Tessa Gratton

“Variations on Body Snatching”

a Blood Journals story

I.

(My body has been dead for centuries.)

His girlfriend kept coming home wearing the bodies of boys. 

She knew he hated that kind of magic, the body-snatching, soul-stealing kind, even if she did always say, “Soul-borrowing, Nicholas, I give it all back.”

That hardly seemed to matter, he thought, if you took somebody’s body in the first place. He cracked his forefinger knuckles with this thumbs; a new habit he wasn’t sure he liked, but didn’t stop because the pop reminded him he was still in control of his body. He said, “I’m not sure I’d want it back, after somebody else had taken it for a test drive.”

“No damage, see?” She grinned and on the strange boy’s mouth it was like a big cat, a lion or tiger or the Cheshire one from that trippy Disney cartoon. This body she wore today was shorter than Nick, bulkier, too, though that was easy – just find any dude-bro from a gym or jock who went to zero-hour for weight training before classes and they’d be bulkier than Nick. 

She lifted the body’s muscular arms over the shaggy blond head, fingers curled elegantly, and twirled on one foot like a ballerina. 

Nick watched because he couldn’t take his eyes off her, ever, her intensity shining as brightly as the first time he’d seen her, two years ago in the cemetery behind his house, using her powerful blood to regenerate dead leaves. Before she’d learned body-snatching, before she knew how to heal or draw protection runes, before the magic had gotten out of control and her brother had died. Before she started running away from herself by ditching her body. 

“You’re not laughing,” she said morosely, the scratchy, masculine voice pitching up. 

The first time she came home wearing some random dude’s body, it’d scared the shit out of Nick. She’d used her key to the tiny flat, and he’d been starting water to boil pasta. It was early – usually she stayed at the campus library to study for a while because he was terrible at letting her work at home. Couldn’t apologize, though; he just wanted her attention when he could get it. He’d hoped maybe she was early because she missed him, and he should turn off the stove and pour some of that box wine Gram Judy had bought them. 

Then he realized the heavy, awkward footsteps coming up the hall did not belong to Silla. 

Grabbing a tiny fruit knife, he’d slashed the meat of his thumb hard enough to draw immediate blood, knowing from experience it was a shit place to cut – his dexterity would be ruined for a week. He cupped his hand so the blood slid into a shallow pool in his palm and ducked behind the fridge. One touch and he’d have the intruder on his knees, blacked out and ready for the police.

“Nicholas?” 

The voice was breathy and deep, like a guy who’d been running. But only Silla and his long-absent mom called Nick his full name. He felt adrenaline or panic draining the heat from his face and whispered one of the stupid rhymes he’d invented for tiny magic like drying the sweat under his pits. 

The intruder called again, and swung into the kitchen. “Nicholas, are you – oh!” 

He thrust his bloody hand out, but seconds before contact, he met the man’s gaze and knew. 

It was the flatness in the eyes that gave it away, like the spark of life was muffled. Always the same, dull, matte-black eyes in every body-snatched anything. Nick wheeled back, knocking the fridge hard enough it rattled and the door popped open. 

“It’s me, it’s Silla, Nick!” 

With large hands, a man’s hands, she lunged to catch him, the strange body’s tan face drawn in worry. But Nick had shoved away again, cussing, and left a smear of blood across the refrigerator magnets as he put the whole six feet of kitchenette between them. “Stay away,” he panted. He couldn’t get the memories of other flat eyes out of his mind. 

She’d slowly drawn out of the room, and he curled on the uneven tile floor listening through the thin walls as she backtracked all the way out of the apartment. When she returned fifteen minutes later in her own body, he was still crouched there, cut hand held over his head and dripping slow and steady into his hair.

“Hey, babe,” she murmured, trying to make him smile by using the endearment he normally reserved for moments he wanted to annoy her. It was her voice, and her delicate hands with the tiny clicks of all her magic rings as she’d touched his clammy temples and hissed at the blood in his tangled hair, put her lips to his palm and whispered healing words. He should’ve healed it himself, but he’d just been too damn scared.

