Body Surfing

sprinter, outbox a heavyweight. For the next several minutes at least, she was a match for any human being in the world, save perhaps Antonio Soma. Her only real advantage was that the Mogran didn’t know that.
    Mogran was another word she tried to avoid, at least while she was hunting. She thought of him only as a demon—a demon whose circle of protection just happened to be a human being named Antonio Soma.
     
    When she emerged into the lobby, however, her quarry was already gone. Damn it, she cursed. She swung by the desk and shot a glance into Soma’s cubbyhole. The note was still there. That, at least, was good news.
    She went up to her room and took a moment to collect herself. Itwas every bit as important to power down, as it were, as to prepare for a fight. To neutralize the chemicals that had been released lest they leave her nervous system so highly strung that it crashed. There was a liter bottle of water on the dresser—a local brand, Source of the Nile—and she opened it, drained half at a gulp. Sinking on the bed, she closed her eyes and reviewed what she knew about this particular demon.
    It had first surfaced in Singapore. It was a hard place for a white face like Ileana’s to disappear, but the demon had been in the grip of the frenzy, and she knew it wouldn’t be paying much attention to the local scenery, archaeological or human. But it had been difficult to pin down for precisely the same reason. It must’ve jumped twenty times in half as many days, leaving behind a trail of bruises and broken bones, STDs and traumatized psyches—some merely battered and confused, others permanently unbalanced. It had only killed once though. Twice if you counted the man who was executed—hanged, in public—for a crime he professed no memory of, right until the noose was slipped around his neck.
    After that she lost it. She used the downtime to interview some of its victims—those that could still talk anyway. Most had no idea what had happened to them, and, as a consequence, no real understanding of what they were telling her. Possession had been a jolt to their mental processes so extreme it registered as little more than amnesia or nightmares. But a few remembered what they had done, the inexplicable violence and even more incomprehensible fucking, and one or two told her about extraordinary acts of strength and agility, perceptions that seemed beyond human ken. One or two even spoke of memories that couldn’t have been theirs. It was these last she focused on, using everything from feminine wiles to hypnosis to POW interrogation tactics to glean whatever residue of its own identity the demon had left in its victims’ minds. She cross-referenced the snippets of information she extracted with the Legion’s database until finally one name emerged.
    Malachi.
    When Ileana first reviewed the data, she was amazed he hadn’tbeen eliminated already. He was sloppy, almost tauntingly so. Left traces of himself everywhere. As far as she could tell, the only things that saved him were the speed of his frenzies and the length of his lulls—he could go through fifty bodies in two months, then hole up in one poor soul for half a century. But that was getting ahead of the story.
    In the beginning, he’d been nothing more than the son of a seventeenth-century cobbler in Old Salem, Massachusetts. At the ripe old age of nine, the boy had been caught in flagrante delicto with his own mother. Believing only witchcraft could cause such aberrant behavior, mother and son had been tried by the traditional method: they were sewn into a sack and tossed in Steney’s Pond. According to legend, if the suspect drowned, it was taken as proof of innocence, and he or she was given a proper burial in the cemetery at the base of Gallows Hill. But if after three minutes the accused was still alive, then demonic aid was clearly present; the witch would be pulled from the water, and promptly burned at the stake. In Malachi’s case, he and his mother both drowned. The mother, whose name had been lost to history, remained dead. But the son…the son came back.
    Perhaps because of the horrific nature of his death, the beginning of the demon’s reign looked more like revenge than the typical random frenzy: the Legion suspected him of being behind more than a dozen cases of supposed witchcraft in and around Salem—fourteen people executed for pranks Malachi had pulled while in possession of their bodies, before he suddenly