Friends and Enemies (Gwen Farris Book 5) (3 page)

It was a good idea. Close to genius, really.

"Oh, hey... Pete, if you could pound on the door two down, and tell Carla that we should be able to call the all clear soon? That way she can go back to sleep."

There was nothing more than a very adult nod from the twelve year old.

"Directly. How many will I be facing?" He meant attackers. It wasn't a mistake, or a joke either. Against unarmed adult fighters he could take on five or six at once, alone. That was using telepathic blasts, but if they had nulls on, he could probably take three if he was starting on his feet. He'd been trained for it, and while he might not know as much, in many ways he was better than Gwen at it already.

She tried to think about it seriously, since she was, supposedly a pretty good precog. Especially when it came to combat related things. These guys had managed to hide from her that way, somehow, which left her feeling a bit less than perfect at the moment. Worse, she doubted it had to do with the null-radiatives they had on. That might have hidden them from her, but not things like her being stabbed.

It had probably just been that she'd been asleep, like an idiot. Safe and snug in her own bed. Gwen had even thought about getting a weapon in with her, but had figured she was being crazy again. Bad things happened to her in bed though. So far.

Never things that were all that good. The best things that way had
all
involved sleeping. Even
that
could go wrong. Twice in the last year she'd woken up with very horrible and traumatic things taking place. Both of them involved being stabbed, too. It was just about a trend now. A fucked up and horrible one that she really needed to stop, as soon as possible.

Gwen rolled her eyes.

"Fuck. What's the date?"

Everyone looked at her funny, and made a face at her that seemed to be saying she was acting funny.

She grinned.

"Sorry, to answer your actual question Pete,
none
. It should be uneventful, or I wouldn't send you off to do it alone. I just wanted to get you out of the room, so that you don't embarrass yourself, looking at Rhonda here." She grinned, and sat up, which really did make her feel woozy. Gwen decided not to stand, using the slightly bloody bed to prop herself up. It was that, or fall over. "Now, the date?"

It was spring, around June, she thought. A good time to have a wedding, or so she'd been told. By Christophe. The Duke that wanted to marry her. They were engaged, if this wasn't a slightly rough way to break up with her. She hoped not.

Letters were so much more sophisticated.

If the Duke of Aubrey wanted to kill her, he could have at least sent a better class of killers to do the job. These guys hadn't been horrible that way, but they'd seemed
creepy
. Not that most killers didn't, but... These particular ones were a bit over the top that way.

Slimy feeling. Low class, and like they were pretending to be Mafioso from the Victorian era.

Peter locked eyes with her, but answered.

"July seventeenth. Why? Is it important?"

Gwen wasn't certain, not at first, but after a bit she had to nod. The weather was just different in this world than her own. It kept messing with her sense of when things should be happening.

"It's the anniversary of the
last
time I was stabbed. When I was brought here, and those freaks, Debussey and Mathews, tried to sacrifice me. It could be connected." It was tempting to surge to her feet, ready to do battle with those two, but they were dead. That made it a bit harder to get done.

She'd had Baron Mathews killed, and watched his head be cut off, right in front of her. She'd killed Erin Debussey herself, making her head explode with a blast of magical force.

Magic. It was
so
cool.

How people here couldn't see that half the time she just didn't understand. She was in a body that had a good level of potential, but even Katherine hadn't done much with it. She could have had the best tutors and schooling in the world for it, her parents being both rich and willing to help out that way. The girl had gone to parties, and had relationships, instead. That might not have been a
total
waste of time, but in the end it hadn't helped her all that much. Gwen was in her head, and if the other girl tried to take over,
ever
, she'd blow her own head off.

Really, it kind of had to be that way.

She was learning too much to accidently leave that little bitch of an heiress in charge of things. How to rift, for one thing. It was basically the ability to turn yourself into an atomic bomb, more or less. There was a good reason for her to do it, but that didn't make it a real risk. Not that she could do that yet. For the last few weeks she'd been improving her ability to teletransport. Failing at it too, it seemed, or she would have left instantly when attacked, instead of fighting like a moron.

