“Well, you don’t look like anyone I know—but that’s even better. A new face is a good thing around here.” He flicked her hair back in a paternal fashion. “And so pretty, too!” He chuckled. “We certainly are lucky to have you. I am Sergei Shaddar, leader of the Pride. And pleased as anything you have joined us.”
Leader of the Pride? Sergei Shaddar? Suddenly it all clicked: Sergei, Alyec’s distant relative, who hadn’t helped his family emigrate. Owner of the mansion Alyec had brought her to. This mansion. It was all coming together.
“I have sent her records on to the department,” Olga said softly.
“Blood work?”
The woman shook her head. “There is no need unless we find some sort of likely jumping-off point.”
“A shame. I like the scientific stuff,” he confided to Chloe with a grin. “It is so modern. A drop of blood and we know who your parents are! If we knew who your parents were, that is,” he added. “So many orphans,” he said sadly. “So few whole families left.”
“I’m sorry?” Chloe said, trying to understand what exactly he was talking about.
“I’ll go,” Olga said, nodding—almost deferentially—to Sergei and backing out so that she faced him the entire time. She closed the door behind her.
“Chloe.” Sergei put a meaty hand on her own. His short fingers suddenly developed claws, much thicker and shorter than hers. He pressed them against the back of her hand, indenting the skin but not breaking it, and looked at her seriously. “You are a daughter of the Kings of the Hunt. Goddesses were your ancestors. You are Mai. That is what we are called.”
“Mai?” Chloe couldn’t tear her eyes from his claws and touched them, picking up his hand and turning it over, staring at it in wonder. Sergei let her without questioning.
“People of the Lions. The Desert Hunters. Children of Bastet and Sekhmet.”
Chloe vaguely recognized the last two names or at least Bastet—that was the cat pendant Amy always wore. “We’re … Egyptian? I thought everyone here was from, like, Eastern Europe or something.”
“No, originally we’re from Egypt and other parts of Africa. But then again, isn’t everyone?” He chuckled. “Our race is thousands of years old, Chloe. We are gifted and different—and there are very few of us left.”
“How did you find me?” Chloe felt a little embarrassed asking; he was giving her the lowdown on their history and she was all like. Okay, but back to me.
“There was no way of knowing for certain you were one of us.” Sergei shrugged. He pulled his hands from her and waved them around as he spoke; the claws made little whistling noises in the air. They slowly retracted back into his fingers. “Usually we … show our true nature at adolescence, fourteen or fifteen or so. Alyec mentioned that you seemed … different, and when we looked up your records, we found out that you were adopted from the Soviet Union—Abkhazia, to be exact. Then we watched you to make sure. Alyec was told to intervene and instruct you in secrecy when things started getting complicated with the Rogue and the Tenth Blade.”
A thousand questions were whirling in Chloe’s mind.
“Why didn’t Alyec just ask or something?” she demanded.
Sergei gave her a patient, pitying look. “Chloe King, if you were already upset by things that were going on with you and someone just said, ‘Hey, you’re secretly a lion woman, there’s a whole bunch of us here in San Francisco, join us,’ what would you have done?”
Freaked out. She nodded slowly.
“We would have speeded up things a lot more if we had known that Alexander Smith was after you and that you were dating a member of the Tenth Blade.”
“We weren’t dating,” Chloe mumbled without thinking.
“What?”
“We weren’t really dating,” Chloe said more loudly. “He wouldn’t even kiss me.”
“Of course not.” Sergei nodded as if this were the most obvious thing in the world. Chloe raised her eyebrow.
“Humans and the Mai can’t—ah, how shall I say this. Uh, mate,” the older man said, coughing in embarrassment. “It kills them. Like we are toxic.”
Xavier! The guy she’d picked up at that club the night before her sixteenth birthday. They had made out in the parking lot, and when Chloe felt herself almost overcome with desire, she had left and gone home. Days later she went back to his apartment to see him: he was almost dead, covered in sores where her fingers had raked down his back. Chloe had even called an ambulance for him anonymously.
