Chapter Text
Regina, Canada Dec 2008
It’s not a secret that if you want your hockey future told from a line on your palm and a drop of your blood in a cup of tea, you need to travel to Ottawa to find Yuna Hollander. Sure, there are plenty of other witches, and even a few sports specialists – there’s a man in Florida who can predict how to best utilize lacrosse players on college teams, for example – but when it comes to hockey, no one holds a candle to Yuna Hollander.
Which is a weird English thing to say, Ilya thinks, saying it again in his head: no one holds a candle. He wonders if it’s a witch thing, one of those phrases that becomes part of everyone’s language because witches did a thing that everyone now talks about but few people remember where it actually comes from. Like how in Russian they say run before the bear melts to mean don’t piss off your sweetheart, when it’s about a real witch who melted an actual fucking bear because she thought her husband was cheating on her. (Which he was, maybe, but probably not with the bear in question.)
Witches were fucking terrifying. Ilya was secretly a little happy no one in his family had that kind of power.
By chance or prior arrangement, Ilya didn’t know which, Yuna Hollander would be at this year’s Prospect Cup in Regina, Canada, where Team Russia would also be. This meant the team didn’t need to make the pilgrimage to Ottawa as they had in previous years. It also meant there was no way Ilya was going to get out of having his future predicted by a terrifying hockey witch. His teammates had been buzzing about it for months. Older players recounted stories of meeting the woman in a dark room, hearing the whispers of ghosts or demons as she handing over their fate like she was sliding a plastic bag of take out food across a restaurant counter. You ordered this. You asked for it. Better be what you wanted because there are no returns. His coaches had made an appointment to meet with her the day before the tournament was due to start; for some reason she was working her way through the other teams in the days days before and had insisted the Russian boys came to her last.
Whatever. It made it easier on Ilya, not having to fly into stupid fucking Canada any earlier than they’d already planned. And waiting to get his fortune read suited him just fine. He already knew who he was, who he was meant to be in the world of hockey. Yuna Hollander wasn’t going to change that.
His teammates didn’t share his confidence.
“I hear if she says you will fail on the ice, you will not be drafted in the MHL,” Nik had whispered on the plane, one hand caught nervously in the back of his own straight brown hair.
“She can tell if you will have long career or break your bones in your first professional game,” Artem said, bumping his shoulder into Ilya’s as they waited in line to go through Customs. They were the same height, close enough to 6 feet tall that no one questioned it, and had similar coloring, but Artem’s hair was buzzed short while Ilya had let his curls grow over the previous year.
“Yuna Hollander took one look at a Swedish boy and told him he should never put on skates again,” Viktor told the boys getting their luggage from the carousel. “Happened last year. Kid didn’t even skate in the tournament. His coach sent him home same day.”
Ilya shivered at that, but it was cold in the airport. No other reason.
“I heard three years ago she turned a Canadian boy into a frog,” Mishka said, when they were seated on the bus taking them to their hotel. The other boys at least had the sense to laugh at that one. “What?” Mishka said, indignant. “Is true story!” Mishka was a goalie, six inches shorter than Ilya and chubby-cheeked. Goalies had weird stories, weird habits. Probably the frog story wasn’t real. Though if it was, if some secret had been passed along from team to team, the goalies would know...
Ilya rested his forehead on the window and tried to focus on the ice instead.
When he was three his mother took him to a local ved'ma to find out his element. It had been a tradition in Russia for as long as there were witches, probably, so his people had been doing this since the beginning of time. Rich people took their toddlers to fancy houses in Moscow, where a child’s spirit was teased out in pristine rooms, well lit and appropriately expensive. Irini Rozanov took her son to an old woman who lived in the tiny village where her parents had grown up. Ilya barely remembered the long drive out there or whether he’d seen his grandparents that day, but he remembered the strange woman in her rustic little shack. She looked like a teenager, with pale skin and long black hair. His mother had bowed to her and called her grandmother. The ved'ma did not bow in return.
