The Nine Lives of Chloe King uncover that she is a descendant of an ancient race called the Mai. She discovers she has nine lives and is told by Jasmine and Alek that she alone can protect the race from human assassins, who have hunted them for thousands of years. The Mai are an ancient race of supernatural beings, the mortal descendants of the Ancient Egyptian cat goddess, Bastet. Chloe learns she is a member of them on her sixteenth birthday. The Mai once acted as defenders and companions of the human race, first as guardians for Egyptian pharaohs. Descendants of the Egyptian cat-goddess Bastet, the
Eye of Ra as Hathor-Tefnut, Mut-Sekhmet, and Bastet-Sothis appear in Egyptian texts. Wadjet could sometimes be depicted with a lion head rather than that of a cobra, Nekhbet could take on cobra form as a counterpart of Wadjet, and a great many of these goddesses wore the sun disk on their heads, sometimes with the addition of a uraeus or the cow horns from Hathor's typical headdress. Beginning in the Middle Kingdom, the hieroglyph for a uraeus could be used as a logogram or determinative for the word "goddess" in any context, because virtually any goddess could be linked with the Eye's complex