead blurry black-and-white heads with dead eyes.

Some kid behind me laughed—an embarrassed, horrified chuckle. Then somebody to my right laughed, and then somebody to my left, and then somebody over by the window did it. It was a laugh that forced its way out like a sneeze, tearing like a razor-burn. And then I laughed. I laughed at the dead men’s heads staring at us across time.

I bent over the desk. I hid it. I barely snickered into my hand. When the teacher lectured us afterward about "amazing insensitivity," she didn’t glance in my direction.

I almost remembered then.

When I was still a small boy, too small to kill anything larger than me, and my father and I lived in the honeycomb cliffs thousands of feet above the frozen sea, we had our version of the barrel of heads. We filled an earthen vase with the severed heads and claws of everything that had ever tried to intrude on our cave, and we placed it in our passageway to discourage future visitors. "Even demons understand elementary self-preservation," my father said.

I saw that image in a flash the day of the film, too quick to hold, and I saw it again that night when I laid my head on the pillow. I thought it was something I had dreamed one night and then forgotten.

***

How evil is it, really, to laugh at the severed heads of dead men? Can you hurt them any more that way?

Me, I was laughing because other people were laughing. But even the kid who first laughed behind me, who started the chain of laughter—was he evil? Did he really find it amusing that all those heads belonged to people who had once had homes and families, and that their homes had been gutted and their possessions scattered and their families slaughtered by madmen?

I once walked out of a room where people were being killed by dozens and closed the door. I thought the slaughter was harmless, wholesome for all concerned, and justified. I may have smiled, but I never laughed. I was too happy for that.

When I came back inside that room, it was full of clothes. Business suits and conservative ties, flowery dresses, basketball jerseys, old leather bomber jackets, sweatpants; watches and rings and chokers by the dozen. All lying there on the floor. From Night and Fog I learned that the Nazis had similar caches of watches, eyeglasses, wallets, passports. Family pictures, signatures, itineraries, lives.

In that room of death, I picked up a jacket from the floor and began to put it on. She, who was made of death, stopped me.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because it would be disrespectful, Connor."

She knew that at least.

***

Anyway, playing along. I’ve done it most of my life. All the fighting parts of my life were pretty simple, but the talking parts were not. So I played along; I pretended I understood who I was and how things worked. I learned how to lie.

"There is only one thing a demon wants," my father said, "and that is to tear and devour. It will not stop until it consumes you."

I accepted that for a while. It seemed obvious. But then a problem occurred to me. "If my real father is a demon," I asked, "why didn’t he just tear me apart when I was born? Why did he want to keep me?"

"Such a curiosity," said my father, furrowing his brow. Then he said, "Such things you may understand when you are older. For your sake I hope you never do. This world is simpler," he said.

After that, I knew enough not to ask questions. One of my father’s favorite sayings was "Simple wins the fight." I made myself simple, all about the kill, and I generally won. I was sad when it rained and happy when I could come home with something to eat. "One day I’ll be free and I will kill him for you. It will happen the first time I see him, and I will tell him who’s doing it," I would say as we sat around the fire. And my father would roll his eyes at my simplicity and say, "Good lad, but easier said than done."

Then I did get out.

And I found that playing along in this world is harder. There were more people, more expectations, and most of them a complete mystery to me. The only thing that kept me afloat was knowing what my father wanted. Had wanted.

I learned to lie better. I looked straight into people’s eyes and lied. I would have disliked myself if I hadn’t known exactly what I needed to do.

I was susceptible to glows. Cordelia’s. Jasmine’s. They made me stop and forget everything—like a bird that fills its stomach with happy-drug berries and flies splat into a window; like a plant bending to the light. I forgot that I was lying; I forgot that anyone had ever given me a mission. I just bent the way it was natural for me to bend; I just flew until I hit the window of reality. Which always happened in the end.

Then I got bitter.

Because, see, I had the most dangerous thing in the world, which is mixed feelings. I liked playing along and I hated playing along. 99.6 percent of me wanted to be the son my father wanted, and the other .4 percent wanted my father to find out I wasn’t the simple boy he thought at all. I also had two fathers who wanted two things, and that makes it hard.

