Blood Doesn’t Lie—But It Waits

“Some things don’t knock before entering your life. They just bleed all over the doorstep and wait for you to notice.”

Gladys brought the car to a gentle halt at the edge of the kerb, the tyres whispering against the asphalt as the engine dropped into silence. The air between us thickened with that peculiar kind of stillness that precedes revelation. I glanced over, watching her expression harden into something contemplative, her brow furrowing as she leaned slightly forward, peering through the windscreen as though squinting might change what she saw.

My gaze followed hers, drawn to the small delivery truck occupying the driveway. It stood there as if it had every right to, but something about it felt… wrong. Out of place. Like an intruder in a memory.

"That's odd," Gladys murmured, the words barely above a whisper, yet they struck like a bell in the quiet.

The air in the car cooled by degrees, the engine's fading warmth no match for the growing chill of unease trickling into my spine. I leaned forward, my eyes scanning the truck more closely, but it offered no obvious answers—just a plain white body, slightly scuffed, the kind you'd see on any street.

"What's odd?" I asked, my hand moving to the door handle, already bracing for action, though unsure of what that action might need to be.

"I'm sure that's not the same truck I brought around yesterday," Gladys replied, her voice taut with unease. There was a particular cadence in her tone that caught me off guard—something between suspicion and disbelief. She wasn’t someone easily mistaken, especially not about vehicles she drove herself.

Her words triggered a low thrum of anxiety beneath my ribs, a pulse of something primal. I opened the car door, its groan oddly loud in the morning hush, and stepped out, the air sharp against my skin.

"Perhaps someone else is helping him?" I offered, trying to inject lightness, but my voice betrayed me. It was thinner than I intended, the hopeful note a brittle veneer stretched too tight over dread.

"Perhaps," Gladys echoed, though the word lingered in the air with all the conviction of a shrug. Her face remained unreadable, but the tension in her jaw gave her away. She didn't believe it, not really.

With a soft clunk, her door opened. She stepped out beside me, her boots crunching against the gravel as she straightened, eyes fixed on the truck like it might suddenly move. The sun, half-hearted behind thin clouds, did little to warm the moment.

Something wasn’t right. And we both knew it.

As we walked towards the driveway, I cast a glance at Gladys—not seeking permission, exactly, but some kind of grounding. A flicker of familiarity. Her face, however, was unreadable. That particular brand of neutral she wore when she didn’t want me to know she was thinking too much. Her presence was steady, yes, but it wasn’t comforting. Not this time.

My eyes drifted toward the house. The front door yawned open, its edges catching the pale morning light. It wasn’t just open—it was waiting. The kind of open that made the hairs on the back of my neck rise, alert to a disturbance. The air was still, unnaturally so, as if the world was holding its breath, unsure whether to continue.

Gladys, picking up on the unspoken tension, gave a half-hearted shrug. Then she raised her voice—casual, but rehearsed. "Hey, Luke."

Nothing answered. Not a footstep, not a voice. Just the breeze stirring through a nearby hedge, indifferent.

Drawn forward, my gaze landed on the delivery truck again. I stepped closer, the angle now revealing the rear door, partway open. It hung there mid-swing, like a gesture left unfinished. Something about it made my stomach tighten. There was no reason it should bother me—no obvious sign of distress, no blood, no broken things—but it did bother me. Profoundly.

The door seemed to breathe, ever so slightly, with the wind. A door half-open is never just a door. It’s a question.

I hovered at its edge, one foot on the concrete, the other near the swinging door, the truck's shadow slicing across my boots. The silence around us thickened, humming with potential, with all the things we hadn’t yet uncovered but were about to.

And still, no sign of Luke.

The moment I swung the other side of the truck open, an involuntary scream tore from my throat—raw, primal, and laced with pure shock. "What the fuck, Luke!" The sound didn’t even feel like mine; it cracked through the air, trembling with disbelief, terror folding tightly around the edges.

