Nine Lives of Chloe King

  When she awoke, she had the feeling that there had been lions in her dream again, but she couldn’t remember what had happened. There was just a vague lingering presence of a familiar warmth and coarse, honey-colored fur.

  When they came in the next morning, Chloe felt achy but good, like she had hiked a mountain or had a really good workout. A couple of the women brought the rest of the deer into the back and finished butchering it or doing whatever it was they had to do, but Chloe went straight to the kitchen for coffee and a muffin—she was starving.

  Kim was there, blowing delicately on a mug of green tea. Chloe wondered if there was anything the girl did that wasn’t healthy, pure, or proper.

  “How was the hunt?” the other girl asked politely.

  “Great … I think,” Chloe added. “I’m surprised you didn’t come along—it seems right up your alley.”

  “I’m not sure what I think about it.”

  Chloe looked at her in surprise. The girl with the cat ears, slit eyes, and claws didn’t know what to think about a hunt?

  “I have given the matter a considerable amount of thought and prayer and meditation,” the girl explained, seeing Chloe’s expression. “We are hunters, yes—but the time of needing to hunt for food is over. Should we still do this and kill? Or would the gods consider it a waste?” Kim shook her head. “I don’t have an answer yet.” And she padded silently out of the room.

  Chloe frowned, more confused than ever.

  Sixteen

  Amy and Paul were at his house, actually studying together for once. Amy sat on his tiny twin bed, Paul on the floor next to her, her legs often wrapped around his shoulders. Sometimes he would lean over to kiss her calf … and another half hour would disappear before they got back to work. But on the whole they were fairly productive. The room was quiet, much quieter than in Amy’s household, and Mrs. Chun came up occasionally with a plate of cookies and to “make sure they weren’t doing anything”—although she was obviously kind of hoping they were. Compared to his cousins, Paul was an extremely well-groomed, hygienic, cool dresser … and Mrs. Chun was a fanatic devotee of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. She’d come to her own conclusions about her son, concerned that the divorce was somehow screwing him up.

  Everything was still very neat in Paul’s house but light: things were missing that Amy couldn’t quite put her finger on, some essential furniture or spirit seemed to be gone. The Chuns were polite and amicable when it came to dividing up their possessions, but the whole place was a testament to their separation. Depressing.

  Paul’s iMac made some backward-sounding music noise, recognizable only to Amy as a tune by Siouxsie and the Banshees. “Mail for me!” she cried, leaping up and almost taking Paul’s head off as her feet hit the ground.

  “Who is this? You’ve been checking your mail all evening. You got another boyfriend or something?” Paul asked, straightening his shirt and looking back at his book. Amy clambered onto the stool in front of the two-by-three-foot wood board that passed for his desk, kept immaculately clear of the hundreds of books, records, and CDs that crowded the rest of the room. She hit enter twice: her account had no password on his computer; she had no secrets.

  Her eyes widened when she saw the address of the sender.

  “It’s from Brian.” She took her purple pen and wound it through her hair, sticking it down the middle of the knot to keep it all up off the back of her neck.

  “Brian who?” Paul asked, not really interested. Then he looked up, realizing. “Brian who?”

  “Chloe’s Brian.”

  He couldn’t see her face, but Amy flinched, waiting for the inevitable.

  “Why is he e-mailing you?” He put his book down and got up to stand behind her and read over her shoulder.

  Amy, you and Paul need to STAY OUT OF THIS. You’re safer not knowing any more than you already do. Your lives could be endangered.

  I don’t know where Chloe is, but I’ve had word from her that she’s safe.

  Brian

  P.S. Don’t talk to Alyec about this anymore either.

  “Where did you get his e-mail address?” Paul asked, wanting to solve that mystery before he tackled any of the other number of issues this missive brought up.

  Amy sighed. “I cut out of school early on Wednesday and went over to Chloe’s house. I broke into her computer. I also e-mailed him from there.”

  “You did what? Why?”

