No Rest for the Wicked

Part 1: Unmade

Chapter One

Well, I had a little rest. But it didn’t last long. I remember his eyes and the long pain in my chest, a pain that seemed to tunnel its way into my throat. There was sunlight in the doorway and I remember thinking, How did he get here? and then, This is the last. I remember a mannequin holding one of the liver-colored balls that they use in that game Gunn likes to watch on TV. Then a white fuzz of light, then nothing. But there was rest for a while. I know it.

* * *

I was sleeping, a long, sound sleep, and she woke me. I tried to turn over and sleep again, pulling the blankets over my head, but she took them away. She made me sit up and gave me a glass of water. I felt like I’d been sick for weeks; all my joints were stiff. My head and my throat ached.

She said, "Being corporeal again, ain’t it a bitch? Or do you even know what corporeal means? I know your education was spotty."

I said, "I know what it means."

She said, "Two minutes back on this mortal coil and Junior’s already in a snit."

"I was dead," I said. I didn’t know where I was and I was still trying to place her, but I did know that.

"Are dead," she said. "Present tense, sweetie, present tense. Just think of this as a rest stop in the land of itches and aging."

I tried to ask more questions, but she shushed me. "They can’t hear me, but they can hear you. C’mon, let’s find somewhere where you can talk to yourself in peace."

Peace. That was just the point. I didn’t know what it was like, but I knew I’d lost it. I tried to explain while she hustled me downstairs through some dark low rooms crowded with furniture, through a door and out onto a kind of wooden balcony. It was close to the ground and faced some dark spiky trees that smelled a little like the juniper that grows on streets near the beach. The sky was very black and filled with stars, and I couldn’t see any other buildings.

"Nice. Nice homestead," she said and perched her long unstable body against the edge of the railing. One of her high-heeled shoes slipped off and she dipped her foot down for it with a little murmur of laughter. When she looked up again, I could tell even in the dark that she was looking at me. It was by the smell I knew her: no flesh or blood or perspiration, but that same old whiff of peppery, sickly-sweet perfume, like a rose that’s getting brown at the edges.

She said, "Much as I’d love to stay here and enjoy your scintillating banter, I’ll be off in a minute or two. I was just sent to get you up to speed with the program."

I said, "What program? I died."

She nodded. I could almost see her smile. "You did, and how. I have to say, Connor, I was deeply impressed. Mental torture’s something I know about, and I thought you couldn’t top the whole slow-starvation-in-a-metal-box-at-the-bottom-of-the-ocean dealie. But you did. The whole set-up was for him, wasn’t it? You didn’t have any intention of blowing that mall sky-high before Daddy’d showed up to play hostage negotiator. And you knew he would, huh? You know him better than you let on. After that it was all good, whether he killed you or you killed them or you killed you. All paths lead to the same place: sad-face Angel. Moping, brooding, tearing his hair out, asking the Powers where he went wrong. You even pulled the old You didn’t love me enough card, didn’t you? I haven’t used that one since I was twelve and trying to wangle a new pair of Nikes out of my old man. He got wise after that. Yours is a softie."

I said, "I wasn’t trying to get anything. I wanted it all to go away. That was the point."

"Well, you could have done it with a little less carnage. Some people just pop a bottle of Tylenol and call it a day. But I’m not here to critique your suicide technique. What do you think you deserve anyway?"

I stared at the blur of starlight where she was. "Deserve?"

"I didn’t make up the question, kiddo. Standard. So, do you think you deserve to have it all go away? The rest-in-peace bit?"

I hadn’t thought of it that way. I said, "People get things they don’t deserve all the time. Good and bad. That’s just the way it is."

"Love the fatalism on you," said Lilah. "Classic look, it goes with the empty eyes. But the fact is, there’s a definite feeling in certain quarters that you don’t deserve the whole R.I.P. Not the rest part and certainly not the peace. That’s what I’m here to tell you."

"So what, then?" I said. I didn’t stop to wonder at the time what business a deceased agent of evil had doling out peace to me or refusing it. I put my hands to my face to make sure it was solid. "Do I have to stay alive? Is that it?"

She laughed—a deep graveyard laugh. "Not that either. Once you’ve thrown it away, it’s not so easy to get back. No, the in-the-flesh part is temporary—sort of like mine. Easier to talk to you this way."

"So what, then?" The same question a second time, and now I was getting angry. My hands were itching, and I made them into fists. It was all coming back now, just as if nothing had happened. The black cloud in my head that pulsed to red and blinded me; the feeling of not being able to breathe; the voices that said things like It’s too late now, you never will, your own fault. She had done that. She had pulled me back into that. I wanted to pin her arm hard behind her back and tip her and hurl her over the balcony so that her head hit the pavement first. She’d never been strong.

She was smiling again in the dark. "So it’s time for the full-on psycho glare, huh? Charles Manson at a parole hearing’s got nothing on you, Connor. Sorry to disappoint you by being so, y’know, dead and all."

She was going to leave, I could tell. It was almost as if her dim outline wavered at the edges. And then I felt something too: a weakness that made me sit down where I was on the splintery boards. My legs wouldn’t fold back under me; my head hurt and I couldn’t lift it to look at her. I said, "It wasn’t like the time I put him in the box. That wasn’t the point. He would have taken me back this time. I could tell. He would have tried to make it all OK again."

"You’re probably right—the long-suffering sap," said Lilah.

Now her voice sounded almost as if it came from behind me. But it was hard to tell: the bright white fuzz was in my eyes again, and I felt my legs going numb. In spite of what she had said, I thought maybe this would be like last time. I thought I’d better get some last words in, like it mattered. I didn’t like the way she’d described things.

I said, "No, that’s not the point. He would have tried to make it OK. He would have made the others pretend it was, like nothing had happened. Like I hadn’t done anything and She had never—"

"But you would’ve known," Lilah said. I couldn’t tell whether she was mocking me or trying to help me explain my thoughts to myself. "No matter how many fresh starts they give you, Connor, you know where you belong, don’t you? They could rebuild the world all sweetness and light and Enya songs and you would still make it into a hell dimension. Speaking of which… I’ll give one your regards if you want. Going that way now."

I lost my body again. It felt different without the wound and the pain and the sirens in the background to distract me, without the rage and the memory of his face. It was simpler but worse. A steamroller came down on my chest and pushed all the air out, and I was alone in a pitch-black crawl-space with roaring in my ears. Then no roaring. I still thought maybe she had lied and I would stop hearing, seeing, feeling things soon. Just black, just silence. I was wrong.

