Girls' Night Out

by Jenna Black

  I couldn’t hold Al up indefinitely, so I lowered her back to the floor as gently as possible. My heart was racing, and my ears were straining for the sound of footsteps. There was no reason Gary or Tom should be coming to check on us again so soon, but if they did and they found us like this, we were doomed.

  “Please, Al. Wake up.” I shook her and patted her cheeks again, and

  eventually her eyes opened. She looked confused and disoriented. “We need to get out of here,” I reminded her. “You were saying something about using magic to . . .

  burn off the GHB?” She hadn’t said anything quite that clear, but it seemed like a logical assumption.

  She dipped her chin in a half-hearted nod. “Gather . . . for me.”

  I frowned, trying to make sense of her telegraphic messages. “You want me to gather magic for you to use?” There were two steps to using magic: gathering the magic to you, and commanding the magic to do your bidding. I was really, really good at the former. The magic loved me. Unfortunately, it was rarely interested in doing what I commanded. The only spell I’d ever been able to cast successfully turned Fae into mortals, which I supposed could come in handy if I were on the verge of being separated from Al, but otherwise didn’t do much good under the circumstances.

  I’d heard that the Fae could channel magic to one another in a pinch, though I’d never seen anyone do it.

  “Um, I don’t know how to channel it,” I told Al doubtfully, not at all sure I was capable of such a thing.

  “Just gather. I’ll use.”

  Figuring it couldn’t hurt to try, I began to hum under my breath, which was my peculiar way of summoning magic. Magic is an almost sentient force, and it had always seemed to “like” my voice. Almost immediately, I felt it coming to my call, prickling over my skin. I didn’t know how much magic Al needed to cast her spell, but I figured the more, the better, so I kept humming. Al’s eyes were heavy lidded, and I was afraid she was going to pass out again, but I kept humming.

  Eventually, Al drew in a deep breath, then murmured the word “out.”

  The magic dimmed like a flashlight with a dying battery, and Al’s back arched. I stopped humming, knowing she’d already cast her spell and didn’t need it anymore. Al dragged in another deep, gasping breath, then turned over on her side and puked her guts out onto the floor. I winced in sympathy and tried to keep her hair out of her face. I closed my eyes and prayed Gary and Tom couldn’t hear the noise.

  My prayers were answered, and after a round of dry heaves, Al groaned and pushed herself into a sitting position. Her face was greenish pale, her pupils were still dilated, and there was a sheen of sweat on her skin. She was clearly more alert than she had been, but she was a long way from all better.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked her, then shook my head at my dumb

  question. “Can you do magic on your own now?”

  A tiny prickle of magic skittered over my skin, gone in the space between one heartbeat and the next. Al shook her head.

  “I’m very weak,” she rasped. “And my head’s spinning.”

  “Do you need to do another detox spell, or whatever that was you just cast?”

  She shook her head again. “I suck at healing magic. That was the best I could do.”

  Fae magic users tend to specialize in certain kinds of magic, and I

  remembered Al telling me her specialty was illusion magic, which probably meant it was lucky she’d been able to heal herself at all. Of course without her magic, I wasn’t sure we had much chance of getting out of here. We were certainly no match physically for Gary and Tom. Not to mention that Al still looked pretty shaky.

  “Can you walk?” I asked her, biting my lip anxiously.

  Al tried to get up, but quickly fell back. My heart sank.

  “I’ll need your help,” she said, heaving a sigh.

  I was happy to help her up, but it seemed like a waste of energy until we came up with a concrete escape plan. I had thought earlier about trying to escape out the window, but even if Al weren’t too weak to walk without help, the plan seemed insanely dangerous, with a high likelihood that one or both of us would end up splatted on the pavement. The fall from this height might not kill us, but I was certain bones would break. But we couldn’t exactly go out the front door as long as Gary and Tom were keeping watch downstairs.

  Which gave me an idea.

  “If I gather the magic for you, would you be able to cast your invisibility spell?” I asked Al.

