“Dana!” she protested in a shocked whisper.

“Remember, you promised to hear me out.” Well, maybe promised was a strong word, but Mom was convinced enough to backpedal.

“All right,” she said, voice quavering.

“I’ll come home with you, but you have to swear to me on your life that you’re going to check yourself into a rehab as soon as we get there. And if you deny you have a drinking problem right now, then I’m going to hang up on you, and I will never come home. Ever!”

I could almost feel it, my mom’s desperate desire to feed me the lie once again, tell me she didn’t have a problem. But I think even in her booze-addled mind, she heard how dead serious I was. My life in Avalon so far had sucked. But now that Mom was here to remind me what it was like to live with her, I wasn’t so sure life at home sucked much less. It was just a different brand of suckage.

“I swear to you on my life that I will check myself into a rehab when we get home. Just please, come home with me. I need you. And no matter what, baby, I love you. You know I love you, more than anything else in the world.”

I took a long, slow, deep breath, trying to bring my thoughts to order. Could I be sure my mom would keep her promise when I wasn’t holding the proverbial gun to her head? Hell no. But maybe, just maybe, this time I was getting through to her. This time she’d actually go to rehab, dry out, rejoin the human race. And if there was even the slimmest chance that my ploy would work, I had to try it.

Of course, getting out of Avalon was going to take some doing, even if I cooperated. Actually, at the moment I had no idea how I was going to go about it. But I was determined to find a way.

“Okay, Mom,” I said. “I’ll come home with you. But I need to take care of a few things first.” I wasn’t about to tell her the long list of obstacles that stood between me and freedom. She was probably going to continue to drink herself silly as soon as I got off the phone anyway, but there was no reason to add more fuel to her fire.

“You mean your father,” she said with a hiccup.

“Yeah, that’s a big one,” I said.

“If Seamus Stuart thinks he can keep my daughter from me, he’s got another think coming!”

Yeah, right. Like Mom was in any kind of shape to take Dad on.

“Please, Mom. Let me handle Dad. I think I know a way to make him see things my way.” I did the lying-through-my-teeth finger-cross. “But I need you to lay low for a bit. I have a feeling if he starts fighting for custody, we’d need an army to get me out of here.”

Mom thought about it a bit, and I could hear the clink of bottle against glass. I gritted my teeth to keep from snapping at her. If by some miracle my ploy worked, she’d have the rest of her life ahead of her without the pickled brain effect; I could put up with her drinking for a little while longer.

“All right, honey,” she finally said, and I let out a silent sigh of relief. “I’m at the Hilton, room 526. I’ll wait to hear from you.”

“Thanks, Mom. I’ll let you know as soon as I have things worked out.”

“Don’t take too long, honey,” she warned. “The longer you’re here, the harder it will be to get away.”

“I know. I’ll hurry, I promise.”

We said our good-byes. And then I lay down on my bed and tried to figure out how on earth I was going to escape.

chapter twenty-three

I didn’t make a whole lot of progress on my escape plan before falling asleep, stress and the exhaustion of my workout with Keane having stolen most of my energy and brainpower. I woke up in the morning not having moved past step one.

Still in my sleep-addled, pre-coffee daze, I sat up and swung my legs out of bed. That’s when my body reminded me that it wasn’t used to the kind of exercise it had endured yesterday, nor was it used to being repeatedly bashed against a shield spell and thrown to the mats. I groaned in misery and almost got back into bed.

I spent way more time in the shower than was strictly good for me, but the hot water pounding down against my sore muscles felt heavenly. I was still stiff and sore when I got out, but at least I was able to move.

Silly me, I’d expected that after yesterday’s intense training session, I’d get a day off. But when I made my way downstairs in search of coffee, I found Finn and Keane sitting at the dining room table.

They didn’t see me at first, and I hesitated in the stairway, surprised at the sight that met my eyes. Keane was smiling. Not a nasty smile, or a condescending smile, but a real smile. He and Finn were each nursing a cup of tea, and though their voices were too quiet for me to make out words, they seemed to be having an easy, bantering conversation. Was this the same Keane I’d met yesterday?

Then Keane caught sight of me, and the smile vanished. Didn’t that just make me feel welcome? Obviously, he had some kind of a problem with me, but hell if I knew what it was.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” I said as I breezed past them into the kitchen for a cup of Dad’s awful instant coffee. I was going to have to remember to buy a coffeepot and some real coffee if I was going to stay here much longer—which I was, if I couldn’t figure out how to get out of Avalon. The kettle was empty, so I took it to the sink to fill it, but when I turned around, Keane was standing way too close behind me.

I hadn’t heard him approach, so he was lucky I didn’t drop the full, heavy kettle on his foot in my surprise.

“You might want to wait until after working out to put anything in your stomach,” he said, smirking at the pleasure of having startled me.