The first thing I saw was the boy in pajamas scrabbling at the deck and scrabbling at his chest, trying to catch his breath and, after a hard second or two, succeeding.

The first thing I heard was his voice next to me in the darkness, in the dark crawl-space where I was and still am even now, even though I see things outside. We were here together, alone together, the way it had been from the very beginning.

He sounded wise and satisfied, the way he did after the occasional full meal of something I’d killed for him. He sounded glad to have me beside him again. He said, "No one can say you haven’t lived up to your birthright, son."

I said, "You’re a hollow sack of lies. I know that now. Go away."

But he laughed, he only laughed. He said, "You can’t make me keep quiet by finding things to hit now, Stephen. You can’t hit anything. And I’m always here."

* * *

That’s how it went on—goes on. He’s right: I can’t make him keep quiet. Even if I were able to ignore him, to drown him out, I still might listen, because he always spoke better than me. He has words from books, soft smooth right ways of expressing things: lies and truth both. When I get tired, which is often, I let him say everything for me. I let him tell a story.

It goes something like this:

"Instead of punishment they gave you what they called a second chance. Instead of peace they gave you a life tied to the body that committed your sins, and they called this a fresh start. You died. You saw the world grow darkling and gentle around his face and you looked into the darkness. That was your punishment. It was only justice. You were prepared to spend an eternity burning in the fire that burns without consuming, mourning your separation from a God in whom you haven’t believed for quite some time. It was only right. Whether you believe in Him or not, the Father is the only one who can really love you.

"But the other father, the father of your corrupt flesh intervened. He wouldn’t let you go, so here you are. Where’s the justice in that?

"You never wrote or talked much. I made sure you could do both, but those weren’t your strengths, son. Your greatest natural ability—let’s be honest with each other—was for killing. You thought words were for the weak; when you wanted something you took it. Then someone used sweet words to persuade you that a hell was a heaven, and you learned that words can be strong. Anyway, they’re all you have now.

"So you try to sneak into his words when he isn’t paying attention. Only in small ways: it’s the most you can do. The margins of his notebooks are filled with schoolboy doodles and your disconnected thoughts. Sometimes his mind drifts and his pen moves aimlessly over the outlines of a crude daisy or a girl’s face, tracing and retracing them, and then you guide his hand. But only then. Only for seconds at a time. So far does his strength outweigh yours—this simple boy, this innocent living creature with your hands and face and eyes, your smile and your glare and even your strength.

"You haunt his steps; you don’t have much choice. Today he’s outdoors at least, running laps around a track. This is just a modish way of saying he isn’t going anywhere. He has your strength, but he has no use for it, so he has learned to hold it at a distance. He considers it dangerous, a source of evil even. Perhaps he’s right. When he was fourteen he chose to step into a fight in order to defend a boy who played the piano from a bully. The bully ended up with a sizeable contusion on his brain. (How do you know all this? You don’t know. You just do, the way you know that when you were fourteen you killed your first 400-pound adult male kvaltaquitor and tanned its hide and used it to build a rusty-smelling shelter for us both, which kept us safe for sixteen days until the seasonal rains of bleach came.)

"He was wretched after it happened—this boy with your face. It had never occurred to him that he might hurt someone. There were conversations with physicians, because everything in this world is discussed with doctors, and his parents have never let him forget what they call his rage episode. So he avoids schoolboy tussles, even contact sports, and holds back his strength. He tries not to notice the acuity of his sense of smell, though it bothers him a great deal when people don’t bathe regularly. And the fact that all his wounds heal quickly—even a fracture—only perturbs him.

"He’s soft.

"That’s how it is with someone who was always loved. People can feel the love as if it’s embedded in his bones, as if he exhales it with every breath. Naturally they gravitate to him: who wouldn’t want to be close to all that love?

"I know your secret, son. I know you hate him. I know you envy him. You thought you were too proud to envy anyone. You thought that was a mark of your strength—that you never coveted anyone else’s happiness, even in the throes of your most selfish, sinful despair. You thought you were without malice toward their world, the world of the innocent and fortunate. You thought you wanted only the best for them, whether they deserved it or not. We know how that turned out."

* * *

Here I sometimes object. I say, "I don’t hate him. He’s me after all, and Angel was right. You can make things right, start over. This is what he wanted for me, and he would have given it to me if you hadn’t…"

But at that point the tremendous wave of his sarcasm hits me, and I know nothing I’m saying is true.

"That lad’s you, you say? But he’s loved, son, loved. Every day you see that they love him because he deserves love, because he’s worthy of love, because he expects love, because he’s never expected anything but love. That’s how it goes: in a circle. You love and you’re lovable and you’re loved. Perhaps you never knew."

I say, "I knew. I used to love you."

"As a child loves," he says. "But not when you were strong enough to turn away from me. A few blows, a few well-meaning attempts at discipline, a few questions not answered to your satisfaction made you desert me. Yes, you deserted me in your heart, though you pretended to serve me loyally. You let the demon’s kindness and his soft, licentious world seduce you, and to have my revenge I had to force your hand. Perhaps you thought you loved me still. But I knew better. I knew it as I died. You had already stepped outside the circle into evil, and even love is tainted after that."

I say, "I loved Her."

He makes a derisive sound in his throat. "Indeed. And we mustn’t forget the harlot who came first, must we, with her black lace and her soft bosom and her simpering words? She all but waved her corruption in your face and you chose to be blind. Then came the Fallen Angel, and you basked in her love as if she had been a seraph sent by God Himself. Even though you saw her true face and it was the face of death. Even though you saw her bring death."

"She took their pain. She tried to take mine," I say.

"‘Take your pain!’ And what is your pain, my son, if not a just return for the sins you commit? The choices you make? For that innocent child, for her cries, for the pleas you ignored—for her limbs dragged across the floor of a charnel house, for her neck meeting steel at the hand of a heartless woman while you stood and watched? That new life was yours to save. Who would be right, who would be just to take that pain from you?"

I say, "You always laid on the drama when you lectured, Father. I learned to tune you out."

He sighs the way he always does when he feels my attention drifting. "Perhaps I bear some blame too, lad. Perhaps it’s because I raised you to be the scourge of the creature who sired you, so the love I nurtured you with was corrupt."

And then: "You wouldn’t really rather listen to this conversation between two snot-nosed schoolboys whose mothers still pack their luncheons in paper sacks? Now would you?"

