by Liz Braswell
“I’m beginning to think that no one’s innocent of anything,” Chloe answered with a lopsided smile. “But at least I think I know where you stand.”
They were quiet for a moment. He didn’t let go of her hand. She cuddled into him and looked up at the sky again. She thought about their first real date, when they’d gone to the zoo, and she’d bought him a stuffed monkey, and they’d talked about all sorts of important things.
“How did your mother die?” she asked softly.
Brian squeezed her hand and then dropped it. He played with some pebbles on the roof before answering. “My father’s family has been in the Order since … well, since it was documented. All the way back to the Mayflower and England. Before that, actually. One time we were barons or princes or something in Italy. Royalty.” Chloe could tell that he was being modest and knew exactly what they were and wasn’t saying. “Italy … Christendom … knights … the Crusades … I don’t want to bore you with a history lesson.
“My mother’s family comes from Klamath Falls, Oregon,” he said with a smile. “My grandparents own a berry orchard.
“I guess like with any secret club, there are those who marry and don’t tell their husbands and wives about it and those who marry and do tell their husbands and wives about it. But my father went beyond all that. He encouraged my mom to become a part of it with him.
“I don’t think she really wanted to, but that may be my own subjective memory of it. I don’t remember her getting involved much when I was little; I do remember her disappearing off with Dad later on, for long meetings and trips away, and practicing in the weapons room.”
He threw a pebble down and stared at his empty hand. “She was killed on a mission. When I was twelve. They were raiding a Mai hideout in LA. She was shot in the head. Her face … It was a closed-casket funeral.”
Chloe sucked in her breath. It explained a lot about Brian.
“One of … ” What did she say? Us? The Mai? Them? “She was killed by a Mai?”
Brian laughed angrily. “That’s what I thought for years. You’ve been living with them for a while now, Chloe. Have you ever seen someone with a weapon?”
She thought about the kizekh Ellen and Dmitri. She couldn’t really remember what they carried.
“The Mai don’t use guns,” Brian hissed. “They almost never use any weapon with a blade, even. I didn’t realize this; I mean I knew it, but I didn’t put two and two together until a couple of years ago. My father let me believe it for years. … I finally found out the truth. She was killed by a random gang kid. He saw her gun, thought she was undercover or something, and let her have it.”
Chloe shuddered. There were no clouds above at that moment, just a hazy sky with a few brave stars cutting through like diamond-tipped blades.
“She was killed for a cause she didn’t even really believe in,” Brian finished. “By someone who wasn’t even involved.”
Chloe struggled, looking for something to say. “Why did your father want her to join so much?”
“Because he’s the head of the Order, Chloe.”
A thousand things made sense now. Why Brian hated his dad. Why Brian, though he questioned and didn’t approve of things the Order did, was still in it. He had been raised in the Order! It was all he had known his entire life. … Trying to leave it would be like Chloe leaving her mom and her friends and living an entirely new life, with new ideas and rules and people.
Yep. Exactly.
Chloe laughed quietly, a little crazily. Brian looked up at her, alarmed.
“My ‘adoptive’ father is the head of the Pride.”
Brian blinked at her for a moment, then laughed himself.
“Great. Just perfect,” he said. He put his arm around her and hugged her close to his side, a comforting gesture.
“Did you mean it before? On the phone?” Chloe asked softly. “Did you really mean you …?”
“Yes.” Brian closed his eyes, frowning. “I love you, Chloe.” It was obviously hard for him to say, for a million different reasons. “Absolutely.”
No one had ever said it to her before. Not outside of jokes, or out of friendship, or stupid grade school crushes. Not even Alyec; there was always humor around the word when he used it, like “love of my life”; inflated, expressive, hyperbolic, and not really serious at all.
It made her giddy.
But how did she feel?
She didn’t want to think about it right then. It might spoil the moment.
“But we can’t—”
“Your lips are poison, Chloe,” he said with a smile, knowing exactly how dramatic it sounded. “Your tears, your tongue, your saliva, your sweat … they would all kill me with extended contact.”
