The Nine Lives of Chloe King (31 page)

She wiggled her feet, now free, and was somehow unsurprised when claws extended out the tips of her toes, just like Kim’s. She extended her hand claws and leapt, unsure what she was going to do as she fell but confident she would figure out something and positive that she would land safely.

And she did.

Chloe didn’t even think about what she was doing as she shot down, as fast as she’d fallen off Coit Tower. She landed lightly on a lower gable. There was a quiet, high-pitched squeak of her foot claws against the stones. With only a moment’s pause to grin at what she had done, Chloe scurried from curtained window ledge to curtained window ledge, one story at a time, letting her feet dangle and then drop down.

When she hit the lawn at last on the back side of the house, the grass was cool and wet and almost silver. With her night vision, she could see her own footsteps on the turf: slightly darker impressions where the balls of her feet dissolved the individual spheres of dew, causing them to blend together and sink into the ground. It was such a beautiful and fascinating discovery that Chloe had to force herself to look away and continue on with her journey.

No wonder you always catch cats staring at nothing for hours. I bet they see a billion little things.

She ran with her body against the walls of the house, trying to get to the woods as fast as possible. She tried a couple of test leaps as if she had four legs, stretching her arms in front of her and pushing off with her legs. Sort of like the way Gollum did it in
The Lord of the Rings
movies. It worked, but not too gracefully, and didn’t seem to help her pick up speed. The Mai were one hundred percent upright walkers.

Which made her wonder about what Kim had said. Were they really a race created by ancient gods? Chloe still didn’t quite believe it, but what if it were true?

Then again, what if the Order of the Tenth Blade was right? What if they weren’t created by benevolent ancient gods, but by demons? What if they
were
demons of some sort?

But she had tried to help the Rogue after he tried to kill her. Chloe wasn’t evil. Was she?

She let go of her thoughts and refocused on her present. She ran, and yards of ground disappeared under her strides. She felt herself slip into the shadow of the pines. No one could see her if she didn’t want to be seen; she
knew
this. And if she had to, Chloe could easily live out of doors full time, in the trees, like a child’s fantasy of freedom.

Her cat imaginings fell short as she ran along the edge of the driveway and came to the road. It didn’t take more than a second to figure out how to scale the fence when the gatehouse guard had his back turned, but once she was on public streets again, she suddenly realized that even with her Mai speed, there was no way she could run all the way to her house, chat with her mom, tell her everything was okay, and get back in less than a few hours.

Feeling a little defeated, she took a bus over the Golden Gate, from the edge of Sausalito. She sat in the back, trying to keep herself from bouncing, only remembering to retract her claws at the last instant. No one took much notice of her bare feet; this was San Francisco, and with the wild look in her eyes and her barely contained energy, she easily passed for either a strung-out junkie or a riot girl on the way to her next rally.

Chloe got off the bus when it crested around Golden Gate Park, preparing to run the rest of the way. She decided to take a somewhat circuitous route in case anyone was following but didn’t go too out of her way because time was short.

In the end, it didn’t matter.

She passed a surprisingly healthy looking street person—she would remember that later and curse herself for it. As Chloe gave him a wide berth, he turned to look at her. Their eyes locked, and she suddenly realized there was something far too sane and directed about him.

Just as she was about to move even farther away, he raised an ornate wooden club and smashed it down at her.

Chloe threw up her hands and claws to deflect it, but the club was moving so swiftly and the man who wielded it was so strong—and prepared—that she only managed to keep the tip from hitting her head.

It made a cracking noise as it hit her collarbone instead, but most of the impact was taken on the side of her neck.

Chloe fell down, pain and fear shooting through her at the same time. She tried to get to her feet, but the pain and feeling of
wrongness
in her neck kept her from moving properly.

Another person appeared over her.

He wasn’t another “homeless guy”: just a normal-enough man walking a tiny dog, distinguished only by his bright orange sweater.

“Help me!” Chloe cried, lifting her hand to him.

He reached for her, but then she saw that he held something black and ropy that Chloe couldn’t identify. As his sweater tugged up his arm, she saw the tattoo, the same one the Rogue had had:
Sodalitas Gladii Decimi.

