Exposed (18 page)

“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 ticking 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
jazz 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 waving 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. He 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 drop-dead 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.”