Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Additional Tags:

Demon Summoning, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Demon Ilya Rozanov, Forced Proximity, accidental boyfriend acquisition, Hockey Curses, Demon Deals

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-08-24 Completed: 2026-09-10 Words: 19,710 Chapters: 4/4

Hit and Miss

Summary

Shane summons a demon.

Notes

Not beta read, so I have no one to blame here. This is mostly pre-written, and I'll post the rest as I finish editing.

Chapter 1: Shane Summons a Demon

Shane Hollander, twenty-six years old, captain of the Montreal Metros, and three-time league MVP winner, pauses with a bag of salt under one arm and a sprig of dill caught between his teeth and wonders where his life went wrong.

The salt comes in big bags, industrial-sized, with smeary red writing printed on the thick paper. Shane had to go to the specialty shop to buy it, coarse-grained pink crystals, uniodized, a hundred pounds in five paper-wrapped bags. He crept through the place, dreading the questions he was going to attract, but the girl at the counter barely glanced at him except to turn the screen around and tap pointedly at the tip screen.

Shane hefts a bag onto his coffee table and tears along the dotted line. The paper catches and rips and half the bag ends up on his floor, and he allows himself five measured breaths before he fetches a broom and a fresh bag.

The lines have to go down in a single, unbroken pour, which involves a lot of squatting, the bag up against his pyjama-clad hip as he walks in an awkward backward circle. He’s sweaty and sore by the time it’s done. The circle looks, generously, like shit, larger than he meant to pour it and sort of a lumpy oval. He’s never had the knack for it, inherited the hockey but not the magic. It always felt like a fair trade.

Shane folds the empty paper bag, for want of something to do with his hands, and puts it in the recycling. It works or it doesn’t. That’s what it comes down to. This works, or it doesn’t, and he’s right back where he started. He’ll spend a few hours vacuuming salt off his hardwood floors and he’ll let the professionals handle it, wait as they drag their feet and his season fizzles out before it’s even begun.

Jackie keeps spells the way other people keep recipes, printed and collated in a blue three-ring binder. He poked through it earlier. It’s a weird mix. There are printouts from mommy blogs up against scientific reviews of runic theory, a years-long collection marked up in highlighter and her messy handwriting. She marked the pages he needs with a cheery yellow post-it.

The salt was the hard part. Now that the circle is laid, there are a few runes chalked onto Shane’s floor, a small bouquet of dill and tarragon tossed into the center of the circle, and a pinprick hurt on his thumb. He squeezes out a single drop of blood, which spatters red into the salt. Shane slumps against the couch for the last bit, ass on the floor and legs splayed out in front of him as he holds the binder against his knees.

He never liked the way spells taste. It’s the same rusty tang that comes when he takes a stick to the mouth, followed by a sparking sourness that puckers his lips. He runs a tongue across the back of his teeth before he goes on. The salt glows a hot gold for a long second, so he knows something is working, and he allows himself a brief moment of anticipation before it fizzles out.

“Fuck,” Shane says. He gets a glass of water and tries again.

Nothing happens, and then nothing happens again. Shane chews over the spell, repeats the words under his breath. He Googles some of it, comes up with a blog discussing the original poster’s problematic behavior, and throws his phone at the couch. He sweeps up the salt and the blood and the herbs and pours another circle. He peels a fresh sprig of dill out of the grocery store pack and ties it with a little red ribbon and gouges a bigger divot into his thumb in case the first wasn’t enough and then wraps his finger up in a Disney Princess band-aid that he’s pretty sure one of Hayden’s kids left in his bathroom.

He doesn’t want to call Jackie. It’s not her problem, first of all, and also he had been adamant that he wasn’t going to resort to back alley spellcraft. “Just in case,” she’d said, when she pressed the binder into his arms.

After the fourth attempt fails, he texts her. She’s probably asleep already. He glances over at his oven clock and finds it’s pushing midnight. Definitely asleep, he amends. Like he should be, but Shane has always been stubborn. One of his earliest memories is of hockey. He remembers how cold it was, and how his fingers felt gripping the stick through his thick gloves, the weight of the helmet on his head. He remembers sprawling on the ice, splayed out like a starfish, his face scrunched up in tears as his mom tried to corral him off the rink, then slipping past her in his sock feet and skidding back onto the ice.

When she tells the story, she adds how unhappy he had been when his feet got cold and how he had cried about his wet socks. He doesn’t remember that part. The last thing he remembers is the feeling of having won.

Hockey always came easy, hard work gilded by natural talent. This, though, magic and incantations and the frustrating metal tang of failure—

Shane spits blood into the sink and washes his mouth. He isn’t sure if that’s supposed to happen. He learned the basics in school, like everyone does. Horseshoes to hang over the lintel and lavender under the pillow, the type of everyday protection charms that go along with how to sew a button or cook an egg. He never got the knack of buttons or eggs, either. All of Home Ec felt like a waste when scouts were already watching him from the stands.

He should give it up, for the night at least. He should trust that the league can handle magical maledictions. He thinks about Comeau, the sneering look on his face when Shane’s pass kicked wide. Shane tries again.

He’s blinking sandy eyes by the time something catches. Shane can feel it, a split-lip sensation, the concussive stir of magic. It feels, briefly, like flying, and then like falling as a ricochet of energy shoves him physically across the room. His back hits a bookshelf, and trophies and photos crash to the floor around him. He closes his eyes against a flash of green light, but it’s blinding bright all the same.

“Jesus Christ,” Shane mutters, blinking the glare away. One of the picture frames broke and he picks up glass gingerly. He doesn’t cut himself, so maybe the whole thing worked, though maybe it’s because he’s at home where it’s safe. He’ll know tomorrow, he supposes, though at this point he’ll be useless at practice one way or another.

Shane stifles a yawn. It’s late, so far gone that it’s nearly early, but his apartment is a mess. Salt crunches under his feet as he picks his way over to the cleaning supplies—the broomcorn is traditional, but doesn’t clean worth shit—when he stops. Blinks. 

Fear thrills through him in a cold sweep. It’s the feeling of missing a step, his whole body stuttering to a halt, his stomach clenched up against his lungs. Shane forgets how to breathe until his body reminds him, and then he sucks air in too fast, tastes sulphur in the back of his throat.

The man in Shane’s living room watches him with a stony expression.

Shane’s first instinct is to look at the doors, the windows, his body working faster than his overtired brain. The door is still closed, the latch turned. The windows are shut against the winter chill. The man is not dressed for the weather. He doesn’t have a coat or a hat, only blue jeans, frayed at the hem, and a black shirt tight across broad shoulders. 

He is standing precisely in the center of Shane’s circle.

“Fuck,” Shane says, and gets only a tilt of his head in response.

Jackie’s printout doesn’t say anything about demons, or summoning, or most importantly, how to un-summon one once it’s in your living room. Shane reads it again to be sure, skirting the edge of the salt as he checks his spellwork against the diagram. His lines, messy as they are, follow the same patterns as what’s supposed to be there. He steps a little too close to the salt, his socked toe crunching against the grains, and skitters backwards, his chest heaving. The demon watches him with that same inscrutable calm, arms crossed.

Shane unearths his phone from the throw pillows at the corner of the couch. Accidental demon summoning comes up with a series of Reddit threads that read more like creative writing. Demon murder gets him a news bulletin that he tries to put out of his mind. He carefully types in the url from the top of the printout and finds the same diagram, the same spell. There is no second page describing how to handle accidental summonings. The comment section is disabled.

He searches the writer’s name again and comes up with a Twitter thread twenty posts deep about their problematic behavior. This time he reads them all.

Shane’s breath catches in his chest. He has to fight to take the next breath, then one more. His head jerks up when he catches a glimpse of motion.

“Noooo, no no no.” The words spill out of him, and Shane waves his arms in a frantic warning. The demon stops, just inside the edge of the circle, and looks at him from under furrowed brows. He looks down at where Shane is pointing, and understanding washes over his face as he takes in the circle. He spins slowly, taking in the unbroken lines.

“You can’t—” Shane says, and then trails off. He doesn’t know what happens if a demon tries to pass a binding circle. His imagination supplies a number of possible options. A puff of sea-salt and smoke. A pile of char and ash where the demon used to be. A wall of purifying fire. His homeowner’s insurance would drop him, he thinks hysterically.

The edges of the skyline glimmer with the early risers’ artificial lights. Jackie doesn’t answer her phone.

Shane: Text me when you wake up

Shane: It’s an emergency

Shane has always known his next steps. It’s one of the things he likes about his career. There is a game, and a win, and press. There is a pass across empty ice and a breakaway and a goal. There is a puck and his stick and an empty building where one day his number will hang in the rafters.

Every step of his life there has been a clear next step, back to when, small for his age at eight years old, he had dangled his feet in the booster seat of his mom’s minivan and announced that he was going to play in the MLH when he grew up. “Oh yeah?” she asked him, eyes meeting in the rearview mirror. “I guess we’re gonna have to find you a better coach, then.”

He owes her everything. She put her life on hold for him. She dragged him and his gear to every game and every tournament and didn’t cry when she dropped him off with his billet family in Kingston. She sat him down and warned him about always using a condom and to make sure to change the batteries in his smoke alarms and never to play with magic he didn’t understand.

He has no idea what to do in this situation. He doesn’t keep spellbooks in the house, for the obvious reason that he outsources his magic, the same way he hires someone to tailor his clothes and prep his meals. He thinks briefly about calling his mom, goes as far as to pull up her contact, but he can’t bear the thought of her disappointment. She wouldn’t know how to handle it either, he tells himself. She’s good at household work, scrying, minor prognostication. Not demons.

Shane abandons his phone for the bigger screen of his iPad and looks up a Latin lexicon. The demon watches him with curious eyes, following Shane’s movements, but doesn’t move otherwise. He probably wants to go home just as badly as Shane doesn’t want him here. It’s all a misunderstanding, and Shane only needs to make him understand. Maybe he can poof himself back home. The idea is flimsy in Shane’s mind, but it’s something. It’s a plan.

“Okay,” Shane says, and sits on the couch. It’s only a few feet away from the demon. He isn’t sure if he’s imagining the new warmth in the room. “Okay, let’s try this. Salve,” he says, two distinct syllables. He wishes for the first time in his life that he had paid attention in middle school Latin. He had dropped the subject in high school, when school had become a far second priority to hockey.

“Accidens est quod tu es hoc. Incantamentum pro carmen dispellere um… erit.”

The demon stares at him, so still that he might be a statue if not for the faint rise and fall of his chest. His eyes are a striking blue. All of him is striking. He’s tall, about Shane’s height, with softly curling hair that tumbles around his temples and a sharp jaw. Shane wrenches his gaze back to the iPad.

“Right. Okay. Um. Ad domus necesse est, um, tibi. Fuck.” Shane stumbles through more Latin, hoping that mismatched noun-gender-whatever doesn’t matter in terms of intelligibility. It is an accident that the demon is here. The demon needs to go home. Please tell me how to send you home. He thinks that’s all the important points. He needs this demon to fuck off back to wherever Shane pulled him from, so Shane can go back to his only mildly cursed life.

The sun is starting to rise out past the wide windows of Shane’s living room. Shane has a brief flash of panic that the demon will burst into flames when the morning light hits him, but that’s vampires, which aren’t, to the best of his knowledge, real. 

“Right.” Shane caps out, suddenly exhausted. The adrenaline that carried him through the night is fading, and his limbs are too heavy to hold. An ache is building behind his eyes, and the thumb and forefinger on the bridge of his nose do nothing to quell it.

“So, um. Vale, I guess. Ite domum. Go home. Please. Liberatio tibi do. Liberationem? I don’t know.”

Shane startles when the demon moves, arms crossing, hands tucked into his elbows. He pauses there, a carved marble creature, thick thick forearms corded with muscle, a cap of tidy dark blond curls around his head. There is a mole on his cheek, a small brown spot under the ridge of his cheekbone. Shane wonders if there are fangs hidden behind his lips, a tail tucked into his jeans.

“Intellegis?” Shane asks. Do you understand?

