Body Surfing

dutifully pored through every one of the text’s numbingly repetitious passages, studied the intricate design and manufacture of the original sigils, scrutinized the seals, circles, and incantations associated with the jar in which the king was said to have kept his demons when he wasn’t using them. She paid particular attention to the biography of Foras: “He is a mighty great president & appeareth in ye form of a strong man, he can give ye understanding to men how they may know ye vertues of all herbs & precious stones & teacheth them ye art of Logick & Ethicks.” If such hokum had any more significance than the mumbo jumbo spouted by a two-dollar palm reader at a Renaissance fair, she couldn’t see it.
    But Malachi had said it. And, although the demon hadn’t revealed the nature of the “secret” Foras had confided in him, Ileana had a pretty good guess what it was. No one, not even the demons themselves, knew how they came into existence. As Malachi himself had boasted, he was the youngest. There hadn’t been a new Mogran in more than a quarter of a millennium. Thus, though it might take a year or a decade to track down a single demon, each individual death was a definitive step toward the Mogran’s ultimate extermination.
    Of course, if Malachi was telling the truth, then there was the Alpha Wave to deal with as well. And if a member of the original nine was in fact spreading the secret of the Mogran’s reproduction, all bets were off. Ileana had her doubts, though. In the first place, why would a species voluntarily conceal the method of its reproduction, and so render itself vulnerable to the elimination, one by one, of their entire population? Indeed, the idea of any restriction on the demons’ actions failed to resonate with her experiences as host or hunter. Ileana had had a demon inside her. Had felt what it felt: a ravenous loneliness coupled with the need to pervert everything it came in contact with. And even if the Mogran did want to curtail the scope of their actions, the dictates of the frenzy made it impossible.
    But.
    But Malachi had dropped his bombshell at a moment when he had no need to dissemble. And Mogran rarely played mind games with humans, for the simple reason that they didn’t respect humans’ minds. For a Mogran to engage in a battle of wits with a single person was a bit like a supercomputer playing chess with an infant. No, there was every reason to believe Malachi had told the truth, or what he thought was the truth: that somewhere in the world, one or more members of the Alpha Wave—the oldest and most powerful of all the Mogran—were locating the last of their kind and teaching them how to breed.
    Ileana knew she should contact the Legion immediately. Here was the information she needed to make the far-flung members of the organization realize the hunt was not yet over, the Mogran down but hardly out. If even one demon knew the secret, then the clock was ticking on everything she and Alec had done over the past decade. But something kept her paralyzed.
    Soma’s face.
    Dumas’s.
    Yes, and Alec’s too. Because even worse than not having a partner was the idea that the Legion would finally assign her someone else to work with, at which point she would no longer be the companion of the man who had helped her recover from the horrors of possession. She would be an assassin, nothing more, nothing less. A hired killer who took an innocent life for every guilty party she executed. And so she sat in her rocking chair, the ancient grimoire slack in her hands, and let Malachi’s words bat about the tattered web of memories her own demon had left in her mind. But the only thing that came to her were the horrors of that single night in 1992. The memories held her captive in a waking nightmare more terrible than anything she could dream up, and in their grip all she could do was wait for the sun to rise. Wait for the children’s fearless voices to remind her there was still innocence in the world, purity, however tenuous or temporary. That’s what she was fighting for, she reminded herself. Not her salvation.
    Theirs.

2
    S ue Miller wondered if she had time for a cigarette as she strode across the hospital parking lot. Three o’clock Sunday morning, pole lamps glowing like fuzzy yellow tennis balls in the mist, a faint scent of flowers wafting through the air. Technically it was her day off. Now, assuming she even got out of the hospital before Monday, she’d probably