Dogs and Other Collateral

“There’s a difference between losing something and having it taken. With dogs, the difference matters.”

The two of us followed Luke into the house. He walked across the living room without a word, his shoulders tense, his steps heavy as he disappeared down the hallway like a man retreating from his own conscience.

"Hey! Where are Duke and Henri?" I called out, unable to stop the question from spilling out. The concern for the dogs came unbidden, but it anchored me for a fleeting second in something ordinary. Something good. Something real.

I turned to the kitchen, instinctively reaching for a wine glass from the cupboard above the sink. My hands moved on autopilot, opening the smaller cupboard above the rangehood—Jamie’s little wine cache, neatly stocked with mid-range reds and the occasional pinot he swore was "only for special occasions." I pulled out a bottle of shiraz, the label familiar, comforting. It was absurd how soothing a familiar vintage could feel with the weight of a corpse still hanging in the air outside.

"Oh," Luke said from the hallway, his voice oddly casual as he paused to glance back at us. "Henri accidentally ran through the Portal earlier this morning. And I accidentally took Duke with me."

Accidentally? The word stuck in my mind like a pebble in a shoe. It chafed. Too small, too offhand, too absurd to apply to this situation. Luke, covered in blood, dodging questions about a dead delivery boy, and now he’s misplacing dogs as if he’s dropped car keys? It didn’t compute.

"Can they get back out?" I asked, my voice rising with a tremor of hope. I couldn’t bear the thought of those dogs—their warm fur, their silly little habits—trapped somewhere strange and unreachable.

"Nope," Luke said flatly. "We tried that already." No elaboration. Just that. Then, without another word, he turned and continued down the hallway. "Anyway, I'm going to shower."

And then he was gone.

My head dropped forward, as if gravity itself had finally noticed the weight of everything I was carrying. The panic of Jamie’s disappearance, the grotesque scene in the back of the truck, and now this—Henri and Duke gone, like everything else lately, swallowed into a place I barely understood. And Luke? Luke could only seem to produce one thing with any certainty: a dead body.

"Poor Duke and Henri," Beatrix whispered beside me, her voice laced with quiet sorrow. She shook her head slowly, her eyes glossy with thought.

The bottle I had just uncorked clanged sharply as I set it down on the kitchen island, the noise jarring against the fragile quiet. I winced at the sound and placed it down more gently the second time, exhaling slowly.

"Why are they poor?" I asked, already knowing the answer in the pit of my gut, but needing to hear it aloud. I reached up into the cupboard for a second wine glass, the routine offering a thin veil of normalcy over the madness.

"Ah," Beatrix hesitated, her voice distant. "No particular reason," she said at last, settling herself onto the couch. Her gaze drifted blankly across the room, landing on nothing in particular. She looked like someone trying not to look at something.

Minutes passed, filled only by the subtle creaks of the house and the faint hum of the refrigerator. I could feel the clock ticking louder with every second, as though time itself was bracing for whatever came next.

"Here," I finally said, breaking the silence as I walked over and held out a full glass of wine towards Beatrix.

She accepted it with a soft murmur of thanks, raising the glass to her nose and breathing in the wine like it was medicine. Maybe it was.

I lowered myself onto the couch beside her, slowly and deliberately. My own wine glass sat untouched on the bench. Instead, I picked up the bottle again and took a long sip straight from the neck. The sharpness of the shiraz hit the back of my throat, but it didn’t warm me. It didn’t soothe anything.

It just dulled the edges—blunted the panic, the grief, the ever-present fear that this story was only getting started, and we were already in far too deep.