“Come,” she had said, so Ilya came, walking across the room to her without a thought, as if his feet made the decision without him. She put her long fingers on either side of his face, tilting it up so she could look into his eyes. Her lips were painted white. Her eyes were entirely black. She looked, Ilya remembered later, like a porcelain doll, the kind his father’s mother kept on a shelf in her house in Sochi. No matter how often he imagined it later, he could never remember if he saw the witch breathe.
“Ice,” she said the moment she touched him, the word flowing into Ilya’s body and shifting his insides, as if speaking that one word out loud meant he had changed from someone who could be anything to someone who knew himself in a way his three-year-old mind couldn’t have expected. He had been formless in the way children were before they knew anyone expected them to be something instead, then he was ice, and the ice was home.
Behind him, he heard his mother gasp. “I know of no one who is ice,” she whispered. “Water, yes, I am water. His father and brother are stone. But ice? What will this mean for my son?”
The witch’s fingers were still on Ilya’s face. Her eyes were still black. He still wasn’t sure if her lungs were moving.
“He knows the ice,” the witch said. “The ice knows him. He will find his future there, and it will keep him safe.”
“Will he…” Ilya couldn’t turn to look, not with his head in the witch’s hands, but he heard his mother speak, then pause, then speak again. “Will he be able to love, in a life full of ice?” Her voice sounded very small, and farther away.
The witch brushed a strand of Ilya’s hair from his forehead. “I have never seen this before, but yes,” she said as one side of her mouth curved up in a smile. “His love is in the ice too. He will love only once, but he will love so hard the ice will crack. And… oh.” She frowned then. “Granddaughter, his love will not be easy. Do you wish to know more?”
The witch didn’t ask Ilya. At three, no one asked Ilya what he wanted. He was used to it. But he opened his mouth anyway, suddenly sure that he didn’t want to hear any more.
His mother answered first. “Yes, please,” she said, the words coming breathless and wrong.
“His love is not in Russia. He will go, he will love, and he will never be able to return.”
The proclamation felt heavy in Ilya’s chest. The only love he understood was his mother. How could he ever leave her?
“Granddaughter, come here,” the witch said softly. She let go of Ilya then, pale fingers slipping from his face. Ily watched as his mother moved to stand next to them, her golden curls catching the light from a dozen candles, as if each strand of her hair was glowing softly. The witch whispered into his mother’s ear.
Irina gasped. She looked at Ilya, eyes wide and wet. Her hand flew up to cover her mouth. He felt, suddenly, a crushing feeling in his chest, the first moment he would ever remember feeling as if he’d disappointed her, deeply, just by being who he was. He knew that feeling from his father, of course, and his brother, already, but his mama – then she was bent at the waist, covering his face in kisses, whispering her love for him over and over. He let the fear of failing her be kissed off his skin until he was giggling in her arms.
Now, sitting alone on the team bus with his face pressed against the glass, he would trade almost anything to feel like that again.
Nik slipped into the empty seat beside him. “Couple of us are sneaking out tonight, once we’re checked into the hotel. You coming?”
In Russia, the answer was always and immediately yes. In Russia, Ilya had kissed, sucked, fucked any girl he wanted, and (secretly, desperately, just a few times in dark rooms where no one thought to look for him) a boy too. None of it mattered, because he couldn’t love any of them. The witch had seen him for what he was, and the ice whispered it to him every time he laced up his skates: Ilya Rozanov couldn’t love, not here. Unless he escaped the borders of his country and the long reach of his father’s disappointment, he’d never find love at all. So in Russia it was safe to do whatever he wanted, knowing he wouldn’t lose his heart over it. Knowing he’d never had to choose between love and the ice his mother had placed him on three days after returning from the ved'ma.
But they were in Canada now. And as much as Ilya wanted to pretend that changed nothing, the ice in his blood had been whispering something new from the moment he stepped off the plane.
“Not tonight, thank you,” Ilya said. “Too long on the plane, I think. I need to get to the rink.”
