by Jenna Black
She gestured at the windows, which showed a perfectly blue sky with only the occasional wisp of white cloud. Even in the summer, it was rare to have such a clear blue sky in Avalon, and I’d heard the weather was even gloomier in the fall and winter. It seemed a shame to retreat into the darkness of the tunnel system beneath the city, where my safe house was located. Which did I want more? To get away from the prickle of Al’s magic, or to go outside and enjoy the beautiful weather?
Of course, I could enjoy the weather without having to eat lunch with Al. It was on the tip of my tongue to say “thanks, but no thanks,” when Al added an almost plaintive-sounding “Please?” She sucked her entire lower lip, piercing and all, into her mouth, in what looked like a nervous gesture.
Call me a total sucker, but I couldn’t say no when she looked so hopeful.
She’d struck me as a bit of a bully early on, but maybe I’d misjudged her. I imagined being the daughter of a Faerie Queen meant Al’s life was even further from normal than mine was, and that maybe the reason she’d seemed kind of bitchy was because she was fronting to cover up feeling isolated. After all, we were the only two kids in class, probably the only two kids in the entire university, who had bodyguards. Maybe I should cut her some slack.
“Sure,” I said, against my better judgment. “I’d love to.”
Covering up for my mom’s alcoholism had taught me to be a really good liar, and Al beamed at me. I assumed that meant I’d done a good job of hiding my reluctance.
“Great!” she said with obvious enthusiasm. “It’ll be my treat.”
I shook my head as we headed up the stairs toward our bodyguards. “No it won’t,” I said, possibly being a little more blunt than was wise. When I was living with my mom, we’d always been strapped for cash because she couldn’t hold a job, but my dad didn’t have that problem. I’m sure Al’s mother was richer than my father, but I certainly wasn’t in the need of charity. “You don’t have to bribe me to have lunch with you.”
Al looked over her shoulder at me and frowned. “I didn’t mean it that way.
But okay. We’ll go Dutch.”
We reached the top of the stairs, our bodyguards converging on us.
“We’re going to go have lunch on the quad,” I informed Finn. “If that’s all right with you.” For a while, my dad had been so paranoid he wouldn’t let me leave the safe house without permission, but since the threat against me had eased off, I had a little more freedom now. If you considered not being able to go anywhere without a bodyguard hanging over your shoulder “freedom.” I didn’t need my dad’s permission to have lunch, nor did I need Finn’s. But just because I didn’t technically have to ask Finn whether it was okay with him to go out to lunch didn’t mean I felt right taking it for granted. My dad treated Finn like a servant, always at his beck and call—and Finn considered this treatment completely appropriate, because the Fae class system is archaic and rigid—but I refused to do the same.
The Goth look and the informal language made me hope that Al was the kind of modern girl who would ignore the class system, but the look she gave me when I consulted Finn about my schedule put that hope to rest in a hurry. She didn’t even acknowledge her Knight’s presence, much less lower herself to actually speaking to him.
Finn smiled at me, and I had the feeling he knew what I was thinking. He’d certainly heard me argue with my father about the Fae class system enough times.
“I have no other pressing plans,” he told me wryly.
Al didn’t wait for him to finish speaking before she headed for the exit, pausing only so her Knight could open the door for her. I had half a mind to tell her I’d forgotten some important appointment, but I knew I was overreacting to what I perceived as her rudeness. Presumably she’d been born and raised in Faerie, where customs were very different from those in the human world and in Avalon. A few months spent attending the university here in Avalon weren’t enough to change a lifetime’s worth of cultural training.
But I still couldn’t persuade myself to like her, and wished I’d had the guts to tell her no.
____
It was one of the prettiest days I’d seen since I’d first set foot in Avalon, and Al and I were far from the only ones who thought having lunch on the quad sounded like a good idea. There was a smattering of picnic tables outside the sandwich shop, but those seats were all taken by the time we got our food, as were the seats on the wooden benches that were sprinkled here and there along the quad. Al and I settled for an impromptu picnic at the base of a massive oak tree. I’d have loved to have sat in the warmth of the sun, but I’d inherited my skin tone from my Fae father, and I’d probably burn to a crisp by the time lunch was over.
Al’s bodyguard stood stiffly at attention as Al plopped down onto the grass with her sandwich bag. He made no attempt to be unobtrusive or to hide the fact that he was guarding her. Finn, on the other hand, leaned casually against the trunk of another oak tree, close enough that he could get to me in a couple of his large strides, but far enough away to give me a semblance of privacy. I liked Finn’s technique better.
Al sat cross-legged on the grass, her short skirt making the position . . .
inadvisable. She didn’t seem to care that she was flashing the quad, though I supposed the opaque tights kept her from being indecent. When I sat on the grass, I realized it was damp—well, duh, this was Avalon, and the grass was always damp.
