The Nine Lives of Chloe King (28 page)

There it was again, those two names out of his mouth. Like he really was a close member of her life now, someone who had met her mom, taken her out on dates, and fed her chocolate during her period, and not someone she had done everything to keep her mom from meeting, who had taught her how to extend her claws, to climb trees, and run on rooftops at night.

Chloe put the phone in her back pocket and followed him out of the room.

Seven

Paul was happy
just staring at Amy.

They were at Café Eland, and his girlfriend was animatedly talking about her day. He never really got over how she
sparkled.
Chloe was pretty, too, but different. Sort of reserved, held closely inward. Though she would be the last to admit it, Chloe King was an introspective person, prone to occasional insight and moody sulks, which was why her semi-disappearance from his and Amy’s life—before her
real
disappearance three days ago—didn’t surprise or upset him as much as it did Amy.

But with Amy, what you saw was what you got. If she was feeling something, no matter what it was, you knew it immediately. There was no guessing her moods or mind games. And even if some of her ideas and leanings were passing beyond the border of eccentric and well into the country of the insane, at least she had amazing amounts of energy to put into it.

Her dark red hair—almost back to its natural color, Paul noted—was framing her face and bouncing gently as she waved her hands around and spoke excitedly. He looked deep into her beautiful marble blue eyes, smiling, his harelip scar barely tugging his skin.

“And
then
he put his hand over my mouth and dragged me into the room!”

She said this so loudly that not only did Paul come to, but half of the café stopped for a moment to listen.

“Wait, what?” He shook his head. He knew he should have been listening, but Amy talked a
lot.
All the time, in fact. He couldn’t help tuning out once in a while.

“Alyec!” she repeated with exasperation. “When I told him that he had better not have hurt Chloe. He
grabbed
me and dragged me into the music theory room.”

“Why did you do that? Why
would
you do that?”

“Blame the victim, why don’t you?” Amy huffed. “Typical male.”

Even though he was confused and impatient to find out exactly what had happened, Paul thought over his next words carefully. “Did he hurt you?”

“No,” Amy admitted grudgingly. “But he grabbed my arm and put his hand over my mouth!”

“Did he threaten you?”

“Yes!”

Paul waited, staring steadily at her with his dark brown eyes, raising one of his perfectly rectangular eyebrows.

“No,” Amy finally said under his scrutiny, looking down at her coffee and kicking the table leg like a little girl. “But he
might
have. If there hadn’t been other people nearby.”

“So wait—you accused him of doing something to Chloe in the hall in front of other people?”

“No, I’m not an
idiot.
There were just some band geeks walking by.”

Paul sat back and stirred his tea slowly, not wanting to look her in the face while he digested everything. Paul could be enigmatic, but sometimes he was just so stunned by what Amy said or did that it took a moment for him to adjust.

“But he knows
something
about what’s going on,” Amy said desperately, unable to bear his silence. “When I told him what we saw on the bridge, he got all surprised and weird and stuff.”

Paul reached for the zipper under his neck and loosened it a little, playing with the tag as if it were a tie. It was his new Puma running jacket, sleek, with red stripes going down the sides. When he wore it, he fit in perfectly with the older, “real” DJs at the clubs he liked. It was like his personal superhero costume.

“Amy,” he finally said, “you shouldn’t have done that. If he’s innocent—and let me remind you that you still don’t have any real proof of anything—then it was crazy and mean. And if he
is
involved somehow, how is confronting him like that going to help?”

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.

Eight

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, although 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.”

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

Chloe had to ask the question.
Well, I am a
cat,
after all, 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.