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 human 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.”
“Who’s Brian?”
“He’s my—” Chloe stopped, unsure of how much to reveal. “He’s a friend of mine in the Tenth Blade who saved me, sort of, when I was fighting the Rogue and then when Alyec and I ran away….”
It was Kim’s turn to stare in incredulousness.
“Your life,” she observed finally, “is very complicated. And extraordinarily dangerous.”
“Tell me about it.” Chloe looked at the blank eyes of the house, its dead windows. “So—you think my mom is dead?”
Kim shook her head. “If she was killed by the Mai, there would be signs. We aren’t perfectly neat killers. Ironically, it may be a good thing that the Order of the Tenth Blade—or whoever—got to her first.”
“Hey, guys, stop with the chatting!” Alyec poked his head into the bushes where they sat. “We have about five minutes before they figure out I led them on a wild-goose chase.”
He put out his hands and helped the two girls up. Chloe was surprised that Kim didn’t object, but the girl still seemed a little stunned by the evidence and their discussion. As they walked back, just three normal-seeming teenagers, Kim filled Alyec in on what she had found.
“So we think she’s been kidnapped by the bastards?” Alyec asked excitedly.
“She’s probably still being held somewhere by them, yes. Assuming it is the Tenth Blade and not someone else, for some different reason,” Kim said. “If it is them, your little diversion with their guards tonight may have bought us some time—it proves to them that Chloe is interested, or someone is interested, in coming back to this house. Which means they have a reason to keep her mom alive.”
“Excellent,” Alyec said, rubbing his hands together. “We can have a real raid! I’ll bet Sergei knows where their HQ is…. This is going to be great! There hasn’t been any real action in years!”
“I hardly think the leader is going to sacrifice a troupe of us and the kizekh to attack the home base of the Order of the Tenth Blade to save a woman it looks like he was meaning to have killed.”
“Maybe we can embarrass him into it,” Alyec posited.
“Pride leaders don’t embarrass that easily, Alyec,” Kim objected, with the faintest gleam in her eye. “I think we should look to volunteers. There are enough who think we’ve been too intimidated by the Order for years and are just itching for some payback.”
“I wonder how many we can get.”
“I wonder how we can avoid too much death and injury.”
As her two friends animatedly discussed and
formed plans, Chloe remained silent. In the streetlights, their three shadows climbed the empty street before them, doubled, and then receded into the light of the next to be reborn slowly again behind them. They could have been Amy, Paul, and Chloe for all the detail their gross shades gave them. Just turned away from a party or something, planning great revenge, or discussing their dreams, filled with the sort of energy only walking on the streets at night can give you.
Instead of making war counsel.
“Hey, are you all right?” Alyec asked when they got back. Chloe still hadn’t said a word.
“Yeah. I’m just a little … tired.” She couldn’t even smile weakly at him. “It’s a lot to think about, you know? I thought Sergei was like—”
“Your dad?” Kim prompted quietly.
“And now it looks like he was just going to kill—”
“All the fun, if he catches the three of us skulking around,” Kim interrupted what Chloe was about to say, looking obviously around with her eyes. Chloe understood immediately. No more talking. Not here.
“I should get home, anyway.” Alyec kissed her sweetly on the lips. “I’ll come back tomorrow after school and we’ll talk about this more, okay? What to do about your mom, I mean,” he added pointedly. While Alyec had seemed a little aghast at what Kim had accused Sergei of, he, too, didn’t seem particularly surprised. Between the family enmity and his desire to maybe take over someday, the boy was all gung ho about disobeying the leader—and possibly punishing the older man somehow.
Chloe waved good night to him and Kim and went upstairs.
Hours later she was still awake. The photos were once again spread over her quilt as she sat huddled against the headboard, knees drawn up to her chin. Sometimes Chloe would pick up a picture, like the one of her sister, and hold it in front of her face for a long time, staring at it like she was trying to see the 3-D image in one of those trick posters. She tried to feel the other girl through her face, tried to pick up some sort of impression or thought across the void. Then she would put the picture carefully back down in the exact same place it had been.
Her photo quilt was missing quite a few panes: there should have been pictures of her mom, Amy and Paul, Marisol from the shop. All the people she hadn’t really been related to but who felt like family had been slowly replaced with people whom she was probably related to but knew little about. Kim and Olga. Igor and Valerie. Even Sergei. And what about Brian and Alyec? If things continued the way they seemed to be going, Brian and Alyec might be literally facing off in a few days.
She thought about her mom, who hadn’t known what she was getting into when she’d decided to raise Chloe on her own.
Amy’s walkie-talkie buzzed.
“Hello?” she asked distractedly, still staring at the pictures.
“It’s Brian. Look … I can’t talk much now.” He was panting as though he were running, and Chloe could hear street sounds in the background. “Listen, I was just over at the … Order’s place and found an earring. Does your mom wear big blocky silver things with patterns and black in the etchings … ?”
“John Hardy,” Chloe said calmly, both shocked and unsurprised. “Does it kind of look like animal plating? Like of a snake? Or like spheres that have been squished flat, almost into polygons?”
“Bingo. I don’t think anyone in the Order wears anything like them.”
“Can you … can you get her out?”
“I don’t even know exactly where she is, Chloe. And people are becoming suspicious of me over there. If we tell the police, it will amount to nothing—my dad’s very experienced in avoiding that kind of trouble.” There was a long pause. “Chloe, if you are planning some kind of raid, you should know—it’s going to be a bloodbath.”
