by Liz Braswell
“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.
“Chloe, it’s Brian again. Listen to me—whatever you do, wherever you are, stay there for the next couple of days. The Order has blanketed the streets around your house with members looking to bring you in—one way or another. Don’t try to visit your mom or your friends. I’ll try to talk to you later.”
Chloe checked the time the message had come in—8:12. Almost an hour before she had gone to try and visit her mom. If she had left her phone on, she would have gotten the call and avoided the fight.
Chloe thought about this, and Brian, for a while, looking up at the ceiling and finding little lion images playing in the knots and whorls of the wood there. They seemed to twist and jump, dancing like lions in the wild….
Not ibuprofen, she realized, sinking into unconsciousness.
“I told her she was all fat and nasty—nobody would want her. I didn’t know there were guys like Joey who liked bleep like that.”
Currently there were four of the largest women Chloe had ever seen on the TV. One woman didn’t seem to have a neck at all, even when Chloe paused the TiVo to get a better look. Another had been to the hospital and had a fifty-pound tumor removed, without ever having realized it was there. Next to them were the men who loved them and across from them the siblings who reviled them. Now this was television.
When she had woken up, Chloe had been determined not to think about anything important or deep again for a while, but just to take advantage of being a sick little girl, recuperating in front of the TV.
Kim appeared at her door, silent as ever.
Chloe beckoned her in but held up a finger: the fat woman who had just been insulted was getting out of her chair and waddling over to try and hit her attacker.
“What’s this?” Kim asked, coming over to her bedside and looking at the TV curiously.
“Jerry Springer,” Chloe replied, shaking her head as it took four stagehands to pull the woman away from her sister.
“It seems sensationalist and distasteful,” Kim said, wrinkling her nose. Chloe started to laugh, but then paused.
An ad came on and Chloe shut it off. “What’s up?”
Even with Kim’s alien features, it was easy to tell she was disappointed by something. She sat on the edge of Chloe’s bed, gripping the covers with her foot claws for balance, and waved a manila folder of papers.
“I don’t think we are related.” She said it calmly, but Chloe could see her eyes flicker. “As far as the genealogical people have made out, you more closely resemble the Mai who fled to Turkey from Abkhazia in the nineteenth century. My family stayed in what is now Georgia.”
Chloe didn’t understand half of what she was saying. “You mean I’m Turkish, not Russian?”
Kim fixed her with a cool look. “You are Mai. Not ‘Turkish’ or anything else. There are no human nationals of any sort in your background.”
Chloe had
forgotten about that. She was a completely different race. Wonderful, colorful images of herself in scarves, black kohl eyeliner, and bangles, with belly-dancing music in the background—like at the restaurant her mom used to take her to—sadly faded.
“Is this my file?” she asked.
Kim shook her head. “No, it is a sort of general file with information on places we are all most recently from. I thought you would be interested. St. Petersburg, where Alyec is from.” She passed Chloe pictures of an exotic city, with spires too long and thin to be mistaken for those of American churches. Onion domes dotted the skyline. Everything seemed to be covered in gold like a fairy-tale kingdom.
“What’s this?” Chloe pointed to one of the other photographs, of a building with a wall of large white stone blocks. A woman was walking along it, a woman with long black hair. “It looks familiar. I saw it in a dream.” She suddenly felt the crowded market street again, the shady, quiet alley with the horrible smell.
Kim looked at her strangely but turned the photograph over. “It is one of the old sulfur bath complexes in Sokhumi. This part of Abkhazia was a famous retreat with spas—the natural hot springs and mineral water there were supposed to have curative powers.”
Sulfur … This is a little too weird.
“Does sulfur smell like rotten eggs?” she asked, afraid of the answer.
“Almost identically.” Kim put the photograph down and looked Chloe in the eye. Her black velvety ears lay almost flat against her head, turned backward. Chloe couldn’t tell if she was upset or listening for footsteps in the hall. “You dreamt that, too?”
“Yeah. It was humid, and there were people, and … it was kind of confusing. Modern and ancient at the same time. And it stank. But I remember that wall.”
