by Liz Braswell
Kim had darkly hinted that Chloe wasn’t the first Mai raised by humans whose human parents had “disappeared” in order for the orphan to be brought back into the fold. But even if Sergei hadn’t been planning to actually kill her mom, he also refused to rescue her from the Tenth Bladers. When Chloe finally decided to “fix” everything by offering to trade herself for her mom, both sides showed up at the Presidio—along with Kim, Alyec, Paul, and Brian—for a royal showdown that ended in Chloe losing one of her lives.
Sergei had let out a shot, but Chloe still wasn’t sure who the bullet had been meant for. Had it been really aimed at Brian and not her mom? Could it have been meant for Chloe? Sergei had taken her in and treated her like a daughter, lecturing her, playing chess with her, eating dinner with her, and doing other dad things that she had never gotten from her real father or the adopted one who took off when she was little. And there was the whole being-the-One thing she didn’t want to deal with, either. It would effectively mean usurping Sergei’s leadership of the Mai, which wasn’t something Chloe particularly wanted to do or even talk about.
“Yeah, I’m a little off the whole kitty-kennel thing right now,” she admitted.
“I don’t blame you. Hey, did I tell you I’m going to audition to spin at the fall formal?” He held up some twelve-inch records and waved them excitedly.
“You’re going to make them dig up a turntable?” Chloe asked dryly. They started toward The Lantern’s office, the school newspaper Paul sort-of worked on so he could get access to their office and computers.
“What? No. They’re totally not that hip. I just bought these off of Justin. I’m using my iPod and a computer.”
“Wow. That’s so old school.”
“Piss off, King. At least we’ll get to hear some good stuff this year.”
“Yes, but can we dance to it?”
“I’m counting on you to help fill the floor until things pick up,” Paul said earnestly. “I even promised Amy and some of her gothier friends that I’d play some Switchblade Symphony and New Order in the first set.”
“You know, you should actually write something for the paper sometime,” Chloe said as Paul unlocked the office door to The Lantern’s office. She didn’t actually work on the school newspaper herself but often took advantage of the couch and computers that her friend had access to because of his position as editor. “Put your vast musical knowledge to use. Write a ’just released’ column or something. Get some college application points.”
“Huh.” He paused, considering it. “Sure would beat editing the crappy freshman editorials. Well, that’s why you’re the brains of the operation.”
“Nah, just the brawn. And the claws.” Chloe shuffled in after he opened the door for her, prepared to throw her backpack onto the couch like she always did before throwing herself onto it, but she stopped herself midswing, just in time to keep from throwing the ten-pound bag onto Amy’s head. She was flipping through a copy of The Nation, her legs primly crossed, pretending not to have realized she’d surprised Chloe and Paul.
“Hey, guys,” Amy said casually. “What’s up?”
“Not much—how’d you get in here?” Paul didn’t sound as thrilled as he probably should have been—his girlfriend had decided to surprise him by suddenly appearing in a semiprivate room. Once Chloe left, it would probably mean a major snogging session—what gave?
“Carson let me in.” Amy jerked her thumb over her shoulder. Somewhere in the supplies closet, someone was rummaging.
“I can take off…,” Chloe suggested. She would have to find someplace else to nap—maybe under the bleachers at gym? The only people to find her would be janitors or dealers, and neither would show up until after school.
“Nah, it’s okay,” Amy said, putting the magazine down.
“Good.” Chloe heaved a sigh of relief and fell down next to Amy, immediately curling up and putting her head on one of the well-worn and slightly grimy pillows.
Carson came out of the supply closet and glared at the three of them. “Paul, you’re an editor. You work here—you can’t just keep using this place as your private club room.”
“Actually, I’m a columnist now,” Paul said with an evil grin.
“I’ve got an idea,” Chloe called sleepily from the couch. “You shut up about us being here, and we won’t tell Keira that you made the hot and heavy with Halley last night.”
Carson didn’t even try to deny it; he just huffed and spun on his heel back into the supply closet.
“And how do we know that?” Amy asked, looking at Chloe.
Paul pointed at his nose and made a little cat-clawing motion with his hand.
“Oh, right. Nice work, Chlo.”
But Chloe was already fast asleep.
Alyec actually took her out to dinner that evening—a diner, but at least it wasn’t McDonald’s—and gossiped about the band trip. He was as bad as a girl, his eyes lighting up delightedly as he related the exploits and disasters of various hookups that had occurred. No wonder he didn’t mind the cultish aspects of Firebird: it was just one big soap opera to him.
The lighting in the diner was dismally fluorescent and the decor was faded plastic aqua, all the way from the scratched-up bar to the bench seat Chloe’s ass was sticking to. Outside giant pane windows, the blackness was solid except for the lights of an occasional passing bus—kind of like that famous painting by Edward Hopper. It was a far cry from Firebird, with its velvet curtains and mahogany desks.
It was the same place where Alyec, Kim, Paul, and Amy had eaten after the fight at the Presidio, wondering what was going to happen next. Chloe had gone home with her mom and had the big talk about everything she had been hiding for the past couple of months: the claws, the Mai, everything. Afterward Brian had said goodbye to Chloe through her bedroom window.
