The Stolen

  The moon slowly glided across the sky, inching toward midnight, and Chloe watched the intricate shadows in the grass grow and change direction.

  She was still at the window hours later when Kim came padding in, carrying a sheaf of papers and clippings and photographs. She wore a long black turtleneck sweater and a black skirt that went to the floor, making her look like an ancient priestess. A cat-eared female—and, Chloe noted wryly—a pretty sexy priestess.

  “I have some pictures for you. Your relatives … I mean, they might be.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to talk about it.”

  Kim sighed patiently, as if she had expected this response but didn’t feel the need to apologize.

  “How did you know I was here?”

  Kim blinked once, then touched her nose.

  “Of course.” Chloe looked back out the window. “My mom’s gone. You were right about my ‘human parents’ being in danger.”

  “I’m … sorry that I was right.”

  “Sergei and Olga and the others … they won’t do anything. They won’t help me. They won’t risk the kizekh. …” She pounded her fist on the window sash. “And what can I do? If I try to go out, Sergei’s goons will drag me back to make sure I’m ‘safe.’ If I manage to get out—and get anywhere near my home without an army, the Tenth Bladers will get me….” She trailed off. “I guess I’ll call the police, like Sergei said. It’s the only thing I really can do.”

  “I’ll help,” Kim said simply.

  “What?” Chloe looked at her; she hadn’t really been talking to the other girl, just getting her thoughts out.

  “I’ll help. I’m the best tracker here anyway. We will return to the scene of the crime and look for clues.” She said this in such even tones that Chloe worried she was joking. Not that Kim had a great sense of humor or anything.

  “Really?” Chloe asked slowly.

  Kim nodded. “I can evade the goons, too. So, do you want to see these pictures?”

  It was like the conversation was over as far was Kim was concerned. She had made her choice, and that was that. Chloe stared at her a little more.

  “I’m totally thrilled, but I have to ask—why are you helping me?”

  “You’re my friend,” Kim said, shrugging. “And I believe that once you tell him, Alyec will come along, too. Unlike him, however, I will not be expecting physical rewards from you.”

  Chloe suddenly exploded with laughter—like she hadn’t since Alyec had teased her into a good mood in the middle of the school hall. That felt like it has been ages ago. Her face relaxed into a smile. It felt good.

  She held her hand out for the photos. “Let’s see these.”

  “That woman in the background—and clearer, here: she is the former pride leader. The one who might be your mother.”

  Chloe took the picture from her. It was cracked and bent and had what looked like coffee rings in a corner. The woman in it was certainly not as pretty as Chloe, but there was a definite resemblance, with the high cheekbones and cupid’s bow lips. Her eyes were also hazel but darker, or at least they seemed shadowed in the picture. Her forehead was wider. She was handsome and had thick black hair that came down over her shoulders and covered her breasts. She was laughing, and her whole body was involved: her head thrown back, her hands on her hips, her mouth wide open, exposing perfect white teeth. There were deep creases around her eyes, like she had seen more of the world than her age would seem to indicate.

  “Both my moms spent their lives helping people,” Chloe murmured.

  “What do you mean?”

  “My mother—my human mother—is a lawyer in a private firm, but she does a lot of work for legal aid. Mainly for a women’s domestic abuse shelter in the Mission District.”

  “She sounds like a good person.”

  “She is.” Chloe smiled weakly. “Thanks for not saying ‘was.’”

  Kim just blinked at her. Chloe wondered how much of the girl’s slow transformation to something more cat than human had affected her mind.

  “How did you know my mom might be in danger?” Chloe asked aloud.

  Once again Kim looked uncomfortable. “It only stands to reason,” she said slowly. “For one thing, she makes perfect bait for the Tenth Bladers to lure you out.”

  “And … ?”

  “And if you are still asking the question, you are already familiar with the other possible answer.” She bit the sentence off as she finished it. Chloe knew she wouldn’t get more out of her about it. She continued flipping through the pictures.