“Oh my God—” Chloe covered her mouth with her hand. “I made out with a guy at a club, and he totally had to go to the hospital….”
Sergei raised his eyebrows.
“Is he going to die?” she whispered.
“Probably not, if you just kissed him,” he said slowly. “But keep this in mind for the future.”
Thank God I didn’t kiss Brian, Chloe thought, and then quickly remembered that she had no intention of kissing Brian ever again. Or seeing him. Or thinking about him, she thought. It had been a great relationship until the whole revealing-he-was-a-member-of-the-Tenth-Blade-thing. Chloe went over the facts in her head again; she couldn’t help it. He’d claimed he was trying to save her from the Rogue at the fight on the bridge—but some of his shuriken had come perilously close to her own head. And then there was the one that he’d neatly buried in Alyec’s leg when they were running away…. He’d said he was trying to stop them. To protect them from Tenth Bladers hidden in the Marin Headlands. But he never had liked Alyec….
And now Chloe began to understand why.
“Anyway, think of it, Chloe! You have a real family now—people who are related to you by blood and who share your heritage! And you know what?” He pounded his fist on the palm of his other hand, causing Chloe to jump back. “I’ll sponsor you. You can’t live here all the time—”
“What about my mother? When can I go back?” Chloe didn’t want to offend Sergei, but all of this family talk did bring Chloe’s mind back to her mom.
Sergei sighed and shook his head. “Not anytime soon, I’m afraid. The Tenth Blade is trying to track you down. They believe you killed Alexander Smith; the streets are crawling with their agents. If you leave, you will be dead before you get halfway across town.”
“Can I call her at least?” Chloe thought it might be best to ask this before admitting that she already had….
“I’m sorry, Chloe, but no. Even if the Tenth Blade hasn’t tapped her lines, they are almost certainly monitoring her every move. And if your mom called the police, then her line is definitely tapped.”
“But … won’t she be suspicious? Where does she think I am? Oh my God—what are my teachers going to think when I don’t show up on Monday?”
Sergei ticked off his fingers. “Your mother is being informed that you are part of a federal witness protection program and that she will be allowed to speak with you as soon as it’s safe. Your school has been informed that you have come down with mono and will be out for a while.” Sergei smiled. “We have even given them an address to send your homework,” he added, satisfied with himself.
Chloe flinched. Did it have to be mono? The kissing disease? Couldn’t it have been Ebola or mad cow or something you don’t get from sucking face?
Sergei fixed her with unamused eyes, noticing her reaction. “It is the most logical debilitating sickness for a teenager to come down with.”
“It’s just that everyone’s going to think, well, whatever …” Chloe said, resigned.
Everything sucked. She couldn’t talk to her mom; she couldn’t even tell her mom the truth; the whole school would be laughing at her; and she was stuck here for a while. It wasn’t that she wanted to leave, precisely, but she wanted the option. And then there was the idea of an entire city blanketed with men who wanted to kill her. Whose purpose was to kill her. Her, Chloe King. Sixteen and harmless.
“I didn’t kill him!” she said, the anger in her voice surprising even her. “When he slipped, I tried to h
elp him back up!”
“Why would you do that?” Sergei asked, genuinely surprised.
“I don’t know, I just … I don’t know. It seemed like the right thing to do.” Chloe shrugged helplessly; she couldn’t explain it. It’s just what you do. “Who are these people anyway?”
“The Tenth Blade exists solely to wipe us out,” Sergei said, putting his hands back on her shoulders, a black and serious look in his eyes. “They believe the Mai are evil, sent by the devil or some such nonsense. They only tolerate us here because it is harder to kill people out of hand in America than elsewhere….” His eyes glazed as he thought about another time and place. Then he refocused. “And as long as we don’t draw too much attention to ourselves, we are more or less safe.” He spat viciously. “We have to hide like rats here.” He waved his hand around the room, a room that Chloe personally didn’t think would be out of place in the White House, much less a place for rats. “They fear our power. We are stronger, faster, and quieter than they—we should be revered, not annihilated.”