Nik, knowing that Ilya needed the ice the same way Nik needed to return to the ocean as often as he could, the same way Artem was allowed to carry three lighters (useful, whenever Ilya forgot his but needed a smoke), the same way Mishka tied a feather into his hair before every game. They were all what they were made of, and none of them could change it.
The bus rumbled into the hotel parking lot just after 6 PM, local time. Ilya’s brain thought it was 3 AM because in Moscow that’s what time it was. He should be sleeping now, his alarm would be going off in 150 minutes, no matter that he’d changed it on his phone, his brain knew his schedule from years of morning skates, and nothing as unimportant as being in Canada was going to change that now. He’d slept on the plane, as much as he could with a layover in Paris, so his plan was to stay up as long as he could between now and tomorrow afternoon, when Yuna Hollander would look at two dozen teenage boys and tell them if they were allowed to want the sport they’d loved their whole lives.
Ilya lifted his gear bag onto his shoulder as they filed off the bus. His suitcase he collected from the assistant coach helping to unload the storage area between the bus’s wheels. He waited while the other boys lined up to be checked off from a clip board: everyone was here, accounted for, assigned a room, and given a list of useful English phrases (with their Russian counterparts and definitions) because some of the boys could barely say hello even though they could also say hockey, ice, puck, and fuck off faggot in four languages at least.
“Coach,” Ilya said when he reached the front of the line, “I need to get on the ice.”
His coach looked up at that, into the face of an 18 year old Russian center who needed the ice like fire needed oxygen. “Yeah, we know Rozanov,” the man said. “Let me get these guys sorted, then we’ll get you a ride over to the rink.”
Ilya sighed then, his muscles relaxing slightly. He’d be home soon. Not his bedroom in his father’s flat in Moscow. His real home, the flat expanse of cold under his blades, where everything made sense.
It itched at him, while he waited. It must be Canada, he thought to himself. It’s the travel and being away from Russia, he kept telling himself, as his thoughts kept wandering back to that night with the witch, to his mother’s kisses, to the boy in the dark room putting his lips on Ilya’s skin. All things he tried very hard not to think about, most of the time. But there was something about Canada that made his brain uncomfortable inside of his skull, as if it longed for something Ilya couldn’t explain. There was an energy building up just under his skin, and his heart fluttered in his chest so hard he had briefly woken from his nap on the plane thinking a bird had somehow forced its way behind his ribs.
There was a dream too, he suddenly remembered. A boy with black hair and stars on his skin. Something about the rink. And a woman, older, with long dark hair and emeralds on her fingers. The woman was between Ilya and the other boy.
He blinked, hard, trying to shake the image from behind his eyes, trying to remember that he was not in the dream any longer. The car shook to a stop.
“We’re here,” his coach’s voice said.
Ilya unfolded himself from the back seat, pulling his gear bag with him. His suitcase had gone with Nik to the room they’d be sharing. The team knew from experience to only put Ilya with water boys; the one time they’d insisted he share with Artem, two years ago now, he’d woken in a panic to find Artem had snapped under a pressure he couldn’t name and started a fire in the little trashcan from their room.
Ilya’s ice kept everyone away, after a while.
He looked up at the sign on the outside of the building: Al Ritchie Ice Arena. He briefly wondered if his English was worse than he thought, because only two of those words made sense. It didn’t matter, after a few seconds, because the ice was calling him. His feet moved before his brain understood what was happening, same as the day in the witch’s hut. The ice whispered, Ilya moved. Some things didn’t need to be understood.
When he got into the building, the call was louder. The whispers, usually a comforting touch inside the back of his head, were moving into his ears in a way they never did in Russia. Ilya moved faster, pushing past a few people he barely noticed. His coach said something, behind him, to Ilya or to the other people, he didn’t know and he didn’t care. The ice was trying to tell him… something he couldn’t yet hear. Ilya wasn’t capable of stopping himself from finding out what it was.
