Nine Lives of Chloe King

by Liz Braswell

  “Can I—help you?” she asked, unsure whether to run away or continue the dialogue.

  “What’s the matter? No urge to fight? The ancient instinct hasn’t awakened in you yet?” the man sneered.

  “I had kind of planned on a cocoa and an early bedtime, actually.” She circled carefully, keeping a tree between them.

  “You almost sound human.” With a misdirection of his left hand, he threw the dagger at her with his right. Chloe jumped, but it tore her shoulder as it passed.

  He had two daggers now, one in each hand.

  “Where do you keep all those things?” Chloe demanded, touching her shoulder. Running now would definitely mean her death: by two quick blades, one in the neck and one in the back.

  “I see no one has properly warned you about me,” he said, almost disappointed.

  “No, no one told me about a crazy blade-wielding psycho—“Then she remembered. Your life is in danger. Be wary of the company you keep. Be prepared—and ready to run. The Order of the Tenth Blade knows who you are. …

  Order of the Tenth Blade? She thought about the shuriken. Maybe it means that he only has ten blades? Chloe somehow didn’t think that was it. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he had a tank hidden somewhere on his body.

  “A pity. You should know your executioner.”

  Chloe shivered again; she felt the hairs on her arms and shoulders rise. Even if he was crazy, he was still serious.

  “My executioner is probably all the trans-fatties in Oreos and stuff,” Chloe countered. He’s going to attack—he’s going to attack! Any second now…

  “Id tibi facio,” he whispered, and lunged.

  Chloe jumped aside, a tenth of a second too late—once again he cut her, but shallowly this time. He didn’t move like the homeless guy from the other night; he was fast and well trained—a professional fighter. Killer, she corrected herself. He wanted to kill her. She leapt again as he brought a dagger down on her and realized she had no time to think, only react.

  Her left leg throbbed. It was still bleeding.

  He went at her belly with a swipe; she leapt up and grabbed a tree branch, hauling her torso out of the way. He spun, keeping the momentum to hit her as she dropped back down, but she curled in a ball to avoid it. His heel ground against the sidewalk. Whenever she stepped backward, he stepped into her; whenever she leapt to the side, he was there with a dagger.

  I have to attack him.

  She ducked as he swiped a blade through the air above her head. When she came up, she brought her claws ripping up to his groin. They clanged on something metal.

  He laughed.

  She had to roll quickly out of the way as he threw a dagger down at her. Chloe saw little blue sparks jump away as it bounced off the pavement with incredible force. She shot out a foot, kicking him neatly in the calf. It made enough impact to give her a little hope.

  Fight in, closer, her instincts told her. She was terrified but obeyed. Chloe waited until the last moment and then sprang forward, closing the distance between them, and tried to swipe him across the face with her claws. Even if you get the slightest bit of flesh or eye, she remembered her self-defense trainer saying, the pain will be great enough to distract.

  Only if you hit, though—his arm came up immediately and his wrist blocked her. Chloe brought her knee up to his groin again, planning to shove up really hard, figuring that even if he wore some kind of ancient metallic jockstrap or chastity belt or whatever, it would at least hurt a little as it dug into his flesh. At the last minute, though, she leapt up and brought her foot down onto his cup and the other foot, too, pushing with all her strength. The way a cat disembowels.

  She was rewarded by the first real response from her attacker: he groaned and caught his breath. Then he shot out his fists, one after the other, trying to slash her before she pushed herself away from him. He ripped right down her shirt and through her bra strap, drawing blood underneath in the soft part of her shoulder.

  I’m going to lose this fight, Chloe realized, her stomach going cold. He seemed to be able to predict all of her moves—though if it weren’t for the exercises the cat person put her through the other night, she wouldn’t have survived as long as she had. She would have been lying on the sidewalk, blood running from her throat.

  “Give up, blasphemy of nature,” he growled. “Demon!”

  As his slashing blades came closer, she slashed him back, batting at him with her claws and hissing.