  “My friend Amy suggested that it might not have anything to do with the Mai or the Order of the Tenth Blade,” she added casually. “My dad left when I was really young—my mom’s story is that he went gradually psycho or something. It wasn’t exactly an amicable breakup.”

  “I … don’t think he’s a likely suspect. Occam’s Razor—the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I think, too,” Chloe said, sighing. “But it was kind of exciting thinking about him for a little while again, you know? I wonder what he’s doing now….” She shook her head. “I didn’t know him very well. As a kid I thought he was a superhero, the best dad ever … and then an asshole for walking out on us. Of course, for a long time I blamed my mom for that.” Chloe frowned, thinking about the fight they’d had the night she discovered her claws. “Then it turns out that one of the reasons they split up was because of me…. They had very different ideas on child raising. Apparently he was this super-strict jerk, all about not letting me go out or date or—” She stopped and looked away from the photos to Kim. “Not letting me go—he made my mom promise before he took off. To not let me date.”

  Kim came to the same conclusion she had. “Did your parents know what you are?”

  “My mom doesn’t,” Chloe said, pretty sure of the fact. Things like claws and litter boxes had not been brought up during the tampons and Advil discussion. “But what if my father knew?”

  “Then your mother’s disappearance becomes even more complex. Aside from the Tenth Blade, I think I can say with some certainty that almost no humans know about us.”

  “It would be on the news instantly,” Chloe agreed.

  “Perhaps he was Mai,” Kim wondered.

  “Um, no? The whole sex thing? She’d be all, like, dead and stuff?”

  “Oh. Of course,” Kim said, blushing. She turned back to the manila envelope in her hand. “So you had no father growing up … ,” the girl said, playing with the idea. “I can see why you would get attached to Sergei so quickly.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Chloe snapped.

  “Nothing more than that he is a charismatic, charming, and powerful leader. A perfect father figure. A role he enjoys, I might add. There have been other … orphans he has attached himself to.”

  Was Kim trying to make her jealous? But that didn’t make sense unless—she was one of those other orphans, who’d maybe gotten dumped when Chloe or someone else came along. Like Igor. He certainly looked to Sergei as a male role model. Maybe it was a warning?

  “Did he take you under his wing?”

  “Yes,” Kim said hesitantly, “when I first came.”

  “What happened? You don’t seem to like him very much.”

  “That was it. I never have.” Kim shrugged. “There is very little room for personal choice among the Mai, especially if you’re an orphan, being welcomed in by the only people who will—who can—take you. But something about him … I didn’t like him from the beginning. So I was raised by everyone and no one.”

  Chloe thought about this, drumming her fingers on the photos. There was a lot of information in what the other girl had just told her, but she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it yet. So Sergei liked to take the lonely under his wing—what was wrong with that? It was nice, in a sort of den-mother-at-the-orphanage kind of way. And Kim was kind of a freak—maybe she just resented authority figures. Maybe this was nothing m
ore than a slight personality clash of two very different people….

  But she didn’t rule out that it might be something more.

  “Who’s this?” Chloe asked, suddenly coming across a much more modern picture. In it a girl was grinning, standing with her arm around another girl, at the top of what was probably the Empire State Building. Old-fashioned quarter-operated binoculars, the kind that looked like giant silver robot heads, were blurry in the background, and there was something distinctly urban and gritty about the landscape beyond.

  Kim leaned over, saw the picture, and cleared her throat.

  “That’s the girl who would have been your sister. If we are correct about your parentage.”

  “My sister?” Chloe held the picture closer. The girl was darker than Chloe and older; the date on the back indicated that it had been taken a few years ago, and she already looked like she was sixteen or seventeen. Her hair was the same as Chloe’s, and there was a shape to her eyes that was similar; her nose was smaller, too. She had two fingers up in a V behind her friend’s head.

  Kim’s exact words suddenly sank into her mind.

  “What do you mean, ‘would have been’?”

  “She was the one I told you about who was killed by the Tenth Blade. The pride leader’s daughter. That would make you her sister,” Kim said patiently, making Chloe feel like more of an idiot. “It happened several months ago. We think it was the Rogue.”

