The Chosen Read Free

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’teven 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 ofher 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

    “ChloeîChloe?”
    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 her 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