It didn’t seem to bother Al, but I cast a quick, longing glance at the nearest benches, hoping a couple of seats had opened up. No such luck.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Al said, then took a huge bite of her sandwich and chewed it happily.
“I’ll bet,” I murmured. Her magic was still prickling my skin, and the damp was soaking through my jeans. My ham sandwich didn’t seem terribly appealing under the circumstances, but I took a bite anyway.
“What’s it like to be a Faeriewalker?” she asked around the bite of sandwich she was still chewing. Apparently table manners weren’t highly prized in Unseelie princesses.
I shrugged. “It’s kind of weird, I guess.” Honestly, I had no idea how to answer her question, nor did I particularly want to talk about myself. I wished again that I’d declined the lunch invitation. “Do you mind if I ask you for a favor?”
Al smiled brightly and took another bite of her sandwich. “Go ahead.”
“Is there any way you can, um, tone the magic down a bit.” I shivered, partly from the annoying sensation of her magic, partly from the damp chill of the grass.
A sunny day it might be, but the temperature was still hovering in the low sixties.
“It’s kind of uncomfortable to be around you like this.”
Al raised a pierced eyebrow. “I’d heard you could sense magic,” she said. “I guess that wasn’t just a rumor.”
“So can you tone it down?”
“It’s a glamour,” she told me. “My mom would kill me if I really did this to my hair.” She grabbed a handful of her jet-black and purple hair. “And she would kill me slowly for the piercings.” Al grinned at me, her eyes dancing with glee at the thought of her mother’s reaction to her look.
While she hadn’t directly answered my question, she hadn’t dropped the glamour, either. I supposed that meant the answer was no, which irritated me to no end. Obviously, her Goth look was more important than my comfort, but then what did I expect from a freaking princess?
“It’s kind of tough having Queen Mab for a mother,” Al continued, looking a little forlorn. “I need my little rebellions here and there.”
Once again, I chided myself for being too hard on Al. My dad, whom I’d only known for a few months now, was a big-deal Fae politician who was hoping to be elected Consul—Avalon’s top political post—in the next election. I didn’t guess being the wannabe-Consul’s daughter was anywhere near as weird and stressful as being the Unseelie Queen’s daughter, but I did have an inkling of what it was like to have a politically powerful parent. An
d yeah, it’s tough.
“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.
But she had pretended, and it did hurt, even though I didn’t want to be friends with her anyway.
“Please, Dana—”
“Absolutely not!” I shoved the remains of my sandwich back into the paper bag, sure an angry flush was creeping up my neck. “It’s way too dangerous. If I took you into the mortal world and you got more than about five feet away from me, you’d be dead.” So it was an exaggeration, and she could actually get about fi
fteen yards from me without dying. Sue me. I thought it might discourage Al from asking anymore.
“So I’d have to stay close. I could do that.”
I had so many objections to this idea I couldn’t even begin to voice them all.
But one of those objections rose above the rest, clamoring the loudest. “I may not be an official member of the Seelie Court,” I said, because although my father was Seelie, I’d categorically refused to pledge my allegiance, “but if I were to take an Unseelie princess out into the mortal world and something went wrong, it could very easily start a war between the Courts.” Faerie wars had been started for far less cause, and had devastating effects not just on the Fae, but on the mortals unlucky enough to get caught in the middle. “I’m not about to risk that, and there’s nothing you can say to change my mind.”
I leapt to my feet, no longer caring about being polite, so pissed off I was practically vibrating with it. I doubted Al was an idiot. She had to know how risky her suggestion was, and not just to her personally. And yet she was willing to risk something that could start a war just so she could confront a boyfriend who refused to answer the phone when she called. The selfishness of it blew me away.
“Wait!” Al cried, jumping to her feet also and grabbing my arm to keep me from storming off.
Our sudden movement had startled the flock of pigeons who’d been
feasting on Al’s sandwich, and we were both buffeted by the gusts of air from their wings. I hoped one of them crapped on Al’s glamour-enhanced hair.
“Let go,” I growled. “I have to go home now.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Finn watching our interaction closely, but he didn’t come any closer. I silently thanked him for letting me handle things. From the look on his face, I suspected Al’s bodyguard would have flattened me if I’d grabbed her like she was grabbing me.
“I’m so sorry!” Al said, still holding my arm. Her blue eyes glimmered with tears as she looked at me beseechingly. “I’ve made a total hash of everything.” One of those tears leaked down her cheek, and she made no move to wipe it away. “I shouldn’t have asked that of you. I just . . .” She sniffled, finally letting go of me and staring down at the ground, the picture of repentance. “I just wanted to see Gary, to make sure he was all right. It was stupid, and I’m sorry I asked.”