Gladys appeared beside me almost instantly, her footsteps pounding against the driveway as she rushed to my side, driven by the sharp urgency in my voice. She skidded to a halt, her breath catching violently as her eyes took in the tableau laid out before us.

We froze, united in horror.

Inside the truck, a young man lay sprawled motionless on the floor—lifeless or unconscious, it was impossible to tell. Blood pooled beneath him, thick and unrelenting, glistening wetly in the light that streamed in from the open doors. It coated the grooves of the metal floor like oil in water, too much of it, far too much, soaking into the recesses and trickling in slow, crimson rivers.

My brain scrambled to make sense of the image, but the pieces wouldn’t fit. They refused to form anything coherent or human. The coppery tang hit the back of my throat like a slap, and the edges of my vision wavered—narrowing, contracting.

Luke was there too—his face turned upwards to meet ours, pale and damp with sweat, eyes wild. He looked like someone caught mid-nightmare, a man still falling and waiting for the impact. His chest rose and fell too quickly, breaths ragged, like each one was an effort pulled from the core of his body.

I slapped a hand over my mouth, fingers digging into my cheek as I tried to hold down the wave of nausea crawling up my throat. My knees threatened mutiny, trembling beneath me, demanding that I sit or fall.

A sickening reel of thoughts unspooled in my mind. What the hell is this? Who is that man? Is he dead? Did Luke—did he—?

The blood. The sheer volume of it. The back of a truck. It didn’t make sense. Or maybe it did, and I just didn’t want to face it. Didn’t want to admit what this might mean. What it might cost.

My heart was hammering so loudly I could barely hear my own thoughts.

Why the fuck is Luke covered in another man's blood? And in the back of a truck, no less?

My stomach turned again, as if those very questions were too much even for my body to bear.

The world tilted further still.

"No, no, Luke, no," Gladys's voice cracked through the thick veil of silence, snapping me out of my shock-induced paralysis like the sudden shatter of glass. Her words trembled with disbelief, their edges raw with anguish. She turned sharply, pacing in tight, frantic circles, her arms crossing and uncrossing as if trying to physically hold herself together. Then she vanished around the corner of the truck, as though the sheer weight of the scene had driven her into hiding. Or retreat.

I remained frozen, unable to follow, unable to move. My legs felt like stone—my whole body suspended in dread, like I had stepped into a waking nightmare and couldn’t claw my way out.

My eyes, wide and dry, were locked on Luke. On his stained clothes. His blood-speckled hands. His face—a portrait of panic and pale remorse—tilted toward me like a man caught in a flood, begging for rescue.

Everything about him screamed desperation, but I couldn’t find the space for compassion. Not yet. My gaze pinned him like a dagger. Accusing. Demanding. What did you do?

The words wouldn’t come. My voice was lost somewhere between the pounding in my head and the bile in my throat. But my silence said everything.

"I didn't do it," Luke blurted suddenly, the outburst snapping through the tension like a whip. His voice rang out, defiant yet breaking at the edges, as though he’d only just begun to grasp the magnitude of the tableau he was part of. "I swear, it wasn't me."

His denial fell into the blood-slicked silence, landing with the weight of a stone into dark water. It rippled between us, a fragile thread of defence straining against the undeniable brutality that surrounded him.

I took a long, slow breath, forcing it into lungs that had gone shallow. My chest felt tight, not just from fear, but from memory.

This wasn’t my first encounter with death.

That realisation surfaced like a shadow beneath the surface of my panic. Cold. Familiar. The image of Brody's pale face, the emptiness in his stare, rose unbidden behind my eyes. A memory I had tried to bury clawed its way up, dragging with it everything I’d once tried to forget.

I swallowed hard. I had seen death before.

And worse—I had seen how quickly things spiralled when truth and lies began to tangle.

