The Name with Teeth

“Some names aren’t spoken—they’re set loose. And once they’re out, they start looking for someone to bite.”

“Beatrix.”

My name came not as a reprimand, but a murmur—soft, uncertain. A ghost of sound, barely more than breath. It slipped into the space between us like vapour, and somehow that quietness struck harder than any sharp word ever could. After the tension of moments ago, the gentleness was jarring. Unsettling. Like finding silk in the place you'd braced for stone.

Mum stepped towards me, slowly, like each movement had to be negotiated first with her body, then with the air between us. There was a hesitance to it—a careful choreography, the kind reserved for approaching animals you weren’t sure wouldn’t bite. And I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t.

She didn’t reach for me. She stopped just short, hands clasped in front of her, fingers threaded tight in a gesture I knew too well. Defensive. Contained. Her posture had changed. Something had given way. Her shoulders sagged—not dramatically, not enough to draw sympathy—but in that quiet, deeply human way that meant something had been weighing on her longer than she was willing to admit.

It caught me off guard. My irritation—still fresh from being ambushed by her just metres from freedom—began to loosen its grip. It frayed slightly at the edges, replaced by a thin thread of concern that I didn’t welcome but couldn’t ignore. She wasn’t posturing. Whatever this was, it had depth.

And it was coming for me.

I stepped forward, one slow movement peeling me from the front door, from the half-spun lie that still hovered behind my teeth like something half-chewed. The urge to run dissipated—not gone, but muffled. Muted by something weightier. The house held its breath with me. Even the air felt stiller.

"You said earlier that you and Dad had something that you wanted to discuss with me. What's the matter?"

My voice was quieter than I intended, the question tiptoeing out as if afraid it might disturb something already broken. But beneath the softness, dread curled its cold fingers around my ribs. Whatever this was, it wasn’t routine. I could feel it, deep in the marrow of the moment.

She looked at me, then away, her gaze darting past my shoulder, to the hallway, the kitchen—anywhere but my face. Evasion as instinct. Her lips parted, then closed again. I could see her calculating—balancing what to say with what not to.

"We really should wait for your father to return," she said, low and uneven. Her hand rose, a half-gesture in the space between us, then dropped again. A motion aborted. Like she'd considered pretending it didn’t matter, and couldn’t quite follow through.

It wasn’t just reluctance. It was fear. Subtle. Polished. But fear nonetheless.

The knot in my stomach tightened. My brain was already sprinting ahead of the silence, filling it with every possibility I didn’t want to entertain. Things unspoken. Words better left in their boxes.

“Are you sick?” The question escaped, sharper than I meant it to be. It tumbled from somewhere primal, skipping past the filter of tact. I didn’t want to ask it. But I needed the answer.

My breath stalled.

She shook her head slowly, deliberately. Her hair caught the light, silver strands shifting like threads of fine wire. A quiet denial. Not flippant. Not automatic. Something weightier than words.

And just like that, the storm inside me shifted—still there, but a fraction less brutal. A crack in the tension. A sliver of space where something softer could live.

But the question remained: if it wasn’t illness… then what the hell was it?

“Is it Dad?”

This time, the question dropped like a stone in my gut. Heavier. Sharper. The kind of weight you feel in the chest before the mind even finishes the thought. If it wasn’t her, then it had to be him. The dread twisted differently now—less panic, more that hollow ache that precedes grief. My voice barely made it out, laced with that specific kind of fear that only attaches itself to the people you can’t imagine losing.

“No, Beatrix,” she said, at last. Her eyes lifted to meet mine, and what I saw there stopped the spinning in my head cold.

Honesty. Worry. And not a hint of the sharp-tongued matriarch I’d been at war with all evening. This wasn’t performance. It wasn’t even strategy. It was real.

“It’s about your sister.”

“Gladys?”

The name leapt out too fast, too loud, tinged with disbelief. Of all the names she could have said, that one hadn’t even been on the list.

“Do you have another sister that your father and I don’t know about?” Mum quipped, lips twitching in the direction of a smile, though it never quite arrived. The joke flared briefly, a flicker of dry wit in the gloom, then died on contact with the tension in the air.

The silence that followed seemed to breathe around us, pressing closer. The walls inched in. I swallowed, but it did nothing to shift the sudden tightness in my throat.

Whatever she was about to say… it was going to change something. I could feel it. That eerie, prescient hum before a storm rolls in—when the sky is too still, too quiet. The moment before.

My patience cracked.

I flicked my wrist in a sharp, silent gesture—get on with it. It came out more brusque than I meant, but urgency doesn’t always have time for softness. Luke was still waiting. Duke’s fate hung suspended in time, just one portal away. But now this… this unexpected detour demanded attention in a way I couldn’t quite ignore.

