by Liz Braswell
Chloe pulled out her cell phone and called Brian, but it clicked immediately over to voice mail, like it had the last twenty times she’d tried. And his voice mail was full. She hadn’t heard anything from him since the night she’d died and come back saving her mom from the crossfire between the Mai and the Order. Brian, the son of the Order’s leader, had come out on her side—and vengeance was promised by the rest of the Bladers. He had said his goodbyes at her window, where they’d shared a kiss through the glass pane, and then he’d disappeared into the dark city.
“Hey, Selina, what up?” Paul asked, going up to his own locker. He had taken to calling her that since she had told him and Amy about her true nature. Selina was Catwoman’s alter ego, and, she suspected, his way of dealing with the fact that she had superpowers while he, the comic geek, remained a normal human. Whatever helps him cope, thought Chloe.
“So, besides being tired all the time and getting mocked by the general school population, are there any other symptoms of mono I should know about?” Chloe asked.
“I know you can’t go to some countries in Africa because Epstein-Barr interacts with some weird fungus and can kill you,” Paul said diplomatically.
“No African countries, no weird fungi. Check and check.” She thought vaguely of the Pride in New Orleans, made up primarily of Mai who had chosen to stay in Africa after they were forced to leave Egypt and had eventually migrated to Louisiana.
“How you doing, dealing with being back and all?”
Chloe sighed and leaned against the lockers, hands behind her head. “Let’s see. Three weeks of extratricky trig to catch up on, I somehow managed to miss the Civil War Reconstruction, and I have to figure out oxidation-reduction reactions on my own in the lab after school. Oh,” she said, snapping her fingers, “and Moby-Dick. The entire thing, whale meat, peg legs, and all, by next Tuesday.”
“That, uh, sucks,” Paul said.
“I don’t think they have invented a word beyond sucks yet that adequately describes my academic situation,” Chloe reported. They started walking down the hall together, Chloe dragging her feet to phys ed, seriously bummed. She still hadn’t decided between blowing Mr. Parmalee’s mind by suddenly slam dunking something or pulling a Smallville and trying to hide her secret powers by acting like a normal, physically inept slacker.
“What about, you know.” Paul searched for his words awkwardly, something he rarely did. He made a little clawing gesture.
“Fitting in with you monkeys like a normal human being?” Chloe said dryly. “It’s really not that big a deal, Paul. I’ve done it my whole life.”
He nodded, but Paul’s expressive caterpillar eyebrows were drawn together a little, like an anime character miming worry. Paul swished down the hallway in his hipster DJ track pants and Chloe realized she hadn’t seen him in khakis since … well, before she discovered who she really was and fell in with the Mai. As she pushed her way into the locker room, a thought occurred to her: I wonder what else I missed.
When she went over to Amy’s that evening to study, her friend’s already cloth-covered and messy bedroom looked like a costume factory had exploded—a sure sign that Halloween was on its way. There were Styrofoam coffee cups filled with sequins, beads, buttons, and other shiny things dotting every free surface. Bits of lace and pieces of velvet were strewn everywhere. A glue gun and scissors and needles and a sewing machine all perched precariously in one corner, as if afraid of falling into the chaos below and being incorporated into an outfit. Amy’s previous triumphs were hung on hangers, looking strangely organized against the chaos of the rest of the room. She was already playing her Halloween music: Buffy: The Musical blasted through her old-school wood speakers that were hidden under the craft crap.
“I’m thinking seventeenth century,” Amy said, a finger to her lips. “You know, by way of the undead. Zombie, not vampire.”
“Yeah. Vampires are so passé,” Chloe muttered, erasing the math problem she was working on and starting over again. She had managed to carve herself a little nest on one end of her friend’s bed and was using a bolt of muslin as a lap desk. In front of her, Chloe’s notebook teetered unevenly on her math book, covered with sines and cosines and bits of equations.
Amy took her friend’s comment at face value. “I know! Isn’t it ridiculous? But this will be great. I’ll use real boning in the corset this time—you know that place Dark Garden? They said they’d sell me scraps of their two-way coil boning and tips to go over them.”
