The Stolen

  Amy frowned. “I told him if he hurt Chloe, I would kill him.”

  Paul tried not to smile. “Very John Constantine of you.”

  “You’re a jerk” Amy said, so distracted she sucked hot coffee up through the stirrer. She tried not to react, maintaining her dignity. Paul sighed inwardly, knowing he would just have to wait it out. We have time for what, one, maybe two more mood swings tonight? While it occurred to him that this was a little tiresome sometimes, he wasn’t sure he’d have it any other way. For now he would stay. They would talk. And later they would make up.

  Chloe and Alyec had Firebird’s lounge to themselves that night. Sergei had made it very clear that there were to be no boys anywhere near Chloe’s bedroom, and she knew that meant Alyec especially. So the lounge was as private as they could get.

  The lights were dimmed, candles were lit, and she and Alyec were lying on the floor, eating some post-make-out Chinese.

  “It’s better than going to a restaurant,” Alyec said, delicately stuffing his face with lo mein. His skill with chopsticks was extraordinary. “No one else is here, and we can do whatever we want.”

  Chloe was clumsier with her own set of chopsticks and had to resort to tipping the mostly empty carton of fried rice into her mouth while digging at the bottom with a single stick, making it fall in great clumps into her mouth.

  He sucked up a last noodle as lasciviously as he could without getting soy sauce all over everything. Then he leaned forward and kissed her, briefly licking her teeth with the tip of his salty tongue.

  She rolled over to him and kissed him more, holding the back of his head so he couldn’t pull away. He didn’t try. He mouthed his way off her lips and down to her neck; as he traced the delicate veins on her skin there, she felt her claws extend. She threw her head back, enjoying it.

  “Chloe,” he whispered, pulling back and smiling gently at her. “I have to go.”

  “Tease!” she said, only half pretending to be upset. She felt her claws retract again.

  “Mom’s giving me a ride home,” he said apologetically. “I should go find her unless you want to keep making out and have her walk in on us….”

  “No, I understand.” Chloe sat up, sighing. “It’s just that I don’t really get to see you anymore. Now that I don’t go to school—I mean, I used to see you at least off and on all day.”

  “I know,” he said, kissing her on the forehead. “It was one of the few reasons I looked forward to going.”

  “How long were you interested in me? I mean, before we really talked?” Chloe asked, her face brightening.

  “A long time before I knew you were Mai.”

  “If I was human, what would you have done?”

  “The same thing I did with Keira Hendelson. And Halley Dietrich. Nothing. Not that I wanted to!” he added quickly when she raised her hand to hit him.

  Chloe backed down and began to pick at the fried rice again, trying to make the two chopsticks work. “Do you hate humans? The way Sergei seems to?”

  Alyec shrugged. “It’s hard to hate six billion people all at once. Sometimes it is difficult being in both worlds. Like …” He shifted position as he really thought about it. Chloe tried to remain as casual and silent as she could; this was the most he had ever really talked about his feelings. “Like I’ll be listening to music or whatever at my locker, slapping hands with someone, and that will all be fine—but at night, you know, when the sun sets, I get that urge to run, explore the night, chase after something. For a while I can be tricked into thinking I am completely human, but there is no denying that other, completely different world we inhabit.”

  “Why aren’t you in danger going to school like this? By yourself? Won’t the Tenth Blade try to kill you?”

  Alyec shook his head and stuffed another dumpling into his mouth, the moment of reflection over.

  “We’re at kind of a stalemate. If they out-and-out killed me, it would mean instant retribution from the Mai. War. Newbies, prideless Mai, don’t count—like you before we got you. Because technically you are not under any protection. In this ‘modern’ world, the Tenth Blade doesn’t tend to attack members of a pride unless they hurt or kill a human.”

  “It all seems a little …” Chloe looked for a word, thinking of The Godfather. “Archaic.”

  Alyec shrugged. “How is this fantastic bedroom of yours I’m not allowed to see?”

  He wasn’t changing the subject because it made him uncomfortable; he was really just done with it and moving on to other things.

