“I’m fine.”
“Uh-huh. If you let me clean it, I won’t ask you why.”
It seemed a fair deal. Lucky hustled me to the couch and sat me down. He touched the bruise on my face with gentle fingers, but they lacked the current of Rae’s—the magic—and I winced. “It’s just a bruise.”
“Not really, mate. It’s dripping down your face. Did you get clouted with something?”
“Thought you weren’t going to interrogate me?”
“I’m not. I’m ascertaining if you’re likely to fall into a coma over dinner.”
The boy was obsessed with food. I tried for a scowl, but failed because being a dick to Lucky was hard work. I loved him, and making him worry was at the bottom of my wanker list. “I didn’t get walloped. He missed.”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“Yeah, well. Think about what he actually wanted to do to me.” Unbidden, the face of the man who’d hit me flashed through my mind, and I shuddered. I’d known Rae’s crew was up against it, but these clowns weren’t playing around. They’d come at me with a crowbar and no fear, confident in the fact that nothing would happen to them if they left me bleeding in the ditch. That shit was scary. My only comfort was they’d caught me and not Rae.
Lucky sat back on his heels. “I’m worried about you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re not yourself.”
I laughed, bitter and mirthless. “Not myself? Fuckin-A, Luck. This shitisme. You think that bland motherfucker you eat fish fingers and drink tea with is a real person? You think that’s who Iwantto be?” I stood up and pushed past him. “You don’t know me. I wish you did, but you don’t.”
Retreating to my bedroom seemed like the end of the world, but Lucky followed me, brandishing my phone, which made me feel even worse.
He tossed it onto the bed and flopped down beside it, a clear indication that my Rae-induced tantrums weren’t enough to get rid of him. “Idoknow you,” he said. “I might not have your life story committed to memory, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know who you are.”
“You—”
“No. You don’t know everything about me either, and neither of us knows everything about Dom. That doesn’t make us strangers. And it doesn’t mean we’re not friends. Come on, mate. Talk to me. Maybe I can help.”
Defeat sank through me like a stone in a rushing river. Suddenly, I couldn’t stand up. I took my ruined coat off, dropped it on the floor, and lay down beside Lucky. “I forgot how consuming it is.”
Lucky propped himself up on one elbow. “The fox thing…what’s it called, sabbing?”
“Yeah.”
“I looked it up the other day.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah. I’m so sorry, Cash. I had no clue stuff like that still went down.”
My worry for Rae warred briefly with the fear that the hunt had gone ahead despite our stinger hit. That foxes, and anything else that had got in the way of the hunt, had been chased down and killed. “It’s not your fault.”
“Isn’t it? Perhaps if more people knew about it, it wouldn’t happen.”
“Of course it would. No one cares, Lucky. Hunting is a sport for the rich, and they rule the world. We can vote Corbyn or Green as much as we like, but it’s not gonna change.”
“So why do you do it?”
“Because I have to.” I closed my eyes.
Lucky rubbed my arm. “Can we do anything to help?”
“You can’t have this shit anywhere near Dom.”
