Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Alexei Rozanov | Andrei Rozanov & Ilya Rozanov, Scott Hunter & Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander, Alexei Rozanov | Andrei Rozanov, Scott Hunter, Original Daemon Character(s)

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, POV Shane Hollander, Friends to Lovers, Slow Burn, Mutual Pining, Oblivious Shane Hollander, Fluff and Humor, Comfort No Hurt, Good Sibling Alexei Rozanov | Andrei Rozanov, NHL Draft, Worldbuilding, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse

Language:

English

Series:

Part 2 of Terem-teremok, Part 8 of Set in Heated Rivalry-verse

Stats:

Published: 2026-10-11 Updated: 2026-10-16 Words: 33,909 Chapters: 7/9

Volchok—seryy bochok

Summary

“Ilyusha,” Vasilisa says. “We are keeping this up indoors also.”

“Is sun umbrella. For sun.”

“There are lights.”

Ilya looks at Shane over her head. He looks exhausted, thinner than Shane likes, and happier than Shane has ever seen him.

“You see what you did,” he says. “Tyranny, everywhere, and everywhere, enablers.”

Or

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a fox in possession of a good fur coat must be in want of a wolf.

Notes

Listen you guys, i cant help it. I'm cursed, idk. Its just - It's just so nice to not worry about plots and dates and like - endless psychological pitfalls and traumas? This just flows, and it's just pure fluff. It's two good boys in love with a good boy and a good girl, and everyone tries hard and works hard, and there's magical kickass familiars and hockey. You know? There are elections in my country that im afraid we're gonna lose, America has lost the plot, AFD is rising in power, i need to defend my dissertation in practically five second -

So - fluff. It's fine.

Chapter 1

The friend request comes when they're in the cab to the airport. Ilya Rozanov wants to be friends. Ilya Rozanov wants to be friends. With Shane. Fuck yeah.

"Oh my God, Ollie, look," he says, clutching his phone. Ollie scrambles up, ears perking, and squints at the little screen. Shane huffs, irritated. Take a BlackBerry, they said. It'll be better than an iPhone or a Samsung, they said. And now look: Ollie can barely see anything. "Look, Ilya sent us a friend request."

"I can't see—tilt it down—maybe try the light—"

They fiddle with the stupid thing for a while until they find an angle that works: Ollie climbs up onto Shane's lap and twists over onto his back, so he's more or less lying between Shane's legs, and Shane can reach around him with both arms and hold the screen where he can see it.

"We have to fix this, Shane, this is unacceptable. But okay—come on, accept—go to photos—"

There's not much. Ilya's Facebook is three weeks old. It has fourteen friends, twelve of them on Team Russia, and one photo of Vasilisa sitting on a windowsill, the sun lighting up her fur so she looks like she's on fire.

"He made it for the tournament," Ollie says. "Wow. Look at that."

It's a nice picture. Shane doesn't have anything like that of Ollie. They have nice photos, but they were all taken by professionals, and they're stiff and fake. This is different. It's relaxed and—calm, or whatever.

"Maybe they don't use Facebook much in Russia?" Shane says. Under Websites, there's a link to something called VKontakte, which looks exactly like Facebook, right down to the blue, except every word is in Russian and it wants a password. Something to look into later.

The second link is to Twitter. Shane's heard of Twitter. His agent keeps bringing it up, and until now Shane hasn't even considered making a profile. He has enough press nonsense as it is. He barely uses his Facebook since the whole thing blew up. There's been talk of paying someone to manage his social media, and Shane firmly redirects those conversations.

The account isn't Ilya's. The name is Vasilisa, the picture shows one ear with two gold hoops, and forty thousand people follow it.

Regina is very cold. I approve.

Hotel has marble floor. Canadian wolf has no brakes.

Ollie laughs. "That's me. Shane. That's me, I'm the Canadian wolf—"

"You're the Canadian wolf with no brakes. In front of forty thousand people. That's not a good thing, bud."

"She noticed."

It's Ilya typing, obviously. Or somebody at an agency in Moscow. Daemons don't have Twitter; it's a bit, like those accounts that pretend to be the prime minister's daemon. It's a really good bit.

"It doesn't sound like him," Ollie says.

"It's not supposed to. It's a bit."

"It sounds like her."

"That's what makes it a good bit."

"Should we make one?"

Shane hesitates. He has Facebook, with seven hundred friends, all of whom he's actually met: most through hockey, the rest in his Kingston classes. Another four thousand requests sit in a queue he hasn't summoned the strength to decide on. BBM, for the team. An MSN he hasn't opened since grade ten. And Skype, because Mom put it on his laptop before he moved to Kingston, so she could check that he was eating.

"I mean—probably?"

Mom and Dad are laughing at them, but whatever. They don't have international friends to keep in touch with. Or they do, but they're old, and it's all—email, or something. Shane is not going to email Ilya. That would be ridiculous.

By the time he and Ollie finally finish making the account, they're past security, and then they have to find a cool name. Making it just for Ollie is—too much. But—

"Username. What should our username be?"

"Hollander," Shane says. "Shane Hollander. Like on everything."

"That's just you."

It is just him. Usually that does for both of them. It doesn't seem to today.

"Shane and Ollie, then."

"Why are you first?"

"Because—okay. Ollie and Shane."

Ollie thinks about that. "That's weird too."

It is. Either way, one of them goes first, and somebody had to decide, and that feels like a much bigger decision than anyone should have to make at a departure gate. So, no names.

"Pucks and Paws," Dad says, having been listening in for ten minutes.

"That's a daycare, Dad."

"Pawer Play."

Mom shuts her eyes. Maggie says, "David," quite gently.

"Get it? Because power—"

"We get it."

"Homini lupus," Shane says. "From the Hobbes thing. Man is a wolf to man."

"Nobody knows what that means," Ollie says.

"We know what it means."

"We know because we read forty books about it. And it's still just wolf, Shane. It's wolf in Latin." Ollie's ears have gone down a little. "Everything's already wolf."

Which, yeah. Three years of headlines. Wolf of Canada. Okay. Not wolf.

They've got nothing by the time the plane starts boarding. It's Ollie who gets there, flat on the carpet at the gate with his nose on his paws.

"Forecheck," he says slowly. "Shane. Forecheck."

Shane, miraculously, doesn't throw his phone out the window and strangle him. "What about a forecheck, bud?"

"Four. Paw. Check."

Nobody says anything.

"That's so bad," Shane says. "It's so bad." He's already typing. "Do you think it's available—"

"It is!" Ollie yelps, then grins. "Of course it is. Nobody else on earth is this stupid."

fourpawcheck follows one account.

The BlackBerry buzzes while he's still looking at it: a Facebook message, no capitals.

hollander. you have skype?

"Tell him yes," Ollie says.

"I'm telling him yes—"

Then life happens. The bus happens. There's a roadie through the Soo and Sudbury in a blizzard, and Sudbury's team is called the Wolves, and somebody on the bus always thinks that's funny. There's a calculus test he writes on four hours of sleep. There's his billet mom's lasagna, exams, his birthday, and every other night, four men in suits on TSN arguing about whether Boston takes Hollander or Rozanov in June like it's the fate of the free world.