She probably shouldn’t have been thinking about him while she was at dinner with Alyec, but it was hard not to. She nodded when it seemed appropriate and grunted at regular intervals.
“… and then I shot flaming chickens out of my ass,” Alyec finished, biting off the end of a fry that was speared on his fork.
“Uh, what? Sorry,” Chloe said when she realized exactly what he had said.
“You’re not listening! They’re talking about actually having a king and queen of the formal—like out of some cheesy old movie or something.”
“Oh. Bizarre.” She stared out the window, looking at the darkness, concentrating on not letting her eyes go slitty. She could feel the muscles tensing.
“Is there something you want to talk about, Chloe King?” He mock-frowned when he said it, but Chloe could see the worry in his eyes.
This was her chance to be honest, to let him know how confused she was about him and Brian, even though Brian was nowhere to be found.
Nope. Not yet. She just couldn’t.
“Remember when we were eating Chinese,” she said instead, “and you told me that it was hard for you sometimes to relate to normal humans and normal human life?”
“Yes. We had chicken and ten-vegetable lo mein,” he recalled fondly.
“How do you do it?” Chloe asked earnestly.
He raised his eyebrows, surprised by the directness of her question.
“I don’t know. …” He squirmed uncomfortably, like a completely normal human teenage male. A lock of thick blond hair fell into his eyes. “I have fun with everyone at school, but I’m not really that close to them, you know. They think it’s because I’m Russian or supercool or something. And …” He frowned, thinking about it. “And I’ve got my mom, and my dad when he bothers to come home, and everyone else—I grew up Mai, you know? Surrounded by them. It’s easy to be ’normal’ in the day if you can relax with others like you at night.”
“Oh. Right,” Chloe said glumly, picturing her own mother and house in the evening. Not exactly relaxing. She suspected that if there was a book called Dealing with Your Adopted Mai Child, her mom would have already read it and decided t
o make sure Chloe was appreciating her native culture. Difficult when my ethnicity is a big ol’ secret and my people can—and do—take down running deer with their bare claws.
“And … you’re different, Chloe,” he continued gently. “Even from us. You’re our spiritual leader—you have nine lives. Chloe, you died and came back to life. Twice. That makes you different from everyone.”
Chloe began to suck noisily on her chocolate milk shake, not wanting to hear about it. There were big issues—death, the afterlife, the goddesses of the Mai, God in general—concepts of thousands of years and infinities, and she wasn’t really prepared to think about them right now. Maybe never. Dying and coming back to life was weird. And she didn’t want it to have anything to do with her current ennui at school.
“I’m sorry,” Alyec said instantly, seeing her look. He brushed her cheek with his hand. “We don’t have to talk about this. But you asked. I think maybe readjusting to your old life is going to be … difficult, Chloe.”
“So not the answer I wanted,” she growled.
“Okay, how about this: If you have sex with me—like actual sex—I promise it will fix everything. Including your acne.”
Chloe cracked up. That was what she needed right now—to laugh, even if it only put off thinking about the inevitable for a little while.
“Wait,” she said, suddenly sobering. “What acne?”
Four
“ll faut que nous parlous,” Kim repeated patiently.
“Il faut que nous parlous,” Chloe said, trying to copy the sounds exactly.
“Better. Now can you give me all of the present subjunctive of parler?”
They sat on the roof of Café Eland, Chloe with a latte and Kim with her green tea. While the other Mai girl was growing more and more curious about Chloe’s daily life in San Francisco proper and what “normal” teenagers did, she was still too shy to ask. It had taken a lot of pleading from Chloe—as well as personal coaching on how the buses and BART worked—to get Kim to agree to meet in the city instead of at Firebird.
“Parle, parles, parle, parlous, parliez, parlient…”
“Parlent,” Kim corrected. Then one of her ears flicked back and for just a moment her eyes narrowed. “Your friends are here—in the café below us. They just came in.”
“Amy and Paul? I’m not meeting them tonight,” Chloe said, intrigued. And willing to do almost anything other than conjugate verbs.
“Perhaps they’re on a date,” Kim said mildly.
“Maybe.” Chloe crawled over to the heating vent and put her ear up next to it. Her hearing was nowhere near as good as Kim’s, but it was still several times better than a normal human’s. It took her a moment to sort through the extraneous noise: chairs scraping against the floor, the cash register ringing, other people talking, before she was able to single out her friends.
“Yeah, she kind of freaked when I told her.” That was Amy, settling herself into one of the big, comfy chairs. Chloe could imagine her friend tucking her long legs up underneath her, looking like a little girl in a big chair. Affected, but cute.
“Well, it’s big news.” That was Paul, stirring even more sugar into his hot chocolate.
“You didn’t freak out.”
“I want whatever’s best for you.” There was a pause and some wooden-sounding noises, like someone was pushing around them to get by.
“You up to a long-distance relationship?” Amy said this perkily, but there was something in her voice, something strained. Something testing—like this was a question on which many other things were balanced.
Paul let out a sigh, which he tried to cover by blowing on his drink.