Fear wasn’t the worst of it now, after months and a dozen different bodies. Now it was frustration, it was nerves. Silla liked being in these other bodies, he was totally sure. She said it was practice, she said she was only trying to find the right body to offer her brother, that she had to, she owed it to him because it was her fault his own body had died. But Nick knew the smiles, the dancing, the exhilaration caught up in her breath and laughter when she finally was back in her own little body, it all meant she was addicted. 

“I’m not laughing because it’s not funny,” he said now. 

“Trying to pee standing up is definitely funny,” she countered. 

“Jesus…” Nick couldn’t help the flood of possibilities he imagined as he stared at his girlfriend in this other guy’s body. 

Silla smiled again, softer this time, and for a split-second he saw the quirk of eyebrow he knew was hers, her expression, not that body’s. “Thinking about my hands on… this?”

And the curling amusement in her – his – voice was familiar, too. It did something to him he didn’t want to think about. Silla-things, things that turned him on. He was not prepared to analyze the inside-out, outside-in, convoluted suggestions about his own damn sexuality.

He squeezed his eyes shut. “I can’t have this conversation while you’re in – him. Whoever the hell he is.”

His girlfriend stepped closer. “I saw that, Nicholas,” she whispered. A finger scraped down his jaw. 

“Jesus,” Nick said again. “Sometimes you scare the shit out of me.”

II.

(But I don’t need a body of my own, when the world is full of them.)

The body snatcher had been following Gabby since she was a little girl. 

Animals at first, like the flat-eyed kitten everybody thought was the smartest kitten in the whole world or the dumbest, depending on if the tiny calico thing decided to listen to a command or not. A stray lab mix when Gabby was seven followed her around the family campground all three days they were there to watch the August Perseid shower. Both blue jays nesting in her back yard when she started junior high, scaring her mother because they perched on the long maple limb and stared into Gabby’’s bedroom window even at night. 

Gabby wasn’t afraid of any of it, but didn’t understand it was the same thing – the same creature – until her grandpa told her a story about guardian angels. She understood immediately: her guardian angel spied on her in the form of little innocent animals. 

She was in sixth grade when a girl with her hair plaited tight to her scalp and decorated with red beads caught her attention; the beads were the exact color as the red line in their plaid uniform skirts. The girl sat down on the plastic stool attached to the long cafeteria table and leaned a pointy elbow next to Gabby’s brown bag lunch. “Hello Gabby, I thought it was time I said something to you.”

“Hello,” Gabby said quietly, calm like when she was the seeker in a game of hide-and-seek. There was tension, but she wasn’t the one being hunted. 

The girl with the red beads smiled and stared, just like the calico kitten, just like the lab mix, just like the jays. After a moment, Gabby ate her lunch. She offered the girl a handful of potato chips, which the girl ate slowly. 

The next day Gabby waved at the girl as she waited for a box of chocolate milk, but the girl scrunched up her face like she’d never said hello, and ignored Gabby the rest of the year. 

Then there was a teacher, the eighth grade history teacher, with suspenders and a beard and a belly that hung over his pants. The older kids called him Santa to be cruel, but the younger kids heard it and usually believed it for a few days. Gabby was too old to believe, but too young to think it was funny. Santa tugged his wiry gray beard and watched her as she did one of the readings at all school Mass. She noticed the look in his eyes and smiled bigger, which made her enunciate better, which made the religion teacher seek her out for more readings in the future. 

She saw her angel everywhere as she grew older: baristas and grocery baggers, her volleyball couch, two girls on the B team, her Uncle Wallace, her neighbor across the street. Always Gabby smiled or waved, and felt better, safer.

When she was fourteen the angel appeared inside her mother and burned the dinner rolls. It was unnerving seeing that flat-eyed expression on her mother’s round, gentle face. Like her mother suddenly was a puppet, strings pulled by a stranger. For the first time, Gabby made a request: “Please not my mother again,” she said. 

Her mother pursed thin lips, smacked them in an air kiss, and said, “Promise, love.”

Everything shifted when Gabby turned sixteen. 

The angel came as a lovely boy off the Varsity soccer team, all long limbs and strong wrists, blue eyes and a smile angelic enough even without the body-visitor. Gabby caught her breath, and touched his mouth. He nibbled at her fingers and Gabby understood a new thing about her own body and the Holy Spirit. She kissed him.