* * *

The boy is chatting with another boy named Owen in the smelly hole they call a locker room. Both of them are changing back into the clothes they consider suitable for attending classes in mixed company. Owen is his friend: a big square-shouldered athlete with good features and nasty skin. Owen is telling him about a girl he dated last night, a girl who dresses in black and calls herself Violet although this is not her real name.

He says, "I think I’m gonna bang her next time, Con. I had her practically begging for it in the car, but know what I fuckin’ did? I held out on her."

The other one chuckles nervously. He wants to know more, but somehow his mother and girlfriend are always over his shoulder. The disrespect he hears in the words repels him, but it interests him too. "Yeah?" he says. "How come?"

Owen snorts in his throat and pulls his T-shirt over his head. "I wanna make it seem like it was all her idea, so when I cut her loose she’ll be too freaked to start doing a Fatal Attraction on my ass. Think it’ll work?"

The other one shrugs. "How do you know you’re gonna want to cut Violet loose?"

Stupid question. Owen and I both know it. But Owen is used to dealing with his naïve, high-minded friend; his friend who has had the same girlfriend for the past three years. He explains patiently, "You think I want to go to Prom with Violet ‘Bride of Nick Cave’ Klemmer? You think I want Sarah Hassler and Emily Bliss and those other babes to see me walking down the hall with Morticia on my fuckin’ arm?"

The boy laughs in a confused way. "I didn’t think she was that bad."

"Bad. No. You should see those wicked tiny hips." Making a six-inch circle in the air with his hands. "When it goes in it’ll go in, baby. I think she might even still have a cherry." Owen pauses for an instant, probably contemplating it. "But it’s not like I have to socialize with her afterwards, right? And it’s not like I’m actually, you know, fucking her over. Mutual exploitation, right, Con? It’s not like everybody can have a chick like Tracy."

"Huh." His face is flushed and without thinking about it he’s smiling, picturing her.

* * *

"What a smile he has," says Holtz to me. "It stops people dead in their tracks—did you know? But I raised you not to be vain. Movements should be purposeful before they are graceful, and he certainly has grace. Too bad about the rest."

"What rest?" I say, though I’ve been trying to ignore him.

In the mind’s eye I see him shrug. "The morals, Stephen. The soul."

I say, "I can’t see his soul, and neither can you."

"But you see his actions. There he stands and hears his friend savor the prospect of defiling a virgin. Does he object? Does he attempt to use arguments of reason and manly honor? No. There he stands. And tonight he goes and lies with his own sweetheart, the girl he can consider himself responsible for corrupting."

I say, "I don't remember seeing much of this ‘manly honor’ in Quor-toth."

"But he isn’t you, don’t you see, Stephen? He wasn’t raised among heathens or demons. He hasn’t got your excuse. And yet he commits your sin. The sin of standing by, of relinquishing his will to evil. He does it all by himself. The sin’s born in him."

I say for the five thousandth time, "You’re wrong. He’s better than I am. He deserves better."

Now I can almost see him shaking his head, and his small canny eyes on me. His eyes were keener than his other senses: almost as keen as mine. "So you still believe this lie, this nonsense about a fresh start? An innocent boy in his innocent world? What do I remember you saying once about lies?"

* * *

He’s not all wrong. Much as I want to think differently, I can see this world isn’t innocent. The school, for instance, bristles with cruelty. I don’t know how else to say it. I can’t read minds and I never was much good at reading faces, but I can tell when a living being wants to grab another and throttle and stomp on it, or fornicate its brains out of its throat. There’s a lot of that in these halls. And it’s not just the big bruisers like Owen you have to watch for, or the girls with hair like tin foil and slit-eyed treacherous glances. The one who stabs you in the back could just as easily be the quiet fat boy, or the girl like Violet whose eye-makeup always looks smudged with tears. Sometimes the ones who’ve been treated cruelly are the cruelest. Bring Jasmine in as principal and you would be down four or five students a month, but the ones left would be nicer. I’m just saying.

The boy, though, sees only a fraction of what goes on here. It’s the love thing Holtz talks about. He doesn’t have to see. A damned soul could walk into the classroom and claim to be his new English teacher, her silk scarf barely covering the telltale red line around her throat, and he would open his book and dutifully start taking notes.

Which is what happens today.

She tells them Mr. FitzJames came down with pneumonia over spring break. She launches into a discussion of Dante’s Inferno. She draws the levels of hell on the board and seems to like especially describing the Sowers of Discord, who are torn limb from limb.

"Appropriate," says Holtz.

A student with wispy hair raises her hand. "Why did Dante put Mohammed in with the Sowers of Discord? All he did was start another religion."

"You clearly don’t know how to run a religion. Or any organized power," says Lilah. She seems to be enjoying her position of authority; as she talks she gestures with one red-nailed hand and pats the scarf around her neck with the other. "Rule Number One is If you don’t agree with us, we crush you. If we say Mohammed is a Christian schismatic, he is a Christian schismatic. If I say you’re going to hell for plagiarizing the best two sentences on the psych paper you handed in today, whereas he—" she points straight at him, bent over his book—"can engage in virgin sacrifice and still get a second chance—well, what I say goes."

"Her little joke," says Holtz.

Color spreads over his innocent face while boys to the left and right of him make cracks about virgin sacrifice, and the wispy girl raises her hand again and demands to know whether Dante would really tolerate such unfairness. Lilah has a hard time hiding her smirk.

She’s a thin tall racehorse or clotheshorse of a woman. Muddy complexion too, from sitting in the sun. Still I seem to remember that when she and I were both alive, the rotting-flower whiff of her perfume made me feel queasy and fearful and slightly excited, just like the click-clack of her outlandish heels. I couldn’t see one of those without imagining it as a weapon, jammed into the base of my spine.

Of course they can’t tell what she is—someone who will never wear perfume again unless it’s to hide the scent of her own putrefaction. Two of the boys hang around afterwards asking questions, their blue-jeaned thighs grazing the edge of her desk. She has to lean over that desk and almost bellow after him to make him stay.

He trudges back. He doesn’t seem a bit happy that he is the one the other boys are grudgingly making way for; the one chosen to stay after class. She beckons him to sit back down in the first row, and he almost rolls his eyes as he obeys.

She says, "Connor Beckford! All the guidance counselors positively genuflect when they mention you. They say you cracked the college admissions lottery wide open."

Holtz murmurs, "I wonder what the bitch is up to?"