  “Only if I stay still and don’t have to hold it too long. I’d never be able to hold it long enough to get us downstairs in the shape I’m in.” She looked around.

  “This is the attic we’re in, right?”

  “Yeah. And we don’t just have Gary to get through now, we have his

  house-mate, too.”

  “I know,” she responded with a nod. “I came to for a bit when he was pawing me.” She shuddered.

  “You won’t have to hold it for long,” I assured her. “Just sit tight and gather your strength.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said with an attempt at a rueful smile.

  When I’d rummaged through the attic before in search of a weapon, I’d seen a rickety wooden chair in one corner. Walking carefully, trying not to make the floorboards creak, I picked my way through the darkening attic until I found the chair, then wedged it under the doorknob. It was way too flimsy a barrier to keep Gary and Tom out, but it might delay them a little. Then I groped my way over to where I’d found a half-empty can of paint and hoped it was heavy enough. I lugged it over to where Al was sitting and squatted beside her.

  “What’s the plan?” she asked me, her voice still hoarse and raspy from puking.

  I held up the can of paint. “I’m going to use this,” I said, “to break the window. Tom and Gary will come running. When they get the door open, they’re going to see the broken window and a couple of empty zip ties sitting on the floor, and they’re going to assume we got out somehow. But of course we’ll just be invisible. They’ll go running outside, and we’ll slip out while they’re looking for us.”

  What we were going to do when we got out—assuming we actually

  managed to pull this off—I didn’t know. In Al’s condition, we wouldn’t exactly be moving fast, and I wasn’t about to take the time to go looking for our cell phones—or Al’s money—before getting out of here. This probably wasn’t the safest neighborhood for a pair of teenage girls to go wandering around in after dark, but surely being out there was better than being in here.

  “I don’t know if I can hold the spell long enough, even if you gather the magic for me,” Al said. “My head’s really spinning. It’s hard to concentrate.”

  “Well, our lives depend on it, so you’d better hope you can keep it

  together,” I said sharply. “Unless you can use your compulsion spell to make them let us go.”

  She shook her head miserably. “That takes even more concentration.”

  “All right, then. You’re making us invisible.”

  “But they’re going to trade us for ransom, right?”

  I swallowed hard and forced myself to hold on to my patience. Al had been unconscious for hours and was still all fuzzy-headed. She hadn’t had the time I’d had to work out just what was going on, and what the eventual conclusion would be.

  “Think it through, Al. We know who they are. If they let us go, we’ll tell, and they’ll be arrested. They can’t let us go.”

  “Gary wouldn’t hurt me!” she protested without an enormous amount of conviction.

  I wanted to slap some sense into her—hello, the guy slipped you a roofie and is holding you for ransom!—but I had a better chance of making her see sense if I left Gary out of it. “Maybe Gary wouldn’t, but Tom would, and I’d bet on him to win any argument.”

  A tear trickled down Al’s cheek. I had no idea what she could possibly have seen in a pathetic loser like Gary, but my lack of comprehension didn’
t mean she wasn’t in pain at his betrayal.

  “He wasn’t like this when we were dating,” she told me, but of course I didn’t believe her. “I knew he’d had a drug problem when he was younger, but he’d kicked it. He was clean, and he was a nice guy.”

  Drugs and alcohol can do a lot of rotten things to a person, but I was pretty sure they didn’t turn nice guys into guys like Gary overnight. Maybe he’d done a better job of hiding his creepy side when he was clean—surely he must have had some redeeming qualities to attract Al—but he’d still been a creep, even if Al couldn’t see it. I kept my opinion to myself and started to stand up, ready to get this show on the road. Al grabbed my arm to stop me.

  “Dana. I’m sorry. About everything. Especially about the compulsion. It was a shitty thing to do.”

  I agreed wholeheartedly, and I wasn’t much moved by her apology. If Gary had been anything at all like the prince she’d imagined, she wouldn’t have been sorry about compelling me. Being sorry only because things had gone so horribly wrong didn’t buy her any brownie points.

