Girls' Night Out by Jenna Black

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.
    She could make my life very, very difficult if she wanted to.
    Al was quiet beside me, though her eyes were open, and she seemed
    progressively more alert. I turned to her and found she wouldn’t meet my eyes.
    This didn’t give me a warm fuzzy feeling.
    “Are you going to tell your mother you used compulsion on me?” I asked. I had a feeling that if Mab thought I’d taken her little girl out into the mortal world of my own free will, she was going to want me drawn and quartered.
    Al hunched her shoulders and slid down a little lower in her seat. “She doesn’t know about the compulsion spell,” she said softly. “No one does. It doesn’t work as well on people if they know you can do it.”
    Anger surged in me for about the ten thousandth time since I’d met Al. “I’m sorry if people knowing about your spell will cramp your style,” I said acidly, “but you almost got us both killed, and if you don’t fess up, your mom will blame me.”
    I didn’t need to know Mab personally to know that if I told her Al used a compulsion spell and Al denied it, she’d believe Al. Faerie Queens are like that.
    Hell, moms in general are like that.
    I can’t say I had high expectations of Al doing the right thing. She’d made it pretty clear that her own wants and desires were more important to her than anyone else’s. Certainly she’d never shown any sensitivity to my situation, nor had she shown any sign that she respected my opinion. But she surprised me.
    “All right,” she said softly. “I’ll tell the truth. It’s the least I can do after everything I’ve put you through. And I really am sorry. I’m obviously the world’s worst judge of character. Someday, somehow, I’m going to make it up to you.”
    Ugh. I didn’t want her to make it up to me. I wanted her out of my life, for good. Maybe she’d grown up a little, but I didn’t think she’d fundamentally changed. She was selfish, and spoiled, and manipulative. Toxic, as Ethan had described her. I still felt a hint of pity, maybe even sympathy, for her—I knew being the Unseelie Queen’s daughter must be terribly difficult, and she wouldn’t have fallen for Gary if she didn’t have some serious self-esteem issues—but that wasn’t something I could build a friendship upon.
    I opened my mouth to tell her in no uncertain terms that after tonight, our paths would never cross again. But before the first word escaped my throat, Al’s eyes closed and she sagged in her seat, resting her head against the side window.
    “Al?” I whispered, but she didn’t respond, her breathing slow and heavy. The damned GHB was still messing with her, and would be until she was seen by a qualified Fae healer.
    Trying to ignore my uneasy suspicion that severing ties with Althea
    Mabsdotter wasn’t going to be as easy as I hoped, I let her sleep.

    About the author
    Jenna Black is your typical writer. Which means she’s an “experience junkie.”
    She got her BA in physical anthropology and French from Duke University.
    Once upon a time, she dreamed she would be the next Jane Goodall,
    camping in the bush making fabulous discoveries about primate behavior. Then, during her senior year at Duke, she did some actual research in the field and made this shocking discovery: primates spend something like 80% of their time doing such exciting things as sleeping and eating.
    Concluding that this discovery was her life’s work in the field of primatology, she then moved on to such varied pastimes as grooming dogs and writing technical documentation. She is now a full-time writer and lives in North Carolina.
    www.JennaBlack.com
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