Body Surfing

besides killing an innocent person. You could get what you want, Ileana. And I could get what I want. And no one else would have to die.”
    Ileana’s voice was icily flat. “Forgive me if I doubt the sincerity of your motives, doctor. What do you really want?”
    For the first time the doctor faltered. “I have never been possessed. I can only imagine the anger you must feel. The sense of violation. But for the same reason, I can see things about the Mogran that you do not. Especially a Mogran such as Leo, born under the reign of Nero, eyewitness to almost two thousand years of history, and possessed of a perfect memory of everything each of his innumerable hosts has seen. If we could convince him to talk”—the doctor glanced at the restraining chair behind him—“his testimony could exponentially expand our knowledge of the world.”
    Ileana also looked at the chair. Imagined Leo bound by its restraints, the doctor pricking, poking, sawing at him in an attempt to torture his secrets from him.
    “Do you really think your cell will hold a demon, Doctor?”
    “I think the sigil will.”
    “You want to trap the demon in a body?”
    The electronic silence stretched on endlessly as the doctor weighed his answer.
    “Michaela Szarko woke up this morning. When the nurses came in to check on her, they found her sitting up in bed trying to peel the cast off her—”
    Ileana let go of the intercom button.
    “Michaela’s awake?” A smile of pure wonder spread across Q.’s face, but just as suddenly as it appeared, it faded. “But that means—”
    Ileana nodded grimly. “Jasper. Or Leo.”
    Something in Ileana’s face caused Q.’s jaw to drop. He grabbed her wrist. “Ileana, no! You can’t expect me to hurt—not Michaela .”
    Ileana’s face went as hard as the bones beneath Q.’s fingers. Only her eyes betrayed her.
    “No,” she said. “I would never expect you to hurt Michaela.”
    The huntress’s fist slammed into the boy’s head with a force that would have crushed another man’s skull. Q. bounced off the plexy and slumped to the floor.
    Ileana ran her fingertips over his head, was pleased to feel a goose egg already rising from the boy’s temporal bone.
    “So you can be hurt after all.” Ignoring the doctor beating silently on the sheet of Plexiglas, she turned the lights off and walked from the room.

7
    A s Jasper reached for the doorbell of 216 Aitken Street, Q.’s watch flashed on his wrist. Time is expensive . His friend’s words echoed through his mind, but who had really said them: Q. or Leo? How different such a statement was coming from a Mogran rather than a human. People lost time, but the demons only accumulated it, saved the seconds like pennies until they were billionaires.
    The inner door suddenly opened. On the other side of the screen, Mrs. Szarko gasped, and Jasper, taken aback a moment, had to remind himself she was looking at Larry’s face, not his. There were dark circles under her eyes, but the eyes themselves were strangely luminescent, as if she’d just beheld something miraculous. Miraculous, but a little frightening. Well, Jasper reflected, her daughter had awakened from a coma and walked out of a hospital that most observers predicted she would have been carried out of in a bag. You could hardly blame her for being frazzled.
    “My goodness, you startled me. I was just going to check the—” Mrs. Szarko shook her head. “Pardon me. Jasper—my daughter’s boyfriend—had a Dearborn sweatshirt with stains just like those.” She pointed at three red spots on the stomach—wine, which Jasper had never really liked. “‘Cranberry juice,’ he told me. Teenagers.”
    Good lord, Jasper thought. The woman has a memory like a Mogran. Before he could say anything, however, a voice rang out.
    “It’s for me!”
    Mother and visitor both froze. Jasper knew they shared the same thought: he hadn’t pressed the doorbell, so how had Michaela known there was a visitor? A pair of heavy feet half skipped, half thudded down the steps. Skin swished over floorboards. She’s barefoot, Jasper thought. No, he’s barefoot. Leo—
    A pale sliver appeared beside Mrs. Szarko, and all the words fell out of Jasper’s brain. Leo or no Leo, this sliver was Michaela.
    “Dig the threads, Larry.”
    Jasper shivered. There was something disjunctive—disgusting—about the words that had come out of Michaela’s mouth, like chocolate cake soaked in vinegar. The voice was