Nine Lives of Chloe King

  “Okay, chill,” Chloe said, getting angry. She didn’t even feel like pointing out how she only had one “human” parent. Was Kim acting all pissy because she’d never had any real family at all and was jealous of her? “I just want to know, all right? Who gave birth to me?”

  “I will let you know as soon as Olga’s people have found something,” Kim said, opening her book again. The conversation was officially over.

  Chloe left, still confused by the other girl’s seeming animosity. Maybe it wasn’t jealousy—maybe Kim, the one friend she had actually made since coming here, was now keeping her distance because of the danger surrounding Chloe. The thought only fueled Chloe to get out of Firebird. Now.

  On the roof of the Sony Metreon, lying on her back and looking up at the sky, Chloe felt freer than she had in months. Thick clumps of gray clouds sped across the heavens like dumplings until they massed into a heavy blanket on the far eastern horizon. As they passed over the downtown area, they glowed orange from below, only regaining more natural shadows and sky colors as they headed out over the bay away from streetlights, neon signs, and other illuminating pollution.

  She thought about how easy it would be just to run from rooftop to rooftop, never returning to the Mai, never returning to her school, and never returning home. Just living in the night. Not a street person … a skyline person, like Batman without his cave or his mansion. She could probably survive with her Mai abilities—heck, she knew how to run down a deer now. How hard would it be to steal something from a convenience store?

  A lone figure came walking across the roof toward her. She didn’t move; she could tell by his walk, sounds, and smells that it was Brian. He almost tripped over her, she was so black and still, blending in with the harsh shadows of the buildings.

  He was perfect, like a vampire, his dark hair and eyes barely distinguishable against the night sky. The wind picked up and played with his hair a little, and he turned his head to look out at San Francisco. Chloe got a perfect view of his profile, from shadowed brow to bitten lips. A scarf waved behind him like the tattered cape of a worn-out superhero.

  He lay down next to her, also looking up at the sky.

  “Beautiful night,” he observed. “Feels like a storm is coming.”

  “I want to run into it,” Chloe said. “I want to run away.”

  Brian didn’t say anything.

  “I have everything I ever wanted. A father figure. A rich father figure,” she added with a chuckle. “A family. Being told, once and for all, that I really am special”

  “I wish I was special,” Brian said with a smile, quoting Radiohead. “You’re so fucking special.”

  Chloe grinned sadly and sat up. She looked back down at him. The scarf that framed his head was soft chocolate brown and cashmere, knitted with intricate little cream diamonds in the pattern.

  “You made this, didn’t you?” she said, feeling the unbelievably downy ends and thinking about what had first brought them together, his funny homemade knit hat with the kitty cat ears.

  “Yep. Had a lot of recent angst I needed to get out.” He smiled ruefully. “You can always tell how upset I am by how crazy intricate the patterns are.”

  “You haven’t … seen my mom, have you?” Chloe asked wistfully.

  “No. My movements are kind of circumscribed these days. I got into a load of trouble after the whole bridge incident.”

  “Oh.” She didn’t say she was sorry. Chloe wasn’t sure exactly what she did feel. An overwhelming sadness. A sense of loss or of having too much. “The Pride … I think it’s like a cult.”

  There. She’d said it.

  “Welcome to my world.” Brian sighed, also sitting up. “You never hear the term used around the house, but there really is no line between ’cult’ and certain ’secret orders’.”

  “Hey, you’ve got freckles,” Chloe suddenly noticed, reaching over to touch his cheek. They were brown and added a lightheartedness to his features that wasn’t normally there, without making him look too cute.

  “I’ve been outside during the day a lot more recently. Since being, uh, dropped from your case. It’s been kind of nice. I’ve been shadowing your friends some, making sure that they’re okay, but it doesn’t seem like either side is interested in them.” He took her hand. “Thanks for trusting me, Chloe. For meeting me here. It means a lot to me.”

  “I’m beginning to think that no one’s innocent of anything,” Chloe answered with a lopsided smile. “But at least I think I know where you stand.”