There's press, all of it awful. He does as little as he can get away with, which is still a lot more than he wants. And classmates and teammates suddenly start asking questions. What are Ilya and Vasilisa like in real life? Incredible. Is it true she talks to people for him? Sort of. She talks for herself; it's not that weird, and she's really funny. Is it true Ilya got a movie deal, a brand deal, a race car deal? Yes on the brand deals, yes on the commercials, probably not movies; Ilya's pretty busy with school and hockey, and they play serious hockey over there. Is he dating that actress, that singer, that model, that porn star? Shane doesn't know, but he doubts it. It probably would have come up.

More importantly, most importantly, incredibly, there's Skype. Ilya is eight hours ahead, so it's mostly messages, sent at ridiculous hours and answered at worse ones. A clip of a goal with no comment. A photo of Vasilisa asleep on a radiator in what looks like a crocheted hat. your wolf is sad in this picture. tell him to stop

About half the messages aren't from Ilya at all. Those have capital letters and proper punctuation, and they're signed with a single В. The first time Shane works out what that means—that she typed it herself, on her own, to them—he has to sit on the edge of the bathtub for a minute. Mostly, though, he finds out what Ilya's life looks like through the messages: in pieces, at four in the morning.

Ilya plays on a team of grown men, and some of them were in the league before he could skate. He dresses most nights and plays almost none of them. On nights he doesn't dress at all, he gets sent down to the junior team, scores three, four, six, or, once, incredibly, seven, and gets called back up to sit at the end of the bench again. The roadies are flights, not buses, and one of them crosses seven time zones without leaving the country. Shane looks that up, because it can't be right. It's right.

He lives with his brother on the ninth floor of a building that looks like every other building around it, in an apartment with a kitchen about the size of the Hollanders' hall closet. None of it matches the things he and Vasilisa wear. His designer coats hang on a length of pipe somebody screwed straight into the wall. His shoes cost eight thousand dollars—Shane checked, then checked again, because what the fuck—and they sit piled in a corner, still in the boxes they came in. The only wardrobe in his room is Vasilisa's, and it's just as mixed up: silk and fur and velvet, gold and diamonds, fur hats sewn to her measurements with holes cut for her ears, and next to them cheap blankets, baskets, flattened pillows, things that are all but falling apart.

Aleksei works. That's all Ilya ever says about it—he works, he works a lot—and Shane figures, well, yeah, probably. Their parents obviously aren't around. Shane hasn't asked, and he hasn't gone looking online either; it's none of his business. But hockey is expensive, and he doesn't know how it works in Russia; if it's anything like Canada, you barely get paid until you're eighteen, aside from whatever sponsorships and scholarships you can scrape together. He hasn't asked about that either. How would he even bring it up? So it doesn't make sense, exactly, but it fits: Aleksei working from sunup to sundown, and Ilya talking about it with a whole lot of—pride, and guilt, maybe. It's never clear with Ilya. He's strange about showing how he feels.

From what Shane can piece together, Aleksei is the most reassuring thing in Ilya's life and also just—the epitome of a single parent. In every picture where he's home, he's asleep, on a couch a foot too short for him, with Tisha lying across his shins. Ilya does the shopping. As far as Shane can tell, Ilya does everything. There's a whole call where he irons his brother's shirts with the laptop propped on the windowsill and a cigarette going in a saucer, while Vasilisa lies on the clean pile and tells him he's missed the collar.

There are never any teammates in the pictures. Shane notices that around March. There's a drop-dead gorgeous girl with a thick grey snake looped over her shoulders like a scarf. There's a tall, thin boy with sad eyes and an enormous rust-coloured bird behind him—a vulture; Shane checked. There's Aleksei. That's it. The same three people, over and over, in the same two rooms.

It looks like a pretty small life for somebody that famous. Shane doesn't know what to do with that, so he sends back a clip of a goal.

The typing arrangement falls apart on a Tuesday in February, in the basement room at his billets', with a calculus assignment due at nine and Ollie dictating from the bed.

"Dear Sila," Ollie says.

Shane types Dear Sila.

"No. Not dear. Take out dear."

Shane takes out dear.

"Hi, Sila. No—hello. Hello, Sila. Comma. Thank you for the picture of the hat. It looks very—" There's a long pause. Ollie's tail moves on the comforter. "What's a word for good that isn't good?"

"Nice."

"Not nice. She's not nice, Shane."

"Sharp. Classy. Uh. Regal?"

"Regal," Ollie says, and nods, and sticks himself even closer to the small laptop screen. "It looks very regal. Period. I hope practice was—no. Don't put that; that's boring. Put—"

Shane's hands have stopped over the keys.

It's not that he minds. It's twenty minutes, tops, and he'd do a lot worse for a lot longer if it kept those messages coming. It's that he's sitting here hearing all of it: the dear that got taken out, the three tries at hello. And on the other end there's a fox who typed every letter of hers herself and didn't run a word of it past anybody, and what she's getting back is—Ollie, sure. But Ollie with Shane's spelling, and Shane's commas.

Which is a stupid thing to feel weird about. Ollie's him. He is Ollie. There isn't supposed to be anything of Ollie's that Shane could be in the way of. And yet.

"You stopped," Ollie says.

"Yeah."

"You're doing the thing with your face."

"I'm not doing nothing, dummy." Shane turns the chair around. "Does this feel weird to you? Me doing this? Doing it this way?"

Ollie thinks about it. He puts his chin on his paws, which he does when he's deciding whether to be honest.

"A little," he says. "You fixed my spelling."

"You can't spell. You can't even type—"

"I said gonna. Last time. You put going to."

Okay. Yeah. Shane did do that.

"She says is instead of it is," Ollie says, "and nobody fixes her."

Fair play. Shane puts the laptop on the floor. It goes about as expected. One of Ollie's front paws is roughly the size of Shane's whole hand with fingers spread, and the first message he produces on his own is hjnmk,l, which he then sends, by accident, with his elbow. He tries with one claw after that. A claw works, technically. It takes him four minutes to write hello, he takes the H clean off the keyboard doing it, and Shane spends the next ten minutes under the bed with a flashlight, searching for the stupid thing.

The reply is waiting when he crawls back out. Is this English? В.

"Ask her how she does it," Shane says, pressing the H back on with his thumb. It clicks. Sort of.

They ask. With feet, Oliver. How do you think?

"She has very small feet," Ollie says wistfully. "Light and precise—"

They give it a week. It's a bad week.

They try a keyboard for kindergartners that Shane orders online, with keys the size of crackers in four primary colours. Ollie hates it on sight—"I'm not four, Shane"—and it turns out to be made for hands anyway, just very small, stupid ones. His paw covers Q through R.

