Body Surfing

up!”
    “Ironic, isn’t it? When I decided to give you one last chance at mortality, I set you up with Sila because I thought Michaela was too much of a prude to put out. Only it turns out her precious virginity was an illusion. An act.”
    If Jasper could have choked Leo without suffocating Michaela he would have. Would have wrapped his hands around the demon’s neck and squeezed until his head popped off. But there was no way, and Leo knew it. Gloated in it. Practically danced on the fallen tree in his stolen body.
    “Let the record show I gave you a chance, Jasper. To have sex. To save yourself from all this. But you didn’t take it. Somehow I think you wouldn’t have even if I’d managed to get Michaela in that closet. Would you?” He ran Michaela’s hands down her waist, over her hips. “I’ve been around long enough to know. Call it Freudian, call it Darwinian, call it Mogran, but people understand the implications of sex, even if it’s only at the unconscious level. We have sex to breed, and we breed so that some part of us remains after we die. Michaelawas ready. So were Q. and Sila. But not you. Oh, no. You’d’ve held out forever, I think. You wanted to be like me. And now you are.”
    Jasper’s hackles went up. It wasn’t just Leo’s hateful words. Something had changed in the forest. With a start, he realized the alert bell had stopped ringing more than a minute ago.
    Leo saw the look pass over Jasper’s face but misunderstood it. He reached down and popped the top button of Michaela’s shorts.
    “Think I’m wrong, Jasper? Lying? Then prove it. Show me you can resist the need to jump. Show me you can resist…this.”
    Thumbs hooked in beltloops. A little shimmy, and Michaela’s shorts lowered a quarter inch. A half.
    “Right here, Jasper. On this very tree. You don’t think I took you here just to deliver a symbolic lecture, do you?”
    Leo’s voice faded as Jasper concentrated. The sound of the river faded. The forest.
    There was the faintest of clicks. The mental processing was immediate. Instinctual.
    “This is where your little cock-tease of a girlfriend spread her legs—”
    Jasper threw himself to the ground as a bullet ripped through the place where he’d been. The sound of the shot exploded in his ears as a jet of blood shot from Michaela’s left shoulder and her body flew backwards into the dark water. Jasper rolled behind a tree as two more shots chased him into the underbrush. But neither the crashing of branches nor the sound of gunfire could drown out Leo’s voice.
    The demon’s final words ripped through his heart like his assailant’s bullets:
    “It was Q .!”

10
    A s soon as Leo fell into the water, Ileana turned her attention to Jasper. She squeezed off two more shots but the bullets went wide. The fledgling rolled his host’s tall body on the ground and disappeared behind one of those shapeless New World softwoods. Ileana glanced into the river for a sign of Leo, but the dark water had already stilled. Muttering a curse, she took off after the fledgling.
    He went for the car first, and she thought her task was going to be easier than she’d imagined. The keys were in her pocket, and even if the fledgling did know how to hotwire an engine, she’d put a bullet in his brain before he could accomplish it. But after a dozen steps he veered back towards the trees. She stuffed the gun in her belt and took off after him.
    Mud sucked at her boots and vines tangled around her legs. The demon seemed to take two steps for every one of hers. He made more noise than an ox, though, and she could track him by sound if nothing else. Every once in a while she caught a glimpse of his head as he leapt over an obstacle—at one point she could have sworn he jumped ten feet in the air. It was nothing she hadn’t seen before, but she found herself wondering if he’d known how to maximize his host’s strength and speed from the moment he cameback, or if Leo had taught him. Her mind filled with a horrifying image of Leo training an army of new Mogran, and she thought about turning around, taking him out first. But instinct told her the right thing to do was pick off the weak one first, then return for the leader.
    Her target may have been weak in comparison to Leo, but he was getting farther and farther away. He was starting to veer from the river as well. Ileana had passed a small housing development on her way here. The demon could lose her there easily or, worse,