“Amy, I’m trying to not get held back here,” Chloe said, raising her math book so she could see it. “No offense, but I really have to knuckle down.”
“Oh yeah, sorry, no problem.” Amy squinched her nose and Chloe tried not to laugh. Her friend’s dark hair was frizzing out all around her face, exploding out of the strip of cloth she’d tried to tie it back with. There were giant, baby-diaper-sized safety pins lined up neatly on her T-shirt’s shoulder, and a measuring tape hung around her neck. “I am all about schoolish things these days.” She leapt and crash-sat on the bed, causing Chloe to hug the textbook to her chest and grab her calculator for its safety. “Look at this!”
Amy pulled a pamphlet out of the back of her jeans. She had been wearing pants a lot more often these days, ones that were—for her—surprisingly tight and shapely. She used to, um, eschew them as being banal and pedestrian, Chloe thought carefully, trying to use her SAT words. She took the brochure and began reading.
“‘Fit’? What the hell is that, a new diet?”
“No, it’s F-I-T, the Fashion Institute of Technology. In New York. It’s like, the best clothing design college in the country. Very prestigious.”
Chloe looked at the photos: people dressed weirdly—like Amy—sitting in classrooms, walking happily down the street, pinning things up on mannequins, designing jewelry on computers.
“Cool. Looks great,” Chloe said, handing the pamphlet back. “But, uh, you’ve got a ways to go yet, you know? We’re sophomores, remember?”
“Yeah.” Amy blushed and looked down. “I’m, uh, kind of thinking about graduating a year early.”
“What?” Chloe demanded, putting her book aside.
“Chloe, I’m done here,” Amy said, sighing. “I’m already taking one AP course—with just three more by next summer I’ll have fulfilled all my requirements.”
“I … shit,” Chloe said, unsure what to say. The only other person she knew who’d graduated early was Halley’s older brother, a certified genius who went immediately to MIT, not FIT. It wasn’t the sort of thing people like them—her and Amy and Paul—did.
One more year and suddenly Amy would be gone from her life.
“Actually, you—I mean, what’s happened with you—was a big part of my decision,” Amy said shyly, her blue eyes round and big. “You know, the last month when you weren’t really here, when you were doing that whole Mai thing and none of us knew what was going on—you had this whole other life going on. You’re, like, a cat person, and leader of your people and dealing with feuds that go back hundreds of years and you’re, like, sixteen. And still going to school. I want a cool life, too.”
They were both silent for a moment.
“I’m not ’the leader of my people,’” Chloe finally mumbled, opening up her math book again.
For the next few hours they interacted normally:
Amy interrupted Chloe’s studying, constantly asking what she thought of a particular fabric or lace, and Chloe responded by throwing things at her. They took a break at eight thirty and Mrs. Scotkin made them espresso and s’mores over the flames on her stove. At ten the two friends stopped working and watched The Daily Show with John Stewart.
On the drive home, as Amy chatted excitedly about FIT and her plans for next year, she kept looking askance at Chloe. She’s been wanting to tell me this for a while, Chloe realized. She’s been working herself up to it.
When they pulled up the driveway, Chloe’s mom was already looking out the kitchen
window for her. Amy waved. Chloe sighed and gritted her teeth. Anna King never used to do that, and if she was waiting up, she always made it look like she was doing something else, like watching TV or reading. Her philosophy was to respect her teenage daughter and trust her—something her ex-husband hadn’t agreed with. Although Chloe hardly remembered him, her adoptive dad had had been very overprotective. He’d even told her mom that Chloe shouldn’t date. Ever. Chloe wondered if it was possible that he had known who she was all along—a Mai, a lion person—and that any human she was intimate with would die.
Chloe waited as long as she could, waving at Amy until the black Malibu faded into the black night, its red taillights growing smaller like a match going out. Finally it was time to go in.
“Hey …” Chloe stepped inside the warm house.
“Hey, Chloe. How was your day?” Her mom sounded casual and was washing something in the sink. For just a moment, Anna King looked like a suburban housewife, not a single mom who lawyered by day and had to deal with her adopted freaky lion girl at night. Even though things had basically turned out all right, Chloe still couldn’t forgive herself for her mom’s kidnapping.