Leigh’s stories of Portals and Guardians flashed through my mind—whispers of otherworldly horrors and the strange undercurrents of our world. His voice, so steady when telling me of those hidden dangers, suddenly echoed with eerie clarity. A world where shadows slipped through cracks. Where people disappeared. Where things like this—a man half-covered in blood, claiming innocence—might not be what they seemed.

Somewhere deep inside, a part of me was already calculating. Already bracing.

Because I knew.

This moment was only the beginning.

"Who is he?" I asked, my voice surprisingly even. It was a fragile calm, stitched together with sheer will. Inside, I was anything but calm—my heart was battering my ribs, my thoughts racing with images and implications. Still, I stepped closer to the edge of the truck, pulled forward not by bravery, but by an aching need to understand. To give shape and meaning to the horror lying in front of us.

"Fuck, Beatrix! Don’t touch anything!" Luke’s voice cracked like a whip, sharp and frantic. His eyes flashed with panic, as if my presence alone might unravel what little control he had left over the situation. The warning came too late—my hands were already braced on the edge of the truck bed, the cold ridges of metal biting into my palms as I hoisted myself up.

"Sorry," I murmured, shrugging with a nonchalance that felt borrowed, artificial. The word slipped out more as habit than sincerity. I felt that familiar pull in my chest—the one that dragged me towards danger rather than away from it. "I can't help it. I'm curious."

"Curious!" Luke exploded, his voice flaring with disbelief. "I'm covered in a dead man's blood and you're fucking curious?"

"Well, yeah. A bit." The honesty of my reply surprised even me. There was something surreal about the moment—like watching your own actions from the outside. As if detachment was the only way to keep from shattering.

Luke’s face contorted with a mixture of frustration, fear, and raw confusion. "You're fucking nuts, Beatrix!" he spat, his hands thrown up in disbelief. His voice was rising, climbing toward hysteria, as if the absurdity of my reaction was the one thing tipping him over the edge.

I didn’t flinch. Not because I wasn’t affected—but because my mind was already working, already parsing the scene, already trying to thread together what had happened. The body, sprawled and bloodied, told a story with no clear beginning or end. I couldn’t yet read it, but I needed to try.

"We need to call the police," Gladys’s voice cut through the madness, cool and clipped. She’d returned, her tone a brittle shield of logic against the rising chaos. The words were the right ones, the ones anyone else would’ve said first. But I wasn’t anyone else.

I didn’t even look at her. My eyes remained fixed on the blood, the limp fingers, the half-shadowed face that might once have had a name, a life. I could feel my sister’s unease behind me, her need to reassert order. But for me, the urge to call the police was still secondary to the raw, compulsive hunger to understand. To see.

"You’ve got to be fucking kidding me," Luke muttered, his voice low but edged with disbelief. The comment was aimed at Gladys, but it floated somewhere between all of us, suspended in the charged air. I barely registered it.

Because all I could think, as I crouched over the still body of a stranger, was this: There’s a story here. And it’s not finished yet.

The scene before me was grotesque, yes—but it was also a riddle. A brutal, bloodied puzzle. Each detail begged to be interpreted, each stain and still limb a cryptic piece demanding placement. Horror clawed at my insides, yet it failed to quell the deeper impulse rising within me—the need to know. To understand what had happened here, not just in forensic detail, but in motive, in narrative, in truth. There was something almost shameful in that curiosity, but it had always been part of me. That strange compulsion to look closer when others turned away. It wasn’t bravery. If anything, it felt like an inherited flaw—something stitched into my bones.

As I leaned in, drawn forward like a moth to flame, the body yielded more of its terrible story. The cut across the young man's throat was not jagged or chaotic—it was clean. Too clean. Surgical, even. I froze, blinking at the sheer precision of it.

"There's so much blood," I breathed, the words floating into the air before I even realised I’d spoken. My breath hitched as I took an instinctive step back, a protective reflex against the wave of nausea that surged in my throat. The sheer volume of blood was staggering, a deep red tide that had soaked into the truck bed’s corrugated floor and splattered across the interior walls. My gaze followed the fine arc of arterial spray, the pattern unmistakable, almost beautiful in its horror. A painter’s flick, only the brush had been death.

