The Man I'd Waited For

"The thing you pray for and the thing that turns up are seldom on speaking terms."

I came back up the hill to Luke's on my own two feet, and it cost me something to do it that way, tired and sore as I was. I'd opened my portal against the brick of his house not an hour gone, hauling Griffin out through it, and that meant the spot was mine now—registered, the way they all got registered, there to be stepped back into from Belkeep whenever I pleased. It would have spared my legs and the best part of an hour. But I didn't know what I'd be stepping into. A portal came up where you put it, ready or not, and to walk out of one into the middle of an open driveway I hadn't laid eyes on first was the kind of carelessness that got a Guardian buried. So I took the long way round and up. The hill gave me the one thing the portal never could—the chance to come on the place quiet, and see it before it saw me.

I came up over the top of the drive for the second time that morning, my legs letting me know all about it, and the first thing I saw pulled a soft "Oh no" out of me before I could stop it. Gladys's car. Sitting there at Luke's curb, plain as anything, where it had no earthly business being. My mind set to work on it and turned up nothing good. What was she doing here? What had she walked into, and how had Luke come out the far side of my dance with the Portal Pirates?

"Gladys," I called from the foot of the driveway. My voice went out into the cold and nothing came back to me.

The quiet of a place that ought to have answered and didn't was a bad quiet, and this was that. It got in behind my breastbone and pulled itself tight. "Gladys, everything okay here?" I said, and started along the side of the truck, slow, and watching every foot of it.

Gladys put her head round the back of the truck, and the smile she had on didn't fit her—it sat up on top of the fright underneath without covering an inch of it. "Cody!" she said, too bright by half, the word pitched to carry over something.

Something was wrong. Every part of me knew it at once. "Yeah, everything is great here," she said—flat, the words set down careful, like she was working harder to sell them to herself than to me.

I came closer and took her in, the whole of her, from the jumping thing in her eyes on down—and there it was, down on her feet. Little dark red spots, bright against the white of her sneakers. My gut dropped. What have you done, Gladys? Did you touch him?

"Oh," she said, and laughed, and the laugh had a crack running right through it, thin as lake ice. "That’s just wine. I accidentally knocked my glass over." It didn't hold together for a second, and we both knew it didn't.

"Doesn’t surprise me, really," I said, and made myself say it easy, made myself grin, because Gladys knocking a glass over was the most ordinary thing in the world and I needed her thinking I'd swallowed it whole. It was a strange thing to be play-acting with her, of all people, after the way we'd left it in her bedroom—but there was no time to feel the strangeness of it. I put it away with the rest.

"How about I meet you back at home in an hour?" she said, and her eyes went darting from me to the back of the truck and away again, quick, like she couldn't help it and hated that she couldn't.

What else could I do? Push her, and whatever she was stood in front of came out into the daylight, and my cover went with it. So I let it lie. I turned and started back down the drive, slow, every step of it against the grain of me. The gap opened up between us and not a bit of the wrongness let go its hold—the questions, the fear, the blood on her shoes.

"Cody, wait!"

Her voice caught me before I'd made ten yards. I stopped where I stood at the end of the drive, and something in me lifted—a fool's hope that she was about to let me in, to hand me the whole of it.

I turned back to her. But all she gave me was a small, helpless shrug—a door cracked open and no further. I took a breath and went back to her anyway.

I went past her to the back of the truck, and I braced for it, and the bracing wasn't enough. What was laid out in there stopped me where I stood—a thing with no business anywhere under the sun, least of all in a quiet driveway in the hills above Hobart. "What the fuck!"

There was a man crouched over the body—middle-aged, tanned, ordinary as a fencepost—looking up at me now with his face gone to pieces with fright. And it landed on me even in the thick of all of it, even over the dead boy laid out between us: this was him. Luke Smith. The one I'd had on my tongue since before my own two could walk, the one the whole freezing weight of Belkeep hung on—and here he was, on his knees in the blood of a lad he'd got killed, staring up at me like a rabbit pinned in a spotlight. Behind him stood Beatrix. I'd never once laid eyes on the woman, but I knew her the moment I did—she had Gladys's face on her, near enough, about the eyes. Gladys's younger sister. Her clothes a horror, red down the front of them. My look went from the one to the other and back.

