Girls' Night Out

Chapter Two

By the time Friday rolled around, I had prepared an Al-avoidance strategy, aided by Ethan, to get myself out of another uncomfortable lunch. When I told him I’d met the Unseelie Queen’s daughter, he made no attempt to hide his dislike of her.

“She’s a manipulative, two-faced bitch,” he told me. I imagined he was scowling darkly, but since we were talking on the phone, I didn’t know for sure.

“Tell me how you really feel,” I teased, although the vehemence of his reaction made me uneasy. Ethan had been quite the player before he met me, dating and discarding pretty girls at will. He’d grown up a hell of a lot since I’d first met him, but I couldn’t help wondering if he had some kind of romantic history with Al. They were both Unseelie, after all.

“Keep your distance from her, Dana,” Ethan warned. “She’s toxic.”

“I was thinking maybe you could help me with that . . .”

Ethan and I decided we had a lunch date on Friday, one I’d forgotten about when Al had made her invitation. (An invitation I had never actually accepted, I might add.) Likely we’d have to make this a standing date so I always had an excuse not to go to lunch with Al, but I didn’t exactly mind getting to eat lunch with Ethan three times a week.

Having my defense in place, I hoped I’d be able to ignore Al as much as possible and actually learn something during class. But I’d allowed myself to forget how distracting the buzz of her glamour was. Hard as I tried to focus on the professor’s lecture, I just couldn’t concentrate. I hoped that my refusal to go to lunch with her would inspire her to go find someone else to sit with when Monday rolled around.

It turned out, however, that getting rid of Al wasn’t as easy as I thought.

When class was over, I told her in my most apologetic tones that I’d forgotten I was having lunch with Ethan, prepared for her to get pissy with me about it, because she didn’t strike me as someone used to taking no for an answer. What I wasn’t prepared for was her total inability—or unwillingness—to take a hint.

“Oh, that’s okay,” she said breezily when I told her about my lunch with Ethan. “Three’s company, right? Where are we meeting him?”

I mentally examined my words, wondering if I’d somehow managed to

convey an invitation without meaning to, but I was certain my implication had been clear. I clenched my teeth to contain a groan of frustration. Obviously, subtlety was not my friend when dealing with Al. If I wanted her to go to lunch on her own, or with someone else, I was going to have to say so straight out.

I almost did it. Almost blurted out the truth, that I didn’t want her coming with me. I’m capable of being both blunt and rude, when circumstances require it.

But I wasn’t sure open rudeness to Mab’s daughter was the best idea in the world, and I wasn’t a hundred percent certain she deserved it. Sure, she was a bit socially awkward, and she’d only befriended me because she wanted something from me.

But she was clearly lonely, and she had apologized for asking me to take her to London. Maybe there was a kernel of sincerity in her attempt to make it up to me by buying me lunch.

I didn’t entirely convince myself, but I couldn’t quite force myself to rebuff her, either. I let out a soft sigh of resignation.

“At the little cafe on Elm Street,” I said, wondering if Ethan would chase Al off himself when we got there. I doubted most Unseelie Fae would be willing to be rude to the Queen’s daughter, but Ethan and Kimber believed firmly in their father’s progressive platform, which said that the Avalon Fae shouldn’t swear allegiance to the Courts of Faerie. Ethan wouldn’t treat Al with any more deference than he’d treat any other Fae girl. And I knew he was going to be pissed at me for being spineless enough to let her come along on what was supposed to be our date.

____

Ethan was already seated at a circular table meant for two on the cafe’s patio. It was another beautiful day in Avalon, although the temperature had dipped to the high fifties. Al was wearing another flimsy black camisole, while I was wearing a heavy wool sweater over a long-sleeved T-shirt. The Fae generate more body heat than humans, and they’re practically impervious to the cold, but that’s one Fae trait I’d failed to inherit.

Ethan smiled when he caught sight of me, then scowled when he caught sight of Al. I knew right then that it was going to be a miserable lunch.

I was right. Ethan was rude and surly—which is really unusual for him, since he usually tries to be roguishly charming even when he’s in a bad mood. I was resentful and uncomfortable. And Al was completely oblivious, chattering on about trivialities, never seeming to mind that neither Ethan nor I was participating in the conversation. Apparently, she liked listening to herself talk.