  “Oh, it’s pretty cool. Usually after everyone’s gone to sleep, all the girls come over in their skimpy jammies and we have pillow fights until we’re all basically naked.”

  Alyec’s eyes lit up for a moment, and then his face fell. “You’re lying,” he realized.

  “You think?” She popped another dumpling into her mouth. It was scallion and vegetable, and she was secretly relieved she still liked that kind. Chloe had been experiencing a quiet but growing fear that she would become a complete carnivore the more time she spent with the Mai. “Sergei wanted to give me a real room, like with a four-poster bed and all this wonderful stuff, but I asked to stay in the first room. You know, the little gable they let me nap in. I love it. Everything is sort of dusty pink and green. It’s the bedroom I’ve always dreamed of,” she said shyly. “Kind of like living in my own version of a Gothic novel.”

  “Like The Scarlet Letter?”

  It was what they had been reading in English when Chloe was forced to disappear. She felt a brief pang of sadness as she thought of Mr. Mingrone sketching little A’s on the blackboard.

  “No, more like, I don’t know, Wuthering Heights or something.”

  “Oh. I think we have to read that next year.” He gathered up his garbage neatly and stuffed it into one of the plastic bags the delivery came in, making sure to put lids back on the little dishes of soy sauce so they wouldn’t spill. Chloe watched him, amused. When he was through, Alyec leaned over and kissed her gently on the lips. “Goodbye, Chloe King. I’ll see you the evening after tomorrow?”

  “What’s tomorrow? A prom committee meeting?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.” He winked and kissed her again. He squeezed her hand and left.

  Chloe sighed, watching him go, then began to blow out all the candles. Her evening of romance—her couple of hours of normalcy—were over. She gathered up the bags of garbage and went in search of the kitchenette to throw them out. For a moment she happily imagined that this was what college life would be like: a hard day of classes, a cheap date in the dorm’s common room, and then borrowing incense from a next-door stoner to refresh the place after complaints from vegan neighbors.

  Chloe wondered if she would ever get to college at this rate. How was she going to make up for the time lost in school? Maybe they had a copy of The Scarlet Letter in the library somewhere. Maybe she could home-school herself. Apparently Kim did.

  She started to open a door in a nearby hall, thinking it was the kitchenette, but stopped cold when she realized what she was looking at. The room was large and mostly dark, lit by candles and oil lamps. The floor was made up of thick tiles of rough-hewn sandy stone, and in the back was sort of a stage, set higher than the floor. On this stage were two huge statues like the bookends she had seen in the library. The left one was a human with a lioness’s head. On the right sat a giant black Egyptian stone cat, an earring in her right ear and a smile on her kitty lips. Separating the stage from the rest of the room was what could only be described as a moat, a thin rectangle of water stretching the width of the room.

  Kim was kneeling at a little altar in front of those statues, her head down. She wore a rough, off-white robe and was murmuring quietly. Except for the three-dimensional perspective, it could have been a painting off an ancient Egyptian wall.

  Chloe tried not to make any noise but accidentally scuffed her sneaker against the lintel. Kim’s black cat ears flicked back in response to the noise, althoug
h the rest of her didn’t move.

  “Sorry,” Chloe whispered.

  Kim seemed to finish whatever she was doing and stood up.

  “Didn’t mean to disturb you …”

  “No problem,” Kim said easily. She slipped out of the robe and hung it on a rack near the door, where similar robes were hung, in different sizes. Under it she wore her usual outfit: jeans, a sweater, no socks or shoes.

  “What’s, uh, what’s all that about?” Chloe asked as casually as she could, jerking her thumb at the two statues, afraid of the answer she would get.

  “Those are our gods, Bastet and Sekhmet,” Kim said seriously. “Two forms of the same goddess.”

  “Does, uh … everybody …?” She tried to imagine Alyec kneeling in a white robe to ancient, foreign statues and couldn’t.

  “Not to the extent that I do.”

  Kirn’s ears twitched occasionally toward various noises in different rooms.

  Chloe had to ask the question. Well, I am a cat, after ally and curiosity hasn’t killed me yet….

  “Uh—I hope you don’t mind me asking, but Sergei said you thought we all used to, uh, look like you, but how did you—?”