"Who the fuck is that, Luke?" I said, and heard the accusation come up under the words, and let it come. Beatrix's ruined clothes had my eyes again. She hadn't touched him. Had she?

Luke's mouth worked a moment before anything came out of it. "Wait. You know who I am?"

"Of course," I said—and cursed myself the instant it left me, because it was too much, too soon, and I knew better. "We’ve been waiting for you."

"Waiting for me?" There was the fear in it, and under the fear, worse, the first small flicker of a man wanting to believe.

I'd said too much. I could feel the whole thing tilting towards a cliff I couldn't afford, and I hauled it back the only way I knew how—hard, and sideways. "What happened to him?" I said, and climbed up into the truck, setting my body to work so my mouth would have less room to give me away.

"Shit," Luke breathed, and his eyes came up and locked onto mine, and there was a thing in them that put me further on edge than all the blood in that truck. "You were in my dream."

I let the dream lie. Not here, not with a dead boy at my feet and the clock running. "Throat looks like it has been slit," I said, and gave the wound a hard, flat look I didn't have to put on. "Any idea who did this?" I knew the answer better than the lot of them—the hand that had opened that throat was roped to an iron ring in another world, breathing through the ruin of its own face—but there was no telling Luke that, not a word of it, not yet.

"You were in my dream," Luke said again, softer, and not to be turned aside. "I recognise you now."

"We don’t have time for this now, Luke," I said, harder. Whatever he'd dreamed, and whatever it meant, it would keep, and this would not. "I need to know who he is and what happened. We don’t have much time."

Luke's mouth opened and shut on nothing.

"His name is Joel," Beatrix said, stepping into the gap where Luke had stalled. "He’s Jamie’s son."

Jamie. Of course. Jamie, Luke's partner, Gladys's dearest friend, whose name I'd heard out of Gladys's mouth a hundred easy times across a dinner table and never once thought would fetch me up standing over a corpse. Which meant Luke, God help him, had got his own partner's son killed. I kept it off my face. There'd be time to feel the size of that later, or there wouldn't; either way, not now.

"Is he...?" I let it trail off, and tipped my head at Luke—meaning, one of us. A Guardian. The last thing on God's earth we needed was the dead lad turning out to be more than he looked.

"No, I don’t think so," she said, and I let a breath go.

"What happened?" I said.

Beatrix lifted her shoulders. She didn't know either.

"I’m not sure," Luke said, low. "He delivered a few tents here this morning. I took the opportunity to take them through the Portal while he was in the toilet. Then the boys accidentally ran through."

"The boys?" What boys?

"Dogs," Beatrix said.

So the dogs had bolted off through the open door of the worlds, and the delivery lad had come out of the dunny to find them vanished and a hole in the air where they'd gone. "And did he see?" I said, though I had the shape of the answer already.

"Yeah," Luke said, grim. "I’m pretty sure he did. And when I returned, I found him like this."

"Shit," I said, under my breath, and set to pacing the length of that truck bed with the answer already forming up ugly in my head. The body had to go. And there was only the one road it could go by.

"Oh my god!" Gladys had come up behind me, and her voice cracked clean in two. "We’ve both seen the Portal too." Her hand went from herself to her sister and back. "Does this mean we are going to die too?"

It near pulled a laugh out of me—not at the horror of it, but at the sheer child's plainness of the fear, the way she'd gone straight to the bone of the thing. "Not today, Gladys. Not today," I said, as gentle as I could make the words go.

"I am really confused," Luke said, dragging a hand down his face. "Who are you again? And how do you know me? Did you have a dream too?"

"I think Gladys and I had better finish making those deliveries," Beatrix said—and there was a level head on her, steadier than any of ours just then. "I’ll call you later. When we’re done."

