Nine Lives of Chloe King

by Celia Thomson

  She carefully closed the door behind her and listened for a minute. If anyone was staking out the place, there was no sign: everything looked fairly normal in the King household. No furniture was overturned, nor was there any other sign of violence. Just to be safe, however, Amy pushed herself up against the wall and slid toward the stairs, ducking when she got in front of windows, doing a crouching run up the staircase.

  Which resulted in a very non-cat-burglar trip on the top step and a flying fall that nearly smashed her chin against the bathroom door. Most of Amy’s life was spent trying to get noticed and stand out; this sneaking thing was entirely new to her. She pulled herself up into what she hoped looked like a shadow and tiptoed into Chloe’s room.

  Once again everything seemed normal, maybe a little dustier than usual but not noticeably changed. Chloe’s computer was properly shut down. Amy turned it on, using the special black gloves so she wouldn’t leave any fingerprints. She admired them while it booted up, then went online and logged onto Chloe’s e-mail—her friend had had the same password for years: adopTED5.

  Aha.

  Chloe religiously purged her trash to keep her mailbox from going over its size limit, downloading and saving all of the particularly juicy letters in case her mother ever found her way on. She did not, however, empty her sent mail folder as often as she should—and was far too painstaking about adding names to her address book. After just a couple minutes of poking around, Amy found brian9@bitsy.net and, searching Chloe’s “locked” Word documents, confirmed that it was the Brian that Chloe had been interested in.

  Amy then signed off and switched Hotmail over to one of her own alias accounts—one that she used when she didn’t want to be found, for contests and spam and mailing lists and stuff—and sent Brian an e-mail. Early on, Amy had decided to handle everything Chloe from foreign computers, not her own, in case someone was capturing her IP address.

  Brian: This is from one of Chloe’s friends. Where is she? Can you help us? Alyec seems to know something but won’t tell. E-mail me ASAP.

  Then she made sure it sent properly, deleted it out of the sent mail, and purged the trash. She checked it again to make sure it was really gone, cleared Explorer’s cache for temporary files, and started to even defrag the hard drive—to really make sure all the information was gone—but looked at her watch and realized it would take twenty minutes. So Amy shut down, mission accomplished, and prepared to sneak back out.

  Just like out of the movies, she was halfway down the stairs when the phone rang. Amy froze, flattening herself against the wall so hard that static electricity lifted her frizzy red ends straight up against the wallpaper and her shoulder almost dislodged a picture. She waited, frozen, knowing intellectually that it was okay to move but unable to make herself. She scanned the room until voice mail picked up, counting the seconds.

  She noticed something that she wouldn’t have if she had just snuck immediately back out. Nothing in the house looks moved. Like for a while. There was a stillness to it, and though there were no layers of dust, there was a palpably stale feeling about the place. It even smelled a little old, like the garbage had been sitting there for just a day or two too long; there was no tang of cleaners or soap or perfume or anything that connoted movement or life in a house of two women.

  Shaken by this realization, Amy left the house less carefully than she’d entered—after all, she was only human, which was exactly what the people watching her exit the house wanted to be sure of.

  Fifteen

  A new loving family, a secret race of people like her, no more school ever again, and all Chloe could think about was how bored she was. Her “internship” at Firebird mainly involved stuffing envelopes, making copies, collating large stacks of contracts, and taking orders from the obnoxious Mai receptionist.

  While she was waiting for a stack of … something, she wasn’t sure what, from Igor, Chloe thought about her and Amy’s dream of setting up a shop somewhere. Amy would design the clothes and Chloe would run the business. Assuming the two didn’t kill each other, it would be a match made in heaven.

  Igor must have seen the look on her face.

  “You should become a full-time paralegal,” he said, smiling.

  “Wow. This for a living,” Chloe said deadpan, tapping the stack he was adding to. “That would be just great. For my entire life.”