  He was waiting for that, apparently, and kneed her in the stomach.

  Chloe fell over, unable to breathe. He’s trying to goad my instinctive reactions; as soon as I stop thinking and just react, he knows how to get me. When she fought, he could beat her. He was a good fighter. …

  This gave her the slightest shred of hope. She slowly drew herself up and faced him.

  “So I don’t scare you?” she asked. Get a dialogue going.

  “Your kind doesn’t scare me,” he said with a sneer. “You only disgust me.”

  Chloe flicked a glance over his shoulder into the street.

  “Do cops scare you?”

  His eyes widened and he turned.

  Chloe hadn’t thought he would actually do it. Before he realized there weren’t any actual police coming, she kicked him as hard as she could in the stomach with the flat of her heel. She spun and did a backward handspring, putting her at least seven feet away from him.

  Then she ran, not looking back and putting all of her effort into flight, satisfied with the heavy, thudding sound of his body hitting ground.

  Fifteen

  She took random paths home, sometimes doubling back and retracing her route for several blocks, sometimes running in circles. She considered finding a body of water to run through to hide her scent—before remembering that she was the animal; her attacker had obviously taken great pride in being a normal human. Unless he’s a dog, Chloe mused. Who was to say that in a world where a girl could have claws, a guy couldn’t have a muzzle and penchant for bones?

  The thrill of the fight drove her; part of her wanted to turn back and finish it. To face death.

  But she continued running.

  When she finally felt it was safe—after pausing for a long time in public places like convenience stores and crowded Muni stops, waiting to see if he would reappear—she went home, carefully locking the doors behind her. She waited in the kitchen, listening.

  After a while the adrenaline in her blood finally died down.

  Chloe began to be afraid.

  Just because she’d taken a labyrinthine path home didn’t mean that he couldn’t find her. Obviously he knew who and what she was—how hard would it be to find out where she lived? How did he know what she was, for that matter?

  He could be coming for me now.

  Suddenly she was terrified. It was one thing to be running free on the streets, between houses, out in the open—up to a police station or public place if she had to. But now she was trapped. The windows looked out on a black night spotted with pools of light from other houses and streetlights, which somehow just made the night seem darker, more likely to hide monsters, villains, psychos. Chloe had never really believed in them before, the people who came at you for no reason, from the outside, into your home—that was the stuff of horror movies and urban legends. Now she knew better. It was real.

  Chloe turned on all the lights, but the corners still seemed dim and treacherous. She wanted to put on music or the TV, but she was afraid of not hearing him sneak up. She sat on the couch, paralyzed, certain that the next moment was going to bring him smashing into her house with a huge crash.

  Just until Mom gets home, she told herself. She should be here any minute. Just stay calm until she gets home.

  The thought reassured her.

  And then she remembered the fight, the crazy, cold look in his eyes, the names he’d called her. What ancient, childlike habit made her believe that her mommy could protect her? She didn’t even have the speed or claws
of her daughter.

  A second thought, more gruesome than this one, came:

  If he comes here, it’s my fault.

  Not only could her mother probably not protect her, but Chloe would have led him directly home, if not now then later—and if her mom got hurt, it would be because of Chloe. …

  What else can I do?

  She reached for the phone. Maybe this guy knew her secret, but he was still a violent weirdo and she had the scrapes and bruises to prove it—she could describe him perfectly to the police and let them take care of it. If her attacker raved about Chloe being some sort of “blasphemy” and mentioned her claws—especially if he mentioned her claws—they would decide he was a crazy from whom she and the rest of society should be protected.

  She dialed 9-1—

  What about Xavier?

  She paused. Whatever happened to Xavier, anyway? What if he had died? Not all deaths appear in the obituaries.

  Her DNA was all over his lips and back and shirt. Her fingerprints on his doorknob and phone. If there was an investigation, she would at least be questioned, probably as a prime suspect. What if they examined her? Looked at her claws, checked her fingernails, x-rayed her fingers?