Chloe leaned back, putting her head on his shoulder and his arms around her waist. Surely that was safe.
“We should go soon,” he whispered in her ear, not quite touching it. She shivered at the feeling. “If we want to meet your friends on time.”
“’We’?”
“I’m not leaving you alone until you’re by yourself on the way home again. Your friends … They mean well, but they leave a trail as wide as the Grand Canyon.” Chloe smiled, thinking of Amy and Paul trying to be stealthy. “Amy even found my e-mail address somehow. I told her to stay away, that it was all dangerous for them.”
“She won’t listen,” Chloe said dreamily, pushing herself up against him more. She kissed his shoulder. “Let’s just stay another minute or two?” she pleaded. “It’s such a pretty night out. This is … perfect.”
Brian opened his mouth to say something: that there were a thousand reasons why this wasn’t perfect, starting with the fact that she was being hunted and ending with the fact that their relationship was ultimately doomed. But he swallowed whatever he was about to say.
“All right,” he said, holding her more tightly. When she shivered, he took the scarf from around his neck and wrapped it around hers.
Chloe smiled and closed her eyes, but a single tear leaked out down her cheek.
She was supposed to meet Amy and Paul in the street behind Café Eland, private but close enough to the public where there couldn’t be an attack. Brian kept assuring Chloe that the Order of the Tenth Blade would never hurt a human, that they took oaths to protect them, but Chloe only knew one thing: These days, wherever she went, trouble followed.
Brian shadowed her silently. She only heard or saw evidence of his presence once or twice along the way: a scuffed pebble in an alley, a shadow above. He was almost as adept at hiding as the Mai, and Chloe had the sneaking suspicion that the few times she thought she detected him, he was letting her.
She quickly checked out the coffee shop: 10:05, the back door was just swinging shut. In the summer the café put a couple of chairs out on the delivery dock in the back for its regular customers who knew they were there. Chloe scaled the fire escape of a building nearby and looked down.
Amy and Paul were there, Amy underdressed for the weather as always, stomping her feet, with her arms wrapped around some gigantic pink puffy coat that looked like it should be warm but obviously wasn’t. Paul was looking around, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, nervously tapping ashes onto the pavement below.
Something pulled inside Chloe, seeing her two friends from above. It was like in a book: she was apart, beyond them, not part of their story and lives. Before she could think any more along those lines, she dropped down neatly out of the sky in front of them.
“Holy shit,” Paul said. Chloe was gratified to see that he was actually capable of losing his cool: half of his hot chocolate went flying.
“Chloe!” Amy shrieked. Both Paul and Chloe gave her looks. “I mean, Chloe!” she whispered, then threw her arms around her friend.
“Hey,” Chloe said weakly, the air being pushed out of her. Paul ruffled her hair.
“What the hell, King,” he said, his voice thick with barely contained emotion. “Where have you been?”
“And w
hat are you wearing?” Amy asked, looking at the expensive jeans and long-sleeved black tee with Paris in gold grommets across it, the mismatched but beautiful scarf.
“Someone else’s stuff.” Chloe hopped back up on the rail that cordoned off the delivery area. The move was as smooth and graceful and impossible as when she’d landed in front of them.
“Uh,” Paul said, clearing his throat, not sure what else to say.
“It’s a long story. I only have a few minutes. Anybody get me a coffee?”
Amy managed to pull a venti out of one of the pockets in her pink coat; it hadn’t spilled at all. Chloe took it, slipped down from the rail, and slugged back several swallows gratefully. “Russians,” she began, “like really sweet and disgusting drinks.”
Then Chloe took a deep breath. There really was no simple way to say it.
“Okay. Here goes. My people, the Mai, are actually an ancient race of cat warriors. The Order of the Tenth Blade is a Knights-Templar-style organization that has been trying to wipe them out for the last five thousand years or so.”
Amy and Paul just looked at her.
“There is no Russian Mafia,” Chloe went on. “At least, not in this case. It’s a race war.”
“Okay …,” Amy said carefully, trying not to look around her to see if other people heard.