Beware of that little voice in your head that wants to sneer at anything simple, anything happy, anything good. In my head, a few times, it got louder and louder until it was all I could hear.

***

I just walk up an alley, and then I just climb up a rickety ladder until I’m on a roof. There’s not much of a view from here, but I like how it feels. Hot smoggy wind in my hair. A pigeon strutting on an outcropping cornice. Angry horns and sirens far below.

I’ve always liked rooftops. They give you room to think.

When she comes toward me from behind the square bump of an elevator shaft, I think at first she’s just the shadow of a traffic helicopter. Something black and liquid snaking its way across the rooftops. Then I notice that bits of her, like the studs on her suit and her eyes, glint in the sun.

"This one is still here," she says, hooking one skinny index finger at me.

I peer around to see who she’s talking to. No one.

"How did you get out of that lab?" I ask. "Did the runt vampire help you?"

She shakes her head, her too-blue eyes giving me a spark of malevolence. "The one who helps me helped me. Didn’t you see us in the warlock’s hall?"

I shrug. I don’t want to say that at the time I wasn’t noticing things. "Were you always this way underneath?" I ask.

I can’t help it, but Not-Fred fascinates me. If there’s one person I wouldn’t have pegged as a demon in human’s clothing, it’s this one.

"I am what I am," she says. "Above and below, within and without, always." Looking offended that I could doubt it.

"Then you really aren’t Fred," I say sadly. Things were a lot simpler a few hours ago, when I thought she was just a chick with superpowers in a smoking outfit.

She narrows her eyes, as if trying to figure out what I want. "I contain the last traces of that living entity. Its memories."

I have her memories. "Memories are great," I say. "They’re like umbrellas. You can never have too many."

Again with the sidelong glance from Not-Fred. "When Fred knew you, you talked less and hit people more."

"And that was good?"

***

When I woke up, I woke up all at once, in a second. And I thought I knew why.

I was on my back again. A strong hand pinned me down by my throat, and there was a fog of pain and panic over my eyes. This time, though, I wasn’t going to let him do it. I still hurt all over, but alive felt good and I meant to stay that way.

I grabbed his windpipe. I fought. Only after I had sent his head rolling across the polished granite floor did I take a real look at his face.

It meant nothing to me. A demon of a species I didn’t know. I looked up then.

I saw a wall made of smooth, featureless red wood. I turned around. In the corner of my eye I saw that store with its glowing windows. In the back of my mind I heard someone’s shout echo through a corridor: "They’re out! Where is he?" I looked straight ahead again, and there was the wall. It meant nothing to me either.

So I replayed the memory-tape a little farther. I saw sunlight ripple with pain as something sharp pinned me in the calf from behind. I saw Cordelia’s slack face. I saw the button on the detonator belt in a lurching glance. I saw strangers begging. I saw him. I opened my eyes. I saw the wall.

In the wall there was now a door. Someone came through it.

"He should be dead; I killed him," I thought. Then I remembered that he had said, I’ll be right here. And I knew I had a fraction of a second to make it look right.

***

"Wesley returned your memories," Not-Fred says. She sees my face. "Did you not know?"

"Tell Wesley thanks."

She comes closer to me. Her hair moves with her, sleek and iridescent as a grackle’s wing. "This is your human way of lying without concealment."

"It’s called sarcasm." It took me a while to understand that myself. I wonder if she’s from Quor-toth or somewhere like it. "Anyway," I say, "I thought you were supposed to be locked up. Do you eat people or something?"

She rests her hand on my arm. It’s small and too cold to be human. "I am not your Devourer. Do you wish I were?"

I try to laugh and do the thing, the thing I do now. Be the nice kid. "Dunno what you mean."

"Fred knew," says Not-Fred dreamily. For an instant her bluebottle eyes focus on the distance, and I look that way and see nothing but a gull swirling into the air. "Wesley isn’t far. He does not know I came to you. He thinks you are a danger to yourself and others. Even me."

"What do you want?" I ask. Her movements are ungainly, almost robotic, but somehow I can’t pull my arm free or stop looking into her eyes.

She cants her body closer, standing on tiptoe, peering at me as if I were a reptile behind glass. "What is your virtue, creature? How did you make her?"

"I never made anybody."