She asks him stupid questions—flattering him, pretending she has a niece who wants to get into Yale. In the corner of his eye is his open notebook, with some of my doodles in the margins. They bother him—he can’t figure out why he keeps drawing bloody broadswords and maces and fists all the time, or what the hell that poor rendering of a fledgling kyndswatter demon is. He doesn’t even notice when Lilah takes a glass ashtray out of her desk-drawer and lights a forbidden cigarette, which she uses to ignite a stick of incense. It also camouflages the odd gestures she’s making behind a stack of books with her other hand.

I ask him, "What is she doing?"

"More magic, you slow boy. What else?"

"I know it’s magic, but what is it for?"

He says, "To separate you from me and bend you to an evil will, I expect."

That’s when I start to hear it: the old roaring. Different from the way I "hear" now, as different as if I were completely deaf and suddenly someone switched on a staticky radio in my head. Someone is sliding the dial, trying to tune the radio to a station. This time I know what’s happening, and I fight it. I try to resist the weight, the pressure, the downward pull, and when air is whooshed into my lungs I do my best to push it back out.

To expel me from him is the idea. To leave him intact. But all that happens is that I end up in his body gasping and half falling out of the chair, one knee buckling to the side and one hand clutching at the edge of another desk.

She’s leaning on hers, the hard painted smirk still on her face. "What’s this now? Don’t tell me our academic star’s been hitting the bottle between classes."

I manage to sit up. I’d forgotten a lot of it: the way clothes limit your movements, the hair in your eyes, the random itches. Suddenly the world seems full of sounds—the drone of power tools across the street, the chattering and jostling in the hall, the tic-tic of Lilah’s long nail on the desk. It’s the way I felt when I first came to L.A.: too many sounds, too many sights, and not enough words in my head to describe them.

She says, "I shouldn’t be waiting around for a thank you, should I? Send me a card sometime."

"Thanks for what?" I say.

She taps the side of her glossy head. "Little Masterpiece Theatre host that’s always buzzing in your ear? Gone now, no?"

After an instant I know what she means, and then I realize. He is gone. Not just holding his peace for now, not just taking a phantom breath before launching on another lecture, but gone. I’m alone.

"He was right. You were trying to separate us."

She shrugs. "Don’t tell me it isn’t an immense relief. Sort of like sneaking out for a smoke behind daddy’s back. Anyway, now we can get down to business."

I say, "I thought we finished our business last time. I want to go back."

"You do?" She looks genuinely surprised, her dark eyes widening. "I know you were never averse to a little pain, but I didn’t think you were a masochist. You do realize it’s a punishment to exist in your limbo?"

I say, "Holtz says my proper punishment won’t start until you release my soul to go to hell. Anyway, what business do you have punishing people when you’re damned yourself?"

She looks a little embarrassed at that, the way Fred and Gunn did when I tried to eat everything with a knife. "Dante has demons and fallen angels punishing the sinners. But that’s beside the point. Holtz’s view of things is a little… antiquated, to say the least. We can’t very well release your soul without destroying the nice-looking if fashion-challenged high-achiever who usually inhabits that body." Gesturing at me. "And we can’t do that without violating the terms of a certain contract."

"So it’s true then," I say. "He is me."

I don’t know how I feel about that, since whatever it is I know Holtz will find a way to spin it round on me.

She shrugs and settles herself back on the desk, her long legs dangling. "Call him a spin-off of you. He’s different but no, he isn’t what you’d call freestanding. You should know that every time you scribble in his notebook. The thing was, I thought you might jump at the chance to be a little more up and about, if you see what I mean. Was I wrong?"

I stand up and get myself out of the stupid desk-chair and come toward her—I know I can’t touch her, but it feels good just to be in fighting-stance again. "How did you make him? What magic was it?"

She shrugs archly. "I’d have to put it in layman’s terms, and you won’t like it anyway."

"I want to know."

"Well, then." She rolls her eyes. "Lucky no one wants the room. We told Angel it had to be a clean slash of the jugular, minimal tissue damage. It isn’t absolutely de rigueur, but it makes resurrection less of a hassle. We got you in the lab and did a standard resurrection. You may know—no, you probably don’t—that a standard rez only raises bodily and lower mental functions. Stop there and you’ve got a nice hungry zombie on your hands. We lowered your breathing and induced a coma, and that’s when we started downloading the content the client—you know who—had requested. That part was a chore for somebody, let me tell you. Kodak memories from ages zero through seventeen-and-a-half: sickeningly happy stuff with just enough rained-out picnics and stubbed toes to make it seem real. And it does, doesn’t it?"

I make a fist with my right hand and rub it against my palm. Maybe Holtz is right: I need to hit things. "What do you mean? The past, all the things I—he remembers—"

"Didn’t happen. Oh, Connor." She turns on the mock concern, the wide moist eyes, and I feel my fist itching. "You didn’t seriously think we’d do interdimensional mojo and divert an alternate reality just so Angel could see his John-Boy Walton dreams for you come true? Way, way too resource-intensive, especially since we happen to be working on a tightish budget right now. Not to mention the schedule. No. If it makes you feel better, there is another ‘verse where Holtz got away with you and bit it in a car crash, and the Beckfords ended up raising you. Of course, over there you’re still toddling around in diapers and trying to eat your fingers. We used it strictly for research purposes. We did the standard selective wipe on everyone who’d ever known you in this world except the client, and then we added you to everybody who could’ve plausibly known you here in Waltonland. Call it poor-man’s alternate history. That was all good, but now what we had was a vegetable with his head full of a nice family album. There was one thing missing."

I ask, "What?"

"You, stupid—what else? We had a body and a mind, but we needed the spark to get it running—call it a soul. We got out the Orb of Thessala, ran the ritual, called you out of the ether and tethered you to him by a homing spell or two. It happened the first time you had a convo with yours truly."

"That night on the deck? But that means he’s only been alive for—"

Lilah shrugs and counts on her fingers, her scarf slipping a little. "Eleven months, seven days, twelve hours and something. But it’s a primo bit of corrective surgery, don’t you think? Once we had you back here, bam!—we had re-animated Connor 2.0, now without that nasty sociopathy! Angel was positively blown away when we let him take a peek."

Her voice has a meaner edge when she talks about Angel. I’m trying to hold off my natural urge to hit her (or hit something) in order to notice things that might help me. Or him. I say, "What did Angel give you, anyway? I can’t believe you did all this for nothing."

She grins. "Isn’t it obvious? His firstborn son."

"But you don’t have—"

"That?" She waves her hand in my direction, and I know what she means. The body. "No. We’re contract-bound to make sure little Connor Beckford doesn’t start living la vida loca any time soon. Not unless it’s his free choice, of course." She winks. "No, I mean you. You’re ours now: signed, sealed and delivered."