"We can’t, Gladys," Luke’s voice cut in sharply, grounding me again. Desperation made it hoarse.

"Why not?" Gladys snapped back, somewhere just behind me, her panic sharpening into irritation.

I turned towards Luke, the grotesque fascination receding slightly as the urgency of his objection took precedence. His face was pale, eyes bloodshot and twitching at the corners, as though sleep hadn’t dared visit him.

"Well, that'll look great, won't it," he said, the sarcasm biting but brittle. "I'm covered in blood, your sister now has her fingerprints all over the crime scene and you're just standing there, drinking wine out the bottle."

I flinched. The words hit like slaps—accurate and brutal. My gaze dropped to my hands, suddenly hyperaware of the tacky feeling on my fingertips, of how many surfaces I'd touched. The side panel. The lip of the truck. The floor beside the body.

Shit.

Luke wasn’t wrong. In my single-minded drive to decode the scene, I’d forgotten the very basics of self-preservation. My prints were everywhere. I'd walked in like an amateur sleuth and ended up stamping myself into the story in the worst possible way.

Panic began to rise in my throat—not for the blood, not for the body, but for what might come next.

Not what had happened.

But what would.

Luke's frustration snapped like a live wire. His fist slammed against the metal siding of the truck with a metallic crack that echoed across the driveway, sharp and final. I jumped at the noise, instinct tightening every muscle in my body. The sound wasn't just anger—it was something raw and rattling, like grief trying to claw its way out through skin.

My gaze snapped back to the interior of the truck, still reeling, and that’s when I saw it—an ugly smear of bile, glistening on the floor near the body’s head. It caught the light in all the wrong ways, a grotesque punctuation mark on an already brutal tableau.

"Spew," I muttered under my breath, the word small and dry as I crouched to get a better look. The sharp stench hit immediately, coiling into my nostrils with acidic force. I winced, instinctively pulling the sleeve of my jumper over my mouth and nose.

"What happened to him?" I asked, rotating slightly on the balls of my feet to face Luke. "Is that yours?" My voice came out flatter than I intended, the question blunt. I was past pleasantries. There wasn’t room for tact anymore.

"It is," Luke said, and the air seemed to deflate from him as he spoke. The fury that had driven his fist into the truck had fled, leaving only exhaustion and something darker—shame, maybe. Or dread.

I didn’t know which would be worse.

Behind me, Gladys’s voice surfaced again, quieter now, like she was speaking from further away than she physically was. "What are you going to do with him?" she asked, the words threaded with nerves, but also a grim sort of curiosity. Her fingers curled protectively around the neck of the wine bottle, her crutch in moments like this. She hadn’t let go of it since the moment we arrived.

Luke’s reply was barely more than a breath. "I don’t know," he said, and the uncertainty in it twisted something deep in my gut. "I was thinking of taking him through the Portal."

I stared at him, blinking, my brain scrambling to recalibrate. Not because the idea of a Portal itself was absurd—no, that part I could accept. Last night had been too strange, too charged with unsaid truths, for me to cling to disbelief now.

It was the implications that hit hardest.

So, Gladys had told the truth. Luke did have a Portal Key.

And if he had one, that meant he wasn’t just in possession of a rare object—he was part of something. A Guardian, maybe. Or at least something adjacent. The thought chilled me. Not because of what that meant for him, but because of what it might mean for all of us. If more Portals were real, if more than just Leigh’s Portal Key was real, then so were the things that guarded them… and the things they kept out.

Or in.

And here we were, three ordinary people on an ordinary morning, standing beside a dead body and talking about throwing it through a hole in reality.

The air felt suddenly thinner, like we’d slipped sideways out of our lives and into something else entirely.