“I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but the name kept bothering me,” she said. Her voice dropped, low and tight, barely more than a thread of breath. A tremble caught at the edge—small, but unmistakable. That vulnerability slipped through her mask, lodging itself under my skin.

Worry etched deeper into the corners of her eyes, lines I hadn’t noticed earlier now standing out stark against the glow of the hallway light.

“What name?” I snapped, too fast. The words punched out of me on instinct, their edge unpolished. I didn’t mean to bite, but confusion and dread make for poor diplomacy.

“Cody,” she said.

The word dropped between us like a pin in a bomb.

“Cody?” I echoed, flat as stone. I didn’t move. Didn’t blink. But inside, the reaction was instant. Electric. My stomach clenched, every nerve spring-loaded. That name—it lit something up in my chest I didn’t want lit. The spark of recognition was a flare I couldn’t afford to acknowledge.

I fought to keep my face still. The control I’d built over years of careful, necessary lies held—just.

“Yes,” she confirmed, her gaze narrowing, more precise now. She was watching for cracks. Studying me. Not accusing, not yet—but poised, as though she’d seen something move in the dark and wasn’t sure whether it was a shadow or a threat.

“You asked us a few days ago whether your father or I had heard of anyone named Cody.”

“I vaguely remember,” I lied. The words slid out on well-oiled wheels, smooth and unhesitating. But my pulse had kicked up again, pounding against the inside of my skull.

Of course I remembered. That moment had hung in the back of my mind like smoke after a fire—insistent, inescapable. I’d asked the question out of curiosity.

Now, the echo had come back with teeth.

She shifted again—subtle but telling. Her arms folded tightly across her chest, not in anger, but in that closed-off way she defaulted to when the air got too thick with discomfort. A shield, not a sword. Her eyes dropped briefly, then returned to mine, waiting.

The silence stretched again, swollen with unsaid things. The air around us had shifted, subtly but unmistakably. We weren’t just mother and daughter anymore. We were something else entirely now.

Witnesses. Co-conspirators. Or perhaps two people on either side of a truth that had only just begun to surface.

“Perhaps we should sit?” she suggested, her eyes flicking towards the living room with the kind of calm insistence that didn’t ask—it directed. There was something quiet in her tone, graceful even, but beneath it, I felt the tremble of something more tightly wound.

I hesitated, held for a moment in the tight pull between two competing threads. Luke and Duke still hung suspended in the back of my mind like ticking clocks. But this—this—had the scent of something deeper. And far more dangerous.

“Can you give me the abridged version now and then when I get home with dad you can tell me the full version?” I bargained, voice tight. I was trying to thread the needle between urgency and curiosity—between duty and dread. And, frankly, failing.

“That sounds reasonable. I’ll do my best,” she said, and turned towards the living room.

Her steps were deliberate, slow. Not the measured pace of someone unsure, but the careful tread of someone approaching something breakable. She looked like she was about to carry fine china across a battlefield. I followed, reluctant, with nerves stretched taut—my whole body waiting to flinch.

Trailing behind her, each step felt like descending another rung into water I couldn’t see the bottom of. My thoughts twisted and writhed, a tangle of apprehension and questions that kept slipping through my mental grip.

I tried to prepare myself—mentally, emotionally. But the storm in my chest refused to settle. Whatever she was about to say, I wasn’t going to be ready for it. I could feel that now. My body already knew.

She began to speak, her voice steady and methodical. And I—unable to trust my legs entirely—leaned against the hallway wall.

She started, almost inconsequentially, with a story of how she and Dad had stopped by Gladys’s house. Something about checking in. Routine. Normal. Safe.

Dad, predictably, had gone straight to the lawn with the mower. His sacred ritual. A man who believed that any familial unease could be buried under the hum of petrol and the clean lines of a freshly trimmed edge.

Mum, meanwhile, had used the spare key—because of course she had. She didn’t knock. She never did. Her version of care always came laced with subtle trespass. Letting herself in had less to do with Gladys’s wellbeing and more to do with satisfying that itch to know things. To peer behind closed doors under the guise of concern.

I felt my attention drift, tempted to urge her along. Get to the point, please, screamed the unspoken part of me that remembered we were still dancing on the knife’s edge of a dozen other disasters. But just as I was about to interject, she said something that froze me in place.

She described sitting calmly at the kitchen table. Nothing dramatic—coffee in hand, sunshine through the glass, domesticity painted in watercolours. And then the shift.

Her eyes had drifted to the window. Something—someone—caught her gaze.

A man.

She didn’t give a name, not even a description. Just that word. And the way it dropped into the story made it sound wrong.

I stopped breathing.

There was a slight tremble in her voice now. Not obvious—but real. She described how he hadn’t just been passing by. He’d been there. Still. Watching. Standing on the periphery of normal life like a spectre that hadn’t been invited.