Inside the arena, the whispers found a shape, edges growing sharper, until it was almost a sound. Until it was almost words. Ilya felt the goosebumps traveling up his skin. He dropped his bag on the bench closest to the ice, about to step out in his sneakers, when he heard his coach bark his name. It stopped the whispers like a shoe coming down on a cockroach: suddenly and completely squashed.
“Have some control, Rozanov,” the man yelled. “Put on your skates, you selfish boy!”
Ilya clenched his fists but said nothing. He made himself sit on the bench, fumble with the zipper on his bag, and pull out his skates. The whispers slipped back into his skull, much quieter this time, and Ilya ached with the loss of what might have been said.
By the time he laced them up and stepped out onto the ice in Regina, Ilya knew two things:
Something very strange was happening to him in Canada, and
Something was inside of the rink, watching
He looked up quickly, trying to find the source of the eyes he felt cataloging him from a distance. He drifted forward a few feet, letting the ice come up through the blades under his feet, locking him in place. The whispers moved as the ice climbed Ilya’s legs, from their usual spot at the back of his skull, around the sides of his head, into his ears as his head swiveled slowly from one side to the other, searching.
There he is, the ice said, out loud, with actual fucking words.
Ilya fell on his ass.
Across the rink, at the top of the stands, was a form he couldn’t quite make out. It was, Ilya thought, probably human shaped. It could be about the same size and shape as himself, maybe. He could see what looked like grey pants and another grey shirt under a black jacket. It might have been another man sitting across the ice from him, watching gravity give way as Ilya Rozanov connected with the ice in a manner that might have been embarrassing if Ilya was capable of being embarrassed. Or if he was, at that moment, capable of breathing. But whatever watched him did not have a face, and Ilya was pretty sure that meant it couldn’t be human at all.
The ice moved up Ilya’s body into his chest and pulled.
He watched it happen.
Ilya was a lot of things, right? He was a strong, confident hockey player, maybe the best in his generation. Maybe the best, right now, in the entire world. He was an excellent teammate, a beast on the ice, fun to fuck, and clever with a chirp in both English and Russian. He could drink more than any other boy on his team. He could dance until 2 AM then be back on the ice at 6 the next morning, leading drills with a gleam in his eye. He had been, once, when there was someone who deserved it, a good son even. He was a lot of things.
The one thing he definitely was not, was a fucking witch.
But as he sat on his ass and watched it, literally watched, ice slid out of his chest to slither along the top of the rink like a snake with one destination: whatever creature watched him from the other side of the room.
“Rozanov!” his coach yelled, snapping his focus.
Ilya blinked again. The snake was gone. The ice wasn’t moving. The creature at the other side of the arena was gone.
“Get the fuck up and skate some laps already,” his coach was saying. “We’re not missing dinner for you to fuck around.”
“Yes, coach!” Ilya yelled back, getting to his feet.
He was really not looking forward to meeting Yuna Hollander tomorrow.
The dream came back to him just before morning, Canada time. It was too dark inside the dream, as if Ilya was in a tunnel with only one point of light in the distance. He moved forward, or the darkness moved around him to make it appear he was walking forward, the same way his father’s old house moved to bring Ilya closer to his mother’s bedroom in the dreams where he was, again and again, a twelve year old boy finding out that he was instantly, truly alone. But in this dream, he was moving toward something bright and alive. He was sure of it, in the way of dreams, even though he couldn’t see what it was yet. Ilya knew that at the end of the other dream he would always find his mother’s arm, hanging off the edge of her bed, no longer warm. In the same exact way, he knew that this dream would end with heat and a sense of belonging. He needed it. He was certain of that now, whatever it was, he needed it. Ilya moved forward.
“NO,” the woman said as she appeared in front of him.
Ilya sat up in his bed. “Fuck!” he said out loud, the word slipping from his lips as his eyes slammed open. The air felt clammy on his skin; he realized he was sweating through the plain black tee he’d worn to bed. He looked over but Nik was still sound asleep. The three glasses he’d filled with tap water were still sitting on the night table next to his bed.
