Nine Lives of Chloe King

  Chloe was just a normal high-school girl. Well, not quite normal. She was on the edge of the social crowds but never resentful of them. She had an amazing attitude toward work—Brian had seldom seen someone her age so committed to a crappy job. At least half the time Chloe showed up early at Pateena’s and often stayed late to help the manager close up, without complaining or demanding overtime.

  The Tenth Blade ordered him to get closer, to get a better reading on her and how close she was to discovering her background. He did as he was told.

  He’d arranged their first “accidental” meeting at Pateena, the place where she worked. Liking her instantly was unavoidable: Chloe was funny, passionate, gorgeous, and had a spark of something else Brian couldn’t put his finger on. Energy, verve, something that made him want to go everywhere with her, do whatever she was doing, not be left out in case he missed something great.

  But he’d never counted on her liking him back.

  Or having to decide how much to tell her. Or having to choose between betraying her or his father and the way he had been brought up, all the people he had known since he was a kid, the way of life he had always lived. In the end, he’d made a half-assed decision to come to her rescue at the bridge when she was fighting the Rogue without telling her anything beforehand. Not that she’d really needed his help.

  And he’d screwed it all up again anyway. While there were Tenth Bladers waiting in the Marin Headlands for her to go running by, he hadn’t really had to throw the shuriken so hard into Alyec’s leg to stop them from going that way.

  He knew that Alyec really wasn’t the cause of the trouble—that one way or another Chloe would have realized she was different and, even worse, if she’d done it alone, the Order of the Tenth Blade would have simply killed her.

  But the other boy could kiss her.

  While Brian was forced to walk a strange tightrope with Chloe between friendship and something more, Alyec had no such difficulties. He was free to pursue any level of relationship with her, without having to worry about dying from it.

  Brian was on the third floor, in a small complex of secret rooms where the real library was and where he was pretty certain there were more secret rooms, ones he didn’t know about. He did a few quick calculations in his head and noticed how the decorative architecture was confusing, with excessive paneling and wainscoting, bookshelves set up in mazelike arrangements, lots of extra crown molding, cornices, and other random decorations.

  A flash of something on the floor caught his eye. Brian bent over and picked up what could have been a gum wrapper. It was actually a silver earring. It looked expensive, patterned, and faux ethnic—and far too modern for anything Edna Hilshire would wear.

  Brian quickly thought about all the other female members of the San Francisco chapter. Only two of them had access to this room besides Edna. Sarah-Ann never wore jewelry, except for a Sodalitas Gladii Decimi pendant, and Tyler always had a pair of simple diamond or pearl studs.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Of course. Of course Dickless would see me come in and follow me here. He was probably monitoring the security cameras.

  Brian didn’t turn around immediately, pretending to continue looking for a book.

  The excuse he’d originally been going to use was that he had lost a knitting needle somewhere—his hobby amused some chapter members and annoyed some others, who thought it was unbecoming and housewifeish for a member of the Order of the Tenth Blade. Like flash camouflage, his answer would probably amuse or annoy an interloper, completely disarming any suspicion.

  But Richard had a real grudge against him and still thought that the two were competing for Whit’s affection and eventual leadership of the Order.

  “Richard,” Brian said formally, only turning around after he pretended to be done with whatever he was doing. “How are things going for you?”

  “What are you doing here?” Richard repeated. His eyes were black and intense, and his hair was black and intense, too. He sneered so much, it looked like he was constantly trying to stop a runny nose.

  He was also smaller than Brian, which suited Brian just fine. Brian walked up to him as close as possible without making it an actual insult, looming over him.

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but I am experiencing a crisis of faith,” Brian said, with just a touch of excitement in his voice to make it seem more real. “I wanted to read through the Sidereal Codex again and think about the vows.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a little late for that?” Richard demanded, retaining his sneer but obviously accepting the excuse.

  “Remind me to tell the others that you’re the go-to guy for spiritual support,” Brian said, rolling his eyes and walking away.

  “You can’t just leave the Order,” the other boy spat after him in a final attempt at ruffling his feathers. “Nobody just ’leaves the Order.’ It’s for life.”

  “Whatever,” Brian called back.

  “Even your father knows that, Brian. He understands the rules and lives by them. He’ll do what’s right. For all of us,” he added.

  Brian kept walking, but the smile he could hear in Richard’s voice left him feeling cold.

  Twenty-four

  “Get anything yet?” Alyec needled.

  “It would be a lot easier to ’get’ a scent if you weren’t wearing so much cheap cologne,” Kim growled.

  “It’s not cheap! It’s Eternity, by Calvin Klein!”

  Chloe winced, fingering one of her mom’s rings that lay next to the sink. The whole thing would have been funny if her mom’s life wasn’t at stake. Alyec seemed to rub all of Chloe’s female friends the wrong way, not just Amy.

  The three had escaped the mansion with little attempt at covering up their trail; with Kim’s superior hearing and smell, they’d managed to eventually evade the two kizekh who had followed them. Alyec had crowed in triumph, but Chloe wasn’t so sure it really had been just that easy; perhaps Sergei thought it was safe enough for her with Alyec and Kim.