The demon looks Shane up and down in a slow assessment, eyes trailing along Shane’s hockey-puck-print pajama bottoms and his Metros tee shirt. He raises an eyebrow when he reaches Shane’s face, evidently unimpressed with what he sees.

The demon runs his tongue over his front teeth, sucking in air. It’s a weirdly human gesture, bridging the gap between annoyance and expectancy. When he finally talks, it is with an unexpected accent, syllables rolling off his tongue.

“Are you fucking done?” he asks, and Shane’s mouth drops open.

Jackie arrives a little after eleven, once the kids are safely in their nanny’s care. Hayden is at practice, and Shane is sick with guilt for skipping and for the lie he’d sent to the group chat. He rarely misses practice, only when he’s ill or, on one uncharacteristic instance, so hungover he was afraid he would puke on the ice. He waits for someone to call him out: it’s obvious he’s not actually sick. He’s hiding something. Something is wrong.

“Huh,” Jackie says, when he sees the demon in Shane’s living room. The demon looks back at her, eyebrows slightly raised.

“Yeah,” Shane says, and runs his hand over his face. “Do you want coffee?”

She doesn’t, but Shane puts on another pot anyway. He didn’t want to sleep with a demon in his living room, even one safely contained in a binding circle. And it is a binding circle. He knows all about binding circles now, after three hours reading the Wiki, five articles from JSTOR, and one exhaustive hour-long YouTube video which he turned off when it took a turn to the erotic. 

Jackie doesn’t have a high opinion of Shane’s spellwork, but agrees that the circle seems fine. It’s mostly circle-shaped, and the sigils around the edges are in the right general arrangement and match the diagram, not that Shane puts much stock in her research skills right now. The spell was meant to reverse a curse, not summon a demon. A demon that won’t shut up.

“Who is this?” he asks, cross-legged in the middle of the circle. Jackie ignores him, which Shane’s research says is the right choice. Demons are tricky, and any engagement is risky.

“Hi,” he says, when Jackie is looking over the sigils, and then, to Shane, “wow, she is also rude. You are a perfect match. This is your wife? This makes sense, she is pretty like you are.”

Shane bites his tongue on the correction, and the demon laughs. “Okay, so not that. What is your name, pretty man?”

He has a distinct accent. Russian, Shane is pretty sure, based on the rotating series of teammates he has had that hailed from that part of the world. Why a demon has a Russian accent is beyond him. It’s not something he had ever thought about. How demons talk. Whether the demon plane has an accent.

“He’s not going to tell you that,” Jackie tells him, and Shane hisses at her not to talk to him. 

“So, what? I just stay here? What about your name?”

“Also no,” she says, and squats down to look at the salt.

“Boring,” the demon pronounces, and leans back on his elbows to watch them. “So this is what, orgy? You come in here?” He leers at Shane. “I think you will like.”

“I’m not—” Shane snaps his mouth shut, unsure what he meant to say. His cheeks are hot.

“Oh, you have not told her you’re gay?” The demon cocks his head to the side. He does not have fangs, Shane finds, as a self-satisfied grin winds its way across his face. “Oops.”

“What do you think?” Shane asks when they’ve decamped to his bedroom, the door shut against the demon’s whining. The sick feeling has not faded from his stomach.

“He has a lot of opinions,” Jackie says tactfully.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Shane blurts out.

“About the demon? No shit.”

“Or about—” he can’t get the words out.

“One crisis at a time,” she tells him. “Let’s focus on the demon thing.” He recognizes her mom voice. The pick up your toys and then we can have a snack practicality, the natural triage of chaos. She would have made a good doctor. 

Shane nods gratefully. “Do you have any ideas?”

She shrugs. “You’re way out of my weight class here. A demon, Shane?”

“It was your spell.”

She winces, and Shane feels terrible. She’s already apologized a dozen times for it. It’s not her fault, he knows. She was passing along research she found, using her own time to find solutions to his problems. Maybe it’s another facet of the curse, sliding its tendrils along Shane’s social circle and twisting her work into something that suits its own purposes.

“You need a specialist.”

Shane sucks air in through his teeth and thinks about what happens if this gets out. He doesn’t think it’s illegal, at least not in the way that would get him in any real trouble, but it’s the kind of scandalous bullshit that gets dragged up on morning talk shows. Hockey player summons demon, next up let’s talk about a jet-skiing squirrel in Oklahoma.

“I can’t tell anyone.”

“What about the team?” She already has the staff page open, scrolling down. “Bryan. Staff practitioner. He looks nice.”

“Yeah, he’s fucking great. Hasn’t done shit to fix my problems. Sure he’ll know just what to do about an accidental demon.”

“Right, right.” She nods. “Probably has mandatory disclosure, too.”

“I can’t let the league find out,” he says, horrified. “What do you think coach would say? What would the media say?”

She crosses her arms, painted nails tapping. “What’s the plan then?”

“I’ll figure it out,” Shane says with more conviction than he feels. “He’s trapped there, right? He can’t do anything.”

The demon is waiting in the living room when they emerge from the bedroom. He watches as Jackie puts her jacket on and Shane hugs her goodbye. When the door closes, the string holding Shane upright snaps, and he slumps down onto one of the bar stools by his kitchen counter.

“Ok,” Shane says, mostly to himself. He needs to sleep. He lives by his routines, none of which allow for adrenaline-fueled all-nighters. He goes mechanically through his kitchen, pulling a frozen pack of kale and blueberries from the freezer and blending it with protein powder. The demon stares at him while Shane drinks his smoothie.

“That looks like shit.”

“Shut up,” Shane says. He rests his elbows on the counter, face in his hands. “Go away.”

“You summoned me,” the demon points out reasonably.

“How do I un-summon you?”

The demon yawns, hand over his mouth, like the long night is catching up with him too. “Make a deal. I tell you this.”

“Fine. I’ll trade you, uh,” Shane looks around his kitchen, “a fridge magnet for you going home.”

“Ah, no. You are very bad at this.”

“Fucking tell me, then.”

“Eh,” the demon shrugs. “Soul for glory, that kind of thing. That is a good trade.”

“I have glory.”

“Then why the summoning?”

“I told you it was a mistake.”

“Okay.” The demon jerks his chin at the circle. “Break this, then.”

Shane laughs, startled. “Absolutely not.”

“Why?”

“Would you trust you? If you were me?”

“No, because I am not stupid. You, though.” He makes a noise like he’s considering. “We will see.”

“Fuck you,” Shane says, but any spirit in it is worn out by his exhaustion. “I’m going to take a nap. Don’t burn the place down.”

“Burn it down with what?” The demon gestures at the blank patch of hardwood available to him.

Shane is so tired there’s nothing left in him to care. The smoke will wake him up if there’s anything important. He ignores the demon’s indignant protests and trudges down the hall. He expects to toss restlessly, but sleep takes him nearly immediately. He does not dream.

Chapter 2: Shane Fucks a Demon

At eighteen years old, Shane signed the paperwork for his Montreal penthouse. The league offered him a billet, but he hated the thought of living with someone else. He hadn’t liked it as a teenager, living with someone else’s borrowed family, and tolerates the required roommates on roadies.

Hayden isn’t so bad, outside of the snoring. He has nothing on Hemming at the Olympics, who brought a new girl home every night in a rotating parade of distance skiers and doubles luge and a goalie from the women’s hockey team who Shane was briefly starstruck to meet before he was summarily kicked out of his own room.

“I’m fucking bored,” the demon whines, a week into their cohabitation. Shane ignores him, focused on scrubbing a turmeric stain from his counter. He had to cancel his housekeeping service, which is the cherry on top of the indignity sundae.

Shane makes it through the dishes and the laundry and is sorting his mail before the demon picks up again. He’s lying on the ground, hands behind his head, staring at Shane’s ceiling. “What are you doing?”

“None of your business,” Shane says absently. He’s been pre-approved for a loan. His water bill will auto-draft on the fifth. He’s been invited to a wedding for a third-line defenseman down in New York. He must have invited half the league, if Shane made the cut.

“I’m bored,” the demon complains again. Shane hadn’t known demons could be so dramatic. He can’t even be annoyed about it, not the way he was at the complaints about the lighting, his decor, the hardness of his floor, and the number of throw pillows, which had resulted in him chucking one of the pillows at the demon and then panicking and opening a google search to see if passing objects over a binding circle invalidated the protection of the circle. No, said Google.

Shane would be bored, too, if he were trapped in a circle. The demon has informed him how many light switches are in the room, and the exact number of books on his shelf in each color.

“Shut up,” Shane says. He tosses the junk mail, pins the invite to the fridge, and chucks a granola bar across the room. He asked once if the demon needs a bucket or something, mostly to avoid the potential stains on his hardwood, and got only a withering stare in response. Eating seems to be more recreational than sustaining, but it does shut his mouth for at least a few minutes.

“Where are you going?” the demon asks, when Shane emerges from his room in his game day suit.

“That’s personal,” Shane says, and grabs his wallet and keys from the counter.

“You have games on your phone?”

“Shut up,” Shane says automatically, and looks critically back at him. “How do you even know what phones are?”

“Are you fucking serious?” the demon looks, as usual, wildly unimpressed with him. “You think I just pop into existence from what, medieval village? Churning butter and shit? Of course I know what a phone is. You have games?”

“No,” lies Shane, who plays Candy Crush on plane rides when he doesn’t want to talk to his teammates. “And I’m not giving you my phone.”

“Give me something,” complains the demon. He flops to the ground, some of the drama hindered by only having about a six foot radius to work in, not quite enough to stretch out in. He twists to the side to watch Shane. “I am dying of boredom.”

“Go home then.”

“I can’t,” he whines. “I tell you this. You need to make a deal.”

“Not fucking happening.”

He sits up slightly, eyes narrowing. “You have xBox. Give me the controller.”

“No.”

“I will scream,” he says seriously. “This is an apartment. People will hear me. You do not want people to know I am here. You have only told the lady who was here.” Shane freezes, which is enough for the demon to look at him with a triumphant expression. “I am right. Give.”

“If I give you the controller you won’t scream?”

“I will not,” the demon says.

Shane breaths deep, drawing air deep into his diaphragm. “Whatever. Fine. Yes.” He startles as a shiver winds its way down his spine. “What the fuck was that?”

“You made a deal,” the demon says, and holds out his hand, his fingers flexing in a grabbing motion. “Now give.”

A proper deal needs to be big, the demon explains while Shane navigates the HDMI inputs and hands over a fully-charged xBox controller. He tosses it the last foot, unwilling to edge his hand across the salt. Small deals don’t matter. He can’t break his promises once the deal is made, and Shane shouldn’t either. “Or what?” Shane asks. He glances toward the door. If he weren’t habitually early, he would already be late.

“Not good for you,” the demon says, and gasps in delight when Shane’s television flickers to life. “What game is this? Never mind. I will figure it out. You can go.” He shoos Shane towards the door with one hand.

“Don’t fuck with my settings,” Shane says, and feels immediately stupid about fixating on something so minor. It’s going to happen anyway. The demon is already tabbing through the key bindings.

Shane drags himself back through the door hours later, nursing a new bruise under his ribs. Nothing went right all game. His skates caught on nothing, sending him tumbling in front of his own net, allowing Belchetz to snap a tidy goal right above his prone body. He expects to see it in highlight reels for the next decade or so. That’s the worst part of hockey. All of his worst mishaps since the time he was seventeen years old are available on YouTube for anyone to find, bundled up into neat little compilations.

The demon, predictably, is still in the circle, cross-legged on top of one of Shane’s pillows, eyes fixed on the screen where his tiny hockey player is doing tiny hockey moves. Badly, Shane is gratified to see. Maybe he’ll want to play sometime. Shane should get something out of this arrangement.

“Welcome back, Shane Hollander,” the demon says, and Shane’s water bottle bounces off the floor with a metal clang.

“How—”

“You’re in the fucking game, idiot.” He pauses it and looks over his shoulder. His curls are worse for wear after all that time in a circle, matted down on one side. Shane feels a brief pang of pity and forcibly shakes it off.