Suddenly I wish I still had Holtz in my ear. He knows about these things; he would know what to say to her. I think he would say that although my soul is black and evil and damned to hell for eternity, it’s still my own.

I say, "You said I would get to be up and about some more. What happens to him while I’m here?"

She reaches forward to touch me, and I almost shy away. She’s there, though. It’s a cold touch but solid. "Don’t worry about that, sweetheart. He’s still there, just sort of dormant. There’s no he without you anyway, so he can wait. It won’t hurt him if you take a few breathers and do some business for us."

"Business?" I back away from her.

She tilts her head to one side, giving me a good view of the scar, and says sweetly, "Violence, of course. It’s what you’re good at."

"You want me to kill something?" I feel the cold prickle of rage on my spine even though I shouldn’t be surprised since she’s right, it is. "You want me to kill someone?"

"Heavens no," she mock-innocents. "The last thing I’d ask you to do is add to the body-count when the healing process is just beginning. Only properly justified violence will do for an anti-hero on the path of redemption. Ask your old man."

"You’re going to guide me on the path of redemption," I say.

She whoops as if she hasn’t laughed in a week. "Sarcasm, right? It’s hard to tell with you, kiddo. Anyway, much as I’d love to chat with you till the janitor comes in, we have to be getting back to our respective personal hells. Here’s the deal: we’re going to let you do a good deed tonight. Owen’s making his play for the Goth girl. If you feel like dropping in and possessing your old body and giving him a few well-aimed whacks, we won’t interfere. Think of it as a little taste of things to come."

* * *

After she leaves, after I leave, I watch him carefully. He’s a little dazed, sitting back down. He doesn’t know how he ended up here in the front row of an empty classroom after the last bell. He remembers the hot new teacher (his word) asking him to stay, and how it made him nervous. First she was droning on about Yale, then she was just gone. He thinks he fell asleep. Maybe it’s narcolepsy setting in.

"He’s upset. He’s scared," I say.

Holtz says, "No he isn’t. Watch."

And he’s right. Already Connor’s looking at his watch and realizing he’s late for track practice. But he isn’t especially bothered by this either, because now he’s fumbling in his pocket for enough change to buy a Twix bar out of the machine. They were my favorites too.

"You always judge him by yourself," Holtz says. "See how easily he gets his footing? You—a word out of place sets you off and makes you a menace. Remember that poor constable on the roof."

"What that man did was wrong," I say, feeling the shame and outrage all over again. "He was going to desert his family for his own selfish reasons."

Holtz just laughs at me.

He used to laugh even more when we first got here. He said I watched over the other Connor like a mother hen, or like a nervous old maid with a piece of heirloom china. I was always examining him for nicks and cracks; I couldn’t believe he would survive everyday use. I thought his happiness was fake, a lie he was making himself believe. I kept waiting for reality to set in.

Watching him, I pitied him for what I thought I knew would happen. I remembered how it felt when I first realized that even though She— Jasmine— was smoothing everyone else out, the wrinkles in me were still there. I think it started when they cut me and smeared me with the blood I knew was Cordelia’s. At first I thought they were just being vile, monstrous, the way I’d been afraid they were all along. Then I realized that it was all about black and white, true and false for them. They hadn’t been working to make themselves believe in Her, the way I had. They’d just believed, and then because of the blood they hadn’t believed anymore. It was that simple. They were strong enough to live without believing, and I wasn’t. I felt like a fool.

But it’s not like that with him. I know that now.

I watch his evening at home quietly, the way I always do, ignoring Holtz as best I can. I watch him come in late for dinner, toss his backpack on top of the piano and slump into his chair. I watch him shovel spinach lasagne into his mouth, not even looking at the plate. I watch him bicker with his sister Mercy about who let the toilet run all night and whose turn it is to load the dishwasher. I listen to him argue with his dad about the route he should take on his summer backpacking trip through Europe. Dad thinks the former Soviet Union is too dangerous. Mom heard that youth hostels in Amsterdam are full of heroin dealers and crack whores. They want him to spend a nice week in Paris with an old friend of the family. He thinks Paris is for wusses, middle-aged tourists with platinum cards. Mercy pipes up that all of Europe is for wusses: why not go to the Australian outback? And so on.

All of this used to drive me crazy. This back-and-forth, bickering, sniggering, taking-for-granted, interrupting, grabbing things off each other’s plates, raising voices, not looking at each other properly. I didn’t think they acted like a family. I didn’t think it was possible they could love each other. I felt like I was back on that bench in the Century City Mall, holding myself tight so I wouldn’t crack the next time I heard a child’s voice raised in a whine. I watched him very carefully, waiting for him to crack too. I thought he couldn’t take it much longer. I thought that when he laughed and jabbered and mock-threatened along with the rest of them, he was hiding the pain of knowing that no one loved him.

Then I figured something out. I calmed down, I shut up the noises in my head—well, most of them—and I watched more carefully. The Beckfords still acted only slightly more civil than the more domestic demon-species, in my opinion, but I started to see something else sneak in around the edges.

Sometimes it happened late at night when Mercy fell asleep in front of the TV and he just watched her for a moment before tussling her awake. Or when his dad talked for the millionth time about staying in-state for school. Connor grumbled, but I could hear in both their voices that it wasn’t about possession, it was about protection. They wanted to protect him and they wanted to prepare him, but not for anything in particular. They didn’t have plans for him. They were sending him to college because the whole point of college was to decide what you wanted to do. That part I didn’t get at all, but I liked the sound of it.

"In my day, a child knew his place in the world before he could toddle. Now it’s all laxity and liberality and this ‘self-esteem’ nonsense. A small demon incursion would make short work of them," says Holtz.

But I pretend I haven’t heard. And I enjoy these moments, these moments I’ve learned to see if not to understand.

After dinner, after the last dishwasher argument (which Mercy loses), I follow him into the laundry-room where his mom is setting the washer-dial. He hands her the dirty shirt he just changed out of, and she groans. "It’s whites, Con! Do a load of darks yourself or else save it."

He balls the shirt up on the shelf next to the detergent bottles, and she tells him that isn’t the place for it. He doesn’t take it down. She asks him if he’s going out tonight and he says yes, Tracy wants to see Slash ‘n Carry. Mom groans that sometimes she doesn’t understand that girl. He thinks: what a wishy-washy ex-flower child she is, my mom— but so that you can tell he likes her that way. Then she takes something out of the pocket of her sweater and says, "Look. I decided I was finally going to finish Gravity’s Rainbow, and when I picked it up these fell out."

