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
Bastet Egyptian as "pr-bꜣstt" (also transliterated as "Per-Bastet"), carries her name, literally meaning "House of Bastet". It was known in Greek as "Boubastis" ("Βούβαστις") and translated into Hebrew as "Pî-beset", spelled without the initial "t" sound of the last syllable. In the biblical Book of Ezekiel 30:17, the town appears in the Hebrew form "Pibeseth". Herodotus, a Greek historian who traveled in Egypt in the fifth century BCE, describes Bastet's temple at some length: The description offered by Herodotus and several Egyptian texts suggest that water surrounded the temple on three (out of four) sides, forming a type of lake known