Read Body Surfing for Free Online Page B

bruises and broken bones, STDs and traumatized psyches—some merely battered and confused, others permanently unbalanced. It had only killed once though. Twice if you counted the man who was executed—hanged, in public—for a crime he professed no memory of, right until the noose was slipped around his neck.
    After that she lost it. She used the downtime to interview some of its victims—those that could still talk anyway. Most had no idea what had happened to them, and, as a consequence, no real understanding of what they were telling her. Possession had been a jolt to their mental processes so extreme it registered as little more than amnesia or nightmares. But a few remembered what they had done, the inexplicable violence and even more incomprehensible fucking, and one or two told her about extraordinary acts of strength and agility, perceptions that seemed beyond human ken. One or two even spoke of memories that couldn’t have been theirs. It was these last she focused on, using everything from feminine wiles to hypnosis to POW interrogation tactics to glean whatever residue of its own identity the demon had left in its victims’ minds. She cross-referenced the snippets of information she extracted with the Legion’s database until finally one name emerged.
    Malachi.
    When Ileana first reviewed the data, she was amazed he hadn’tbeen eliminated already. He was sloppy, almost tauntingly so. Left traces of himself everywhere. As far as she could tell, the only things that saved him were the speed of his frenzies and the length of his lulls—he could go through fifty bodies in two months, then hole up in one poor soul for half a century. But that was getting ahead of the story.
    In the beginning, he’d been nothing more than the son of a seventeenth-century cobbler in Old Salem, Massachusetts. At the ripe old age of nine, the boy had been caught in flagrante delicto with his own mother. Believing only witchcraft could cause such aberrant behavior, mother and son had been tried by the traditional method: they were sewn into a sack and tossed in Steney’s Pond. According to legend, if the suspect drowned, it was taken as proof of innocence, and he or she was given a proper burial in the cemetery at the base of Gallows Hill. But if after three minutes the accused was still alive, then demonic aid was clearly present; the witch would be pulled from the water, and promptly burned at the stake. In Malachi’s case, he and his mother both drowned. The mother, whose name had been lost to history, remained dead. But the son…the son came back.
    Perhaps because of the horrific nature of his death, the beginning of the demon’s reign looked more like revenge than the typical random frenzy: the Legion suspected him of being behind more than a dozen cases of supposed witchcraft in and around Salem—fourteen people executed for pranks Malachi had pulled while in possession of their bodies, before he suddenly abandoned his hometown and melted into the larger world. Every seventy-five to a hundred years the trail would get hot again. There was persuasive evidence he’d spent time in France during the Revolution, in America during the Civil War, in Germany during the Holocaust. He liked judges, generals, camp directors—people who held the power of life and death over masses of individuals, rather than just one or two. For that reason it was impossible to pin down his body count, but even by the standards of the Mogran he was a vile specimen.
    By comparison, his recent behavior was low-key, almost lethargic. After leaving Singapore, he’d reemerged in Sydney, then Cape Town,Lagos, Fez. Fez is where he’d taken Soma. The fact that he was still in Soma’s body in Darfur was a good sign. Suggested the frenzy was winding down. Ileana had moved in quickly. For two weeks Malachi stayed one step ahead of her, but for whatever reason he hadn’t jumped, and now, finally, she had her chance.
    She opened her eyes, slipped a finger