His name was Harry, and the angel kept him for three months, dating Gabby, taking algebra and AP Physics exams, ditching his friends and teammates to hang out with her. It was a scandal, and her friends freaked out on her, made her promise not to get pregnant. Gabby never did anything like that with Harry, though.

It was the next one she had sex with: a thin young man at least five years older, not white and not from her school and forearms covered in scars, and that was all she determined before she never saw him again. 

She kissed girls, too, because they were her angel. The flat-eyed passion was all that mattered to her, and a mouth that knew its work. They all did, because they were all the angel. 

Gabby began to think she was the holy one, and when she graduated she followed her angel across the country. She got in her car and left, and the angel met her every time she stopped, money in hand for the next leg. Gabby saw everything she could drive to, in America, Canada, Mexico, though they stopped only as far south as Tijuana. Sometimes the shadow of a great vulture trailed her car, and she knew it was her angel soaring overhead, or she snuggled in a terrible hostel with a trio of warm rats, or slept in a posh hotel with the girl who brought room service.  

When she got home too late for starting a semester at college, she moved back into her bedroom and got a job waiting tables. Her angel came for lunch and always tipped insanely well. It made her laugh, but it made her unpopular. 

Once, in the guise of a young Latino, he grasped her wrist and told her to sit down. He wanted to flirt with her, he missed her. She did, and for the first time in her life asked what his name was.

The borrowed mouth quirked up, and he dug into his back jeans pocket for a wallet. Flipping it open, he said, “Looks like Eduardo.”

“Oh, God,” Gabby said, rolling her eyes. 

“You can call me that, too, if you like,” was his cheeky reply.

Instead she called him Beast. Like in the fairy tale, she thought, she loved this creature but did not know his true form. Or her true form, its, or zes or hirs or caers. (She’d been reading a lot of Internet thoughts on bodies and sexuality.)

She was twenty years old when the angel cornered her as she dashed down the steps of her apartment building on her way to class. He was tall, with brown eyes that should’ve been bright, and a full mouth and acne scars making an appealing mess of his jawline. “I want to see you through my own eyes, finally,” he said, and his voice charged down her spine. 

It would change everything, Gabby knew. She licked her lips, touched the scars on his jaw, and answered, “The beast I love has no eyes of his own.”

III.

(I can match the body to the occasion.)

Josephine Darly had lived a long time. Some might even say nearly forever. They’d be wrong, but Josephine wasn’t the sort to deny such accolades. 

During the twentieth century, she’d painted towns across America and several key European cities as well as a memorable stint in Sydney, Australia. 

This, just before the new century, was the first time she’d fallen in love with another woman. 

Sarah looked everything you expected of a blood witch. Red hair, pale white skin, a scatter of red freckles, square young face and angry gray eyes. She worked in one of the damp old mansions off St. Charles and took the bus to the clapboard two-room house near the river where she lived with her Irish grandmamma. Josephine saw her after a twenty-five-cent-cocktail brunch at Commander’s Palace one Sunday late in April, and read the power in the girl’s witch blood even through too-high blood alcohol level and across a cracked street.

Josephine was in New Orleans to bribe or bully Papa Just into trading a vile of her blood for some of his grandfather’s bone powder, and she’d been having a rough go of it. She’d wooed him already with brunch and planned to spend the rest of the day at the same task, possibly with a stop at the Roosevelt on their way to the Quarter, and end the night at the dawn Mass at St. Louis with the tourists. But the moment she saw Sarah, Josephine abandoned Papa Just, intent on this new prospect.

If Sarah had been a man, Josephine would’ve instantly recognized her own tendency to want to eat in bed, so to speak. But in nearly a century of slipping in and out of bodies, seducing and loving all sorts of people, those people had always been rather male. It simply did not occur to her as she absently patted Papa Just farewell and strode between slow-moving town cars toward Sarah’s departing form that when she caught up with the girl she was chasing, she didn’t want to open a vein or grind up the girl’s bones, she wanted to tear that red hair free of pins and taste the glossy pink lipstick. 

Josephine dashed along the sidewalk in her butter-yellow leather heels, old fashioned for this decade, but she kept having the things resoled. They matched her style of cinched waists and high blond bob, slips and clutch purses and small cocked hats with useless veils. Grandmother fashion to many, but on Josephine’s perfectly preserved, youthful body, more of a statement. Not to be trifled with, she called her blood red lipstick and thick black kohl. 

