by P. S. Power
Bethany didn't move.
“OK... Did you know that he and a group of other people were going around sacrificing people?” Gwen smiled when she said this, trying to make it seem good-natured.
“What?” His voice came out grumpy again. “No, that's ridiculous. Now if you're done wasting my time...”
“Lie,” Beth said.
His hand darted for his jacket pocket. Gwen didn't hesitate this time. She punched him as hard as she could in the solar plexus, running straight at him, sliding her arms under his, kneeing him in the groin, and forcing him to bend backward as hard as she could. This took him rearward with a sudden groan. To be fair, the knee that hit his groin probably caused the moaning that came from him, not just being forced down. They both went to the floor with a thud, her knees hitting hard enough to leave bruises, but he had the wind knocked out of him for a few seconds having landed on his back. She wrapped his arms in a tight hug, her crotch ending up just under his chin, ready to land on her head if she had to, in order to keep her hold, knowing he could try to bridge back and throw her off. The stupid dress got in her way, making it hard to keep her position, but, she noticed, the web of fabric had drawn a line across his throat, putting pressure on the wind pipe. That would help a bit, his face had turned a nice, deep purple-red color already.
Unfortunately she'd heard a popping sound that meant some part of her costume had ripped. Hopefully nothing that would show too much. She didn't have time to care right now, but later it could be embarrassing if she was walking around with her underwear showing all day.
“Empty his pockets. Be careful, we don't know what he's got in there, if anything. Quick!” The man tried to use brute force to push his arms apart. Foolish of course, since that would be the weakest and least effective thing he could do, even going limp would be more effective, possibly gaining him wiggle room, but she wasn't about to correct him. If he'd failed to learn how to fight that was her gain right now.
After a few seconds, Chuan told her that he thought they had everything.
Letting him go, she backed up fast, staggering a few steps as her dress rode up around her upper thighs. She let the male detectives, with their greater strength, pick the man up off the floor. They weren't gentle about it, Chuan having grabbed the nerves on the back of the man's upper arm, pinching them solidly against the bone. Gwen shimmied a little, righting her clothing as best she could.
“Get him into the office, but don't let him touch anything.” She told them, then realized she didn't actually have the authority to tell them what to do. Wilbur just shrugged and walked the smaller man back, Chuan holding his arms, preventing escape.
“Your collar, your interrogation,” the young detective told her, his voice suddenly much more mature than it had sounded earlier. Deeper and smoother somehow.
Her first order of business involved getting Beth back to normal, so she could tell them anything he'd thought. Other than that Katherine had a nice rack.
“Oh, he knows what's going on. More than that, he was there when Mathews stabbed you, Gwen... He just didn't recognize you past your breasts.” Beth looked worried for a moment, as if she'd caught the flash of anger that had come off her or something. Gwen tried to copy the grin she'd seen Beth use at the store, when they found the illegal canned goods. She really needed to practice these things in the mirror.
“Oh really?”
She swung the door shut forcefully with a kick, the back of her heel catching the wood firmly. The frame shook under the impact of it. The boy winced. That would work as a place to start, she decided.
“Good then, we can do away with the niceties and get straight to business. Bethany, if you'd go back into interrogation mode?”
When Bethany went blank, Gwen turned to the man, looked at the two male detectives and picked up a letter opener from the table. Remembering some things she'd learned watching spy dramas she knew that intimidation tended to work best in interrogation. Torture itself normally didn't work that well at all, people tending to tell you what they thought you wanted to hear, rather than the truth, if they hurt too much for too long. Most probably figured that they were dead anyway, if you were willing to cut off body parts or do too much damage, so they'd decide to not crack, or to lie so that if they did break, you wouldn't be able to tell what part had been the truth and what was a fake.
“Tie him down,” she said.
They did.
Then the man started screaming.
Chapter thirteen
Gwen held the silver handled letter opener in front of the screaming man's eyes by two fingers and sighed loudly. Wiggling the shiny metal to catch his attention, she suddenly flipped it in her hand catching it by the very dull blade, laying the handle on the top of his leg and tapping lightly as he continued to yell.
“Seriously, you should save the yelling, we haven't even started anything yet. You do seem to be getting the right idea though, so how about this: I ask you questions...” a tap with the handle of the metal knife shaped object on his knee made him jump, even though the blow wouldn't have been enough to actually hurt, it reminded him that she held something dangerous looking near his groin, “and you give me honest answers. We don't want to hurt you, or even your friends. We just want everyone to be safe, you understand? Now, if that means hurting you to get the answers we need to protect everyone else, then we'll do it. We'll be sad about it later, but that won't stop us right now...” Gwen knew that she'd lifted the last bit from what Chuan said earlier to Wilbur, but it sounded good. The guy in front of her seemed to think so too, if his whimpering could be taken as a sign.
laying the letter opener on the beat up wooden writing desk – already strewn with papers, some of them covered with red ink, a few hardly touched, except for large A's written at the tops – she searched for a few other dangerous looking things. Soon an old fashioned quill pen joined the letter opener and a large book in an ancient language she didn't recognize at all, except that it looked vaguely like cuneiform, which she only got at all because a client had once wanted her to put up a web-site on the subject for them.
