The Nine Lives of Chloe King (65 page)

“C’m back soon,” he mumbled, trying to open his eyes and failing. “Miss you.”

Chloe leaned over and kissed him. Brian smiled but was soon snoring again.

How do I feel?
Chloe asked herself, picking her jeans up off the floor and putting them on. They fit softly and nicely, like third-day jeans always did.

Do I feel different?

She made her way through the benches of hospital-y stuff, surprising Dr. Lovsky, who was carrying a breakfast tray for Brian.

“Oh, uh, morning, Honored One,” the older woman said, a little shocked when she realized the two of them had been together all night. But whether it was because he was a human or that hanky-panky in general had gone on in her little sterile kingdom, Chloe couldn’t tell.

“Morning,” she said cheerfully before resuming her thoughts and her progression upstairs. Maybe there was a whole ceremonial day-after-New-Pride-Leader-speech breakfast fete in her honor. That would be terribly embarrassing, but there might be fruit salad.

Sniffing the air and using her Mai hearing, Chloe was sort of disappointed she didn’t hear any of the sounds that might be associated with fete preparations, so she went to the kitchenette instead, where at least she smelled coffee.

Kim was in there already, getting her morning green tea.

“Honored One,” she said, dipping her tea bag and her head at the same time.

“Chloe,”
Chloe corrected grumpily, getting a cup. Since she had been away, they had installed a cool new coffee machine where you could choose a packet of ten different kinds of coffee, or tea, or even hot chocolate—and press some buttons and the machine would make you almost anything. Of course, the packets were made out of nonbiodegradable Mylar, so as soon as things calmed down around here, Chloe would have to start pushing to get rid of it.

Surely a Chosen One could do that.

Her aim was still a little off: as she poured the milk, the coffee overflowed her cup—at least it wasn’t plastic foam—and spilled on the counter.

“Damn,” Chloe grumbled, carefully lifting the cup to her mouth to sip the excess off. She almost felt hung over.

“Did you sleep well?” Kim asked.

Chloe frowned, looking her friend in the eye, but there were no double entendres. It was an innocent question.

“Not … exactly.”

Kim nodded wisely. “Did you and Brian have sex together?”

Chloe choked on her coffee and spat it out, spilling some more from the cup as she did. “What the hell?” she demanded.

The cat-earred girl barely hid her smile. “I was just curious.”

Chloe had opened her mouth to say something about the private lives of Chosen Ones when Igor came into the room.

“Honored One.” He gave her a quick nod. “You should come quick. Dmitry is back—he’s killed someone.”

There goes the happy ending that was just beginning.
Why wasn’t anything easy?

She followed Igor out and into Sergei’s office. Kim came padding quietly behind. For some reason, Chloe didn’t mind her constant presence, even when it wasn’t exactly invited. She was never distracting, opinionated, or full of herself.

Chloe expected to find him standing tall, impassive, scary, threatening—like he normally was. The kizekh were the soldier class, after all—and from what she had seen at the fight on the Presidio, they were quite effective and disciplined in their own scary, catlike way.

Instead he was sitting on a chair, bent over and weeping. Olga was standing next to him, a hand on his shoulder.

“Honored One!” Dmitry whirled around—of
course
he would have heard them talking. His senses were probably almost as sharp as Kim’s. The big guard threw himself to his knees at her feet and touched her ankles. “I did not know! That he was a
murderer
of our people—that he—that he—
killed
our Chosen One!” Chloe was confused for a moment before she realized he meant her biological mother. He was old enough to remember her, she realized, and had maybe even met her before he came over.

“What happened?” Chloe asked as gently as she could, considering there was a crazy murdering adult below her wailing and prostrating himself.

“When I learned the news of our Pri—of Sergei’s death, I grew incensed and swore vengeance!”

Chloe turned to glare at Igor.