  “Let’s just get out of here, okay?”

  Al sniffled delicately and dabbed at her eyes, but she nodded and let go of my arm. I took a deep breath and hefted the paint can, wishing it were full. Our plan would be doomed before it got started if I couldn’t break the glass out of the window.

  “Here goes nothing,” I murmured to myself.

  I crept across the attic floor, my heart pounding and my mouth dry. There were about a million things that could go wrong, but I couldn’t allow myself to think about them. This was our best shot at staying alive, and we had to take it.

  Steadying myself, I put both hands on the handle of the paint can and swung it like a pendulum to work up some momentum. Then I slammed it into the window with all of my strength.

  Chapter Six

  The window shattered, sending a spray of glass everywhere. I turned my face away and closed my eyes, but most of the glass shards went out instead of in.

  Humming to gather the magic, I dropped the paint can and hurried back to where Al was sitting. I heard muffled cursing from downstairs, and then the pounding of footsteps on the stairs as I crouched beside Al and waited.

  “Don’t cast until they’re at the door,” I warned her. “Save your strength.”

  Sweat shone on her brow, and her eyes were too wide, but she nodded her agreement. Our captors reached the head of the stairs, and one of them tried the door, expecting it to open easily. He said something foul, and I recognized Tom’s voice. Luckily, he was making such a racket there was no way he could hear my nearly silent humming. I would keep gathering magic as long as there was enough noise to cover me, and then I’d have to hope the magic didn’t lose interest too soon. Tom pounded on the door with what sounded like his shoulder—he’d get more power with a kick, which I suspected he’d figure out soon enough.

  Beside me, I saw Al go invisible right as the door burst open. I had to trust that she’d covered me with her spell, too, because I could still see myself.

  The overhead light flipped on, and Tom looked frantically around the attic.

  He was brandishing a wicked-looking knife, and I doubted he had any qualms about using it. He took in the discarded zip ties and duct tape, then hurried to the broken window and craned his head out. Gary entered the room and started poking around in the corners, though there wasn’t any nook big enough for the two of us to hide in.

  “D’ya see ’em?” Gary called, and Tom withdrew his head.

  “They ain’t splattered on the pavement,” Tom growled, his composure

  shattered, his eyes wild-looking. “Come on!”

  He headed for the door at a sprint, and Gary followed. Beside me, Al shuddered and dropped her spell.

  Step one of our plan had succeeded, but we had plenty more steps to get through before we were safe. “Let’s go,” I said, putting my arm around Al’s waist and helping her to her feet. She staggered even with my support, and her dress was drenched with sweat.

  “I can walk!” she insisted when I gave her a worried look. It takes a lot of strength to cast magic, and Al hadn’t had a whole lot of strength when we got started. I hoped like hell she wouldn’t run out anytime soon.

  I supported her all the way to the stairs, but they were too narrow for us to go down side by side. I let her go first, steadying her as best I could with a hand on her arm. She clung to the banister like a lifeline. I wanted to run, but a walk was all Al could manage.

  “Hurry,” I urged her. I had no idea how much time our diversion had gained us. How long would Tom and Gary run around the neighborhood looking for us before realizing that they had to have been duped somehow?

  Al tried to speed up and almost took a header down the stairs, but we eventually made it down to the second floor and rounded the landing to the first.

  And that’s when things started to go wrong.

  Gary suddenly appeared at the base of the stairs, scowling up at us. “No fair using magic, Althea,” he said reprovingly.

  “Gary, please,” she whimpered, clinging to the banister for support, but I had a better idea than pleading, seeing as Al was ambulatory and Tom and his knife weren’t in sight.

  I squeezed past her on the stairs as Gary started climbing toward us.

  “Be good girls and get back in the attic,” he said. “No one has to get hurt.”

  I disagreed.