There's dictation software, ninety-nine dollars in a box at Future Shop, which is the closest they get. It has to learn your voice first, so Ollie lies on the carpet and slowly reads it fifteen minutes of the instruction manual in his best interview voice. After that, it gets about two words in three. It also turns Vasilisa into vast Lisa, every single time, which they agree she can never, ever find out about.

The actual problem is the headset. It's built for a person: a band over the top of a person-shaped head, and a mic on a little arm that's supposed to end up in front of a person's mouth. On Ollie, it ends up over his left eye. Shane tries hockey tape. Shane tries a lot of hockey tape.

"How do I look?"

"Like you work at a call centre," Shane says. "For the end of the world."

Ollie shakes his head once, and the whole thing hits the far wall, practically disintegrating on impact. Shane high-paws him in commiseration. The thing had to go.

Then they go down a few research holes. Shane doesn't know shit about tech, and he doesn't especially care, but he figures somebody has already solved this.

Somebody sort of has. It's just not anywhere you can buy it. There's a clinic in Toronto that builds rigs for people who can't use their hands, or can't talk, so their daemons can type for them: big flat switches, mics on straps, screens on swing arms. It's pretty cool, actually. It's also medical. You get it through a hospital, with a referral and a waiting list, and it's built to measure, for people who need it. Shane has two working hands and a mouth. He's not going to jump a line full of people who don't, just because his wolf wants to message a fox.

Outside of that, there's nothing. Nobody makes a keyboard for a paw or a mic for a muzzle that you can walk into a store and buy, and when he asks the guy at Future Shop, the guy looks at him like he's asked for a toothbrush for his elbow.

"What's he need a computer for?" the guy says, not even meanly. "Just type for him."

Which is what everybody would say. It's what Shane would have said in December.

It's past two in the morning when he works out what's actually bugging him, lying on his back in the dark with Ollie taking up three-quarters of a double bed. It's not that nobody can make this stuff. Somebody already does. It's that you're only supposed to want it if something's wrong with you. But Ilya wouldn't have been stuck on that for a week. Ilya would have looked at it for about a second and said: she wants to type, so she needs something to type on; where is problem? And then there'd be something for her to type on. It's not even brave when Ilya does it. It's just the next logical thing, and he does it, and it only looks insane to people who never asked themselves the question.

"You awake?" Shane says.

"No."

"Who makes computers?"

A long, wolfy sigh in the dark. "Computer companies, Shane. Fuck you."

"Right. So we ask them."

He picks Apple because the Mac in the Frontenacs' video room is the only computer he's ever liked, and because their website has an accessibility page with an actual email address.

Dear Sir or Madam, he writes. My name is Shane Hollander, and I play hockey for the Kingston Frontenacs of the Ontario Hockey League. My daemon is a grey wolf, and he would like to be able to send his own messages. Do you make anything for that? If not, could you? I can pay. Sincerely, Shane Hollander.

"Put my name," Ollie says, reading over his shoulder.

"It's got my name."

"My name. It's for me."

Shane looks at him. Ollie looks back.

His name is Oliver, Shane adds, and hits send, and figures that's the last he'll hear about it.

The answer comes two days later, from a vice president. Shane keeps forgetting that being Shane Hollander works on people outside of rinks. It turns out they already quietly build a version of this for hospitals. Nobody has ever asked them for one who didn't have to.

The call is on a Thursday, on speakerphone, with his cell propped against a mug on the desk: three people in California, two men and a woman, all very friendly and very fast. They've clearly had meetings about this. They have a lot of questions, and they ask Shane every one of them.

What's the animal's reach? Would he say it's comfortable sitting upright for long periods? How does it do with new objects—is there a tendency to chew?

Shane answers the first few. Yes, sir. No, ma'am, he doesn't chew. It's not rude; it's how it's done. You don't talk to somebody else's daemon, and you sure as hell don't do it over the phone, from California, on company time. Two months ago Shane wouldn't even have noticed. Two months ago he hadn't had a fox walk across a parking lot and look him dead in the eye.

"Sorry," he says. "Sorry to interrupt. He's right here. You can just ask him. He's the one who's going to be using it."

The line goes so quiet that he checks the phone hasn't dropped the call.

"Sure," the woman says at last, carefully, like somebody stepping out onto ice she hasn't tested. "Okay. Sure. Uh—Oliver? Hi."

"Hi," Ollie says. "Call me Ollie."

"Ollie. Great. Okay. How wide is your paw, Ollie? The front one."

Ollie looks at Shane. Shane looks at Ollie.

"No idea," Ollie says. "Shane. Ruler."

The ruler's in his calculus binder. Ollie plants a paw on the carpet, and Shane gets down next to it.

"Eleven centimetres. With the toes spread."

"Don't do it spread, I'm not going to type with them spread—"

"You might. You don't know." He measures again. "Eleven spread, nine normal."

"Is that big?" Ollie asks the phone.

"That's—yes," the woman says. She sounds like she might be trying not to laugh, but in a nice way. "That's a big paw."

Ollie looks extremely pleased with himself, then doubtful, ears flicking back and forth. Shane gives them a nice scritch, the way he likes. This shit is hard.

It goes a lot better after that. By the end they're asking him everything—how he likes to lie when he's relaxed, whether he'd rather look up at a screen or straight ahead, how loud he talks when he isn't thinking about it—and one of the men has started saying buddy. It's going great, right up until the other one says the microphone will have to sit close to his throat, and would Ollie mind wearing something around his neck?

Ollie goes still. Shane feels it land, a small cold drop somewhere under his ribs.

"Like a collar," Ollie says.

"No! No, not a—more of a lanyard. A pendant, kind of. With a strap."

"Can we call you back about that part?" Shane says.

They end up on the floor, where they end up for most things: Shane against the side of the bed, Ollie flat on the carpet with his nose pointed at the wall.

"It's a collar," Ollie says.

"It's a microphone."

"It's a microphone on a strap, on a wolf's neck. You know what they'll—"

Yeah. Shane knows. They've spent three years being the wolf from the brochure, the one who's so polite and steady and well-mannered that nobody ever has to wonder. The one thing they've resisted, all these years, is collars, straps, leashes. One photo of Ollie with something buckled around his throat, and every asshole with a column gets to write whichever headline he likes best. Somebody finally put a leash on it; should have done it a long time ago.

"So we don't," Shane says. "We tell them no, and they figure out something else. A stand, or a thing on the wall, or—"

"Sila wears fur."

Shane shuts up.

"Somebody else's fur," Ollie says, to the wall. "With a gold clasp. And earrings, Shane. People say way worse things about her than anybody's ever said about me, and she just—"

"Does it anyway."

"Does it on purpose." He rolls onto his side, so that he's looking at Shane upside down. His ears have come back up. "I want to send my own messages. I don't want you writing for me. If I have to wear a thing, I'll wear a thing. It's my neck."

"It's sort of my neck too."

"So you get a vote. What's your vote?"

Shane thinks about Ilya Rozanov in the back seat of Dad's rental, brushing road grit out of a fox's fur with a little silver brush, like there was nobody in the car, like there was nobody in the world whose opinion on it he'd ever thought to ask.