"Shit," Luke muttered, the word dropping like a stone into the charged air between us—a raw, honest summary of the chaos we stood in.

"Don't worry," I said, almost too quickly, my hand reaching out to tap him lightly on the shoulder. It was meant to comfort, or maybe distract. A gesture to reassure, even as I felt far from steady myself. "Gladys already told me about your Portal."

Luke’s head whipped around, his glare slicing through the haze like a blade. He didn’t need words—his look said it all. Betrayal. Frustration. A very clear you weren’t supposed to tell her. The silence that followed was heavy with accusation.

Despite myself, a giggle escaped.

It wasn’t mockery, not really—more like a reflexive burst of energy from the sheer absurdity of it all. Dead body in a truck, vomit on the floor, my sister drinking wine like water and a conversation about secret Portals hanging in the air like it belonged in a dinner party anecdote. Somehow, the madness of it all unlocked something impish in me. I enjoyed watching Gladys squirm far more than I should have.

"Sorry," she murmured, her voice so soft I barely caught it over the gentle glug of the wine bottle tipping against her lips. The sound of it grated—too casual, too human in a moment that felt anything but.

"Can I see it?" The question burst out before I could stop myself, propelled by a blend of fascination and an urgent need to turn the abstract into something tangible. The stories I’d heard, the warnings, the possibilities—they were all just words until now. My heart kicked up a gear, hammering out a rhythm of want.

Luke's entire body stiffened. "I don't know," he said slowly, his uncertainty like a hand braced against a closed door. He didn’t quite say no, but he didn’t say yes either. I could see the hesitation flickering behind his eyes, the tightening of his jaw.

That only made me more determined.

"Oh, come on," I coaxed, my voice dropping into a persuasive cadence. I was already half-building the argument in my head, stacking logic over desire like a tower of cards. "You have to get rid of this body anyway, so you may as well."

It was a little twisted, I knew that. But practicality had always been my refuge when emotion got too sharp. If we were already wading through the surreal, why not lean into it?

Luke didn’t move. He just stared at me, lips slightly parted, caught somewhere between horror and deliberation. The weight of what I was asking hung between us.

Come on, I urged silently, eyes fixed on his. My breath caught in my throat. This was it—the moment the veil might lift. After all the cryptic remarks, the guarded expressions, the warnings that danced just out of reach, I was finally close to seeing something real. Something other.

Please, I thought again, my pulse now a drumbeat of anticipation.

"How are the two of you being so calm about all of this?" Luke’s voice cracked through the stillness, his eyes darting between us, wide with disbelief. The pitch of his question hovered between accusation and pure bewilderment, as if he couldn’t decide whether to scream or laugh—or both.

"Calm?" Gladys repeated, raising the wine bottle like a theatre prop, her tone thick with disbelief. She gave it a little shake, the liquid sloshing audibly inside as if to say this is what’s keeping me upright. The humour in her gesture was bitter at best, a brittle sort of bravado that barely held her together.

Luke turned his gaze on me then, searching my face with a question his words hadn’t framed—What kind of people are you? Or maybe just What kind of person are you?

I met his stare evenly but offered only a shrug, the motion casual, even as my stomach twisted in a thousand knots beneath it. Outwardly, I projected indifference—an old reflex. Internally, my thoughts were anything but calm. Leigh’s warnings about secrecy, about trust, buzzed like static in my ears. I was balancing on a tightrope between loyalty and curiosity, and each new revelation pushed me closer to one edge.

"I don't know," I said finally, my voice steady but not entirely honest. The truth was a tangle of motives—desire, fear, guilt—and I wasn’t sure how much of it even I understood.

Luke sighed, the sound long and leaden, the exhale of a man trapped in circumstances spiralling far beyond his control. “I need to clean up first,” he said, and though the words were simple, they carried the weight of reluctant acceptance. His arm gestured for me to follow him, a subtle, unspoken permission passed between us.