  “Remember, it is hard for people like us to integrate completely,” Igor said seriously. “That’s why it was so good for Sergei to set this up here.” He was wearing khakis, a button-down with a fashionable tie, and suede shoes. The way he leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his back made him look like any young professional: a little bit arrogant, but bright eyed and smart.

  Pity about the name. Maybe assimilation would have been easier if the Mai hadn’t named their kids after horror film characters. With just a slight tilt of her nose to the air Chloe could tell he was Mai. It wasn’t a smell, exactly, but a feeling.

  “Is this why he’s pride leader?” she asked, waving her hand around the office.

  “He is pride leader because when the previous one was killed, he bravely took up her mission of trying to reunite the Eastern European Pride.” Chloe wanted to jump in and prove her knowledge to the older boy by saying yeah, yeah, the Abkhazian Diaspora, etc., but decided maybe it would be a good idea to pretend to know less than she did for once.

  “He organized everyone after the Georgian violence, and when he immigrated, he began the process of bringing us all over. Sometimes legally, sometimes not so legally.” His dark eyes were shining with admiration. “And he built all this—an empire of city real estate—from nothing, an immigrant! And a Mai. So in a way, yes, it’s about all this but more, too.”

  “Seems pretty nice,” Chloe said, meaning it. “So why does Alyec bitch about him not helping his family out?”

  Igor chuckled. “Alyec is a whiner. Perhaps there is some prejudice—but the ones in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and even Kiev were better off than the Abkhazians. Sergei wanted to help out the most desperate first.”

  “Oh.” She looked around for something to do now that their conversation was over. Her foot tapped spastically.

  “I know what you need!” Igor said, suddenly popping up out of his chair and pointing at her. “You are all itchy and nervous and bored. You need a—“He suddenly looked around and trailed off. “A hike,” he finished lamely.

  “Oh. Boy. That will fix everything,” Chloe answered with as much sarcasm as she could muster. Currently she was wearing a pair of expensive jeans—probably picked out by Olga or Valerie—that were a size too small around her crotch, so she had to leave them unbuttoned and wear a big, stupid, trendy wide leather belt around her waist. The sweater was light pink cashmere. She still had her Sauconys, but everything else wasn’t hers and didn’t feel like hers. Like her room, like her new family, like this crappy new part-time job—which didn’t involve clothes or a cash register.

  “Good,” Igor said, taking her at face value.

  Chloe wasn’t sure if it was being Mai or Eastern European that prevented everyone there from getting sarcasm.

  * * *

  She had dinner that night with Sergei. It had become their little ritual on days that he worked late: she would come to his office and he would clear his desk. They would order Chinese, pizza, whatever they were in the mood for, and play a game of chess. Chloe never thought she would be good at it, but she was slowly learning. She treasured these evenings no matter how much she hated losing.

  She wondered if her real father—her adoptive father—played chess. She couldn’t even imagine thinking about her real, real father. …

  “Igor told me I should go on a ’hike’; what does that mean?” she asked after moving a pawn.

  “A hike? I haven’t the slightest idea.” Sergei blinked at her with surprisingly innocent eyes. In his emotions and movements, he seemed very childlike sometimes—maybe that came from being in his forties without a wif
e and children. “Oh! He means a hunt. Ah, that Igor, he is a smart one. I think they are organizing one for this Saturday. Do you know anything about raising wildcats—bobcats, cheetahs? For pets?”

  Chloe had no idea what this had to do with anything, so she shook her head. Sergei got up and came around to her side of the desk and sat on its edge, looking at her seriously, like he was giving her a very important father-daughter lecture. Chloe prepared to be bored, but it was sort of a nice new feeling.

  “People up in Oregon and other places raise wild cats to sell. Some make great pets, like bobcats and lynxes, if they have been bred and raised properly by a loving family. But no matter how gentle, well behaved, and obedient a cat is, no matter how much regular cat food he can stomach—once a month the good breeders throw a live chicken into the pens and let what happens happen.”