“I know your name now,” the demon says, too many teeth in his grin, more than should be possible in that human face. Shane’s heart stutters, and he falls back a step, reaching instinctively for the door. The demon stands, facing him, hands coming up, palms up in front of him. “Do you know what I can do with your name, Shane Hollander?”

Shane shakes his head mutely. Sweat prickles under his collar. He is hot all over, replaced with searing cold panic. “What?” he asks, his voice rasping.

“Fucking nothing,” the demon says, and rolls his eyes. “Dumbass.” He flops back to the ground and starts the game again. “Pass the other controller, this one is almost out of battery.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Ilya.”

“Il y’a quoi?”

“Ilya,” the demon says, dragging the syllables out like molasses. “That is my name. Not that you asked.”

Shane stands there in his entryway, waiting for the walls to crumble in on him or the sky to fall. None of that happens, so he snags the extra controller, tosses it to the demon—to Ilya—and goes to bed.

When November rolls around and there is still a demon in his living room, Shane’s panic grinds down to a low, constant anxiety. Ilya, for his part, seems as unconcerned as ever, lounging on a growing pile of pillows and chewing loudly on a package of beef jerky that Shane bought for him. He glances over when Shane walks through the door, shrugs, and turns up the volume on the television.

It could be worse. For all his foibles, the demon doesn’t leave the bathroom a mess, doesn’t eat Shane’s food, doesn’t go through his things. Because he’s trapped in a salt circle, but still. It’s almost, nearly, not-quite nice, sometimes. To have another person around when Shane gets home, to watch him experience the world through this narrow lens.

Ilya understands the human world in a way that Shane finds by turns baffling and endearing. He knows how television works, and understands that he can play games on Shane’s iPad, but stares blankly at the lock screen the first time Shane hands it to him. His face breaks out in genuine delight the first time he tries Indian takeout, and he figures out Shane’s Prime subscription well enough to navigate to and buy thirty five seasons of Survivor. He watches each one of them, gobbling up the seasons in sequence. Survivor is kind of like hell, Shane thinks, as Ilya insists on recounting the events of season eighteen while Shane is trying to make his morning smoothie. Even the noise of the blender cannot quite drown him out.

Shane would like to know less about Survivor. He would prefer not to know about Coach and exile island and the host’s plastic surgery. He can’t make out whether Ilya genuinely wants to tell him about it or if it’s another tactic to goad Shane into making a proper deal. Shane can’t make out much about him at all. For all that Ilya talks, he gives away very little. He prattles on extensively, but it’s formless self-aggrandizement. He beat Shane’s record at his own video game, he’s sure he knows who’s going to win this season, he’s ready to make a deal, Hollander, whenever you like, said with a twist at the corner of his mouth.

He watches Shane intently, never seems surprised when Shane comes home from practice or disappears for a week on a road trip. Underneath everything else, Shane feels a rising guilt at keeping him there, but neither he nor Jackie have come up with any new ideas.

“I don’t know,” Jackie says one evening, when Shane escapes the prison cell of his house to have dinner amid the chaos of hers. His nails are bright pink, courtesy of one of the twins. Ruby, probably. “I’ve asked around. Carefully, Shane. I can’t find any way to get rid of him.”

“You can’t just—?” Hayden makes a gesture with his knife, and Shane’s stomach twists.

“I don’t want to hurt him.”

Hayden wrinkles his nose and takes a bite of orzo. “Yeah, I know. But he’s just—Shane, come on. He’s a demon.”

“No shit, Hayd.”

“So you gotta, I don’t know. Expand your options.”

“You’re into magic now?” Shane asks, exasperated.

“There are a couple of specialists in Montreal,” Jackie says, interrupting them. “I think you should look. I’m just saying.”

Shane fusses with the label on his drink. “It’s fine. It’s contained. I don’t want anyone to find out.”

“You gonna make a deal?” Hayden asks. 

No. Shane is not. There are too many horror stories about demon deals. Everyone has a story, someone’s friend of a friend who wanted to be the best player on his team, only to have his teammates succumb to broken ankles and dislocated shoulders, leaving him the best player on a team that never goes anywhere. Shane isn’t sure what the moral is. Make better deals, maybe.

There is plenty to keep him busy outside of demonic concerns. Outside of his apartment there is hockey and the season that splays out like a wound. There is no longer any doubt about the curse. It’s a nagging, uncomfortable weight on his skin, like an itch he cannot scratch. 

Shane noticed it for the first time at a preseason game. His skates skidded out from under him during the anthem and he landed on his ass in front of eighteen thousand people. His blue line buddy stared down at him, his baby face round with shock.

It’s gone on from there, not worse, not better. There isn’t anything so bad that it risks serious injury, not the way Pugachyov’s season ended. It’s been a series of uncomfortable, embarrassing incidents. Skates that won’t catch the ice quite right, mic’d up incidents where his innocuous chirps are taken out of context and circulated across Twitter. At one game, his water bottle’s lid popped off, drenching him in lightly diluted blue Gatorade.

Comeau thinks it’s hilarious. Shane catches him and Gagnon smirking by their lockers, amused at Shane’s discomfort. Shane isn’t stupid. He knows he’s never quite fit in with them, that his place on the team is hard-won through the relentless grind of hockey, fifty goals in the year enough to win him their respect. He didn’t expect it to take so little to tear it away again.

They aren’t the only ones to notice, of course. It’s there for anyone to see, and there are a lot of people watching. Everyone gets cursed eventually. It’s part of the game, the same way the stupid pre-practice TikTok interviews and promo calendars are, the same as knowing there’s a few thousand hand-illustrated pieces of him in anatomically improbable poses out there on Tumblr. Most curses don’t do much, scraps of magic that cling to hair or skin and wither away under the protective charms at the rink.

Whatever fucking hellscape this curse was dragged out from is stronger than that. Etsy, probably. Someone, upset at the money they lost on their own shit team, decided that the way to revenge went through Shane. He reported it at the first twinges, and the league, in their judgement, is ‘working on a resolution’ together with the players’ association, sorting through allowable magical usages and attaching long memos from their respective legal teams.

None of this has done Shane any good, which is why he had been trying to resolve the problem on his own, out from under the overbearing eye of the league’s magical mediation team. Maybe the curse twisted that as well. Maybe that’s why there is a demon in his living room, eating his food and critiquing his hockey.

“What the fuck do you even know?” Shane asks, irritable after an afternoon game. He lumbered back in from a roadie late the previous night, and the flash of relief in Ilya’s eyes flushed him with unwanted guilt at having left him with nothing but the television for company.

“I Know your backhand sucks,” Ilya says, gnawing on a piece of jerky. “I want a Coke.”

“Get your own Coke.”

“Sure,” Ilya says, and yawns. Shane isn’t entirely sure whether he sleeps. “Just scratch circle, right here, and I will get it myself. No problem.”

“Fuck you.”

“You wish.”

Shane throws a can at his head and Ilya catches it with one hand, pops the top and frowns when the soda fizzes out in a cascade. “You shook it. Dumbass.”

“Why are you even here?”

“You,” Ilya says, pointing at Shane, and then turns his finger to himself, “summon me. We have talked about this. You want me to go away? Make a fucking deal. Then I will—” he makes a gesture with his free hand, fingertips exploding outward like a firework. He grimaces at the spill. “This is a mess.”

Shane tosses a balled up kitchen towel across the circle and wonders about the effect of soda on salt. “Like I’d trust you.”

“Okay, so what? I live here forever? In this kind-of-circle? What is the word for circle but squashy? I will run out of Survivor.”

“Read a book.”

“What do you have?” He looks genuinely interested, so Shane rifles through his bookcase. It’s mostly nonfiction about hockey, though he finds a romance novel Jackie once tried to make him read and tosses it underhand into the circle. “Taken by the Demon Lord,” Ilya reads out, and raises an eyebrow. “Oh now I see why I am here.”

“It’s not mine.”

Ilya makes a disbelieving noise. “You get porn on this?” he asks, gesturing to the TV.

Shane stubs his toe on the edge of the couch and curses, hobbling against the rush of pain. “Fucking hell.”

“Prime does not have.” Ilya flicks the app open as though he’s demonstrating the lack. “I can show you. What do you like? Gay? Both?”

“Is this your new thing? You think you can be annoying enough and I’ll give up and let you trick me into making a deal?”

“What?” Ilya gives a good impression of offense, but it’s undercut by the amusement that wrinkles his eyes. “I can’t watch porn? This is monastery now?”

“I’m not buying you porn.”

“Take your clothes off.”

Shane’s brain blinks to static and reboots. “What?”

Ilya gestures at him, fingers spread. “Go on. No porn? Give me show.”

Shane stares back at him. He’s off kilter, like he’s been knocked too hard on the ice and the world is swimming around him. He isn’t sure if he’s being fucked with, or if the demon actually expects him to disrobe. “No.”

“Okay,” Ilya agrees, too easily. His smile is dangerous. He hitches his thumbs under the edge of his jeans and shimmies them down an inch. “I will show you, then.”

Shane freezes. He could not move if he wanted, struck still by the force of his own reaction. Between Ilya’s jeans and his shirt is a widening strip of skin, dark hair in a narrow line, disappearing down under the denim. His mouth is wet. Desire prickles along his skin.

Shane had noticed before, of course. Ilya is attractive, objectively. His face is clear and sharp-jawed, his mouth plush and pink. He carries himself with a self-assured confidence that calls to Shane, too often out of sorts in his own skin. But Shane is good at compartmentalizing. He tucks his life away into tidy pockets; this knowing had been settled into one labeled demon.

It’s too much, everything changing too fast. Panic is a flock of birds in his chest, a sandy tightness behind his eyes. It threatens to shatter the careful dams that separate the pieces of Shane’s life.

Shane pours himself a glass of water, watching the way the bubbles gather against the glass, the way the water trembles against the lip with the movement of his hand. He keeps his eyes down as he walks past the salt circle and out of the room.

Shane does not think about Ilya as he brushes his teeth and washes his face. He sets his water on the bedside table and picks up his book, then sets it aside when the words dance nonsensically on the page. He is over-aware of his body. His pyjamas sit strangely on his skin. His covers are too heavy, the room too hot. He kicks the sheets away and peels his shirt open, baring his skin. His hand is warm, too, as his fingers trip down his stomach and down under the waistband of his pyjamas.

“Fuck,” he says to the room at large.

Nothing about this situation is fair. Shane does what he’s supposed to do. He followed the plan for his life, pushed his body to the brink and earned the rewards. He thinks about Ilya, the bow curve plushness of his lips and the jut of his jaw, and wonders if everyone else wants this deeply, if they go through their lives with desire crackling under their skin. Shane has been reading about demons on plane rides, his Nook turned away from his team. Nothing in his books covers what to do when you want to fuck one so badly that it sits like stones in your mouth.

Slowly, Shane peels the covers back and undoes the drawstring of his pyjama pants. His hand is dry and callused and he arches up into the touch, lip caught between his teeth. It feels the same as it always does. It has never felt so insufficient.

His bedside table has lube, a single purple dildo. He picks up the first, leaves the second. He drags his hand slowly up his dick, cups the head, chewing on his lip to hold back the low whine of pleasure.

Ilya’s voice is pitched high to carry through the apartment. “You can do that here.”

Shane stops dead, hand on his dick, pulse fluttering in his throat. He has no idea what Ilya has heard. The apartment is expensive, thick-walled to block out neighbors and city noise. He can’t hear the laundry from his bedroom, always needs to get up to check if his dryer is done. He can’t hear the television from the bathroom when the game is on.

“Hollander,” Ilya calls in a syrupy, wheedling tone. “Do not be shy. Come out.”

Nothing in Shane’s books mentioned demons having super hearing. He lies in his bed, muscles locked tight. The clock on his nightstand shows an accusing hour. He has practice in the morning.

He waits for long enough that he starts to think that Ilya has given up, and then: “Come here, Hollander.”

Shane does.

He stands in his living room with a damp spot in his boxers and his shirt buttoned up wrong, the buttons offset by one and pretends he knows what to do with his hands. Ilya is on the floor, laying back, his weight up on his elbows, shirt hitched up to show a taut line of muscle. His amusement looks genuine, and Shane wants to strangle him.