Growling a bit, very much under her breath, she just sat.

"Go, get that stuff done, Pete. Deidre? I have some things that will fit. Rhonda and I are almost the same size." Which was weird and hard to remember, even now. Most of her life she'd been small. Pretty much a midget. Thin too, more or less. No one had really cared about that part of things though, since her body had been so distorted and lumpy that the small portions of her being that weren't awful were just ignored by most people.

They were both the same height, however, and while the other woman was a few pounds heavier than Gwen, it wasn't enough to mess up sharing clothes.

The maid, who was actually clutching her bloody hands together, and looking rather politely worried, rushed away, over to the large clothing press. There was fussing for a bit, as Peter got out of there, knowing that his free show was about done for the evening anyway. Not that she was going to
blame
him for peeking a bit. It was just that Rhonda had so clearly been busy when the call came in, that Gwen didn't want to have the conversation about it with a boy in the room. Any boy. Winslow, or Mr. Vernor, for instance.

They counted as boys still, in her head. It was, she had to figure, more about her own lack of experience with men as anything other than professionals. Gwen knew she was pretty clueless about that gender as anything that didn't have to do with fighting. The
only
group that was worse were women. She
was
one of those, and still didn't have much of a clue about what most of them wanted at any given moment. Thankfully that didn't matter too much, most days.

Gwen rubbed at her side, where the wound was, and realized that it was a mistake pretty quickly. She might not be bleeding anymore, but there was still a wound, and from the feeling of it, the thing went down a good way into her body. That was field healing though. It was kind of like super first aid. In a lot of ways it was better than what an EMT could have done back home, by about fifteen or twenty
times
. There was a flaw in the equation however, in that only one in about two or three thousand people ever bothered to learn how to do it at even the level that young Peter already could.

Worse, healing was the strongest kind of magic a human could do. That meant something, a thing that Gwen understood on a deep level. She knew, instinctively, what kind of an asshole didn't learn how to heal others, when they had the magic for it, waiting to be used, no matter how weak they were in other areas. Tensing up a bit, Gwen sat up, knowing that while she
should
make the effort herself, that would require living long enough to gain the skill. It probably wasn't going to happen. Not if people were going to kill her while she slept.

With a grunt, she smiled.

"I
hate
being stabbed. So, is this some kind of magical thing, do you think? A revisiting of the power of the first attack? Part of a ceremony, or ritual?" It was an abstract comment, but the Healer shook her head.

"Almost certainly not. I can't think of any reason that it would do anything important mystically. Possibly something done to get revenge on you for thwarting the plans of certain people? Other than that I can't see it, and I wouldn't think that any of them would be bothered by the date things happened on. Probably a real coincidence. I know it's rare, but things like that are theorized to happen." There was a pulling down of her t-shirt then, and a blush, finally, as she realized she was half naked, sitting there in the middle of a virtual stranger's bedroom.

Flashing her goodies, and proving that her hair wasn't dyed.

The woman smiled though, and looked away as Deidre came back over with an armload of clothing, most of which were very nice things.

Dresses mainly. Three of them, by the look of it. There was also, almost as if the maid was hiding it under the other things, a tan jumpsuit that Gwen normally used to exercise in. The Healer tugged that out of the mess immediately, since it could be pulled on in about ten seconds, rather than taking twenty minutes to get everything arranged.

It was a problem with the clothing there, for Gwen. Half of it took a friend being around, willing to help you get dressed for the day. Worse, if you wanted to use the bathroom, you had to take a pal with you, and hope you weren't going to take too long for your bladder to handle.

On the good side Rhonda was well and efficiently covered when the other Westmorlands got there, rushing into the room. Three of them. That was a big deal, considering there were noblemen that wouldn't have had that kind of response if three assassins came for them in the night.