He was silent for a moment, seething.
“Well, I’m sure Olga is having someone make up a real room for you,” Sergei said, lighthearted again in a flash. “I have to go to a meeting now, but you should go to the library and learn the history of our people. Simone and Ivan will be notified about our newest resident. You have complete run of the place. Goodbye, Chloe, and welcome!” He gave her one last bear hug and then ushered her out, pushing her lightly on the back.
“Wait! One more question!” Chloe begged.
“Yes?” He paused just as she was over the threshold.
“Why are so many people here on a Saturday?”
“This is real estate!” he said as he began shutting the door behind her. “We never really close!”
She just stood there, dazed for a moment, thinking about everything Sergei had said. Blood tests? Goddesses? Thousands of years old? A fax beeped somewhere, breaking her reverie. This was a strange place for ancient hunters to gather.
The girl in the ugly, sparkly T-shirt told Chloe how to get to the library and then ignored her.
Chloe wandered off. She felt disoriented and ghostly in this half-modern, half-old place; not properly belonging but somehow connected with it. There was no one around she knew, nothing familiar, yet she was probably safer than she had been anywhere for the past month. A refugee in the home of the people who really were her family. Her … pride … It was all too much, yet so far they all seemed painfully normal. Olga with her cell phone and Sergei with his businessman’s attitude. Chloe realized she was expecting them to act secretive and weird, like vampires.
And to not be involved with stuff like real estate.
The library, like everything in the mansion, was spectacular and perfect and right out of an English costume drama: built-in wall-to-wall bookshelves, infinitely high windows between parenthetical pairs of infinitely long velvet drapes that were just a touch faded. She walked along one immaculate bookcase, looking at the titles. Most of them were classics or encyclopedias—though there was a case devoted to modern books like Bridget Jones’s Diary. One shelf had a pair of bookends in the form of Egyptian cats—Bastet, Chloe realized, and it was the same one on Amy’s necklace, a house cat with a slight smile and an earring. The other was a lion with her teeth bared. In between the two were books with titles like The History of the Mai, Essays on Mai Origins, Res Anthro-Felinis. Chloe picked one up and flipped through the pages, already bored and intimidated by the old-fashioned font and paragraph-long sentences.
She sighed and threw herself into a chair.
“What do we do now?”
Behind them another helicopter was circling the bridge. They had been hovering like pissed-off dragonflies off and on since Friday night. Paul and Amy hoped that the National Guard had caught up to Chloe and whoever was attacking her and split them up—but almost a day had passed, and it didn’t look like there had been any resolution.
Paul thought he’d seen a body fall from the bridge, but he didn’t say anything about it to Amy.
“Well?” his girlfriend demanded again.
Paul sighed.
“I don’t know—what do you think we should do?”
“Call her mom …?” But even as she suggested it. Amy trailed off, knowing that it probably wasn’t the right thing to do—or, more importantly, that it wasn’t what Chloe would want. She ran her hands through her chestnut hair in exasperation, pulling on the roots. It was a leftover habit from when she was younger and tried to flatten her big, often frizzy hair every chance she got. “What do you think it was all about—really?”
They’d had this conversation several times in the last twenty-four hours, but somehow Amy was never satisfied with Paul’s answers.
“I don’t know. Drugs? Gangs? Some weird psycho game of tag?”
“Maybe it’s got to do with her real parents or something. Maybe she’s actually some sort of Russian Mafia princess.”
Paul gave her a lopsided smile. Silently they started to walk home, not holding hands or anything. Like they had in the old days, when the three of them were just good friends. Before Chloe almost died from falling off Coit Tower. Before she and Amy got into that weird little snit they were in for days—and had just patched up. Before Chloe started seeing Alyec and Brian …
“You know,” Paul said slowly, “a lot of weird shit has happened with Chloe in the last couple of months, don’t you think?”
