Tremble in the Dark: A Gwen Farris Novel

Tremble In The
Dark

A Gwen Farris
Novel

P.S. Power

Orange Cat
Publishing

The
slap came in hard. It was done with intent, which made a huge difference to
such things, Gwen knew. In practice such things were generally soft, and done
with control, no matter how wild the movement looked. The woman hitting her
however wanted her dead, and even a simple blow to the side of the face showed
that.

Hope
left her then, draining out, as she sat tied to the plain brown kitchen chair.
It had been purchased from a wholesaler down the street, and delivered just a
few weeks before. It was going to end up being ruined now, she knew.

Then
she pushed herself backwards, as her friend and mentor, Bethany, charged into
the room, her Power Conduit, the small red metallic rectangle that only the
most magical of people could use as a weapon, held out in front of her.

"I
highly suggest you let her go. Now." There was no menace to the words,
just a cool certainty that left Gwen feeling much better, as the young
University girl that was trying to kill her turned to face the good-looking
Detective.

"Never!
She's thwarted far too many of my master's plans. I have my orders, and I will
see them done." The girl, who was a bit dowdy, bookish, and quite mad, lunged
at Gwen, the ceremonial dagger shining a bright silver, already well coated
from the blood of her previous victims. "Now die!"

Then
without even twitching, without breathing hard or even seeming out of sorts,
Bethany cast the woman against the wall, using the weapon in her hand to push
her back.

"Luckily
for you, Miss Forester, I've borrowed Gwen's practice PC. Else you would be
dead now, instead of merely nursing a headache in the morning. Now, I ask you
again, please give up your evil ways, and release my companion. She is
blameless in this, as you well know." There was-

Gwen
looked up from what she was writing, to see the object of it, Beth, her friend,
smiling.

"Well,
we have the travel itinerary all set. Finally. I do wish we could travel by
airship for it. Teletransport is out, since we're being requested to aid the
local constabulary, but there have been reports of magical properties not
functioning right in the area of the murders. So we travel by train, where we
can at least get off and walk if it comes to it." She didn't seem upset by
the idea at all, because very little ever really disrupted the good-looking
blonde woman.

She
was in a dress, which had a practical air to it, compared to the rather lacy
and frilly thing that Gwen was wearing. It was a plain, and rather heavy, blue
dress with a matching jacket. The styles here in this new world were a lot
different than back home. She was starting to get used to some strange things
since she'd been there and in the body of Katherine Vernor for over a year now.
It wasn't that easy of a transition.

For
one thing, everything in the new place ran on
magic
. She could do that
too, make magic, but it was a lot harder than most stories or television shows
made it seem like. Katherine had been a top end natural talent, like Bethany
was. The difference had been that Beth was a Westmorland, a brainwashed and
enslaved orphan, tortured into becoming a super-soldier. Katherine had been an
heiress. It wasn't the same thing at all.

It
meant that Gwen had been borrowing the clothing of Katherine the whole time
she'd been there though, which, as Ethyl Vernor had recently pointed out,
needed to be updated. Otherwise people would think the Vernors were trying to
keep her in poverty. The kind woman had even offered to pay for them herself,
but Gwen had demurred. She had enough for a new wardrobe already, and the
Vernors had already been so kind to her, trying to make up for what their
daughter had done.

Stealing
her from another world, and, it turned out, murdering her in the process. Her
real body was a rotting corpse now, thanks to Katherine. The little bitch.

The fact that they'd offered to give her
every penny they owned, including their businesses and properties, to make up
for it needed to make it into the story she was writing somewhere. No one
realized that they'd done that and had really meant it. It had been so hard for
them, for the last months, since it had become common knowledge that their
daughter had
stolen
her body. Not that her body had died. People thought
that Katherine had just traded with her, which was bad enough. If they knew the
whole story, people would freak. Big time.

Almost
no one knew that Katherine was inside her still.

Beth
moved in beside her, sitting very properly, and looked at the notebook, her
keen detective's eye scanning the page a lot faster than Gwen would have
managed. She'd probably been forced to learn to read that fast. It was what
they did to her kind, after all.

"That...
Are you writing your memoirs? I can't say that I recall the events described as
going exactly that way. In fact, I believe that
I
was the one tied up,
naked, lying face down on the sofa, and it was you that fought and captured
her. A bit different, don't you think?" She seemed a little odd, and
looked away for some reason. Gwen hadn't really expected that, but she didn't
do it herself, trying to guess what the woman was feeling.

Gwen was good with recognizing anger and
hostility, having had a lot of that in her life, in her own world. She was
pretty much an expert on being hated and reviled really, having been horribly
deformed before. Like the elephant man. Except that he'd actually been a bit
better looking. Not that anyone knew who that was here. Now she was pretty, but
she'd lived a lot of her life isolated from others, and thinking the worst of
them. It had left her deficient in some ways. Emotionally crippled. That was a
thing she could fight against however, and she was good at fighting, so she
stared at Beth, and tried to work it out, instead of assuming her friend was
disgusted by her, which was what she'd nearly done. One year didn't outweigh
over thirty that way, it seemed.

"Um.
You don't like it?" That was possible. She'd never really written anything
before, but she'd been asked to write about her experiences in her new world,
since she was, as odd as it seemed, popular here. As in a minor celebrity. It
had been a bit convoluted, but it turned out that she'd sort of ended up
helping to save the world. People liked that for some reason.

"It's
well written, I just don't know that it reflects reality well. I... You can
tell the truth, Gwen. I won't be insulted by it. Westmorlands can't afford to
let minor things like embarrassment derail them, after all. We aren't allowed that
luxury."