“You want something. Tell me.”

“I want this fucking curse gone,” Shane says, the honesty knocked out of him by the late hour and the exhaustion of pretending for so long. He thinks Ilya can see through him anyway. There is no hiding the longing that frays his edges.

“Now we have something.”

“You’re not surprised.”

“No. I have been watching your games. I thought probably. Not for certain; maybe you have weak hands, cannot keep hold of your stick.”

The joking hits Shane’s nerves like nails on a chalkboard. He was ready for mockery, for cajoling. For temptation. Shane doesn’t know how to adjust like this. The distance between expectation and reality has always been a chasm. His shoulders creep up further around his ears.

“No, no,” Ilya says, soothing. He stands in one fluid motion, toes at the edge of the circle. His face has gone gentle, inviting, and Shane takes an unconscious step closer. He knows it’s all a trick, but he thinks that if they were closer Shane would let himself be held, would rest his head on Ilya’s shoulder, would tilt his neck to the side and let Ilya sink his teeth into his skin.

“I can help you,” Ilya says, when Shane’s breathing has steadied.

“How?” Shane asks, and hates how raw it sounds.

“We can make a deal,” Ilya says, offering it like it’s something new and not the same weak trick that he’s been trying to play on Shane for weeks, grinding his resistance to dust. “It must be real. I can fix this for you, Hollander. What will you give me?”

“I don’t—what do you want?” Shane casts a look around the room. “I have—I have cup rings. I have a house in Ottawa.” It has to be something valuable. He knows this. Nothing he owns feels valuable, not the kind of value that magic demands.

“Has anyone fucked you?”

Shane is burning up from the inside. “No,” he says, the truth spilling out reflexively. Lying feels impossible here. The air is thick, reality slippery in the bruised nighttime. 

Ilya looks at him like he can see the bitter truth of it behind Shane’s eyes. Shane wants it. Has wanted it. Has decided that the risk does not outweigh the reward. He nearly did, once, on a trip to Mexico. Didn’t, in the end, when he spotted the gleaming black eye of a security camera in the corner of the bar.

“A trade, then.”

Shane is flush with the shame of wanting. The demon watches him with curious eyes, a shade darker now. Shane is stripped bare under his attention. “Yes or no, Hollander.”

“How would we—?”

He gets a victorious smile in return. Shane has given up an inch and will be dragged the rest of the mile.

There is no spark of magical energy as Shane steps across the ring of salt. It feels like nothing. The sticky tension follows him through, and he stands just inside it, his socked feet crunching against stray grains of salt. They stand watching each other for long enough that Shane startles when Ilya finally moves with an easy, leonine grace.

It is a relief to give in. Shane lets Ilya position him. His hands are soft and warm on Shane’s already overheated skin. He whispers in Shane’s ear as he undoes his shirt buttons, that it’s going to be good, that he’s going to make Shane like it.

Shane can spend the next fifty years telling himself that he agreed to this for hockey, for his career. He can slip back into the contained pressure of his life when Ilya is gone and pretend that this never happened. It is the easy way out, to slip back into his old skin, too tight to breathe in.

If there is only tonight, Shane will take what he can.

He strips off his unbuttoned shirt, the cotton rasping over his arms. His hands shake as he reaches for Ilya’s jeans. His knees hit the ground too hard, a shocking ache that echoes the one coursing through his body.

“Can I?” he asks, looking up. Ilya’s face is a mask of surprise, but pleased, Shane thinks. He likes that he put that expression there.

Ilya tugs his own dick out of his pants, strokes it one, twice, while Shane watches. Shane should feel small down there at his feet, but there is no room for anything other than the wet of his mouth and the flickering heat in his gut. Ilya’s thumb swipes along Shane’s bottom lip, nudges his mouth open.

His tongue flicks out, a tentative touch against soft skin. It doesn’t taste like he expected. Maybe that’s a failure of Shane’s imagination, or because he has his tongue on a demon’s dick, but all he tastes is skin and salt and then musk that he finds when he noses at the junction of hip and thigh, mouthing over the skin there while Ilya’s dick sits wet on his cheek.

Broad hands twist in his hair and guide him back down. Shane revels in the sensation, the little grunt that he drags out of Ilya. He tries to push himself further, wanting to gag on it, to swallow down as much of this experience as he can. “Fuck,” Ilya says, and tugs him off.

“Was that—”

“Not our deal,” Ilya reminds him.

The experience is gentler than Shane would have imagined. He expected to be taken, like in one of Jackie’s romance novels. Instead, he shivers, cheek pillowed on his forearms, back arched. The hardwood is unyielding under his knees.

His fingers are thicker than Shane’s. It is a new experience to be touched like this. Shane’s life is full of touching, body checks and palms on his shoulder and the crush of bodies after a goal. None of them compare to this, the invasive pressure of someone else’s skin inside of his, the sharp pain fading to a gentle ache.

Ilya doesn’t warn him before he lines up and presses in, and Shane’s breath comes in sharp pants. He keeps the moan tucked under his tongue. This is a transaction; he cannot give too much away. All the same, he would chew on the gristle of this moment. He wants to drag out the feeling of Ilya’s dick inside of him, the shivery sensation that ripples through him as Ilya’s thumbs dig into his hips.

“Okay?” Ilya asks once, the only thing he’s said since he pulled Shane’s mouth away. “You need to stop?” Shane grits his jaw tight and shakes his head. 

Ilya’s thrusts pick up, and all Shane can think is that he can never have this again, even as the heat builds in his gut, the tremble in his thighs. His orgasm takes him by surprise, and the demon behind him makes a delighted sound. He presses a hot, open-mouthed kiss to the base of Shane’s neck, teeth scraping even as his body jerks inside of Shane’s. Shane hopes it leaves a mark.

Ilya fumbles him over to the couch after and lays him out on the leather. Shane’s skin is sticky all over, fever-hot, and he blinks when a damp cloth lands on his stomach.

“Was good,” Ilya says, and kicks back, leaning up on the other side of the couch, lax and naked. He stretches his arms over his head. “You liked?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” Ilya grins at him, a human grin, his mobile mouth curved up at the corners. “Maybe you will do it again.”

“Maybe.” He won’t, probably. This is the penalty, Shane supposes: the having, the never having again. “The curse?”

Ilya leans back, eyes closed. “What curse?”

“The fucking—” Shane starts, ready to build up to a safe indignation, but Ilya cuts him off with a wave of his hand and tells him to give it a moment.

It’s an electric shiver through his body, sparking along each nerve. Shane’s stomach cramps, so tight he can’t breathe, a rushing wave of pain, and then—then it’s gone. His whole body feels lighter. The room is brighter, his heartbeat steadier. He hadn’t realized how off-balance he had been until the vertigo lifted.

His pyjama pants are in reaching distance. He tugs them on, self-conscious of his nudity, even while Ilya lies there with his dick soft against his thigh. “You’re going to go now?” Shane asks, and gets just a grunt in return.

“We made a deal. You said that was the—the price.” Shane stumbles over his words.

“I say that, yes.”

“How does that work?”

“You ask a lot of questions, Shane Hollander.”

“You can leave the circle now,” Shane says, which probably comes off stupid since Ilya is sitting on the couch, now looking at him through slitted eyes. It’s funny how Shane didn’t notice any change when it happened, not like the curse lifting. “So how does that work. Do you, um. Unsummon? You have to go now, right?”

Ilya heaves himself upright. He pads to the kitchen and rifles through Shane’s cupboards, pulls down a glass and pulls a Coke from the fridge. The tab opens with a snap. “Why do you think that?”

“You said so.”

“Oh, Hollander.” Ilya looks over at him, half a smile flickering on his face. “Haven’t you heard? Demons lie.”

Chapter 3: Shane Casts Out a Demon

Chapter Notes

He tries, anyway. Bless his heart.

Shane, having run through the normal options, is starting to consider drastic measures. Burning down his apartment, maybe. He could ask for a trade, but he’s halfway sure that Ilya, who is still, two weeks later, lounging around his apartment, would follow him to his new team and leave live snakes in his skates.

Shane doesn’t like having a roommate. It was bad when it was a demon stuck in a salt circle, and it’s worse now that it’s the same demon wandering around his apartment, sticking his fingers in Shane’s almond butter and smoking in his bathroom.

“This is gross,” Ilya complains, licking pulverized almonds off his fingers. “Why do you eat this?”

“I bet there’s something you’d like better out there,” Shane says, and gestures at the door. “Go on. Give it a try.”

“Get the other stuff,” Ilya suggests, and scoops another fingerful out of the jar. “I saw it on the TV. Nutella.”

“Nutella is bad for you,” Shane says, instead of anything sensible, like get your own groceries or even another round of why are you still here. “I’m not buying you Nutella.”

“Mm, okay. If you say so.”

When Shane drags himself in after that evening’s game, three of his pre-portioned, nutritionist-approved meals lay open on his kitchen counter, picked through. Shane picks them up one by one and disposes of what’s left. Moving mechanically, he scrapes brown rice and mushrooms into the compost and sets the glass containers in his dishwasher. He texts the meal service and asks for replacements.

Ilya is nowhere to be seen. Shane checks the bathrooms and the spare room and even peers under the bed just in case. He is, for the first time since this whole thing started, completely alone in his home.

He locks the front door.

Shane wakes up, several hours later, to a rhythmic thudding. It jostles through his brain, a steady pounding like a drum. He blinks blearily at the wall and wonders if the towels have wadded up in his dryer before reality sets in, cruel and cold.

“Fuck off,” Shane hisses through the gap between door and frame. The security chain stops Ilya from pushing the door open, and Shane can make out only a sliver of his coldly unamused expression.

“Open the door, Hollander.”

“No.”

“You think this will work?”

“You can’t walk through walls.”

Ilya’s teeth are a white smear in the darkness. “I do not need to walk through walls. I only need you to open this door.”

“Not gonna happen.”

Shane doesn’t recognize the metallic click at first. A quick grinding sound follows and then the soft whuff of flame. “I think maybe you will come out,” Ilya says. The cap flicks shut, then open again in a mesmerizing repetitive threat. “Or maybe we will see how all your nice wood floors burn.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, fine,” Shane says, and fumbles with the latch. He’s too tired to gauge whether it’s a real threat. Besides, he tells himself, Ilya would just bang on the door if he didn’t let him in. He’s already risking his neighbors coming to see what the fuss is about.

Ilya saunters in like an invited guest. He kicks his shoes into an untidy pile by the door, Shane’s shoes since he’s taken to stealing his clothes, and sets a paper bag on the counter in the kitchen.

“Where did you find Nutella at three in the morning?”

“Depanneur. Long walk,” Ilya says, and shoves two glass jars in the cabinet next to Shane’s protein powder. “You are up. Want to fuck?”

And yeah. Shane’s not dead. Of course he wants to.

When Shane was little, he had a book of stories, mostly fairy tales, truncated for a child’s reading level. Cinderella called birds to clean spilled lentils and the little mermaid walked on aching feet and a little Dutch boy stuck his finger in a dike to stop the water from flooding out and destroying his village. He stayed there all night in the freezing cold, his single finger holding back disaster.

Shane isn’t holding back a dam. There is no city-levelling disaster on call. He has, however, spent his life plugging up the outswell of his own desires. He had not realized until now, when the dam has crumbled and the water come rushing in, just how cold he had been.

It’s convenient, he tells himself as he lets Ilya manhandle him down the hall and into his bedroom. He strips when Ilya tells him to, leaves his clothes in a tidy pile on the dresser, and tries not to mind when Ilya drops his own (Shane’s) clothes on the floor. He forgets about the clothes entirely when Ilya steps closer, fever-hot hands running over Shane’s chest, down between his legs. He kisses like fire, with an intensity that makes Shane wonder if he will simply burn to ash, float through Ilya’s fingers.

Shane doesn’t think it’s a demon thing to suck cock like this, mouth hot and inviting, hands on Shane’s hips, dragging him closer. Shane watches the pink circle of Ilya’s mouth, watches his own cock sink into that heat, groans when Ilya swallows, throat working.