I stepped down from the truck with a light thud, my shoes hitting the driveway like punctuation. “Sure,” I replied, trying not to sound too eager, though the thrum in my chest betrayed me. The horror of the body in the truck still hung heavy, but this—this opportunity to see the Portal, to confirm what had only ever lived in the realm of stories—this was something else entirely. A thread I couldn’t stop myself from pulling.

And I would follow it, wherever it led.

"What are you doing?" Gladys’s voice cut through the tense silence like a shard of glass, her words sharp with bewilderment, tinged with something close to alarm.

"Huh?" I turned instinctively, pulled by the note of confusion in her tone. But the second I caught her expression, it clicked—she wasn’t speaking to me. "Oh," I murmured, realising I’d inserted myself into a conversation that wasn’t mine, my attention snapping back to Luke.

"I need to move him forward," Luke said, and though his words were plain, each syllable seemed to sink heavily into the thick air around us. "His foot is stopping the door from closing properly."

That was it. No drama. No poetry. Just grim logistics. The way he said it made my skin crawl—how matter-of-factly he'd addressed the problem of a corpse obstructing a vehicle door. There was something almost surgical about it, like adjusting furniture. A necessary evil, stripped of emotion.

Then came the sound—the scrape of fabric, the drag of limbs against metal. Luke’s face contorted with effort as he grabbed the man beneath the arms, dragging him forward through the slick mixture of blood and vomit. The smear left behind was obscene, like some grotesque painting in motion. My stomach clenched, bile threatening to rise. And yet I couldn’t look away. It was like watching a nightmare unfold through the wrong end of a telescope—distorted, surreal, yet painfully real.

You're screwed now, Luke. The thought pulsed through my mind with grim finality. No matter how this played out, he'd already crossed a line. We all had.

"So, who is he anyway?" Gladys’s voice cracked the silence again, louder this time. The question hung there, jarring in its bluntness.

I watched Luke carefully, tracking every micro-expression, every flicker of discomfort.

"Did you know him?" she pressed.

He hesitated, just long enough for doubt to curl its fingers around my spine.

"He's just the delivery guy," Luke said at last, the words clipped, defensive. Too fast. Too easy.

That’s bullshit! My mind roared, though I kept the outburst contained behind a narrowing of the eyes. You totally know more than that.

"Who?" I demanded, stepping in where Gladys had left off. My voice wasn’t raised, but it carried weight—a challenge, a refusal to accept the surface-level lie. My stare fixed on him, unblinking, insistent. I wanted the truth. No more evasions. No more half-answers.

Just the truth.

Luke’s demeanour crumpled in an instant, like something fragile giving way under pressure. The defensiveness evaporated, and in its place came something raw—unmistakably human. His eyes, glossy with withheld grief, brimmed until one tear escaped, carving a slow, glistening trail down his cheek.

"His name is Joel. He's Jamie’s son," he said, each word landing with the dull thud of finality, like nails into something already dead and buried.

"Shit," I breathed, my voice low, hollow. It was all I could manage. The weight of the revelation hit like a hammer to the sternum. Jamie’s son. I didn’t even know Jamie had a son. And now... this. It twisted something inside me—grief, guilt, disbelief—a knot of emotions too tangled to unpick.

Then the sharp, unmistakable sound of breaking glass sliced through the moment. Gladys’s wine bottle had slipped from her fingers, shattering against the concrete like a punctuation mark on our collective despair. The wine bled out slowly across the ground, a dark, spreading stain that mimicked the one inside the truck. A crimson echo.

"Oh dear," she murmured, as though she'd dropped a vase, not witnessed the bloody demise of a young man whose identity changed everything. Her eyes stayed fixed on the shards, unmoving. A futile attempt to focus on something simple—understandable—in the midst of a situation that made no sense at all.

