Free Girls' Night Out by Jenna Black

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