“Amy, I’m not sure we’re up to a close-distance relationship,” he finally said.
There was a long, frosty pause. Even Chloe stopped breathing.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I … We … It hasn’t been … You haven’t felt anything weird recently?”
“Well, yeah.” Amy probably had that angry-sarcastic look on her face, where she scrunched up her nose. “What with saving Chloe and the cat-people thingy and Halloween coming up and all … What are you saying, Paul Chun?”
“I don’t know. With Chloe back, it’s kind of like the old days. Maybe this—us —is just sort of an aberration. A nice one,” he added quickly. “But maybe we were trying to make too big a thing out of some sexual tension and all the other weird things going on.”
“It’s not the old days, dipshit,” Amy snapped. Usually she used that word endearingly, but there was very little warmth in her voice this time. “Chloe’s a freaking cat person. Who lived with other cat people. Who are hunted by other crazy people.”
Chloe’s stomach sank into a little ball. Amy wasn’t actually saying anything bad about her, but hearing about herself and her recent life put that way was … cold. Kim looked away, pretending not to have heard.
“And if there’s a problem between us, it’s between us,” Amy went on to say. “Leave Chloe out of it.”
There was another moment’s silence that must have been horribly awkward between her two friends. When Amy spoke again, there were tears in her voice.
“I— I’ve been pretty happy recently,” she said weakly, talking in quick sips, the way you do when you’re trying not to cry. “I know I’ve been busy. … What’s wrong?”
Chloe moved her head away from the vent, not wanting to hear any more. She felt a little disgusted with herself for having heard that much. If it had been anyone else in the world or just one of her friends with someone else, she wouldn’t have minded at all. She probably would have kept listening. But this was way, way too close.
“They’re breaking up,” she said tonelessly, crawling back over to Kim. “Or Paul’s dumping her, I guess.”
Kim didn’t say anything, just watched her with large, unblinking green cat eyes.
“I should have realized something was going on,” Chloe continued. “I should have noticed—they haven’t been spending as much time together lately, and Paul doesn’t seem to want her around much.”
“What was her big news?” Kim asked, then suddenly remembered she had been pretending not to listen. She looked around herself uncertainly but didn’t blush. Just like a cat, Chloe thought, smiling inside a little.
“She’s graduating from high school a year early. It did freak me out.” She sighed. “She never talked about this before—I don’t know, it was just kind of sudden.”
“It seems that the three of you are each beginning to head down very different paths,” Kim said slowly.
“I hope you’re not going to start talking to me about this whole being-the-One crap again,” Chloe said, more harshly than she meant.
Kim lowered her eyes back to the French textbook. “I meant exactly what I said. But you will find it more difficult to escape your … heritage than you think.” Chloe was glad that she hadn’t used the word destiny, but she still didn’t like it.
“I’m sick of people telling me that!” Chloe stood up. “I am sixteen. I have spent my entire life as a ’normal human.’ It can’t all suddenly change. I want to get good grades, go out and party, go to the dance, go to college. Which is hard enough with the weeks I lost! I don’t have time for this, or Amy and Paul suddenly calling it quits, or my mom acting all weird around me. …”
“You want to go back to the old days.”
“Yes, I … Shut up.”
“What do you intend to do after we finish here?” Kim asked her.
That threw Chloe off. “What?”
“When we finish your French lesson here, what will you do?”
“I’m going to, uh …” Go home, read some, and go to sleep. These words had been well prepared, rehearsed, and used many times since she had returned from Firebird. But she couldn’t lie into Kim’s big cat eyes. Chloe thought about what Amy had said about her and wondered if she was actually fooling anyone. “Go running,” she finished lamely, sure that Kim would know what she me
ant.
Kim leaned over and, in a rare move, actually touched Chloe, wrapping her hand with her clawed paw.
“Whatever you decide to do,” she said levelly, “don’t lie to yourself, Chloe.”
Chloe thought about Kim’s words as she raced across the skyline, leaping and tumbling over rooftops and electric poles. She couldn’t ignore the fact that she was cheating by coming out here at night, that she was stealing time from schoolwork and lying to people. Before—weeks ago—she had been able to ignore all that and just enjoy the freedom of the night. And now she couldn’t.
Chloe.
She stopped suddenly. There was a whisper, an almost-voice that sounded like it was calling her name. The wind had picked up and was whistling through the old dead antennas that still decorated some rooftops like cactus spines. Chloe put her nose to the air and turned her head, trying to focus her ears on the sound.
“Mirao.”
Without thinking, she turned and followed the sound, leaping across a gap to the roof of the house beyond. There, sitting primly in front of the round chimney of an oil furnace, was a little black cat. Its whiskers and chest were white, matched by little white socks. A dairy cat, her mom would have called him. The kind that hung around dairy barns, catching rats and in return being given bowls of fresh milk.
What’s it doing up here? Chloe wondered. As she looked around for a door or skylight that was left open, the cat demurely picked up a paw and began licking it, like it had all the time in the world. Like it wasn’t a little tiny cat on a cold rooftop in a big city with winter coming on.