Two old photographs she was using as book-marks (Why can’t we have a nice neat family album like other people, Mom?). The first is her backpacking across France in 1975, when she was just about his age. She’s wearing an orange-and-purple skirt and standing in a field of poppies next to a boy she doesn’t know anymore. The field is windy and sunny, and he can see she’s happy in the picture and not thinking at all about her family back home. Something like a glance passes between them then, something I don’t understand, but both of them seem to relax. She gives him the second photo.

It’s her about ten years later, standing in front of a weather-beaten shed and holding an infant. She goes on for a full five minutes about the shed, saying that Dad took the picture just after they bought this place and just before the big renovations started, so that they could stun people with the Before and After. The renovation turned out all right, but she filed the Before picture away and forgot it.

Then she says as if she’d just remembered, "And that’s you, of course. Three months after we’d signed the papers and brought you home."

I can’t concentrate anymore. It’s like I feel the wind whipping around that shed.

I hear him go "Moooom, not again" as she starts to talk about what a good baby he was, but I don’t know what he’s really feeling as he looks at the picture that’s a lie.

"A lie concocted of dark magic by agents of chaos," says Holtz.

"Yeah," I tell him. "If it’s good enough for him it’s good enough for me."

* * *

I’d almost forgotten what Lilah offered. Anyway I was under the impression that it was optional, and I had no intention of taking the option. As if, since coming here, I’ve been given anything that resembles a choice.

This doesn’t. It’s even faster than last time. One minute I’m watching the two of them scramble out of the front seat and run around, giggling, to tumble into the backseat, and the next minute I’m in there with her.

I freeze. She has her arm around me and one leg hooked over my knee, and her long straight hair is brushing my face. (Tracy has smooth brown skin and jet-black hair and brows; her grandparents come from India. Holtz disapproves.)

She says, "Whatsamatter, sport?" Her voice is low and soft but a little sharp at the edges. She smells like herself and some lilac soap and Skittles. When she kisses me she tastes like them too.

She says, "Whatsamatter, Con? You were all gung-ho caveman before."

I reach out and take a strand of her hair and wind it round my hand. It’s as silky as it looks. But that’s all I dare do.

She unwinds it, slides her leg off mine and sits up. "What’s wrong? You thinking about the letters again?"

The stupid letters from colleges that are supposed to have come but haven’t yet: sometimes they are all he thinks about. For the first time it occurs to me that when he goes to college, so will I. I won’t be able to see his family in the evenings anymore.

I nod, but she just looks at me harder. "You see something out there? You look kind of spooked."

I finally manage to say something. "I’m thinking about Owen. About him and that girl."

She nods, because it was only a few minutes ago that Owen’s car slid past. No idling, none of the usual shooting the breeze through open windows, just one short toot of the horn and then on up the hill. They were heading for the usual clearing at the top, the picnic area with a valley view. "What about them?"

"He’s with the wrong girl," I say. "I think he’s going to hurt her. I need to go stop it."

In the orange stripe of light from the edge of the parking-lot, I can see she looks completely perplexed. "What girl? What are you going to stop?"

"Violet Klemmer." I edge away from her and open the door. It occurs to me that I never learned to drive. But tracking is easier on foot anyway. "Look, if I leave you the car will you just drive it home? To your house, I mean. I’ll come get it later. You can leave the keys on the dash."

"Violet Klemmer? I don’t think Owen would go out with her. I’ve seen her prick herself with safety pins under her desk. If I park your car in front of my house my folks will go ballistic—Connor!?"

I’m out of the car already, hoping to slip away and lose myself in the shadows. But she’s out almost as quickly, and she pins me with her sharp dark eyes across the car-roof. I can tell she has a million arguments and all the words for them, just like Wesley or Fred.

"What’s the big problem, Connor? Why’re you acting so weird about it? Why don’t we just drive up there together?"

"I need my space," I say, and I turn and start walking. I look back once, because though saying the space-thing often seems to work, I think there should be a better explanation. "I’ll be less weird later. Just leave the car somewhere near your house, anywhere you want, and send me one of those computer-notes to tell me where it is."

"You mean email you?"

"Yeah, that," I say.

She doesn’t come after me, but she uses both palms to drum on the roof of the car. When she’s finished three little drum-rolls she stops and calls, "Are you the moodiest boy in the world or what? Why do I put up with you?"

* * *

I veer into the trees, walking not on the paved road but on the soft bank beside it. It gets very dark quickly, but I can find my way.

To speed things up, I try to call up a memory of Owen’s scent—his memory of course, not mine. I get a vague pattern, mostly gym-shorts. He hasn’t learned to pick out the differences: to separate the flesh and blood from the things it wears and smears on itself. But I have. If nothing else, I know there are five or six human beings about half a mile up the hill.

There’s something soft under my feet, maybe moss. The air has a nip to it. I can smell moist smells coming from the earth: rich rusty smells of plants decaying and sharp sour-sweet smells of new shoots and buds. Not like that city in the desert with its underlayer of dust and car exhaust, and not like any part of Quor-toth. I like walking in it, though this wasn’t my choice. I like picking out the sharp tips of the trees called pines and the tangles of eucalyptus against the sky. I like that I can’t hear Holtz anymore, though I can guess what he would say.

But I ignore that, because I’m almost at the top already. Flames lurch from one side of the iron firepit, and I can see two or three shapes slumped in the grass or draped over the picnic table. That’s where the sweet thin smell-thread was coming from. It’s the sweet smoke that people put in their lungs so that they can forget what a harsh world they live in.

None of the smokers gets up, but one of them calls to me across the clearing. "Hey Mr. Voted Most Likely. Wanna join the party?"

"No thanks." I go on.

The car is parked at the far edge of the clearing, on the other side of a line of small scrubby pines. Maybe that’ll be enough cover, I think, ducking between them.

The windows are sending off orange reflections of the campfire, so it’s hard to see inside. I creep around the back end, low and stealthy, and take a look from there.

Some movement in the backseat; a flash of white. I switch to a normal, noisy stride and veer back around with plenty of rustling in the underbrush. When I’m back where I started, I reach out and rap on the window. There’s no answer the first time. I do it again, hard.

Something makes a thunking noise. Then the window-glass descends into the door in a series of jerks and reveals Owen. His shirt is open and his pasty face blinks into the dark.

"What the fuck?"