"What the... how... when did...?" The questions stumbled from my lips like loose stones on a steep path, collapsing before they could find direction or meaning. They weren’t even complete thoughts, just fragments caught in the whirlpool of my mind. None of them mattered, not really—not when a life had ended in blood and mystery right before us.

"I had no idea. No idea at all," Gladys repeated, her voice thin and distant, as if she were speaking from behind a veil. Her eyes darted between the corpse, Luke, and me—searching, calculating, desperate to make sense of a truth that had just shifted under our feet. She looked as if she’d aged a year in the last five minutes.

The puzzle had changed. And none of us knew what picture we were building anymore.

Luke’s sudden exit from the truck was jarring—too quick, too uncontrolled. He leapt down as though the vehicle itself had turned against him, the force of his landing throwing him straight into Gladys. She staggered slightly at the impact, arms flailing before steadying herself on the edge of the open truck. The jolt rippled through all of us, disrupting the grim stillness that had settled like dust in the wake of his confession.

"Luke! Where are you going?" I called out instinctively, my voice cracking slightly as it chased after him. The fear wasn’t fully formed yet, but it was there—tightening in my chest, curling cold at the base of my spine.

"Don’t leave us here with him!" Gladys shouted, the panic sharper in her tone. It wasn’t just about the corpse anymore. It was about what it represented—the impossibility of return, the weight of knowledge, the strange sense that we had stepped through some invisible veil and could no longer turn back. Standing alone beside Joel’s lifeless form felt like being stranded at the scene of an unspeakable crime, without any map of how to proceed.

But Luke didn’t answer. He didn’t even slow. His silence was loud, full of tension and urgency, and it sucked the air out of the space between us as we hurried after him, drawn like reluctant shadows in his wake.

We crossed the threshold of the house in silence, the change from outdoor chill to indoor warmth unnoticed in our disorientation. Luke strode ahead, his steps purposeful in a way that only deepened the unease coiling inside me. He didn’t glance back, didn’t explain. He simply moved, and we followed, as if anything else might shatter the thin thread of logic still tethering us to the moment.

"Hey! Where are Duke and Henri?" Gladys’s voice broke the silence, sudden and incongruous. Her gaze swept the room like a searchlight, scanning for the usual blur of fluffy tails and yappy greetings that had, until today, always been part of this house’s charm. Their absence hit me belatedly—another familiar detail erased in the growing list of things that weren’t right.

Without waiting for an answer, Gladys veered off towards the kitchen, the sound of cupboard doors opening and closing echoing through the room. Her movements were efficient, almost automatic. She retrieved a wine glass with the muscle memory of someone who knew exactly where everything lived, her fingers curled around its stem like a lifeline. As if drinking from something proper, instead of straight from the bottle, could restore order. Reclaim dignity. Push the horror a few inches further away.

"Oh," Luke said, almost as an afterthought. He had stopped in the hallway, one hand braced against the wall as if gathering himself. "Henri accidentally ran through the Portal earlier this morning and I accidentally took Duke with me."

The words hung there for a moment, surreal in their casualness. If he’d said he’d left the kettle on or misplaced his car keys, it wouldn’t have sounded more offhand. A dog lost to another world. Another carried away through inter-dimensional space like forgotten luggage. And this was just… Wednesday?

"Can they get back out?" Gladys asked, the edge of the wine glass barely brushing her lower lip as she spoke. There was genuine concern in her voice—a break from the wine-soaked cynicism that often tinged her tone. For a fleeting second, I was struck by the absurdity of it all: standing in the aftermath of a possible murder, discussing inter-dimensional pet logistics like we were on a group Zoom call gone wrong.

"Nope," Luke said simply, no emotion in his voice. "We tried that already."

A silence fell again, this one heavier. Final. As if the question itself had marked a boundary we couldn’t uncross.

And beneath it all, my mind churned—quietly, trying to file these new details into the already overflowing cabinet of things I didn’t yet understand.

