“You should not sleep with her either,” Magnus added now, and when Scotty turned a surprised face his way, he pointed out, “Sleeping with her if you cannot ultimately bring yourself to claim her is cruel. And it would make you just as bad as the men in her past who used her for their own pleasure, or for profit.”
Magnus left him then, and walked over to sit in the empty seat next to Beth. He didn’t speak to her or disturb her rest in any way. He simply leaned back and closed his eyes. He was sending Scotty a message. Magnus was on Beth’s side. At least in this.
Frowning, Scotty turned away from the seating area and walked back to rejoin Donny and Rickart. He didn’t really enter into their conversation, but simply nodded and made the appropriate sounds at the appropriate times. In truth, his mind was on his own thoughts . . . and his feelings about what Beth had done as a mortal. Now that he was being forced to confront his feelings on the subject, he admitted that before meeting Beth he’d always thought prostitution to be the lowest of trades. He’d been raised to believe prostitutes were shameless, deceitful whores who cared only about coin . . . and he couldn’t bear knowing that Beth had once been one.
And that, he acknowledged, was a serious problem.
Eleven
“What think you?”
The whispered question made Beth glance to Kira. She noted the woman’s narrow-eyed gaze as she surveyed their surroundings, and then turned back to the barn in the clearing and commented, “It’s pretty quiet.”
Kira nodded. “Maybe they are sleeping, da?”
“Maybe,” Beth allowed, but didn’t move. Something didn’t feel right about the place. It looked like it had been abandoned for a while, which wasn’t what bothered her. Actually, that was the problem—she couldn’t quite put her finger on what was bothering her.
“Is dump,” Oksana, one of Kira’s bodyguards, growled, not bothering to keep her voice down. “Is perfect place for the disgusting rogues. Let us catch this dyatel and leave here.”
Beth didn’t respond, except to smile slightly at the use of the word dyatel. Kira had explained it meant woodpecker, and was considered a terrible insult. It seemed calling a Russian any kind of an animal was insulting. Whether it was osyol which meant donkey, or kosyol which meant billy goat. Russians did not care for being likened to animals.
“Da,” Nika, another bodyguard, agreed. “I do not like here.”
Turning on the pair, Kira hissed angrily, “Shhh. Would you let them all know we are coming?”
Oksana quickly hid a resentful scowl, and presented an unconcerned face, but her voice was quieter when she said, “Is okay that they know. I am not afraid of some rogue.”
“Perhaps not,” Beth said in a low voice. “But if they hear us, they could escape before we can catch them.”
Oksana shrugged. “Then we no catch them.”
Beth closed her eyes briefly and shook her head. “I really should have insisted the four of you went for training.”
“We are trained,” Oksana growled. “In Russia. Think you Athanasios would make us protectors to Kira if we were not the most skilled warriors? I could beat you in battle with any weapon. I could kill you with—”
“Enough,” Kira whispered furiously. “In future, you will keep shut the mouth, or I will send you back to Russia and tell Father you were unsatisfactory bodyguard.”
Oksana shielded her expression quickly, but not before Beth saw the flash of fury there. The woman was eventually going to be trouble.
Releasing a small breath, Beth turned to survey the barn again. A tip had been called in to the local police that children had found an empty coffin here. Mortimer kept tabs on all calls to the police, just in case anything came up that was immortal-related. If something suspicious did crop up, he sent Enforcers to check out the claim, as well as to ensure the tip was forgotten by the police. Beth and Kira had got stuck with investigating this claim.
This job was what Beth would’ve categorized as a joke job, something trainees were normally sent on. Mostly because these missions were a waste of time. They included things like checking on immortals who hadn’t been heard from for a while, and traveling to California to just make sure that one celebrity or another wasn’t really an immortal in hiding because “they hadn’t aged in years,” or single solitary coffins found in old abandoned barns.
And why would a single coffin in a barn be considered a joke job? Because rogues tended to gather acolytes—new immortals they turned themselves and convinced to follow them. Which meant they would need many coffins. One by itself simply would not indicate the usual rogue’s lair. In fact, on the way out here, Beth had been positive that this single coffin could have nothing to do with immortals. She had even come up with alternate possibilities for the existence of a coffin in an old abandoned barn. For instance, it could be that the former owners of this barn had stored the coffin here for their own future funeral, or . . .
Well, frankly, that was the only excuse Beth could think of for there to be a coffin in a barn, and even that seemed a piss-poor one. No one really bought their coffins ahead of time and stored them for the day they died, did they? Still, it had made more sense to her than that a rogue was living in an old abandoned barn. And she was quite sure it must’ve struck Mortimer the same way, or he wouldn’t have sent her and Kira here.
This wasn’t Beth’s first case with Kira. Mortimer had been pairing her with the girl ever since they’d landed back in Toronto two weeks ago. Most of the cases he’d sent them on had been pathetic, easy checks of the more ridiculous tips. She quickly realized that Mortimer was trying to keep Kira away from anything dangerous. The problem was that it meant keeping Beth herself away from anything juicy too, and she was too good a hunter to want to spend her time on joke jobs. It was something she fully intended to complain about after they checked out this barn.
Beth understood that Mortimer wanted to keep Kira safe, but while she was coming to like the Russian girl, it was time someone else took over babysitting duty. Two weeks was punishment enough for talking the girl into coming to Toronto.