“All right. I got most of my math done at Amy’s—if I can get through fifty pages of the Dick tonight, I’ll be golden.”
“I really wish you wouldn’t call it that,” Anna said, giving a smirk that was—just for a second—all lawyer and old mom. “Do you want anything to eat?”
There had suddenly been a lot of extra meat in the fridge, and while Chloe wished her mom would stop trying to be so subtly and awkwardly supportive, she was secretly grateful. She hadn’t gone totally Atkins since her claws first came out, but she definitely found more of a preference for things salty and red these days.
Vampires are so passé, she thought. Cats are in now.
“I’ll grab something in a little while. I really want to get this done.” She began to head up the stairs to her room.
“Chloe?”
She stopped, cringing at the openness in her mom’s voice.
“I’m really proud of you.” Her mother’s pixie-cut hair was pulled back flat and into two tiny pigtails on the back of her head, but she still managed to look maternal and older in that instant. “Not just because of … everything you’ve been through, but how you’re really working hard to get back to where you were in school. I think you’re doing a great job.”
“Thanks,” Chloe said. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to say anything else, but her mom just nodded and went back to doing the dishes.
After the showdown at the Presidio, the two of them had had a big ol’ heart-to-heart about a lot of things. Chloe told her all about her secret powers, the Mai, the Tenth Bladers who kidnapped her, how when she was dead, she saw her biological mom. Her mom had sipped scotch and listened. Finally they both cried and hugged, and that was that.
But things had changed between them, and she was uncomfortable even thinking about it. There was no getting around the fact that she had saved her mom’s life by taking a bullet and dying, losing one of her eight remaining lives. That was a big, heavy thing for a mother to accept, a mother who still thought of herself as protector and guardian.
And Chloe didn’t like the walking on eggshells her mom was doing while trying to figure out the best way to deal with her superhero teenage daughter. I should do something bad and get grounded, she half decided. That would set things normal real fast.
Her cell phone rang—or rather, Amy’s cell phone, the one with the GPS that had allowed Chloe’s friends to track her down when she was trying to trade herself for her mom with the Tenth Bladers, rang. Chloe hadn’t given it back yet, another loose thread from the whole incident. But not the loosest one.
“Hey,” she said, recognizing Alyec’s number.
“Hello, Chloe girl! Guess where I’m calling you from?”
“The All-State after party?” she guessed.
“Absolutely! Can you believe it? There’s no beer!”
“Amazing. And in our state’s capital, too.” Chloe smiled tiredly, dropping her books. “How was the concert?”
“Not too bad. But I’m beginning to think that the flute is for losers. I’m going to learn piccolo—at first I thought it was totally gay, but those guys get all of the chicks after their solos.”
“Nice, Alyec.”
“Hey, I gotta go, but I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
“Yeah, see you tomorrow,” Chloe said, kissing into the phone. He kissed back and she hung up.
She drew Moby-Dick out of her bag and leaned back on her bed, slowly turning to the page where she left off.
Okay. It’s eleven fifteen. Two good hours and I’ll be in the black.
But her eyes soon glazed over. The fact that it was all about the fatty part of the whale called sperm didn’t even amuse her. She put her finger down to mark the page and looked out her window.
A round, misshapen moon rose, too white to really be called a harvest moon. Amy would be so disappointed—it wouldn’t be full at Halloween but past it, already waning. Something she never would have known or noticed before becoming fully Mai. Mist or fog or smog blurred the bottom part of it and winked out the stars in the lower half of the sky.
Brian was somewhere out there. The last missing thread of the fight. All of the other key players were accounted for.
Chloe looked outside for another moment, then finally turned back to her book.
Two
She Was having that dream again.
She knew it was a dream, but there was no way to stop what was about to happen: His arms had curlicues of ink and scar tissue spelling out the words Sodalitas Gladii Decimi. He dressed in matte black, like a shadow. His eyes were blue with something crazy in them.