He rolls the window the rest of the way down and leans out, running one hand through his slick messy hair. "What the fuck—Connor? ‘S Tracy with you? I’m kinda in the middle of something here."

Behind him I see the girl’s white face pop up—a small, thin oval face. Maybe she’s a sophomore, or even a freshman. She’s holding what looks like a white rag around her breasts, and her shoulders are pressed against the door. She says in a squeaky voice, "Owen, who’s…"

"Get out," I say to him. "Just you." I reach for the door-handle and give it a good tug.

It sticks a little, but it opens. "Get out," I say again. "I want to talk to you."

He tumbles out now, reaching for the top button on his shirt as he lurches toward where I stand in the grass. "What the fuck, Con—that door was locked. You just busted my motherfuckin’ door. What the fuck are you trying to do to me?"

I take a good step back, out of the window’s line of sight. Then I grab him by the shoulders and hold him still. He’s got three or four inches on me, not to mention broader everything, and I can tell he doesn’t think I’m a match for him.

"Listen to me. I want you to stop what you’re doing with her. It’s not right."

He doesn’t push me off, just stands there with his shirt dangling half open. He’s had a beer or five, I would guess. "What the fuck, Beckford, you jealous or something? Want me all for yourself?"

"I don’t know what you mean," I say. Lecturing people on the right thing to do is harder than it looks.

He sniggers at me and reaches up to thrust my arms aside. "Sure you do. I’ve seen you lookin’ at me. Always thought you gave off kind of a fey vibe, Connor, but howsabout you put those claws away and—"

Before he can get free, I hit him. A good clean line to the jaw: it feels wonderful. I’ve missed it.

He goes straight down, of course. I stand and watch while he scrabbles in the dirt, one hand over his bloody mouth, trying to shake off the dazed feeling and lever himself upright.

He isn’t doing very well at it, but I can tell he’ll get there eventually, and when he does he’ll try to hit me back. I can tell by the way his shoulders quake, not with fear, and his torso is rigid and his free hand is already making a fist. I stand easy and balanced, waiting for it. I wait until he has both feet under him and finds his center of gravity and is straightening his knees. Then I kick him.

He sails about three feet and goes down rolling on the mossy ground, moaning. He’s still got his hand clamped over his mouth.

I wonder if I overdid it. I take a few steps closer so that I can be sure of his hearing me. "Get the point now? From now on you won’t touch a girl unless you think you might really like her. Or unless she… well, she doesn’t care. Anyway, you won’t trick anybody with your—"

I mean to say words, but at that moment something latches onto my jacket from behind, hard, bunching the cloth at the small of my back. I spin on my heel and tug free as I go, bending my knees and drawing one arm back for the next blow.

The girl stands in front of me, shivering in her T-shirt and black skirt. I can see her straggly, silvery hair in the dark, and I can see that her shoulders are set and her hands are both fists. She’s at least as much smaller than me as I am than Owen; she’s smaller than Mercy. Or Fred. Her chest is rising and falling quickly as if she’s been running.

I let my arm fall and hold out my hands. "Look, this looks wrong. I’m not gonna hurt you. Just be smart and find yourself another b—"

She hits me. I step to the side by instinct, but her fist still manages to connect with the point of my jaw. It hurts, maybe because it’s right up against the bone. It actually makes me take a step back.

"Just stop," I say and come toward her again, ready to hold her arms still if she tries the same move. I’m surprised she isn’t cradling her black-and-blue fist.

And then I’m on the ground. It’s such a shock that at first I think they’ve pulled me out of my body again. There’s the same sensation of having my breath yanked out by the roots. But instead of floating into nothing, I’m lying here smelling pine-needles and marijuana and oily eucalyptus branches sweating in a fire. I can feel the ground against my back, and a dull ache in my chest where the kick must have connected.

I slide my feet under me, dig in my heels and spring up. She must have expected me to come up more slowly and awkwardly, like Owen, because she flutters a few steps in retreat. I know she did it, though. I can still smell the fresh asphalt that’s stuck in the treads of her sneakers.

"What are you?" I ask.

She takes a running step and goes to kick me again, but this time I’m prepared. I parry, using my full strength to knock her to the side. She takes a few hopping, weaving steps, then swivels on her heel and comes at me with the force of the rotation: fist this time.

I block with my forearm, but it hurts. The pain makes me lighter on my feet, makes me more alert, makes my blood sing. Usually when people hit me the impact feels muffled, like being pummelled through layers of padding. But when her foot or fist connects, it’s as real as fighting a demon. I feel the impact deep down, the most real feeling I know, and it steadies me. Somewhere inside me it’s as if a space opens, a whirling core where everything’s balanced and I can observe and control every breath, every sinew tightening, every leaf falling from the tree overhead, every twitch of her limbs as she stumbles toward me again. There’s no room for anger in this space, only action.

I feint to her left, and she grabs my arm and twists it back and tries to pull me to the ground. But she doesn’t have her feet well-planted, and I kick them out from under her. She’s strong, but she doesn’t have much practice at this.

While she’s getting up, someone lunges at me and claws my shoulder from behind—Owen. His face is bloody, but it’s white and determined. I catch his fist and give him an open-handed slap to get him out of the way.

He crumples, and I turn again just in time to block Violet’s flying kick. She probably shouldn’t have tried that, because now she’s really off balance, and I get in a good hard hook to the jaw that sends her reeling back against the car.

That’s all I need. I catch her wrist, swing it around and bring her down with her forehead against the metal and my knee in the small of her back. She squirms, and I press her elbow back a little more.

She whimpers. I let her go and take a few strides back, for safety’s sake.

But she’s done now, I can tell. She stays slumped against the fender, shivering and cradling her hurt arm with her good one. She’s staring at me, her eyes like dark holes in a white mask, and she smells like stale sweat and adrenaline. If I didn’t know better I’d think I’d just beaten on a tiny girl.

Behind me I can feel Owen getting up slowly, keeping his distance from me, hugging his arms round his chest. I ignore him. I lean close to Violet and ask her softly, "Are you the Slayer?"

Her lip trembles, and she swallows hard. "You hurt him. I’ll slay you, you freak."

"But you’re not the Slayer?"

I can tell, though, that she doesn’t have a clue what I mean. Now that the fight is over I’m starting to feel antsy again, and I could do without all the talking that probably should come next.

I say, "Look, whatever you are, I figure you can take care of yourself. This boy here wanted to dishonor you—" I can’t help blushing, though I know they use cruder words—"and just dump you. So if he tries to start it again, hit him like you hit me. Won’t need to be as hard."

