Beth’s eyebrows rose and she wondered what he meant by it. Scotty was a mess? Why? Had he been hurt? No one had mentioned that when she’d woken up.
Frowning, Beth sat up and pushed the sheets and blankets aside to get out of bed. Much to her relief, the room didn’t spin around her and she didn’t sway on trembling legs. She was done healing for the most part, and Rachel said she just needed a good night’s rest as the nanos finished the work inside her and she’d be good as new. The fact that she was no longer suffering pain had made Beth think that the healing must be over. However, Rachel said her pallor and the continued need for extra blood suggested otherwise. The nanos were still working inside, just on things that apparently didn’t hurt. Perhaps even only on rebuilding their forces, but whatever the case, she should take the opportunity to rest to help them along, rather than slow their progress by giving them more work.
“Scotty, listen to me,” Magnus said now. “Donny, Etienne, Mortimer, and I will take turns sitting with Beth. We will keep her safe. What you need to do now is concentrate on healing.”
“I listened to ye the last time and look what happened,” Scotty shot back. “She’d be fine, ye insisted. She’d have Kira and her bodyguards there with her to keep her safe, ye assured me. Besides, whoever attacked her in Vancouver wasn’t likely to follow her back to Toronto, ye said. And now look! She barely escaped having her head cut off, and was damned near burned to death.”
“I know. I was wrong,” Magnus said soothingly. “I will not make the same mistake twice, though. Obviously whoever attacked her in Vancouver has followed her back here. We will keep an eye on her now and we will look into who it could be. I am just saying that you should concentrate on healing yourself. Just for the next twenty-four hours. The worst of your healing should be over by then and you can—”
“I can heal and watch her too,” Scotty growled, turning away from Magnus and toward her door just as she opened it.
They both froze. Beth noted that Scotty was scowling at her as if expecting her to try to send him away, but she was too busy taking in the ruin of his face and head to do so.
His hair, that long, beautiful hair she’d tangled her hands in and pulled as he loved her, was gone. In its place was a charred mess. It was how she imagined a scorched earth would look from space. But that wasn’t even the worst of it. His face too was charred, but the healing had started there so that strips of flaking black skin were interspersed with ribbons of raised, red, ridged scars.
“It’ll heal,” he growled and Beth shifted her eyes to his, blinking as she noted the solid silver staring back. The nanos were obviously hard at work there, repairing whatever damage the fire had done. At least, she assumed it was fire, although she had no idea how he’d been burned. She’d got out of the fire on her own. Beth remembered that much. Reaching out, she gently touched a section of his face that was already scarred and shouldn’t hurt and asked in a soft voice, “How?”
Scotty raised a hand to cover hers and she just managed not to flinch at the mess it was. Dear God, the pain he must be in, she thought weakly.
“He tackled you when you came running out of the barn on fire,” Magnus explained when Scotty remained silent. “He rolled on the ground with you, trying to put out the flames.”
That made Beth frown, and she glanced to the man and asked, “But why isn’t he healing?”
“He is. But apparently where the tranquilizers simply help get others through the pain of healing and the nanos ignore it until they have finished their work, with Scotty the nanos turn all their efforts to removing the drug from his system first and then return to the healing. So the tranquilizer just slows his healing.”
“I think he must be allergic to the tranquilizer,” Rachel announced, approaching from the stairs. “And highly allergic at that. The nanos in him react as if they’re removing a life-threatening poison and turn all their attention to getting it out of him. Thus slowing his healing.”
Beth nodded solemnly, and then turned her hand in his to clasp it gently.
“He can stay with me if it makes him feel better,” she announced and tugged him into her room.
Beth wasn’t surprised when Magnus and Rachel followed, but she simply led Scotty to the bed, urged him into it and tucked him in. She noticed the wide-eyed way he was looking at her as she did it, but ignored that and simply walked around the bed to climb in next to him. She didn’t lie down, however, but sat up against the headboard and pulled the blankets up to cover the pale blue hospital gown she wore. Beth then peered from Rachel to Magnus expectantly. “So, you think it was another attack directed at me?”
The pair exchanged a glance, and then Magnus asked, “Do you disagree?”
Beth considered it briefly. “It was definitely a trap, and a well-thought-out one. If I hadn’t noticed the new nails sticking out of the wood of the barn as we approached, I might have walked straight in to take a look around when I saw that it appeared empty. We probably all would have.”
Magnus nodded solemnly.
“But I don’t see how it could have been directed at me specifically,” she continued. “I’m not the only Rogue Hunter working for Mortimer. In fact, he has more people to call on right now than he did before you and the others came from England. Any one of us could have walked into that trap.”
There was silence for a minute, and then Kira said from the door, “Except it appeared to be a joke job. That is what you call it, da? The joke job?”
“Da,” Beth admitted reluctantly, watching the other woman enter. It was the first time the Russian had visited since she’d woken up, although she’d been told Kira had refused to leave her bedside the first night, insisting on staying to watch over her.
“So,” Kira continued, “if this person knows you are stuck with me, going only to the joke job, then they know is likely you will be assigned barn.”
“She’s right,” Scotty said grimly. “Yer team is the only one that would’ve been sent to that barn.”
“But who could have known that?” Beth asked with a frown.
“Pretty much every Enforcer working for me right now knows that,” Mortimer said, entering the room as well. Pausing, he glanced around at the people in the room, and raised his eyebrows. “You could have let me know there was going to be a meeting about this.”