  If it had been Tom climbing the stairs toward us, I might have had to rethink my strategy. Tom had the look of a hardened criminal to him, and although I was certain he would underestimate me as much as Gary did, he might be more prepared to deal with any threat. Gary, on the other hand, didn’t even realize a threat existed.

  I put myself between Gary and Al, holding on to the banister for extra stability. Then, when the stairs put Gary’s head at just the right height, I lashed out with my foot.

  If he’d been prepared for the possibility of an attack, or maybe even if his reflexes hadn’t been slowed by whatever he was on, it probably wouldn’t have worked. A good kick takes a bit of time to develop, and an experienced fighter can usually avoid them. But Gary wasn’t an experienced fighter.

  My kick connected with his face, snapping his head back sharply. Behind me, Al gave a muffled cry as Gary crumpled and slid down the stairs. We didn’t have time for her sentimentality or squeamishness, so I reached back and grabbed her arm, pulling her along with me as I descended and keeping a careful eye on Gary.

  He wasn’t moving, and he appeared to be unconscious—or even dead—but I wasn’t taking any chances. Al obediently tottered behind me, still unsteady on her feet.

  We had to step over Gary to get to the front door. I pulled Al’s arm over my shoulders, trying to steady her as her strength waned and her knees shook.

  The door burst open, and I thought sure the jig was up, that Tom had figured out we were still in the house and had come back to kill us. Instead, a pair of policemen charged through, pointing guns. Al’s knees chose that moment to give up entirely, taking us both down to the floor, which I figured was just as well when there were police pointing guns at us.

  Chapter Seven

  I’d been so focused on getting myself and Al out of the attic that I’d never put much thought into what my dad might be doing in my absence. It turned out that as soon as Finn and Al’s bodyguard had realized the two of us had flown the coop, her bodyguard had made an educated guess what she might be up to. He didn’t know about Al’s compulsion spell, so he’d apparently almost started a Faerie war right then and there, thinking I’d willingly risked Al’s life for what he figured were frivolous reasons. Finn and my dad had managed to calm him—and the rest of Mab’s representatives in Avalon—down and prepared to send a human search party into London to retrieve us.

  That’s when he’d received the ransom call from Gary.

  Dad had played along, then contacted the London police the moment he got off the phone. Gary had, of course, threatened to ki
ll us if Dad called the police—though he’d assumed at the time that my dad had no idea who he was or where he lived—but my dad came to the same conclusion that I had about the inevitable outcome of paying our ransom. The police had surrounded the house, but knew that the moment they burst in, they’d have a potentially ugly hostage situation on their hands. They were still working on their strategy when I broke the attic window and eventually sent Tom running from the house in pursuit.

  It was almost funny to see the looks on all those macho policemen’s faces when they realized a pair of teenage girls—one of them so looped out on GHB she could hardly stay conscious despite her attempt to heal herself—had managed to trick their most dangerous attacker into leaving the house and had knocked their other attacker unconscious. I shuddered to think what would have happened if I’d waited a little longer to put our plan into effect. Maybe the police would have been able to take Gary and Tom down without getting Al or me hurt, but maybe not.

  Hostage situations are notoriously tricky, especially when one of the hostage-takers is under the influence of drugs.

  Al was too out of it to talk to the police, so I gave them the best accounting I could of what had happened. The idea that a real live Faerie Princess was in their midst clearly both awed and unnerved them, and the fact that magic had been involved in our escape evoked obvious disbelief, no matter how silly that disbelief seemed in the face of a Fae girl in the mortal world.

  We were plucked out of the police station after about an hour by a couple of representatives of the Avalon embassy in London. The police wanted to keep us longer—at least until Al, who had categorically refused human medical treatment, was clear-headed enough to give her own statement–but the embassy pulled some diplomatic strings to get us out of there. It was nearing midnight when Al and I climbed into the back of a diplomat’s black Mercedes and started driving back toward Avalon with a police escort.

  I didn’t think this incident was over yet. According to our diplomatic escort, Mab had arrived in Avalon in the early evening, and she was not in a good mood.