But both of her assailants were well trained, if slower than the Rogue. The one dressed as a bum put his knee on her chest, forcing all of her air out. He grabbed one of her arms while the guy in the sweater grabbed her other.
“Going to visit your mommy?” he asked nastily.
She kicked: this was something they were not prepared for. While Chloe couldn’t reach the one crushing her ribs, the claws of her left foot shot out and neatly got sweater man dead in the stomach. He screamed as she felt his flesh gather up and tear beneath her claws. But she still couldn’t breathe, and silver stars began twinkling at the edges of her vision.
Then somebody hissed—and it wasn’t her.
Suddenly the weight was lifted off her chest. She sucked in as deeply as she could and was rewarded by a scorching pain that was so great it masked the pain from the wound on her neck. She could see again, although what was going on was mostly a blur: there seemed to be two other people, faster than the Tenth Bladers, attacking and pummeling them with an eerie silence.
Chloe sat up as best she could. They were Mai, of course, although she didn’t recognize them. Their movements and their scent were unmistakable. They were big, too—which made their silence even scarier. Homeless guy landed with a thump next to her, his eyes blank with unconsciousness. Chloe lost her temper for just a moment, finding the urge to slash his face almost overwhelming. Instead she dug her foot claws into his crotch. When he woke up, he’d have something to remember her by.
Then she collapsed back on the pavement.
“I knew she was going to be trouble,” one of her saviors sighed, walking toward Chloe. This was a woman; she was dusting off her pants. With a casual kick she stilled the “homeless” guy, who had begun to moan and twitch.
“Can’t blame her. She’s a kid,” the other one, a man, said. It might have been Chloe’s delirium, but the two looked very similar. “Besides, I haven’t had this kind of fun since August.”
The woman was scanning the night. Suddenly she dropped down, crouching with one hand for balance, the other pointing. “More coming.”
“Bring ’em on!” the other said. Then he added, “I know, I know.”
“You grab her legs—careful of the neck. It might be broken.”
“Where’s our glorious pride leader?” the man asked with heavy sarcasm. “This wouldn’t even have cost him a life. Assuming he has more than one.”
“Shhh! Keep it to yourself, Dima. The girl might still be conscious.”
She is, Chloe thought, before fainting entirely.
Thirteen
They weren’t traveling in the land of the warm sun anymore, of endless sky and sand. They were someplace colder and wetter, with incredible mountains and a very different sea, very close by. She walked through the streets of an ancient city. Stones of buildings centuries dead stuck out of the ground.
Few people paid attention to her. The markets were crowded with people from all over. One of her shadow companions sniffed the air disapprovingly, wrinkling her nose at the stink of the hordes. She smiled down at the four silent lions. “Let us find our orphans and move on from this place.”
They turned a corner and a shadow fell over the five Mai; one whined as the stink of rotten eggs became overpowering in the wet heat of the afternoon sun. …
“Chloe?”
She opened her eyes. Sergei’s face was uncomfortably close to her own, and he looked concerned. His breath stank of garlic, which was not the smell in her dream at all but still made her sick.
Chloe was lying in her own bed at the mansion. There was cloth mounded tightly against her neck, wet with melting ice. She tried to turn her head—it was possible, but the pain was searing.
“Maybe you’ll listen to me about visiting your mother next time?” he said gently, patting her on the hand. It was a little rough, the action of someone who wasn’t used to showing affection. Chloe blushed and looked down, too embarrassed by her disobedience and its result to look him in the eye.
“I know you miss her,” he continued, “but the Order wants you dead, Chloe girl. You took out one of their best—and craziest—soldiers. They knew you would try to go home at some point. Every exile does.” His white-blue eyes looked beyond her for a moment, into the distance at something else.
He really does sort of look like a lion, Chloe reflected. If his reddish-silver hair and beard were drawn back from his head—and just a little longer—it could be a mane.
“All you’re doing right now is endangering her. Give it time, let us help work things out, and we’ll reunite the two of you eventually. Okay?” He patted her on the head.