Luke nodded, and it took me a breath to catch what she'd just done. Finish the round. Make it look, to anyone who came asking, like the lad had dropped his last parcel and driven off home—no missing deliveries, no reason for a soul to come looking up this hill. It was quick, and it was cold, and it was clever, and it hadn't come from Luke. Beatrix had the sharpest head in the yard, and I made a note of it.

"Be careful. Both of you," I told the sisters, and meant it down to the ground. Getting Gladys away from this, out from under the shadow of it, eased something in my chest, even knowing what I was sending the pair of them off to do.

The sound of the two of them faded off down the hill, and the quiet came back around Luke and me, a heavier quiet than before. He looked at me with the whole of it plain in his face—the fear, the questions, the wanting to be told what to do.

"I think you’re in imminent danger, Luke," I said. And I did think it. Nelson Price was loose on the far side of a portal now, somewhere near whatever settlement Luke had gone and started himself, and Nelson had no clean way home. He'd come across chasing what he was chasing, and I'd taken his man Griffin through my own doorway before ever the two of them could set their pirate trick and pin the crossing down—so the road back was shut to him. The only way Nelson had left ran straight through Luke: through Luke opening his own portal, and Nelson praying Griffin was still stood on the Earth side of it to close the circuit. I was rusty on the finer points of how their kind moved between the worlds—it had been a long while since I'd had cause to think hard on any of it—but I knew enough to know this much: if Nelson lost his head and put Luke in the ground, he'd be burying his own last chance of ever seeing Earth again along with him. Which was about the only thing keeping Luke's heart beating. A thin thing to hang a man's life on, and I didn't say so out loud.

"Was he killed because of me?" Luke's voice went thin. "Because I let him see the Portal?"

"No," I said, and put every ounce of steady I had behind it, for a man drowning in his own guilt was no use to a soul, and I needed this one able to move. "I don’t think it was your fault at all."

Luke pulled in a long breath, his shoulders going up and down with the weight of it.

"We need to get rid of the body. You should take him to Clivilius," I said.

"I can’t. Jamie would kill me if he knew his son was dead because of me," Luke said, and there was a real terror in it—not of the law, not of me, but of Jamie. And I couldn't fault him for it. There was no heavier thing a man could be made to carry home to the one he loved than this: that their boy was dead, and that the fault of it was his.

"Luke!" I had him by both shoulders before I'd decided to, gripping hard, trying to put some iron into him through my hands. "It’s not your fault."

"There has to be another way," he said, half a plea.

I let go of him and paced it out, up the bed of the truck and back again, turning the thing over. And there was another way. There was mostly always another way, for a man who'd lived as long as I had and done as much he'd sooner forget. "There is," I said.

"Get out of the truck," I told him, and swung myself down without waiting to watch him do it.

He climbed down after me. "I need the keys," I said, and put my hand out for them. It wasn't a request and I didn't dress it up as one.

"Where are you taking him?" he said, and laid the keys in my hand, his eyes hunting mine for an answer I wasn't sure he was ready to hear.

For an answer I reached into my shirt pocket and took out my Portal Key. A small, plain thing to look at—you'd not give it a second glance sitting in a man's palm—and the most dangerous object for a hundred miles in any direction.

Luke's breath went in sharp.

I aimed it and woke it. A small ball of light broke from the end of it and flew, quick and clean, across the driveway to the big gate at the top of the drive, and where it struck, the gate took fire with colour—that shifting, impossible spill of it running out across the bars and the timber, a doorway standing open where a breath before there'd been only a fence.

"I'm taking him to Clivilius," I said. There was no room left in it for argument, and I left none.

Luke stepped back out of my way without being told, his eyes never once leaving me.

I climbed up into the cab, and the keys were warm still from his hand, and I turned the engine over. It caught and rumbled, loud in the quiet of that street. I put it into reverse and backed it slow and careful up the drive, towards the colour, towards the gate that wasn't a gate any more.

The crossing took me the way it always took me, that lurch low in the chest that thirty years had never once worn smooth. And then the truck, and the dead boy in the back of it, and me at the wheel—we were all of us gone through the wall of colour, and the quiet Hobart street lay empty behind us, as though not one bit of it had ever happened at all.