  She cursed herself for not following up on him, seeing what had happened. If he hadn’t died, the people at the hospital would have questioned him—“Yeah, there was this girl I met at the club; she was the last person I touched before I got sick. …” Typhoid Mary. Scratches and boils across his back where she had scraped him. Where her claws would have been, if she had known. She would make an interesting research subject. …

  She put the phone back down.

  I have a secret.

  It didn’t sound pretty, like a junior high secret crush or journal or juicy piece of gossip. The claws, the expanded senses, the speed, the freedom, the night—she hadn’t realized they came with a price. Like the time she’d taken a pull from a bong, when the giggles were over and she’d realized she had done something illegal—that if they chose to, any of her friends could have told, and she would have had a police record or gone to juvie hall. She had a secret and it was punishable.

  Silence overwhelmed the house. Once in a great while a car drove by and Kimmy the shih tzu would bark—Chloe thought about going outside to see if he still acted weird around her, but she couldn’t bear the thought of opening the door.

  There was a bang and a metallic-sounding scrape as someone threw a glass bottle into a recycling can.

  More slowly than she had ever done anything, Chloe moved to the stairway and went upstairs. Every step was forced, every moment balanced. She listened for footsteps outside in the grass or on the pavement beneath the windows. The twelve steps took twenty minutes: she could barely hear over her own heartbeats and breathing.

  When she finally got upstairs, she opened her drawer with what seemed like way too much noise.

  Squeak!

  Mus-mus ran from her. She put her hand down and he ran into the corner, cowering. Chloe frowned. She pulled a Cheerio from the sandwich bag and held it out to him. He stayed in his corner. It took almost five minutes for him to work up his courage—and then he only ran forward, grabbed it in his mouth, and ran back into the corner again.

  “What’s gotten into you?” Chloe demanded. He was her only friend in the house right now; she didn’t have the emotional energy for him to wig out, too. “Come on!” she said, a little more annoyed, going to pick him up. Then she noticed her claws were still out.

  He thinks I’m a cat now. A predator.

  She made herself relax, calmed her thoughts, waiting until the claws disappeared.

  But when she put her hand in, he still ran away.

  Chloe was sitting on the bed, in the same position, staring at the closed drawer, when her mother came in hours later. Chloe didn’t move when the car pulled up or the door opened or when she came upstairs.

  “Hey.” Her mom stuck her head in, face slightly flushed from drink and good times. “You’re not in bed yet?”

  “I’m going. Now,” Chloe said with a wan smile. Her tears had dried up a while ago, but they’d left scratchy, salty tracks on her cheeks.

  She knew it wasn’t safer now that her mom was home … but somehow still she felt like it was.

  Sixteen

  Chloe had no desire to go to school or work the next day—lying in bed under the covers definitely seemed like a superior option. But not the safest. Public places like school and work were absolutely the safest places to be, and in between she would make sure she was with crowds or other people.

  And at home, tonight?

  She never wanted to live through an evening of fear like that again. Thinking about it made her want to throw up. She hadn’t slept much, jumping up at every noise and lying awake for hours, following each sound to its conclusion: cars driving into the distance, someone—possibly with a different malevolent purpose—striding down the midnight street, pausing, taking a piss, and then going on his way. A rat or something small and noisy pushed its food along the ground outside her window, into a hole, for what seemed like half the night.

  She surfed the Web for a few minutes before getting ready, looking for alarm systems and door jammers and electronic sentries—most of which seemed to start in the five-hundred-dollar category. Chloe tried to come up with a way of suggesting it to her mom: “Uh, there’ve been a lot of breakins recently, and I was wondering …” The easiest thing would probably be to get a bunch of those kids’ toys that were supposed to guard your locker or room from a sibling and set them up all over the house.

  But what about her? What if he attacked her again, more sneakily?