“Okay,” Chloe agreed, smiling despite herself. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be too sorry—Ellen and Dmitri had fun for the first time in a while. And neither of the criminals they took out will be causing any more trouble for a long time.” He grinned, showing a mouth of teeth as short and square as himself. “Enjoy yourself, Chloe girl! You’re a teenager who doesn’t have to go to school for a while. At your age I would have loved such a thing.”
She nodded, and he adjusted the sheets around her, tucking her in.
“Will I ever be able to go home?” she finally asked, sounding more pathetic than she meant to.
“Of course you will, Chloe,” he said fondly. “We do not mean to keep you here forever—although, of course, I’d like to.” He smiled and chucked her under the chin. His teeth were very carefully divided by the black lines separating them, Chloe noticed. It was a strange, perfect little grin.
“How is it ever going to be safe?”
“Ah. Well. Five ways,” he said. He held out five fingers and counted them down. “One: Someone finds the Rogue. This is still possible—it takes a lot to kill one of those bastards and no one actually saw him hit the water. Two, and this is far less likely, we have a true détente and convince them of your innocence. They do not really consider us human—I mean, intelligent rational beings—and almost never agree to meet, but it has happened once in a great while. Three: We make things very difficult for them; tie their hands with other methods. Like a police investigation. Or, even worse, an IRS investigation. Or an accidental ’explosion’ at one of their weapons factories.”
“Weapons factories?”
“Yes. They skirt the law themselves a lot, these so-called protectors of the innocent. Four”—he coughed to show a sense of embarrassment where there wasn’t really any—“we could threaten the family of one of the Order. I know,” he said, putting up a hand and closing his eyes as Chloe started to say something, “this is an idea alien and horrible to your young, naive, human ears. But Chloe, they don’t play by fair rules, either. Why else would they hunt an innocent teenage girl like yourself? Why would they send the Rogue after you to begin with?”
Actually, now that Chloe thought about it, why had they? She hadn’t become a threat to anyone until after she’d had to defend herself from that psycho, when the Mai had sent Alyec to teach her how to defend herself. It was a chicken-and-egg situation.
“They sent someone after you because you were an easy target,” Sergei said sadly. “You weren’t part of a pride, you weren’t part of a group who could protect you. It would have been an easy way for them to pick off a member of the Mai with no risk and few repercussions. They have done this before with other orphans like yourself—you should ask your friend Kim about it sometime. We found her hiding in an alley, living in a box in the garbage.”
Chloe could see it, although she didn’t want to. A little girl with black hair and bright green eyes, terrified, keeping to the shadows and hiding in piles of trash so the men hunting her wouldn’t find her.
“Trust me, Chloe,” Sergei said, a hard look coming into his face. “As someone who lived in a very dangerous part of Eastern Europe at a very dangerous time, survival is difficult and often unpleasant.” His finger went up to a comer of his eye and scratched there, apparently of its own accord. Chloe had never noticed it before: part of his righ
t eyebrow was especially kinked, and there was a very slight line where what looked like two different pieces of flesh had been sewn together to cover a wound.
“There was a fifth way,” Chloe whispered. “You said there were five ways it could be safe for me.”
“Ah. Yes.” Sergei snapped himself out of his thoughts and looked at her both sternly and pragmatically. “That would be if one of us was killed by them in the next few weeks. Then we would be even.” Chloe sucked in her breath.
With that, he left.
Chloe tried flexing her shoulder again. More pain, but still not so bad. Her neck wasn’t broken, and neither was her collarbone. She noticed a glass of water on the night table next to the bed and a dish with two ibuprofen, which she immediately scarfed down. She grabbed the remote and fluffed up her pillows, preparing for a good afternoon of daytime TV. Then her hand hit something—her cell phone, which she had stashed there the night before, when she went out. She pushed the power button and saw that there was a message waiting from an unrecognized number. She called her voice mail as she began switching channels, looking for Jerry Springer.
