My parents were out there in the stands. They’d be cheering for me. They’d want to see me after the game too.

Something inside me twisted tight.

I missed them. I’d spent the last month putting off their calls and texts and telling them I was good, I was fine, I just wanted a little time to get my feet under me before seeing them.

I was surprised they let me get away with it and hadn’t shown up on my doorstop yet.

But then, Mom’s schedule switched between swing, grave, and days, and Dad was teaching at the university along with his library job. They didn’t have a lot of free time as it was. Just getting the same day off together could be challenging.

So I’d dodged having to see them for over a month.

I just…couldn’t bear to see them walk away. When I got my head together and actually belonged somewhere, then I knew I could see them come and go without breaking down.

“Duncan?”

I stopped dead in my tracks, my hands balling into fists. I squeezed my eyes shut hard, trying to hold back everything that roared and rolled and howled in me like a thunderstorm raging.

Hazard.

“Jesus, would it kill you to answer your texts with more than a single word?” He was frustrated, his voice sort of high-handed with disgust. But I could hear what was below that: fear.

I’d pretty much frozen him out too.

But right here, right before the first game I might actually get to play, the first game I’d be playing not only against my ex-teammates but also against my brother, I was rocked by the realization that it was going to happen.

I’d be playing against him.

Directly. He was fourth line too.

That’s why Coach Nowak wanted me to play. That’s why he picked this time, this game out of all the others to put me out there with a team that hated me and didn’t want me, against the team that I’d turned my back on.

What a clusterfuck.

“Duncan? Dunc?”

He was close. So close I wouldn’t have to even take a step to reach him. Everything in me stayed stone still while I decided, did I run? Did I fight?

I inhaled hard, felt the ache in my lungs, the stretch of my ribs. This was my life, my body, my world. This was where I was grounded. Where I belonged. Everything was okay. Everything was fine.

I relaxed my hands, licked my lips, smiled.

“It’s about time you showed up,” I said with a close approximation of my actual voice.

He blinked and a crease pressed between his eyebrows. Then his eyes, blue and sharp as winter tracked from my feet up to my face.

“You’re looking lean,” he said. “Have you been eating? Are you okay?”

His gaze narrowed in on how I was favoring the left side of my ribs. Not because I’d been hit during the game. I’d been running in wolf form every night and had taken one too many jumps over an alley wall and had landed badly a few times. Plus, shifting always cost something. For Canidae shifters, our coordination was blown after a shift. Some of the bruises I sported were from me running into things as I struggled to replace the fuel and motor skills magic sucked out of me.

“Is someone hurting you? Is he hurting you?” His scowl was epic and he aimed it down the corridor. After Coach Nowak.

Yeah, no love lost there.

But that was not a fight I wanted Hazard to take on. That was the whole reason I’d volunteered. He was strong, and hell, maybe stronger than I gave him credit for.

Physically, though, I was still stronger than him. It wasn’t pride or bragging. It was a fact. Second-marked wolf shifters were physically stronger than first-marked wizards.

“Like I can’t take care of myself,” I scoffed.

He hooked his thumbs in his belt and gave me another disbelieving look. “Not a good answer. Who hit you?” He nodded to my ribs.

“No one.” At his look, I rolled my eyes. “Did it to myself, dude. No big deal. Just a bruise that’s fading.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Treat me like I’m lying.” Without realizing it, I’d squared off to him. My arms weren’t crossed over my chest. They were hanging loose at my sides, my fists curled.

I was ready to fight. Ready to wipe that fucking scowl off his face.

Because I couldn’t take it. Couldn’t take his notice, his words, his caring. It was too much. Much too much after so very little over the last month.

I didn’t realize I was making a sound. Something caught between a growl and a pained whine. Random was right there. Right in front of me. I could smell him, see him. I could touch him.

Home. Family. Team. Pack.

That rage, that pain, that loss knotted up inside me, rising so hard and fast I had to swallow to choke the feeling back before it came out in tears…or something worse, something darker. Something that rode the edge of madness.

“Jesus,” he whispered. He lifted his hand, maybe just to touch my arm.

I jerked, my whole body stumbling backward like he’d just tried to slap me.

“The hell?” he snarled. “Since when? Since when can’t I touch you? What the hell happened Duncan, and don’t give me some bullshit excuse of walking into a door.”

I tried to say something, but words were buried beneath the screaming in my head and the only thing that made sense was to follow my gut, follow my instinct. Stay alive.

Staying alive meant staying away from anything that hurt.

And right now, standing here, seeing him with that look on his face, that storm rising in his eyes, the shift of his body and stance, everything hurt.