“He wasn’t around when I passed along your novengeance thing,” he protested. “And even if he was, well, tensions were running a little high. …”

“I went to a place where I knew there would be one of the filthy human Order patrolling,” Dmitry said, a hard glint in his eye as he recalled. “And killed the coward with my bare claws.” Then he began to weep again. “I thought I was avenging our leader, our great protector…. I knew you were the One, but he was as a father to us in the days between you and the One before. …”

“Do you remember which one you mur—uh, killed?” Chloe asked.

Dmitry shook his head. “They are all alike—brown hair, terrible smell—he was one from the skirmish the other night.”

He sounds more Klingon than Mai,
Chloe noted.

“You’ve heard my new rule? No more bloodshed, except in self-defense?” Chloe asked.

“Yes, Honored One. Of course. Our duty is to protect the Pride, not declare war.” He looked up at her, his crazy face streaked with tears but set with new resolve.

Chloe wasn’t sure if he was asking forgiveness; she wasn’t sure that she could have given it. There were more important things to deal with immediately. What was it they said on TV?
Damage control?

She tried to block out the image of the man before her ripping out the throat of some nameless human, tried to forget that there was a murderer at her feet.
Murder.
Someone’s life snuffed out because he was in the path of an angry, vengeful cat person. Not that anyone in the Tenth Blade was exactly innocent, but what if it was someone like Brian? Forced to join, not exactly in complete agreement with the tenets …

Chloe went around to Sergei’s desk and did the only thing that made any sense—she called Whitney. Directly.

“Hello?” From the obnoxious tone in that one word, she could tell he already knew who was calling.

“Whitney, we need to meet
now.
This is the second death in a week from our stupid little war—we need to end it.”

“What second death?”

Chloe looked at Igor and Olga and Kim. They all shrugged—whoever Dmitry had killed, apparently his body hadn’t been found yet.

“One of my people killed one of your people in revenge for Sergei’s death, against my orders. I don’t know who it is, but you might want to issue a roll call.”

“Son of a—”

“See? I’m
calling
you to
tell
you about it. I’m being open and honest in an attempt to end this…
craziness.”
Amy had a much better word, but somehow Chloe suspected Mr. Whitney H. Rezza didn’t know Yiddish.

“If you think I’m going to
thank
you for being the first to let me know about the death of one of my Order or break down weeping and beg for a
truce,
Miss King, especially from
you…”

Chloe wondered if it would have been any different if she had been male. Or older. He only called her “Miss” when he was really upset and looking to insult her.

“Listen. Remember how I asked you about your son?”

“What does—?”

“We have him.
Alive.
Barely.”

There was finally silence on the other end. This was a gamble; he seemed more than willing to give Brian up to other members of the Order of the Tenth Blade who thought he had betrayed them by helping Chloe. But Brian
was
his son, after all, and she bet that whatever fate he wanted, it probably didn’t involve him ending up at the mercy of the Mai.

“If you want to see him again,
alive,
you will come to”—somewhere public, somewhere safe—“Pier 39, at seven o’clock, with all your little cronies or whatever. This whole thing is ending
today,
one way or another, Mr. Rezza.”

She hung up on him again.

It was kind of nice.

She looked up—Olga, Kim, Igor, and Dmitry were all staring at her.

“What?” she demanded.

“You don’t, uh”—Igor cleared his throat—“sound like the intern we hired a couple of weeks ago, Honored One.”

Chloe just smiled, saving her energy for things greater than laughing.

Seventeen

“I have never
seen these up close,” Kim said, intrigued by the sea lions. She leaned dangerously over the rail, a black baseball cap and her willowy wispiness making her easily mistaken for an overeager young boy.

“You’ve lived in the Bay Area your
whole life
and you’ve never seen the sea lions before?” Chloe asked, amazed. Brian tried to stay alert in a wheelchair nearby; Dmitry and Ellen stood guard over him. With his good looks and their weird presence Brian was occasionally mistaken for a celebrity; tourists took candid shots of him, thinking he was
somebody.
Besides this being amusing, Chloe liked having the extra witnesses.

Brian hadn’t been completely on board when she told him her plan; he thought it was dangerous for her—and any other Mai involved. But when Chloe asked him what else she could possibly do, he didn’t have a better idea.

