Read Girls' Night Out for Free Online

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.