“The hell was that out there, Dunc?” Random asked as soon as I was out of the arena. He wore a hoodie and leaned against my Chevy Vega, his arms crossed. It was the middle of December, and cold enough most nights that we frosted.

Already the blacktop had gone all diamonds and stars, glittering, twinkling, silver and black.

The air smelled of exhaust from the roads surrounding the Veterans Memorial Coliseum and that weird tang of the electric trolley MAX that ran nearby.

This late at night, my favorite Portland smells were the rich, savory scents of garlic and beef and butter wafting out of the restaurants and bars filled with party people and night owls.

My mouth watered—I last ate hours ago, and that fuel was long gone.

I could really go for a greasy burger and fries dripping in cheese. But I needed something protein heavy and carb light if I didn’t want to skate like I had a ten ton slab of concrete in my gut tomorrow.

“Duncan. Are you listening to me?”

“Of course I am idiot. I can hear a fly fart.”

He smiled and rubbed his jaw where his manly stubble was stubbling.

I had been growing a beard since I was thirteen, pretty common among wolfies. So I’d had years and years to absolutely tease the ever loving shit out of Random about his baby smooth face.

“Why did you start the fight, dude?” he asked. “Did Coach scratch you for it?”

I checked the way he was standing.

Shoulders back and a little too tight, chin up, legs spread. He was bent just slightly to his left, favoring that hip shot he’d taken in the first that had painted a black bruise across the side of his ass and all the way down to the outside of his knee.

“How’s the hip?” I asked.

“Killing me. Now it’s your turn to answer.”

I waved him out of the way so I could open the door and we could get out of the cold. Cold didn’t bother me as much as him, but Dad would give me hell if Random came down with pneumonia. Also, we had a hard game coming up.

I did not want to go into that without Hazard at my side.

On the ice we were like honey and bees. Sweet and deadly.

Some people thought he was the sweet one and I was the deadly one. And yeah, they weren’t wrong. He was smooth as cream over glass on the ice, and handled the puck like it was magnetically attached to his stick. Sweet.

I got into a lot of fights. Enjoyed doing so. Deadly.

But my boy Haz could kick any ass out there and hand out seconds. Hell of a player and not afraid to get physical.

That made him deadly.

When I was on fire, when I was all blood and soul thrumming and alive, heartbeat set to the pulse and breath of the team around me? When I was a part of the thing that was so much bigger than me?

There was no one as fast, no one as dirty, no one as good as me on the ice.

And that made me sweet.

He punched me in the arm. “Talk.”

“Ow. That almost hurt, Ran. Did you up your weights from tuna cans to chili cans? ’Cause it’s paying off, buddy.”

Random locked his stance, refusing to move from between me and the door.

I could wrestle him for it. Wouldn’t be the first time we ended up fighting in the middle of the night in an empty parking lot.

We weren’t related, but we’d been brothers for so long, we both knew how to deliver a hit and how to take one. We were also maybe a little bit competitive.

Hockey players, right?

“Oh, that’s how it is, huh?” I asked. “You want to fight? Think you can take me?”

“I am not going to throw down with you in the parking lot,” he said. “But I will turn your Vega into a potato.” He raised one hand, fingers loose, ready to casually gather a handful of bombastic magic out of the air right then and there.

“Really?” I tipped my head and sniffed the air a little, trying to sense the lie or truth of him. “Can you do that? Magic my Vega into a spud? Because: cool dude. And you should just go all the way and make it a pile of French fries. No, wait. Chili fries. I’m starving.” As if to prove it, my stomach growled.

“Maybe I’ll just freeze the carburetor.”

“How you gonna get home?”

“I have a cell phone and a girlfriend. You have neither.”

“Ouch. Owie. Kick a guy when he’s down. Coach just chewed my hide. And my cell phone’s at home.”

He sighed, loudly. “Tell me the details. What are you going to have to do? Sit out a game?”

“No.” I decided to give him this one since, okay, it was starting to rain frozen pellets and I was getting tired of standing in the parking lot. “He wants me to play smart. Smarter.”

Hazard rocked his head back and forth. “Can’t squeeze blood out of a stone.”

“And he said I have to go to a class.”

“A what?” Random leaned forward as if he hadn’t heard me. Which he probably hadn’t because I’d sort of mumbled it.

“A class, you ass,” I enunciated.

“What kind of class?”

“Just. A class.”

“Hockey class? Skills? Conditioning?”

“Meditation. Okay? Is that all right with you? I’m going to go chill and peace out and find my inner goddess or something, all right Random? You have a problem with that? With my inner fucking bliss?”

