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 dynasties, the deity remained, but was assigned a lesser role in the pantheon by bearing the name "Bastet". This happened after Thebes became the capital of ancient Egypt, during the Eighteenth Dynasty. As they rose to great power the priests of the temple of Amun, dedicated to the primary local deity, advanced the stature of their titular deity to national prominence (Amun-Ra) and shifted the relative stature of others in the Egyptian pantheon. Diminishing her status, they began referring to the deity with the added suffix, as "Bastet", and their use of the new name was well-documented (thereby becoming very