Ilya looked the other way. The glass of water Nik had left on Ilya’s table was frozen solid.
“I’m not a witch,” he whispered to himself. The ice in his head whispered back, shapeless but reassuring. Witches weren’t allowed to play professional ice hockey. Hockey was the only way Ilya was getting out of Russia. Somewhere outside of Russia was the one and only love of Ilya’s life. The witch in his grandparent’s village had told him. Even if Ilya never wanted to fall in love, even if Ilya’s one true love would always be hockey, he still had a destiny that was also the only thing saving him from a future where everything Ilya was is ground out under the heel of his father’s boot. So Ilya couldn’t be a witch. Even the universe didn’t hate Ilya that much.
“I’m not a witch,” he whispered again, as if repeating it made it true, and laid back down.
He watched the soulmates find each other over the hotel breakfast buffet. One minute he was sitting with Nik and Artem, laughing about how one of their coaches had confiscated the trash can from Artem’s hotel room, when the flowers appeared around Mishka’s feet. The room went silent as people noticed, radiating out from Mishka’s table. The other boys he’d been sitting with pushed their chairs away in a rush, getting up and away, away from Mishka and the flowers growing up around his legs. Ivy crawled. Red roses opened their petals. A pale blue flower Ilya didn’t recognize spread across the carpet.
“Oh shit,” Nik said, his words too loud in the silent room.
Ilya noticed last. His mouth hung open, but the fork with the piece of pancake he’d been about to eat wouldn’t move any closer to his face. He set the fork back down as Mishka stood up.
In the doorway, a family stood: the father, middle aged but handsome with silvering hair and a Team Sweden jacket on; the mother, one hand on her mouth, the other arm wrapped around her teenage children, one boy with short cropped hair and one girl with long straight hair down to her waist. They were, all of them, blond and objectively beautiful in the way Northern people often were. The father had one arm out, blocking the way between his children and the unstoppable fate that was about to meet them in the middle of a cheap hotel in Canada.
Please don’t let it be the son, Ilya thought. He was halfway sure the unintelligible whisper in the back of his head called him a traitor. He closed his mouth to keep from answering out loud.
Mishka took a step forward. He held out one hand. Yellow flowers budded and bloomed along his fingers.
The Swedish girl said something to her mother, who nodded. Next to her, her brother beamed. She touched her father’s arm, gently. He looked down at her with understanding on his face and tears slipping down his cheeks. The arm stopped being between her and the room.
Ilya thanked gods he didn’t believe in that it was the girl walking toward his friend.
The flowers grew up her body as she moved to meet Mishka in the center of the room. For one brief moment they were a garden, intertwined, and the scent in Ilya’s nose like a physical object, sweet and pure. Then they were in each other’s arms, the moment ended.
The flowers had disappeared by the time the noise came back into the room. People were clapping and cheering, with boys rising from their seats to pat Mishka on the back. The Russian coaches moved to join them, shaking hands with the girl’s parents. Ilya wondered if either of the two spoke a language in common. Not that it would matter, not when soulmates found each other in public like this, the way it happened sometimes. Fate spoke, and parents listened. They’d find a way to make it work.
“Lucky bastard,” Artem mumbled. Ilya nodded, agreeing completely. With two choices in front of him, Miska had a 50% chance of being publicly celebrated for his fate, and a 50% chance of being privately shamed out of ever returning to Russia. He was very lucky indeed.
All of this was on Ilya’s mind as he waited in the hallway next to the rink for his turn with Yuna Hollander. He couldn’t stop thinking about it, every piece of it. The dreams, the witch in Russia, his mother, the whispering ice, the way Mishka found his soulmate standing near a mediocre breakfast table in a country neither of them were from. Ilya had smiled when Mishka had come off the ice, grinning widely, to hug his new fiance his arms and tell her that Mrs. Hollander proclaimed his future was to join Team Sweden. He knew the coaches from both teams would make the change immediately, swapping out a future in Russia for one in his fiance’s hometown as easy as swapping out a busted light bulb for a new one. It needed to happen, obviously, so it would. Yuna Hollander and fate said so.