Shane drags Ilya off. “Wanna come when you fuck me,” he says, startled by his own bluntness.

None of this is a good idea. Knowing that doesn’t change his actions. Ilya is there, close, in Shane’s apartment. He knows the shape of Shane’s longing. Shane can’t claw that secret back. He had thought briefly about NDAs and contingency plans and then Ilya had stepped close, one eyebrow raised, and reached out a hand to trail his fingers under the hem of Shane’s shirt.

The second time they fucked, Shane had barely enjoyed it, too tangled in his own self-recrimination to pay attention to his own body. Now, his resistance is worn down to the smoothness of a well-travelled path. It’s easy to tell Ilya that he wants to be fucked, to let Ilya tangle their fingers together and yank Shane’s arm behind his back, press his head down with Ilya’s other hand, three points of connection all that grounds Shane to this world.

“Fuck, Hollander,” Ilya grunts out, and he ruts into Shane. He has made space for himself, found a hollow gap and poured himself into it. He shifts his angle and Shane keens, arching back for more. “That’s right.” Ilya’s hips snap into him, and Shane’s orgasm rips through him. Behind him, Ilya stutters, then goes limp, shoving Shane down into the bed.

Ilya is considerate during sex, awful otherwise. He lingers long enough for Shane to settle, and then he’s up, running a shower, singing loudly and off-key while he uses too much of Shane’s body wash. He disappears for a while and shows back up when Shane is done with his own shower, shoves him to the side, and crawls into Shane’s bed. He curls up under the covers like a cat and wraps himself in the covers even when Shane complains. Shane edges closer, basking in the heat.

Ilya loves Nutella. “Like chocolate butter but better,” he declares and licks the spoon clean. “You want?”

“I’m a professional athlete.”

“Okay mister big shot,” Ilya says, hands raised. He flops backwards onto the end of the couch, hits the remote with his ass, and has to juggle spoon, jar, and remote to turn Survivor back on. It’s a new season and they are lying to each other, always. “Did not know that hazelnut will make you skate worse.”

Shane chews determinedly at a mouthful of quinoa. The texture is all wrong, like mushy gravel. “Watch your fucking show.”

“I would like to do this, I think,” Ilya says, watching intently as a player throws the clue they found into a volcano. “Look at that. Look at how many trees they have. The ocean. I have never seen the ocean.”

“It’s a bit of a drive. Bet you can make it by morning.”

“We did not have this where I grew up.” Ilya brandishes his spoon and Shane has a sudden horrifying premonition of chocolate spread on his leather couch. “Not allowed there. I always wanted to try.”

“What, the demon plane?”

Ilya looks at him like he’s stupid. “How many demons you know with this accent?”

“I don’t know any demons,” Shane says reasonably. “What do you mean where you grew up, then?”

“Russia, idiot.”

“How does that work, then?” Shane isn’t sure he’s allowed to ask this. Ilya hasn’t offered any personal details so far. Everything Shane knows he’s picked up in the course of antagonistic cohabitation.

Ilya shrugs. “I lived in Russia. Now I do not. Simple.”

“That doesn’t sound simple.”

“You want to watch this show or you want to interrogate me?”

Ilya is getting worked up, so Shane, who does not care about Boston Rob or tribal council or their whole stupid island, nods and turns to face the television.

“Jędza,” the woman’s business card says. She is tall, maybe mid-fifties if Shane has to judge, fine-featured with thick, expressive eyebrows. She is dressed how Shane might expect from someone from the PR team, a loose, silky top tucked into high-waisted pants, all of it with an expensive sheen. Her hair is tucked on top of her head with a series of golden pins, though a few stray ringlets escape. She is rated five stars on Yelp.

As sleek and modern as the witch is, her shop is the opposite. It is down a side street off Rue Sainte-Catherine, an inconspicuous storefront with old-fashioned black and gold lettering on the glass window and a little bell that chimed his entrance. Thickets of dried herbs hang from the ceiling and bowls of crystals line the glass counter. Everywhere there is lace: a tablecloth under a display of woven wicker figurines, a flimsy curtain that divides the front and back of the shop.

Shane peers at the rest of the merchandise. A shirt on a hanger reads witch please.

“This is the tourist side,” she explains, gesturing at the trinketry. “Come. My office is in the back.”

Shane settles in a thick orange armchair and accepts a cup of tea before he thinks to wonder if it is a good idea to accept drinks from a professional witch.

“Chamomile,” she offers, sipping from her own cup. “You seem on edge.”

“I’ve never done this before.”

“So,” she says, and gestures with one beringed hand, “what do you want?” 

She is blunt in a way that he likes, straightforward with her concerns. She has Shane produce the original incantation and the spellwork, tsks in disapproval when he tells her he didn’t take any photographs of the actual salt, long since swept up. Her hands are dry and warm as she holds his to examine the scar leftover from the blood drawing.

“Cut here next time,” says, and twists his hand to tap at the side of his middle finger. “It hurts less. Heals easier.”

“I’m not planning on doing this again.”

She shrugs. “You say that now.”

She has a faint accent, a slight shift to her vowels that suggests she was born somewhere else, though Shane isn’t good enough at accents to make it out properly. Not that it matters. He wasn’t looking for a practitioner of any particular background; he needs someone to get the demon out of his house. Already it feels too late. The damage is done. Shane walks into his home and looks for Ilya, his body reacts to his presence like a sunflower chasing the light. He needs to sever this cleanly.

The estimate is higher than Shane expected, but he swallows his discomfort and pays her in gold, three small bars no longer than his thumb. She does not offer a receipt, and Shane wonders if he’s being taken advantage of and whether he cares. On the way out of the shop, he brushes shoulders with a gaggle of teenage girls oohing over a milky-white basket of crystals.

Another month passes, eaten up by the hectic rush of practice and games and travel. Every time he comes home, something else has changed. There is a plant on his windowsill or a throw blanket on the armchair. There is a pile of DVDs spilling over his coffee table, all of the Fast and Furious movies, and Ilya on the couch, chewing popcorn as he watches Dominic Toretto live his life a quarter mile at a time.

Shane’s apartment has always felt bland and impersonal. It had been designed by a stranger to appeal to a broad, flat appeal. He is used to coming home to his possessions tidied, his laundry cleaned and sorted, his meals waiting in his apartment. His housekeeper has been re-engaged, and Ilya had made an eye-rolling deal, agreeing to stay out of sight in exchange for the key to the apartment. Shane finds himself looking for the changes every time he comes home, searching for Ilya’s thumbprint on his life.

He comes home after a game expecting Ilya to be waiting with Mario Kart ready. They had played when Shane was meant to be napping, left off with Shane up three to one. The same steel core of competition lives in both of them, and it makes Shane like him more, easing up despite his best intentions. Ilya isn’t in the living room, though.

Shane finds him eventually on the roof, leaning against the bulkhead, a cigarette burned down nearly to the filter between two fingers. The stars are muted by the city light, but the sky is dark and moonless and Shane can make out the scattered gleam across the throat of the night.

“Is nice,” Ilya offers. He drops his cigarette and crushes it under his heel.

“It’s cold.”

“Not so bad.”

Shane tugs his jacket closer around himself. It’s November in Montreal, and winter is a wild animal worrying at any exposed skin. His breath comes out in a white cloud. “You should come inside.”

Ilya glances sidelong at him, then goes back to staring up at the sky. “Now you want me inside?”

“It’ll be hard to explain why you’re a popsicle on the roof.”

Ilya scoffs and leans further back into the wall. He’s in one of Shane’s hoodies, thin fabric printed with Property of Montreal and a matching pair of sweats. He should look ridiculous, but instead the sight makes Shane’s stupid heart kick. Ilya lights another cigarette and blows smoke at Shane.

“There are more stars out of the city,” Shane says. “Lots of them. I have a cottage, a few hours away. When it’s clear you can see the Milky Way.” He doesn’t know why he’s saying it. It’s not an invitation. He doesn’t want this demon in his cottage, the one place that’s really his, built just for him, where he is just Shane. Ilya flicks another glance at him, then back up to the sky,

“Maybe one day. Would be nice to see.”

“It is.”

They stand there together while Ilya finishes his cigarette. “Okay,” he says. He drops the butt and watches Shane stoop to pick it back up. Ilya heads for the stairs. “Mario Kart, yes? I am winning.”

Shane follows him downstairs and loses in a best of eleven. His fingers smell like tobacco for the rest of the night.

Shane goes home for Christmas, like he always does, and wears flannel pyjamas and lets his mother take a photograph of him and his dad next to the tree, the latest in a decades-long series of photographs that she keeps in a padded photo album.

She puts her hand on his cheeks and smiles at him fondly, eyes crinkling around the edges. “I missed you.”

“I live in Montreal, Mom. I see you all the time.”

“We both missed you,” his father says, leaning over to call through the kitchen door. “Twenty minutes to dinner.”

“So,” his mom says, rubbing her hands over his arms. “What’s new? How is everything?”

“Everything is fine,” he says, at once annoyed and endeared by being forever eight years old in her eyes. “The team is fine.”

“Well your power play isn’t.”

“Except that,” he allows, and smiles, perfused with warmth.

He lets her fuss over him and nods along while she rants about a potential sponsor. “Not a good fit,” she says archly, and winds into a long-winded explanation about the man’s views of hockey and his lack of email professionalism.

The secret is a sandpaper scrape on his soul. Shane wants to ask her advice, but his mom is his mom. She has firm opinions about who he is; he doesn’t want to imagine what she would think to know he was playing with unfamiliar magic. He doesn’t want to tell her what else he’s been doing.

He gets home late on Boxing Day. The fluorescent lights in his parking garage shine a harsh yellow, and he navigates the narrow turns until he reaches his assigned spot, only to find the space already taken. It sets his bad mood a notch further, and Shane grits his teeth while he finds the guest parking spaces and scribbles the number for the tow company on the back of a receipt dug out of his glove box.

There is no cell service in the subterranean parking garage, and it’s spotty all the way up his elevator, so he’s only just gotten someone on the line when he pushes through his front door.

“Yeah, orange,” he says, kicking his shoes off. “Temporary plates. No, I definitely didn’t authorize—”

“Hollander,” Ilya calls, and bounds towards him. “You are back.”

“Shut up.” Shane tries to extricate himself from Ilya’s grip. “I’m on with the tow company. Yeah, sorry. Temp plates. B E P—hey!”

“Never mind. Big mistake,” Ilya says into Shane’s phone, then he ends the call. “You do not like my car?”

Shane snatches his phone back. “You don’t have a car,” he says, and then, at the smug look on Ilya’s face, amends that to, “How the fuck do you have a car? Did you steal a car? You can’t even register a car.”

“Fake ID,” Ilya says, shrugging. “Paid a man on that street, the big one? Very convincing, he says. You want to see?”

Shane has to stop and reconsider his life choices. “What do you mean you got a fake ID? That’s—that’s so illegal. How did you even pay for that?”

“Ah, I will show you,” Ilya says and rummages around in the back pocket of his sweats. He emerges with an expensive-looking leather wallet. Inside is a convincing facsimile of a Quebec driver’s license, a thick stuffing of paper money, and—

“You fucking asshole,” Shane breathes, and tries to grab the credit card out of Ilya’s hand. “That’s my card.”

“Is nice, right? Metal. Very fancy. You were not using it. I found it under your panties.”

“They’re boxers, asshole, and you can’t just steal my shit. You’re trying to tell me you put a car on my credit card?”

“Charge card, not credit card. Man at the dealership told me,” he adds, when Shane’s face must give away his confusion. “No limit. You are very rich. What is the point of having money if you do not buy nice things?”

“It’s orange,” Shane says dumbly.

“Very nice orange. Porsche. Not like your car.”

Shane grips the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb, as though this will ease the burgeoning headache. He wonders if he can go back to Ottawa. He has practice in the morning, but maybe his team would believe him if he called out dead. He can’t, though. He can’t go back to Ottawa, because his mother would ask questions about why he was back so soon, and who knows what Ilya would charge to his accounts in the meantime. A private island, maybe.