She brushes her hand over my lips. "It was through physical copulation. But flesh-sacks and halfbreeds don’t breed such glories. Where did you get the virtue to make Her? Do you still have it?"

"Why?" My heart is racing and I’d like to say I’m not responding at all, because this really isn’t good. "You want your own demon baby?"

She pulls herself away from me. But her eyes don’t move a millimeter, and I could swear they don’t blink. "I have no experience of such things. I wonder if by devouring you, I would absorb your virtue. A conduit to the old powers would be of use."

"Try it."

"I would," she says almost apologetically, as if I had asked her to do it. "But now is not the time."

***

Once I watched this movie at my friend Charlie’s house. It was about a girl who had a lot of memories that weren’t really her memories, because she was a robot. She thought she had grown up in the usual way, but she was just two or three years off the android assembly line. The memories had been stuck in her brain to fool her into thinking she was alive.

A man confronted her. She told a story from her childhood, and he finished the story before she could. "See? The memories aren’t yours, they’re somebody’s niece’s," he said. The girl ran down a rainy street crying because she wasn’t real. But in the end she went off with the man in a flying car, and they looked happy.

I wonder if this memory is somebody’s idea of a joke.

***

As soon as I needed to say something, I knew exactly what to say. Have you ever been two people? It’s strange. The last few words came out wrong because suddenly I couldn’t remember the feeling behind what I was saying, and it was like reading a cue card that just stops.

At first he’d only looked relieved to see me alive. When I stopped talking, though, he looked testy. Not convinced.

The whole conversation took maybe ten seconds, but I remember hours of my thoughts wheeling in no discernable pattern. The first clear one to emerge was this: Of course he knows, underneath. Just don’t let him admit it.

"I don’t like people touching my neck," I told him then. Which was meant as a warning.

(But I couldn’t help bringing my hand to the place, to see if the clean, gaping wound was still there. Later on, in the law firm’s restroom, I looked for a scar. Nope.)

"Can we get out of here?" I said. "This whole fighting thing—I’m not sure it’s for me." Which was his second warning, but also the truth.

He didn’t say anything. What was he going to say? "Now, about that Cordy situation…"? "Sorry about the throat thing"? "Hey, being mindfucked sure beats a padded cell"?

***

"What happened to Cordelia?" I ask Not-Fred. "Is she still…you know?"

Not-Fred seems to ponder that. Her eyes are on the horizon now, and it’s hard to tell whether she doesn’t know or whether she’s just bored with me. "She is returning to her base elements as living beings do," she says at last. "Her virtue abandoned her."

"You mean she’s dead." It’s hard for me to say that because, well, whose fault is it? I guess I was hoping she would just get up one day and be Cordy again, whatever Cordy was before the Powers took her. Even if that was someone who didn’t remember me.

But Not-Fred is thinking about something else. "The virtue is questionable," she says. "The one who used you for her progenitor was corrupt."

I shrug. "Jasmine? She was a Hitler. I know that now."

Not-Fred shrugs back at me. The way she does it, it’s almost like she’s a kid playing the mirror game. Playing at being normal, the way I did. "She loved the earth and its beings in a way that was pitiable. She wanted to consume them, but for their good. Why do you still breathe after she is gone?"

"Why do I breathe?" I ask, trying to make it into a joke. She’s certainly got me.

But Not-Fred looks very serious. "My Qwa’Ha Xahn would never have deserted me in this way. He died for me. And you—" She makes a contemptuous gesture, and the light slides off her suit like water off scales. "You have more strength, but no loyalty. Rather than kill yourself with honor, you let your father perform a spell."

"I didn’t let—" I take a step, my arm coming back, testing my balance—and suddenly I realize what I’m doing.

Too late. I hit her hard. She catches my fist and twists my arm backward, but I writhe away.

I come down in fighting stance and don’t go anywhere. OK. That’s enough. Use your non-reptilian brain, Connor. But after standing motionless for an instant or two, I can feel myself sweating and trembling, desperately needing more. More motion. More impact. More pain.

"Like a drunk," I mutter. "Like a drunk falling off the wagon after a year."

Not-Fred’s mouth isn’t smiling, but somehow her eyes are. She looks like she suddenly finds me a lot more interesting. "Tell me how you do it," she says.

