“We suck!” Watson, our defenseman who was a Felidae, fourth-marked—tiger—groaned and collapsed onto the bench. He clunked his head on the locker wall behind him.

We were down four-one in the second. He was right. We sucked. “When did they get so fast?” I scrubbed a towel over my face and neck, sopping up sweat.

“They’re the same speed as they ever were, Donut.” Joelle Thorn, our goalie, sat next to our captain, a very intense Swede: Laakkonan who we just called “Lock.”

Thorn’s long brown hair was braided back but bits of it had pulled free and stuck down the side of her face. She was just as sweaty as the rest of us, having thrown every move she had to keep the score from plunging off an even steeper cliff. She was amazing in the net, but I knew she was angry they’d gotten four past her.

She still had on her heavy goalie pads, but had set her blocker and stick to one side so she could down a sports drink and eat a bar. She was third-marked, a sensitive, which meant she was calm as a brick wall in the net, and swift as death on skates.

Off the ice, she was loud and fun. On the ice, she was solid, fierce, and could carry our entire team across her capable shoulders.

But no matter how many times she blocked the puck, if we didn’t shoot the other team’s net, we were not going to win this thing.

“You’re just slow, Donut,” Jada Green said. She was a second-marked like me, but instead of wolf, she was a coyote shifter. She was also six two, had darker skin and curly short black hair, and was our second line center between Fisk and Yoffie.

Her hockey sense was wicked sharp. She was intense, focused, and our clutch scorer during a power play. “Maybe you should try skating instead of standing around waiting for a play to fall in your lap.”

I scowled at her and she serenely showed me her teeth.

Coach Clay and Assistant Coach Beauchamp stalked into the room.

Two ex-hockey players had never looked more different. Coach Clay was blond, had an easy going vibe and body language, tended to smile and motivate with carrots instead of sticks. He gave off that California surfer dude kind of thing, and was strong in the shoulders and long in the leg.

Assistant Coach Beauchamp was a brick shithouse ex-defenseman. To put it bluntly, he looked like the butt end of a bear—an ugly bear. At just over six foot, he was wide everywhere. Big paw hands, big barrel chest, big stomach that used to be all muscle and was now muscle covered in a thick layer of fat.

He was somewhere between old and expired. We had a betting pool on when he’d retire, and the pool didn’t cover more than two years.

He and Clay were our coaches and along with some rich cake shop guy who liked to invest in losing prospects, they were also owners of the team.

Clay and Beauchamp had dragged the Thunderheads out of the muck of a failing franchise and built a team that was something worth watching, something worth cheering for.

That was even before they picked up the ex-NHL rookie wizard. Bringing Hazard onto the team spiked ticket sales. There were a lot of eyes on our team right now, and advertisers were catching on and cashing in.

The Thunderheads hadn’t gotten into the playoffs under Clay and Beauchamp’s watch yet, but this could be our year.

This could be our year to take the Cup.

“All right, listen up,” Assistant Coach Beauchamp growled. “Pay attention to the damn neutral zone. They are riding roughshod over the top of you out there. Get off your damn heels and shut them down. Hard. Grow some balls. Block those damn passes. And stay on your damn man. Or woman. You know what I mean.”

He stared at me the longest. Heat prickled across my neck and face. I’d let two cringe-worthy passes slide right in front of me and hadn’t been able to get a stick on them. Plus, I’d botched my coverage and was pretty much responsible for at least one of those goals they’d scored.

The Brimstones were fast in the neutral zone and didn’t put on the brakes at the net, either. As the game had gone on, they’d somehow gotten even faster.

They had found third gear and we were stuck in first.

“Do you hear me?” Beauchamp asked.

“Yes, Coach,” I said along with the other players.

“Defense,” he pointed at the players. “I better see you scrambling for some offensive assists. Get in the damn dirty areas, get the puck and shoot top shelf on Yancy’s ass.”

“Yes, Coach,” the defensemen said. Well, all except Graves.

Hawthorne Graves was tied with Bucky as the oldest man on the team. He’d played on almost every team in West Hell. I hoped he wasn’t thinking about retiring because he had, somehow, been the one who had pulled us all together and made us finally “click” as a team.

My wolf and I got lots of mixed signals from him.

He gave off alpha vibes like no one else I’d ever met. He was quiet, steely-eyed, tall, strong, scarred. He was smart as hell on the ice, swore like an inmate, and talked with a Texas drawl and had the cowboy attitude to sell it.

So it made sense he felt like an alpha.