  “Because Alyec won’t talk, Chloe’s still missing, and we still don’t know anything!” she said, beginning to feel less defensive and more pissed off. Her blue eyes flashed and she stood, putting her hands on her hips. It would have been a far more effective gesture if the pen hadn’t chosen that moment to pop out of her hair and fall to the ground.

  “Besides that message from Chloe herself, two people have already told us she’s safe—two people close to her. What more do you want?” Paul said, his voice also rising.

  “What do you mean, ’two’?” Amy asked, frowning.

  Already caught, Paul didn’t have time to retreat into his blank look.

  “What do you mean, two?” Amy repeated, pushing her face closer into his. “Brian and who?”

  “I talked to Alyec,” he finally admitted, “after you totally accused him of everything. I talked to him calmly and rationally, and he told me that she was fine, and he would tell her that we were worried about her.”

  “Oh, so that’s how it is?” Amy shrieked. “You approach Alyec all man-to-man like after your hysterical girlfriend screws everything up and he just tells you everything?”

  “It worked, didn’t it?”

  “Assuming he’s even telling the truth. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about your little breaking-and-entering routine?”

  They both fell silent, staring each other angrily in the eyes. Then they both looked away. The answer to both the questions was the same: they were afraid the other was going to disapprove and freak out over it.

  Which was exactly what had happened.

  Then Paul laughed. “I can’t believe you actually broke into the Kings’ house.”

  “I know where the key is,” Amy admitted sheepishly, also smiling.

  They were quiet again, too full of their own thoughts to say anything, for the second time that evening—and for the millionth time that week.

  “When I was there? At Chloe’s?” Amy began, quietly and more calmly. “It was weird—like it hadn’t been lived in for a while. Nothing was messy, but it just had this stale feeling. A little dusty or something.” She screwed up her eyes, trying to think about the last time she had been there, before they’d walked across the bridge, the last time they’d seen Chloe. “I don’t think the glasses near the sink were washed,” she hazarded, “but I’m not sure.”

  “Too bad they have voice mail,” Paul said with a wry smile. “You could have seen if the answering machine light was blinking out of control with all the calls we left her. I don’t suppose you have their password for that, do you?”

  “No,” she pouted. “If I did, there are a lot of messages I left over the years that I would have erased an hour later, when I calmed down.”

  Paul smiled and ran his hand up through her hair at the base of her neck. Amy closed her eyes and pushed her head back into his hand.

  “Maybe it’s time we called Mrs. King at work,” he suggested quietly, picking up the phone.

  Amy looked at him in surprise, then at her watch. “It’s ten after five—she’ll definitely be there.”

  He dialed and Amy pressed her head to the other side of the phone.

  “Greenston and Associates,” the receptionist said in a deep, interested, expensive-receptionist voice.

  “Hello, can I speak with Anna King, please?” Paul spoke in an even voice. His tone might have been youthful, but the sound was polite and professional, something Amy never could have accomplished.

  “No, I’m sorry, she’s away on vacation this week. Can
I help you or direct you to another lawyer?”

  Amy and Paul looked at each other.

  “Uh …” Paul cleared his throat. “Where did she go?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t divulge that kind of personal information,” the receptionist said regretfully. “I hope it’s someplace warm.”

  “When will she be back?”

  “She has a lot of vacation time saved up, so I’m not exactly sure precisely which day—would you like her voice mail? She often checks it when she’s away.”

  “Uh, thanks anyway. It’s nothing urgent. I’ll call back in a couple of weeks.”

  “Thanks for calling.”

  He slowly hung up the phone. Both of them stared at it.

  “Now can we do something?” Amy finally demanded.

  Seventeen

  This was a different sort of dream, restless and real. It was daylight and silent; Chloe’s feet made no sounds in the harsh grass beneath her feet. The broad blades cut into her soles, but it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was the hunt. She saw her quarry on a rolling hill below her, a familiar doe who paused to watch a plane overhead. There was something wrong with that, but through her thickened mind Chloe couldn’t figure it out.