  They were quiet for a moment. He didn’t let go of her hand. She cuddled into him and looked up at the sky again. She thought about their first real date, when they’d gone to the zoo, and she’d bought him a stuffed monkey, and they’d talked about all sorts of important things.

  “How did your mother die?” she asked softly.

  Brian squeezed her hand and then dropped it. He played with some pebbles on the roof before answering. “My father’s family has been in the Order since … well, since it was documented. All the way back to the Mayflower and England. Before that, actually. One time we were barons or princes or something in Italy. Royalty.” Chloe could tell that he was being modest and knew exactly what they were and wasn’t saying. “Italy … Christendom … knights … the Crusades … I don’t want to bore you with a history lesson.

  “My mother’s family comes from Klamath Falls, Oregon,” he said with a smile. “My grandparents own a berry orchard.

  “I guess like with any secret club, there are those who marry and don’t tell their husbands and wives about it and those who marry and do tell their husbands and wives about it. But my father went beyond all that. He encouraged my mom to become a part of it with him.

  “I don’t think she really wanted to, but that may be my own subjective memory of it. I don’t remember her getting involved much when I was little; I do remember her disappearing off with Dad later on, for long meetings and trips away, and practicing in the weapons room.”

  He threw a pebble down and stared at his empty hand. “She was killed on a mission. When I was twelve. They were raiding a Mai hideout in LA. She was shot in the head. Her face … It was a closed-casket funeral.”

  Chloe sucked in her breath. It explained a lot about Brian.

  “One of … ” What did she say? Us? The Mai? Them? “She was killed by a Mai?”

  Brian laughed angrily. “That’s what I thought for years. You’ve been living with them for a while now, Chloe. Have you ever seen someone with a weapon?”

  She thought about the kizekh Ellen and Dmitri. She couldn’t really remember what they carried.

  “The Mai don’t use guns,” Brian hissed. “They almost never use any weapon with a blade, even. I didn’t realize this; I mean I knew it, but I didn’t put two and two together until a couple of years ago. My father let me believe it for years. … I finally found out the truth. She was killed by a random gang kid. He saw her gun, thought she was undercover or something, and let her have it.”

  Chloe shuddered. There were no clouds above at that moment, just a hazy sky with a few brave stars cutting through like diamond-tipped blades.

  “She was killed for a cause she didn’t even really believe in,” Brian finished. “By someone who wasn’t even involved.”

  Chloe struggled, looking for something to say. “Why did your father want her to join so much?”

  “Because he’s the head of the Order, Chloe.”

  A thousand things made sense now. Why Brian hated his dad. Why Brian, though he questioned and didn’t approve of things the Order did, was still in it. He had been raised in the Order! It was all he had known his entire life. … Trying to leave it would be like Chloe leaving her mom and her friends and living an entirely new life, with new ideas and rules and people.

  Yep. Exactly.

  Chloe laughed quietly, a little crazily. Brian looked up at her, alarmed.

  “My ‘adoptive’ father is the head of the Pride.”

&nbs
p; Brian blinked at her for a moment, then laughed himself.

  “Great. Just perfect,” he said. He put his arm around her and hugged her close to his side, a comforting gesture.

  “Did you mean it before? On the phone?” Chloe asked softly. “Did you really mean you …?”

  “Yes.” Brian closed his eyes, frowning. “I love you, Chloe.” It was obviously hard for him to say, for a million different reasons. “Absolutely.”

  No one had ever said it to her before. Not outside of jokes, or out of friendship, or stupid grade school crushes. Not even Alyec; there was always humor around the word when he used it, like “love of my life”; inflated, expressive, hyperbolic, and not really serious at all.

  It made her giddy.

  But how did she feel?

  She didn’t want to think about it right then. It might spoil the moment.

  “But we can’t—”

  “Your lips are poison, Chloe,” he said with a smile, knowing exactly how dramatic it sounded. “Your tears, your tongue, your saliva, your sweat … they would all kill me with extended contact.”