“Hello,” she purred at Sarah, matching pace with the girl in the sturdy, practical shoes and huge canvas purse slung gracelessly over her shoulder. 

Sarah’s stride didn’t falter at the greeting, and she merely flicked a glance at Josephine. It was the glance that did her in: Josephine was a vision. 

“Hello,” Sarah murmured, knowing she needed to get home before her gran woke up and contrived to make herself a doctor-forbidden afternoon Highball. 

“You’re beautiful,” Josephine said in her most chocolate voice, touching the girl’s mouth. 

Sarah jolted and glared with those sparking gray eyes. “Who are you?”

Josephine blinked, then giggled, covering her mouth, then laughed brighter and loud enough to ring up through the waxy magnolia leaves all around. Men never reacted so badly to her chocolate voice. That alone was enough to clue Josephine in to the desire prickling her skin. “Josephine Darly,” she said, happily, not bothered at all by this new turn in her attraction. She smiled her usual flirtatious smile. “And you are beautiful.” 

Flustered, the girl patted back her hair. “I don’t know what you want, but I don’t have it.”

“Oh, oh,” Josephine clapped her hands together in glee. “You do, beautiful witch!”

Sarah’s jaw clenched, she turned on her heel and marched toward St. Charles again. 

Josephine ducked into an empty driveway, slipped off her heels to sneak around the back of a Greek Revival house with iron balustrades and long blue shutters. Before Sarah escaped too far, Josephine crouched down between two massive elephant ear plants, staining her skirts with mud. She jabbed her finger with the key-shaped fleam she kept tucked into her bra for emergency blood-letting. A few drops smeared over her heart, and Josephine’s body lurched, then went limp as her spirit dove out, latching onto the first black crow she found. 

A flutter of feathers and tussle with leaves, and she was a-flight. Light changed, colors changed, but Josephine Darly knew too well how to body jump, and had flown in more alien bodies than this fine, loud bird. 

Thick, wet wind off the Gulf lifted her higher, and she angled herself with the crow’s own muscle memory down toward the square of scrubby green grass and marble mausoleums that was the Lafayette Cemetery across from Commander’s Palace. From there it was simple to find the gleam of the witch’s red hair. 

Josephine chased the girl home to the river, landed on the lintel of the tiny house, and cried an abrasive cry of triumph. She could find Sarah again now, in any body she wished. 

Sunday morning, she attended Sarah’s church, wearing a handsome male body, twenty-something, an artist she’d chosen because he was deliciously languid, known by his friends to be eccentric and addicted to enough substances any strange behavior would be written off. And because she could pour her own money into his accounts and pretend to be an anonymous art lover. 

Josephine excelled at living in other bodies: women, children, wolves and kittens, hungry criminals and rich wives, whatever she needed to get what she wanted. Men were awkward, she’d always thought, but safer much of the time – not because she couldn’t take very good care of herself in her own delicate body, but because as a man she didn’t have to. 

It wasn’t awkward with Sarah. Maybe that was all Josephine had ever needed to find the balance inside a male body like this: lust. Love, she whispered to herself, laughing and laughing and laughing.

She flirted, using the artist’s elegant hands, his long lashes, his thin, lovely mouth to her advantage. She rather thought she flirted like a woman, but it didn’t matter, nobody looked past the body. Certainly Sarah, with her unproven, unawakened blood magic, would not guess who it was she agreed to go out for drinks with. Who she danced with so closely their noses brushed. 

When Josephine kissed Sarah, the girl gasped into it, arched her back, and Josephine felt dizzy in a moment of complete bliss. She put large hands on Sarah’s ribs, pulled her close, and imagined slipping half her mind into Sarah’s, half her heart and spirit, until she was both, all, and nothing, too. She could do it.

Sarah pushed away, but with a smile that made Josephine’s borrowed body stiffen and groan.

This was the grandest thing: seduce this girl-witch again and again. Different bodies, maybe, or come back to the same one. Discover what appealed most. 

Love her. Use her. 

After all, Sarah’s blood and bones would be just as potent if the girl died at eighty as if she died tonight. 

IV. 

(And rule the world.)