  With two powerful leaps she flew over yards of scrub, landing in the middle of the perfect road that separated her from the kill. The pavement was velvet black with solid yellow lines and seemed to focus all of the sun’s heat on her. She prepared to leap again.

  The deer turned toward her, as if it had known she was there all along.

  “Chloe,” it said, in an achingly familiar voice.

  Chloe froze and screamed, but no sound came out.

  * * *

  She sat up suddenly in her bed—no, the couch. It was the middle of the night—no, she checked her clock and it was only seven thirty. Another nap, she realized. Chloe had drifted off to sleep again while she tried to plow through The History of the Mai It was Bible thick and combined all of the confusing names of a Russian novel and the deadly dullness of a badly translated history text. She fell asleep fairly easily these days; if she was full, warm, and not immediately occupied, it seemed like sleep was the inevitable next step.

  Chloe rubbed her temples with her knuckles. The doe in her dream had spoken with her mother’s voice.

  It was the scariest nightmare Chloe had ever had.

  Just a few weeks ago she’d been fighting with her mom, making up, going to work, and hanging out with her friends. And now she was … not. She fingered the soft, richly colored velvet spread she had slept on. She squinched one eye shut, noticing how she could suddenly see all of the individual furry threads in different shades of ruby, like through a magnifying glass. Then they turned darker and matted down, sucked up into the weave of the fabric, as her tear was slowly absorbed by it.

  She sat up again.

  “I have to get out of here,” she said aloud. “I want…” She couldn’t quite figure out what she wanted. She ran a hand through her hair. A haircut? Some new vintage clothes? She leapt up and ran out of the room, suddenly terrified by the silence.

  Out in the hall she slowed herself down, embarrassed by her behavior. Then she pulled her cell phone out of her back pocket and turned it on. Technically she didn’t need to use it for this phone call—no one cared; in fact, they probably encouraged her speaking to Alyec. Only an eighth of a battery left and she had to talk to him now.

  “’Alloo?” he asked, accented, as if he expected someone Russian to call.

  “I need to go out,” she said without preamble.

  “Chloe!” She could hear the happy boyish grin on his face. Simple, just glad that she had called. “Didn’t you just go out on a hunt?”

  “I don’t want …,” she growled, shaking her hands in frustration. If she couldn’t make Alyec understand, she was doomed. “I just want to go out and do something normal. Fun. You know? Fun? Like a date?”

  “I don’t think Sergei will let you out alone with me. I’m a pretty strong boy, you know, but not a trained bodyguard.”

  “Okay, okay.” Chloe thought furiously. “We’ll make it a group date. He can’t object to that, can he? A bunch of us—whatever goons he wants to send along with us— we’ll all go out. To a movie together. How about that?”

  She fell back against the wall and slid down until she was sitting on the floor. “I just want to go out,” she said miserably. “I want to eat popcorn.” Not wild deer. “I want to drink a blue slushy, watch stupid previews, and use a crappy public bathroom with ugly tiles and mirrors that show all my zits.”

  There was a long pause at the other end. She waited for Alyec to ask about that last thing—she wasn’t sure why she had said it but remembered when she and Amy used to go in before and after a movie and make faces and put on lip gloss. Amy would complain about the size of her nose, wrinkling it, and Chloe would bitch about getting breasts too early.

  He didn’t let her down.

  “I’ll see what I can do. But your skin is perfect, Chloe. You have no zits.”

  Sergei said he couldn’t refuse a thing to his adoptive daughter, which was how Chloe, Igor, Alyec, Valerie, a couple of the kizekh—the same ones from the other night—and Chloe wound up sitting around the lounge with the entertainment sections of different newspapers.

  And Chloe was reminded how, no matter what your race was, whether you were human or Mai, trying to get more than three people in a group to decide on a movie was a royal pain in the ass.

  “I would like to see The Russian Ark,” Valerie said. “It’s still playing at a couple of art houses.”

