Body Surfing

was just running.
    The current had taken him about a quarter mile below his dad’shouse, and he limped and stumbled his way upriver. Then there were the steps: all 492 of them. His left leg had tightened up again, wouldn’t even bend at the knee, so he had to take the staircase like a little kid, lifting up his right foot and pulling his left to meet it, lifting up his right and pulling his left to meet it, up with the right, the left beside it. It seemed to take almost as long to climb the stairs as it had to swim across the river, and he wasn’t sure how he made it to the barn, let alone up the ladder and into the loft. As he undid the buckle of the swollen leather belt he saw that one of Larry’s boots had fallen off at some point—the one with the pants, and Sue’s engagement ring—but he couldn’t think about that. He dropped to the hay-strewn floor. From somewhere far away Gunther’s hysterical barking sang him off to sleep.
    Stupid dog. Stupid fucking dog. Shut the fuck up, you stupid fucking—
    “Ahem.”
    Jasper started from sleep. He knew in the way the Mogran know these things that three days had gone by since he’d fallen to the floor. Knew as well that all the processes Leo had set in motion to fix Larry’s body had done their job, and the paramedic was good as new. Better than new. A single green dot danced around the edge of his right eye. Jasper concentrated; the dot disappeared. Nevertheless, he could almost believe he was still hallucinating, save for the fact that the apparition before his eyes wasn’t the kind of thing Larry’s punctured occipital lobe had been manufacturing. It was much too concrete. Much too real, and much, much too familiar.
    The grizzled visage took a pull from a bottle of brown liquid, then squinted at the prone figure before him.
    “Well, let’s see,” John Van Arsdale said. “You’re nearly naked, you’re covered in mud, and it looks like you pissed your panties while you was sleeping.” He held out the bottle. “You want a drink first, or you want me to go ahead and toss your ass back into the river?”

4
    S ettle down, Q. You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
    The boy stared at Ileana balefully. “Very funny.”
    Such a beautiful boy. The huntress let herself admit it. The time had come for honest assessments, and this was Q.’s dominant feature, if not simply his dominant trait. He was a pretty, pretty boy. A complex beauty to be sure. Anachronistic. The planes of his face—the high cheekbones, the broad, slightly aquiline nose and wide jaw—communicated the haughtiness Herodotus attributed to Cyrus and Xerxes, but the flesh laid atop this severe foundation—the plum mouth, the coffee-colored skin—was almost perversely sensual, as if one of Kayyam’s erotic quatrains had been dressed with organic tissue. Then there were the eyes, piercing, wounded. Here was the root of masculine sexual appeal: strength wrapped around weakness. A conqueror’s spirit concealing a lover’s neediness. Such a boy would have women swooning at his feet for the rest of his life. Whether he would ever do anything to deserve their love was another question.
    “You are convinced it is your friend?” Ileana said now. When the boy didn’t respond immediately, she said sharply, “Q. Focus!”
    After lunch, Q. had gone out for a walk. Though both Ileana and Dr. Thomas adjured him not to contact his family or friends, the boy had apparently bought a prepaid cell phone—a “burner,” he called it, citing some cop show or other, “untraceable”—and used it to checkhis messages. Apparently, in the midst of well-wishes from various aunts and uncles and schoolmates, there had been a call from someone claiming to be Jasper.
    “He mentioned Billy Lethem. Billy Lethem and the Gatorade and the Fanta and how much my watch cost.”
    Such a banal—indeed bizarre—catalog by which to quantify the infinite. But though it didn’t show on the outside, the huntress’s mind was reeling nearly as much as Q.’s. A new Mogran! The first in centuries. The floodgates had been opened, and who knew how far the deluge would spread. Killing Jasper would be like sticking a finger in a dyke. Even Leo wasn’t really the problem. Not anymore. She had to find Foras, and all the Alpha Wave. Despite the fact that they had managed to stay hidden for almost two thousand years, she had to find each one of them, and take them out, before it was too late.
    But first she had to give