My voice rose with each comment, but that was only because he’d started snickering, then chuckling, and finally laughing.

“What is so damn funny?”

“I love how angry you are about a meditation class. You’re gonna have to Google Map to find your inner bliss, Goddess.” He wiped his fingers over his mouth. “Okay, is that it?”

“Is that what?”

“Is that all he talked to you about?”

“Yes?”

Everything in him relaxed. His eyes, his breathing, his heartbeat, which, yeah, had been running a little fast. That was…weird. I hadn’t been paying attention, but he’d been tense. Defensive.

He must have expected Coach to say something else. Something bad.

“Talk, Ran.”

“I am.” He unwound his arms from where they were locked across his chest. “Let’s go home. I’m hungry.”

He walked to the back of the car where his duffle and mine were tossed on the ground. I unlocked the trunk and we both heaved in our gear.

“Why are you acting weird?” I asked.

“You’re weird.”

“You’re worried.”

He shrugged. “Not really.”

And that was a lie. I stared at him over the top of the car, but he ignored me and ducked down into the passenger seat.

“Random, Random, Random.” I lifted the door to ease the weight off the sagging hinges, then pulled it open, and cringed at the loud metal squeal.

He continued ignoring me, jamming the seatbelt lock into place until it clicked.

“Talk,” I said.

“Drive.”

“Talk.”

He stared out the window, mouth closed.

Fine. Like him not talking would make me stop pushing. I’d get it out of him. I shivered as ice pellets melted against the back of my neck. Time to get the car, and maybe even heater going. “C’mon, baby. C’mon, pretty girl.”

“You need a new car.”

“I like this one.”

“This one doesn’t drive.”

“This one drives faster than you can walk, which is what you’ll be doing if you keep up the Vega shade.”

“She was old when you got her years ago.”

“If by old you mean mature and experienced, then hell yeah, she’s old.” I patted the dash fondly.

“I just mean old, Duncan.” He rested an elbow on the windowsill and wiggled around in the seat. Probably trying to avoid that one spring that got pretty up there if you didn’t sit just right.

“She still has plenty of good years left in her,” I said.

“Yeah, and I think we’re gonna spend all of them in the parking lot.”

I made an offended noise and gave him the chew-toy glare. The key caught, finally, and the engine rattled to life.

“Ha!” I cried shoving a finger at him. “She lives! She lives! The old lady is a-live!”

“Want me to get out and help the old lady cross the street?”

I laughed. “Cruel. So cruel.” I jiggled her into gear and we shot off at a respectable three miles an hour.

Hazard pulled out his phone and got busy texting.

“How’s Genevieve?”

“Good. She’s got a gig in Seattle over the next couple days.”

“Tell her I love her,” I said.

“No. Shut up.”

“Tell her I really love her. I love you, Genny-vieve!” I yelled.

“This is text, idiot. She can’t hear you.”

“This is love, my dude. She will hear its wild call across the miles. We don’t need no phone!”

“Oh my god you are so annoying!”

Sure, that’s what he said, but he was grinning and texting and pushing away my hand when I tried to grab for his phone—a maneuver I would never try at the speed of a normal car. But my sweet Vega hadn’t made it over ten miles an hour yet because she was cold and had been waiting out in the parking lot all alone for hours.

I wouldn’t feel like zipping around after being abandoned for so long either.

He jammed his phone into his coat pocket, mostly out of my reach.

“Since we have a ways to go before we get home,” I started.

“It’s under a mile,” he said. “If you’d step on the gas…”

I pulled my foot off the gas and the Vega sputtered and shook, gasping like a vaudeville starlet shooting for an Oscar.

“What is wrong with you, Duncan?”

“Me? Oh, I’m fine. What are you hiding from me, Random?”

“I don’t even know what you mean.”

“What did you think Coach was going to talk to me about?”

“Nothing.”

He said it too quickly, avoided looking my way too studiously. He was a terrible liar.

“Talk, Wizard.”

He didn’t say anything. I added a little gas mostly because we had rolled to a startlingly slow crawl and I didn’t want to get rear-ended.

“All right,” I said, “if you’re not going to talk, I will. You know I can talk. Like it’s one of the best things I do. I mean, I do lot of things better than other people, but talking is right up there as the best thing that I can do for as long as I have to do it even if I have to talk about absolutely nothing other than how amazing and great I am and how I know you think I am the most amazing and greatest person you’ve ever met because you tell people all the time that I am amazing and great, like all the time.