"Do what?"

"Feign," she says. "Use the dead parts of you—the memories. Be the one they want; block the one they fear."

"You mean play along?"

***

By the time I came back to his office to say goodbye, I had it down pretty well.

It was a shock, seeing him stand immobile in the flood of sunlight. At first I wondered if they’d managed to make him human.

He explained that it was just special glass, meaning that it was a lie. He couldn’t really stand in the sun. It figured.

Now I wonder if, what with getting so used to the glass, he sometimes forgets the sun burns him. I wonder if he steps outside without thinking, starts to sizzle, and scuttles back in again. I wonder if his not being able to stand in the sun is like my not being able to ride a bike or do quadratic equations, but doing them anyway. Then I realize: it’s not like that at all. Wherever I am, I can still do those things. They’re not just some special suit made of glass, like the Pope has. They’re part of me.

All this doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to hurt him.

And you know, I wouldn’t have done it at all, but he kept pushing. He kept asking questions. He wanted so hard to believe I didn’t remember a thing.

So when he started in on Cyvus Vail, I gave him a gentle nudge. I said, "He can’t show me anything I haven’t already seen."

Do you think he got it that time? I do. But he still asked if I could stay. He was humble and shamefaced when he asked it, but not as shamefaced as he would have been if I had pointed out why I couldn’t.

I was ashamed too. So I gave him only one thing, the best I could do. I reminded him whose idea this was. And that it was not a bad idea. Really.

Because, look how different I am now. Some of the time.

***

"Let me try," says Not-Fred (he told me her name once, but I forgot it).

She takes a skittery step back and lifts her hands to her face. And all of a sudden she’s Fred. No transition. Her hands flutter in the air. Her mouth smiles gummily and her eyes, still too blue, blink like moths’ wings beating. She says, "Connor! I haven’t seen you since—since…"

"Never mind about that," I say quickly, remembering her face through the bars of the cell in the basement. "It was a while ago." Then I catch myself. "Stop it. What are you really?"

"Oh, jeezum crow, what kind of question is that?" burbles Not-Fred. "I mean, I know people go from good guy to soulless demon in under sixteen seconds round here, but me?"

And here we go with the squinchy eyes. They look just weird with the blue hair. "I’m just me. Li’l old Fred. Say, do Angel and Wesley and Charles know you’re back? And are you a hundred percent sure you aren’t still all about Jasmine, or should I pick up a rock or something and make a doomed attempt to defend myself?"

"Stop it," I say. I start to turn my back to her.

And just like that she changes. Her body straightens and seems to get more sinuous, as if her very substance was shifting. Her eyes harden, fixed on me, and her mouth comes down straight and then curls up just a little, mocking me. "That was very true," she says.

"That’s what you think. Nobody would ever mistake you for Fred in that get-up."

Not-Fred shrugs. "That can be altered. I appear as I choose, and I choose what interests me. Not like you, feigning out of shame."

"Not ashamed or feigning," I say, feeling my fist clench.

Not-Fred’s eyes get very big again. They’re the dense, layered violet-blue of a flowering weed I used to see growing along the road when I was about—well anyway, I saw it. She says, "Then perhaps you have forgotten who you are."

***

"You have to confront bullies, Connor," my father said. "I’m not saying fight him. Just draw the line and try to solve your problem with words."

I was ten. His face was very solemn, and I knew his words were true. Maybe he wasn’t God, but he knew everything. I also knew in another part of my brain that bullies don’t listen, and that I would probably get slugged for my trouble.

"I can’t talk to him," I said. "It doesn’t work like that. I’ll just pretend he’s not there." We were talking about Steve Woodcock, who used to make my life difficult at the bus stop in the mornings. He kicked gravel in my eyes and called me a girl.

"No," my dad said. "He doesn’t deserve your fear. He can’t control you." He looked straight into my eyes with his own dark ones, steady and stern as a priest. "Tomorrow," he said, "you’re going to tell him to stop. And you’re going to do it in a way that WILL make him stop."

"No I’m not," I said.

"Yes you are."

I knew he was right. Anyway, it seemed to me that I had no choice. That night I slept poorly, dreaming of giant boots stomping and trampling on me. I lay awake for a whole hour while the sky slowly lightened outside, keeping my fingers on both hands crossed in the hopes that I would have a fever and be allowed to stay home from school.