But sometimes…sometimes he was more and different and danger. Like the silence before a really big boom. I didn’t even know how to describe it. I hadn’t talked to anyone about how much he threw off a sense of other.

His record said he was second-marked, wolf shifter, and yeah, I guess if I tipped my head to one side and squinted an eye, that worked. He sometimes radiated alpha vibes and that was a wolf thing. He had pack intelligence and teamwork too, both things that wolves possessed.

And when he whistled—which he did during games, on the bus, when we took a few hours of downtime in whatever city we were visiting—it was like he cast a spell over us.

Okay, he didn’t actually cast a spell. I knew what wizards could do now that Hazard had gotten over himself and used magic. Wizards manipulated reality, turned it into other things with the sheer willpower of their minds.

That was magic.

What Graves did came out of magic, just like shifting came out of magic. But his hypnotic whistle had something else behind it. Something primal. Primordial.

Hearing it drew us together, settled us, created a connection we sometimes struggled to find on the ice.

The team needed that. Needed him with us because he made us better. He made us more. Which is why I didn’t want him to retire.

His head was down, eyes closed. He wasn’t breathing hard, but I knew he was in some kind of pain. It was odd to see him checked out, eyes closed, not responding to the coaches.

I took a tentative sniff and didn’t smell his blood, didn’t smell sickness. He’d been playing physical and aggressive out there, laying out the body checks. No more than normal. I wondered if someone had gotten a dirty hit on him, and therefore was curious as to whom I’d be taking down in my next fight.

Or maybe it wasn’t just pain he was dealing with. Maybe he was digging deep, doing some kind of his own meditation thing so he could do what the coaches asked.

Usually he sat loosely, staring at the coaches out of sandy-brown eyes, silent as the desert.

I glanced at Hazard. He caught my gaze, followed it to Graves and frowned.

Okay, so I wasn’t the only one who thought Graves was acting weird.

Assistant Coach Beauchamp was done with his pointing-out-the-obvious speech, so Coach Clay took over.

“This team is not defeated. We’ve been behind before. We know how deep the damn hole is, we sure as hell know how to dig out of it. Play your damn game. The same damn game you play every practice. Every warm up. Every match. Trust your damn linemates. Trust your damn instinct. Trust your damn gut.

“Be there for the pass, the check, the rebound. They showed us their game, now let’s shove ours down their throats.

“Shoot. Every damn time. Keep the damn pressure on. Fight for it until the last damn second. This is your damn game. Get out there and take what’s yours.” He raised one finger, punching it toward the ground.

We all knew what he was going to say, so we said it with him. “Dammit!”

Players yelled, hooted, whistled. Coach stepped back so our captain could have a word.

Lock stood and kept standing. The tall Swede’s straw-colored hair was plastered flat to his head. He was red-faced, fire-eyed and ready to get his pillage on this village.

“They might have put us in hell, but we’re not going to let them out of it.”

We howled, stomped our feet, someone yelled “Thunder! Thunder! Thunder-heads!” and the room filled with the chant.

Jada turned on the music—AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck,” of course.

We yelled with it, clapped with it as we got on with our rituals.

We taped sticks, changed socks, retied skates, juggled tennis balls. The Terminators— Tetreault and Troiter who were making a name in the league as a hell of a defensive line—launched into their boxing/hand-slap game, fists and palms connecting faster and faster until they screwed up and punched each other in the shoulder as hard as they could.

I fed on the energy of my team, drank it down, ate it up, breathed it in. Their hope that sharpened every heartbeat, fear that made it all sweet and uncertain, lust, raw and zinging under their skin, my skin.

Life. It was life. Distilled, thickened, concentrated.

This was what I needed. This was what made me whole. Teammates, family, pack.

I retaped my stick to keep my hands busy while I soaked up the energy. I’d already downed a heavy protein bar and guzzled enough liquid to keep me going. The wolf in me was antsy, excited, chomping for movement, ready for the fight.

Hazard was over there in his own zone, meticulously retying his skates, his gaze focused inward. He needed a clear head and a lot of willpower to keep a lid on all the magic boiling around inside him. Now that he’d started using magic, he said it was harder—all the time—not to use it.

I don’t know why he tried so hard not to use it. If I had magic at my fingertips, you can bet your butt I’d be ala-kazaming all over the place. Want a sandwich? Ala-kazam! Got bills to pay? Ala-kazam! Three points behind at the end of the third? Ala-ka-frickin’-zam, baby!

But he was all, “no, Duncan. There are rules about magic in hockey. Rules that keep players safe, you idiot.” My brother was a total killjoy do-gooder.

I snorted. Chump.