The air I breathed, the skin I was in hurt. The ungodly noise in my head made it too hard to think.

So I laughed. It came out hard and weird, and manic, but acted as a release valve on the pressure doubling and doubling inside me, stretching me into a weird painful thing, stretching me out of shape.

“No one,” I snarled through clamped teeth. “Touches me unless I want them to. Not even you, Wiz.”

His head jerked back, his eyes wide. Like I’d hit him. And maybe I had? In the clatter of sensations spiking under my skin, behind my eyes, in my brain—

—I can’t breathe—

—I didn’t know exactly what had made him react like that. My tone? My words? That I called him Wiz—his hockey nickname instead of Ran, the name I’d called him for years?

Unable to parse any of it, I spun and strode down the hall, blinking until my vision cleared, until I could hear past the roaring of my pulse in my ears.

I had a hockey game to play. The first one Coach Nowak was going to let me have. It was mine and I wasn’t going to let anyone else take it away from me. I would be on my home ice against my team, against my best friend, my brother.

I would play in front of my parents. My real coach. People I loved—

—hated—

—no. People I loved. People who I had to leave behind. People I could not afford to let back into my life, my thoughts, my game because I had made them small and weak so I could feel big. I wasn’t that Duncan anymore. Didn’t want to be that Duncan.

I had to be something different out there than the Duncan Spark who had worn the Thunderheads jersey and been a brother, a son, a teammate.

I had to be something that could do more than survive. I had to be something that would win at all costs.

My teammates crowded me on the bench, all of us geared up. It was impossible not to bump into each other.

Every knock, tap, shove felt like a bullet shot into the middle of my brain.

The contact hurt. Five minutes into the game I wanted to scream at them to get the hell off me. Wanted to see them hurt. See their blood.

But they were my teammates. They were what I had. All I had left to be a part of.

I jerked at every contact, but otherwise tried to ignore them and ignore the pain. All my attention was on the ice, on the players of my team sweating and cursing and fighting through their shifts. On the puck, that small black devil’s disk that carried our lives, our future on its hard, flat edge. On the goalie and the net behind her.

Thorn was a demon in the net. What she didn’t have in height, and she was six foot even, she made up for in sheer, crazy grace.

She had a way of knowing where the puck was going to be. Since she was sensitive—she probably had some way of tracking the puck the rest of us didn’t have.

She’d told me she could sense the inert magic in an object one of the times we’d gone out for beers as a team. One of the times she’d made us all dance with her for luck.

A wash of memories and emotions flooded me.

I shut that shit down with a brutal growl. Those things, what I had once been, what this team had once been to me, didn’t matter.

All that mattered was getting that puck past the Thunderheads’ goalie.

I was already sweating. If I stopped to think too hard, everything got a little wavy at the edges.

I felt like I had a fever. I was ice cold.

And when it came time for me to jump the board and skate, I did it hard, I did it fast.

I was a left wing, which put me up against my old linemate, JJ, who was also a sensitive. It was weird as hell, but only registered for a moment or two. JJ quickly went from ex-teammate to opponent.

He was who I had to stop, he was who I’d be ducking to get the puck in the net.

“Fuck, look at your eyes.” JJ’s voice came from far away even though he was right next to me as we headed for the boards to save a pass my center had overshot. “You okay, Donuts? Seriously, are you sick?”

I snarled and went hard after the puck. He was on my heels, fast, ready to slam me into the boards if I didn’t move out of the way in time. I was quick, dug the puck off the boards and shot it up ice to my winger who was waiting for it.

And that’s when I saw their center move. He was crazy fast. And he was good. Darting in to steal the puck, a clean pickpocket, then flying down the ice, dangling the puck on the edge of his stick like it was magnetically attached. His shoulders were down, his head was up.

He was amazing and so was his team.

His D-men were in position to screen his shot, their big bodies cutting off our goalie’s sight line.

He was going to score.

Not if I had anything to say about it.

I shut JJ down, putting my body and stick in the way to close any possibility of the center passing to him.

But it wasn’t enough to stop the goal. So I pushed more speed into my stride, crossing the ice to get in the center’s way, aiming for him like he was the only damn thing in the world.

He wasn’t going to score a goal as long as I was breathing. That was my fucking net with my fucking wall of Iowa crouched in it. This was my fucking team; I hated them, I needed them. I wasn’t going to let them down.

I was going to keep them safe, keep them alive, save them.

I crowded up on the center, shut down the shooting lane, and followed him as he winged around the back of the net.

