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.
