“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 organization 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.”
Paul looked deeply uncomfortable, though he tried his best to hide it.
“And your mom doesn’t know any of this?” Amy asked, amazed.
Chloe shrugged. “This has all been kinda recent, and it’s all kinda hard to believe. I was thinking about maybe trying to sneak over to see my mom tonight after you guys,” Chloe went on dully. “But smarter than last time. Not just, like, walking up to the front door.”
“Oh. Uh.” Amy and Paul exchanged another look. Paul cleared his throat again. “That’s another reason we wanted to see you, Chloe.”
“I think your mom’s missing,” Amy blurted. “I broke into your house about a week ago and it was like no one had been there for a while.”
Chloe stared at her, mind numb.
“We were going to call the police,” Paul began.
“I have to go home,” Chloe whispered, and then, without another word, she turned and ran.
“Wait! Chloe!” Amy called out to the figure disappearing into the night.
“Chloe!” came a new voice, masculine, from somewhere above them. “Chloe! Don’t go! It’s a trap! Chloe … !”
Paul and Amy looked at each other, then ran after their friend.
Chloe ran until her lungs shrieked from the cold air and lack of oxygen, until her insides stung with heart attack pain. Even with her Mai strength and speed, she was pushing herself far harder than she ever had. When a car blocked her way, she leapt, sinking her hand claws into its roof and pulling herself over it like a pole vaulter, leaving the driver with a horrible tearing sound in his ears and the image of rabid dogs and werewolf movies in his mind. She stuck to the streets and lower levels, not wanting to waste any time with the sort of stunts she usually enjoyed on her nighttime runs. She felt her foot claws trying to come out, straining at the fabric in her sneakers. On one landing, they finally pushed through the soles of her Sauconys, grabbing the dirt below her to push her forward.
Chloe ignored the shadows around her. She was far too fast a moving target this time to worry about an ambush. She was only concentrating on one thing: the nightmare that had kept
her awake since the whole thing began. Bringing the violence that was now part of her life home, onto her mom.
She ran up the steps and unlocked the door, slamming it open, and threw herself in.
“Mom?” she called.
A step in and she instantly knew something was wrong.
The air was stale, as Amy had suggested; there were no recent human movements, warmth, or smells in there except for her friend’s. None of her mom’s perfume, soap, or skin scent was less than a week old. And there was a rancid, rotting scent beneath everything, like the drain in the sink hadn’t been cleaned in a while.
Chloe flipped on the lights. Everything looked exactly the same as it had the last afternoon she’d been there, except for a few glasses that were put near the sink. Maybe when her mom had come home from work and found that note of Chloe’s—she looked around frantically. There it was, by the phone. Scribbled in her mom’s handwriting on it was Keira’s number under her name; Mrs. King had fully intended on checking up to see if her daughter really was where she said she was.
Hummus. Chloe realized what the sour smell was. She followed it to the fridge, where a clump of it trailed down the outside of the door. It was so unlike neat freak Anna King that Chloe felt her heart stop when she saw it. She opened the door and saw the open container of hummus, now molding.
On its surface, the word help had been sloppily inscribed.
I can’t believe this.
The first coherent thoughts Anna King was able to form as the drug wore off were incredulous and disbelieving. She opened her eyes to confirm what she was sure couldn’t be true.
She was tied to a chair. Just like out of the movies, she had come to, tied to a chair.
It was a very comfortable chair, more like a La-Z-Boy or lounger, and she wasn’t tied to it exactly like in the movies, but still. Her arms were belted onto the tops of the armrests—the chair had been neatly altered specifically for this purpose. Her feet were connected to each other by some sort of hobble, rendering it impossible for her to walk, much less get up, but that did not prevent her from being able to switch to more comfortable sitting positions.
She closed her eyes again, still sluggish and sleepy.
The drug was thick in her mouth, like a morning-after-Nyquil hangover but a thousand times worse. They’d given it to her after they’d slipped her out of the house. As soon as she opened the door, she knew something suspicious was up. Years of living in the city first by herself, and then later as a single mom, had made her sensitive to vibes. They were polite and the woman in the group had asked if they could come in. When Anna had said no, they’d somehow wound up inside anyway. She’d pretended she wasn’t scared, putting pieces of dinner away. They talked about her daughter, and the trouble Chloe might be in, and how they wanted to help. She’d written the word help in the hummus, inspired and terrified.
It was a good thing she’d done that, too, since a few minutes later she was trying to scream and they had a gag over her mouth and there was a big, sleek car like out of the movies and she was taken away into darkness.
“Mrs. King,” someone was saying gently, trying to wake her up more.
“Anna,” she corrected instantly, in lawyer mode She blinked a few times before managing to keep her eyes open. Someone had thoughtfully taken her glasses when they kidnapped her and had put them on her when she was passed out.
The room came into focus after a couple of moments of blurriness. She was in an office or a library, nicely appointed with a thick wool rug and big mahogany desk. A man was leaning back on it, almost sitting, legs crossed. He was a large man, middle-aged and white, with a sleek patience in his eyes that Anna the lawyer instantly recognized as a direct result of having money and/or power. He was dressed in a suit without the jacket, his tie loosened.