Wait, there was something familiar about that. …
And then she ran.
She ran into an alley, even though she knew that was the wrong thing to do. In the nightmare, it was the only thing she could do. The darkness swallowed her whole and before she could be spat out into the other end of the alley, a barbwire-topped gate loomed above her.
His first throwing star hit her in the leg. A second caught her wrist. She fell down and he was above her, brandishing the silver dagger that would end each of her eight lives. He smiled, almost sadly, and cut her throat.
Chloe sat up in bed, covered in sweat. “Seven lives,” she told herself aloud. “I have seven. That was my sister, not me.”
The dreams were always about her sister, the other possible Chosen One, who had been murdered earlier that year. Once in a great while they were about her biological mother and her quest to unite all of the Eastern European Mai twenty years ago. But Chloe never had any dreams about the brother she’d been told she might have—did that mean he was still alive? Did she only relive memories of the dead at night?
Her clock radio said 4:17. It was still dark out, and the stars shone in the coldest part of the night. Chloe got up and opened the window, letting the freezing air cool her down. There was no way she was going to be able to get back to sleep anytime soon.
With one last glance toward her bed, Chloe leapt up to the sill and down onto the ground, disappearing into the darkness.
Three
“Chloe? Chloe?”
A familiar, nagging voice was … well, nagging her into awakeness. Chloe dizzily swam toward consciousness, suddenly aware that her left arm was asleep, crushed against the desktop.
“Maybe you really do have mono,” Paul said, kicking her chair to rouse her. “Trig is over, buddy. The good news is that Abercrombie dashed out to make a phone call.”
“Gnnerrrrhh,” Chloe said, trying to make her mouth work.
“What’s going on with you? Burning the midnight oil? It’s only a few weeks to catch up on.”
“Yeah, I’m having a hard time getting a hold on this stuff. You know, like you can’t train cats to do tricks? Like that. I’m a dumb cat.” She stretched and, because no one was around, let he
r claws out. Paul still wasn’t entirely used to it, and his eyes widened. Lying to them again. What a great way to start over.
“Yeah, that’s why you’re in superadvanced math. Because you’re stupid,” Paul said dryly.
Chloe shrugged, choosing not to answer. “Kim’s going to help me out later with French.”
“Kim can speak French?”
“Flawlessly. It’s kind of eerie.” Of course, watching the Mai girl with the big cat ears and slit eyes and fangs do anything normal was eerie, but for some reason conjugating verbs and reading aloud from Les Liaisons Dangereuses was particularly disturbing.
“Are you going … uh … there?” Paul asked, meaning to Firebird. She suspected that if he ever actually used the word Mai, he would whisper it, the way her grandmother said the word homosexual.
“No, I don’t think so. We’re going to get a cup of tea or coffee,” Chloe said, shoving her notebook into her book bag and putting the pen behind her ear.
“You don’t like going back there, do you?” Paul asked.
He was absolutely right. When Chloe was first taken there, it seemed like such a haven—not only were they protecting her from the Tenth Blade assassins, but Alyec, Olga, and Sergei introduced her to a whole new world. They helped find out who her biological mother was. They supported her and took her in …
… and kept her there. Everything she did, she had to do with them. She couldn’t even leave by herself “for her own protection.” It was only toward the end that she began to think of them as a cult.
Individual members were fine, like Alyec and Kim, one of her newest, closest friends. And Igor and Valerie were harmless, even if they bought into the whole philosophy of the place.
It was Sergei she didn’t want to think about.
There was no proof that he’d sent members of the Mai’s warrior class, the kizekh, to kill her mom. On Chloe’s one real escape from Firebird, while they were “protecting” her from the Tenth Blade, Amy and Paul had told her that they thought something weird was going on at her house—like that her mom was never there anymore. As soon as Chloe realized her mom had been kidnapped, Kim had volunteered her particularly feline talents to search Chloe’s house for clues. The girl with the cat ears had not only sniffed out traces of humans from the Order—but also the presence of Mai. What had they been doing there? If it was just to watch and protect her mom, surely Sergei would have told her … wouldn’t he?