He didn’t even look up, but he paused in messing with his skates long enough to throw me the bird. I cackled. He’d known what I was thinking. Little brothers/linemates were like that.

“Not even a little spell?” I shouted loud enough for him to hear over the music. “Wham, bam, Ala-kazam!”

“That’s what she said!” Watson chortled.

JJ threw a towel in his face.

Hazard ignored them both. He gulped down a sports drink, eyes on the ceiling. Probably going through the failed plays and botched shots. Analyzing how he was going to bring it, to turn the tide.

If anyone got a good shot, a breakaway run, a hot rebound, it would totally change the momentum of the game.

But if it was Hazard who buried the biscuit? The crowd would lose their minds.

He was the only one of us who had made it into the NHL. The coaches and the team expected big things from him. The fans expected fucking miracles.

And with Hazard, miracles weren’t out of the question.

I thought he’d stand up and become the center of this team, the heart. But he hadn’t done that yet. He was still learning to control magic. Learning the ways hockey and magic fit together.

First wizard to play the game came with a lot of responsibility. Or so he insisted.

Someday he’d be the captain of a team—this team, with any luck—and we’d be damn lucky to have him.

Without Hazard stepping up into that gut-solid center of us, the vacancy seemed to be filled by Graves.

It should be the team captain, Lock who held us together, but he preferred players to work out their own problems for a bit before he stepped in with advice or assistance.

I mean, not on the ice. On the ice Lock was one-hundred percent there for us. Ready for every play, digging it out against the boards, putting his sweat where his mouth was. But as the one person on the team I wanted to look up to?

Nope. That was the scarred old defenseman with a Southern drawl who was sitting across the room, still and silent.

Quiet before the boom.

I was about to poke him with my stick just to see what he’d do.

Right before I lifted my stick, Graves finally opened his eyes. He blinked a few times and holy crap.

Just before his eyes went back to their pale brown, they flashed red. Devil red. Monster red. I-don’t-even-know-what-the-fuck red.

For a second, long enough I knew it was real and I was not seeing things, his eyes blinked sideways.

Like, dude. For a second, he had a second set of eyelids that worked the wrong way.

What.

The.

Hell.

I jerked my head toward Hazard, who wasn’t paying any damn attention, damn it. Then I looked back at Graves.

Who was staring at me. Cold, unconcerned. He studied my face, which was probably doing things I didn’t want it to do. Shock things. Surprise things.

A small, wicked smile curved his lips and he lifted his eyebrows once quickly. He blinked again, a totally normal blink with totally normal man-eyes and totally normal man eyelids.

Then he bent and retied his laces like nothing had happened.

Like he totally hadn’t had monster eyes just a second ago.

Monster. Eyes.

“Airing out your tonsils, Donut?” Johan Jorgesen, or “JJ,” asked. He was third-marked and the right winger to my left winger, with Hazard as our center.

He and I got along like frogs and mud. I liked him off the ice, a-fucking-dored him on the ice, because he was a sharpshooter with the long pass.

I’d played with a lot of people since I was a kid, but there was something great about JJ that made him the perfect linemate. He knew where I was going to be. Even better, he knew where my stick was going to be. The boy made me look good, even when I was on my heels.

He was a sensitive and could tell how magic was moving, who it was pushing and who was being pulled by it.

And he could follow that puck like a duckling imprinted on a mama duck’s butt.

I snapped my mouth shut. He started laughing.

“You look like you just found out someone didn’t really throw the ball, but hid it behind their back.”

Bait and switch. Yeah. That’s exactly how I felt.

“You have a stupid face,” I said. It made no sense, but got him laughing again. JJ had this sort of ridiculous laugh. It was scratchy and high and had honest-to-God “yuck-yuck-yucks” in the middle of it.

Contagious. He was the kind of guy you wanted at the comedy show. The one who belly laughed so hard you couldn’t help but laugh too.

I chuckled. He threw his old socks in my face, I beaned him with an ACE Bandage roll.

Other players got into the laughing and the throwing. Jada and Thorn high-fived each other and pressed foreheads together while they repeated whatever they said to each other before games. Our backup goalie, Tomas “Happy” Endler, who always seemed to have his eyes on Thorn smiled as Jada and Thorn slapped each other’s shoulders.

Then Thorn stood and so did Endler. They had their own ritual: a hand slap, a shoulder slap, a stick tap.

Graves started whistling that sly, dark Decemberists song about getting revenge from inside a whale’s belly, and I held my breath for a moment, just savoring being here. With my family. With my pack. With my good, good life.

Right where I belonged.