Body Surfing

state of affairs, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.
    He didn’t just have to fight his host’s fleshly buoyancy. He had to fight her mind too. Her body had already been underwater for more than a minute, and even though her connection to her senses was muted, the instinctive panic was making her particularly unruly. Unconscious urges were always harder to control than conscious ones. He wasn’t as skilled as other Mogran at tracking down every little impulse hiding at the bottom of this or that mental crevice, around the corner of this or that phrenic blind alley. Years ago, he’d managed to track down one of the Legion’s agents—gatherers, the hunters called them, which he thought was adorable—and he’d learned that more hunters had been culled from his former hosts than any other demon. The gatherer had called him “sloppy,” which word Leo had written in 119 languages on the gatherer’s walls, until he finally ran out of blood.
    But it was true: even now, lost in his thoughts, he’d loosened his hold on Michaela and she’d made a break for the surface. He snapped back in control, propelled his host’s body back toward the muddy riverbed. He could’ve just beaten her down, of course, crushed and compacted her psyche so tightly it would never open up again, but he didn’t want to do that. Not yet. The girl was still his best bargaining chip with Jasper, and he didn’t want to throw her away by destroying her mind. Not yet. He could hear her screaming for air, could feel her desperately trying to kick her arms and legs. Her terror was so overwhelming that he could actually feel it: little electrical charges that prickled at his nerves like pins stuck in his skin. Such spirit, this girl. He could see why Jasper was in love with her. He wasa passive boy, and she would have dominated him like an Arabian queen lording it over her harem eunuchs.
    Speaking of Arabs: Leo chuckled to himself to think what Jasper was going to do to Q. now that he thought his best friend had slept with his girlfriend. Not just slept with her: deflowered her. Lying didn’t come naturally to a being with access to vast reservoirs of knowledge—the truth was almost always more powerful. But in this case, a little deception seemed the perfect way to chip away at Jasper’s two most powerful connections to the living world: not just his best friend, but his unfaithful girlfriend as well. In fact, Michaela had slept with a boy named Adam McCluskey a few months before she started going out with Jasper. The experience hadn’t been a positive one, which is why she decided to wait with Jasper. But he didn’t need to know that.
    Not even a Mogran could see clearly through a river as silty as the Hudson, but he thought he could make out a sinkhole about a hundred feet upriver. Sinuous shapes writhed through it. Tree roots probably. They’d make good cover to pull himself out of the water. He swam toward it.
    When he reached the roots he waited a few more minutes, then slowly surfaced. The hawthorn tree whose roots he held blocked his view of the bank, so he opened his ears and listened. He heard footsteps immediately, then the rasp of breath. He listened carefully until he was sure it was a man. Not the huntress then, and not Lawrence Bishop either—not Jasper. Jasper wouldn’t be sucking down air with such ferocity. Who could it be then? As if on cue, a voice called out:
    “Jasper! Jasper, where are you?”
    The demon smiled. Q. He doubted the boy had managed to track them here on his own. This Dr. Thomas was proving more resourceful with each new encounter.
    “Michaela?” Q.’s voice was plaintive, forlorn. “Are you here?”
    As quietly as he could—and no creature on earth is as silent as a Mogran in stealth mode—Leo pulled himself out of the water and set out on an intercept course. The sodden tanktop had shrunken andridden up, enveloping his host’s lovely breasts. It was a shame the fledgling wasn’t there. Leo would’ve liked to see Jasper try to fight the urge for release.
    When the demon’s path took him past a dead oak, he broke a long straight stick off its trunk. The dry wood snapped cleanly from the tree, leaving one end angled and sharp. Q. was moving fast, but making more racket than a pack of elephants. When Leo came to a large poplar he stopped, knelt down, angled his branch into the deer-path the boy was following. He waited.
    Q.’s steps grew closer. The demon smiled. It had been a long