Amy, Paul, and her mom were with him, too; Chloe wanted
everyone
who was involved to witness whatever occurred. Alyec pretended to pitch Amy headfirst into the water a couple of times, and Paul even offered to help once.
I’m sure sublimated anger has nothing to do with it,
Chloe thought. Olga was eating a soft-serve ice cream cone, though from her figure it looked like the concept should have been alien.
I wonder if she’s also a dairy cat.

About a half hour after the sun set—it was hard to tell, it being one of those cold gray San Francisco fall days—Whitney strode up with a sleek umbrella he swung like a swagger stick, his expensive raincoat unfurling behind him. There were other people with him, mostly middle-aged, some younger.

“Where is my son?” Whitney demanded immediately.

“I’m right here, Dad.” Brian waved weakly.

His father’s face went white when he saw the extent of his son’s injuries.

“What have you
done
to him …?” Whitney demanded, coming forward, his face now going purple with rage.

Igor stepped easily between him and Brian, arms poised. Ellen and Dmitry loomed forward.

“We
didn’t do anything.” Chloe resisted the urge to add,
old man.
“I found him, practically dying, in an alley.
Your
people did this to him.”

The old man didn’t say anything. He wouldn’t deny or confirm it.

“It was Dickless, Dad,” Brian said, his thin voice almost lost in the evening breeze and wails of the sea lions. “He and his little bitches took me by surprise. They left me for dead.”

Whitney opened his mouth and closed it again several times. “Richard is dead,” he finally said. “The Mai killed him last night.”

“Oh,” Brian said. “Darn.”

“See, this is
exactly
what I mean!” Chloe said, frustrated. “Sergei was killing his own people for power, your people are killing your own people just for—I don’t know, old rules. Maybe power as well. And for
what?”
She looked around at everyone gathered there. “What really has been the reason you both have been at each other’s throats for so many thousands of years?”

“The Order of the Tenth Blade exists to protect humanity from those stronger who would easily defeat them,” Whitney said dramatically.

“Would you take a
look?”
Chloe threw her hand out at her Mai friends. “If your intelligence is
half
as good as ours, you know that there are less than a hundred of us in the West.
A hundred,
Whitney. That’s less than the Native Americans, or Tibetans, or Jews, or any
other
dwindling, oppressed minority!”

“Hey,” Amy muttered. “I don’t think we’re dwindling.” Paul kicked her to shut up.

“Forget the Tenth Blade: one good earthquake or fire or dirty bomb or terrorist attack and there’d be no more Mai west of the Mississippi. When was the last time, exactly, the Mai actually posed a threat to continued human existence?”

“We have always been there to stop it,” Whitney said, drawing himself up. But from the looks on the younger members’ faces, he wasn’t really convincing anyone.

“And let us not forget the original reason for our existence,” a middle-aged woman said, stepping forward. “The villages and cities that were wiped out—”

“Because you raped and murdered one of our sisters!” Igor said, also stepping forward.

“Five. Thousand. Years. Ago. Jesus
Christ,
guys, let it go!” Chloe glared back and forth at both of them. “And may I remind you”—she addressed this to the Order—“the Mai are not
vampires
who prey on the living. You are not vampire slayers who protect the innocent.”

“They are fell, foul beasts spawned from the pits,” one of the other Tenth Bladers spoke up. “Their existence is anathema to God. Thus they are punished to never have a home and never commingle with true humans.”

“You sound like the Rogue,” Chloe muttered. “Who, by the way, is an insane psycho killer. And anyway, the whole five-thousand-year-curse thing seems to be over. Brian and I have not only, uh,
kissed
multiple times, but…” She didn’t want to say it, but if it would further the cause, as it were, well, illusions of her chastity didn’t really count much against dead bodies. “Last night, we, uh … Look, anyway, the point is, he’s
fine.”

There were shocked looks from everyone, especially Amy. Chloe had
sworn
to her years ago she would be the first to know when It happened.
Technically, it wasn’t “It” yet
—she had no desire to get pregnant on top of everything else that was going on in her life right now. But what happened was close enough to It to count.