  “My sister,” Chloe said again, feeling it on her tongue. Again she felt nothing in particular when she looked at the photo, but the word brought a swirl of emotions.

  “Why … ?” she began. Tears sprang up in her eyes. It wasn’t fair. She’d wanted a brother or sister all her life and it turned out that she’d had one all along and she’d been taken from Chloe, scant months before they would have found each other. It was so wretchedly, horrifically unfair.

  “I understand she was a lot like you, actually. Or you if you had been raised Mai,” Kim added thoughtfully. “I heard that she went out a lot by herself, doing a lot of things strictly among humans, and after her mother was killed, she was sent to live with her relatives, who were members of the New England Pride.”

  “There’s a pride in New England?” Chloe asked. She remembered Kim mentioning the Pride of New Orleans, but colonial houses, white Christmases, and freaky cat people roaming quaint cobblestoned streets struck Chloe as strange. I guess that’s all relative these days, though, she thought.

  Kim just nodded, without explaining further. “I didn’t know her very well. She was killed by herself, far away from her home, at night.”

  “Picked off because she was by herself,” Chloe said grimly. But something seemed familiar about what Kim had said—almost déjà vu. A dream she’d had, maybe: something about a girl running, panicked, in dark city streets. Being caught and having her throat slit.

  “Yes … although the fact that it might have been the Rogue lends an interesting spin to the whole thing,” Kim said, looking at the picture again. “To send someone like that out after her means they were pretty serious about getting her, which means they somehow knew she was the daughter of a previous pride leader.”

  “Do you think they know about me?” Chloe asked in a small voice.

  “We still have no actual proof you are who we think you are,” Kim said carefully. “So I would assume they have even less of an idea.”

  She imagined the man who’d attacked her running after this other girl, in probably the same fashion, running her down—without an Alyec or Brian to help save her. Maybe without so much of a fighting instinct. Killed by whirring throwing stars and tiny silver daggers.

  “Why are they called the Tenth Blade, anyway?” Chloe asked.

  “Because a pride leader has nine lives,” Kim answered. “It takes nine blades to kill the One. The tenth is for the Tenth Blader if he fails.”

  After she and Kim had made some preliminary plans for searching her house the next night, Chloe finally crawled off to bed, a thousand different thoughts and ideas crowding themselves into her brain. She had just drifted off, the pictures of her possible mother and sister laid out on the quilt in front of her, when Alyec showed up.

  “Pssst! Chloe?” He knocked lightly on the door as he opened it.

  Chloe blinked awake, then immediately sat up. “Where were you?”

  “What?” Alyec asked, the eagerness on his face changing to dismay.

  “I’ve been trying to call you. I tried calling you at home—”

  “I was at a party,” he mumbled, a little shamefaced about having fun while she was stuck here.

  “Why don’t you have a cell phone?” Chloe snapped.

  “I do. Have one. Had one. Too many people started calling, so I don’t use it much anymore,” Alyec said defensively.

  “My mom—she’s been taken. Kidnapped. Killed, I don’t know.” She sank back on her bed, trying to hold back the quiver in her voice.

  He came over and sat on the bed next to Chloe and put his arm around her. “I’m sure that’s not true.”

  “It is,” Chloe answered dully. “I went to meet Amy and Paul—” She knew she should have said and Brian but couldn’t deal with it right then. “And they told me no one had been home in a while. I went, and there’s no sign she’s been there for at least a week. She must have disappeared right after I came here.”

  Alyec hugged her to him, waiting a careful moment before asking the potentially inflammatory: “You went back home? After the last time you were attacked?”

  “What would you have done if it was your mom?”

  “I would go to Sergei and we would instantly round up a posse and—”

  “Sergei won’t do anything. Because she’s human.”

  “Oh.” Alyec seemed surprised by this. “What a dick-head.”

  Maybe this racial hatred thing is generational, Chloe thought. She hoped it was so.

  “Why didn’t you take me along?” he asked quietly. “I would have gone with you. You know how much I love breaking rules.”

