Body Surfing

probed a little further, Leo found that Sue had more than memories of her former teacher. Hypnotic suggestions had been placed in her mind, prompting her to contact Thomas should a patient present with a story that hinted of demonic activity. Thomas’s phone number glowed in her consciousness like a Times Square billboard. Oh, yes. Definitely Legion.
    This was interesting. It was also annoying. Jasper was at a delicate stage. Confused, apt to frenzy. Leo needed to get back to him before he disappeared. But all this was as new to Leo as it was to Jasper. Like any first-time parent, there were some things you had to learn as you went along.
    Leo had been suspicious when Foras first approached him, and told him that if something wasn’t done the Legion would succeed in wiping out the Mogran. Foras’s revelation about how the Mogran reproduce was shockingly simple: a bound soul—a virgin, in human parlance—was transformed into a demon if it died while possessed by another Mogran. On the one hand, the Alpha’s words resonated strongly with Leo’s memories of his own metamorphosis. On the other hand, the Alphas had tried to kill him on a dozen occasions over the centuries. If Foras was lying, then any Mogran foolish enough to attempt what he’d just described would die in the attempt. And Foras had no good explanation for why the possessing demonwasn’t killed with his host. Leo told the older demon that he wanted to see him do it first. Imagine his surprise when Foras told him he couldn’t. When the Alpha Wave forged the Covenant seventeen hundred years ago, they’d needed a way to ensure that none of the nine attempted to create new Mogran behind the others’ backs. There was only one way to be absolutely certain. The hunters had their word for it—the sigil—but Foras hadn’t bothered to hide behind fancy terminology (or his pants for that matter). Leo had spent a good ten minutes laughing at what the Alpha showed him.
    Even so, he was skeptical. Amused: but skeptical. Why, after so many years, had Foras had a change of heart? If the other members of the nine found out, Foras’s punishment was likely to be protracted, not to mention very, very painful. The Alpha’s reply haunted Leo: for seventeen hundred years the imprisoned demon had been in a constant state of frenzy, with no way to appease it. No amount of endocrinological manipulation had enabled him to regenerate the organs he needed to achieve orgasm. He was stuck. There were times when the need to jump had almost driven him crazy, but nothing he tried had worked. But Foras believed that if there was one exception to a rule, then there must be two. If a demon could exit a host by killing it—assuming the host was still a virgin, still bound—then there must be other exceptions as well. Foras refused to elaborate, but he had come to believe that advances in technology made it theoretically possible for a Mogran to travel between hosts without having sex. However, he said, he needed other demons to test his theories, which was why he’d come to Leo. He would trade Leo the secret of reproduction if, in turn, Leo would generate a few subjects for him to experiment on. Leo had responded by telling Foras he should’ve struck the deal before giving away his only bargaining chip. He had leapt at the Alpha, but Foras hadn’t spent seventeen hundred years in a single body for nothing. Leo hadn’t even seen him move, but when he woke up his host’s head was facing the wrong way on her shoulders. Round one to the Alpha.
    That had been more than five years ago. In the meantime, Leo heard that Kali and Malachi had also been let in on the secret. Kalihad fallen to the hunters in Estonia, but to the best of his knowledge Malachi was still out there. An obnoxious child, Malachi. Barely three hundred years old. The most dramatic stunt he had to his credit was a stint as a camp director for the Nazis. Leo had killed more people without getting out of bed. It was sibling rivalry more than anything else that had motivated Leo to try to make the first new Mogran in three centuries.
    It wasn’t just fear for his own survival that stayed his hand. To be a Mogran was to be possessed (no pun intended) of a most singular fate, and Leo had misgivings about inflicting that destiny on another soul. Yes, he was immortal, and commanded a reservoir of knowledge that rivaled a great university’s library. But he had lost something too. Something that the living would