“Yes.” Again with the “idiot” look, though Meg’s eyes were kinder. “Him and Fletch have been up at the house since the early hours. Find them there and send Fletch to me.”
A lack of tingling in my skin had let me know Rae wasn’t there the moment I’d hopped over the fence and joined the meeting. Orders received, I slipped through the ranks and jogged back to my car, eager to get to Rae as soon as possible, though I was fairly sure a cool reception awaited me.
The Bedfordshire landscape was familiar enough to me by now that I drove to the camp’s village on autopilot, ditching my car at the supermarket. Before I hit the woods and possibly lost signal, I called Rae.
He picked up before the first ring completed. “Yeah?”
His flat tone cut through me, but I swallowed the clawing feeling in my chest. We’d talk later. “Where you at? Meg wants us on the road with the van, and she said to send Fletch to her.”
“Hang on.”
There were muffled voices as Rae communicated my message to Fletch, and then a harsh crackle as he came back on the line. “Fletch is on his way. Have you got the spare van key?”
My hand shifted automatically to my coat pocket. “Yup. Want me to grab the van and drive up to meet you?”
“Yeah. There’s only a half kennel of hounds up here, so I reckon whatever dogs he’s riding out today were moved out last night, but I want to hang on a little longer to be sure. It might be a decoy.”
I’d tried to explain the lengths hunts went to in their attempts to fool watching sab to an outsider once, and in turn, the extremes sabs use to intercept them. I was met with disbelief, but I accepted Rae’s explanation without a second thought. “Meet me at the bottom of the lane in half an hour.”
I ran to the camp and opened the gate with the key Meg had given me. The van smelt like Rae, but was tidier than when I’d last seen it, like he’d hardly been in it. Even his sleeping bag was neatly folded up, as though he’d rolled out of bed with more on his mind than tramping through the woods to spy on Goon’s place.
You think about him way too much.
Hardly news, so I let myself carry on as I drove the van off camp and hopped out to secure the gate. Let myself dream that he’d be waiting for me with a smile at the bottom of the lane.
He wasn’t. But then, with his gaze glued to his phone, he wasn’t looking at me at all.
I pulled up beside him, trying not to get a kick out of him dressed all in black, mud already spattered up his trouser legs. Maybe one day we’d fuck outdoors, rolling around in the dirt and the grass, clean up after in the river.
The fantasy made my heart skip a beat, but it was over before it truly got started, drowned in the reality that it had beenmeto call time on the fledgling relationship that could’ve led to magic like that.
Dickhead.
Rae pulled himself into the van. Finally, our eyes met. The beginnings of a grin ghosted across his face, but it didn’t materialise. “I see you’re in good mood?”
“Me?”
“It wouldn’t kill you to smile, mate.”
It was so close and yet so far from my own thoughts that I burst out laughing. Inexplicable, ridiculous chuckles that made Rae stare at me as if I was a mutant.
“The fuck is wrong with you?”
It took a moment for me to compose myself enough to answer. And even then, I didn’t have anything sensible to say. I shook my head. “Just happy to be alive, man.”
“Fair enough. Let me second that by having a fag.”
Rae lit a cigarette and went back to his phone.
I wanted to shake him.
And I didn’t want to know what—or who—had him so captivated by his text messages.
The idea of Rae with someone else was enough to obliterate the manic humour I’d arrived with. I scowled at the road ahead until I remembered a small detail from the clusterfuck of last weekend. “No coppers.”
“Hmm?” He glanced up from his phone.
“Coppers,” I repeated. “They were waiting for us last week, and the hunt wasn’t even here. You think it means something that they aren’t here now?”