A new thought occurs to him. “How did you buy a car over Christmas?”

“Talked to them last week,” Ilya says, and grabs Shane’s duffel from where they are still standing in the hallway. He lugs it down to Shane’s room and sets it by the foot of the bed, because Shane hates when people put luggage on the bed, and throws himself bodily across the bed, face down. “Not nice to be stuck all the time, Hollander.”

“So go home,” Shane says, and hates how the demand loses more of its teeth with every repetition.

“Give me your phone,” Ilya demands. He drags Shane down onto the bed and wrestles it out of his pocket when Shane refuses. He unlocks the screen and taps in a new contact. “That is me. See? Now you do not have to miss me when you go.”

“I never miss you.”

“You are a bad liar.” Ilya lays back on the bed and props his head on his arms, watching Shane. Shane flops down next to him, face down, and stares back at him. He tries not to notice how the sandpaper feeling has soothed.

“I make you a deal,” Ilya offers. “I will not buy any more cars if you suck my dick.”

“You can’t buy any more cars anyway. I’m going to cancel that card.”

“No fun. I think maybe bright green? Something very fast.”

“Ugh. Whatever.”

“Whatever what, Hollander?”

“Fine. I accept your stupid deal. No buying any more fucking cars.” Shane closes his eyes against the magic that shivers up his spine and lets Ilya push him gently down.

“All Stars is next week,” Shane says on a Tuesday in January. It’s a rare day with no hockey, no practice, and no tape review. Ilya is laid out on the couch frowning at his iPad, a bowl of pickled something resting on his stomach. “In Toronto.”

Shane had expected to see less of him. Rozanov has his stupid orange car and a pile of cash he found under Shane’s socks. For all that he talks about wanting to see the ocean or the sun-bleached beaches from Survivor he never seems to go far anymore, disappearing for an hour or two at a time and then settling back into Shane’s apartment like he belongs there. He seems tired. Being such an unrepentant asshole must really take it out of him.

“Do you know why the watermelon plant does not work?” Ilya taps aggressively at the screen. “Zombies are coming, Hollander.”

Shane leans up behind him, close enough that their arms brush. “You need to put it here,” he says, and points, then takes the iPad and finishes the level while Ilya peers over his shoulder.

“Oh, shit, do next one,” Ilya demands.

Shane hands the iPad back. “I have dinner with Hayden.”

Ilya sticks his tongue out like a toddler. They had only met once, when Hayden swung by after practice to borrow some tools from Shane, but Ilya took a weird, immediate dislike to him, glaring as Hayden picked through Shane’s kitchen. “She is too good for him.”

“They’re good for each other,” Shane says absently. “She’s pregnant again.”

“I can cut his dick off for her.”

“Yeah, I don’t think that’s what she’s looking for, actually.” Shane moves around the room, unearthing his hoodie from a pile of pillows and his keys from the little bowl by the door. It’s strange, living with another person like this. He has started to learn the new order of his life. His things are not where he leaves them, but Ilya has his own particular methods, a preference for which drawer the knives go in and a dislike for Shane’s mounded throw pillows that usually ends with them pushed up into one corner of the couch. Shane considers tossing them all in the guest room.

Jackie, for her part, snorts when Shane relays the offer, though Hayden looks at him in abject horror.

“I can’t believe he’s still there.”

“I’m trying.” Shane sets a platter of vegetables on the table and returns to the kitchen for the glasses. “I asked the witch for an update and she told me she would hex my balls off if I asked again.”

“I can get you a gun,” Hayden offers, and rolls his eyes when Jackie swats his arm with a tea towel.

“No you can’t.”

“No I can’t,” he sighs. “You have to get rid of him.”

“I know,” Shane says, and does not probe the sore feeling that comes when he says it. He hasn’t told Hayden about the rest of it, any of the things that he’s let Ilya do to him, the ones he’s begged Ilya to do. It’s not anyone’s concern, not for any number of reasons.

Hayden is Shane’s best friend. They’ve been close since the first time Hayden corralled Shane over to his house for dinner. Shane is used to sleeping one bed over from him. Hayden’s kids call him Uncle Shane.

Hayden tries, every few months, to set Shane up with someone he’s met, a girl from the media team or one of Jackie’s yoga friends. He takes Shane’s excuses with good grace. Shane doesn’t know how far that grace extends. Jackie hasn’t said anything, not to her husband and not to Shane. As much as he trusts her, the secret is a sword dangling above his head.

Shane doesn’t want to know how Hayden will look at him if he finds out. The rest of them are his teammates, there as long as their contracts last. Hayden is his friend. Shane hasn’t had many of those in his life. It feels a fair trade to keep this piece of himself locked away so that he’ll never have to find out.

“At least he’s not stuck in that circle anymore,” Jackie says. She kicks a toy truck out of the way and passes a stack of napkins to Shane to set out. He likes the chaos of their house and how she always puts him to work. They’re his only real friends. It’s sad that the closest thing to third place is the demon squatting in his home.

“About that,” Shane says, and winces. “He never was.” Even the memory of it has him cringing. Ilya admitted it one morning, laughing as he sprinkled salt on his eggs. Shane’s shitty spellwork couldn’t keep him in. Ilya had thought it was funny. Shane still feels hot with embarrassment.

“No fucking way.” Hayden’s frown is deep-set on his face. “He was lying to you the whole time?”

“I guess. I think he thought it was a big joke. I’m gone all the time, so he just—” Shane makes a gesture to indicate that Ilya had wandered around his apartment, poking through his things, returning each time to sit patiently in his circle. There is a tablet in Shane’s kitchen that shows his schedule for the week. Ilya hadn’t even needed to guess. There had been entire weeks when Shane had been on travel, riddled with guilt and anxiety, and Ilya had been wandering around Montreal. “He said he thought I would have a panic attack if he told me.”

“Oh so he was looking out for your feelings?” Hayden’s tone is appropriately incredulous. “You sound insane.”

“I think it’s funny,” Jackie says, and sips her sparkling water. “Ugh. Have a glass of wine for me. It’s the least you can do.”

Shane lets her guide the conversation back to safer topics: their travails potty training the twins, the gender reveal the WAGs are planning, the book club she only goes to because it gets her out of the house. Shane likes her, likes the glimpse into a life that isn’t his own, tangentially tied to the team but full of her own dramas.

Ilya texts Shane while he’s at All Stars. He sends a grainy, poorly-lit photo of his dick and demands the same in return, which Shane refuses. Shane spends the whole time waiting for Ilya to show up. Toronto is only a few hours from Montreal. Shane’s hotel reservation was on his calendar.

Shane spends every moment he’s not on the ice waiting for it. His teammates swarm the hotel bar, gregariously drunk, and Shane watches the door. Ilya could appear at any moment. He could introduce himself to Shane’s teammates, swing his arm around Shane’s shoulders. They could fuck in the hotel, Shane with his face pressed into the bed to muffle any sound. He thinks about how his teammates might look at him after, when the noise leaked out anyway, whether they would sneer with smug satisfaction, their suspicions proven true. He presses on the thought like a bruise and is surprised to find it less tender than he expected. It’s a series of dangerous imaginings, and he tells himself he’s relieved when Ilya doesn’t appear.

When Shane gets home, he finds Ilya half-asleep on the couch. He blinks blearily at Shane.

“You okay?” Shane asks.

“Fine,” Ilya says, and closes his eyes again. “Tired. Make a deal with me, Hollander.”

“What kind of deal?”

“You buy me those doughuts. Maple. You know.”

“And what do I get out of it?”

“You eat one.”

“I don’t—”

‘I know, I know.” Ilya waves a lazy hand. “Macro-thing. But you will like it, Hollander. Eat the doughnut”

The frosting is cloyingly sweet on the back of Shane’s teeth, sweeter still when he tastes it on Ilya’s tongue. He can’t make out the shape of this anymore, what is deals and what is want. All of it swirls together into a tingling anticipation and a worry that writhes under his skin.

Shane’s phone buzzes. He doesn’t recognize the number, but it’s a Montreal area code so he answers anyway, clicking through on the third ring. “Hello?”

“Is this Shane Hollander?”

“Um. Who is this?”

“My name is Sergeant Tremblay with SPVM. I’m calling in regards to an Ilya Rozanov.”

“Rozanov?” Shane asks, startled. He hadn’t known Ilya had a last name.

“He named you as his emergency contact.”

“Oh, fuck,” Shane says, already stumbling for his shoes. Fear flutters under his ribs. “Is he okay?”

“He’s not hurt.” Shane can hear papers rustling. “Mr. Rozanov was picked up earlier tonight for public intoxication. He was trying to fight someone over a hockey game. Er, your hockey game, I believe, unless the name is a coincidence.”

Shane breathes deeply. “What do I have to do?”

Shane gets to check off another mark for the next time the rookies play Never Have I Ever. He keeps his head down, baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, and signs a stack of paperwork to release Ilya into his recognizance. When they bring him out from the back of the station, his curls are plastered to his head with what Shane hopes is sweat.

“You reek,” Shane informs him as he maneuvers Ilya into the passenger side, ignoring his protests that he wants to drive. “Did you fall into a still?”

“What is. Still?”

“How they make booze.” Despite himself, Shane can’t help the fond exasperation that swallows him whole. Ilya, drunk, stumbles over English. His accent comes out heavier, and he falls asleep before they get home, cheek pressed against the passenger side window, snoring softly.

Shane helps him strip when they get back, leads him into the shower and then gets in with him when Ilya blinks at him from under the spray. “Not gonna happen,” he tells Ilya when he reaches for Shane’s dick, and Ilya goes along, soluble under Shane’s hands as he squirts shampoo into his hair and scrubs the bar stench off his skin.

“You can’t do this again,” Shane says, because he needs to say it. “What happened?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Ilya says, and rests his head in the crook of Shane’s neck. Shane repositions him so he’s less likely to drown under the spray. “Wanted to.” He wavers on his feet and complies when Shane towels him off and pushes him gently towards the bedroom.

Ilya twines around him under the covers, his leg wrapped around Shane’s, his head on his chest, like he can’t bear to let go. “I know this is not real,” he says, so quiet that Shane can barely hear it. “Is okay.”

“What’s not real?”

“This. You and me. I know this,” he repeats, stumbling into a yawn. His eyes never leave Shane.

“It’s not,” Shane says. He can’t tell whether it’s a question or not.

Shane is in Michigan three days later, shivering in the cold. It is the quiet lull between morning practice and their evening game; half the team has gone out for lunch, the other half dispersed to nap or hang out or do whatever else they can drum up in this shitty, frozen town. Shane wanders down the river bank, exchanging nods with the other bundled-up passers-by.

His phone buzzes in his pocket, and he steps into the shelter between two buildings. “This is Shane.”

The witch doesn’t bother to introduce herself. “I have found a solution,” she says, as straightforward as ever. “We can take care of your demon problem.”

Chapter 4: Shane Keeps a Demon

The ritual has to be done on a full moon. Three weeks, she tells him, exasperated that Shane does not keep track of its phases. Three weeks, Shane repeats back to her. It is good, he tells himself, to have a deadline, to build a boundary between the fantasy he has been living in and his return to reality. There are eleven games between now and then, twenty-one rises and falls of the sun.

For once, his hockey schedule is accommodating. Three weeks from now is the middle of a stretch of home games, all of them important but perhaps not as important as that one free Thursday evening. Shane has to keep his mind on hockey. It is late enough in the season that they’re jockeying for a playoffs spot. He would never say it out loud, but he thinks they have a shot, second round at least. Colorado is playing a dominant game in the Western Conference, but Montreal has been picking up speed as the season goes on. He can’t think about Ilya, about how he would watch all of Shane’s games and pretend he didn’t.

When Shane gets home, there are seventeen days left. Ilya is on the side of the couch that Shane has come to think of as his, wrapped in a green plaid blanket. His curls are mussed, the side of his face pink where it pressed against the armrest.

“Good morning,” Shane teases, and Ilya blinks sleepily back at him.

“Is morning?”

“It’s two in the afternoon. Have you been sleeping all day?”