Ethan had a one o’clock class—which I think he was planning on skipping when he thought it would be just him and me for lunch—and he excused himself at 12:45, flashing me a reproachful look before he hurried off and left me alone with Al. When I escaped her clutches, I was going to give him a piece of my mind for abandoning me like that—and for being such a jerk for the entire lunch. If he was going to be a jerk, the least he could have done was openly tell Al to take a hike. I wasn’t above hoping someone else would play the part of villain in my stead.

Still clueless, Al waved a cheery good-bye to Ethan’s retreating back, then gave me another bright smile.

“Oh, good,” she said. “Now it’s just us girls.”

I looked pointedly at our two very male bodyguards, but I guess they didn’t count in her book.

“I’ve so been looking forward to our little shopping excursion,” Al continued, pushing back her chair.

Ugh. I’d forgotten that Al had decreed we were going shopping after lunch. I don’t even enjoy shopping with Kimber—I’ve never been much of a girly-girl—and the prospect of spending more time in Al’s company wasn’t the least bit appealing.

“I don’t know . . .” I started, not sure what excuse would actually work on Al, but she didn’t give me time to think of one.

“Oh please don’t cancel on me,” she begged, grabbing my hand and

squeezing it while she looked at me with wide, imploring eyes. “I’m desperate for a distraction.” Her voice frogged up and she had to clear her throat. “Coming back to school and finding Gary gone has been really hard,” she confided. “I loved him so much. And I guess I was so wrapped up in him that I didn’t make any other close friends last year. I can’t bear to go back to my flat and be alone. Please come shopping with me.”

How could I say no to a plea like that? I knew I was being manipulated, but I also knew Al was genuinely hurting. Was it worth causing her more pain just to get out of an hour or two of shopping? Probably not.

“All right,” I reluctantly agreed. “Let’s shop.”

____

There are scattered chain stores in Avalon, but the city itself is ancient, as are many of its Fae residents. Change comes, but it does so slowly and with great resistance. Even if the chains had been around, I suspect Al would have turned her nose up at them and gone straight for the designer boutiques. Avalon boutiques don’t exactly cater to the Goth crowd, but it turned out Al had eclectic tastes.

Maybe the Goth thing was just a phase, one she was tiring of.

At the first couple of shops, we just browsed, Al keeping up a steady monologue while I shifted hangers around on racks, not really looking at the clothes. In the third shop, Al decided we needed to get serious, and she grabbed what seemed like one of everything. Her choices leaned heavily to the black and red, and although nothing was ostentatiously Goth-looking, she could easily make a Goth outfit out of some combinations of the items in her haul. I still didn’t do more than stir a few hangers around.

Even if I’d been in the mood for shopping, the clothes in this store were a little too flashy for my tastes. Al hauled me into the fitting room with her anyway.

Apparently, my opinion was needed. I stifled a groan of dismay as I tried not to count how many hangers she’d grabbed or calculate how long it was going to take her to try everything on. Her bodyguard had been carrying her army-green messenger bag for her since the moment class had ended, but she took it back from him before entering the fitting room. Apparently, there was makeup in the bag she thought she might need. I left my own backpack with Finn, taking out only the small purse that held my essentials.

The fitting room consisted of three generously sized cubicles, outside of which was a lounge-like area with angled mirrors and a comfy sofa. Al needed two of the cubicles to hang all the stuff she’d brought back with her. I sat on the sofa and fought not to look longingly at my watch while Al disappeared into the first cubicle. She emerged a couple minutes later wearing a peasant dress in crinkly black silk. Heavily smocked at the waist, it featured puffy short sleeves, a keyhole neckline, and a full skirt that hung past her knees.

“What do you think?” she asked me as she eagerly twirled in front of the mirrors.

I thought the dress would be a lot more flattering on someone with more curves. I also thought it looked ridiculous with the combat boots, and why Al had bothered to put the boots on when she had about a hundred more outfits to try I couldn’t guess.

“It’s pretty,” I said, and it wasn’t a lie. The dress was pretty; it just wasn’t particularly pretty on Al. However, instinct told me that she wasn’t really looking for an honest opinion.