“I believe you,” Paul said in a tone that meant exactly the opposite.
Chloe knew her friends well enough to be pretty sure that they were trying to figure out the fastest, quietest way to get her to the psych ward at a hospital.
Chloe sighed and held up her hand.
“Okay, does this convince you?”
With a whisper-soft sslting noise, she extended her claws.
“Motherfuck,” Amy said, eyes widening like those of an anime character.
Paul grabbed Chloe’s hand and looked closely at the base of her claws, feeling around the tips of her fingers for prosthetics or a glove or something.
“I have foot claws, too,” Chloe said casually, trying not to laugh at their reactions. “And I think my eyes go all slitty—like diamonds—when I’m in the dark. I can see at night, you know.”
“I don’t believe …,” Paul said, not dropping her hand.
“Believe,” Chloe suggested sweetly. She pulled away from him and leapt straight up so that she landed standing on the rail. Then she bent over and stood on her hands, using her claws to clasp the metal. She did a couple of backflips.
“Okay, the über-nails thing I could question,” Amy finally said. “But the Chloe King I know could barely touch her toes.”
“This is completely fucked up,” Paul muttered with grudging admiration. “You’re just like Wolverine. It’s so unfair. I read comic books and you get the superpowers.”
Chloe sat down, took another slug of coffee, and told them everything. Starting from the personal: the night she beat up the mugger to the night Alyec took her to the Mai, with extra details on what happened after her friends left. “I knew we shouldn’t have abandoned you,” Amy said, hands on her hips. Then Chloe moved on to the historic and impersonal: as much as she knew about the Order of the Tenth Blade and the Mai and the history of the Mai (with many mental apologies to the book of the same name she’d never finished).
And she finally told the truth—all of the truths— about Alyec and Brian.
“I wish I had claws,” Amy said wistfully, running her fingers over them. “It’s like … your own personal defense system. You could go anywhere by yourself at night and not have to worry about rapists or muggers or anything.”
“No,” Chloe agreed, “only an entire organization whose sole purpose is to wipe out people like me.”
“That’s why they … your Mai … won’t let you out to see us?”
“Yeah, I tried to sneak out to see my mom a couple of weeks ago and was completely ambushed. I would have died if some of the kizekh hadn’t been trailing me.” Of course, now that she thought about it, she remembered that the man in the sweater had had handcuffs, not a garrote or daggers like the Rogue. Still, his intentions were obviously not good.
“So why don’t they just send you out with a group of them in the open?” Paul asked suspiciously.
“They have to keep a low profile.”
“Yeah? Or do they just want to cut you off from your past life? With your human friends and family?”
“They just want to keep me safe,” Chloe said uncertainly. The words that came out of her friends’ mouths were suspiciously similar to the ideas that had been forming in the back of her own head, in the murky area where the word cult had first caught her attention.
“It sounds like it all kind of sucks.” Amy sighed. “But I still want claws. Was this the reason you wanted a manicure that day?”
“Sort of.”
She told them about Xavier. How the night she’d fallen from the tower, she’d hooked up with a random guy and as a result, he’d almost died from where she’d clawed him on the back in the heat of passion. For some reason, it was far more difficult to talk about this to her two best friends than anything else. It was just sort of embarrassing. “So we can’t, like, have sex or do anything with normal humans, ’cause it kills them.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Paul said, thinking about it. “I’m sure you must have kissed someone, like in grade school, at a party, or as a joke or something.”
Chloe shrugged. “It has to do with the spit itself, I guess. A peck on the cheek doesn’t do anything. It’s more like tongue to tongue. It just started around when, well”—Chloe shot an apologetic look at Paul—“I finally got my period. It’s all about puberty, I guess.”
Paul looked deeply uncomfortable, though he tried his best to hide it.
“And your mom doesn’t know any of this?” Amy asked, amazed.
Chloe shrugged. “This has all been kinda recent, and it’s all kinda hard to believe. I was thinking about maybe trying to sneak over to see my mom tonight after you guys,” Chloe went on dully. “But smarter than last time. Not just, like, walking up to the front door.”