Ilya smiled and tried to convince himself he wasn’t jealous at all.
Whatever the ice wanted to say about that wasn’t clear enough to be understood.
He’d wanted to go last, because he didn’t want to be there at all, so he’d carefully stepped back a few feet at a time until he was at the end of the line. It meant he’d seen every one of his teammates walk out onto the rink with a coach at his side, and though he wasn’t in a position to see what happened to most of them, he saw them all come back. No one else had a morning quite as exciting as Mishka, but no one else came back devastated either, so by the time there was only one boy in front of him, Ilya started to tell himself this was going to be okay. Surely Mrs. Hollander, greatest of the hockey witches, would take one look at Ilya and know he was going first in the MHL draft next year. She’d see him scoring goals, winning cups, and taking home the gold in the Olympics.
She wouldn’t need to be terrifying. She’d simply look at him and know that Ilya needed the ice the way it needed him. No one would take that away from him today.
Grisha went next. Ilya watched him step out onto the ice, find his footing on his skates, then glide forward. There were people waiting: a man with silver hair, white skin and an easy smile; another of their coaches, standing off to the side; a thin woman with long dark hair in the middle.
Ilya couldn’t see her face but the ice in his brain was getting louder.
Grisha nodded vigorously. Good, Ilya thought. A good sign. Everything will be fine.
The other boy came off the ice with a smile. “I am taking Mishka’s place,” he said. “Number one goalie for our team!”
Ilya bumped shoulders with him as he passed. Grisha had been a winger, but he would make a good goalie, Ilya was sure. He’d always been a little strange, in the way goalies always were. He saw more than he should, maybe, and had better hands than feet on the ice. Now that he knew, he wondered a little at how it wasn’t obvious sooner. But Yuna Hollander saw the truth.
Something was happening to Ilya’s own feet now. He was moving toward the rink without thinking, pulled by the ice. Whispering voices curled up in his ears like a well-loved hound settling into its place by the fire.
He heard the witch before he saw her face. “David,” she’d called out suddenly. Her voice sounded fragile. The silver-haired man at her side took a step toward her, steadying her arm. She was looking at him, not Ilya, when his skate touched the ice.
She snapped her head around, one arm already outstretched toward Ilya, speaking like it was a command.
“No.”
Ilya stopped, one foot on the ice and the other still in the air. He felt, rather than saw, the ice reach up from the rink’s surface to gently take a hold of his other foot, bringing it down safely. He skated forward.
“NO!” she shouted, her voice like thunder, rumbling around the room. Ilya slid backwards across the ice.
“Yuna,” the man beside her said.
“David, get him out of here,” she answered, her eyes still on Ilya.
Ilya looked at her then, across the rink. Saw her long hair, the warm color of her skin, the dark color of her eyes. Saw the glint of green in the rings on her fingers.
Saw, behind her, the faceless creature who’d been watching him last night.
Yes, the ice said, loud enough to be heard, the word coming out of Ilya’s mouth.
Ilya took a step forward.
“Not you,” Yuna said. “It can’t be you.” The words were softer then, as if she was fighting against something and losing. “Not yet.”
Ilya wanted to stop. He wanted to get off the ice, get out of the rink, get far far away from this woman and her faceless creature. He wanted to play hockey.
“Yuna, my love, you have to let it happen,” David was saying.
Ilya wanted to be good at hockey, to be seen as good for something, despite what his father always said. He wanted to go home and skate and be loved.
“What is happening?” one of the coaches asked.
Ilya wanted to be loved.
He stepped forward again. He felt it, the force between them, something pushing him back, away from the witch and the blurry thing that had disappeared again. Ilya took a deep breath, leaned forward as if he was leaning into a strong wind, and took another step forward.
The ice cracked under his feet.
“No,” Yuna Hollander said one more time, but this time it wasn’t terrifying. Ilya thought, maybe, she just sounded very sad.