"Fuck 'em," Shane says. "Wear the thing."

Ollie's tail hits the carpet.

"Can we make it a nice one?"

"You want a nice one?"

"I'm just asking if there are options."

"I'm not asking Apple for gold."

"Not gold." Ollie sounds shocked. "Gold's hers. Black. Just black. Classy."

"Regal," Shane says, and gets a paw in the face. "Oh, it's on, asshole—"

It shows up three weeks later, along with a guy from Toronto who mounts the screen on the wall and gets fed two plates of lasagna for his trouble. It's a nice big screen. The mic is a flat black thing about the size of a hockey card, on a soft black strap, with a switch on the front wide enough for a paw. By then, Mom has read the contract twice and crossed out a paragraph. Apple can use both of them in its ads, and Shane is happy to agree. They can't use them however they want.

The Toronto guy leaves. Ollie sits down under the screen, presses the switch, and a little light turns green.

He doesn't say anything. He looks at Shane.

"What?"

"Can you, like. Go."

"Go where? It's my room too."

"The bathroom."

So for the second time this winter Shane ends up sitting on the edge of the bathtub over a fox.

He can hear Ollie's voice through the door, low, starting and stopping. Not the words. He could get the words, probably, if he tried. He counts the tiles over the sink instead. What comes through anyway is the rest of it, the way it always does: the bright fizzy thing, and nerves, and something that drops and catches itself and goes right back up. Then a long quiet. Then a tail, going against the floor like somebody beating a rug.

It's weird to have part of yourself busy on the other side of a door. He's never thought about it, but if he had, he'd have guessed it would feel—well, either fake or wrong. Weird. He tried to keep a diary once, and it felt performative, uncomfortable, like he was doing something, feeling something, for someone else's sake. So, intuitively, this should feel something like that. He and Ollie aren't friends; they're one thing. One whole. So Ollie being over there and Shane over here should feel silly at best and unhealthy at worst, like he's splitting himself in two. It doesn't. It feels like finding out there's another room in your house. Like there was another way to be, which is pretty much the way he's always been, only with some extra stuff on top.

So Ollie has his own line of communication now. And Shane finds that this kind of thinking—Ilya's kind, unconventional but completely logical when you actually look at it—is oddly liberating.

"You can come back," Ollie calls.

He's flat on the floor under the screen, looking smug and completely wrecked. Shane doesn't read it. He glances at the screen by accident for a second, and all he gets is the last line: a single letter.

"O?"

"She does one letter."

"It looks like a zero."

"It's the same in Russian. I looked it up. It's the only one of mine that is."

Shane sits down next to him and gets both hands into his ruff. Ollie leans on him with his whole weight, all hundred-and-something pounds of it, the mic digging into Shane's collarbone.

"So what'd she say?"

"None of your business," Ollie says. Then, because he can't help it, he adds, "She says my punctuation is acceptable."

The press about it, when it comes, is annoying. But all press is annoying, and at least this time nobody's asking him to pose in his base layers looking grim and serious or, God forbid, asking Ollie to snarl or howl or pretend he's about to pounce. He'll take it.

Ilya and Vasilisa think it's cool. They even say so.

Chapter 2

By the end of May he's back in his own room in Ottawa, eighteen for three weeks, and for the first time in about four years nobody else is setting his alarm.

The Frontenacs' season is over. His last two high school credits are coming by mail, which Mom arranged back in September. He runs the river path with Ollie early, before it gets hot, when there's nobody on it who has to cross to the other side, with a library CD going in his headphones and Ollie correcting his vowels. He does Dad's crossword with him at breakfast and is no help. In the afternoons he waits for it to be midnight in Moscow.

There are other things he could be doing. Kingston's prom is on Friday. A girl from his calculus class asked him, over Facebook, very nicely, back in March, and he said he'd probably be busy with hockey. Hockey ended three weeks ago. He's still busy. Dunner has messaged him four times about the team's year-end thing, which is at somebody's cottage on Wolfe Island, and yes, he's heard all of them. u coming sat or what. Shane likes Dunner. He likes most of them fine. He just can't think of one thing that's going to happen at that cottage that he'd pick over a grainy balcony at four in the afternoon.

He isn't lonely, is the thing. He and Ollie talked it over, and read up on it, just in case, when there was time. He's just never needed very many people, and it so happens that the ones he needs are eight hours ahead.

Ian calls at ten. Ian is his agent, and Ian doesn't call to chat. Shane picks up on the second ring.

"Apple's numbers came back," he says. "The testing on the ads."

"Okay."

"They're very good, Shane. They're the best that campaign has tested with anybody." Paper moves, somewhere in Toronto. "I'll be honest with you. When your mother sent me a contract with a computer company in March, I assumed somebody had talked you into something. I didn't expect it to be your idea."

He means it as a compliment. Shane can hear that he does. It still goes up his back like a hand the wrong way through fur. Shane isn't stupid. He's a pain in the ass about sponsor stuff, sure; he likes to know what he's selling before somebody sticks him in front of a camera and tells him to look serious, and apparently that's a lot to ask. But nobody at Apple told him to look serious. Apple asked Ollie how wide his paw was.

"It was Ollie's idea," he says. "Mostly."

"Then it was an inspired one. They want to take it further. Develop it properly, as a product, not a one-off. And they'd like the two of you to be part of that."

Shane looks at Ollie. Ollie lifts his head. "Part of it how? We don't know how to build a computer. And once the season starts—"

"They're aware of your schedule. They want you to keep using it, and they want your name on the campaign." Ian says it the way he reads out a clause. "Half the country still thinks they make computers for people who play Dungeons and Dragons. There's a difference between selling this through a hospital and selling it to someone whose daemon would like his own email. You make the second one look considerably less strange. Young athlete. Good student. Your parents are involved. That matters. They're not RIM, granted, but they have vision. I think it's a good idea."

"Okay."

"I do have to say one thing." His voice doesn't change, exactly. It just slows down. "It is unusual, Shane. A daemon with his own correspondence. Most people aren't going to know what to do with that. It's tested well so far, and I think it'll go on testing well, because it's you. But it's unusual enough that I'd appreciate hearing about this kind of thing before you commit to it. The next time a company offers you a contract, call me. Before you sign."

Shane rolls his eyes at the ceiling. "My mom knew."

"Yes. I'm aware that your mother knew."

"So I figured it was fine." He picks at the seam of the duvet. "We'll talk about it. Me and Ollie, and Mom and Dad. But they're still going to ask him about the actual computer, right? What works and what sucks?"

"I can make that part of the agreement."

"Okay. Good. He's got a list."

On the floor, Ollie nods hard enough to make his ears bounce.

"I'll send the paperwork to your mother," Ian says. "Enjoy your day, Shane."

Ollie huffs. He's never liked Ian much, even less than Shane has, sometimes.

"Would it kill him to talk like a human being?" he says. "God. I bet Ilya and Vasilisa's agent isn't a zombie."

Shane pauses, considering. "You know, I have no idea what their agent is like. Have they ever mentioned one?"

