Nine Lives of Chloe King

by Liz Braswell

  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.

  Two

  “What do we do now?”

  Behind them another helicopter was circling the bridge. They had been hovering like pissed-off dragon-flies 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.

  Three

  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. …

  Alyec’s famous barking laugh echoed down the hall. Amy looked: he was slamming his locker closed and wavin
g goodbye to his friends Keira and Halley—very non-Chloe friends—and balancing his flute case on top of his notebook. Off for a music lesson.

  Amy realized this was her perfect opportunity to thoroughly interrogate the untrustworthy jerk. She snuck along twenty feet behind him, keeping her back to the lockers, Harriet the Spy style. She needn’t have bothered, though: Alyec was too busy waving to people in the main corridor to notice her.

  As soon as he turned down toward the music wing, Amy double-timed her tiptoeing until she was almost four feet behind him. She didn’t have to do it too quickly, though: he was dragging one of his legs a little. What is that, some kind of new cool-guy walk?

  She smoothed her big dark red hair back and put on her best frowny face. She wished she could do the cold-blue-eyed thing—she had the eyes for it, after all—but somewhere between her freckles and “aristocratic” nose, she tended to come across more goofy and pleasant than aloof.

  “You could just, I don’t know, talk to me like a normal person,” Alyec said causally, without looking behind him.

  After she got over her surprise, Amy was so angry at being caught out she almost stamped her foot.

  “Where’s Chloe?!” she demanded. “I swear to God, Alyec Ilychovich, if you fucking hurt her …!”

  A couple of students toting big, cumbersome instrument cases turned the corner, giggling and holding sheet music.

  Alyec easily scooped an arm around Amy and pulled her into an empty practice room. He put his hand over her mouth and held a finger to his own. They stood there, his ice blue eyes locked on her own blue ones, insisting that she stay quiet until the two other students had passed.

  He watched out the door to see if anyone else was coming and then took his hand away from her mouth.

  “If you’re not going to talk to me normally,” Alyec said with a faint smile, “at least don’t go throwing a psycho fit about it in public.”

  The room was mostly dark, on an inside wing with no windows. It was small and cluttered with the sort of desks and chairs small groups of students would sit in while practicing. In just a few minutes some teacher would come in and flip on the lights and the next period would begin. But for now it was just the two of them, and they were very alone. Alyec’s chiseled-perfect face was inches from Amy’s.

  “You … jerk!” Amy lifted up her foot to stamp on his toes. He very neatly spun her away so she was at arm’s length.

  “She is home sick today, that is all,” he said patiently.

  That was what all the teachers had said when Amy had asked them, too.

  “I know she said she was safe, but I saw what happened on the bridge,” Amy said, sticking out her chin.

  Alyec’s blue eyes widened, and for once he didn’t have a comeback.

  “What’s all this about?” she demanded. “Why was someone trying to kill Chloe? Twice? You know. I know you know.”

  He opened his mouth, looking for something to say. “She really is just sick at home. With her mother,” he repeated lamely.

  There was a long, tense moment between them, Amy glaring at him, daring him to lie again. He finally looked away.

  Amy slammed her fist up into his stomach.

  “Jerk!” she said again, stamping out into the hallway as he leaned over, hand to his belly. She knew she couldn’t have done any real damage with her small wrists and the “artist’s hands” that Chloe always made fun of, but at least he looked surprised. Amy spun around.

  “Chloe is my best. Friend. Ever” she hissed. “If anything happens to her because of you, I’m getting my cousin Steve to beat the living shit out of you—and anyone else you know!”

  She turned and left, adrenaline—if not exactly triumph—ringing in her ears.

  Four

  Chloe was snoozing, The History of the Mai resting on her lap, its old leather cover making her sneeze occasionally in her sleep. This was her second time trying to get through the dense text since she’d arrived, and the second time it had put her promptly to sleep.

  She was dreaming again. This time a cat as large as a person walked toward her quietly. Chloe waited for it to tell her something useful or do something….

  “Am I disturbing you?” it said.

  Chloe jumped, finally awake. She was not dreaming. The weird and ghostly visage that had terrified her the night before was standing patiently before her. That’s just Kim; she’s a freak, Alyec had said.

  And boy, was he right.

  She was a skinny and oddly built girl, willowy and sleek. Her hair was shorter than Chloe’s, shiny, full, and black—almost blue-black, almost Asian. She had high cheekbones.

  And velvety black cat ears.

  Big ones. The size they would be if a cat’s head were blown up to human proportions.

