Friends and Enemies (Gwen Farris Book 5) Read online

  Winslow barked something, which took her a minute to understand.

  "Secure the prisoners. Move them to the locking pantry off the kitchen. We need a healer for Miss Farris. Call for a lorrie! Move! She's been stabbed. Hurry along!"

  Gwen looked up at the man and rolled her eyes.

  "I'm not that close to dying yet. It's just a flesh wound. I could use that healer though. I wonder if the Westmorlands would lend us one?" She blinked for a bit, and noticed that several people left the room in a time that she would have figured was just a flap of her eyelids. Meaning she'd blacked out for a moment.

  Which indicated she was hurt a bit worse than she thought. Freaking assassins, always trying to kill people and shit.

  Still, she was on the floor, the hard wood cool under her body, even though the air in the place was toasty enough. It was late spring, or early and even though she was roughly where Nebraska would have been in her own world, it wasn't exactly a desert. The exact opposite really. The city she was living in, Wessington, was only about thirty miles away from the Central forest of the Western Kingdom. They had that instead of the Great Plains. So far she'd never been able to figure out how that had happened.

  Really, she thought it might have been that the natives that had lived there had used more magic than in her world and hadn't cut them all down in the first place. Not that Gwen had any way to check and see if that was the truth.

  Even after suggesting that they ask the Westmorland super soldiers for a healer, since they had some of the best in the world, and liked her pretty well, she was a bit shocked to notice one running into the room not five minutes later. Followed by a young boy. You couldn't really ask for better service than that.

  The blonde woman that she recognized as a healer was wearing only an undershirt, a man's at that, which wasn't long enough to cover the fact that she had on nothing else. The kid was Peter though, who'd been working on learning some basic healing himself.

  From the very same thirty year old looking half naked lady. He had clothing on however, his Westmorland basic blue outfit. So Gwen didn't let her imagine that the older woman had been with him when she'd been called to duty. Plus the shirt was too large for that. His outfit made him seem a little like a Cub Scout. Only without the silly kerchief around the neck. His hands were warm, she noticed, since he shoved in, and moved Deidre out of the way bodily. Then he pulled the bloody red rag away.

  That let some of the red out, in a thin river.

  His voice was pleased when he spoke. "Oh? This isn't so bad then. Just a single tiny puncture? It looks like it lines up to hit mainly muscle?" He was actually asking, but she didn't know the answer to that. Gwen was familiar with a lot of anatomical terms, and even knew where things were located on her body, if roughly, but laying flat on her back like she was, it was impossible to see the damage, and how things had lined up.

  The Healer nodded, her face considering.

  "That's right. Normally we'd just stop the bleeding, and then set up a resonator to aid in wound closure. I think, just this once, we might want to speed that along however. Miss Farris might be under attack again soon. It seems to be a pattern with her. If you can do it safely, without harm to yourself or Gwen, I'll let you have ten minutes of reward time. Can you do it in three minutes?" There was a hesitancy to what she was saying, and Peter, looking sad, shook his head.

  "Not if we have to do it without pain. I don't have the pattern down well enough yet. Four minutes might work. Can I get a reward for doing that?" There was a bit of hope to his face, but only a little, as if he suspected that answer would be no.

  That got a smile, and the Healer nodded at the kid.

  "Good thinking. Do it. Full reward time, if you can, inside four minutes."

  Gwen kept her mouth shut, in case it hurt, but didn't need to scream or anything. The next few minutes felt no more than like having a soft and warm cloth placed over the wound. It stung a bit, but no worse than having peroxide on a deep paper-cut would. By the time it was all done, and Pete pulled back, the pain was gone. She moved to sit up, only to have the Healer wave her back down.

  "I wouldn't, if it were me. The blood loss wasn't horrible, but you do have some. That lack will reduce the internal volume, and that can lead to fainting, if you move too fast." A hand moved out to touch her shoulder, so Gwen did what was suggested. She was kind of used to doing whatever medical professionals told her to. A lifetime of experience had taught her that one.

  "Ah. That's fine. I'll just hang out here for a while. Say, um, Deidre? Could you find something for..." It took her a few seconds to remember the healing woman's name. That was down to the attack, Gwen decided. That, or she was being a snob and not recalling the name of the woman training her buddy Peter. "Rhonda, to wear? We seem to have pulled her from bed for this."

  She didn't really care.

  Okay, Gwen was a prude, and knew it, but she was only worried about clothing for later, when the constabulary came. The poor guys would be forced to look away, and that would distract them from figuring out how to best get information from the assholes that had attacked her.

  Even Peter was doing better than they would, glancing over at the woman's crotch no more than casually. It wasn't even enough that she had to snap her fingers at him, to get his attention. All she did was clear her throat a little.

  "Pete? Can you check the rest of the house, and grounds for us? The men that were here had null-radiatives, or something similar. So, get a stick, or if you use a crin remember that the devices don't seem to cover their feet. That's how Winslow took care of them." She pretended to aim that kind of a thing downward.

  The boy got the idea, and then helped himself to one of the weapons held in her wardrobe. They'd been right there the whole time, not fifteen feet away, but she wouldn't have made it there alive, if she'd tried for them. The big oak thing was all the way against the far wall. Gwen had been surrounded, and stuck once already. That meant her true failure had been in not being armed while she slept.

  Not that it should have really happened in the first place. The men had cheated, wearing amulets that had messed up her ability to fight using magic. She wanted to pout, but it was literally what she would have done if it had been her coming to attack almost anyone in that world in the night like that. Really, having that kind of a thing was a bit like owning body armor, in this place. The big problem was that no one had figured out how to make an on-off switch for that kind of thing. They could build them, making the magical instruction that told magic in the surrounding environment not to do anything, but no one had figured out that the trick was really in the power supply. If you could take that part out of the equation the things would have to shut down. Then again, they grabbed the incoming power to use, so maybe that wasn't the answer.

  Gwen knew enough about that now, thanks to her studies into the topic, to get why that was. Most magical items needed two things to work. A power source, which could be either a person or a crystal pack, charged by an individual. Both of those could be engaged freely, for most applications. The other part was a set of instructions. Given the nature of nulls, they simply told any magical energy they encountered to hold still, more or less. That gave them a limited range, but inside that space, magic just didn't work.

  A month and a half before that night, almost to a day, a group of evil magicians had tried to kill a woman to use her energy in an effort to make a giant version of that field that would have shut the magic off for the entire planet. That was Carla, her old maid, who wasn't in the room, Gwen noticed. She still lived at Park Street, but was planning a new business, along with Ethyl Vernors' help. Teaching the kids of the wealthy and powerful how to get it on before marriage.

  Given that she was an ex-hooker, a whore, as the polite people referred to them in this place, she'd probably locked her door and was busily hiding under the bed. Hoping that the fight wouldn't spill over to her room.

  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 provi
ng 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.