Body Surfing

accessible to the decision-making apparatus, the instantaneous and eidetic memory of a Mogran. But the discomfort Jasper’s question gave Leo made him realize that he—yes, even he—had motives he wasn’t aware of. Secret desires that flew beneath the radar, just like a human being’s. Something that wasn’t thought, wasn’t emotion. Something that you might call personality, or character, or perhaps instinct. To think that he still possessed the same psychological weakness as a mortal was humbling. It was also infuriating.
    The question was, what should he do about it? Should he cut bait? Disappear into the world, leaving the fledgling to his own devices? Or should he eliminate him, just to make sure he didn’t come back and bite him in the ass (or stab him in the back, as the case may be)? Or should he make a statement? Take Jasper out “with extreme prejudice,” as they said? Jasper and Michaela and Q. and J.D. Thomas and Larry Bishop and Sue Miller—and of course the huntress—just to let anyone who might be watching know he wasn’t to be trifled with. No doubt the Alpha Wave had its spies, and would find out about Jasper, if they hadn’t already. Leo needed to make sure they thought twice about coming after him. Of course once the Alphas learnedabout Jasper, they’d suspect one of their own of breaking the Covenant. The fledgling could have been created by chance, of course, as he himself had been, but they would be suspicious at the very least. Who knows what kind of grumblings Foras had made in the past. For all Leo knew, he’d tipped his hand already. That could work to Leo’s advantage. To have the Alpha Wave fighting among themselves. They’d held sway long enough.
    Leo smiled at himself with his host’s pretty mouth. He still hadn’t answered his question. Why? But did it matter why? Was it worth saying he was lonely? Did you really have to admit such things to yourself—say them out loud, the way Sue Miller’s patients bleated out their insecurities and prejudices, as if self-awareness somehow made you a better person? Stronger?
    Call him sentimental, but he still believed the fledgling would come round. But it was clear his ties to his mortal life would have to be severed. That meant his father, and Q. And of course the pretty thing Leo was looking at right now.
    After six hours, the gash in her neck had closed, but it was still angry and pink, an eloquent testament to how close the Mogran had come to dying today—about three millimeters, if you wanted to give it a physical measurement. It was the second time he’d nearly died in a week—which, after various jihads, crusades, and a couple of world wars, not to mention the usual array of famines, plagues, shipwrecks, cave-ins, and wildfires, was a pretty spectacular feat for one dead seventeen-year-old to pull off.
    The demon cast his mind back to his first years as a Mogran. Had it been this difficult for him to make the transition? Before Foras told him the truth, he believed he’d been born a Mogran, or that the overwhelming psychic trauma of his death had triggered some process that enabled his spirit to loose itself from its bodily home. But now he understood what had really happened in the Coliseum. That the emperor had been possessed by the Mogran known as Julian, and that Julian, for whatever reason, had decided to try his hand in the ring. Leo didn’t know what Julian’s motivation might have been—his progenitor had long since disappeared into history—and, since Julianwasn’t an Alpha, it was unlikely he knew that he’d created Leo. Chances are he’d simply relished the challenge of taking on an army of wild animals in the body of a ten-year-old boy.
    It took forty or fifty jumps before Leo realized sex was the catalyst for his exit. But with each new host, he learned a little more about himself, and nearly three hundred years after he died he finally learned exactly what he was, when he attempted to jump into a body only to find himself rebuffed by the presence of another demon. By that time Leo had heard the rumors, of course, legends, myths, tall tales. But that day he learned the truth and was sworn by the Covenant to protect it. For sixteen hundred years he’d abided by its precepts, if only to keep the Mogran off his back, but as far as he could tell the only result of his obeisance was a life of solitude while the Mogran were picked off one by one, until there were none left besides him and the original