Heather Westmorland was in first, armed with a PC, followed by Bethany. It was Billy that held the last place in the line, his scarred face hard. Each of them was there for her, since they all had connections. Billy was, as strange as it seemed, her flesh and blood brother. The Gwen portion of her, not Katherine.

Heather was her, which would have been confusing in any world. Thankfully she was what Gwen always should have been. Fair complexion with a faint smattering of freckles. Lean and attractive with strawberry blonde hair that looked a bit more red today than usual, being tied back loosely.

Bethany was more of a true blonde, and seemed the most concerned out of the people coming into the space. She looked a bit like a waspy woman from New England, but was attractive for it. She looked cold, but was actually the warmest and nicest person that Gwen had ever known. If she had a best friend, it was Beth Westmorland.

Heather covered the far walls in a scanning motion. She was Special Service after all, and trained to guard the King from all threats that might come. Ferdinand wasn't there, so she was apparently going to substitute the woman from another world for the time being.

"What's the sit-rep?"

It was military sounding, but came from the wrong world. Gwen had watched enough television to get it however.

"Three men snuck in here, and attacked. I was stabbed once, with something like an ice-pick, or some other thin blade. They had null radiatives on, and I was taken by surprise, stabbed before I woke up. Winslow came in with a crin when I screamed fire, and shot a couple of them in the feet. The field didn't cover them there." Waving her hands she tried to explain the idea. Beth nodded, and knelt down to take her hand. She was in slacks, but looked to have thrown her gear on in a hurry. She had no makeup on her face, which was practically a sign of being a heathen in the Western Kingdom.

The animal.

"I'm so sorry, Gwen. This is
awful
. Can you stand? We should take you to the hospital. Or back to Central, where we can guard you properly. Why hasn't anyone taken you already?" Her blonde friend glanced at the others, but she was just worried, not angry.

Gwen winked, getting the move right, she thought. It was a thing she'd been working on. For the first few months there, not having a clue she was doing it, she'd been scrunching half her face up trying to do it. That was a thing there, but one that was mainly used by dirty old men to hit on girls less than half their age. Everyone had thought it was hilarious, at the time. At least Beth had finally let her in on it, so she'd worked on fixing the move.

"Peter came and healed me. Field healing, but it's enough for now. It wasn't a bad wound, as far as that kind of thing goes. This means that I get to be in on the questioning for once. How cool is that?"

Billy, who actually understood what she meant, being from the same world, grinned. It was kind of sinister, but heartfelt. That was the kind of thing he did. Almost everyone thought he was more than a little cray-cray. She did too, because he really was. One day it would be a problem, but not yet.

Not while he had fun things to do.

"We can
both
do it. Family bonding time. Hurray. Let's go. We don't want them to fall asleep or anything."

Gwen needed help up, Beth acting as a crutch, so she wouldn't fall down, but honestly Gwen felt fine. A bit of pain, but nothing too bad. She'd felt worse.

Hey, as far as this went, these guys hadn't even bothered to call her names. Given her life, that was an improvement over what she would have expected.

Chapter two

There would be no beatings in the library that day.

It was a bit of a shame, but Gwen hadn't counted on it. Not once Bethany had gotten there. Not that her best friend wouldn't want to
punish
the men that had stabbed her. That idea was so silly that Gwen didn't even have to consider it for more than half a second. Beth would have killed them in the right circumstances.

Just for hurting her. It was a shocking thing to think of, but she was certain of it, after all they'd been through together.

That wasn't going to take place however. For one thing, they were in the locked pantry, not the library at all. It was where they kept the cheap liquor and expensive foods that people might steal to sell on the black market. Not that any of
their
people would do something like that.

It hit her then that a lot of people in the room they entered would have done the same thing. They would have killed these men, to get revenge for her, if it came to it. Even the cops that came, two detectives from the local constabulary, might well have. Gwen understood that when one of them sneered, raising his right hand for a tremendous backhanded blow to the face of a footless man. Nothing landed however.