Body Surfing

he’d at least spoken to him.
    And then there was Leo. Leo and Michaela. Leo in Michaela. Q. prayed the doctor was wrong, but it made too much sense. Michaela had awakened from her coma and walked out of the hospital four days after breaking her back. Only a Mogran could accomplish that. But what if it wasn’t Leo? What if Jasper had gotten to her first? God, what if Ileana killed them both?
    The shots had come from downstream. The strip of vegetation that grew along the edge of the river was fairly narrow. He’d spot them if they tried to make a break for it. At least, he thought he would. He’d never tracked anyone in his life. Never gone hunting—not even a scavenger hunt. He wasn’t really sure what you did. Maybe yelling?
    “Jasper! Jasper, where are you?”
    The only sound he heard was the crashing of his own feet. He broke through the last bit of undergrowth and came to the river. The water ran in gentle dark undulations. He looked down at the ground. It was dotted with footprints. Q. stared at them as if they might tell him something. They appeared to have been made by feet. Feet…in…shoes.
    He decided to try yelling again.
    “Michaela? Are you here?”
    His only answer was the river’s gurgle. Q.’s hands twitched with the energy building up in his body. He couldn’t stand still. He turned and ran downriver. He dodged tree trunks, jumped over fallen branches. A skinny branch poked from a tree trunk about five feet from the ground. It would’ve been simpler to duck under it but Q. jumped instead. To test the limits of his newfound strength. He gauged the distance, paced himself. The muscles of his legs coiled and released, and then he was in the air. He was practically flying. Leo’s jump on the balcony the other day flashed in his brain. Eat your heart out, motherfucker, he thought, but even as he cleared the branch it rose up and tangled in his legs. As he fell to the ground he caught a pale blur out of the corner of his eye. Blond hair. Lithe limbs. He twisted, tried to ward off the blow.
    “Ileana, it’s—”
    The rest of his sentence disappeared in a whoosh of air. His head smashed against a tree trunk and stars flashed in front of his eyes. A hand grabbed the back of his neck and shoved his face in the dirt. He felt a knee in the small of his back, and then something sharp—the huntress’s knife?—pressed against his skin just to the right of his spine, just over his bladder.
    “One word,” a voice hissed in his ear, “and you’ll be pissing out a brand new hole.”

12
    T he demon was getting tired of people shooting him. It had been nearly a century since the last time he’d been shot, and now it had happened twice in one week. If Jasper would just cooperate instead of being so damn obstinate, Leo could focus his attention on the Legion—on this very peculiar psychiatrist, not to mention this most persistent of huntresses. He had to hand it to her: he hadn’t seen her before she shot. It took genuine skill to sneak up on a Mogran. Her aim was great too: if he hadn’t ducked, the bullet would’ve gone right through Michaela’s heart. As it was, the shell tore through the meat of his host’s left shoulder, clipping the bone, but fortunately not breaking it. He stanched the bleeding, set the wound to healing, and put it out of his mind.
    The Hudson was only about four feet deep where he fell in. Fortunately, the trunk he’d been standing on was between him and the huntress, and he pulled himself quickly into deeper water. He stopped when he was about ten yards from shore, fifteen feet down. He heard the second pair of shots, but, since Jasper didn’t fall in the river after him, he assumed his charge was safe. For now, the fledgling was on his own.
    His host’s natural buoyancy pulled her body toward the surface, and he had to wave her arms to keep himself from surfacing. Such cumbersome things, bodies. Subject to the laws of physics and the interactions of billions upon billions of molecules. Leo had spent the first several centuries of his existence as a Mogran learning the limits of his control over those molecules, but he’d spent virtually the entirety of his postdeath existence trying to find a way to shuck the flesh altogether. To exist as pure spirit. But that was one rule that wouldn’t bend, let alone break. The Mogran couldn’t resist the call of the flesh. Could not remain outside a host for more than a moment. He’d learned to be pragmatic about that