  Her eyes were an unreal green, slit like a cat’s, completely alien and lacking the appearance of normal human emotion. She wore a normal black tunic-length sweater and black jeans. She was barefoot; her bony toes had claws at the end and little tufts of black fur. Chloe couldn’t help thinking about hobbits, except the girl was dropdead gorgeous. She seemed about Chloe’s age, but it was hard to tell.

  “Uh, no, I was supposed to be reading anyway,” Chloe said, running a hand over her face, trying not to stare.

  “I’m afraid I gave you a bit of a scare when you arrived. I’m sorry—I do not usually expect, new, ah, people to be wandering around late at night.”

  “Hey, uh, no problem. My bad.” Chloe kept on trying to look elsewhere, not sure what to say, still trying not to stare.

  “I am—”

  “Kim, yeah, Alyec told me.”

  The other girl looked annoyed. “My name is Kemet or Kem, not Kim. No one calls me that, though, thanks to people like Alyec.” She sighed, sinking gracefully into the chair next to Chloe. “Kemet means ‘Egypt.’ Where we are from originally, thousands of years ago.”

  Chloe made a note to ask her about that later, but something else intrigued her more.

  “Is that your given name?”

  “No.” Kim stared at the floor. “My given name is Greska.”

  “Oh.” Chloe tried not to smile.

  “You can see why I wanted to change it.”

  “Absolutely.”

  There was a moment of silence. Kim was looking into Chloe’s face as curiously as Chloe was trying to avoid staring at the other girl.

  “So we’re from Egypt originally?” Chloe asked, trying to break Kim’s icy, blinkless gaze. She closed the book. “I … uh … hadn’t even gotten that far.”

  “We’re first recorded, or history first mentions us there: ’Beloved of Bastet and guarded by Sekhmet.’” Kim took the book up and flipped to a page with a map on it and an inscription in hieroglyphs. “We were created by her, according to legend.”

  Chloe didn’t know where to begin with her questions—Created by? Ancient legends? Kim is my age and she can read ancient Egyptian writing?

  “Most of us in this pride are from Eastern Europe—”

  “Wait, ’pride’?”

  “Yes.” The girl looked up at her coolly. If she’d had a tail, it would have been thumping impatiently. “That is the congregation our people travel in. Like lions.”

  “And Sergei is the leader of the … Pride?”

  “No, just this one in California. There are four in the New World. Well, were. The one in the East is also primarily made up of Eastern European Mai.” Kim flipped a few pages and showed another map with statistics and inscriptions, lines and arrows originating from Africa and pointing toward different places: migration routes to lower Africa, Europe, and farther east. “The pride in New Orleans tends to be made up of Mai who stayed in sub-Saharan Africa the longest. They like the heat,” she added with a disapproving twitch of her nose.

  “And the fourth one?”

  “It was … lost,” Kim said diffidently. “Anyway, we have been driven all over the world, away from our homes. Our pride managed to live in Abkhazia for several hundred years aft
er we left the Middle East for good.” She pointed to a little area shaded pink to the northwest of Russia, on the Black Sea. “The people there remained polytheistic long after the Roman Empire declined, Christianity swept the world, and Baghdad was destroyed by the Mongols.”

  “I get the feeling that there’s a ‘but’ in here somewhere. …”

  “Many Abkhazians were driven out in the middle of the nineteenth century to Turkey by domestic warfare with the Georgians. We got caught up in it and families separated, some staying, some fleeing, some going to the Ukraine or St. Petersburg. And then again, not so long ago, just when some started to move back and reunite with lost branches, there was new violence.”

  She put the book down and twitched her nose again—more like a rabbit than a cat, Chloe decided. It seemed to signal a change in emotion.

  “I’m an orphan, just like you,” the girl continued bluntly. “My parents were killed or separated during the Georgian-inspired violence in 1988, before the Wall fell. They say I had … a sister …,” she said slowly, looking at Chloe with hope. “A year older than me. When I saw you come in, I thought we looked alike—and … maybe …”

  Maybe a little, except for the ears, was Chloe’s first, defensive reaction. If you took away the ears, they actually did look a little similar: dark hair, fair skin, light eyes, high cheekbones.

  What if it were true? Chloe had always wanted a sibling, especially a sister; Amy was the closest she had, but it still wasn’t quite the same, like someone you could whisper to in the middle of the night or talk about your crazy parents with. Someone who you could scream at when she borrowed your favorite piece of clothing without telling you and then brought it back reeking of cigarette smoke or just plain ruined.

  Someone who could tell you it was okay when you suddenly grew claws.

  So maybe she’s a little freaky, but a sister is a sister. …

  “There wasn’t any mention of siblings when my parents adopted me,” Chloe said gently. “My parents told me they asked—they kind of wanted siblings to raise together.”

  “Ah, Slavic bureaucracy. Who knows what they recorded and what they didn’t?”