Body Surfing

taken. A six-pack of beer? Or maybe some more exotic pilfering from Mohammed Qusay Sr.’s liquor cabinet? Maybe all Q. had had to do was ask, which is something Jasper had never done. He’d kissed her, nibbled at her lips and neck and earlobes, rubbed her shoulders, her breasts, put his hands inside her jeans and cupped her bare ass, pressed and pounded their zippered crotches together, and one time he’d laid his face in the crux of her legs, just the thin fabric of her skirt and a virtually nonexistent pair of panties between him and his goal, and he’d inhaled the deep rich odor until he was practically drooling with desire, but he’d never once asked, let alone demanded.
    He’d been a gentleman.
    He’d been a good boyfriend.
    He’d been a pussy.
    He hadn’t gotten any pussy, but he’d been a pussy.
    Aw fuck, Jasper thought. Shoot me now. Fucking get it over with already.
    But.
    But Jasper didn’t want to die. The speed with which he was running from the huntress told him that whatever still passed for instinct in him had not yet given up the will to live. However overwhelmed his consciousness might be by the ethical dilemmas of possession, he, Jasper Van Arsdale, only son of John, wasn’t ready to give up the ghost just yet. He’d only been on this planet for seventeen years, for fuck’s sake. Leo had had no right to steal his life, let alone turn himinto a Mogran, but neither did this woman behind him, or the Legion she represented. He would decide when he couldn’t take being a demon anymore. Not some invisible jury convicting him for crimes he had yet to commit.
    While all this was going through his head, Jasper continued to angle back towards Michaela. When he glanced behind him to see how close the huntress was, he realized he’d lost her. He pivoted, made a beeline directly for the place where Michaela had fallen into the water. He would save her first, and then he’d decide whether or not to smack the bitch up for sleeping with his best friend.
    His mind was racing in a million different directions, but his body was only going one way: toward Michaela. He realized that it didn’t matter if he moved from body to body, didn’t matter if he carried the memories of two or two thousand other people with him. He was still just one person. This body he wore was the only body he had right now, and he would triumph or perish with it, through it, because of it. When you got right down to it, the future was every bit as uncertain for him as it was for anyone else. There was only now.
    He’d been piloting himself solely on instinct. But they were his new, improved instincts. Landmarks he hadn’t even realized he’d noticed—the charred slash where a bolt of lightning had struck a silver birch, an empty bottle of Amstel Light half buried beneath last year’s mulch—flashed before his eyes, guiding him directly to his embarkation point. But when he was a couple hundred yards away from the spot where Michaela had fallen into the water, a scent came to him. Ham, mayonnaise, mustard. And then a whisper.
    “Michaela.”
    Jasper veered toward the sound. It was like a magnet—no, like a star, sucking him in with its enormous gravitational force—and then he was upon them. Michaela was on top so it was Michaela he hit first. The fact that Leo was inside her was unimportant at that moment. He wasn’t stopping Leo from escaping Michaela’s body. He was stopping his girlfriend from fucking his best friend—again.
    “No!”
    He smashed into Michaela’s body and they sailed ten feetthrough the air. And then Jasper was reminded of Leo’s presence, as the girl in his arms twisted while they were still airborne and tossed him clear with an elbow to the jaw that almost made him bite off his tongue. Jasper’s shoulders smashed into a trunk but Michaela was more nimble, managed to curl, roll, land on her feet. She crouched down, hands curled into claws, teeth bared like a lioness, but Jasper was done with her, done with Leo. It was Q. he wanted to punish now.
    He scrambled to his feet. Not gracefully, but fast. Incredibly fast. He launched himself at his best friend.
    Q. made no move to defend himself. Only stared in confusion at the figure hurtling toward him. Just as Jasper crashed into him, a single word escaped his lips.
    “Larry?”
    And it was over. For a few minutes Jasper had been himself again. Just himself. His host had retreated from his thoughts, was no more real than a voice coming through