Chloe didn’t say anything.
“Some people have been waiting years for this kind of direct confrontation. And while the Mai may not carry weapons, we do.”
Chloe felt trapped and uncertain. “Have you told Amy and Paul?”
“Not yet. I’m meeting them in a few minutes to give them back their walkie-talkie—they’re very possessive about it. Maybe the three of us together actually can think of some way of extricating your mom secretly. Anyway, three heads are better than one. And your friend Amy seems pretty experienced at the whole hacking and breaking-and-entering thing.”
She smiled at that. “All right. Thanks. Keep me posted.”
“Will do!”
Chloe hung up and put the picture of the Mai woman back on the bed with the others. Then she flipped open the phone again, dialed Brian’s home number, and waited.
“Hi, this is Brian Rezza—if you’re looking for Whit Rezza, you can reach him on his cell at 415-555-1412. Leave a message. Thanks!”
She hung up. Then she dialed again, carefully remembering the number.
“Hello?” A rich, masculine voice answered the phone.
“Hello, Mr. Rezza. It’s Chloe King.” She paused for a long moment, working up the courage to speak her next sentence. “I want to talk to you about a trade. Me for my mom.”
Chloe Waited On a rock in the middle of the Presidio, obviously by herself and open to attack.
This was one of the most central, hidden areas in the mazelike complex of abandoned army buildings, a long-empty row of houses that were small and neat and as kept up as a suburban dream—but completely empty. The grass was trimmed on the little shared green the houses all looked out on, and the rock on which Chloe sat had obviously been moved there from somewhere else. Lucasfilm was moving its headquarters or something there at some point; for now, the area at dusk was as weird and perfect and lonesome as a Tim Burton set.
Chloe sang a little song to keep up her spirits, but all she could think of was “New York, New York.” It still had a lot of 9/11 connotations to it, patriotic and stirring—fitting for her current mood in the empty military base. But her voice was reedy and got lost in the wind; she kicked her heels like a little girl and waited for something to happen.
As the breeze changed direction, she caught a scent. Human. A few of them. And something familiar—a warm scent, a comforting skin smell.
“You can come out here,” Chloe called carelessly. “I’m all alone.” She tried not to get too excited, but they really had brought her mother with them. The exchange would happen. And no one would get hurt. Except for maybe herself.
Whit Rezza stepped out of the shadows. He wore a long, flowing raincoat that made it look like he was about to get on a plane for Europe, not negotiate for the release of a captive. Following him was a younger man in khakis and a black leather jacket, propelling her mom forward with a gun to her head.
“Chloe!”her mother said, trying to cut the sob of relief into a direct order. “Get out of here. These people are insane.”
“No can do,” Chloe said cheerfully. “It’s my fault that all of this stuff is happening, and I’m going to fix it.”
“Chloe, leave this instant,” her mother said again, standing up straight and looking over her glasses at her.
“None of this would have happened if you hadn’t adopted me,” Chloe said.
Her mom rolled her eyes and almost stamped her foot. “Chloe, would you shut up? I love you and I’m your mother and I’m telling you to run away while you still can!”
“How much did he tell you?” Chloe demanded. “What did he tell you about me?”
“I told her the truth,” Whit said. “Well, up to what she could handle.”
“He told me that there’s some sort of Russian Mafia connected with your biological family and they’re involved in … I don’t know, bad crimes or something, and that they had lured you in. And that they needed to protect me from them—that they would come after me. And that you had been involved in a murder. Whatever the story, this gentleman has a gun to my head, so I’m guessing that the truth is a bit skewed.”
“You never believed anything we were telling you?” Whit asked, a little surprised.
“Piss off,” Chl
oe’s mother spat.
Her daughter couldn’t help grinning. “Don’t worry, Mom, it’s for the best.”
“You would do well to listen to your daughter,” Whit suggested mildly. “For a member of the Mai, she is surprisingly logical.”
“Yet you’re still going to kill me,” Chloe said, rolling her eyes.
“You killed a member of our Order.”
“I did not. I tried to save him,” Chloe said, leaping down from the rock, frustrated.
“Yes, that’s what my son keeps saying.”
“That’s because it’s the truth!” Brian stepped out from around a building, throwing stars ready in his hands.
“Brian?” Chloe said, surprised.
“Brian?” his father said, confused.
“Brian,” Richard spat. “I should have known you were going to try to save the cat bitch.”
“Don’t talk to my son that way,” Mr. Rezza snapped, surprising everyone.
“Since when does the Order start carrying guns, you coward?” Brian demanded, coming closer, eyes locked on the other young man’s.
“How did you know I was here?” Chloe asked, relief washing over her. She still had every intention of saving her mom and keeping the bloodshed to a minimum, offering herself up as a sacrifice—but she was also extremely grateful that there suddenly might be options other than her possibly being killed.
“I didn’t. Once I was pretty sure that they had your mother, I kept an eye on my dad and followed him and Dickless here.”
Brian didn’t look like the brooding, complicated man she knew; he strode forward confidently, never taking his eyes off the gun, every inch the hero she wanted him to be. The wind blew his thick dark hair back, and his face was livid with anger.
“I saw her reach her hand down to try to save Alexander when he slipped—with my own two eyes!”
“But why would she do that?” his father asked, sounding genuinely confused and a little exasperated.
“Because she’s a good person, Dad.”
“You saw that when you were at the bridge helping her,” Richard said, jerking his chin in Chloe’s direction. “I’ll bet.”