  Thinking over the fight, she remembered how he had aimed for her throat and important joints—shoulders, knees—and finally the belly. She needed some sort of protection for those places: armor. Chloe took out the music box her dad had given her the last Christmas they were all together; where she kept all of her favorite pieces of jewelry, and the sparkly things she never wore. At the bottom, tangled up in a bracelet she got out of a cereal box, was a chain mail necklace she’d bought at a Renaissance fair Amy had dragged her to years ago. She put it on and looked at herself in the mirror. The steel links made a chain that was only a couple of inches wide, but if she wore it a little loose, then at least it protected the lower half of her neck, the veins and arteries there.

  Chloe had no idea what to do about her knees and legs. She played with the idea of wrapping them with Ace bandages, the metal pins all stuck along more vulnerable

  areas. For her stomach and shoulders the closest thing to protection she had was a leather vest from Pateena’s—very seventies and cracked in places. But it was a biker’s, thick and strong. She dug it out of her closet and put it on.

  Some call me a space cowboy. …

  Really, all she needed was a ten-gallon hat or a huge belt with a silver dollar buckle. Actually … She tilted her head. With her bob, a pair of feather earrings wouldn’t look too bad, either. Maybe some thick black eye liner, clumpy mascara …

  “Morning,” she called, running downstairs and going right for the door. Her mother was doing a crossword—she never seemed to get headaches or hangovers from nights out.

  Chloe realized she was breaking a major, major rule of their new “honesty” pact and felt guilty about it—but what was telling her mom going to accomplish?

  “You doing anything after work tonight?” Mrs. King asked, trying to sound casual, not looking up.

  Patrolling the perimeter? Setting little traps? Trembling in my shoes?

  “Uh, no, not really …”

  “I thought I would make lamb tonight.” She tapped the pen to her lips. “A really nice cut. Will you be home by eight?”

  An image flashed before Chloe of her coming in late and finding her mother dead on the floor, broken glass and blood everywhere, the smell of burnt lamb fat from the oven.

  “Yeah, absolutely,” Chloe answered quickly.

  At school, she foun
d she could doze for five minutes at a time—catnap—in class, without anyone noticing. While she felt the urge to snuggle down and sleep for much longer—especially in chemistry, when the sunlight warmed her chair and desk—Chloe found that even the brief five was refreshing. In gym she lucked out: they were watching a film about drunk driving. Chloe managed to sleep for the whole forty-five minutes.

  She was woken in Am civ by her phone vibrating. She tried not to sit up quickly, annoyed and surprised out of a deep, dreamless sleep. The number was Brian’s.

  She wondered if he somehow found out about what happened to her the night before. Or more importantly, if he was going to tell her how much he really liked her and apologize for being so hands-offish and weird. Or maybe he was finally going to admit that he was the other cat person. All these things would be good. Any of them. She waited until she was out in the hall after class before calling him.

  “You rang?” she asked, phone pressed tight to her ear so she could hear over the crowd.

  “Yeah—Chloe, we have to talk.” He sounded desperate, serious.

  “Sure! Can you meet me before work, at the café near there, on the other side of the street?”

  “You can’t get out earlier?”

  Chloe raised an eyebrow. “I’m in high school, remember? Not the ‘real world.’ Getting out early means calls to Mom and consequences.”

  “Oh. Right. Okay, then, two-fifteen?”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Chloe promised. She put the phone back into her pocket.

  “Hey, Chloe!” Alyec was waving at her. She smiled and sauntered over, swinging her hips in a half-cowboy-with-spurs, half-sexy walk. “Nice vest. So Keira says you’re a complete slut. Is that true?”

  Chloe’s mouth opened—and then just hung there. She was too stunned to speak. Keira’s closest friends were in earshot, listening raptly. Alyec was excellently maintaining a straight face, the still-foreign aspect of his expressions never too revealing.

  Then Chloe laughed.

  It was such a perfect, stupid high school moment, as far away from murdering psychos, supernatural powers, and mysterious fears as one could get. A complete breath of fresh air.