Body Surfing

musculoskeletal level. If a Mogran jumped into a tennis player, say, it would acquire not only knowledge of the rules of the game, but the physical skills to play it. The demon retained all these memories and skills when it jumped from one host to another. When you factored in the thousands of jumps a Mogran made over the course of hundreds of years, you realized that the average demon was an encyclopedia, a library, a veritable internet of its own, capable of speaking hundreds of languages, master of all the arts and sciences, able to fly airplanes, program computers, sculpt with the skill of Rodin. It could make an atomic bomb as easily as bake a soufflé, and both would come out perfectly.
    These mental abilities were matched by an equally impressive control over a host’s physiology. A Mogran could turn glands on andoff like faucets. Could bolster its host’s immune system, say, rendering it virtually invulnerable to injury or disease, or sharpen the host’s senses, increase its physical strength, even stop the aging process. In extreme cases, demons had been known to change their hosts’ hair and skin color, to add or subtract incredible amounts of fat or muscle in a matter of days, even to alter a host’s secondary sex characteristics, leaving it unrecognizable to friends and family—and to itself, when the demon left, and the former host found a stranger staring out of the mirror.
    Such manipulations had not gone unnoticed at a cultural level. Almost every legendary monster of human or semihuman appearance—werewolves and vampires, yetis and zombies—could be traced back to the work of this or that demon. And, like all those mythical creatures, the Mogran weren’t invincible. Immortal, maybe, but not invincible. Severing the head was generally considered adequate, though Alec removed the genitalia as well, as insurance, and burned the body whenever he could. And, as well, the demons had one Achilles’ heel. This was the pattern of frenzy and lull that no demon had ever been known to overcome. The frenzy was just what the name implied: a period of intense movement from host to host. The chief aspect of the frenzy was an overwhelming urge to have sex—to jump, as the demons put it—but this was often accompanied by random acts of violence and destruction. A demon at the peak of frenzy was difficult to track because it could blip from one spot on the globe to another in the blink of an eye, but it was also careless, and therefore vulnerable if you did manage to pin it down. It was less concerned with protecting itself than relieving the urge to jump. Alec had once walked into a room where a demon was in the act of raping a victim, and though it had looked him in the eye, it had made no move to protect itself or escape. Hadn’t even lifted an arm to ward off the pipe he brought down on its head.
    He was a hunter, he told Ileana. A member of an organization called the Legion, whose sole purpose was tracking and destroying the Mogran. He wasn’t sure how many members there were. Since the Legion would look like nothing more than a pack of murderers toany law-enforcement agency, they had to go to great lengths to remain hidden. The organization’s gatherers—the people who combed newspapers and internet bulletin boards in search of suspicious activity—had never met each other, but communicated electronically, via anonymous email servers and untraceable phone lines. None of them knew each other’s real names, let alone the name of the incumbent hunter.
    There was only one hunter at a time, Alec told her. And one huntress.
    Hunter and huntress were culled from former hosts. Not just because their experiences gave them the motivation to live outside the law and risk death at the hands of the Mogran, but because possession left them…altered. For the vast majority of hosts, these changes amounted to disorientation, blackouts, short-or long-term amnesia, sometimes more serious psychic trauma. Some were plagued by dreams of lives that weren’t their own, spoke languages they’d never heard, let alone learned. A very few retained larger amounts of information, even knew they’d been possessed. A few retained physical changes as well. A greater-than-normal resistance to injury or disease, sharper senses, faster reflexes. It all depended on the changes the demon had wrought while in residence. In theory the former host remained exactly as the demon had left him or her, although in practice it was