Searching the room, she finally noticed a wooden mask on the wall. This got added to the things on the desk, laid carefully side by side. There'd be no way to actually torture the man with the mask of course, but then she didn't intend to hurt him anyway, just scare him enough that he'd think about the names of the people in this mess with him, give them accurate numbers and all that.
“Bethany, please repeat what he thinks out loud...”
She picked up the quill pen and asked the other men to flatten his hand on the arm of his chair. He started to scream again, making panicked grunts and hyperventilating as they manipulated his hand, trying to make a fist to protect it, which Chuan fixed almost instantly by simply pressing on the nerves of his wrist lightly, pushing toward his upper arm, forcing the muscles to relax enough for Wilbur to get it in the right position.
Gwen lightly worked the quill under the fingernail of his index finger, making sure she didn't actually hurt him, but making it look like she was in a position to cause pain. His eyes went wide and his face lost its color.
“Now... who is in this with you?” Over the next half hour she grilled him. He started answering, trying to lie at first, Bethany repeating his thoughts perfectly, causing him to panic and stop answering out loud for a while as Gwen kept doing things that looked intimidating. Sweat pooled under his arms and the front of his shirt grew damp, darkening in color as they went on.
They worked him carefully, getting seven names from him in all. That most of the names were nicknames, meant to protect people from, well, exactly what was happening, just made sense. To Gwen it also meant that these people knew what they were doing was wrong. Why hide from each other if it wasn't? Other people might have misunderstood, sure, but your own “friends”? Bethany kept repeating his thoughts, clearly and without pause, eventually he seemed to just give up and started telling them everything out loud, his voice shaking i
n fear.
Three of the names, Burk, Forster, and Karnawski, he knew personally from the university. He had nicknames for them too, but his mind betrayed them instantly to Beth. Two graduate students and an undergrad, Forster, added because of her tremendous magical abilities. He thought she was cute, in a bookish way, even though they hadn't dated or anything. The guy also thought she might like women. He hadn't checked that out, she just didn't seem to respond to his overtures, so it seemed likely. Why else wouldn't she be at least a bit interested?
Gwen had to fight to keep her mouth closed on that last portion. Really... part of a group of psycho-murderers and he couldn't come up with a reason that a woman that knows he's a killer might not like him other than that she's a lesbian? She had to wonder what kind of ego this guy had hidden in there that left him blind to any other possibilities.
Then again, she mused in a brief pause, he'd enough ego to think that he and his friends could get away with killing people to call up these Elder Gods or whatever and pry secrets loose from them. You'd think that the fact these things were called “gods” would have clued these folks, supposedly intelligent people, into the idea that maybe a group of pasty pink flesh-creatures wouldn't have the actual power in the situation, even if they succeeded in what they tried to do.
The boy knew there was another person, but he didn't even have a nickname for the last one. A shadowy figure that no one talked to or about at all. If there were others past that, he didn't know.
The man started crying and wouldn't stop, wet tracks down his face making it hard to tell they hadn't been beating him. For a murderer the man sure was a giant pussy. They sent Wilbur, quietly, to contact Peals directly since they needed to try and grab all the others they could without warning to prevent them from fleeing using the round, steel gray, metal looking orbs that would teletransport them away.
This guy, who turned out to have the unlikely nickname of “Happy”, and the much more boring name of Jonathon Phillips, had wet himself some time during the questioning, which they all ignored. The smell, an acrid odor, permeated the room, but until backup arrived, all they could do was hide the man and keep him quiet. He just sat sobbing, not saying anything else now, so that wasn't too hard to do.
Gwen searched the seams of her gown and found that the side had split on the right, but it didn't gap enough to really show anything embarrassing. She didn't know if she could fix it, having never sewn anything before really, but maybe she could hire someone to do it. It would probably be best to learn how to do things like that herself, now that she was expected to wear clothes that weren't all cheap, vastly over-sized things from Target.
It took nearly an hour for backup to arrive, which didn't instill her with a sense of safety, knowing that the district house lay only about twenty minutes away. It took them way too long to get there, in her estimation. She hated to think about what would happen if a real emergency ever took place.
A vision of the entire unit having stopped for lunch hit her, everyone pulling out little lunch boxes and taking their tiny bites, chewing everything carefully, as they chatted about the emergency they had to attend to as soon as they were done, almost making her laugh out loud. A tiny chuckle escaped, making the man tied to the chair sob louder.
