Body Surfing

the demon’s breathing had grown husky. Deeper, longer, louder, as if the demon’s throat were slightly constricted.
    All the things Ileana had told him about the frenzy flashed through his mind, and with a start, he realized Leo wanted out. Leo wanted…him.
    He opened his eyes.
    Michaela was looking down at him. Q. looked into her eyes for a trace of Leo, but the demon seemed to have retreated. He knew how this worked. He had felt it when Leo did it to him. Took bits and pieces of his desire for Sila, for his dad’s Porsche, welded them together and turned them up until the only thing he could think of was making Sila blow him while he drove as fast as possible. Leo would hide behind Michaela’s unconscious the same way. Would nudge here, prod there, augmenting those aspects of Michaela’s psyche that best served his need to leave her body. Maybe Michaela had looked at Q. at a party one time and thought he was cute, or maybe she’d thought of him and Sila doing it and wondered what it was like. Maybe she looked at him and thought of Jasper, gone forever. The demon would find these thoughts and tease them out, turn them up. It would be Michaela who put her hand on Q.’s chest, Michaela who undid one button of the Jermyn Street shirt, then another. Q. could do this if he thought of it as Michaela. He could do it with her. For her.
    “Michaela,” he whispered.
    “Sshh.” Her eyes pierced his, held him still. He saw that her nipples had hardened beneath her tank top, and then he felt them as she let her breasts graze over his torso. Her knee slipped off his belt buckle, slipped down between his thighs. She pushed his legs open and pressed her thigh against him.
    “Michaela,” Q. whispered again. He had never coveted Jasper’s girlfriend, but he knew this was his best chance to save her. Leo would get away, but Michaela—Michaela would live. Not even Ileana would kill her out of spite.
    Michaela smiled. It was hard to think it was the demon doing it. She was so sexy, so irresistible. He closed his eyes, kept the picture of Michaela’s face in his mind, tried to block out any thought of the beast within her.
    He felt her hand on his zipper. She pulled. He groaned. Michaela, he kept saying to himself. Michaela, Michaela. He was doing this for Michaela.
    Then: crackling leaves, breaking branches. The stamp of running feet. A scream:
    “No!”
    He opened his eyes in time to see a blur leap from the forest, and then suddenly Michaela—Michaela and Leo—were gone.

13
    I t took longer to lose the woman with the gun than Jasper would have thought. She was fast, and smart too. When he angled in to circle back to the place he’d left Leo and Michaela, she cut in farther and made up lost ground. She’s done this before, he thought, and then he realized:
    She was the huntress.
    Thoughts filled his head, and for a moment he was running blind. How had it come to this? How in the space of a week had he gone from being a normal seventeen-year-old to a fugitive spirit trapped in the body of a burned-out paramedic? His host was wanted by the police for sexual assault, while Jasper himself was the target of an organization whose raison d’être seemed to be his death. It would be laughable if it wasn’t terrifying. If, as the determined footsteps of the woman behind him testified, it wasn’t all true.
    A part of Jasper wanted to stop. To let this huntress shoot him and get it over with. But there was Larry to consider, for one thing, and Michaela too. He had to live long enough to get Leo out of Michaela. Then he’d try to find a way to end this existence without killing his host.
    Gee, thanks, man , bubbled up from somewhere deep inside him. Jasper ignored Larry’s sarcasm.
    There was Q. to consider too.
    Q. and Michaela.
    The betrayal was like a knee to the groin. To Larry’s groin, and Jarhead’s, and his too. It reverberated through all the bodies he’d inhabited, seemed to touch the ether that was all that was left of him. His best friend had fucked his girlfriend. His girlfriend had fucked his best friend. His best friend—who, by the way, had killed him—had lured his girlfriend to a fallen tree at the river and poked her like some slutty cheerleader from a visiting school’s basketball team. And his girlfriend—whose refusal to sleep with Jasper had condemned him to a peripatetic afterlife of borrowed bodies and eternal flight—had put out like some white trash whore. Jasper wondered what it had