  Closer to Chloe’s house Kim had detected two seemingly random people who, on closer inspection, were making fairly regular circuits of the area around the house. The three Mai simply waited until there was a break and dashed in.

  “This is where you live?” Kim asked. Normally the girl was immediately down to business, but she seemed genuinely interested in Chloe’s life before the Mai. She moved her head back and forth, taking in everything in the living room and kitchen, eyes wide at the coffeemaker, the little TV on the counter, the garbage cans, the books on the coffee table….

  “Yeah. Pretty sweet, huh?” Alyec threw himself down on the couch, making it clear that he had been there first and was much more familiar with the territory.

  “This is where I found the … uh, ’clue.’” Chloe opened the fridge and showed her the hummus. Kim came forward to smell it, then buried her nose in her hand.

  That had been fifteen minutes ago.

  While Alyec made the occasional derisive comment and Chloe looked around for other, obvious out-of-place things that only she would be able to notice, Kim moved around the rooms, sometimes upright, sometimes on all fours, trying to catch a scent. She spent an inordinate amount of time with her nose close to, but not touching, objects, sniffing them—and Chloe couldn’t quite watch. It was too inhuman.

  “Here,” Chloe said, slipping in between Kim and Alyec, who were glaring at each other. I’m glad I have such great, supportive, helpful friends, Chloe made herself think. But maybe I should have brought only one of them. She reached into a cabinet over the sink and pulled out a full bag of gourmet coffee beans—another sign her mother hadn’t been there in a while. Normally she would have been through a “tasting”-size bag like that in about a week. She broke open the seal and held it under Kim’s nose.

  “What’s this for?” Kim said doubtfully.

  “They have little dishes of coffee beans out in fancy perfume stores and things like that,” Chloe said, shruggi
ng. “To clear your head of all the previous scents. I thought maybe you could use it for the same thing.”

  Kim looked at her without blinking but took a deep whiff. Then she wrinkled her nose and did the cutest little wheezy sneeze Chloe had ever seen a human—Um, almost human—do. She put her nose to the air again.

  “Huh, it works,” Kim said in wonder, and got back to work, taking the bag with her and glaring at Alyec.

  “Hey,” Chloe said, remembering something. “How come the night you were teaching me how to do all those things you reeked of gasoline, not CK?”

  “Sometimes the Tenth Bladers use dogs,” he said, making little ears on the sides of his head with his hands. “Gas covers the scent. Also to keep you from recognizing me. No one knew if you were going to freak out over everything. Like if you would suddenly start talking about all of this to your mom or the press or whatever—my name wouldn’t be part of it.”

  “Well, I guess you guys lucked out about me, huh?” Chloe said dryly.

  She watched Kim continue to sniff around the apartment. She wished she could do the same sort of thing—she had tried, but the overwhelming familiarity of the house doused all other scents. Kim would occasionally point to an area or a section of a door or something, but all Chloe got was a strange unfamiliar smell, mammalian, but she couldn’t identify or distinguish it.

  She wished she could do something. Anything.

  From the fight at the bridge to here, back home, a few things had changed. This time it wasn’t Chloe who was in danger, but someone close to her. Last time she had been kicking a trained assassin’s ass, feeling every blow bring her closer to victory. This time she was just standing here, uselessly watching someone else do the only thing she could think of.

  Finally Kim stood up and shrugged. “There were two human males here and a woman who wasn’t your mother. There are traces of fear and a chemical smell that I don’t really recognize. …”

  “O-kay,” Chloe said. “But what does this mean?”

  “It means that your mom was probably kidnapped, but the kidnappers didn’t kill her. The chemical smell—it means they used something to make her pass out,” Alyec said, leaping up and coming over to the two girls with a big grin. “It means that everyone’s probably right about the Tenth Blade taking her to lure you out.”

  Kim nodded slow, grudging agreement.

  “Well … now what?”

  “Now we should go outside and see what else we can learn,” Kim said, looking worriedly out at the street.

  “You shouldn’t worry about the two Gerbers out there,” Alyec said, grinning. “I’ll lure them away and get back here ASAP.”

  “Don’t,” Chloe said as he went to the door, even though she knew it was the best thing he could do.

  “You think this is the first time I’ve done this?” He blew her a kiss and went out the back door, closing it silently as he went.

  “We’ll wait ten minutes and go,” Kim suggested.

  They were both quiet, watching the microwave clock.

  “I’m gonna run upstairs and get some of my own, you know, undies,” Chloe said after a moment.

  “Can I come?” Kim asked shyly. “I’d like to see your room.”

  “Sure.” Chloe shrugged. “C’mon.”

  She went upstairs, pushing her hands against the wall—something her mom hated—while Kim followed delicately behind. If this was an actual friend-coming-over scenario, there’d be snacks on the table or popcorn in the microwave, she thought dizzily. Here she was in her own house, late at night, her mom having “disappeared,” toting a cat-eared girl who seemed as anxious as a freshman to see how the cool kids lived.