And as I looked through a gap in my curtains at the sky full of messy pink and gold clouds, I grew calmer. The sky was different every morning, but it was still the sky. My dad was most probably wrong on this issue, but he was still my dad.

I have a faint memory of what happened in the end. An anticlimax. The bully, who wasn’t much bigger than me, called me a "fuckin’ ‘tard" and backed down and went on calling me names for years, but under his breath. What I mainly remember is the sky.

***

"There isn’t any other way out of this, Stephen," my father said to me. "If you don’t kill it, chances are it will kill us."

I was ten. We were hunched in a dirt-floored cleft between two rocks. The roof of sky was jet black, but small fire-red clouds moved over it, making patterns that might remind you of the aurora borealis in your world. "It’s strong," I said.

"But not too strong for both of us. I’ll flush it into the open. You’ll come from behind and use the knife. It’s not sporting, but what does that matter? It is what it is."

"I don’t know."

I had killed things that were bigger than me, but never in hand-to-hand. Only with the crossbow. The thing with human-like legs and leathery wings and a pustulous gash where its face should be had been invading our camps for the past week, raiding our stores. By day it stalked us and toward dawn it moved in, making a sound like hoarse wild laughter. I had tried an ambush, but with one flap of its wings it had raised a wind that tore my bow from my hand. It seemed content to scavenge from us, for now. Still, I tried not to let myself sleep deeply, even when my father mounted guard duty. I didn’t trust the weakness of his body, though he claimed he had killed many a piece of scavenging demon filth in the years I couldn’t remember.

What I did trust was his mind, which knew everything—or anyway, so much more than mine that the gap between them was like the distance from here to the sky. And if he thought I was ready, I was. "All right," I said. "Then I will."

He told me I should sleep and conserve my strength, but I lay awake. The sky lightened slowly to its usual greenish tint, the red cloud-whorls darkening to charcoal. I could see the hunched black icicle-trees of the marsh against it. I kept my hand around my knife handle, knowing I was going to baptize it in the blood of real combat, so different from the blood of gutting, skinning, and other household chores.

Before my father dozed off, he had said to me, "Feeling no fear, eh, lad? Something tells me you were born for this."

So, yeah, then I killed it.

He was wrong—I did feel fear, especially when the thing gave a disdainful shrug of its shoulders and threw me on the ground a good yard from my knife, and I tasted blood and dirt. The moment when my eye found the heart and my hand drove the blade home was probably the high point of my life so far. But what I remember is the sky.

The sky my father told me to look at when I pestered him with questions about when night would come. The sky of home.

***

"And that is who you are," says Not-Fred. "Or am I mistaken?"

I answer, "No."

She cocks her head to one side, and I wonder if she’s listening for something down in the city that even I can’t hear. "The one who engendered you must grieve. You had two lives, two trials of passage, and others guided you through them."

"Yeah, well, we’ve had our share of trials. Even if he was usually the monster I was supposed to kill." I walk to the edge of the roof and peer over, just to get a look at the pigeons and cars and people below. Things are still jittering around down there, which is a relief—I was starting to think time had stood still. It has a tendency to do that when Not-Fred is talking.

I’m hungry too, and tired. Starting to feel shaky from no sleep and too much caffeine. Who was the talky demon whose head’s probably still lying on that polished floor waiting for maid service, and does it matter? Too many questions I can’t ask. From here on in it’s not about questions, it’s all about selective memory. And focus.

"Some of you would call this brainwashing," says Not-Fred. I don’t think she even reads my mind; she just absorbs the vibrations off me. I also think she can tell I’m about ready to go back to my life. For real this time.

"There are things I’ll remember," I say. "I’ll be sure to remember them every day."

Without seeing her I can feel her come a little closer, and I can feel her regret. She likes having someone to play with. Someone with strong feelings, mixed feelings; someone dangerous. She thrives on it. "What will you remember?"

Well, I don’t say. But I know, and probably so do you. A young girl’s pale, grateful face in the second before I hit her. His face when I put him in the box, and then again his face as I told him thank you and saw him for the last time. And both of the skies that belong to me now.

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