Body Surfing

a wireless headset. But the name that had fallen from Q.’s lips brought back the reality of the situation. He was Mogran now. He existed only in borrowed bodies, not quite dead, but not really alive either.
    He didn’t manage to stop himself before he crashed into Q. and knocked them both to the ground. Q. still didn’t fight back—seemed, like Jasper, to have given up. Jasper stared at his friend. At his confused, pained eyes, at a little cut on his lip from which flowed a trickle of blood. Even as he watched, the blood congealed and stopped flowing, leukocytes filled the tiny opening with pus, the process of healing began in sped-up motion. But Q.’s eyes remained wounded, and Jasper knew this was what Leo had done to him. He glanced at the demon, who watched the reunion with a patient, curious expression, then looked back at Q.
    “Q. It’s me.”
    Q. blinked. He wiped his dirty hands on his pantlegs, then put them down in the dirt.
    “Is it—is it really you?”
    He didn’t say the name. Jasper needed to hear him say it. Neededto know that he existed for someone besides Leo. He waited, his eyes pleading. But like Q.’s “please” of a moment ago, he wasn’t sure what he wanted his friend to say.
    “Jasper?”
    Jasper didn’t say anything. Didn’t even nod.
    “Oh my God, Jasper? Is it really you?”
    A snide chuckle answered for him.
    “Oh, this is rich,” Leo said in Michaela’s voice. “This is like eating crème brûlée off the hairless pussy of a ten-year-old Thai virgin whore.”
    Jasper turned to Leo. There was so much wrong with that sentence. Skip the big things: skip the fact that he could hear the fucking diacritical marks in his girlfriend’s voice or the fact that the prostitute had to be a virgin, had to be Thai, had to be ten fucking years old.
    “Michaela’s never eaten creme brulee in her life. She’s lactose intolerant.”
    “Huh,” Leo said. His eyes glazed over for a moment, and then they sharpened again. “Not anymore she’s not.”
    Jasper launched himself. His body sprang in the air as if bungees had snapped him up. The haughtiness. The smarminess. He would wipe that smug grin off the demon’s mouth if he had to break Michaela’s jaw to do it. Leo could just fix it anyway.
    But in the fraction of a second all this had taken Leo had rolled out of the way, and instead of Michaela’s body beneath him there was—
    Q.
    His friend’s eyes were still glazed, as if he were not quite aware of what he was doing. Yet at the same time he was moving incredibly fast. As fast as Michaela, as fast as Jasper. Angling himself to intercept Jasper even as his hand pulled something from the pocket of his jeans. His thumb flicked off the orange cap. A tiny spike caught a ray of sunlight. A needle. Jasper, still in the air, tried to jerk himself out of the way, but it was too late. He felt the needle prick his ankle as he rolled to the ground, jumped to his feet.
    For a moment he thought nothing would happen. Q. hadn’tdepressed the plunger or he was immune to whatever was in the syringe. But then he felt icy coils wrap themselves around tibia and fibula, patella and tarsals. They encircled his femur, scaled his newly repaired pelvis like frozen ivy. Before he could recite the names of the rest of the bones of the body, the coils had coated his skeleton in a frigid, numbing net. He looked inside Larry’s body, trying to find out what was happening, trying to find a way to stop it, but all he saw was a hundred million crystals of ice.
    His vision blurred as he lost control of his eye muscles. By contrast, his hearing grew louder, as the protective muscles of his inner ear softened and sound waves smashed unimpeded against his eardrums. But they were distorted, hard to make out. Birdcalls sounded like fire alarms. A voice—Q.’s? Michaela’s?—vibrated like a foghorn. A pixilated brown field filled his vision. He realized it was the ground just before his face splatted into it. His mouth filled with dirt but he couldn’t spit it out. The only warmth was a faint sensation around his groin. Something like a groan escaped his mouth as he realized he was pissing himself.
    And then, louder than a thunderclap, louder than the slamming of prison doors—or the gates of hell for that matter—a gunshot. By then Jasper was so numb he didn’t even know if he’d been hit. Sound faded, the light seemed to flicker and go out. For a moment he was aware of himself, floating in the