Gwen smiled and patted her buddy on the
arm gently. These people may not touch a lot compared to what she was used to
from movies and television, but compared to her real life, the place was a
virtual hug fest. Beth returned the gestures by patting her leg a few times and
looking at her.

"Also,
this says I'm
pretty
. That's a bit... Shall we say, generous?"

Gwen
let her eyebrows go up, which was a thing that she'd been practicing lately. It
was good that she finally got to use it.

"Nope. You're very attractive. As
for the rest, well, selling this as a Bethany Westmorland adventure was my
idea. The publisher wasn't wild about the idea at first, but I told him that I
didn't need more fame
or
his money, so if he didn't want to get the
sales from having me do the work for it, he could go and shove his head up a
mule's ass. I even offered to buy the mule for him." She winked, not
really getting that one right yet. It was still more of a blink. "Not that
I'd really do that. I don't support animal cruelty. He broke though, when I
told him that I'd write it for free, if we did it my way." He'd actually
gotten a
lot
more supportive of the plan, after that.

Beth stood and fought a smile, shaking
her head just a bit. She had light colored hair, that fell just below her
collar, but was put up loosely in the back at the moment. It was nice and
straight too, unlike Katherine's dark brown curls. Gwen had always just worn a
short crew cut back home, so having to manage hair had been a real chore. She
envied her friend in that. It pretty much had to be easier to manage. Though,
glancing down, she did remember that she had a better bust line. Symmetrical
and everything. Her whole body was, which meant that she woke up in the middle
of the night, stumbling and confused, more than once a week. Normally in abject
fear, but that had to do with other things. The stumbling was just because she
still wasn't perfectly used to her new body. Not without thinking about it.

They were at Park Street, which was the
Vernor's house. Calling it a
house
was a bit wrong though. It was like
referring to Buckingham Palace as a cottage near the river. The first time
she'd seen the place she'd thought it was an extremely wealthy neighborhood. A
gated community with a high, and rather attractive, wall. It wasn't, and this
room showed it.

It was small for this place, her
bedroom, which was actually a set of three rooms. This one was just for sitting
in, and, as she had been doing, working. The bench they were on was made of
sturdy polished oak, but had soft fluffy pillows on it for comfort. Ones
stuffed with goose feathers. Real ones. Those cushions were in a soft amber
color, a tight weave of cotton that made it shine a bit like silk. That was a
thing they'd never come up with back home. It influenced styles here a lot,
especially for men's suits. The whole thing had a shiny look, but was a lot
more like styles from the nineteen-twenties than not.

The Westmorland Detective didn't speak
for a long time, so Gwen just sat and waited. People could be
very
slow
about some things here, and even normal conversations were often spread out
over hours, when a few sentences could have cleared things up almost instantly.
It was, she reminded herself, a different world. Not always a better one
either. In some ways, it was, but in others it was a dark and grim place. Just
because Gwen herself was making out like a bandit, that didn't mean everyone
was.

Her friend sighed.

"To what end? Why give up funds
from your work? Anything written by you is bound to be a top selling piece,
given your fame, but why write it to... Showcase
me
in such a positive
light? I'm only a Westmorland." She had another funny look on her face.

Gwen couldn't tell what it was, exactly,
but then thought she had it. She was having a low self-esteem moment. That was
something that should have been recognizable to her having lived it often
enough, but there it was, right on
Beth's
face, bafflingly enough. The
woman normally seemed pretty confident.

She shrugged, then tried to copy the mannerisms
of the place, and flipped her palms up instead. That's what they did to show
they were baffled or exasperated here.

"
Because
you're a
Westmorland. People here need to learn to see you as people, not as potentially
world killing bombs. If they can see one of you as good, and fair, trying to
fix things through reason and peaceful means first, only using violence as a
last resort, to protect
them
, maybe they'll eventually get it?" Not
that it would work instantly. People were afraid of the Westmorlands, mainly
because some of them really could explode like a nuclear weapon.

Really, all of them could, Gwen was
pretty sure. That part was a secret though, and she wasn't supposed to know
about it. It was the only way that they could get their jobs done most of the
time. Claiming that they weren't
that
kind of Westmorland.

Beth didn't seem convinced that it would
work, but she held her tongue. That was another thing that was different about
this place than back home. People didn't explain things here. Not publically. Even
knowing that she had no way of understanding the rules and conventions, they
just ignored her lapses, and let her carry on, more or less. That didn't help
her adapt though, did it? She was about to mention that to Bethany, for about
the five hundredth time, since it was a real social rule, and the topic came up
a lot, when her friend flipped her own hands up and then made a slight tossing
motion at her.

That meant she was basically saying it
was up to Gwen. If it pleased her or not, she couldn't tell. That was
confusing, but she let it go. Asking people what they were feeling constantly
just didn't work here. If you asked that of a crying and grieving widow at her
husband's funeral, she'd simple turn and sob that she was doing
fine
.
Thank you for asking.

No, she simply had to learn what the
different expressions meant. Some of them were different she thought, from the
ones that people had shown around her while she grew up. It basically meant she
didn't have context for anything. On the good side, she also didn't have a lot
of bad habits to unlearn.

All Gwen needed to do was develop
telepathy now, and she could just read people's minds in order to figure them
out. That got her to smile a bit and shake her own head. Bethany could do that.
Read minds. It was risky though, if you were too strong, because you heard too
much, and that could drive you mad. Beth had been tortured into learning to use
it only on demand. That was the secret Westmorland method. It worked really
well. It was also a horrible thing to do to children. Or to adults that
couldn't say no.