“Is he cursed?” his coach asked, the question stopping Ilya cold.
“What?” he managed to say. “I am cursed?” His knees trembled, threatening to give way completely.
“If that is true, he cannot play hockey,” Ilya’s coach was saying, but David was shaking his head.
“Yuna, you need to tell them,” the man said. “You can’t ruin his career over this.”
“You know what he is,” she hissed back. “I told you, you know.”
David pulled her into a hug. “I know honey. It’s going to be okay.” He kissed the side of her face.
“Mrs. Hollander, if we need to get him off the team…” the coach started to say, but she shook her head.
“He isn’t cursed,” she said quietly, leaning against David. “He’s the second greatest hockey player in the world.”
Ilya’s mouth dropped open. “I am first best,” he said, before he could think about why this was the part he focused on.
Yuna laughed at that, a small breathy sound. “Yes, dear,” she said. “We’ll argue about that later.”
David patted her on the shoulder as he turned her, leading her off the ice. He looked back over his shoulder once, giving Ilya a gentle smile. Then they were gone.
“That was strange,” his coach said as he made his way over to Ilya.
“Witches,” Ilya said with a shrug. As if that explained anything about what just happened.
“Thank god you are not cursed.” His coach sounded relieved. “Second best in the world… I wonder who is first?”
I wonder that too, Ilya thought, but shrugged again as if the answer didn’t matter. He needed to get off the ice, get a cigarette, find a moment alone. Go, the ice said in his brain, and Ilya didn’t wonder why the voice was much clearer now. He left his coaches to talk among themselves, traded his skates for sneakers, and ran out the door.
The wind in Regina made him wish, halfheartedly, that he’d been born from the air instead. Then he wouldn’t have to keep twisting to find a position where his stupid fucking lighter would catch instead of having to flick it over and over. It was because of this that he was looking down then he heard footsteps. He ignored them as he finally got a flame, lighting his cigarette just in time for a boy’s voice to say, “I don’t think you can smoke here.”
When he looked up, the unsettling creature from the rink was standing in front of him. “Okay,” Ilya said, because what else do you say when something that shouldn’t be real was standing there telling you not to smoke the cigarette you very much needed to be smoking right at that moment?
The creature moved forward. Ilya made himself hold still. He was a six foot hockey player, and – according to a very respected witch – probably the best in the world. It wasn’t his fate to be eaten in a random parking lot in Canada.
Ilya hoped that was true, anyway.
The creature was man-shaped. It was the same height as Ilya, and had regular people legs. It was, and this was a little funny, wearing sweatpants. Ilya wondered briefly why it didn’t have a face. He thought about asking, but just then the creature put its hand out. It had human hands, with long fingers and warm-looking skin. The hand was actually kind of pretty, Ilya thought. Without meaning to, he reached out with a hand of his own.
“I think you’re my,” the creature started to say in its regular voice, then shouted, “what the fuck?” as their fingers met.
Sharp sparks danced painfully around Ilya’s hand. He swore too, in Russian, as he snatched his hand back.
“Dammit, mom,” the creature said, shaking his hand out.
“Your mother did this?” Ilya said carefully, flexing his own fingers, trying to chase the pain out.
“I think so.” It started to poke at the pockets of its pants, its jacket.
“She do your face also?”
The creature stopped. Ilya was pretty sure it was looking at him.
“What do you mean?”
Ilya pointed with the hand holding his cigarette. “Your face is, ah… not there. Fuzzy?”
“Blurry? Yeah, that’s not right. I have a face, dude.” The creature sighed. It started pulling at its wrists.
Ilya watched as jewelry fell: a leather string with stones hanging from it hit the concrete first, then a silver chain.
“That do anything?” the creature asked.
Ilya shook his head. He took a long drag from his cigarette as a ring from the creature’s other hand dropped to the ground too.
“Anything?”
“Nyet, I tell you,” Ilya said.
The creature sighed again. “I am so gonna kill her for this,” it said. A black jacket dropped to the ground, clearly visible now that it wasn’t on the creature’s body. There was a pause, then some wriggling, and a grey sweatshirt joined the jacket.