  Chloe leaned back, putting her head on his shoulder and his arms around her waist. Surely that was safe.

  “We should go soon,” he whispered in her ear, not quite touching it. She shivered at the feeling. “If we want to meet your friends on time.”

  “’We’?”

  “I’m not leaving you alone until you’re by yourself on the way home again. Your friends … They mean well, but they leave a trail as wide as the Grand Canyon.” Chloe smiled, thinking of Amy and Paul trying to be stealthy. “Amy even found my e-mail address somehow. I told her to stay away, that it was all dangerous for them.”

  “She won’t listen,” Chloe said dreamily, pushing herself up against him more. She kissed his shoulder. “Let’s just stay another minute or two?” she pleaded. “It’s such a pretty night out. This is … perfect.”

  Brian opened his mouth to say something: that there were a thousand reasons why this wasn’t perfect, starting with the fact that she was being hunted and ending with the fact that their relationship was ultimately doomed. But he swallowed whatever he was about to say.

  “All right,” he said, holding her more tightly. When she shivered, he took the scarf from around his neck and wrapped it around hers.

  Chloe smiled and closed her eyes, but a single tear leaked out down her cheek.

  She was supposed to meet Amy and Paul in the street behind Café Eland, private but close enough to the public where there couldn’t be an attack. Brian kept assuring Chloe that the Order of the Tenth Blade would never hurt a human, that they took oaths to protect them, but Chloe only knew one thing: These days, wherever she went, trouble followed.

  Brian shadowed her silently. She only heard or saw evidence of his presence once or twice along the way: a scuffed pebble in an alley, a shadow above. He was almost as adept at hiding as the Mai, and Chloe had the sneaking suspicion that the few times she thought she detected him, he was letting her.

  She quickly checked out the coffee shop: 10:05, the back door was just swinging shut. In the summer the café put a couple of chairs out on the delivery dock in the back for its regular customers who knew they were there. Chloe scaled the fire escape of a building nearby and looked down.

  Amy and Paul were there, Amy underdressed for the weather as always, stomping her feet, with her arms wrapped around some gigantic pink puffy coat that looked like it should be warm but obviously wasn’t. Paul was looking around, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, nervously tapping ashes onto the pavement below.

  Something pulled inside Chloe, seeing her two friends from above. It was like in a book: she was apart, beyond them, not part of their story and lives. Before she could think any more along those lines, she dropped down neatly out of the sky in front of them.

  “Holy shit,” Paul said. Chloe was gratified to see that he was actually capable of losing his cool: half of his hot chocolate went flying.

  “Chloe!” Amy shrieked. Both Paul and Chloe gave her looks. “I mean, Chloe!” she whispered, then threw her arms around her friend.

  “Hey,” Chloe said weakly, the air being pushed out of her. Paul ruffled her hair.

  “What the hell, King,” he said, his voice thick with barely contained emotion. “Where have you been?”

  “And what are you wearing?” Amy asked, looking at the expensive jeans and long-sleeved black tee with Paris in gold grommets across it, the mismatched but beautiful scarf.

  “Someone else’s stuff.” Chloe hopped back up on the rail that cordoned off the delivery area. The move was as smooth and graceful and impossible as when she’d landed in front of them.

  “Uh,” Paul said, clearing his throat, not sure what else to say.

  “It’s a long story. I only have a few minutes. Anybody get me a coffee?”

  Amy managed to pull a venti out of one of the pockets in her pink coat; it hadn’t spilled at all. Chloe took it, slipped down from the rail, and slugged back several swallows gratefully. “Russians,” she began, “like really sweet and disgusting drinks.”

  Then Chloe took a deep breath. There really was no simple way to say it.

  “Okay. Here goes. My people, the Mai, are actually an ancient race of cat warriors. The Order of the Tenth Blade is a Knights-Templar-style organization that has been trying to wipe them out for the last five thousand years or so.”

