Body Surfing

down the hill. But he didn’t stop to put on his shoes.
    He waited for the screen door to slam behind him. It didn’t.
    Fuck you, Dad, he thought. I’m not turning around.
    “I’ll be in the field if you need me,” his dad called after him finally. “I picked up some cold cuts for lunch. They’re in the fridge.”
    As opposed to the linen closet, or the washing machine. No, Jasper added to himself. Those were good places to keep bottles of liquor, not lunch meat.
    “Cakes said she saw a suit at the Thrift might fit you,” Van Arsdale spoke into his son’s silence. “For your graduation. Said she put it on hold if you want to try it on.”
    Great. The perfect cap to a perfect fucking morning: Cakes. His dad was dating a forty-seven-year-old peroxide blonde who called herself Cakes—who was now, apparently, picking out secondhand suits for him to wear to his own graduation. Cakes , for God’s sake.
    As he stepped into the dusty air of the barn, the screen door finally slammed. In his kennel Gunther barked once, and then therewas just the rain, throbbing on the zinc roof. Jasper dropped his shoes on the ground next to one of several wooden barrels:
     
    Van Arsdale Home-Brewed Apple Brandy
    Distilled from His Own Orchards
     
    There was a slug in the right shoe, and it exploded around Jasper’s toes when he shoved his foot in. Jasper would think of that slug just before he died—the coldness of its innards, the antennas feebly twitching—but that was still a long time in the future. It was barely nine o’clock in the morning, and, if Q.’s $29,000 watch had been right, he still had ten more hours to live in his mother-born body.

5
    I leana checked her pulse as she walked after her target. It was her first hunt in more than a year. More importantly, it was her first hunt on her own, and she was going to play it by the book. Every time she complained that the Legion was taking too long to come up with a new partner for her, she was told someone was “looking into it.” It was “a slow process.” There was “a dearth of suitable candidates” but one would be selected as soon as “humanly possible.” Ileana suspected the truth was that the Legion was losing interest in the hunt. It was prohibitively expensive, for one thing, not to mention risky—and not just for the hunters, as the circumstances of Alec’s death testified.
    She drew a circle in her mind now, of the kind witches were said to use to contain demons when they summoned them. A thick ring of powdered gypsum made iridescent by a tincture of silver dust (not plain blackboard chalk, as so many movies depicted it). Within its protective boundary she allowed certain memories to take shape. Memories of that terrible day in 1992, of the incomprehensible feeling of being a stranger—a prisoner—in her own flesh, a helpless observer of the depraved, degrading acts her flesh performed. The things her hands reached for, the objects she put in her mouth. On the worst days, the days when her own continued existence seemed too oppressive to contemplate, she forced herself to think of all the reasons she had to go on living. In the years before Alec died she’dalways managed to come up with three or four, sometimes even half a dozen, but since he’d been killed she found herself falling back on just one: revenge. But now, as she checked her pulse against the second hand of the watch he’d given her, she put aside ideas like hand , like mouth , let go of words like revenge and reason . She forced herself to reach past the limits of bone and blood, of muscle, tendon and ligament. Any athlete could train those parts of the body. The real key was endocrinology. The glands, the hormones they secreted. Before Francois Dumas had poured himself another shot of Cocker Spaniard, Ileana’s liver and kidneys had neutralized the alcohol she’d consumed, even as her pineal and pituitary and thyroid glands replaced it with a finely calibrated chemical cocktail no mixologist could’ve dreamed of, let alone concocted. Epinephrine to boost her heart rate and insulin to stimulate the metabolism of glucose, endorphins to increase her resistance to pain and serotonin to keep her focused.
    If you could somehow distill the microliters of fluid she produced in the few seconds before she entered the hotel lobby, they wouldn’t have filled a teaspoon. Yet by the time she entered the room Ileana had become as taut as a wire, knew she could outrun an Olympic