Body Surfing

tried to jump on him to express his appreciation. He glanced up at the sky, saw the evening lightshow just starting over the mountains ( H . “Catskill Sunset” was a flower he’d been trying to breed for a decade, but so far nothing he’d come up with was worthy of the name).
    “All right, Mr. Gunther, let’s hose you off and get us both some dinner.”
    The dog ran ahead of him, still barking constantly. He raced down the hill at such high velocity that he nearly tumbled ass over heels into the river, then came barreling uphill toward a robin that stared cockeyed at the barking dog before lazily taking to the sky and alighting on a branch of a sugar maple.
    “You know, if you shut up once in a while you might actually catch something,” Van Arsdale said to the dog, shuffling up to the hose coiled on a spindle mounted to the barn wall. In answer, Gunthershook himself from stem to stern, bits of blood flying off his muzzle and splattering the barn’s faded wood with red drops, as if in direct refutation of his master’s claims. When Van Arsdale turned on the spigot the dog launched into a fresh round of barking, snapping at the water with his huge teeth before letting Van Arsdale spray him clean. He barked all the way through the operation, the sound echoing off the wall of the barn until Van Arsdale’s ears were ringing.
    “Enough already! Goddamn dog. Barking fit to wake the—”
    That’s when the demon took him.

4
    I t was hard not to hurt her. To slip in softly, let his essence mold itself to the shape of Michaela’s mind rather than smashing it out of the way as he’d done to Jarhead and Larry—unintentionally, but still, he’d done it. But he knew he had to be gentle if he wanted to help her, if he didn’t want to leave her worse off than she’d been. He imagined himself as a magnum of champagne being poured into an enormously tall thin flute; he had to trickle from his bottle into the glass or else he’d knock it over and break it or it would foam up and spill over the top.
    Then there was everything else. Michaela. Michaela’s memories. Michaela’s feelings. He told himself he wouldn’t look, but he had no hands to cover his eyes. Her whole life lay before him. The car accident and the coma. The sex with Adam McCluskey. The demon’s entrance. The demon’s exit.
    Jasper seethed with rage when he saw what Leo had made Michaela do with Eric. He could practically hear the demon chuckling. Two lives destroyed for the price of one …
    But all of this was scattered, broken up into bits and pieces like a fragmented hard drive. It took Jasper a moment to understand what all the intervening material was, but finally he realized it had come from Leo. The Mogran had dumped the experience of thousands oflives into Michaela’s brain. No wonder she was so confused. So terrified.
    There were too many external memories for him to wall them off individually. He had to gather them into one unit first, and he had to do it without hurting Michaela. He felt like the proverbial bull in a china shop—a bull dragging a wagon loaded with a pallet of bricks—and he had to do his level best not to chip a single platter, break even one delicate teacup. The whole operation seemed to take an eternity. He was learning that this period of acclimation was the scariest, most vulnerable part of being a Mogran. It didn’t matter if it lasted a fraction of a second or a few hours: until he was firmly rooted in his host’s psyche he had no way to experience the passing of time, so he had no idea how long it was taking, what was happening to his host’s body. He could’ve been in Michaela for a day or two already, or just a few seconds; her flesh could be on fire, or falling through space. It was all meaningless to him.
    Gradually, though, as he managed to shunt off more and more of the wadding Leo had stuffed into Michaela’s brain, he began to be aware of her. There were lingering traces of pain: the damaged spots where Ileana’s gunshot had clipped Michaela’s shoulder and her knife had pierced her neck. But he felt as well the incredible strength Leo had given her to resist these injuries. The demon had practically rebuilt her from the inside out. Again he marveled at what a Mogran could do. She was in better shape than Larry even. Not invulnerable maybe, but as close as a human being could come to it. If he hadn’t come along, she would have lived a long and tortured existence with Leo’s memories