Jenna Black: Girls' Night Out

“If Gary were the kind of boy worth breaking your heart over, he’d have fought harder for you. Why don’t you go try on something else? He’s not worth another second of your attention.”

Al dabbed at her eyes. “You’re probably right,” she said so doubtfully I knew she didn’t believe it. “But I can’t stop thinking about him. If I could just know for sure that he was all right, that my mother didn’t do something drastic.”

Uh-oh. That sounded like a prelude to . . .

“Are you sure you won’t reconsider going with me to London?”

Yep, it was. And here I’d thought she’d given up on that ridiculous idea. I ground my teeth and told myself to take a deep breath or two before answering or I might bite her head off.

“I know it’s theoretically dangerous,” she wheedled, “but as long as we stick together, it’ll be fine. And remember, I am Queen Mab’s daughter. Hers is one of the most powerful of all the Fae bloodlines, and I’ve got enough magic to get us out of just about any scrape you can imagine us getting in. Not that we’d get into any scrapes anyway. All we’d be doing is taking a cab ride into London, knocking on the door of his house, and talking to him—or his family—for a little bit.”

“If you say ‘what could possibly go wrong?’ I’m going to scream,” I muttered.

I kind of felt like screaming in frustration anyway. It was true that when she put it that way, it sounded like a relatively harmless expedition, but I was a cautious person by nature, and I pretty much never did anything without looking for the potential gotchas. There were a lot of them in this scenario, too many ways I could imagine us getting separated.

“If you’re really worried about him, I’m sure you could hire a human P.I. to go check on him.”

“That wouldn’t be the same,” she said, her voice cracking as she looked away.

She didn’t really think her mother had had Gary killed, I realized. She wanted to see him again so she could talk him into getting back together, in spite of any efforts her mother had made to keep them apart. She was just telling me she was worried about him because she thought that was more likely to convince me to do what she wanted.

I’m not that easy to manipulate.

“Even if I were willing to take the risk, there are all kinds of reasons we can’t do it. Like, for instance, your mother would probably kill me for it, though only if my dad didn’t kill me first. And then,” I said, picking up steam, “there’s the fact that you don’t have a passport, which you’d need to cross the border into Great Britain.

And my dad has my passport, and there’s no way he would give it to me if I asked for it. And do you think for one moment Finn and your Knight would let us go?”

Al waved my objections off. “I can deal with all of that. Illusion magic is my specialty, so I can just make us invisible. We can walk right out of the store past our Knights, and they’d never see us. And we can do the same at the border crossing.

We don’t need any paperwork. And no one ever has to know where we went. We can just say we wanted some girl time and slipped away. I know my mother will be mad, and I guess your dad would be, too but we’re teenagers, right? We’re supposed to make our parents crazy.”

“I can’t do it, Al. I just can’t. It’s too dangerous. I’m sorry.” I was much more pissed off at her than sorry about refusing her, and I know it showed in my voice.

“You’re the only one who can help me,” she said in a quavering voice, sucking her lower lip. “I know your history. I think everyone in Faerie has heard about how you rescued your boyfriend from the Wild Hunt against all odds. You know what it’s like to lose someone you love, to have everyone around you tell you to give up on him. You know what it’s like to not be able to bear to give up. You have to help me.”

The last thing I wanted to do was concede anything to Al, but I had to admit, at least to myself, that she had a point. I did have an inkling of what she must be going through if she really loved this guy. It’s easy to tell someone else they should just say “good riddance,” but a lot harder to convince yourself. After all, in my attempts to save Ethan, I’d been willing to bargain with the Erlking, a man so terrifying even the Queens of Faerie tiptoed around him. It was possibly the stupidest, most reckless thing I’d ever done, and I’d known it at the time. Nothing, not even common sense, could have stopped me from going after Ethan.

Of course, I’d been trying to save him from a life of eternal servitude, and Al was just hoping to win back a boy who clearly wasn’t worth the effort. I shouldn’t have even been contemplating helping her under the circumstances. Although as she’d said, the risks weren’t all that great, no matter how large they loomed. And helping Al might be the only way to get her off my back.

“What about money?” I asked, hardly able to believe what I was thinking of doing. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t carry British pounds around.” Avalon is an independent nation, and it uses euros, unlike Great Britain. “We’ll need cash for the cab ride.”

Al laughed in delight, her eyes sparkling with joy and excitement. She threw her arms around me in a crushing hug. “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!” she gushed. “And don’t worry about money. I’ll take care of that.”

She released me from the hug before I got too squirmy, but she grabbed hold of my hand and dragged me to my feet.

“Let’s go now!” she said. “The Knights will expect us to be in here forever with all the clothes I brought in. That’ll give us a major head start.” She grabbed her messenger bag and put it over her shoulder bandoleer-style. Then she disappeared from sight, although I still felt her hand on my arm. I blinked in surprise, although Ethan, the magical prodigy, had an invisibility spell, too.

I’d just agreed to go with her, but I found my feet reluctant to move as she tugged me toward the dressing room exit. “Won’t the Knights sense the magic and know that we’re sneaking past?”

I could hear the grin in her voice even though I couldn’t see her. “One advantage to me constantly using glamour is that people get used to sensing magic around me all the time. They won’t be able to sense what direction it’s coming from, and once we’re far enough past that they don’t sense it anymore, they’ll just think I dropped the glamour for a little while.”

I had the distinct impression this wasn’t the first time Al had pulled this particular stunt. I also suddenly realized her decision to bring about a million outfits into the dressing room was most likely a sign that this whole escapade was premeditated. She’d crafted an excuse to give us plenty of time before the Knights realized we were missing, apparently sure that she was going to get her way.

Maybe the constant annoying buzz of Al’s magic was messing with my

powers of reasoning, because I didn’t figure all this out until she’d dragged me out of the dressing room and we were sneaking past the Knights. I wanted to give Al another piece of my mind, but I wasn’t going to do it in front of our bodyguards while we were in the process of sneaking past them. That would guarantee I’d get in trouble with my dad. I couldn’t imagine how pissed he would be that I’d even considered going along with Al’s crazy scheme. I’d just have to wait until we were out of earshot before telling Al in no uncertain terms that I’d changed my mind, that we were going back into the dressing room so that no one ever knew we’d left.

Al, her hand still on my arm, half-dragged me out of the store. She must have used more illusion magic to keep the Knights from noticing that the door opened and closed with our exit, because neither one looked up.