  “It was something I had to do myself.” And it would have been pretty uncool for you to tag along while I was seeing my other boyfriend. “Alyec,” she said, sighing, “you get to go to school every day and do normal things with normal people in the outside world. I’m stuck here all day. Every day. Away from my mom and my friends and everything. I’m being … cloistered here.” She gave herself points for the SAT word.

  “Kim seems to be okay about it,” Alyec said, a smile on his lips.

  “I love her dearly, but she really is a bit of a freak, you know?” Chloe ran her hand through Alyec’s thick blond hair. “She said she would go back to the house with me and look for evidence or something.”

  “I will go with you, too,” he said, kissing her on the side of her head, above her ear. “Screw Sergei. She’s your mom. Hey,” he said brightly, suddenly sitting back and looking at her, “this is the most naked I’ve ever seen you!”

  Chloe caught herself looking down, forgetting what she had on. It was completely unsexy: a pair of blue-striped boxers Olga swore were new and an oversized, comfy, Old Navy men’s T-shirt. The neck was so big it hung off one of her shoulders. Except for that little bit of Flashdance, Chloe didn’t think she looked very naked at all.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” she said, holding her hand against his head to stop him as he reached for her. “I look like a frump.”

  “A sexy frump. A college girl, taking a break from her studies,” Alyec said, evading her hand and kissing Chloe on her belly. “A librarian at home. You don’t have any glasses, do you?”

  “Alyec, shut up. Stop it!” She tried not to giggle. Her mom was gone, she had two boyfriends, she couldn’t trust anyone…. “We’re being serious.”

  “As a good librarian should be. Chloe, tonight the area will be crawling with Tenth Bladers because you were probably seen. No—definitely seen. You, me, and the freak will go tomorrow night and figure out what happened. Okay?”
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  “Okay,” she agreed grudgingly.

  He lifted the shirt up over her belly and pulled her boxers just the slightest bit down. Chloe was zinging all over as he brought his lips to her skin, both fearing and expectantly awaiting of his next move.

  Which was to suddenly suck down over her belly button like a fish and blow air out the sides, making a ridiculous thirbrrrrty sound.

  “Alyec!” She cracked up, hitting him over the head with a pillow.

  “Chloe,” he said, more seriously, kissing her. “everything’s going to be all right. I promise.”

  Then he really kissed her. It was even better than their little time-out in the janitor’s closet. He pulled her closer to him, sliding his hand up under her shirt. She felt the tips of his claws come out and pressed back into him.

  “Al-yec!” came a booming male voice, pronouncing the name as Russianly as possible. Sergei stood in the doorway, hands on his hips, a growl on his face. He looked extremely leonine. “Do I have to establish a curfew in my own home?”

  “Hey, she’s part of this, too,” Alyec said mock whiningly, sliding up and away from her in one quick movement.

  Chloe wasn’t sure whether to scream, cry, or giggle. This was such a classic situation—one that she had never been in before. Besides being scary and embarrassing, it felt sort of warm and nostalgic.

  “Get out, Alyec Ilychovich,” Sergei said, raising an eyebrow. There was a little bit of tired amusement in his voice as well. Chloe got the feeling that this was somehow not as bad as the whole sneaking-out thing. It was bad, but not unexpected, and not out of the realm of the legal.

  Alyec slunk out after giving a brave salute to Sergei and blowing a kiss to Chloe. When he was gone, Sergei let out a sigh, a breath he must have held the entire time.

  “That boy is a menace,” he said wearily.

  Chloe covered her mouth, pretending to scratch her nose, desperately trying not to giggle.

  “I just came by to apologize,” the older man said more gently, coming in and sitting on the edge of her bed. “I truly am sorry we cannot help your mother more. We should do everything we can for the woman who adopted you and brought you up and helped make you the wonderful girl you are.” He put his square, stubby hand somewhat clumsily on her own. “But these are tough times … and the Tenth Blade is in strange agitation over you. I do not wish to risk lives—there are so few of us. Do you understand?”