“Sokhumi is the city where our pride eventually settled after we left the Middle East for good. Only one of the Mai from that diaspora came back to Abkhazia—our previous pride leader. Her dream was to gather all of the scattered Mai in Eastern Europe and unite them somewhere, like the United States.” She carefully put the photograph away and closed the folder. “But she was killed in a skirmish between the Abkhazians and the Georgians.”
“There were other exiles, from all over, who rested and waited for her” Chloe murmured.
“What did you say?” Kim demanded, fixing her like a mouse with her eyes.
“In my dream I was the pride leader.”
“That’s … interesting,” Kim said slowly.
“Do you think I could be related to her?”
Do you think she could be my mother?
Kim opened the notebook again and looked at the picture of the bathhouse in Sokhumi again. “It’s possible. … But she had only one daughter that we know of, and she is dead. …” She sounded reticent, and somehow Chloe didn’t think it had anything to do with the disappointment about the two of them not being related. There was something else. …
Maybe she was jealous of Chloe possibly being the daughter of the old pride leader. Maybe it meant something, like inheritance in an aristocracy. Maybe she would take over when Sergei’s term was over. She wondered if that entailed anything besides running a real estate empire and tracking down lost and orphaned Mai.
What was it the two guards had said when they were rescuing her? Where’s our glorious Pride Leader? This wouldn’t even have cost him a life. Assuming he has more than one.
“Kim—before I went unconscious, one of the people who rescued me said something about the pride leader not risking losing ’one of his lives.’ What did she mean by that?”
“Traditionally, in the past, the leader of the Pride is also a true military leader, first into a battle or on the hunt, last to retreat—“One of her ears flicked. A moment later Chloe heard the noise, too: footsteps echoing loudly down the corridor. It sounded like Olga; she was probably coming to check up on Chloe.
Kim leaned close in, too close for a normal human. Kind of like Amy’s cat, when he would push his nose and foul-smelling kitty mouth into Chloe’s, smelling delicately around her face before withdrawing. “Listen to me, Chloe. Do not tell anyone about your dream or what we spoke of,” she hissed. “There are leaders, and there are leaders, Chloe King.”
Fourteen
Paul might be complacent and all best buddies with Alyec, but Amy wasn’t going to stand for it. If it were up to her stupid boyfriend, they would just sit back and do nothing until the world fell down. Which was exactly why she was skipping out of school early.
She’d given a half-assed excuse to her teacher about feeling sick and hadn’t even bothered going to the nurse. Her brother’s car was parked in the area of the lot reserved for seniors, and it had cost her an arm and a leg to borrow it: a guaranteed okay on any future favor of his choice. It’s not like he even needs it at Berkeley. It was an ancient, all-black Chevy Malibu station wagon that he called the Batmobile. The Malibu was a pretty small car for its V6, though, so when she floored it, the car tore out of the school parking lot like a bat out of hell.
Amy zoomed through the streets and parked several blocks away from Chloe’s house. She locked the car and went up to the front door, trying not to look around suspiciously, trying to make it look like she had every right to be there, pulling out Chloe’s spare key and entering the house in the middle of the day when they both should have been in school.
Mrs. King usually came home around seven, and Amy had every intention of being out of there in an hour. Maybe she’d even go back to school….
On second thought, who did she think she was kidding?
She had been planning this for several days and wore an appropriate outfit for breaking and entering (even if it was with a key): tight black jeans and a black tee, along with a black Emily sweatshirt whose hoodie had cat ears and sleeves that ended in gloves with claws. Perfect for a cat burglar. She had admired herself in the mirror for a while that morning. It was such a completely different look for her—all sleek and black. None of the crazy, bouncy, fringy, fluffy stuff she designed and wore. Her breasts stuck out a little bit; they almost looked as big as Chloe’s in this outfit. What she really needed was a pair of long black leather boots á la Emma Peel and maybe to dye her hair black, but Paul didn’t like it when she changed her hair color—he’d always liked the original shade.
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 [email protected] 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 t
o 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