  Chloe went to her dresser and began to look through its drawers, trying to disturb things as little as possible. Out of the comer of her eye she saw Kim looking around, eyes wide, paws spread as if she would like very much to touch something. Chloe wondered what the other girl’s room looked like: probably bare and ascetic, like its owner. Not covered in posters of Ani DiFranco and Kurt Cobain and Coldplay, not filled with IKEA furniture, not strewn about with Mardi Gras beads and scarves and other useless sparkly crap.

  Chloe had found Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday of her Paul Frank panty-a-day collection when she heard a slight hiss from her friend.

  She turned just in time to see Kim dive with a speed and movement completely unrecognizable as human.

  When the girl stood up again, she had a mouse between her thumb and forefinger.

  “It looks like the vermin have already taken over in your absence,” she noted, holding the mouse above her head and eyeing it critically.

  “That’s Mus-mus,” Chloe said, putting out her hand, claws extended, and gently but firmly taking the terrified mouse from her. “He used to be my pet.”

  Kim let it go, fascinated.

  Chloe cupped her hand around the mouse with her claws so he couldn’t get out. He was obviously terrified. Any hope that his fear of her was temporary disappeared. When she’d developed claws and her other Mai attributes, he’d become as scared of her as he would be of any cat.

  “A cat with a mouse as a pet,” Kim said, almost sounding delighted. “Weird, but kind of ironic.”

  “I thought we were lions,” Chloe said, crouching and letting him go again under her bed. She fished in his old drawer for some more Cheerios to leave out for him. At least he had decided to stick around. She should be grateful for that much.

  “Well, then there’s that fable about the mouse who begged the lion who caught him to let him go.”

  Chloe vaguely remembered the story but not the details. She tried to concentrate on it so she wouldn’t cry again over Mus-mus.

  “The lion let him go, and later, when he had a thorn in his paw, the mouse pulled it out. They became friends after that.”

  “What’s the moral?”

  “Do kindness to even the least significant creatures—it may wind up helping you far more than you imagine sometime down the line.”

  “Sounds a little self-serving,” Chloe said, finally turning around and jamming the undies into her pockets.

  “Perhaps.” Kim cocked her head at her. “Who knows what thorn of yours Mus-mus may pull out?”

  “I think we can probably go now,” Chloe said, suddenly uncomfortable. Kim nodded and waited politely for Chloe to exit first, following her silently downstairs, through the house, and out the back door.

  Once outside, Kim crouched down in what would have looked like an impossible position to balance in if Chloe hadn’t known herself what it was like to be a Mai. The other girl tracked the sky and then the ground like a werewolf out of a very, very bad movie. Black against the dim light of the street she was skinny and beautiful, and for a moment Chloe felt a pang of envy.

  The Kings’ and their neighbors’ tiny patches of “yard” were separated by a fence and dwarf privet trees that grew out of brown, unhealthy-looking dirt.

  Chloe’s mom did not exactly have a green thumb with outdoor plants. Whenever she came across a pretty landscape in a magazine that might work with their minimal space, she would hold it out to Chloe, who would look at it and grunt. Sometimes there would be a trip to Home Depot or a nursery, things brought back, and diggings begun, but then Anna would take on an especially heavy caseload and would recede from the project, muttering something about hiring someone to do it.

  Chloe suddenly grew depressed when she saw a bottle cap and some gum wrappers stuck to the ground under the trees. Her house was empty; without its two occupants—its soul—it was nothing more than a monument to crappy urban living. She had to resist the urge to bolt.

  Kim had come crawling back to her, looking irritated and confused.

  “Well, it was definitely cased before they came in—I got a perfect scent trail of the two male humans.”

  “And?”

  Kim carefully cleaned off her claws, polishing them with the edge of her jeans. As prim and feline as it looked, it was as obvious as if a hum
an were doing it that she was trying to delay an answer.

  “And?”

  “There were Mai. Two of them. Slightly younger trail. After the humans, but not by much.”

  “Oh.” Chloe thought about this. “I guess Sergei sent them to guard my mom, without telling me, to keep me from getting upset.”

  “If Sergei had sent two Mai to guard your mom and three humans showed up, your mother would still be okay, safe in her house, even now. The humans would be dead or incapacitated,” Kim said. It was obvious she had already come to her own conclusion, and its implications darkened her brow.

  “What are you saying?” Chloe grabbed the girl’s shoulders, wanting to shake her out of her neat little world of logic and puzzles. “That they were sent to kill her?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time. …” Kim trailed off.

  Chloe fell back on her heels. “No!”

  “There is no real evidence, but—”

  “Why haven’t you told me this before?” Chloe demanded.

  “Because everything is watched at the house and everyone listens!” Kim hissed. “I have tried to tell you that a thousand times!”

  “Does everyone hate humans that much?” Chloe asked dully as her universe shifted.

  “It is not about hating humans—it’s about control and keeping the Pride together. The Path of Bastet involves doing it with connection, love, nurturing, and purity. The Path of Sekhmet means doing it through war and violence, by any means possible.”

  “And the current leader is a follower of Sekhmet,” Chloe realized, thinking about what Sergei had told her.

  “Once your mother is gone, you have no more connections to the outside world.”

  Chloe smiled weakly. “That’s what Brian said.”