“I shall now count down all the times that I’ve been amazing and great. One hundred. That time when you got lost in the campground and I found you crying in the outhouse and led you back to our tent which was like right there in front of you. You have a terrible sense of direction. Ninety-nine. That time when you barfed on Dad’s Warhammer figures and I told him about it so I could get your share of ice cream that night and you said ‘thanks a lot, Dummy,’ but I knew you were glad because you were sick and ice cream would have made you sicker. Ninety-eight…”

His hand whipped out and smacked down over my mouth. Which: ouch, because that cut wasn’t healed yet.

I must have made a sound.

He snatched his hand away. “God, sorry. I forgot you had tape and stuff. Someone with a broken lip should not be able to talk that much. For real.”

“Tell me.”

“No.”

“Tell me.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Tell me what you thought Coach was talking to me about. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me.”

He inhaled. I could sense it, the way his heartbeat thunked harder. The slight rise in his pulse. Then it was gone. Whatever he didn’t want to talk about was big.

“Is this about the game? About the one we have coming up with the Brimstones? Do you think he’s going to switch up our line? He’s going to switch up our line, isn’t he?”

I was really gaining steam now. “Fuck no. No way. I am not playing first line with Baller and Cha-cha. I am not. I’ll refuse. Coach can healthy scratch me before I’ll switch lines.

“Right? Right, Random? It’s me and you, buddy. Fourth line for life, right? Or at least through our rookie year. That’s the deal. That’s how it’s going to be. You’re not leaving me, are you, Hazard? You wouldn’t switch lines and play with Captain Swedish Cookie and the Crunchberries, would you? You wouldn’t leave me alone?”

“You really…” Hazard shifted in his seat to better glare at me, but winced when he remembered just how personal that broken spring could get. “You really think you’d be sent up to first line before me? You’re out of your mind. I’m a way better player than you.”

“And yet I’ve never been kicked out of the NHL.”

I held my breath to see how he’d take that last jab. We didn’t talk about it a lot, but his dream had always been to play in the pros. He had hidden magic from his family, from himself, from everyone and the world for that one chance to play in the NHL. And he’d been kicked out.

Marked don’t play hockey with the real players. Marked aren’t human enough.

This was a tender-as-hell subject. But I always thought heartbreak was like other injuries: it only got better when you got some rest, did something to numb it, and kept it protected until it was strong enough to bear weight. As soon as you could, you got back out there on it, as if it had never been broken.

Maybe standing on broken dreams made the new dreams you built even stronger.

“Jerk,” he said. No heat. It was his shortcut for “I love you” ‘cause he didn’t like to admit it very often. “At least I made it into the NHL before I got kicked out, loser.”

“Then, just…” I huffed out a breath. “God, tell me. I’m really starting to worry here. What’s wrong?”

He wiped his hand over his mouth again, thinking. When he nodded to himself, all the lines of him, all the tension of him, settled into his decision.

I had worn him down. Because I am amazing like that.

“It’s Dead Man’s week.”

Oh. Oh.

Dead Man’s week wasn’t something that happened in the NHL.

Back in the early days, it wasn’t uncommon for grudge matches in West Hell to end with a severely injured player. But after Johnny Morton, a star player for the Bismarck Boilers was killed on the ice for nothing more than running his mouth, the entire league lost its shit.

The only way to even the race for the Cup was to allow the Boilers to choose any player in the league they wanted to replace the superstar they’d lost.

It had become a tradition every year since. The losingest team could snipe a player—a Dead Man—from any other team, death or no death.

“Who’s at the bottom?” We were still a couple slots away from making the playoffs ourselves. But I knew we weren’t in the last spot.

Not anymore.

Not since Wiz here had finally brought his A game. He really was good. NHL good. They never should have gotten rid of him.

“It’s not the Brass is it?” That would be a huge upset. They were in the lead, and I had no idea how they could have fallen down so far. But only something like that would be a big enough shake-up to make Hazard act so weird.

“The Brass are in first place.” He picked at the crumbled remains of weather stripping around the window.

“So who is it?”

“The Tide.”

I stared at the streetlights inching by, and took some time to watch a snail lose its lead on us.

“Okay,” I said, slowly. “Tacoma doesn’t like us.”

“They hate us, Duncan. That coach. Nowak.” He scowled and wiped his mouth again, then tugged his hair. “He wants our blood. My—all of our blood. Wants us dead.”

He’d told me what happened with Nowak. The threatening letters, the attempt at blackmail.

Death threats.

The hell. I’d about lost my shit. And I’d done it loudly. We’d told Coach everything. Mom and Dad too. They had been the ones who talked me out of driving up to Tacoma and breaking Nowak’s knees.

Prick.

Coach had taken it up with the people in power in the league. We hadn’t heard if or what action they might take against Nowak yet.