  Chloe felt nausea rise as she imagined feathers and blood and screams.

  “They have to do this, Chloe,” he said gently, “because you cannot completely breed out a cat’s basic nature. They need to hunt, they need to play with their prey, and they need to kill. We are no different. We have always been hunters. Nomads. We never grew our food; we went after it in the wild.

  “If you feel anxious and trapped—if you have the urge to run at night and chase and follow—you need to give in to it once in a while. We cannot run free like we used to before the world grew civilized and the land was fenced off, but we must still obey the ancient instinct.”

  Chloe suddenly understood part of the Tenth Blade’s credo. A Mai gone mad with hunt lust in a city or town probably was a dangerous thing. She decided to keep that thought to herself, however; somehow she suspected Sergei wouldn’t share that conclusion.

  “So we do this every month? Go hunting?”

  Sergei laughed. “Not every month, Chloe. It has nothing to do with the moon, or your feminine things, or clockwork. Sometimes it’s just … time to go.”

  * * *

  Time to go.

  Chloe thought about this while she waited by the Ford Explorer. It was dusk and they were on top of a hill somewhere near Muir Woods. It was a sharp hill, new and ridged, not like the older storybook rolling hills on the way there. A bright star shone in the south, although how Chloe knew the direction was south, she couldn’t have said. Below, the land ran steeply down to a bowl of forest and scrub with smaller hills within it, like the bottom of a scenic snow globe. But instead of plastic flakes, darkness gathered at the bottom.

  About a half-dozen Mai were there, speaking in low voices. They were all women. Olga and Valerie were there along with three she didn’t recognize, one of whom she knew was Simone, the dancer who also lived at the mansion. Chloe never saw her in its halls.

  Most of the women seemed to be in their thirties. They were all beautiful. They all had high cheekbones and thick, shiny hair; even with the different eye and hair color and body shape, it was easy to see a racial similarity once Chloe began to look for it.

  One of the things they all had in common was how inhumanly they walked: standing mainly on their toes and moving with a careless precision that could have only been carefully choreographed by a human ballerina.

  A dark-eyed woman Chloe didn’t know began the evening with a chant, a strange hymn in a foreign tongue that went from low whispers to beseeching cries. Her voice was good but alone and sometimes lost in the breeze—which made it even creepier. Chloe caught the name Sekhmet once or twice, but that was about it.

  Afterward they were silent.

  “I have a scent!” one of them hissed. She had yellow eyes, orange hair, and a round face that resembled Sergei’s but a cool, high forehead and neck that could have easily gotten her on the cover of a fashion magazine. She wore a tank top and had tattoos of leopard spots ringing her upper arms.

  They all cocked their heads, sniffing the air. Chloe did, too, and when the faintest breeze changed directions, she had it: a musky scent that made her think of herbivores, even though she wasn’t sure she had ever precisely smelled anything like it before.

  A deer. They were going to run down a deer.

  The redhead who’d first caught the scent pointed and the rest began running, following the direction of her finger. Chloe paused, thinking about the mountain lion attack on a jogger that she and Brian had argued about just a few weeks before. He had insisted the lion should be put down for attacking a human; she had suggested the unfairness of humans moving in and destroying the lion’s habitat.

  Now she wondered if the attack had been by a lion at all.

  The air tickled her nose again: the deer was farther away. Getting away.

  She ran. Her companions were rarely visible: once they descended off the top of the hill and into the edge of the woods, the Mai darted in and out of shadows, keeping a more or less straight line along the scent of the deer but out of sight of anyone or anything that might be watching.

  Clouds raced across the sky as fast the hunters beneath them. They slipped from the moon, and the blanketing shadows parted for just a few seconds: the bushes and trees went from gray and purple to white and silver-green, then faded back as the foggy curtain closed again. Chloe felt her legs pumping smoothly below her. Her arms moved at her sides as though they were pushing the air behind her to speed her up. Her lungs felt like bursting, but the air was light, inspiring her to run harder. Chloe leapt over a bush and laughed. This is what it’s supposed to be like. Running with a purpose, running with her pride.