“Seriously?” the creature groaned.
“Sorry,” Ilya said. He finished his cigarette, stubbing it out against the wall behind him. As he turned back, he saw the ice growing around his boots. “Close, I think.”
“Yeah, I saw that too,” the creature said softly, pointing at Ilya’s feet. He stepped out of one his own boots, then the other, but his face was still blurry.
“You will be cold,” Ilya said, but the creature shook its head.
“The ice and I are friends,” it said.
Ilya nodded. “Me too.”
“It told me,” the creature said. “Fuck it,” he added, pulling off his thin white tee shirt.
The ice crawled up Ilya’s legs.
"I see you," Ilya said. He took a deep breath. The boy standing in front of him was beautiful. He had short black hair, with dark brown eyes that reminded Ilya of his favorite coffee. He had a long sharp nose and his lips… Ilya breathed out, wanting to kiss those lips. He was muscular, not the same as Ilya – this boy was thicker in the waist and not quite as broad in the shoulders, but well-defined all the way through. His dark nipples were pebbled hard in the cold air.
But the worst thing of all was the freckles scattered across his cheeks. They reminded Ilya of stars, a constellation spread across the boy’s face. Ilya wanted to count them all with his lips. He wanted to look up at them from his bed, the way he looked up at the stars in the night, making wishes.
"She must have sewn a charm into my shirt," the black-haired boy said. "Probably every shirt I brought on this trip. She's, uh... determined, when she thinks she's right."
The ice wrapped around Ilya’s chest.
“Can we try this again?” the boy asked.
Yes, the ice said, using Ilya’s lips to make the word into a sound. He put his hand out, watching as the ice curled around his shoulder and wound its way down his arm like a snake.
“Hi, you’re Ilya Rozanov, right?” the boy said as he took Ilya’s hand. “I think you’re my…” he sighed happily as their fingers connected. “I think you’re mine.”
“Yes, I think so too,” Ilya said as the ice that had been growing up the other boy’s body finally connected with his own. He felt warm all over. He felt the way he did when he laced up before a game.
He felt like he was coming home.
“I guess we’re really doing this,” the boy said softly. “Thank god you play hockey,” he said with a little laugh, still clutching Ilya’s hand in his own. “My parents would flip, otherwise. There’s like a whole plan. I’ll let my mom explain it to you. You’re okay moving to Canada, right? Or maybe the States? Depending on who drafts us.”
Ilya smiled. “I cannot go back to Russia now, not with… you,” he said, “but is okay, I am best player in the world, many teams will take me,” he said. “You play hockey too?”
His soulmate laughed. Why was that the best sound in the world? Ilya wanted to make it happen again and again. He pulled the other boy close.
The ice that held them both broke into snow and drifted away.
“I’m the best player in the world,” the boy said, his breath warm against Ilya’s lips. “You can be like, second best.”
“We will see,” Ilya said, and kissed him.
Yes, the ice said to them both. The boy laughed a little, their lips still pressed together.
“What is your name?” Ilya asked between kisses. “It will not matter, you are already mine,” he added, putting the obvious into words.
“I know,” the boy said, pulling away just long enough to slip his feet back into his boots. Ilya took off his own jacket and settled it around the boy’s shoulders, then put his hands under the jacket and pull the boy back so they were once again leaning against each other. “You know my name,” the boy said as his lips found the side of Ilya’s neck.
“No, I do not,” Ilya said, tilting his jaw to give the boy better access.
Those lips left his neck as the boy stepped back, looking at Ilya with his eyebrows furrowed. “Really?”
Ilya shrugged. “I have only seen your face for five minutes,” he said, as if that explained it. “Tell me your name so I can meet your parents and let your mother plan the rest of my life,” he said with a grin. It sounded like a joke but Ilya found that he liked the idea, deep in his chest. It sounded right.
“You already met my parents,” the boy said. “I’m Shane Hollander.”