  The two guards nodded in approval.

  “Kiss ass,” Chloe muttered.

  “Well, okay,” Valerie admitted gamely. “I would rather see the new Hugh Grant movie.”

  “Is Julia Roberts in it?”

  “No, but Reese Witherspoon plays his niece. …”

  “No, thank you,” Alyec said, sticking his tongue out in disgust.

  “How about Hills of the Dead?” Igor asked.

  “Yeah!” Alyec agreed, leaping, Mai-like, onto the back of Igor’s chair and looking over his shoulder.

  “Absolutely not,” Valerie said, sticking out her jaw— a lot like Amy. “Horror movies freak me out.”

  “That’s the point, dumbass,” Alyec said. “I hear Raymond Salucci did the score,” he added to Igor, who nodded excitedly.

  “It’s gonna suck,” Chloe said hesitantly. Honestly, she didn’t mind—but Valerie did look really upset.

  “How about The Return of the King?” the other girl suggested, offering a compromise.

  “I’ve seen it four times already,” one of the guards replied, shaking his head. Chloe shot the scarred older man a look. He just shrugged. Although she was almost positive that he was one of the ones from the night she’d been ambushed by the Tenth Blade, the other kizekh, the woman, had called him “Dima,” but tonight he had introduced himself as “Dmitri,” and she was pretty sure that was the name Sergei had used, too. She didn’t know what the woman’s name was. Living here is worse than being in a Russian novel.

  Chloe scanned the newspaper, hope dwindling. She didn’t really give a rat’s ass what they saw—as long as she was out, at a movie, with crowds of normal people around her. Well, she thought as she eyed the two guards, already standing protectively behind her, somewhat farther around me. The guards had their arms crossed like storm troopers.

  “Hey!” She suddenly had an idea and flipped through the newspaper, looking for the right ad. “The Red Vic always shows Star Wars at midnight on the weekends.”

  “I thought it was Rocky Horror,” Igor said.

  “Theater one. Theater two always shows Star Wars.” She finally found the ad, the sort of cheap, tiny five-line text-only ad that gave away the theater’s independent nature. “Yep. Midnight tonight.”

  “Fine with me,” Alyec said, still balancing on the back of Igor’s chair.

  “Okay,” Valerie agreed.
r />   “Absolutely!” Igor grinned, big, thick white teeth showing for the first time since … well, since Chloe had met the serious young man. Even the two kizekh nodded. Who, after all, could say no to Star Wars?

  “Let’s get ready and be back here in an hour,” Igor said, looking at his watch. “An hour,” he added, giving Alyec a look.

  “That still gives me time to kick your ass in Soul Calibur,” Alyec said with a sweet smile. Valerie rolled her eyes and gave Chloe a look. Chloe smiled back, sympathizing. But she felt pretty sure that she could kick Igor’s ass at it, too.

  “You’re on,” Igor agreed, suddenly leaping up so that his chair tipped backward because of Alyec’s weight, sending the other boy flying. But he did a neat little flip in the air and landed on his toes and one hand—somehow reminding Chloe of Nightcrawler in X-Men United. Who needs movies when you are a mutant?

  She went back to her room to brush her hair and grab her jacket. The only makeup Chloe had with her was cherry-tinted lip gloss. She put it on as thickly as she could and mourned the fading of her healthy skin to a pasty paleness from being inside for so long. She grabbed her cheeks and pinched them hard, remembering something out of Gone with the Wind or some other old movie. It gave her a little color; she hoped it would last.

  Kim was padding silently upstairs as Chloe headed back to the lounge, reading a book she held before her with the deference of an ancient monk reading his hours. The brown tunic-length sweater with bell sleeves that she wore did nothing to detract from the image.

  “Hey,” Chloe called, catching up to her. “Want to go to a movie? A bunch of us are going.”

  Kim looked at her as if it was the strangest thing she had ever been asked.

  “Thank you,” she said slowly, “but I have some reading to do. …”