  Amy and Paul just looked at her.

  “There is no Russian Mafia,” Chloe went on. “At least, not in this case. It’s a race war.”

  “Okay …,” Amy said carefully, trying not to look around her to see if other people heard.

  “I believe you,” Paul said in a tone that meant exactly the opposite.

  Chloe knew her friends well enough to be pretty sure that they were trying to figure out the fastest, quietest way to get her to the psych ward at a hospital.

  Chloe sighed and held up her hand.

  “Okay, does this convince you?”

  With a whisper-soft sslting noise, she extended her claws.

  “Motherfuck,” Amy said, eyes widening like those of an anime character.

  Paul grabbed Chloe’s hand and looked closely at the base of her claws, feeling around the tips of her fingers for prosthetics or a glove or something.

  “I have foot claws, too,” Chloe said casually, trying not to laugh at their reactions. “And I think my eyes go all slitty—like diamonds—when I’m in the dark. I can see at night, you know.”

  “I don’t believe …,” Paul said, not dropping her hand.

  “Believe,” Chloe suggested sweetly. She pulled away from him and leapt straight up so that she landed standing on the rail. Then she bent over and stood on her hands, using her claws to clasp the metal. She did a couple of backflips.

  “Okay, the über-nails thing I could question,” Amy finally said. “But the Chloe King I know could barely touch her toes.”

  “This is completely fucked up,” Paul muttered with grudging admiration. “You’re just like Wolverine. It’s so unfair. I read comic books and you get the superpowers.”

  Chloe sat down, took another slug of coffee, and told them everything. Starting from the personal: the night she beat up the mugger to the night Alyec took her to the Mai, with extra details on what happened after her friends left. “I knew we shouldn’t have abandoned you,” Amy said, hands on her hips. Then Chloe moved on to the historic and impersonal: as much as she knew about the Order of the Tenth Blade and the Mai and the history of the Mai (with many mental apologies to the book of the same name she’d never finished).

  And she finally told the truth—all of the truths— about Alyec and Brian.

  “I wish I had claws,” Amy said wistfully, running her fingers over them. “It’s like … your own personal defense system. You could go anywhere by yourself at night and not have to worry about rapists or muggers or anything.”

  “No,” Chloe agreed, “only an entire org
anization whose sole purpose is to wipe out people like me.”

  “That’s why they … your Mai … won’t let you out to see us?”

  “Yeah, I tried to sneak out to see my mom a couple of weeks ago and was completely ambushed. I would have died if some of the kizekh hadn’t been trailing me.” Of course, now that she thought about it, she remembered that the man in the sweater had had handcuffs, not a garrote or daggers like the Rogue. Still, his intentions were obviously not good.

  “So why don’t they just send you out with a group of them in the open?” Paul asked suspiciously.

  “They have to keep a low profile.”

  “Yeah? Or do they just want to cut you off from your past life? With your human friends and family?”

  “They just want to keep me safe,” Chloe said uncertainly. The words that came out of her friends’ mouths were suspiciously similar to the ideas that had been forming in the back of her own head, in the murky area where the word cult had first caught her attention.

  “It sounds like it all kind of sucks.” Amy sighed. “But I still want claws. Was this the reason you wanted a manicure that day?”

  “Sort of.”

  She told them about Xavier. How the night she’d fallen from the tower, she’d hooked up with a random guy and as a result, he’d almost died from where she’d clawed him on the back in the heat of passion. For some reason, it was far more difficult to talk about this to her two best friends than anything else. It was just sort of embarrassing. “So we can’t, like, have sex or do anything with normal humans, ’cause it kills them.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Paul said, thinking about it. “I’m sure you must have kissed someone, like in grade school, at a party, or as a joke or something.”

  Chloe shrugged. “It has to do with the spit itself, I guess. A peck on the cheek doesn’t do anything. It’s more like tongue to tongue. It just started around when, well”—Chloe shot an apologetic look at Paul—“I finally got my period. It’s all about puberty, I guess.”