Ilya’s hand covers his yawn. The dark smudges under his eyes do nothing to diminish his beauty. “Am tired. Was out all night.”

“You look it.”

Ilya’s eyes drift shut. “Thank you. What is for dinner?”

Shane consults the list on the fridge. “Whatever the nutritionist sent over. Uh, turkey sausage and celeriac puree. Side salad.”

“Ugh.”

“I’m sure it’s fine.”

“Let’s get McDonalds.”

“That’s gross, Ilya.”

Ilya smiles, eyes still shut. “But I want it. Will you get it for me?”

“Get it yourself.”

“No, I do not think so.” He stretches, and his shirt rides up. It’s one of Shane’s many team-branded soft tees, a little small on Ilya. Shane wants to tear it off him. He’s spent four days thinking about Ilya, about coming home to someone waiting for him.

Ilya watches him through slitted eyes, cat-like. “I’ll fuck you if you get it.”

“Deal,” Shane agrees, and Ilya sighs happily as the magic fritters through them both.

Shane doesn’t tell him about the witch. He keeps it close to his chest, a barbed secret that tears at him every time Iya curls up against him on the couch or nestles his thumbs in the dimples above Shane’s ass.

Shane waits for him to do something outrageous, to come home covered in glitter and smelling like cheap perfume, or to hit golf balls off the roof of Shane’s apartment building and break someone’s window, but he doesn’t. Shane wishes he would. It would be easier to invite the end of this if Ilya were less agreeable, if he were less warm where their bodies press together or if he didn’t thank Shane politely when he brings home the maple candy that Ilya had seen on a TV show.

It feels like a funeral in slow motion, the slow decline of whatever this is, six months of cohabitation extended until Ilya feels as natural in this space as Shane does. He thinks about coming home from playoffs to an empty apartment, the lights off, everything just where he left it, and ignores the gnawing anxiety that builds under his skin.

“Watched your game,” Ilya tells him with twelve days to go. It’s late, and while Shane has long gotten used to putting on a pleasant expression and answering inane questions about his season and his team, it doesn’t mean he likes it anymore.

“You have fun?” Shane asks, already angling towards the bedroom and hoping Ilya will follow.

“No. Goalie sucks.”

“Well he just got here from Laval,” Shane says reasonably. He can’t expect the call-up to put up Drapeau’s numbers.

“And you,” Ilya says, pointing at him. “Pickpocketed in the neutral zone. This is embarrassing for you. More embarrassing that Pike had to save you from breakout.”

“What do you know anyway?” Shane is already sore and irritable, and this isn’t helping. “Since when do you watch hockey?”

“Nineteen seventy five.”

“What?”

“That is when I started watching hockey. About that,” Ilya amends, wavering one hand. “Ah, Gretzky. He is worth watching.”

“I don’t believe you,” Shane says flatly. It’s a stupid lie, one that doesn’t gain Ilya anything. Shane can’t see the angle behind it, but he’s certain there is one.

“Okay, so you do not believe me.” Ilya shrugs. “Does not change your backhand.”

Shane stomps out of the room.

Nothing about Ilya makes sense. He’s pretty sure they don’t have hockey in the demon realm. Six months of watching Shane’s games would be enough to give him enough familiarity to comment on the game. Maybe Shane is too trusting. He wants to believe him. He’s never been great at reading people’s trustworthiness; back on his junior team, he believed Stevenson was his friend for six months, until someone took him aside and told him what he had been saying behind his back.

“Why are your panties in a knot?” Ilya asks, wandering in behind him. He tilts his head to one side and watches Shane as he strips off his game suit, trading it for a worn tee and sweats. Shane isn’t sure what he sees. He always imagines that his feelings are written on his skin, too big to be held inside his body. Other people don’t seem to feel that way, though. He’s been told that he’s flat. Indecipherable. He’s read worse about himself on Reddit, before he got smart enough to block it on his phone.

“Malysh,” Ilya says, and runs a hand down Shane’s arm like he’s gentling a horse. “What is wrong?”

This isn’t—they don’t do this. Shane wants to turn away and hide his face. He should tell Ilya to sleep in the guest room like he should have done six months ago. He shakes Ilya’s hand off and goes to brush his teeth. When he gets back, Ilya is already asleep, his face soft, lips parted.

With eight days to go, Ilya fucks Shane over the back of the couch, Shane’s fingers grasping at nothing as Ilya’s body thrusts into him. His want is a physical thing, barely slaked when he comes on Ilya’s dick, gasping out his name. Ilya murmurs something in Russian, yanks Shane up and holds him there while he fucks into him.

“You will never forget me,” Ilya says, and he sounds almost angry. “You will go on your trip and you will feel me, Hollander.”

Shane whines. His trembling body is clay under Ilya’s hands, ready to be molded to his specifications. Ilya has made a place for himself inside of Shane, a place where no one else has ever been. No, Shane will never forget him.

It’s only later, as Shane leans against the window on the team plane, pleasantly sore, that he wonders what Ilya knows.

Shane gets home on a Wednesday. There are two days left, just one night. He gets on his knees before the door has even closed, scrabbling at Ilya’s belt.

“Eager,” Ilya comments with a smirk, and he has no idea, Shane thinks, he has no idea, the words running a mean refrain through his head.

On Thursday, Ilya orders takeout on Shane’s credit card and they eat sushi together, cross-legged on the couch. Guilt gnaws at Shane from the inside until he is half convinced it is a physical presence, a creature that will burst from his skin to show Ilya the depths of his betrayal.

The witch gets there at six. Shane meets her in the hallway outside the apartment.

“He is in there?” she asks, jerking her chin towards the door.

“Yes.”

“Any changes?”

“No.”

She scrutinizes him and Shane shrinks under her gaze. Her stern, efficient manner reminds him of his grandmother. “You are lying to me, but that is all right. I know what I’m doing, even if you don’t.”

“I’m not lying to you,” Shane protests. “Everything is the same.”

He waits for her to proclaim it, the messy secret that underpins his new hesitations. Maybe it will be easier if someone else says it for him, flays him open and forces his secrets into the light. She doesn’t, though, only sniffs and gestures for him to precede her in.

The supplies are camouflaged in Shane’s kitchen. A new bag of salt, a package of dried herbs. She carries a leather bag with the rest. It isn’t a complicated spell, she assured him. A simple binding to prevent the demon from retaliating against the spellcaster, and then an incantation to spend him back. Back is where he belongs, Shane reminds himself. Back to his home, not this one that Shane yanked him away to.

“Hollander,” Ilya calls when Shane steps into the room. “Where did you go? My dick will not—who is this?”

Shane’s face burns. “She’s here to help you go home.”

“Hollander,” Ilya says. The confusion on his face is an ache echoed in Shane’s chest. “Hollander, what is this?”

“You can’t stay here,” Shane says. He practiced these words, alone in a hotel room in Buffalo. He knows all of the reasons why Ilya can’t stay. It’s not good for Shane, for his career, for his life. He needs to move on. And it’s not good for Ilya, to be a limpet clinging to the edge of Shane’s life. “You have to go back,” he says, and the words are ash in his mouth, bitter. His vision swims.

“This is what you want?” Ilya’s expression is that of a wounded animal, startled by the trap. Behind Shane, the witch is chanting something in a low, melodic stream.

Shane doesn’t want this, but it doesn’t matter what Shane wants. He has spent his life doing things he doesn’t want, early practices and bag skates until he puked. He cried his first homesick night in his billet family’s spare room and bought an apartment in Montreal when men more powerful than him decided that this would be his home for as long as they decided to keep him.  He has learned to find the line between wanting and needing.

He starts to shake his head. He doesn’t know how to explain any of this. The words are stuck down deep in his throat, a choking weight. It won’t help to cry about it. Ilya won’t care about the conflict raging inside Shane, how he’s closer than he’s ever been to straying from his prescribed path. He only sees the betrayal.

Ilya says something in Russian, a thick clot of consonants. Shane can’t understand the words, but there’s a glaze of anger layered on top of it. 

The chanting stops. Shane thinks the witch must be done with the binding, but then she speaks, her voice gone faint. “Ilyusha?”

Ilya’s eyes snap to her. His brows furrow. “We have met?” Shane watches his expression change, flitting between confusion and anger and melting into something new that Shane can’t place, a look that softens the planes of his face, his mouth parted slightly in shock. His face goes white and he reaches for the couch to steady himself.

Shane looks between them, finds the witch teary-eyed. She scrubs her hand over her face, leaving a smear of mascara by the corner of her eye.

“Sveta,” Ilya echoes in a stricken voice. “How?”

She says something in Russian, and Ilya answers in the same, and then they are embracing in Shane’s living room, clasping each other’s arms. Ilya cups her face in his hands, the way he does to Shane sometimes, like she is something precious, then grips her tight, draws her to his chest and gives a single, wracking sob.

“It has been a long time,” the witch, Svetlana, says, when they are sat at Shane’s dining table. She clutches a mug of tea between her hands. Chamomile. She has drawn her sharp-edged composure back around herself, but glimpses of joy peek through when she glances over at Ilya. 

“I don’t understand,” Shane confesses. The two of them have spent the better part of the last hour talking in rapid, fluent Russian while Shane felt like an intruder in his own home. He picks at his cuticles, unable to stop. “How do you know each other?”

“Our parents were friends.”

“But he’s a demon,” Shane says. It’s as though the entire room has shifted ninety degrees and he’s the only one who noticed. Demons live on the demon plane. They don’t grow up in Russia together with little girls who will one day become witches.

“Not always,” Ilya says. His voice is rough. He won’t look at Shane. Svetlana says something to him in rapid Russian and he responds in the same, exasperated. “You tell him,” he adds in English.

She sighs. “Ilya’s father made a trade. Ilya was the offering.”

“What?” Shane’s voice sounds ragged to his own ears. He cannot imagine either of his parents doing anything to hurt him. “So he became a demon?”

“It’s like—” She runs a tongue over her teeth. “Indentured servitude.”

“For how long?”

Ilya shrugs. “Long enough. I did not want to go back.”

“I will not send him back, of course,” she says, as though there is no question. Of course there isn’t, Shane thinks. He didn’t want to, either. He could not ask her to go through with this, not when Ilya is sitting slouch-shouldered at his table scowling into his tea.

Shane does not want to examine the relief he feels too closely. It isn’t his fault if this happens to him. It isn’t his choice that the witch he found won’t do the spell. It isn’t his fault that the demon in his house will stay. “You won’t send him back,” he repeats, savoring the taste of it.

Ilya cuts through Shane’s euphoria. “Does not matter. I will go anyway.” He looks at Shane when he says it, like he wants to catch the moment Shane’s face falls. “Twenty minutes ago you wanted me gone. And now what, Hollander? You will miss me?”

Svetlana asks something in Russian, and Ilya answers in the same. 

“Can we—English?”

“They are trying to pull me back.” Ilya shrugs broad shoulders. Shane knows by now what it looks like when he is pretending. The nonchalance is a careful facade. “Takes effort to stay here. Easier at first. Little bits of energy from making deals, stupid little ones. Now I do not know. It was nice,” he says. He glances at Shane, then away. “Thank you.”

“I don’t want you to go.” Shane’s voice sounds pathetic in his own ears. It’s the first time he’s allowed himself to admit it. The crumbling dam of his self control cracks again. Soon there will be nothing left.

They stay at Shane’s dining table until the early hours of the morning. Svetlana eats one of Shane’s pre-portioned athletes’ meals and makes a face at Ilya when she thinks Shane isn’t looking. It wears the years off her face, and Shane can imagine them, at eight, at twelve, at fifteen, a pair of troublemakers. Ilya sits close to her, his shoulder nearly touching, and watches her with open wonder. 

She promises to come back in the morning. She wants to spend as much time with Ilya as she can, and Shane feels the same way. He would squeeze the drops out of the hour if he could.

Shane is no stranger to failure. It comes hand in hand with success. To strive for something greater than himself is to accept that sometimes he will fail. He has ended seasons with surgery, patching his body back together after a failed cup run. He has watched his teammates straggle off the ice, heads low, jaws tight. Failure has always been a bitter friend.