"Anyway, I’m going to shower," Luke announced abruptly, his voice clipped. The statement served as both a declaration and a dismissal, severing the thread of conversation with a finality that brooked no argument. With that, he turned on his heel and disappeared down the hallway, his footsteps growing fainter with each passing second until only the silence remained—thick and oppressive.

I stood frozen for a moment, the reality of everything catching up to me in a rush. The room, once so familiar—warm with the scent of coffee and dog fur, noisy with half-heard arguments and stupid jokes—felt altered now. Hushed. As though the walls themselves were holding their breath. Every surface seemed to bristle with a new tension, shadows clustering in corners like secrets too ashamed to come into the light.

"Poor Duke and Henri," I murmured, almost without thinking. The words slipped out, gentle and full of a sorrow I hadn’t expected. My mind conjured images of their tiny frames trotting obliviously through some wild, unforgiving terrain in Clivilius—an alien world of strange skies, unknown dangers, and creatures not meant for small, trusting pets. It made my stomach twist.

A sharp clank from the kitchen island broke the quiet. Gladys, unfazed by the solemnity I was sinking into, thudded her wine bottle down onto the counter like a punctuation mark. "Why are they poor?" she asked casually, the curiosity in her tone incongruent with the subject matter. Her hand disappeared into the cupboard above the rangehood, rifling with a familiarity that made something in me wince.

She knows exactly where they hide it.

There was something painfully telling about how easily she navigated Jamie and Luke’s alcohol stash. As if the cupboards were her own. As if she’d done this a hundred times before.

"Oh," I replied, stumbling over the syllable, my brain slow to recover. Caught off-guard by my own slip, I fumbled to cover it. "No particular reason," I said, the words thin and unconvincing, like a patch hastily slapped over a crack in the wall.

I made my way toward the black leather couch, sinking into its cold embrace. The smooth surface creaked beneath me, a reminder that I wasn’t as casual as I hoped to appear. I let my gaze drift deliberately around the room, feigning interest in the mundane—the slightly skewed picture frame, the unopened mail on the coffee table, the dust motes dancing in a shaft of light. Anything to avoid Gladys’s eyes. Anything to shift the spotlight away from the guilt that pulsed just beneath my skin.

The silence that followed was a welcome reprieve, a fragile hush that settled like dust on every surface. It offered me the space I needed—to breathe, to think, to untangle the twisted threads of our morning. My thoughts wandered like restless phantoms, circling the dead boy in the truck, Luke’s hollow expression, the terrifying implication of the Portal, and the two little dogs now lost in an alien world. Each reflection felt weightier than the last, a quiet avalanche of dread building behind my ribs.

"Here," Gladys’s voice slipped into the stillness, drawing me gently back to the present. I looked up to find her arm outstretched, a glass of wine cradled in her hand, the pale gold liquid catching the light as it tilted ever so slightly. I accepted it without hesitation, the cool curve of the glass grounding me. The sharp, oaky aroma of Chardonnay rose up to meet me, a scent so familiar it felt like muscle memory.

"Thanks," I murmured, my voice no more than a breath, yet laced with genuine gratitude. It wasn’t just for the wine. It was for the gesture. The quiet understanding. The wordless reminder that I wasn’t entirely alone in the chaos.

Gladys eased down beside me on the couch, her body folding into the cushions with the same exhausted grace I felt in my own limbs. We didn’t touch. We didn’t speak. But her presence beside me was a quiet lifeline, a thread of something human and steady in a morning that had rapidly spun into the surreal.

Together, we sat in silence, the weight of everything pressing down like fog. The walls, once comforting in their familiarity, now felt like the thin skin of a world too full of secrets.

Then came the sound of water—rushing, sudden, the pipes groaning as they were forced into service. The noise jolted us both, breaking the spell, a vivid reminder that Luke was still here, still blemished, and still—somehow—functioning after everything.

Just as quickly, the sound faded. The pipes quieted. And with it, the strange stillness returned, thicker than before. A silence not of peace, but of waiting.