Spark

Spark

 

“Duncan. Hey. Hey, Donut. Dunc.” Hazard, my best friend brother, smacked my skate with his stick. “Game. Now. Focus.”

Right.

My opponent, my enemy, my obstacle, was six and a half feet of pissed-off Russian with anger issues and a deadly weapon in his hand. He had the too-much-white-in-his-eyes that would have looked a little extreme on a serial killer.

Sweat poured down his face as he growled.

He wanted my blood.

And I mean literally my blood. He was a fourth-marked Felidae shifter. A cat of some kind. Smelled like tiger. I was second-marked Canidae shifter. One-hundred percent wolf, baby.

Me and kitty did not get along.

But here at the ass end of the third period in West Hell hockey, all I cared about was dragging my team out of this one-nothing hole we’d suicided into.

“We got this,” Hazard at my right panted, sweat dripping off the ends of his dark hair under his helmet. “Just keep your head in the game.”

Wizards were not as fragile as everyone thought. Or at least Hazard wasn’t.

He’d pulled a storm of knives out of a clear sky. He’d snapped thirty shifters back into human form mid-shift. He’d caught a hundred mile an hour puck with magic to keep it from killing a guy.

I loved the hell outta him. In a brotherly way.

Our crowd screamed for us. The rolling chorus Thunder-heads! Thunder-heads! Thunder-heads! pulsed and pounded, punctuated with two stomps and a clap. That battering, bolstering wave of sound was so thick, I could feel it in my teeth.

I shivered beneath the heat of it, the thrill of it.

I grinned, happy to be here, surrounded by the stink of sweat, exhaustion, adrenalin and blood, tied together with the hoppy tang of beer, brats, and violence.

Our right winger, Johan Jorgesen, or JJ, a third-marked who had a sensitive’s knack of knowing where the puck was going to be and when, took the face-off.

I planted myself outside the circle, knowing he was going to shuck it toward our D-man, Graves, if he won the drop.

The Tide asshole, Paski, covering me took his spot right up my ass.

I made kissy noises at him. “Here, kitty, kitty.”

“Fuck your face,” he snarled.

There was a lot of cat in those words. Which meant he was gassed, worn out. The human in him was losing control to the cat inside him.

Wouldn’t want him to lose his temper, now would we? Wouldn’t want him to shift and force a break in the game so they could throw him out.

I mean, there was only one minute left.

We wouldn’t want things to get chaotic, now would we? Wouldn’t want to break their fucking stride so we had a fucking chance to bury that puck in the net.

“You ain’t got the bone for it, boy,” I chirped. “I’ve had cat. Tastes just like pussy.”

There. That was the blood-berserker rage I was looking for.

Tension in his muscles, check.

Lowered shoulders, check.

Snapping his damn hockey stick in half with his bare hands? Well, now. Check and double-check.

Upside? We were going to get a break in game play and that would give us a better chance to score.

Downside? This was about to turn into a freak-on-freak brawl.

No, never mind. There was no downside to that.

Commie Kitty dropped gloves and barreled toward me with a roar.

A literal roar.

The terrifying screech cut through the rest of the heat and anger and exhaustion on the ice.

It was the kind of sound that brought a loud auditorium to full silence.

Music to my fucking ears.

I laughed, the only sound in the place, and it echoed off the rafters.

The wolf in me wanted out, out, out. Blood, blood, blood. Kill, kill, kill.

Not today. The only way we were getting through this game without our team being penalized for fighting was if I kept my shift buried.

Good thing the human in me enjoyed fighting just as much as the wolf in me did.

We were a good pair, my wolf and me.

I dropped my stick, and cocked a shoulder down so I could catch the Russian under his charge and either flip him, or get a punch into that broken rib he’d been favoring for the last two periods.

“Kneel!” The league sensitive demanded over the arena speakers. “Players will take a knee now.”

A reasonable request. Too bad none of us were all that reasonable.

I dropped my gloves.

The crowd, which had spent all of three seconds silent, went absolutely wild. They wanted Comrade Kitten to shift. Wanted me to shift.

The chant, Shift, shift, shift rocked the walls.

    As soon as my gloves hit the ice, the chant became fight, fight, fight.

    Oh, yeah. There was gonna be a fight all right.

Players lunged. Someone got slammed up on the boards, snarling, cursing. Refs hauled ass that way, stun prods in hand, ready to throw a few thousand watts of electricity into every shifter who wouldn’t drop knee.

I wondered who was about to get zapped.

Then I ran out of time to think about anyone else because there was a fist the size of a…what’s a large Russian thing? A bear? A tank? A Kremlin?

Yeah, a fist the size of a Kremlin eclipsed all the light in the room and barreled down toward my face.

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