Jenna Black - Girls' Night Out

“I’ll bet,” I said sympathetically, then nibbled on my sandwich some more.

After gobbling about half her sandwich in two bites, Al seemed to have slowed down, fidgeting with it instead of eating it.

“I had to go back to Faerie over the summer,” she said, plucking a crumb off her Kaiser roll and throwing it to a lurking pigeon. “That’s the compromise I have with my mother: I can go to college in Avalon as long as I return home whenever school is out.”

I sighed, thinking about my own deal with my father. “I know all about compromises.”

Al smiled at me, but the smile quickly faded as she pulled another corner off her bread. A couple of pigeons dive-bombed the corner when she threw it onto the grass, cooing and flapping their wings at each other as more birds took notice of the possible windfall and came winging our way.

“I was really, really looking forward to coming back to school,” Al said as she watched the birds fight over the crust of bread. “But now . . .” She shrugged and fell silent. There was a suspiciously shiny look to her eyes, like she might be thinking about crying.

I’d just met Al a little more than an hour ago, and though I was trying, I hadn’t yet succeeded in making myself like her. I wasn’t ready to have a deep, personal conversation with her. I’m used to keeping to myself and playing my cards close to the vest. But Al was obviously in need of a friend, and I like to think I’m a nice person at heart.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her gently.

She sniffed daintily and frowned down at her sandwich as if surprised to find it was still there. “I think my mother had my boyfriend run out of town while I was home for the summer.”

I winced in sympathy. “Ouch.”

For all my dad’s faults, he’d been very good about tolerating my boyfriend, Ethan. Even though Ethan is Unseelie while my dad is Seelie, and even though Ethan’s dad is destined to be my dad’s main opponent in the election next year. I kept expecting my dad to put his foot down and tell me not to see Ethan anymore, but so far, so good. Of course, since I couldn’t leave my safe house without having a bodyguard with me, it wasn’t like I could get too deeply involved with Ethan. Finn might not be an official chaperon, but his presence certainly discouraged Ethan from getting too . . . demonstrative. Which I knew was bugging Ethan more the longer we dated.

“He’s a human from London,” Al continued. “He told me he wasn’t going home for the summer, and he was staying in a flat off campus. He promised he’d be waiting for me when I got back from Faerie, but when I went to his flat, they told me he’d moved out. And I found out he’d dropped out of the university, too.”

“Maybe something came up over the summer and he had to leave.”

Al snorted. “Yeah. Something like my mother, who doesn’t want me dating humans. She was furious with me when she first found out about Gary. She ordered me to stop seeing him, but part of the reason I wanted to come to Avalon U was so I could be free from her just for a little while.”

Somehow, I didn’t think it was that easy to be free from Faerie Queens or from mothers in general. Mine had followed me all the way to Avalon and, after a brief period of enforced sobriety, was back to her old ways, drinking herself stupid so that I could hardly bear to lay eyes on her. I doubted having a Faerie Queen for a mother would be much more pleasant, but sometimes it seemed like anyone would be better than my own mom.

“Do you think he went home to London?” I asked. As a Fae, Al couldn’t physically go to London to see her boyfriend, but she could at least make a phone call and get to the bottom of things.

Al nodded and tossed the rest of her sandwich—cold cuts, oozing

condiments, veggies, and all—in the direction of the patiently waiting pigeons. The large projectile sent them all winging away with cries of alarm, and the sandwich’s contents splatted on the grass. Al, who obviously didn’t care about the mess she’d just made, brushed the crumbs off her hands as the pigeons recovered their courage and swarmed back in.

“His super gave me his forwarding address. I’ve tried ringing him, but no one answers. It . . . worries me. I keep thinking, maybe my mother didn’t settle for just chasing him away. Maybe she had him killed.”

If Al were just an ordinary human, I might have laughed at the absurdity of her worry. But when we were talking about the Queen of the Unseelie Court, I wasn’t sure the worry was so absurd. The Unseelie is the darker of the two Courts, and is often associated with things evil. Not that that’s completely fair, because the Unseelie Fae are just as capable of being good people as the Seelie Fae are. But it isn’t completely unfair, either.

“Do you really think she’d have done that?” I asked, wondering how I’d allowed myself to get sucked into this conversation. It wasn’t exactly the casual, getting-to-know-you lunchtime conversation I’d been expecting.

“She’s capable of it,” Al said grimly. “But I don’t know. She’s scary enough she could probably have just said ‘boo’ and he’d have run for it.”

Wow. That made Gary sound like quite the Prince Charming. I studied my sandwich with great intensity in the hopes she wouldn’t see my opinion on my face.

“Or maybe she just offered him money,” Al continued. “He was on

scholarship and always strapped for cash.”

If she thought he would run away if her mom said boo or would likely take money to break it off with her, then Al was better off without him, but I knew better than to say so. I glanced surreptitiously at my watch, wondering how much longer I had to force myself to make friendly with her. I’d been ready to get away from her—and especially from her magic—since she’d first sat down beside me. I definitely felt a pang of sympathy for her, but not so much that I wanted to sit on the cold, damp grass with her magic making my skin crawl any longer than necessary. But Al looked like she was in no hurry to leave, even though she’d discarded her sandwich, and I was thinking I might need to suddenly “remember” a pressing appointment.

She gave me a speculative look while I was still trying to craft my lie.

“You wouldn’t by any chance be willing to take me into London to look for him, would you?” she asked, and there was no missing the hint of calculation in her eye.

I forgot about the lie I’d been trying to come up with as I gaped at her. “You have got to be kidding me,” I said, although I knew she wasn’t. My stomach clenched as I realized this was why she’d approached me in the first place. I was the only Faeriewalker in Avalon, and one of only two (that I knew of) in the entire world. Thanks to my rare power, I could take a mortal into Faerie, and I could take a Fae into the mortal world—as long as they stayed close to me, within the aura of my Faeriewalker’s power. Through some experimentation with mortal objects in Faerie, I’d determined that my aura stretched for about fifteen yards around me.

Farther away from me than that, they poofed out of existence. Which was just what would happen to Al if I took her into the mortal world and we got separated.

“I can pay,” Al said. “A lot, actually. It would be a quick trip. Just a few hours.

We’d go to Gary’s home, and—”

“No,” I said with a firm shake of my head. I told myself that I shouldn’t feel hurt over this, over the fact that she’d tried to befriend me just because she wanted to use me. I should be used to being used by now. Hell, even Ethan and Kimber had wanted to use me when they’d first met me. And maybe if Al hadn’t pretended to be interested in friendship from the beginning, it wouldn’t have stung so much.