We slammed into the corner and I threw my weight into it to crush him.

His head hit the glass.

The tactile violence, the full-force contact, did something to the pain and rage and horror in me.

Something in my chest snapped. My entire body washed with heat and went loose, like I’d just drunk an entire bottle of whiskey in one long gulp.

My vision tunneled down to red. I wanted to strike, shout, hurl away this pain inside me. I wanted to throw away my lungs, dig my bones free, turn inside out until I’d crawled out of my muscles and skin and rid myself of the constant, constant pain.

I fell to my knees over the top of the center I’d plowed into the boards.

Grabbed jersey. Cocked fist. Hit with everything I had.

Over and over and over.

Even when the players showed up to try to drag me off. Even when the refs elbowed in.

I punched and punched and punched. Breaking a hole in my brain, breaking a hole in my chest, breaking a hole in the world.

And when the stun prod shot lightning through my brain, through my spine, snapping all my muscles into rictus, I laughed and kept drunkenly swinging.

I didn’t even know who I was hitting. Didn’t care.

“Duncan,” the voice was so calm, almost quiet which made no sense because the world was roaring and throbbing, an ocean of hatred and blood and violence, screaming, screaming.

Then she was in front of me. She’d taken off her helmet and her hair, which I knew she usually braided back was pulled free of its bond, hanging over one side of her face.

She was beautiful. I’d always thought so, even though I’d never told her that. Because, you know, you don’t go telling the goalie that you think he or she is pretty.

But Thorn was a looker. Strong, tall, funny, brash in a way that made me want to buy her beer and watch her chug.

I mean, she wasn’t someone I’d date because we were teammates, and also because she was pretty much out of my league. We weren’t ever meant to be. But still. I liked her.

“I’ve got you, okay?” she said, still so quiet and calm. “You’re going to be okay. We’re right here with you.”

And then she reached out, her hand coming toward me for days, years, centuries. I expected her hair to be blowing in some kind of cosmic wind, but instead, sweat ran down her face, catching on the edge of her straight nose, on the corner of her mouth, dripping off her chin.

She looked like she was in the middle of a hard-played game. Like she had been giving it her all. It was in the narrowed focus of her eyes, the stubborn press of her lips that put little lines beside her mouth and between her eyebrows.

Why was she kneeling in front of me, talking, if we were in the middle of a game?

My brain tried to sort through the input but everything was lost to that wall of water: the yelling, chanting. The taste of sweat in my mouth, the sting of it in my eyes, the smell of blood, fresh, hot, and sticky on my knuckles, splattered on my jersey.

Dreamlike, Thorn’s palm landed gently on the side of my face.

Not a slap. Not at all. It was a caress.

The moment her skin touched mine, a crack of something bone-deep snapped in my brain. What followed it was pain so hot, so clean, so fucking pure that I was, for a moment, lifted above it, knowing it was agony, but that I was drifting, alive and free despite it.

“Oh.” It was a soft, almost broken sound that came out of my mouth.

Thorn’s eyes rolled back and her eyelashes fluttered, her body jerking once hard.

Then the world came back and brought with it my horror. My nightmare.

The guy they were pulling away from my feet, the center who was being carefully placed upon a board and moved to a stretcher was my brother.

Random.

Bloody, bruised, broken.

By my hands.

“No,” Thorn said. “No, no, no. Don’t go there, Duncan. Stay with me. He’s okay. He’s going to be okay. I’ve got you. We’ve got you.”

But the thing about being a second-marked is that it’s really easy to smell a lie on a person.

I dropped from my knees, to flat on my belly, and laced my fingers over my head. Total submission. They could do what they wanted to me. I wouldn’t shift to get away.

I’d hurt him. The only brother I had. I’d torn him apart because I was so angry—

—lonely—

—so blind, all I’d wanted was violence—

—contact—

—and I’d lost my mind, lost my humanity.

I didn’t care when they put me in restraints: wrist, ankle, and a choker that would shock me unconscious if I so much as twitched.

Thorn was yelling, telling them they were wrong about me. The crowd pounded the glass, lathered in a frenzy for more blood.

My Tide teammates were nowhere to be seen. But other people—

—pack—

—Coach Clay, Graves, JJ, Watson, surrounded me like a wall, a fortress protecting me.

None of it mattered. I’d probably never play hockey again.

But just as I stumbled off the ice to shuffle down the corridor, I saw Coach Nowak look my way. He gave me a tip of his chin. His eyes brittle and flat, his pupils blown with something like lust.

I had done just what he wanted.

I had taken out the only wizard in the WHHL.