“Oh. Uh.” Amy and Paul exchanged another look. Paul cleared his throat again. “That’s another reason we wanted to see you, Chloe.”
“I think your mom’s missing,” Amy blurted. “I broke into your house about a week ago and it was like no one had been there for a while.”
Chloe stared at her, mind numb.
“We were going to call the police,” Paul began.
“I have to go home,” Chloe whispered, and then, without another word, she turned and ran.
“Wait! Chloe!” Amy called out to the figure disappearing into the night.
“Chloe!” came a new voice, masculine, from somewhere above them. “Chloe! Don’t go! It’s a trap! Chloe…!”
Paul and Amy looked at each other, then ran after their friend.
Chloe ran until her lungs shrieked from the cold air and lack of oxygen, until her insides stung with heart attack pain. Even with her Mai strength and speed, she was pushing herself far harder than she ever had. When a car blocked her way, she leapt, sinking her hand claws into its roof and pulling herself over it like a pole vaulter, leaving the driver with a horrible tearing sound in his ears and the image of rabid dogs and werewolf movies in his mind. She stuck to the streets and lower levels, not wanting to waste any time with the sort of stunts she usually enjoyed on her nighttime runs. She felt her foot claws trying to come out, straining at the fabric in her sneakers. On one landing, they finally pushed through the soles of her Sauconys, grabbing the dirt below her to push her forward.
Chloe ignored the shadows around her. She was far too fast a moving target this time to worry about an ambush. She was only concentrating on one thing: the nightmare that had kept her awake since the whole thing began. Bringing the violence that was now part of her life home, onto her mom.
She ran up the steps and unlocked the door, slamming it open, and threw herself in.
“Mom?” she called.
The air was stale, as Amy had suggested; there were no recent human movements, warmth, or smells in there except for her friend’s. None of her mom’s perfume, soap, or skin scent was less than a week old. And there was a rancid, rotting scent beneath everything, like the drain in the sink hadn’t been cleaned in a while.
Chloe flipped on the lights. Everything looked exactly the same as it had the last afternoon she’d been there, except for a few glasses that were put near the sink. Maybe when her mom had come home from work and found that note of Chloe’s—she looked around frantically. There it was, by the phone. Scribbled in her mom’s handwriting on it was Keira’s number under her name; Mrs. King had fully intended on checking up to see if her daughter really was where she said she was.
Hummus. Chloe realized what the sour smell was. She followed it to the fridge, where a clump of it trailed down the outside of the door. It was so unlike neat freak Anna King that Chloe felt her heart stop when she saw it. She opened the door and saw the open container of hummus, now molding.
On its surface, the word help had been sloppily inscribed.
Nineteen
I can’t believe this.
The first coherent thoughts Anna King was able to form as the drug wore off were incredulous and disbelieving. She opened her eyes to confirm what she was sure couldn’t be true.
She was tied to a chair. Just like out of the movies, she had come to, tied to a chair.
It was a very comfortable chair, more like a La-Z-Boy or lounger, and she wasn’t tied to it exactly like in the movies, but still. Her arms were belted onto the tops of the armrests—the chair had been neatly altered specifically for this purpose. Her feet were connected to each other by some sort of hobble, rendering it impossible for her to walk, much less get up, but that did not prevent her from being able to switch to more comfortable sitting positions.
She closed her eyes again, still sluggish and sleepy.
The drug was thick in her mouth, like a morning-after-Nyquil hangover but a thousand times worse. They’d given it to her after they’d slipped her out of the house. As soon as she opened the door, she knew something suspicious was up. Years of living in the city first by herself, and then later as a single mom, had made her sensitive to vibes. They were polite and the woman in the group had asked if they could come in. When Anna had said no, they’d somehow wound up inside anyway. She’d pretended she wasn’t scared, putting pieces of dinner away. They talked about her daughter, and the trouble Chloe might be in, and how they wanted to help. She’d written the word help in the hummus, inspired and terrified.
