Body Surfing

was seeing through a pair of eyes. He recognized the gates of Q.’s estate. Someone creeping up on it. The thoughts were muddled and hard to read, but then he realized it must be the doctor. J.D. Thomas. But what if he’d taken the sigil? Leo would be trapped. He paused as long as he could. The earthbound pull was nearly impossible to resist at this point. He pounced—
    —and seemed to slam face first into a brick wall. It was like nothing he’d ever felt before. He felt like a baseball hitting a baseball bat. The pain was overwhelming, the sense of being flung away irresistible. He shot back into the void uncontrollably, his consciousness shredded and flailing about like octopus tentacles. If he’d had a mouth he would have screamed in frustration.
    He slammed into a body so hard he felt it roll to the ground. Ittwitched and trembled with the desire to be rid of him. He grabbed at its brain but it was harder to get hold of than Larry Bishop’s drug-addled mind. The memories were vague, wordless, overloaded with sensory data. Smells especially. A thousand odors assaulted his nostrils, then an equally loud array of sounds. A moment later a picture was added:
    John Van Arsdale, his still-twitching body athwart the corpse of his dead girlfriend.
    This was weird.
    Van Arsdale seemed to be conscious, but didn’t have the strength to lift himself off Cakes’s body. Sobs and groans tore out of his throat. But who the hell was Leo in? It wasn’t the West boy. There weren’t any memories that indicated him. There weren’t any real memories at all. Just…urges. Not even feelings. Tendencies. Appetites. Not even a name.
    This was very, very weird.
    Leo heard two sounds then. He heard, first, the snap of branches breaking under a heavy tread, and then he heard a growl, and realized it was coming from his own throat. He whipped his head around, focused his ears on the first sound. Even as he spotted the naked ass of Jarhead West lumbering into the river, he realized that he’d somehow ended up in Gunther.
    He was in the dog.
    He shook his head, tried to laugh, but all that came out was a sputtering bark. There was a first time for everything, but he thought he’d had all his firsts eons ago. This was as much fun as he’d had in centuries. But it was time for it to stop. Glancing back at the figure disappearing beneath the water, he loped toward the prostrate pair before him. Pulling down a pair of pants with his teeth. This was positively rich . Fucking someone up the ass whose dick was in a dead woman’s cunt. This was as good as it got. Leo lifted Gunther’s muzzle to the skies and let out his best howl as, scratching in the dirt for balance, he began to make his way out of his newest, and most unusual, host.

10
    T here was nothing for Jasper and Michaela to do after Q. left but wait. They wandered nervously from room to room. Jasper let her choose her own path, but it was his augmented memory that supplied the names of the furniture that sat on the Persian carpets and Turkish kilims: an Empire sofa and a Florence Knoll console in the living room, a marble-topped Eero Saarinen table in the dining room flanked by eight Louis Quatorze chairs. The armoire was Chippendale, the lamps in the library Tiffany, the wicker in the solarium Lloyd Loom, the metal mesh on the patio Harry Bertoia.
    Man , Michaela said at one point, you sure know your furniture designers .
    Jasper laughed. “Comes with the territory. All those facts that flash by your eyes when you thumb through a magazine in the dentist’s waiting room or scan a page of Google results? They’re stuck in my head forever.”
    Why are you talking out loud?
    “Because I like the sound of your voice.”
    A tiny inward intake of breath, a thousand wordless nuances of emotion. Then:
    So, do you think Q.’s going to be able to get your dad to drink a, what do they call it, a Mickey Finn?
    “Q. could get a dog to trade a steak for a hunk of granite. I’msure he’ll have no problem getting my dad to drink whatever he wants him to. Assuming he even needs to wake him up, that is. The old man should be pretty much unconscious at this hour. Anyway,” Jasper tapped Michaela’s front pocket, “he said he’d call when everything was ready.”
    They had ended up in the library, perhaps because that room was less intimidating than the others, the furniture being straightforward leather club chairs, the walls lined with books that looked pretty much like the ones