I step into the shadows and come up against one of the boys from the campfire. He skitters away from me, laughing a whining excited laugh. "Hey, man, you decked the quarterback! You decked him and his head just snapped back like that!"

I brush past him, hearing Owen moan in the background, "Hey, I’m fucking bleeding here. Somebody make a call. That fucking psycho assaulted me."

"He’s really messed-up. Can somebody help?" Violet asks. Her voice rises in a quaver, and for an instant I stop in mid-stride and almost turn back. Then I go on.

* * *

I walk for a while without thinking much. I just concentrate on the smells and the breeze in my hair and the rustling, skittering sounds of little animals in the underbrush. Just to be safe, I cut off the road and make my way straight down the brow of the hill in the shadows. But I can’t hear anyone coming after me.

I figure I won’t have this body much longer, so I might as well enjoy the silence. There are stars tonight but no moon, and I remember the first time I saw stars. They mystified me, these little fuzzy pinpricks in the air, even though I had been told about them. I’d figured they would be brighter, being giant gaseous orbs. But I was raised in a place where there were always clouds overhead, and the sunlight you got was greenish and gave you headaches. "Here we skulk like the undead," Holtz used to say.

When I swing round to meet the road at the bottom of the hill, it’s quite a shock to see the dirty-white car blocking the entrance to the school parking-lot. His—my car. I duck and start to take the long way around the edge of the playing-field.

But behind me the door bangs. Tracy’s already seen me. She calls, "Hey you, headcase! What’re you going to do, walk eight miles home in the dark?"

I was planning on it. But now it occurs to me that he may not be as good at long treks as I am, and he certainly isn’t as good at using his senses. Might as well do him a favor.

So I turn and trudge back to the door she’s holding open, even though I don’t have the slightest idea what I’m going to say. "You drive."

She’s staring at me again. "I think I better. If I hadn’t known you since we were both on monkey bars, I’d ask what you’d been smoking."

I get in and lean back against the cool seat. That feels good too, after a fight. As she starts the car I say, "I just had to say something to Owen."

"Well, you picked a helluva time to say it. What’s your problem with Owen all of a sudden?"

"He isn’t a good friend," I say. It occurs to me then that Connor’s reputation is riding on Owen’s being too ashamed to tell anyone who kicked his ass and why. I wouldn’t want anyone arresting him. On the other hand, that might keep him from going away to college.

She’s just driving now with her eyes on the road, her face closed. I ask, "Have you ever seen a vampire?"

She makes a gurgly sound in her throat that I’m pretty sure is sarcasm. "All the time. Especially in your neighborhood."

"They smell different." I’m still thinking about Violet. If she hadn’t smelled human, I’d have found something to stake her. But my sense of smell could be a little off these days. I don’t want to think she’s the Slayer, because of what that would mean—the other one, with her whipping black hair and her tank-tops, dead. I liked Faith, even if she did knock me down a lot.

I figure it’s time to make some more normal conversation, since I seem to be staying put. "Why do you want to go to college so much?" I ask. "Are you sick of your family?"

I can tell she’s holding the wheel hard. "Connor! What the hell kind of question is that?"

"It’s just something I’m thinking about."

She shakes her head. "Just ‘cause I tell you whenever I’m pissed off at my folks, doesn’t mean I hate their guts or something. I do care what they want. Not everybody can be Brandon or Brenda Walsh, y’know."

I nod, though I don’t know who those are. "Sometimes I get mad at my folks too. It happens. But I don’t see why we have to go so far away just to learn things we could probably learn at home. Couldn’t we be apprenticed?"

She gurgles again. "What, like to be a blacksmith? Have you been watching PBS specials again?"

I say, "But it’s just so far away. I might not even be with you."

She gives a little toss to her glossy hair, and I realize that I’m never going to learn to talk so she’ll listen. All I’m doing is making her like him less.

"You had a chance to be with me tonight, didn’t you?"

* * *

When I open the door to let her out, I think for sure they’ll take me now. Tracy lives in town and the Beckfords live up the hill, which means there’s still a good three miles to go.

But nothing happens, so I go around and get in the driver’s seat, my legs feeling sludgy. I’ve made enough of a mess of things.

She watches me, her head tipped to one side. "You’re sure you’re good to drive, Con?"

Maybe she doesn’t hate him yet. I nod, though I’m not sure at all, and turn the key. The car’s already on, so it makes a metallic nails-on-blackboard noise. I let it go.

I find the gas pedal and creep up the hill. I have real trouble getting unmoored at first, until I realize that the plastic bar that works as a second brake needs to be released. But I’ve seen people drive plenty of times, and Fred gave me a few lessons that summer before she decided I was a murderer. So I manage. I just go slow and keep as close as I can to the line of lit-up grass on the right.

And while I’m creeping along there, all my attention on the road, that’s when it comes to me. That’s when she comes to me. I don’t know when I last thought about her. Holtz always tries to remind me, but his voice keeps me from really remembering. I see her in the second before I knocked her down. She’s a small silver-haired girl like Violet, wearing an old-fashioned dress, and her face is pasty and thankful. She’s thanking me; she’s drawing deep breaths again, full of relief. I’ve saved her. I don’t even know her.

Later, her crying and pleading annoyed me. She cried like an animal in a trap, angry and shameless. She pretended to believe that I was a good person, a person who would save her a second time and prove himself decent and pure. But I could tell she thought I was completely mad, and probably bad too. She thought I was Cordy’s tool, the one who did the dirty work. Cordy thought I was something more: the one destined to help bring peace to this world. That girl was only part of the struggle. Maybe that’s why she comes back to me and stays with me now, now that Cordy and the One who brought the peace are gone.

And I’m wasting my time in the world on this. Holtz would laugh.

At last I see the mailbox and the little lantern on its white pole. I get myself into the driveway, not exactly straight, and turn the key again. But it takes me a while to find the dial you click to turn off the lights.

After all that effort, it’s when I’m stumbling across the wet grass that it finally happens. Bessie is howling in the barn. (Maybe she can tell there’s something wrong with me. Dogs are good with that.) I raise my foot to take another step, and it doesn’t come down.

Or actually, I don’t have a foot. The sound of the crickets and the smell of the wet grass take an instant longer to disappear, and in that instant I know this time I’m going to miss them.

But it’s too late. I’m in the dark, this darkness that seems to press against me and even inside me. I think I am the dark.

"How’s my little champion?" Holtz asks. "Still saving virgins in distress?"