Body Surfing

call humanity, but that he chose to think of as perspective. He had committed acts that his living self could never have contemplated, let alone executed. Destroyed minds, relationships, families even, sometimes in the name of survival, but more often just for fun. Diversion. Distraction. Every once in a while the impact of his actions caught up with him, though, and during the week he’d spent observing Jasper in Q.’s body, he decided to give the boy one chance. One chance at mortality. But the boy hadn’t taken it. Leo believed that unbinding wasn’t as simple as losing one’s virginity—that there was a psychological component involved in that choice, and that some aspect of Jasper had been unwilling to submit to a single existence, and so had rebuffed Sila in the closet the night before the accident. If anyone was going to be haunted by that decision, it would be Jasper, not Leo.
    Now, though, he was wondering if it had been worth it. If he didn’t get back to Jasper soon, his fledgling was likely to disappear into the world, and it could take forever to track him down. Meanwhile, Q. had opened a whole new can of worms. Sue Miller, J.D. Thomas, the likely involvement of the Legion—which meant that a hunter was going to be on Leo’s trail if he didn’t act soon. Like it or not, Jasper was going to have to fend for himself for the time being.
    He started with Sue. He chipped at her memories of Thomas, but the synaptic pathways held fast. The psychiatrist’s teacher had knownwhat he was doing. He was so good that Leo wondered if perhaps he was a former host himself. In the end Leo had to whack Sue’s memories with a mental sledgehammer—in this case, a flood of protein kinase inhibitor so potent it wiped out everything that had happened to Sue between the ages of eight and twenty-six. Middle school to college, long division to conversational French to Melanie Klein and the unconscious battle between Eros and Thanatos. Her mother’s death from metastatic lung cancer, her father’s suicide, her two-year fiasco of a marriage—all of it, gone.
    That left Thomas. Thomas and Q. Leo hadn’t wanted to harm the boy because he suspected Q.’s disappearance would raise Jasper’s suspicions. It seemed unlikely that the boy would warm to Leo if he knew the elder demon had been the one who ended his mortal life. In time Leo would tell his fledgling—a hundred years from now, a thousand, when Jasper’s ties to the world of flesh had long since faded. But Leo couldn’t have Q. going to the Legion at this fragile stage in Jasper’s development. There was no way around it: Q. would have to be destroyed, along with any evidence that he’d once been possessed by Leo.
    The Mogran used Sue’s lighter to set Q.’s file afire. As he watched it burn, he felt a similar flame spark in that alchemical synapse where Sue’s consciousness met his. As if under his own hypnotic spell, he began to flit about the examination room. Pulled a speculum from a drawer, a bottle of Vicodin, a second of Viagra. Q. and J.D. Thomas receded from his consciousness as the ancient, implacable need took hold. He removed the inhibitions that had kept his host in line for thirty-four years, let her deepest fantasies guide him toward his release. To think that Foras had been unable to appease this urge for nearly two millennia! Leo couldn’t imagine how Foras had stood it without going insane.
    The Ferragamos made a solid sound on the tiled floor as he walked the psychiatrist down the hallway. The skintight Jil Sanders clung to an ass she paid her trainer $55 dollars an hour to keep nice and firm. By the time she put in a call to her boyfriend, Sue was practically under her own control. Leo was just a spectator, cheering heron. He felt her flesh shiver with anticipation. She fingered the speculum, the bottles of Vicodin and Viagra. She was going to ratchet Larry’s asshole open, drop the pills in, fuck them into his system with the vibrator in her bedside drawer, then turn him over and ride him till he passed out. Then she was going to smack him awake and do it again. And again. And again. She only hoped he would fight back. That would make it really fun.
    As she walked to her car, she smelled the flowers she had noticed when she first came to the hospital. The demon gave her the name. Wrote it on her brain in day-glo letters.
    “Phlox.” Sue giggled like it was a dirty word.
    Deep inside her, the demon told himself that Jasper had