Chloe screamed. Her claws came out and she slashed at her captors wildly despite the overwhelming pain.

But both of her assailants were well trained, if slower than the Rogue. The one dressed as a bum put his knee on her chest, forcing all of her air out. He grabbed one of her arms while the guy in the sweater grabbed her other.

“Going to visit your
mommy?”
he asked nastily.

She kicked: this was something they were not prepared for. While Chloe couldn’t reach the one crushing her ribs, the claws of her left foot shot out and neatly got sweater man dead in the stomach. He screamed as she felt his flesh gather up and tear beneath her claws. But she still couldn’t breathe, and silver stars began twinkling at the edges of her vision.

Then somebody hissed—and it wasn’t her.

Suddenly the weight was lifted off her chest. She sucked in as deeply as she could and was rewarded by a scorching pain that was so great it masked the pain from the wound on her neck. She could see again, although what was going on was mostly a blur: there seemed to be two other people, faster than the Tenth Bladers, attacking and pummeling them with an eerie silence.

Chloe sat up as best she could. They were Mai, of course, although she didn’t recognize them. Their movements and their scent were unmistakable. They were
big,
too—which made their silence even scarier. Homeless guy landed with a thump next to her, his eyes blank with unconsciousness. Chloe lost her temper for just a moment, finding the urge to slash his face almost overwhelming. Instead she dug her foot claws into his crotch. When he woke up, he’d have something to remember her by.

Then she collapsed back on the pavement.

“I
knew
she was going to be trouble,” one of her saviors sighed, walking toward Chloe. This was a woman; she was dusting off her pants. With a casual kick she stilled the “homeless” guy, who had begun to moan and twitch.

“Can’t blame her. She’s a kid,” the other one, a man, said. It might have been Chloe’s delirium, but the two looked very similar. “Besides, I haven’t had this kind of fun since August.”

The woman was scanning the night. Suddenly she dropped down, crouching with one hand for balance, the other pointing. “More coming.”

“Bring ’em on!” the other said. Then he added, “I know, I know.”

“You grab her legs—careful of the neck. It might be broken.”

“Where’s our glorious pride leader?” the man asked with heavy sarcasm.
“This
wouldn’t even have cost him a life. Assuming he
has
more than one.”

“Shhh! Keep it to yourself, Dima. The girl might still be conscious.”

She is,
Chloe thought, before fainting entirely.

Thirteen

They weren’t traveling
in the land of the warm sun anymore, of endless sky and sand. They were someplace colder and wetter, with incredible mountains and a very different sea, very close by. She walked through the streets of an ancient city. Stones of buildings centuries dead stuck out of the ground.

Few people paid attention to her. The markets were crowded with people from all over. One of her shadow companions sniffed the air disapprovingly, wrinkling her nose at the stink of the hordes. She smiled down at the four silent lions. “Let us find our orphans and move on from this place.”

They turned a corner and a shadow fell over the five Mai; one whined as the stink of rotten eggs became overpowering in the wet heat of the afternoon sun. …

“Chloe?”

She opened her eyes. Sergei’s face was uncomfortably close to her own, and he looked concerned. His breath stank of garlic, which was not the smell in her dream at all but still made her sick.

Chloe was lying in her own bed at the mansion. There was cloth mounded tightly against her neck, wet with melting ice. She tried to turn her head—it was possible, but the pain was searing.

“Maybe you’ll listen to me about visiting your mother next time?” he said gently, patting her on the hand. It was a little rough, the action of someone who wasn’t used to showing affection. Chloe blushed and looked down, too embarrassed by her disobedience and its result to look him in the eye.

“I know you miss her,” he continued, “but the Order wants you dead, Chloe girl. You took out one of their best—and craziest—soldiers. They knew you would try to go home at some point. Every exile does.” His white-blue eyes looked beyond her for a moment, into the distance at something else.

He really does sort of look like a lion,
Chloe reflected.
If his reddish-silver hair and beard were drawn back from his head—and just a little longer—it could be a mane.