After I’d finished yelling at Random for keeping another huge damn secret from me, he’d explained that he had no actual evidence to take to the police or the league. So, yeah. It was a he said/he said problem with no evidence to back it up.

“The Tide’s record isn’t that bad,” I said.

“Before tonight, they lost the last four in a row.”

How had I missed that? Maybe I had been a little distracted lately. “Holy shit. How did that happen? I hate to say it, and I mean I really hate to say it, but they are not that bad of a team.”

He dug fingers into his thighs, gripping at muscle like he was bracing for a crash. This car couldn’t manage a crash if it was full of explosives, going down hill on ice.

“I think they’ve been throwing games.” He said it quietly, stoically. Like he’d been thinking about this for a while. He didn’t look my way.

“That’s not… I can’t even…wait. Okay,” I said. “Why would they do that?”

“Nowak wants a shot at our team. Wants to take a…a p-player off our team so he can hamstring us.”

“A player?” I pushed.

Yeah, I’d noticed the stutter. He did that when facing the big stuff, the life changing stuff.

He’d done it when he was a kid, abandoned by his useless mother, standing in our living room asking if it was okay if he could have dinner if he washed all the dishes. Because he’d been out of food at his house since like a couple days before.

Random and I were a year apart and it had always been my job to protect him against bigger, older, badder things.

That’s what big brothers were for.

“A player,” he said.

“Which player? Who do you think Coach No-sack is after?”

Silence. We’d made it to my parents’ house and I parked against the curb.

“I don’t know.”

Liar liar, wizard on fire.

“No. Nope. Tell me. Who do you think he wants, Ran?” I used Dad’s reasonable tone that always worked on me.

“You cannot pull that off like your dad,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

He dropped his voice to a fake low octave. “Who do you think he wants, Ran?”

“Shut up. I don’t sound like that.”

“Neither does your dad, you doof.” He smiled, but it was a little watery and his heartbeat was all over the place.

“Fine. I’ll just start guessing. Is it me? Or maybe me? Do you think it’s me? Oh, god, I bet it’s me. Because I’m like the greatest and everyone loves a donut and that’s my nickname, Random. Coach Nowak is hungry for the donut, and okay, that sounded dirty, but still. Me. He’s gonna pick me out of the whole league for his Dead Man just to give Coach Clay a hard screw. And yeah, I heard how that sounded too, get your head out of the gutter. And then I’ll be gone and you’ll all cry and wail and stuff because you won’t have no donut either and that’s sad. The saddest. Wait. Maybe it’s JJ. Holy crap. It’s JJ. Is it JJ. Do you think it’s JJ. Because everyone wants the J, am I right?”

“Duncan…just…” He scowled out the window. “It’s me. Okay? I think he threw games to take me. His rivalry with Coach Clay…”

“Which everybody knows about. The Tide hate the Thunderheads. Always have. So what? Why would Nowak submarine his chance at the Cup just to steal you? I mean, no offense man. You’re good, but let’s face facts. We are both rookies. This is our first season in West Hell. We aren’t the hottest shit in the shed.”

“No,” he said, “but one of us is the only wizard to ever play hockey. One of us is a fad. Pop fucking Rocks.”

I waited a second. Instinct told me this was the core of what he had to say to me and it was important, and any minute it would make sense. Pop Rocks?

Nope. I still didn’t get it.

“Your wizardly greatness will sell candy?” I guessed.

“It doesn’t matter if I’m great or not. He wants me off the ice.”

I groaned and tugged on my ear, which was at the itching and aching part of healing. “But why? That doesn’t make any sense. They can go for the Cup. Why go for you instead? You’re no superstar. His team doesn’t need you.”

“It’s not so I’ll make his team better. It’s so he can keep me under his thumb. Those death threats? That hit he called on his own player, Steele? I can sink his reputation. Maybe his career.”

I growled. “You should.”

“No proof. Remember?”

Yeah, I remembered.

“Even if he took you.” I swallowed to keep the wolf down, to keep the protective growl out of my voice. Because the wolf did not like the idea of Random being taken from him. From family, pack. “Even if you weren’t on our team, we’d still win. We’ve proved that. When you were suspended, we were winning.”

“It’s not about winning.”

“It’s about having a wizard,” I stated even though it was still a question.

“It’s about having a new thing no one else can have. An idiot wizard who threw magic around to save an NHL player’s life, to save a WHHL player’s life too. I was big news,” he said, like announcing a terminal disease had been named after him. “Hell, I’m still big news.”

He wasn’t shouting, he wasn’t frantic. He was steady, accepting this truth as if there were nothing he could do about it.