Al looked at herself in the mirror, smoothing her hands over the crinkly silk.

Her happy smile faded slowly, and a wistful, forlorn look crept over her face.

“Gary would have loved it,” she said softly, and for a moment I thought she was going to burst into tears.

“Well, it’s too bad he didn’t stick around to see it, then,” I said. “It’s his loss.”

Al turned away from the mirror and gave me a tremulous smile. “That’s very sweet of you to say.”

I squirmed, uncomfortable with my own lack of sincerity.

She came to sit beside me on the couch, and her eyes were shiny with tears.

“I tried to call him again last night,” she confided. “Still no answer. And I’ve left him plenty of messages. If my mom chased him off, why won’t he just call me and tell me that?”

I was almost seventeen years old and on my first boyfriend. If Al was looking for advice to the lovelorn, I wasn’t the right one to talk to. I had little experience with boys, and much less patience for the romantic games girls were supposed to play. Still, I was pretty sure of one thing.

“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.

Despite my resolution to put a stop to this the moment we were out of earshot of the Knights, I found myself meekly following along as Al led us down the street and around the first corner. I opened my mouth to voice my objection, but at that same moment, she dropped the invisibility spell and gave me another hug.

“Thanks so much for doing this,” she gushed again. “It’ll be an exciting little adventure, won’t it?” She sucked her lower lip again, looking so excited and hopeful that I found myself incapable of letting her down.

“Exciting,” I repeated dully. “Yeah, that’s one word for it.”

What the hell was I thinking?

But when Al hailed a cab to take us to the Southern Gate, I raised no objection.

____

We had to abandon the cab when we reached the Southern Gate, because we couldn’t pass through without passports. Al exchanged some euros for pounds, then we ducked into the ladies room, where she cast her invisibility spell again. Al held my hand so we could stay together, and we headed for the border crossing, dodging tourists and business people, slipping through gaps and under turnstiles whenever we could. I kept thinking that someone would sense her magic and stop us, but we didn’t run into any Fae—most of the Fae border control agents were stationed at the other end of the Gatehouse, where the border to Faerie was located.

The whole time we were crossing the border, I kept telling myself this was the stupidest idea in the history of the universe, and I should object. But somehow, that didn’t seem to be what I was doing. Instead, I let Al lead me along as my pulse sped ever more rapidly and my palms dampened with sweat.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding once we made it through the border crossing and set foot on English soil. Once again, Al guided us into a restroom, dropping the invisibility spell as soon as we were out of sight of prying eyes.

“This is insane,” I told her. “We have to go back.”

“This is exciting and fun,” she countered, doing that lip-sucking thing again.

It occurred to me for the first time that she was still wearing the dress she’d been trying on at the shop. Add shoplifting to the list of crimes we were committing.

I wasn’t convinced, but once again I found myself following her as she headed out of the restroom and got in line at the taxi stand. I looked longingly over my shoulder at Avalon, wondering what was wrong with me, why I was letting Al manipulate, bully, and cajole me into doing something I knew was both wrong and downright stupid. Sure, I’d taken some pretty reckless chances in the past, but it was always for a good reason, always because I was convinced it was the right thing to do. This time, I was convinced I was doing the wrong thing, and yet I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

We reached the head of the line and climbed into a cab. Al rattled off an address, and the driver took off. I still couldn’t believe what I was doing. I tried to rally my mental troops in hopes I could craft an argument that Al would actually listen to, but she turned to me with a frown.

“You look sleepy,” she said, then sucked her lower lip. “Why don’t you take a nap until we get there?”

Suddenly, my eyelids felt really, really heavy. A chill of alarm crept down my spine as it finally occurred to me there might be a very good reason I was doing this against my better judgment. Every time I came close to putting my foot down, Al sucked her lower lip and somehow talked me out of it. The most powerful of Fae magic-users can trigger spells with subtle gestures, and I’d guess that as Mab’s daughter, Al was definitely a powerful magic-user.

She smiled at me, and I might almost have called the look on her face apologetic.

“Sleep, Dana,” she said.

The compulsion slapped me upside the head with the force of a

sledgehammer, and my eyes slid closed.