He watches them say goodbye, Svetlana’s eyes creased with age, Ilya mustering up his flagging strength, and an odd sour taste floods his mouth. He failed, unequivocally. He failed to banish the demon and he failed to stand against his own desires, and his failure has changed nothing. Shane is left in the aftermath, with a demon that will leave him anyway, and all he feels is hollow.

Ilya hovers in the hallway until Shane jerks his head in the direction of the bedroom.

They don’t talk, but Ilya’s hands strip Shane bare, and his mouth follows the ladder of Shane’s ribs. They fuck face to face, Shane with his knees tight around Ilya’s body, like he’s trying to hold him in place. 

Shane doesn’t even get out of bed the next morning before he’s calling the team’s medical office and lying blatantly. He hangs up when they ask him to come in for an in-person assessment. It doesn’t feel good to lie, but the alternative is worse.

“How old were you?” Shane asks. He is lying with his head on Ilya’s chest, listening to his heartbeat. His too-human heartbeat. He’s mostly human, he explained. Some demon physiology layered on top. He’s only aged a few years in the last thirty, but he will be old before he is free again.

Ilya’s heart beats slowly, slower than Shane’s. There are eight beats before he answers. “Sixteen. I was sixteen.”

“How did he make you?”

Ilya’s fingers card through Shane’s hair. It is impossible that he has not asked these questions over the last six months. It is like a dam has opened up and Ilya is willing to bare pieces of himself. “I said yes. He told me it was to help my mother.”

“Your mom?”

“She died. A long time ago. He said it would help her.”

“Bring her back?”

“Yes.”

“Did it?”

His hand pauses. “No,” Ilya says finally. “No, I do not think so. I was not there to see, but I knew it was a lie. I think maybe I did not care.”

Shane absorbs this information. Ilya, at sixteen years old, sold into a lifetime of magical servitude. “You were just a baby.”

“And when you were sixteen?”

“I already knew I was going to play in the MLH,” Shane says absently. “I was playing in juniors. There were scouts at my games.” Ilya gives him a look Shane can’t decipher.

“We should get up,” he says, and dislodges Shane. “Sveta is coming back soon.” He shrugs into one of Shane’s shirts, pulls on Shane’s underwear and Shane’s pants. He brushes his teeth with, thankfully, not Shane’s toothbrush, but one he pulled out of the drawer of spares branded with Shane’s dentist’s name. He brushes his hair with Shane’s hairbrush and uses Shane’s cologne and fits into Shane’s life like a puzzle piece that Shane had not known was missing until it appeared.

“I don’t want you to go,” Shane says in a small voice, near to crying.

“Ifs and ands, Hollander.” It is only the morning, but Ilya already looks worn out, wrung through by the effort of staying where he is.

“How long?”

“Week, maybe?” Ilya shrugs. “It was nice.”

Shane thinks about Ilya sitting on the couch, watching Survivor. He wants to take him to the shore and watch Ilya watch the ocean. Ilya would like the cottage, he thinks. He would be beautiful there, under the vast sprawl of the sky.

Svetlana spends the next two days in Shane’s house. Shane does not know if it is a magical thing or a Russian thing or just a them thing, but she makes herself at home the same way that Ilya did, settling in without asking. She has opinions on hockey, sharp insights into the Metros’ power play and how they are struggling tonight without Shane. She sits close to Ilya, chatting in fluid Russian while Shane tries to pick out words.

They keep the volume low while they watch the games. Shane does not usually listen to hockey commentary. He focuses on his own team and the collection of coaches that hone him into something more than himself. 

Hockey is a nebulous kind of fame, barely C list, but still people think they know him. They watch videos of Shane training in the summer and analyze how he stands, how he skates, how he laughs. Some of his teammates lean into it, posting stupid Reels or talking about themselves on podcasts. Shane went the opposite way. He locked it down, refusing to give them an ounce of his life. He gives bland answers in interviews. The team is special, they are getting the puck in deep, really showing up in the third period. His real life he keeps close to his chest, so that his life becomes a blank slate on which they can write their own intentions. 

On the television, they talk about him as an abstract. There he is a limited slice of Shane Hollander, that exists only in arenas and practice rinks, one that played seventy nine games last season. They discuss his absence, and how the Metros have swapped Andropov up to the first line. Shane Hollander is resilient, they say. They expect him back for the next game.

Shane, who has never wanted anything but hockey, wonders if he cares.

Ilya’s exhaustion is obvious now that he has stopped trying to hide it. It takes all of his energy to cling to the human realm. He makes the most of it, ordering Shane to fetch him drinks or a blanket, demanding that they all watch the show he wants. Svetlana goes along with it with less grace than Shane, bickering with him like they had never parted.

All the while, Shane’s thoughts spiral tighter. He tries to outrun them, putting in miles on his treadmill, but they keep coming back to Ilya, to soft curls and a teenager, a life sacrificed for his father’s ambition.

His mind stops, sticks. He misses a step and stumbles, nearly falling.

“I want to make another deal,” Shane says, cutting off the Russian conversation in his living room. He is breathing heavily, his hair sweaty and sticking to his face. He needs a shower. He needs to tell someone this.

“Hollander. What the fuck?”

“I want to make another deal,” Shane repeats, staring at Ilya. “Can you do that?”

“Hollander,” Ilya says gently. “We can make deals every day. Little deals are—they are nothing now. And big deals, they are not, not good, usually. You will give up much for little.”

“I don’t want little, Ilya. Can you do it or not?”

“Yes, fine. What do you want?”

“I want you.” Shane crosses the room in just a few steps. He feels awkward, standing above the two of them while they sit, and he thumps uncomfortably into his hair just as Ilya starts to stand to meet him, which eats up enough time for the awkwardness to rise in Shane again. He swallows spit. “I want you to stay.”

“Okay. We have talked—”

“Shut up. I want you. What’s the price? To buy you out.”

“To buy me out,” Ilya repeats, obviously not understanding the words.

“You traded a lifespan for something. I want to buy it back. What will it take? What if I—” He swallows. “Could I trade time? Mine for yours?”

“No.” Svetlana says it with authority.

“Fuck off,” Shane tells her, and turns back to Ilya. “Well?”

Ilya stops to think about it, which Shane thinks is probably a good sign, but then he shakes his head. “No. Will not work.”

“How do you know?”

“I do not make the trade, Hollander. I know, here—” he taps his chest “—if it will work. Not a good trade. Will not work.”

“So what?”

“Hollander. Would be too much.”

“What, Ilya?”

Ilya’s eyes go vacant, a distant assessment. He shakes his head. “No. Would be your whole life. Your career, your family. Gone like—” he snaps his fingers, and Shane half expects sparks.

“What about—” Shane stops. His whole body tenses up. He swallows.

His mind works better while he’s moving. It always has. He comes up with his best ideas in the gym, during long runs or with his muscles burning on the rowing machine. His worst ideas too, he thinks, chewing on his lip.

Ilya listens while Shane lays it out. It has to be enough. The thought of this trade makes his stomach churn. His mouth is sour with bile.

“Yes,” Ilya says, after a moment of that distant conferral. “Yes this works.”

“Okay, so—”

“So you have to do it, Hollander,” Ilya says, and laughs at him when Shane’s flummoxed expression paints itself across his face.

Svetlana makes them do it properly. She sets out the salt circle for him, neat lines and runes chalked out with precise edges. Shane slices into the edge of his finger and watches the blood fall to the floor. They sit in the circle together this time, cross-legged. Ilya looks at him expectantly, eyebrows raised nearly to his hairline.

He doesn’t think Shane will do it. He hasn’t said as much, but Shane can read it on him. He’s playing along until Shane chickens out, and then they will go their separate ways, back to their separate lives. Shane will go to practice and win a Stanley Cup and his apartment will return to its bland sameness, his life with it, and Ilya—

Ilya will go wherever Ilya must go. He won’t tell Shane about it. Shane doesn’t think he ever will, not even if they spend the next fifty years in this circle together. 

Shane brought his phone in with him. It won’t take much to finish his side of this deal. His jaw is so tight he can feel it in his shoulders and his back, and his fingers fumble as he dials.

He had decided not to warn his PR team. It’s against the spirit of the deal to mitigate the disaster. The consequences that earn the reward, and he will accept them. It’s past the trade deadline, at least, he tells himself as the first sports reporter he has saved in his phone picks up.

“Hey, Adam,” he says, his throat tight. “This is Shane. I want to tell you some stuff.”

It’s a front page story. Shane Hollander, gay, in love with a demon. That is an editorial decision, though he thinks maybe they’re not wrong as he watches Ilya mouth the words as he reads the paper. 

He’s suspended. Obviously. The call came in from management that morning. Don’t bother coming to practice. Wait at home until we untangle the mess that you made.

It wasn’t unexpected. There are predictable consequences to standing out in the MLH. Even so, the walls are too close around him, and he fidgets, wishing he had ice and stick and puck to leech away his nervous energy.

It’s a good trade, Ilya said, and Shane has done his part. It isn’t the soul for glory that Ilya had suggested that first day, but the principle is the same. Shane’s glory, Ilya’s soul.

Shane is sick with anxiety but also lighter than he’s ever been. He had sat in that circle with Ilya and mapped out months of his own misdeeds, and when he was done he had watched it happen: Ilya, mouth slightly parted, a startled expression on his face as his whole body jerked like a string had pulled tight. “Breathe,” Shane had reminded him, when Ilya’s now-human body hadn’t quite caught up yet.

“Is a good story,” Ilya says, and tosses the paper onto the table. “Not true, of course.”

“Oh?”

“No. You never beat me at Mario.”

“That’s what you’re worried about?” Shane asks, incredulous. There are any number of incriminating confessions now in print. He doubts anyone will come after Ilya for stealing Shane’s wallet, not when Shane has since registered the car in his own name. Ilya doesn’t exist in this world, technically.

Shane hasn’t wrapped his mind around the logistics yet. He needs to call his lawyer, probably. He needs to call his mom back. He needs to figure out whether Ilya is technically a Russian citizen still, or if there are other considerations. Refugee status to the human realm, maybe. 

“We will go driving,” Ilya says, standing so quickly that it startles Shane. He isn’t used to this Ilya again yet, the one filled with boundless energy, as annoying as he was those first few weeks. His skin is clearer, his eyes brighter. He is lively. He is perfect.

“You don’t have a license,” Shane points out. He’s already standing himself, pushing his chair back so the legs drag on the wood. 

“Ugh.” Ilya rolls his eyes. “Nevermind. You drive like grandma. My car did nothing wrong. Does not deserve this.”

Ilya is human again, fully, with all the foibles that come with it. He woke with morning breath, and he’s horrified at his own appetite and his own need for sleep. He no longer runs furnace-hot, and gives a disgusted snort when Shane hands him gloves on the way up to the roof. 

It’s March, and the world is still frozen over, the morning light spills over them in a thin blue sheen. It only takes a few minutes in the cold before Ilya gives in and tugs the gloves on, deliberately not looking at Shane. 

“You have to give those up now,” Shane says, gesturing to the cigarette between Ilya’s lips, and he makes an aggravated sound that encompasses all the foibles of his new mortality.

“So fucking boring, Hollander.”

“That’s being human.”

“What else do humans do? It has been a long time. Maybe I have forgotten.”

Shane thinks it’s a come-on, but he indulges the question anyway, chewing on his lip as he thinks.

 Ilya is too big for the apartment. He spills out around the edges, a whole life ready to be lived. He is a spring full of kinetic energy, ready, ready, curled up and waiting to be released. Despite that, he has gone nowhere. Shane hasn’t been more than a dozen feet away from him since they made the deal, circling each other through the bedroom and kitchen and back again. 

The ocean is a short plane ride away, but Ilya has no identification, no real sway on the bureaucratic wrap of human existence. Shane has never made that drive. He has never had any reason to. He thinks about twelve hours wrapped in the uncomfortable bucket seats of Ilya’s impractical orange car, driving into the sunrise. He thinks about Ilya watching Survivor, peering into a world that could never be his.

Shane wants to see the morning light reflect off his face. He never wants to look away.