The hairs on the back of my neck lifted.

Of course she’d confronted him. That was textbook Mum—God help any man who tried to haunt her daughter’s garden. But what chilled me wasn’t the fact that she’d approached him. It was that he hadn’t run. Hadn’t explained. He’d just walked away.

Silent.

Unbothered.

Calculated.

And that—more than anything—set my instincts on fire. This wasn’t just weird. This was deliberate.

And suddenly, I wasn’t so sure that Cody was just a name pulled from the shadows.

Then came the part that twisted the knife.

She reminded me—too casually, too precisely—of something I’d said in passing. A throwaway comment, a scrap of idle speculation about Gladys and a possible boyfriend. I’d barely registered it at the time. A flick of the tongue, nothing more. But now, hearing it echoed back to me with perfect clarity, it landed differently. Stupid. Careless. A spark I hadn’t meant to strike.

Mum, of course, hadn’t let it pass. It had lit something in her—suspicion, curiosity, that relentless instinct to connect dots that no one else could see until they were already bleeding. She’d brought it up with Dad, naturally, and that’s when the so-called coincidence unspooled.

He’d seen the same man.

The same man.

Not a random passerby. Not some lost tradie or misdirected courier. No. He’d told Dad he was waiting for Gladys.

The words dropped like stone slabs, heavy and indisputable.

A chill unfurled at the base of my spine and crept outward, wrapping itself in cold fingers around my ribs. My skin tightened. Something was wrong here. Very wrong.

And yet, through the noise of it—through the logical panic taking form in the back of my mind—I held onto a thin thread of belief. I didn’t want to fear Cody. I didn’t want him to be the threat. That would complicate everything in ways I wasn’t prepared to deal with.

“Cody and Gladys have been seeing each other for a few months now,” I said carefully, shaping the words like glass—controlled, cautious. A bit of reassurance, a bit of redirection. Beneath it all, a quiet plea: Don’t press this. Let it go.

“Cody might look tough, but he is completely harmless.”

She arched an eyebrow with slow, deliberate grace. A single, devastating movement. No words necessary—the disbelief radiated off her like heat from tarmac. Then came the follow-up—surgical, inevitable.

“Oh, really? From the way you were asking about him the other morning, I would have guessed that you hadn't met the man before?”

The delivery was immaculate. Light, almost conversational. But beneath it, a scalpel. Precision designed to cut clean. She didn’t need a direct accusation. This was far more effective—she was giving me the rope and letting me tangle myself.

A pulse of heat surged up my neck, crawling over my shoulders, wrapping itself tight across my chest. I felt my composure begin to fray at the seams, tiny fractures spiderwebbing through the facade I’d tried so hard to keep smooth.

My mouth was dry. My thoughts splintered. I licked my lips, uselessly, trying to summon a half-plausible excuse. Anything to cover the silence stretching dangerously between us.

My mouth has really gotten me into trouble this time.

“Best you talk to Gladys about it,” I said, voice clipped, tone brisk. A deliberate pivot. Efficiency over vulnerability. A lifeline disguised as logistics. I stood too quickly, my limbs stiff with tension, the movement too sharp to be casual.

“I had better go and see Luke.”

It was a pathetic excuse. Fragile, transparent. But I threw it into the air like a smoke bomb and didn’t wait to see if it landed.

Behind me, I heard the sigh. Long. Slow. Weighted like a sack of flour dropped on stone. Mum’s signature disapproval.

“Yes, well, that is another matter we will talk about when you and your father get back,” she called after me, her voice thick with implication. She wasn’t done. Not by a long stretch.

In the hallway, I paused—just long enough to make sure I was alone. I strained to hear her movements, the telltale clatter of dishes, the rhythmic shuffle of drawers opening and closing. A performance of domestic normality, but I could hear the tension humming beneath it.

Good. Let her stay distracted.

I turned to the door, fingers moving on muscle memory. I unlocked it quickly, cleanly. Pulled it open with the right amount of volume to sell the story. A little clatter, a little force. Not too much.

Then, with the same precision, I slammed it shut again.

The house held its breath.

But I didn’t step into the street. I didn’t disappear into shadows or dodge down the side path. That was the story I left behind for Mum to find.

Instead, I reached into my pocket and closed my fingers around the Portal Key. Cool metal, familiar weight. I activated it against the door’s surface.

The colours came then—bright and surreal, ribbons of energy unspooling like ink dropped into water. The threshold shimmered, swirled.

And I stepped through.

Let the cupboards rattle. Let Mum draw her conclusions.

Whatever storm waited behind me, I’d left it—for now—in someone else’s kitchen.

Ahead lay something else. Uncertainty, yes. Risk, always.

But it was my uncertainty. My risk. And for the moment, that was the only truth I could stand to face.