“All you’re doing right now is endangering her. Give it time, let us help work things out, and we’ll reunite the two of you eventually. Okay?” He patted her on the head.

“Okay,” Chloe agreed, smiling despite herself. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be too sorry—Ellen and Dmitri had fun for the first time in a while. And neither of the criminals they took out will be causing any more trouble for a
long
time.” He grinned, showing a mouth of teeth as short and square as himself. “Enjoy yourself, Chloe girl! You’re a teenager who doesn’t have to go to school for a while. At your age I would have loved such a thing.”

She nodded, and he adjusted the sheets around her, tucking her in.

“Will I ever be able to go home?” she finally asked, sounding more pathetic than she meant to.

“Of
course
you will, Chloe,” he said fondly. “We do not mean to keep you here forever—although, of course, I’d like to.” He smiled and chucked her under the chin. His teeth were very carefully divided by the black lines separating them, Chloe noticed. It was a strange, perfect little grin.

“How is it ever going to be safe?”

“Ah. Well. Five ways,” he said. He held out five fingers and counted them down. “One: Someone finds the Rogue. This is still possible—it takes a lot to kill one of those bastards and no one actually saw him hit the water. Two, and this is far less likely, we have a
true
détente and convince them of your innocence. They do not really consider us human—I mean, intelligent rational beings—and almost never agree to meet, but it has happened once in a great while. Three: We make things very difficult for them; tie their hands with other methods. Like a police investigation. Or, even worse, an IRS investigation. Or an accidental ’explosion’ at one of their weapons factories.”

“Weapons factories?”

“Yes. They skirt the law themselves a lot, these so-called protectors of the innocent. Four”—he coughed to show a sense of embarrassment where there wasn’t really any—“we could threaten the family of one of the Order. I know,” he said, putting up a hand and closing his eyes as Chloe started to say something, “this is an idea alien and horrible to your young, naive, human ears. But Chloe, they don’t play by fair rules, either. Why else would they hunt an innocent teenage girl like yourself? Why would they send the Rogue after you to begin with?”

Actually, now that Chloe thought about it, why
had
they? She hadn’t become a threat to anyone until
after
she’d had to defend herself from that psycho, when the Mai had sent Alyec to teach her how to defend herself. It was a chicken-and-egg situation.

“They sent someone after you because you were an easy target,” Sergei said sadly. “You weren’t part of a pride, you weren’t part of a group who could protect you. It would have been an easy way for them to pick off a member of the Mai with no risk and few repercussions. They have done this before with other orphans like yourself—you should ask your friend Kim about it sometime. We found her hiding in an alley, living in a box in the garbage.”

Chloe could see it, although she didn’t want to. A little girl with black hair and bright green eyes, terrified, keeping to the shadows and hiding in piles of trash so the men hunting her wouldn’t find her.

“Trust me, Chloe,” Sergei said, a hard look coming into his face. “As someone who lived in a very dangerous part of Eastern Europe at a very dangerous time, survival is difficult and often unpleasant.” His finger went up to a comer of his eye and scratched there, apparently of its own accord. Chloe had never noticed it before: part of his right eyebrow was especially kinked, and there was a very slight line where what looked like two different pieces of flesh had been sewn together to cover a wound.

“There was a fifth way,” Chloe whispered. “You said there were five ways it could be safe for me.”

“Ah. Yes.” Sergei snapped himself out of his thoughts and looked at her both sternly and pragmatically. “That would be if one of us was killed by them in the next few weeks. Then we would be even.” Chloe sucked in her breath.

With that, he left.

Chloe tried flexing her shoulder again. More pain, but still not so bad. Her neck wasn’t broken, and neither was her collarbone. She noticed a glass of water on the night table next to the bed and a dish with two ibuprofen, which she immediately scarfed down. She grabbed the remote and fluffed up her pillows, preparing for a good afternoon of daytime TV. Then her hand hit something—her cell phone, which she had stashed there the night before, when she went out. She pushed the power button and saw that there was a message waiting from an unrecognized number. She called her voice mail as she began switching channels, looking for
Jerry Springer.