Ollie shakes his head and grins. "Nope. But I bet they're amazing. Some—I don't know, crabby old man who isn't an agent at all. A writer, or something, who agreed to represent them just to fuck with the org—"

The courier is coming at noon, so the rest of the morning goes to the box.

The birthday present thing got a little out of hand. It started with one pillow. That was the whole plan: something nice for Vasilisa to sit on. He wasn't thinking of Scheherazade at all, even though hers is about the most famous fox daemon there is. Then, on about the ninth website, he saw these, and it all came back like he had the picture books open in front of him: a beautiful woman and her fox on a heap of silk, a thousand and one nights of talking their way out of it. It fit Vasilisa to a T. Clever, and gorgeous, and never once shutting up.

The trouble was picking one. He and Ollie couldn't decide, so they asked Maggie and Dad, and then they still couldn't decide, so they brought in Hisashi and Mom, and after that it was a Hollander family project. Mom tracked down the woman in Toronto who makes them, with silk and hand embroidery and a lot of questions about the fox who'd be sitting on them. Hisashi vetoed two fabrics. Maggie insisted on tassels, which Shane and Ollie would never have thought of, and would have kicked themselves over afterward. Dad drove to Toronto and back in one day to pick them up, because nobody was going to trust the mail with them, and then built the crate himself, in the garage, like they were shipping a painting.

The sizes came from Aleksei. Shane emailed him in April, not expecting much, and two days later got back: Window is 31 cm. Radiator 22. Old ones are dead. She likes red, gold, purple. A. and T. That's about as long as Aleksei and Tisha's emails get. They've answered every one of his.

It worked out in the end. There are three of them, and they're fantastic. They're silk: a deep red one, a gold one that Shane and Mom held up against four different photos of her earrings before he'd sign off on it, and a purple one with a complicated pattern in gold all over it and tassels on every corner as long as his hand. All six of them agree they're absolutely perfect.

So this morning is just the packing. Ollie is in charge of quality control, which means putting his chin on each one in turn before it goes in the crate. Shane is in charge of the lint roller afterward. Ilya's goes in beside them: six tea glasses in brass holders, from a Persian shop Dad found in Toronto, sent home as photos first so Shane could approve them. On calls, Ilya drinks his tea out of a plain glass with a dish towel folded around it, because it's too hot to hold. These come with handles, and engraved vines, and a little saucer each. Shane ran them past Aleksei too.

Down the side of the crate, where there's a gap, go four rolls of the good stick tape. Ilya complained once, months ago, that you can't get it in Moscow for love or money. Shane may not know anything about silk, but he knows how to buy tape.

Getting it there is the hard part. Shane spent an evening reading about mailing things to Russia and came away convinced the box would arrive in August with half the stuff missing. So it's going by courier, with a customs declaration that took him and Mom three evenings and one long phone call to DHL. Every pillow is on it. The tape is on it. Aleksei has agreed to deal with whatever happens at the other end, and has so far ignored four separate emails about the fees. Is fine. A. and T.

It's going to Aleksei's work, to wait there until the fifteenth. Ilya doesn't know it's coming. Neither does Vasilisa. Shane has nearly told them about six times.

Aleksei sent the address in Russian letters, and then, when Shane asked, again in English ones, and Shane got as far as the first line and stopped.

Library for Foreign Literature.

"Ollie," he said. "He works at a library."

"No way."

"Look at it. Look at the website. It's huge."

So that's what Aleksei does. He works in a library, a big one, with about a million books in languages Shane has never heard of. That is so cool. That's the coolest possible answer. It explains how quiet he is, and it sort of explains Tisha, who has the manners of somebody who's spent a lot of time being shushed. It doesn't totally explain why the guy is asleep in every photo Ilya has ever sent, but what does Shane know? Maybe library work is really stressful in Russia. Maybe the books are heavy.

He copies the address onto the waybill one letter at a time. If DHL is telling the truth, Aleksei will have it a week before the fifteenth. Shane checks the address again anyway.

Then the box is gone, and it's four o'clock, and he's on his bed with the laptop on his knees and Ollie taking up the entire floor, feeling pretty fucking good about his life.

"Four weeks," Shane says. "You ready to lose?"

On the screen Ilya is a grainy shape on a balcony: the end of a cigarette and a lot of hair. It's past midnight there. "Lose what."

"First overall. I'm going to beat you."

Ilya laughs, and smoke comes out with it. "You are so fucking weird, Hollander. I will not be anywhere near first."

What? Bullshit he won't. Shane has spent half the season watching every shift of Ilya's he can find footage of, and some of what Ilya does with a puck is frankly disgusting. Beating him is the whole point. "TSN says—"

"TSN." He leans forward, and even in the grainy image Shane can see his smile go strange. "I play eight minutes a night, when I play. Fourth line. My coach looks at me like I am something fox dragged in."

"I heard that," says a voice from somewhere off screen.

"So you're underused," Shane says. "Obviously. Everybody knows that. But that's not—you're the best player our age on the planet. That's just a fact. It's not up for debate."

It comes out a lot more sincere than he planned. Smooth, Hollander. Very normal. On the floor, Ollie puts a paw over his nose.

Ilya doesn't say anything for a second. He looks away over the balcony rail, and the corner of his mouth does something he is clearly trying to stop it from doing.

"Ilya is being modest." Vasilisa climbs into the frame over his shoulder, all ears and ruff, and looks straight down the camera at Shane. "It does not suit him. Hello, Shane."

"Hi, Vasilisa."

Five months, and it still goes through him like a static shock when she looks straight at him and talks. It makes him a little dizzy every time. She always waits for his answer, too, like of course he's going to give her one.

"Hello, Oliver," she says, and Ollie's tail hits the bed frame hard enough to hurt both of them. "I enjoy how you made that ugly cat stand down."

Shane groans. Fucking hell, the interview made it to Russia. Of course it did.

It was a sit-down thing for one of the sports channels, two weeks ago: a guy with very white, very blocky teeth, and a Siamese cat daemon on the arm of his chair. Ten minutes on the draft, and then—did Shane have a girlfriend? Was there somebody special? Was it hard to meet people, with a wolf? And the Siamese leaned over the arm of the chair at Ollie, purring, and said that he must be so lonely.

Standing down isn't how Shane remembers it. The way Shane remembers it, Ollie yawned. That's all. A big, slow, lazy one, right in her face, with his tongue curling and every single tooth on display for about three seconds. Totally polite. Could have happened to anybody. And the cat left the arm of the chair in a straight vertical line and came down somewhere behind the lighting rig.

There are memes about it already. So many memes. Three years in the papers, and apparently what the internet needed was one scared cat. Between that and the footage from Regina, Ollie is having a fucking month. Ollie skidding. Ollie grinning at Vasilisa. Ollie and Tisha sitting side by side while she bites their ears, one of them a lot more into it than the other.