“Chloe, it’s Brian again. Listen to me—whatever you do, wherever you are, stay there for the next couple of days. The Order has blanketed the streets around your house with members looking to bring you in—one way or another. Don’t try to visit your mom or your friends. I’ll try to talk to you later.”
Chloe checked the time the message had come in—8:12. Almost an hour before she had gone to try and visit her mom. If she had left her phone on, she would have gotten the call and avoided the fight.
Chloe thought about this, and Brian, for a while, looking up at the ceiling and finding little lion images playing in the knots and whorls of the wood there. They seemed to twist and jump, dancing like lions in the wild….
Not ibuprofen, she realized, sinking into unconsciousness.
“I told her she was all fat and nasty—nobody would want her. I didn’t know there were guys like Joey who liked bleep like that.”
Currently there were four of the largest women Chloe had ever seen on the TV. One woman didn’t seem to have a neck at all, even when Chloe paused the TiVo to get a better look. Another had been to the hospital and had a fifty-pound tumor removed, without ever having realized it was there. Next to them were the men who loved them and across from them the siblings who reviled them. Now this was television.
When she had woken up, Chloe had been determined not to think about anything important or deep again for a while, but just to take advantage of being a sick little girl, recuperating in front of the TV.
Kim appeared at her door, silent as ever.
Chloe beckoned her in but held up a finger: the fat woman who had just been insulted was getting out of her chair and waddling over to try and hit her attacker.
“What’s this?” Kim asked, coming over to her bedside and looking at the TV curiously.
“Jerry Springer,” Chloe replied, shaking her head as it took four stagehands to pull the woman away from her sister.
“It seems sensationalist and distasteful,” Kim said, wrinkling her nose. Chloe started to laugh, but then paused.
An ad came on and Chloe shut it off. “What’s up?”
Even with Kim’s alien features, it was easy to tell she was disappointed by something. She sat on the edge of Chloe’s bed, gripping the covers with her foot claws for balance, and waved a manila folder of papers.
“I don’t think we are related.” She said it calmly, but Chloe could see her eyes flicker. “As far as the genealogical people have made out, you more closely resemble the Mai who fled to Turkey from Abkhazia in the nineteenth century. My family stayed in what is now Georgia.”
Chloe didn’t understand half of what she was saying. “You mean I’m Turkish, not Russian?”
Kim fixed her with a cool look. “You are Mai. Not ‘Turkish’ or anything else. There are no human nationals of any sort in your background.”
Chloe had forgotten about that. She was a completely different race. Wonderful, colorful images of herself in scarves, black kohl eyeliner, and bangles, with belly-dancing music in the background—like at the restaurant her mom used to take her to—sadly faded.
“Is this my file?” she asked.
Kim shook her head. “No, it is a sort of general file with information on places we are all most recently from. I thought you would be interested. St. Petersburg, where Alyec is from.” She passed Chloe pictures of an exotic city, with spires too long and thin to be mistaken for those of American churches. Onion domes dotted the skyline. Everything seemed to be covered in gold like a fairy-tale kingdom.
“What’s this?” Chloe pointed to one of the other photographs, of a building with a wall of large white stone blocks. A woman was walking along it, a woman with long black hair. “It looks familiar. I saw it in a dream.” She suddenly felt the crowded market street again, the shady, quiet alley with the horrible smell.
Kim looked at her strangely but turned the photograph over. “It is one of the old sulfur bath complexes in Sokhumi. This part of Abkhazia was a famous retreat with spas—the natural hot springs and mineral water there were supposed to have curative powers.”
Sulfur … This is a little too weird.
“Does sulfur smell like rotten eggs?” she asked, afraid of the answer.
“Almost identically.” Kim put the photograph down and looked Chloe in the eye. Her black velvety ears lay almost flat against her head, turned backward. Chloe couldn’t tell if she was upset or listening for footsteps in the hall. “You dreamt that, too?”
“Yeah. It was humid, and there were people, and … it was kind of confusing. Modern and ancient at the same time. And it stank. But I remember that wall.”