Bullshit. There was always something to do. There was always a choice.

“We don’t have to worry about it,” I said. “Coach didn’t mention Dead Man.”

“He wouldn’t. He probably won’t even tell me until it happens.”

His distress was so thick, the sharp vinegar and pepper coated my nostrils. It bothered me, and made the wolf stretch outward, twisting to escape my control. The wolf needed to defend and protect Random just as much as I did.

“Look,” I said. “You need to stop stressing so hard, dude. You’re killing me here. Until it happens, until anything happens, all we need to do is play our game. It’s gonna be okay.”

I patted his shoulder, awkwardly, since there wasn’t room to bend two elbows in this car.

“Yeah,” he said, not even a little convinced. “Sure. It’s gonna be okay.”

He didn’t believe it, but that didn’t matter. I had his back. And I was determined to do anything necessary to make sure he remained a Thunderhead, right here alongside me.

That night, after flopping around on my bed until I couldn’t stand it anymore, I did a little research.

Started with the background on Clay and Nowak. Moved on to articles that were long and boring so I didn’t read them. Finally thumbed to videos, watched a couple games Clay and Nowak played against each other.

It was pretty normal West Hell hockey, which is to say brutal. The two men hated each other. It was obvious their coaches tried to keep them from being on the ice at the same time.

But every time they ended up playing the same shift, the crowd got worked up to a lather.

Because when those two were on the ice, fists flew.

“Holy Gordie Howe. Look at you, Coach Zen-is-in. You know how to bring the pain.” I watched a younger Coach Clay get his hate out on the younger Coach Nowak.

Nowak was giving it back as hard as he got it. Body checks that could break a human’s spine, elbows and head shots and cross-checks that would knock a non-marked off their skates and straight into the morgue.

Every time they hit the ice, players shifted so quickly to beast, the refs had to get off the ice, had to get the humans and sensitives off the ice, and had to electrocute the ice itself.

Electrocute. The. Ice.

Which: okay, that was balls-out metal. It was hardcore shifter management right on the edge of abuse.

Maybe that was the way it was done back then, but there hadn’t been an ice electrocution in years. And there wouldn’t be.

Even a guy with my attention span (short) could read through a contract and tell if it mentioned something about group electrocution fun times. Mine didn’t.

Watching the players in beast form stagger and fall on the ice, snarling and twitching and thrashing, was rough.

That video wasn’t hockey. It wasn’t even freak league hockey. I didn’t know what it was, but the crowd ate it up like bacon-wrapped candy.

The camera panned the ice, littered with ripped jerseys, gear, and skates. Looked like a tornado had blown the roof off a Laundromat. And right there in the middle of it all lay the shifted, bloody snow leopard—Coach Clay—and another shifted, bloody snow leopard.

Holy shit, Coach Nowak was a snow leopard.

All the jokes about cat and dog behavior didn’t really apply to shifters. Nor did birds of a feather always flock together. But enemies were enemies, no matter what kind of marked they were.

This was more than just two men hating each other, which, yes, happened in any sport. This was war.

I flipped through a few more vids of them together. None of their games were as violent as that one with the mass electrocution. But none of the other games put Nowak and Clay on the ice at the same time for long.

“Did you two ever get along?” I wondered out loud.

I did some deeper digging and found a single short, grainy old clip of the two of them on the ice playing on the same team back when they’d just started out in the league. They played on the same line, actually, two wingers for a center I was going to have to look up since I didn’t recognize her.

Even though it was only thirty seconds of ice time, one thing was so very clear.

Clay and Nowak were amazing together. If two players could be perfectly matched, if two players could work the ice like they were one brain controlling two bodies, it was these guys.

There were a lot of amazing lines in hockey history. Lots of amazing lines at every level all the way up to the NHL. Lots of amazing lines here in the WHHL too. So how come I’d never heard of these two?

“Why would you walk away from that?” I muttered as I replayed the video again. “That right there is something that doesn’t happen…ever. Why would you quit the team, Coach? What made you hate him so much?”

After watching the fights again I knew in my gut that it had been Clay who had walked away from the team, and not Nowak. Coach had quit. And I just didn’t see quitting in him, not in the man he was now. He was a hockey player. He wasn’t made to quit.

Unless there was another answer as to why Clay suddenly left the team he and Nowak played on so perfectly together. Another option.

And then it hit me.

“No way.”

I rubbed at my eyes and blinked hard to clear the blurriness. I was tired. And hungry. We had to hit the road early to get to Bend. And before that, I had to go to meditation class.

Still, I followed my hunch and looked up one more list.

And there he was, way down on the list. Coach Clay was a Dead Man.