  “I follow the path of the ancients,” Kim responded, a little primly.

  Chloe just raised her eyebrows and shook her head; it meant nothing to her.

  “If you were to keep your claws out and your night vision constant for many years, you would look the same,” the other girl responded, running a hand claw over one of her ears. “It takes a lot of concentration and meditation and prayer.”

  “O-kay.” Meditation? Prayer? What have I gotten myself into?

  Chloe’s parents had never been particularly devout: her mother had been raised Episcopalian and her father Catholic, but they didn’t take her to church on a regular basis. She had never really had to think about religion before, not apart from occasionally joining Amy for Passover or remembering to watch her mouth around Paul’s more religious Baptist relatives. After her father left, Chloe’s mom tried taking her to Anglican churches like she had gone to with her own more religious mother, but this was halfhearted and only lasted until Chloe put her foot down as a dissenting teenager.

  Chloe focused back on the present and Kim, the weird girl before her with the cat aspect. What would her Episcopalian mother think now?

  “I don’t know if lean….”

  “Many have the same problem,” Kim said soothingly. “They aren’t accustomed to worshiping any god at all. But they are Mai and always choose a path. The way of Bastet is maternal love, the home, and physical, emotional, and spiritual nourishment.” She pointed to the cat.

  “Oh, like Olga?” Chloe remembered Sergei telling her. “How she takes care of everyone?”

  Kim nodded. “Sekhmet is the side of war, disease, violence, protection.” She pointed to the enthroned statue.

  “Oh.” Chloe thought uncomfortably of Sergei. “She’s, uh … evil?”

  “Neither goddess is evil” Kim said patiently. “They just are. Sekhmet is the goddess of our soldiers, the kizekh, and she defends her young fiercely. Like a mother lion protects her cubs.”

  “Who else follows her? Besides Sergei and the ‘kizekh,’ I mean?” Chloe laughed uneasily, thinking of Alyec and unable to imagine him following either.

  “That is a question you would do well to consider,” Kim suggested. It would have sounded patronizing from anyone else, but with her alien, emotionless green eyes it sounded wise. “Before you make your own choice.”

  “Who do you follow?”

  “Both. They are two sides of the same coin, a wholeness that is too often forgotten.”

  The lights in the room flickered. For just a moment it was as if a wind blew through the room, a zephyr from another, forgotten land. Chloe and Kim stood a few feet apart, and as their shadows seized and danced in the wavering light, Chloe noticed how frail the girl seemed, almost hollow. An orphan, like me. Without even an adopted family. No wonder she threw herself into these ancient rituals and history—it was a way of connecting herself with something, of fitting in with their people, even if it was only their past.

  I may be a newcomer, but she’s always been a loner.

  “Huh. Hey, can you show me where the kitchen is? I got a little lost.” Kim nodded and padded silently out before her, beckoning her to follow. “And can I ask you another question?”

  “By all means.”

  “So there are very few of us left, we have these weird catlike characteristics, the Tenth Blade watches our every move….”

  Kim was nodding. She opened a door and Chloe filed after her into the small, linoleum-white room she had been looking for.

  “Why don’t the rich ones just pool resources and buy some frickin’ huge tract of land somewhere—like, a hundred acres or whatever—and have everyone just move there and live happily ever after? Just a little independent Mai survivalist community where everyone can show their claws and hunt and use the litter pan or whatever?”

  Kim ignored her last comment. “Some say it is our curse,” she answered simply.

  Chloe dumped the garbage in the can that was under the sink, then opened the fridge, looking for dessert. “What?”

  “Our curse.” In a fluid movement Kim leapt backward up onto the counter next to the sink and sat with her legs dangling down. It was one of the most human things Chloe had seen her do. “Five thousand years ago or so, the stories say that a Mai girl and human boy fell in love in the Upper Kingdom. Egypt,” she added.

  There was a lot of meat and cold cuts in the fridge. Good-looking stuff. Also weird pickled stuff, bottles and bottles of beets.