“Sokhumi is the city where our pride eventually settled after we left the Middle East for good. Only one of the Mai from that diaspora came back to Abkhazia—our previous pride leader. Her dream was to gather all of the scattered Mai in Eastern Europe and unite them somewhere, like the United States.” She carefully put the photograph away and closed the folder. “But she was killed in a skirmish between the Abkhazians and the Georgians.”
“There were other exiles, from all over, who rested and waited for her” Chloe murmured.
“What did you say?” Kim demanded, fixing her like a mouse with her eyes.
“In my dream I was the pride leader.”
“That’s … interesting,” Kim said slowly.
“Do you think I could be related to her?”
Do you think she could be my mother?
Kim opened the notebook again and looked at the picture of the bathhouse in Sokhumi again. “It’s possible. … But she had only one daughter that we know of, and she is dead. …” She sounded reticent, and somehow Chloe didn’t think it had anything to do with the disappointment about the two of them not being related. There was something else. …
Maybe she was jealous of Chloe possibly being the daughter of the old pride leader. Maybe it meant something, like inheritance in an aristocracy. Maybe she would take over when Sergei’s term was over. She wondered if that entailed anything besides running a real estate empire and tracking down lost and orphaned Mai.
What was it the two guards had said when they were rescuing her? Where’s our glorious Pride Leader? This wouldn’t even have cost him a life. Assuming he has more than one.
“Kim—before I went unconscious, one of the people who rescued me said something about the pride leader not risking losing ’one of his lives.’ What did she mean by that?”
“Traditionally, in the past, the leader of the Pride is also a true military leader, first into a battle or on the hunt, last to retreat—“One of her ears flicked. A moment later Chloe heard the noise, too: footsteps echoing loudly down the corridor. It sounded like Olga; she was probably coming to check up on Chloe.
Kim leaned close in, too close for a normal human. Kind of like Amy’s cat, when he would push his nose and foul-smelling kitty mo
uth into Chloe’s, smelling delicately around her face before withdrawing. “Listen to me, Chloe. Do not tell anyone about your dream or what we spoke of,” she hissed. “There are leaders, and there are leaders, Chloe King.”
Fourteen
Paul might be complacent and all best buddies with Alyec, but Amy wasn’t going to stand for it. If it were up to her stupid boyfriend, they would just sit back and do nothing until the world fell down. Which was exactly why she was skipping out of school early.
She’d given a half-assed excuse to her teacher about feeling sick and hadn’t even bothered going to the nurse. Her brother’s car was parked in the area of the lot reserved for seniors, and it had cost her an arm and a leg to borrow it: a guaranteed okay on any future favor of his choice. It’s not like he even needs it at Berkeley. It was an ancient, all-black Chevy Malibu station wagon that he called the Batmobile. The Malibu was a pretty small car for its V6, though, so when she floored it, the car tore out of the school parking lot like a bat out of hell.
Amy zoomed through the streets and parked several blocks away from Chloe’s house. She locked the car and went up to the front door, trying not to look around suspiciously, trying to make it look like she had every right to be there, pulling out Chloe’s spare key and entering the house in the middle of the day when they both should have been in school.
Mrs. King usually came home around seven, and Amy had every intention of being out of there in an hour. Maybe she’d even go back to school….
On second thought, who did she think she was kidding?
She had been planning this for several days and wore an appropriate outfit for breaking and entering (even if it was with a key): tight black jeans and a black tee, along with a black Emily sweatshirt whose hoodie had cat ears and sleeves that ended in gloves with claws. Perfect for a cat burglar. She had admired herself in the mirror for a while that morning. It was such a completely different look for her—all sleek and black. None of the crazy, bouncy, fringy, fluffy stuff she designed and wore. Her breasts stuck out a little bit; they almost looked as big as Chloe’s in this outfit. What she really needed was a pair of long black leather boots á la Emma Peel and maybe to dye her hair black, but Paul didn’t like it when she changed her hair color—he’d always liked the original shade.