Shane worried about those ones. He and Ollie are nothing if not painfully transparent, and these photos are no different. But Ilya and Vasilisa's reputation turns out to be a strange kind of shield against the most obvious conclusion. Next to the most famously imperious daemon in hockey, Ollie looks less whipped than gallant. Or so Shane's publicist assures him, in more polite language.

"She didn't stand down," Ollie says. "She jumped. I only yawned."

"You did." Vasilisa sounds enormously satisfied. "I have watched it many times. Is my yawn, Oliver."

"Yeah," Ollie says. "I thought of you."

Nobody says anything for a second. Shane looks at the ceiling.

"We're the least of that guy's worries, anyway," Shane says. "My mom stopped by their offices after. She was not happy."

Ilya whistles, low. "He is alive?"

"He sent a fruit basket."

Ilya is still laughing when Shane changes the subject, because if they stay on this one somebody is going to ask him the girlfriend question again, and he'd rather boil in acid than have Ilya Rozanov ask him about girls.

"Boston's got first, though," he says. "And they've already got, like, five Russians. Half the guys on the panel think—"

"Boston will not take me."

The smile goes. His voice is flat, not even bitter. It's a door, and it's shut.

"Okay," Shane says.

"I will be drafted. Yes. When…" Ilya shrugs and taps ash over the rail. "We will see when. Important thing is that I am drafted. After that I do not care if I am number two or number two hundred."

"There's only two hundred and ten picks."

"Then I have ten to spare."

Shane has tried asking about this before. He gets as far as scouts and teams and what happens after the draft, and suddenly they're talking about his backcheck. Ilya will talk about anything, happily and for as long as you let him, except this. Russia as a hockey team is fine. Russia as the place he lives gets you a shrug and then a very funny, very thorough change of subject. He hasn't worked out how to get past it without being an asshole.

So Shane changes it for him.

"It's going to be, like, thirty degrees in LA," he says. "How are you two beasts of the frozen tundra going to handle it?"

There's a short silence.

"Hollander," Ilya says. "You are Canadian. From Ottawa. With wolf."

"Whose cow is mooing," says Vasilisa.

Shane blinks. Frowns. Cow? "What?"

"Is saying. In Russian." Ilya waves the cigarette. "It means you, of all people, are calling us this."

"We have summer in Ottawa—"

"We also have summer. Is very nice week." Ilya brightens. "But is fine. Sila has bought sunglasses."

"She—for the two of you?"

"Certainly for us. We are going to match." He's grinning again. Shane lets go of the seam he's been picking. "They came yesterday. They are very ugly, but she assures me is the trend now."

"They are Italian," says Vasilisa.

"They are terrible. Big black blocky things. We look like flies."

"No, that's good," Shane says. "Smart. The sun there is no joke." He has thought about this. He has, if he's honest, thought about it quite a lot. "What about her coat, though? She's not bringing the fur one, right? Did you get something made for summer? Mom says silk breathes. Or linen. Is linen a thing? For, like, a capelet?"

The other end goes quiet.

"Linen creases," Vasilisa says slowly. "And my fur catches, sticks on fabric."

"Silk, then. You'd look awesome in silk." Just picturing it makes him a little faint. "Also, for the sun, I was going to bring you a parasol—a little sun umbrella, with a stand, so Ilya doesn't have to hold it the whole time—but then I figured there's no point lugging it all the way from here, so I ordered it to the hotel. It'll be at the front desk. It's white. We didn't know what colour."

"White goes with everything," Ollie tells the carpet.

Nobody answers. Vasilisa has gone completely still. Ilya is looking at Shane with an expression Shane hasn't seen before and can't read at this resolution.

"You bought her a present," Ilya says.

"I—yeah?" It's a bit unconventional, maybe. Okay, very unconventional; he's never actually heard of anyone buying presents for somebody else's daemon, apart from the crate he shipped this morning. But she likes nice things. She says so all the time. And he knows perfectly well that Ilya buys them for her, so why shouldn't he? "Is that not okay?"

"Very okay," Ilya says.

On the floor, Ollie makes a very small, strangled noise and puts both paws over his nose. Shane doesn't look at him. If this is what a parasol does, the fifteenth is going to kill somebody.

Vasilisa still hasn't moved.

"White," she says at last. "With fringe?"

"Uh. I think so? It's very pretty, I thought. Sort of—lacy? You know, like, with flowers and stuff? Mom and Hisashi helped. There's a whole thing with parasols in Japan."

"Hm." She thinks about it. "Next time you ask me first. White is very good choice—goes with everything, as you say. But other colours I am particular about."

"Okay. Yeah. Next time."

"She says thank you," says Ilya.

Vasilisa smacks him with her tail. "Do not speak for me." She shakes her head at the camera in mock despair. "As I was saying before rude interruption: thank you, Shane, Oliver. Is very thoughtful."

Shane's whole face is hot. Downstairs, Mom is calling him for dinner for the second time.

"I have to go."

"Go. Eat your vegetables." Ilya leans in to end the call, so that for a second he's nothing but an eyebrow. "See you in Los Angeles, Hollander."

"Yeah. See you there."

The screen goes dark. Shane shuts the laptop and lies back and looks at the ceiling. A moment later Ollie leaps up on top of him, knocking the laptop aside. "Next time," Ollie says. "Shane. She said next time."

"Fuck yeah, she did." He scratches Ollie's ears while Ollie tries to squeeze in between him and the wall. "Good thing we asked Aleksei about the colours."

"Do you think the parasol needs tassels?"

"Don't fucking start. It's already at the hotel."

Ollie looks at him. Shane looks back.

"I'll check if they can add them."

On their birthday, the first picture comes from Aleksei. Vasilisa is sitting on the purple pillow, with one front paw on the red one and the gold one wedged against her side. She has managed to be on all three at once. Behind her, Ilya is elbow-deep in the crate.

They like them, Aleksei writes, unnecessarily. Thank you. All of you. A. and T.

Vasilisa's message takes longer. She has opinions about the tassels, all of them good, and instructions about who Shane is supposed to thank for what. Ollie reads it out to everybody at dinner. Twice.

Ilya sends a picture of one of the tea glasses on the kitchen table, full, with the laptop open behind it.

very fancy now. alyosha says we need to clean kitchen to match.

Then another message.

thank you, shane. really.

Shane saves the picture. It's a fucking glass of tea. He saves it anyway.

On the next call, Ilya has it beside him. On the one after that, too.

The parasol is at the front desk, like the website promised, in a box the size of a shoebox with FRAGILE on it in three places. It folds down, which matters, because it has to get back to Moscow somehow. Shane knows exactly how much the base weighs. He also knows they don't do tassels; the woman on the phone was very clear about the tassels. Shane signs for it at eleven in the morning and then stands in the hotel lobby holding it for forty minutes, because the Rozanovs' flight got in at ten and he is not going to miss them.

"You could sit down," Mom says, from an armchair.

"I'm good."

"He's good," Dad tells Maggie.

The lobby is full of hockey. Guys Shane has played against since he was nine, in suits their moms picked, with labs and retrievers and one very nervous goose. Agents. Scouts. A camera crew. All of them are leaving a nice polite circle of empty marble around Ollie, who is sitting very, very carefully, because it's marble, and Ollie and marble have a history.