  She paused for a moment to smell the air again and continued: they were catching up. Even though they were two-legged, they were running down a deer. A cat’s growl sounded behind her. Chloe didn’t answer. She went where her senses told her: to a clearing up ahead, a long field in the open. Chloe could feel the closeness of the brambles begin to give way to something that was open to the stars.

  She came out suddenly, before she could stop herself. Momentum caused her to almost tumble over the rock she paused at—a beginner’s mistake. She saw the deer. It, too, had paused and was flicking its long ears left and right. It seemed to look right at Chloe with big dark eyes, but she knew that if it actually saw her, it would have begun running again; the Mai were downwind from it. The deer was beautiful, and Chloe could barely wait for it to begin running again so they could resume the chase.

  The deer must have heard something; it suddenly turned and leapt, a beautiful four-legged spring from a standstill that Chloe had only seen on nature programs. The smell of the terrified animal hit her nose with a slap, and before she knew it, Chloe was running again.

  She saw her companions emerge from the bush and silently nodded at them in greeting as the pack drew up into a close formation, the redheaded girl taking up the rear. The deer flashed into darkness and the six women plunged after it into the woods, where Chloe could hear nothing but her own breathing and heartbeat, not a footstep of those around her.

  They shot out into the bright moonlight again—the doe was only twenty feet in front of them. One woman pulled ahead with a series of springs and leaps that were so far from human that anyone watching would have been hard-pressed to recognize her as a form of sentient life.

  Chloe suddenly realized what was going to happen.

  They were on a hunt. There was the deer, there was the hunter.

  She stopped running and turned her head, covering her eyes.

  The girl before her let forth a cry—it was Valerie, Chloe realized, a little stunned. She put her hands over her ears and waited, unwilling to experience anything of what she knew had to come next. Her chase lust vanished.

  “Hey, not a bad first hunt, eh?”

  Chloe opened her eyes. One of the other women approached her, speaking gently. She was in her late thirties, as fit and taut as a circus performer. Her long hair, tied back for the chase, now swung freely to her waist. Her accent was pure Californian; she must have been here even before Sergei. “No rabbits, not a lot of blood—are you okay?”

  “I’m just, uh …” Chloe w
asn’t sure what she wanted. “It’s all a little, uh…”

  “You feel better than you did before—the night you tried to sneak out?” She said this with a grin.

  Chloe opened her mouth to snap back at her, but now that she thought about it, Chloe realized she really was a lot more relaxed. She still wanted to see her mom, but the insane urgency was gone.

  “Yeah,” she answered slowly.

  “Here.” Valerie came by with a bottle and handed it to Chloe. “To the hunt and your health!”

  Chloe eyed the rim carefully, looking for bits of blood. Then she tipped it and took a huge swallow of the ice-cold, perfectly smooth vodka. The women’s laughter rose on the smoke of the campfire up to the stars above them.

  * * *

  They returned to the mansion at seven or eight the next morning. It was like nothing Chloe had ever experienced before. The six of them spent the night laughing, talking, singing, passing around the vodka, and cooking deer steaks. It was like one of those New Age women-power touchy-feely weekend getaways she had seen in movies or in ads for antihistamines, completely unselfconscious and natural. She had tried a little bit of the deer—it was very different from the venison she’d once had at a restaurant her mom had taken her to, tougher and more gamey tasting. Nothing she would go out of her way to eat again, and now that the chase lust was gone, she couldn’t help thinking about the doe’s eyes and face right before they’d killed it. It made her feel a little sick or, at the very least, not so hungry.

  Some stayed up all night and some—like Chloe—had dozed off. She should have been cold, but the campfire was warm, and she found she could just pull her arms into her shirt and retain her heat that way. She thought about the desert in her dream and how cold it must have been at night.