“How are you feeling?” he asked politely.
She opened her mouth to tell him precisely how she was feeling, but nothing came out, like she had used up all her speech with her name before. “Water” was all she managed to croak instead.
“Of course.” He turned to look at someone blocked from her view by the side of her chair—she had begun to think of it as her chair—and made a little motion with his hands. Quiet footsteps went off to do his bidding, no questions asked. Money and power, she decided.
A moment later someone handed him a glass of ice water. He came forward, and just when Anna was afraid he was going to feed her, he unlatched her left arm and let her take the glass herself. She didn’t drain it instantly; this was not a time to show weakness. Instead she took polite, demure little sips, as though she were at a dinner party.
“Is that better?” the man asked.
“Where’s my daughter?” she countered.
“What?” the man said with wry amusement. “You don’t think she’s at her friend Keira’s house?”
“What have you done with my daughter?” Anna repeated.
“We haven’t done anything, Anna. Although Chloe is in a lot of trouble—she has fallen in with a bad crowd and has been involved in a murder.”
The doubt that flashed through Anna King’s mind registered nowhere on her face. “I don’t think so,” she said.
“Well, I’m afraid she has.” The man sighed, crossing his arms. “One of my friends—one of my colleagues—is dead because of her.”
“You keep not saying that she killed him,” Anna noted, sounding exactly like the attorney that she was.” ‘Involved in a murder’ and ‘dead because of.’”
The man laughed, and his full, jowly chin shook a little. His voice was rich and beautiful, and every time he used it, Chloe’s mother hated him more. “You are absolutely correct, of course; this is not a black-and-white world. We have no actual proof that my friend is dead.”
“Why am I here,” Anna said wearily, “and where is Chloe?”
“Chloe is with her new friends, most likely. To make a long story as short as possible, Mrs. Ki—Anna—your daughter’s biological family is from a long line of … well, I guess you could call them warriors of a sort, or maybe a hunting caste—more than anachronistic in this day and age. Anyway, her people want her back. We have reason to believe they contacted her about a month ago and are fairly certain she is with them now.”
Anna stared at him for a long moment before speaking. Even though she was the one tied to a chair, with her blondish hair coming out in wisps around her cockeyed glasses, she didn’t feel like she was the ridiculous one in the room.
“Do you mean to tell me that some crazy ancient Russian Mafia wants Chloe to join them like her parents did?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“If you care so very much about my daughter’s welfare, why aren’t you talking to the police or to me on the phone instead of kidnapping me and tying me to a chair?”
“Well, that brings us to your first question, doesn’t it?” The man uncrossed his legs and put his arms behind him, supporting himself on the desk. “You are here because the Mai are extremely dangerous. In situations that have occurred before, with adoptive children of American parents, they have been known to kill the parents to ensure complete loyalty of the child and to cut off all connections with the rest of the world.”
“And again, why do you care?”
“The Mai don’t play by normal rules—they are like a gang, but far worse. Very much like the mob you mentioned. My organization exists to protect the public from them. To limit their influence. Hopefully one day to destroy them completely.”
“How charitable of you.”
“My wife was killed trying to save someone from the Mai,” he said softly. “I don’t want you or anyone else suffering the same fate.”
Both were silent for a moment. The corners of the room were obscured in gloom, and there were no windows. She was someplace secret, dark, and impossible to find. Mrs. King felt like squirming, both from his gaze and from sitting still for so long, never mind how comfortable the chair was. She didn’t, though. “Why am I”—s
he pulled at her right arm—“still tied to the chair if you’re just trying to protect me?”
“Anna, if we had come to your house and told you what I just did, would you have come quietly along with us?”
He did have a point.
“It was imperative to get you out of your house as soon as possible, as quietly as possible. Any one of a number of things may happen next—someone, a hit man from the Mai, may be sent in to kill you—or Chloe herself might try to sneak out and visit you, encouraging them to have you killed, even if they hadn’t decided to before. Remember, they want complete control of their members’ lives. I’m sorry about any unpleasantness, but this really was the easiest way. Now we can keep you safe while seeing what can be done about Chloe.”
“Will you release me?”
“Yes—but I’m afraid we’re going to have to keep you confined for a time. In a much nicer room than this,” he added quickly and apologetically. “The temptation for you to leave and try to find your daughter would be far too great.”
So let me get this straight. The “good guys” are holding me captive so I can’t get hurt seeing my daughter, who is being held captive by the bad guys who don’t want her out seeing her mother.
“What is going to happen to Chloe? Can you”—save sounded too melodramatic—“get her?”
“Of course.” But there was something in his face, a slightly surprised look, as though he had already dismissed Chloe and her fate. As though Anna herself and her safety were all that mattered now. He probably considers her one of “them” now. Chloe will get no help here.
“Who are you people?” she demanded, half sarcastically.
“I’m afraid I—”
“Can’t tell me that either. Yeah, of course.”
“You can call me Whit,” the man offered.
Anna had every intention of escaping as soon as she saw a way. She might not return home; she agreed with her captor that would be a pretty dangerous thing to do. But she would go immediately to the police and call the cult hotline and tell them about everyone.
Chloe was still sitting on the floor, head in her hands, when Brian came in.