"They landed at ten," Ollie says. "Then customs, then bags, then a cab. I did it three ways. They should have been here already." He hasn't taken his eyes off the revolving door in forty minutes. His ears keep going up, one at a time, and he keeps putting them back down.

"It's LA. There's traffic." Shane checks the box. It still says fragile. Nothing rattles when he tips it, which is either very good or very bad.

"What if she hates it?"

"She didn't hate the pillows," Ollie says. "She sent forty photos of the pillows. She's asleep on the red one in nine of them."

"That's different. Aleksei measured for the pillows."

"If she hates it, she'll tell us. In detail. And it'll still be the best thing that's happened to us all month."

Which is true, and no help at all.

"What if it's weird?" Shane says, quieter. "What if we're weird, in person? It's been five months. What if we're only good on a screen?"

That gets Ollie's eyes off the door. He looks up at Shane like Shane has taken a puck to the head.

"You think Ilya and Vasilisa would talk to us every day if they didn't want to? What, to be nice? Are you nuts?"

Okay. Yeah. That's fair. Shane drops his free hand, and Ollie's head is already under it. He scratches behind the left ear, the good spot, a few times. For courage. For solidarity. Ollie leans against his knee.

Then the revolving door turns, and—

Okay. So.

Ilya is wearing the sunglasses. They are exactly as bad as he said: huge, black, square, eyebrow to cheekbone. He looks like a fly. He looks like the most handsome fly who ever flew, towing a suitcase. And on his shoulder, in a capelet of something pale and liquid that has to be the silk, Vasilisa isn't wearing sunglasses at all.

Vasilisa is wearing gold. There's a fine chain running from the hoops in one ear, over the top of her head, to the hoops in the other, and then on down her back in loops, and it catches the light every time Ilya takes a step. It's not technically a crown. Shane would like to hear somebody explain the difference.

The whole lobby turns to stare. Neither of them seems to notice.

Behind them comes Aleksei with the other two suitcases, a suit jacket folded over his arm, and Tisha pressed up against his knee. He stops just inside the door to look around. Tisha stops with him. Neither of them looks half as pleased to be here.

Shane gives it two seconds. He counts. Two seconds is cool. Two seconds is a guy who just happened to be standing here.

Then he says, "Mom, Dad, come on, they're here," and goes.

Ollie beats him. Ollie forgets about the marble completely, gets up to about half speed, remembers, and skids in at Ilya's feet, sideways and low to the ground. Vasilisa looks at him from Ilya's shoulder.

"Wonderful, Oliver," she says, in that thick, throaty accent she uses in public, presumably because it makes her sound like a Bond villain. Von-derr-full. "Is like car drift. Very creative."

Ollie makes a noise like a locomotive, but he grins up at her the way only wolves can grin—except goofier, because he's Ollie. "Sila, hi. You look beautiful. Very ferocious."

"So true," Shane says. "Hey. Hi. You made it. How was the flight? You look—" Ilya has pushed the sunglasses up into his hair, and under them he looks grey. He looks like he hasn't slept since Tuesday. "You look really tired. I mean, great. You look great, obviously, you both look amazing, the chain is—wow. But God, that flight must have sucked. What is that, fourteen hours? Did you eat? Here, give me that."

He has the parasol box under one arm. He takes a suitcase out of Aleksei's hand with the other. Aleksei lets go of it out of what looks like pure surprise.

"Hollander," Ilya says, grinning. "You are bellboy now?"

"Shut up. Give me the other one."

Ilya laughs and hands it over, and Shane juggles until he has a suitcase in each hand and the parasol box clamped under one arm.

"Where are her sunglasses? I thought you were matching. I was looking forward to it."

"She wore them in taxi. Ten minutes. Then she says they make her ears ache." He spreads his hands. "So now I am fly alone."

"Thank you, Shane," Aleksei says, slowly, like a man setting down something heavy. "It is very good to see you again. I hope your flight was comfortable."

Shane stops fussing with the suitcases. In Regina, Aleksei had maybe fifteen words of English and used them like he was stepping through a minefield. That was three whole sentences. With verbs.

"Holy shit," he says. "I mean—sorry. Your English is really good, sir. Uh, Aleksei."

"He has classes," Ilya says. "Four nights every week, since January. He practises at work. Now everybody there says I hope your flight was comfortable." He says it like a complaint, but he's watching his brother, grinning, waiting for him to do the next one.

"I have also how do you do," Aleksei says, a little shy about it.

"They pass B1 weeks ago," Vasilisa says sharply, and climbs down Ilya's arm to jump onto Tisha's back. She goes straight for his ears. Ollie's tail thumps; at least he's not sighing.

"That's amazing! So quickly—four nights a week on top of work? That's, wow—and pozhaluysta, by the way. For the thank you."

There's a pause.

"Since when," says Ilya.

"It's nothing. I got some CDs out of the library. I know, like, forty words."

"Which forty."

"Mostly food."

"Say fox," says Vasilisa.

"Lisa."

"Very good. Never call me this."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

By then Mom and Dad have caught up, and Shane does the introductions and mostly doesn't fuck them up. Mom, Dad, Hisashi, Maggie. Ilya and Vasilisa. Ilya's brother Aleksei, and—

He stops. He's been calling the dog Tisha in his head for five months—not Trisha, thank God he caught that one in time, how embarrassing—and it's just occurred to him that he doesn't know if that's actually his name. Russian names are treacherous.

"Tikhon," the shepherd says. His voice is deep and slow, and it's the first time Shane has ever heard it. "Tisha is fine. Please."

"David Hollander." Dad already has his hand out. "Ilya, good to see you again. Aleksei, we've heard a lot about you. Good flight? No, don't answer that, I can see."

Maggie comes around his ankles, goes straight up to Tisha, who is about eleven times her size, and looks him over the way she'd look over a messy, disorganized river with some enticingly placed trees on the bank. Tisha holds still for it.

"Fourteen hours on a plane, a dog your size," she says. "Did they at least give you water?"

Tisha looks at Aleksei. Aleksei looks at Tisha. Neither of them seems to have a plan for this.

"Yes," Tisha says. "Thank you."

"Good. We'll find you somewhere to sit."

Hisashi doesn't say anything. He dips his head to Tisha, slow and formal, and then lowers it a lot further, to the fox.

"You are very tall bird," Vasilisa informs him.

"So I'm told."

"And you." She's turned to Mom—a woman plenty of people call intimidating, who she's known for forty seconds—like it's nothing. Shane's heart skips. "You helped with parasol. Shane said. And with pillows. Alyosha told me everything."

There's the smallest pause. Shane holds his breath.

"Hisashi and I had opinions," Mom says, to the fox, directly, in exactly the voice she'd use for anybody. "Shane chose them."

Vasilisa's tail moves, once. "Thank you. The red one is very good for sleeping." She studies Mom a moment longer. "Shane looks a lot like you. Both of you, but you especially."