Amy shrugged. “Seems to me she got her period and turned into a total bitch. For a while, at least,” she added hastily. Chloe might have been a bitch, but she was still Amy’s best friend, and she was still missing.
“No, it’s more than that.” Paul frowned, crinkling his long white forehead. “I mean like her fall and the bruises on her face and her random absences from school—not to mention being totally incommunicado about general Chloe life issues.”
“She was going to tell us everything,” Amy remembered. “On the bridge … She was just about to explain something….”
“…when that freak with knives showed up.” They looked at each other for a long moment.
“We were talking about her crush on Alyec when she jumped off Coit Tower,” Amy suddenly pointed out.
“She didn’t jump, she fell,” Paul said, surprised at the way Amy said that. She was the only person on the planet who probably knew Chloe better than he did, and it was a really weird thing to say about their friend. At no point in her life, even at her gothiest moments, had Chloe ever seemed the suicidal sort. A jackass, sometimes, but never suicidal. Jumping up onto the ledge to get more attention had been a little rash, but they had been drinking, and it wasn’t completely out of the range of typical Chloe behavior.
“Whatever,” Amy said quickly, dismissing it. “Her life started going crazy after that. I’ll bet it has something to do with him.”
“That’s insane. How could thinking about him have anything to do with getting mugged or whatever?” Paul asked. He tried not to laugh or smile but couldn’t stop his dark eyes from twinkling. Fortunately Amy wasn’t looking directly at him.
“No! Think about it.” She began counting off facts on the tips of her black glitter fingernails. “She was mugged right after we all split up at The Raven, then became a total hag when she started actually dating Alyec—and he’s Russian, just like her. Maybe he’s got her into something bad.”
“What about Brian, then?” Paul demanded. “As long as we’re accusing random people of having somehow screwed up Chloe’s life and sent assassins after her. Brian, the mysterious sort-of boyfriend who never kissed her, who isn’t in school, and, most importantly—who we’ve never seen?”
Amy stared at him with blank blue eyes, at a loss for an answer. He was about to add a few more salient facts that proved she was a complete wacko with insubstantial—crazy—arguments, but then he noticed Amy’s lips trembling and tears forming on her lower lids.
“She’ll be okay. The National Guard
is out there. We can call the police if you want or her mom later—let’s say if we haven’t heard from her in a few hours. Okay?”
Amy nodded miserably, and they continued walking home.
Amy looked into the bottom of her locker hopefully. Nope, nothing. She was always making cute little notes for Paul and slipping them into his locker. Sometimes they were quick scrawls—See you in English!—and sometimes they were really intricate things she made the night before with cloth and her glue gun and stuff.
Not. Once. Had he ever done the same for her. She didn’t want to outright ask—but how strongly did a girl have to hint? Now that she was finally dating a nice, nonpsycho boy, she figured she should cash in on some of the perks that were supposed to go along with it. She was being stupid, she knew, and selfish: Paul did all other kinds of nice boyfriendy things, like buying tickets ahead of time for movies they wanted to see and getting her a coffee at the café if she asked. And he would talk to her for hours on the phone about all sorts of things….
But once, just once, Amy wished someone would treat her exactly the way she wanted them to. All that stuff about the Golden Rule and karma and stuff—her do-gooding didn’t exactly seem like it was making its way back to her yet.
She closed the door dejectedly. Then she kicked it, hard enough to leave a dent with her steel-toed combat boots. Things were so up in the air and uncertain these days. Chloe was still gone. Amy cursed herself for not hearing the phone when she’d called; it had been jammed at the bottom of her backpack and she had been outside, looking for Chloe, of all people. Amy started checking her voice mail about a thousand times an hour, hoping to hear something from her friend, but nothing.
She was definitely worried about Chloe. No doubt about it.
But she also felt a little … left behind. It was like she had made the decision to go out with Paul and now all these strange and mysterious things were going on in Chloe’s life that Amy still wasn’t in on….
The Stolen Page 2
