Where the hell had she got to? he wondered, getting to his feet to improve his view of the dancers.
“What is it?” Matias asked, standing up as well.
“I can no’ find Beth,” he muttered, looking for her little black dress among the dancers. The problem was, there were a ton of women in black. Why the hell would she wear such a common color? She was not a common woman.
“I see Donny,” Matias said after a moment. “Beth’s not with him. Perhaps she went to the ladies’ room.”
“Aye,” Scotty murmured and settled back on the couch.
Beth flushed the toilet and stepped out of the stall to find the bathroom apparently empty. There had been half a dozen women primping in the mirror or washing their hands when she’d entered, but it seemed they’d finished their business and left.
Shrugging, she quickly walked to the sink and washed her hands. By the time she finished and turned off the tap, the rushing of water from the toilet had stopped too, leaving the room silent except for the somewhat muffled throb of the music coming from the dance floor . . . and heartbreaking sobs coming from one of the stalls.
Frowning, Beth ripped off a section of paper towel and dried her hands, her gaze traveling along the floor under the row of stalls. Two of them were occupied. The one nearest the door, and one two doors over from that. Beth wasn’t sure from which one the crying was coming, but suspected it was from the one closest to the door.
“Hello? Are you all right?” she asked, tossing the paper into the wastebasket. When she didn’t get an immediate response, Beth walked to the last stall, only to stumble to a stop as it flew open and a young woman hurried out, nearly crashing into her.
“Sorry, sorry,” the woman cried and rushed for the exit.
Beth tried to slip into the woman’s mind to slow and calm her, but ran up against a wall of pain, confusion, and helplessness that brought her up short. By the time she regained herself, the woman was out the door. Frowning, she followed and stepped out into the hall in time to see the woman disappear through a door marked Emergency Exit at the back of the building.
Hesitating, Beth glanced briefly up the hall toward the dance floor, but then turned to follow the woman’s path to the other end of the hall and the waiting door. She couldn’t help herself. She recognized all those feelings the woman was experiencing. Fear, pain, helplessness . . . Beth had suffered them often enough when she was young. She knew how debilitating they were, and wanted to help her. If she could.
The emergency exit led to an alley, Beth discovered when she pushed through it. A long, dark alley with boarded windows and large metal garbage bins on one side, she noted as she sought out the source of the fast tap, tap, tap of fleeing high heels. The woman was already halfway up the alley. Beth hesitated again, glancing back to the closing door. The men had no idea where she was and—Her thoughts died abruptly when a loud cry from the woman made Beth turn back toward her. She had stopped at the midway point and was hunched over, sobbing violently.
Mouth tightening, Beth started forward. She would just find out what was wrong. There was a chance she could help, but at the very least, she could slip into her mind and calm and soothe her. The woman had stopped just this side of the metal bins, but as Beth neared her, she suddenly scuttled forward, halfway into the shadows cast by the bins. There she dropped into a squat.
Reaching her, Beth hesitated, but then dropped into a squat as well. Before she could reach for the crying woman, however, a thunk overhead made her glance up sharply. She stared blankly at the sword embedded in the boarded-up window above. Had she not dropped when she had, it would have been in her neck right now, she realized as she sought out its owner in the shadows just past the crying woman. All Beth saw was a dark-clad figure holding the sword in a two-handed grip, and then the sword was pulled free, and her survival instinct kicked in.
Jerking upright with a curse, she grabbed for the sword and the figure in the darkness at the same time. Her right hand went for the assailant’s throat, nails digging into the skin with vicious intent. With her left, she caught the sword and gripped it, ignoring the pain as it sliced into her skin.
“Beth!”
Startled by the sound of her name, Beth glanced over her shoulder to see Scotty standing in the open club door, concern on his face. That momentary distraction cost her. She didn’t see her attacker remove one hand from the sword, and only realized it happened when she was punched in the kidneys.
Gasping in surprised pain, Beth lost her grip on the sword and stepped back, but then instinctively moved her arm up to block the sword as she heard it singing toward her again. Pain immediately sliced through her, radiating out from her arm as she stumbled and leaned back from the blade, trying to get her neck as far from it as possible in case her arm was lobbed off and the sword’s momentum carried it into her neck. Fortunately that didn’t happen, although the sword did dig deep. Her lower arm and hand were still attached when the sword pulled away, but just barely. Beth was pretty sure the sword had cut most of the way through the bone before being stopped, and she instinctively wrapped her hand around the wound as she glanced around to see the attacker racing away up the alley. Her gaze narrowed on the dark figure moving faster than a mortal could.
The thud of new footsteps heralded Scotty’s arrival, and she turned to face him as she squeezed her hand tighter around her wound, trying to keep it closed. The more blood she kept from dripping out, the more blood the nanos had to work with until she could get to the supply in the SUV.
“Here.” Scotty wrenched the tail of his linen shirt out of his black leather pants and quickly tore a strip off the bottom.
Beth watched silently as he quickly and efficiently bound the wound. The man had obviously done a lot of that, she thought wryly. But then, most hunters had.
“What happened?” he asked as he tied off the makeshift bandage.
Beth shook her head helplessly. “I was in the bathroom and heard a girl crying.”
“Your attacker was a woman?” he asked with surprise.
“No,” she said and then shrugged. “I don’t know. The person was super tall, wearing a dark suit, and had wide shoulders, so no, probably not,” she added on a sigh and then gestured toward the ground behind Scotty and concluded, “She was the woman I heard crying.”
Scotty turned and stepped to the side as he noted the woman huddled on the ground at their feet, still sobbing.
“She was hurting and weeping, and I followed her to see if I could help,” Beth said and quickly explained what had followed.
“So, she was bait,” Scotty murmured, peering at the woman.
They were both silent for a minute, both concentrating on the woman’s thoughts, and then Beth gave up and admitted, “I’m not getting anything. You?”
Scotty shook his head. “She was obviously controlled, but her thoughts are so scrambled . . .”
“Yeah, it’s like someone put an eggbeater in there,” Beth said softly, and then sighed. “We can’t leave her like this.”
“Nay,” Scotty agreed, running one hand wearily through his hair.
“I can’t go back inside covered in blood,” Beth pointed out. “You go on in and fetch the boys, and I’ll take her to the SUV.”
“Nay,” Scotty said firmly. “I’ll walk ye both to the SUV and call Matias and Donny on the way. Yer attacker might be hanging about, waiting for me to leave.”
Beth opened her mouth to argue, and then shrugged and closed it again. He was right, of course. Her attacker might still be around, and she was in no shape to take him on now.
Scotty urged the woman to her feet with a hand on her arm. He must have taken control of her mind then because she accompanied them without protest or question.
“You’d best text rather than call,” Beth murmured when he started to punch in numbers on the phone. “They won’t be able to hear you over the music anyway.”
“Right,” Scotty grunted and quickly typed out a message. He’d finished sending them both texts by the time they reached the mouth of the alley. The men were swift to respond, and both Matias and Donny caught up to them before they’d reached the vehicle parked a block away from the dance club.