  “Neither side was particularly thrilled with this, but it wasn’t unheard of—back then. One night, when the two lovers were supposed to meet, the girl, Neferet, was ambushed by friends of the boy’s family and killed. Possibly raped and tortured,” she added, almost as an afterthought. “In retaliation the Mai called upon their brethren and set out in the night, every night, until the moon was new again and disappeared from the sky, and killed every human within a twenty-mile radius.”

  “Is this all true?”

  Kim shrugged. “That is what is written. The gods cursed the Mai. Even Bastet and Sekhmet abandoned their own children. Never again would human and Mai be able to love, and the Mai would be driven from their homeland for thousands of years, unable to settle down until the wrong had been righted.”

  “And again I ask: Is this true?”

  “It doesn’t matter whether or not a thing is true if it is what people believe,” Kim said philosophically. “Every time we seem to find a new home, something happens. Ugarit. Ur. Ashur. All destroyed, and we were forced to move on. The Diaspora from Abkhazia was only one of the latest examples. This particular pride used to have its headquarters in LA. Then our home was destroyed by the earthquake in ’94. These things keep happening, to the point where even the skeptical become disheartened and draw the conclusion that we really aren’t meant to live anywhere permanently until we have overcome our past.”

  Chloe was listening, but she also noticed an area of the fridge that was locked off, like a strongbox. She raised an eyebrow at Kim and pointed at it.

  “It’s where the adults keep the alcohol,” she answered in the same even tone in which she had been telling the stories.

  “I could really do with a beer,” Chloe said wistfully. “’Beer’ in ancient Egyptian, as well as the old language of the Mai, is henqet,” Kim said, a little pedantically. Then she raised her hand and extended her index finger, pointing her beautiful, thick black claw. She hopped off the counter and bent over to the fridge, inserting her claw into the lock. After fiddling with it for a moment, there was a click and the door swung open.

  Inside were a bunch of frosty bottles of Rolling Rock as well as Michelob Ultras, Sam Adamses, and Anchor Steams.

  Chloe took two out, offering one to Kim.

  “To the Mai,” she said, clinking a bottle.

&n
bsp; “To Bastet and Sekhmet,” Kim answered back, flipping the top off neatly with her thumb claw.

  As Chloe downed the wheaty bubbles, she decided that she was beginning to really like this freaky girl.

  On Wednesday, Paul was still thinking about what Amy had told him when he’d pulled his wallet out of his locker, ready to go across the street for comic day. Alyec had also been at his locker, down the hall. Paul had felt a wave of embarrassment, almost afraid that the other guy saw him. He had to do something about this.

  As casually as he could, he strolled down the hallway toward the exit, past Alyec.

  “Hey, Ruskie, you coming?” he called.

  “Yeah, hang on.” Alyec tossed his blond hair out of his face as he pulled his head out of the bottom of his locker, then slammed the door and joined Paul. “Did you read this month’s Wizard? I think I might want to try Heroes of the Adamantine Age.”

  Paul shrugged. “I really like the writer, but I can’t stand Dave Applebee’s art. It’s so out of proportion. All muscles and tits and calves, like it’s still 1982 or something.”

  “It’s nostalgic!”

  They walked out of school in silence. Paul had to walk slowly: Chloe’s boyfriend was favoring one leg. Halfway to the store Alyec gave Paul a sideways look.

  “Your girlfriend’s a complete psycho,” he said without malice.

  “I know.” Paul sighed, relieved that the other boy had brought it up first. “I’m sorry about that.”

  “Not your fault. She has a pretty wild imagination, though.”

  He should let it go. He knew it. He should follow his own advice. But he had to ask.

  “Is Chloe safe? Just tell me that,” he said quietly.

  Alyec rolled his eyes. “You too? Are both of you crazy conspiracy freaks or something?”

  Paul stopped and ticked off points with his fingers. “Weird stuff has been going on with Chloe since, you know, you and Chloe. She was fighting for her life on Friday, and suddenly you develop a limp at the same time. And you’re her boyfriend, and you don’t seem that concerned that she’s been ‘out sick’ for the last three days. In fact, you don’t seem very worried at all…. Which leads me to believe that you know something about what’s going on and that she’s okay.”