Free Girls' Night Out by Jenna Black Page B

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 kill 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