Peals found them, led into the room by Wilbur, the only one of them that looked young enough to fit in, able to blend with the students in front of the building. Well, Gwen looked young enough and Beth could probably pull it off too, being only in her mid-twenties. That however, would have required a woman to be standing alone, so the men had overruled it without even considering the option. The Constabulary, once there, made up for their lack of timeliness by showing a total disregard for personal rights, locking down the entire perimeter of the school, not letting anyone pass in or out at all.
Warrant? We don't need no stinking warrant! Gwen had to bite her lips this time. The stress of the situation must be getting to her, she thought, as the Constabulary rushed into position.
They found the students in various locations, two were in classes, based on their schedules, and since they were teaching those classes for professors, they actually turned out to be there. The last in the group they found in the secondary library, the one that covered historical texts and information.
Gwen and Bethany were tasked with bringing in this one, since it was the powerful magic user and the only girl in the group. Technically, Peals had ordered the Westmorland detective to take her in, but as Beth pointed out, she didn't have any particular fighting prowess.
“Sure, I could open up a rift in space, burning this part of the country to a cinder and poisoning the land for a thousand years to come, but... most of my other skills are in data collection and analysis.” Gwen stopped walking and stared at her friend. Beth grinned at her, face coming alive with a strange glee. “Sorry, just kidding with you there. National doesn't actually let those trained to rip space just walk around unattended. But I am a bit rusty on unarmed combat and I didn't think to bring any weapons...”
This made Gwen glare for a second before volunteering to go along with her, since it seemed to be part of her job, protecting Beth from physical harm, along with making sure the other woman ate on time and brushed her teeth. Peals had just nodded as if that had been his intent all along anyway.
As they walked over to the girl, who sat at a table surrounded by books, glasses hanging off of her nose, no makeup, and hair flying this way and that haphazardly, Gwen whispered to the other woman, “Let's see if we can do this quickly...”
She took the lead, approaching the girl first, since they all agreed she had a knack for these kinds of things. Everyone agreed but her of course. Gwen knew that it only looked like skill to others, when everything she'd done so far had really just been her pretending and playing make believe, using television and movies as a guidebook since she still had almost no context for anything here. Her heart started to pound in her chest, so she forced herself to relax as much as she could outwardly, just like a fight, she told herself. Stay calm and act, don't let the other people gain the initiative. When in doubt, hit things...
“Hello.” She tried to make her voice sound crisp, almost an English accent, like most of the other people around here. She'd made a point of practicing for the party, so might as well try it out now. “Would you be Emma Forster?”
The girl looked up, a weak smile on her pasty features.
“Yes... May I help you?”
Gwen took a deep breath and nodded letting it out in a big gust.
“Oh yes! We were told that we might be able to get some special tutoring from you? I have a lot to learn about all this...” She waved her right hand around the history library and realized it to be the truth. If she could read her way through this place she might even begin to have a small grasp on this world. Looking at everything closely, she wondered if the university let people not enrolled use their resources. Maybe she could ask the dean?
She moved toward the girl, holding out a hand as if to shake, knowing that given this girl's level of ability, she couldn't give her a chance to fight or cast spells or whatever they actually did here. Or teleport away, which seemed to be the go-to move of these people so far. She knew they had to touch the small silver spheres to do that, so if she could keep the girl's hands tied up like she had the last man's this might work.
The girl took her hand, shaking it professionally, not bothering to stand, being that they were both women.
“Oh? Well, I do have some passing knowledge of history, but who recommended me?” The voice sounded polite and pleased.
Gwen pulled her forward with her right hand hard, hitting her on the chin with her left fist at an angle to the jaw, rocking the smaller woman's head back. At that angle, about forty degrees off of straight on, the neck didn't have any supporting muscles to absorb the blow, so the woman, girl really, being only about nineteen, dropped to the ground from her chair, small spasms running through her body.
“Got her! We got
her! We need to secure her immediately!” Bethany yelled, causing a half dozen uniformed men to run into the room. They searched the girl's belongings, but couldn't find anything that looked magical or radiative in nature on her or in her bag. Gwen looked at the searchers and wondered how they knew if something looked radiative. Did it glow to them or something, like the radium dials on those old watches that gave people cancer?
“Maybe she can teleport, teletransport, herself without anything? I mean, if she's supposed to be so powerful?” Gwen put forward, not really knowing if it would even be possible.
Bethany nodded, but hesitantly.
“Not... likely, but possible. Some of my brothers and sisters can do it, but it takes years of conditioning... Still, we need to bind against it and anything else she might come up with. We need some Null-radiatives over here!” Beth didn't turn or look away from the girl as she yelled.
