The Nine Lives of Chloe King (48 page)

“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 to 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 meant.

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.

“Hey, little guy.” Chloe figured that being Mai, she should be able to speak cat or something—but apparently not. It paused, its licking for a moment, then went back to work.

“You shouldn’t be up here. Are you lost?”

Chloe crept closer to it, making the
tchk tchk
noises that Amy’s cat always came running to. She crouched down and started to extend her hand, but the little cat leapt up to the top of the chimney, out of her reach.

“Mirao!”
it said again, louder.

“Come on, easy now.” Chloe dug her toe claws into the brick and prepared to push herself up. “You might be able to outrun a normal human, but I’m afraid—“She swiped her hand up, but the little cat jumped down and ran faster than Chloe’s claws could come out, scrabbling its feet like a cartoon. “Kitty!” Chloe called, beginning to get annoyed.

She ran across the roof after it, but it leapt over the side of the building.

“No!” Chloe looked down to the street. She couldn’t see into the darkness below, even with her cat eyesight.

“Mirao!”

Chloe looked up: the cat was on the roof of the far building, patiently waiting for her. It must have dived down to a window ledge and then climbed back up again. “Mir-ao!”

“I get it now. You want to play, is that it? We’re playing tag?” It wasn’t a lost little kitty—it was an alley cat, or a
sky cat,
more like. This was its world, and it just wanted to play with a newcomer. “Okay!”

Chloe grinned and leapt. The cat waited a moment, as if giving her a fair start, then took off—pausing now and then to make sure she was following.

This is great. I should totally get a cat,
Chloe decided. And it wasn’t as if her mom could really object to having one in the house anymore.

Whenever she got too close, Chloe made herself slow down; neither she nor her playmate wanted the game to end too soon. She smiled, wondering what they might look like to a random bystander: a witch and her familiar flying across the upper stories of the city? A large cat hunting a smaller one?
Maybe they would just dismiss it.
Halloween was just around the corner; anything supernatural seemed possible.

Suddenly the dairy cat veered to the left, down to the top of a fire escape.

“Ha! Getting tired?” Chloe taunted.

The cat gave her what she could have sworn was a nasty look.

“Okay, but I can’t play too much on the streets with you,” she warned. “I can’t let other people see me.”

“Mirao!” The cat turned and slipped down the metal stairs like a black Slinky.

“Is this your home? Are you showing me your—?” Suddenly Chloe stopped, forgetting the cat entirely. The fire escape led down into a dark dead-end alley, apparently unused except for garbage collection. Most of the pavement was pocked and puddled with slick black flats of shiny city water.

There was an ominous outline that cut into the oily reflections, large and organic and shaped suspiciously like a body.

And there was a smell … a familiar smell…

Chloe leapt straight down the last two floors, landing in a crouch just inches away from the edge of the shape. She crawled over closer and as her eyes adjusted saw what was indeed a human body, unmoving and broken looking.

It was Brian.

Five

“Oh my God—“

Chloe put a hand to his neck, carefully retracting her claws. There was a pulse—but it was sluggish. His skin was cold and clammy, as if his body could no longer fight the chilly environment around him.

“Chloe?” Brian croaked.

Chloe ran her hands over his body, trying to see and feel what was wrong. He moaned and struggled a little—it didn’t look like his neck or back were broken.