"I like to think so, too, thank you."

Mom shakes Aleksei's hand last, and has to tip her head all the way back to look at him. Something crosses her face, there and gone. Shane knows that look. It's the one she gets reading fine print.

"It's lovely to meet you, Aleksei," she says.

Then she looks at Dad. Dad looks at her. Hisashi, who never fidgets, shifts from one long leg to the other.

"Shane's right, you all look exhausted," Mom says. "David, find out where we can get these boys lunch."

Shane has no idea what that was about. Boys. Aleksei has a job and pays rent and raised Ilya. He has to be, like, thirty.

"Shane," Vasilisa says. "The box is for me."

It isn't a question.

"Oh. Yeah. Yes." He puts the suitcases down and gets on one knee on the marble—fuck the cameras, go ahead and film, Shane doesn't give a fuck—and gets the parasol out of its tissue paper and sets it on the floor, where it stands up on its little weighted foot exactly like the picture. White lace, with flowers and vines everywhere, over a thicker white fabric. On the website it looked classy. In a hotel lobby full of hockey players it looks like something for a doll's wedding.

Vasilisa jumps down from Tisha's back, walks around it once and noses the edge.

"This is not fringe," she says.

"No. Sorry. It's—"

"Is scallop." She walks underneath, turns around twice, and sits with her tail over her feet, in her gold, under a white lace parasol, looking out at the lobby like she's owned the building for a hundred years. "I like scallop more. Oliver. Come. There is room."

True to form, Ollie drops flat on the marble, gets exactly two-thirds of his nose into the shade, and shuts his eyes.

"Ilyusha," Vasilisa says. "We are keeping this up indoors also."

"Is sun umbrella. For sun."

"There are lights."

Ilya looks at Shane over her head. He looks exhausted, thinner than Shane likes, and happier than Shane has ever seen him.

"You see what you did," he says. "Tyranny, everywhere. And everywhere, enablers."

Chapter 3

Chapter Notes

I was just having a talk with a friend and we had this strange and partly welcome partly unsettling realization that we’d kind of gone full circle on the Disney men. Obviously, they were cool when we were little children. Then when puberty started, they were lame, going lamer and lamer the older we got. And now that we are moments away from disintegrating intno a fine dust, we’ve kind of accepted most of them as adorably positive fools. Cindarella’s prince? Not a thought behind those pretty eyes, but he seems fundamentally kind hearted, and isnt that, in the end, what it’s all about? Look at Eric. That dummy is always doing dumb shit like playing flute to his dog or bringing stranded mute people to his palace, or killing a sea witch with a boat—

So in honour of that milestone, here’s another chapter; also, end of Arc1/3

The draft is at seven that night, at the Staples Center, with the ice covered over. By half past six Shane has redone his tie four times, given up, and gone running to Mom about it.

Ian says it's going to be him. Ian has said it's going to be him every day for two months, without so much of a shred of doubt in sight. Meanwhile, the Bears' general manager has spent those same two months grinning at reporters and saying we like a lot of players, and half of TSN still thinks Boston is going to take Ilya, and nobody has actually said the words to Shane's face.

So call it eighty percent.

Mom fixes the tie in about eight seconds. Shane gets a finger under the knot.

"Leave it."

"It's tight."

"It was tight the last three times, too. Somehow you survived."

Dad lifts the camera. Shane drops his hand, automatically, and Mom catches it before it can go back to the tie. She squeezes once. Then she looks at him, and at Ollie, and at her watch.

"Five minutes," she says. "Go on. I'll hold them off."

There's a family washroom down a service corridor, with a lock on the door and a changing table bolted to the wall. Shane sits down on the tile in the nicest suit he's ever owned, with his back against the wall, and Ollie lies down and puts his head in his lap.

The rule is that neither of them says anything. Ollie breathes. Shane breathes. That's the whole routine, and it's worked before every game for three years.

"Eighty percent," Shane says.

"We're not supposed to talk."

"It's not a game."

Ollie thinks about that. His ribs go up and down under Shane's hand.

"Eighty's a lot," he says. "You'd take eighty on a breakaway."

"I'd take eighty on a breakaway." The fan in the ceiling ticks around. "What if it's him?"

"Then it's him."

"I think I'd be happy. Is that fucked? I've wanted this since I was four, and if that guy gets up there and says Rozanov, I think I'd actually be—"

"I know," Ollie says. "Me too." He shifts his chin on Shane's knee. "And then we'd go second, and we'd be mad about it for a week."

"A month."

"Bullshit, a month. A day, tops. I was being generous."

Shane laughs. It comes out shaky.

"It's not that I don't want it. I fucking want it."

"I know. It's my head you're squeezing."

Shane loosens his hands. Ollie pushes back into them, which is helpful. Really clear instructions, bud.

"It would be good, though," Ollie says. "For them. What with all the shit people say."

Yeah. It would. Shane wants to go first. Wants the acknowledgement; yeah, you worked hard, then harder, and it paid off. He also wants somebody to get up in front of all those cameras and say Ilya and Vasilisa are exactly who they want, fox and earrings and all. Wants the world to acknowledge that Shane and Ollie are competing for best hockey player, but Ilya and Vasilisa are doing more than just hockey. They’re competing in other categories too.

He gets both hands into the fur behind Ollie's ears and holds on, and Ollie lets him, and for a while they do it properly: in and out, with the fan ticking, and a whole arena finding its seats somewhere over their heads.

Then Ollie gets up, shakes himself from nose to tail, and looks at Shane's trousers.

"Oh, no," he says.

It's a black suit. It was a black suit. From the knee to about halfway up the thigh, it's now a grey one.

Mom has a lint roller in her purse, because of course she does. She doesn't say one word the entire time she's using it.

"We needed it," Ollie tells Hisashi.

"So I see," Hisashi says, and watches Mom peel another sheet off the roller.

The arena floor is all tables, thirty of them, one for every team, covered in laptops and binders and men in suits. The prospects are up in the stands with their families, in the seats the league gave them. The league gave the Rozanovs two seats a section over and six rows back. Mom had a word with a woman with a clipboard, so now it goes Dad, Mom, Shane, Ilya, Aleksei, all in one row, with Ollie on the aisle steps at Dad's end, Hisashi standing over him, and Tisha jammed in between Aleksei's legs at the other.

Vasilisa is on Ilya's knee, close enough that Shane could reach out and touch her. He wouldn't, obviously; that would be insane, and probably illegal. He's just noting the distance. Daemons don't come close to him and Ollie much, and while Vasilisa has always been the exception, it's still exciting.

"Hollander," Ilya says. "Your leg."

Shane looks down. His knee is going so fast the program on it is sliding off.

"Sorry."

He stops it. It starts again.

"You are shaking whole row."

"I'm not."

"Little bit," Aleksei says, from the far side of Ilya.

Great. Five months learning English, and now he can join in. Shane jams the program under his thigh and plants both feet on the concrete. Ilya's knee nudges his, once, and stays there.

"Better," Ilya says.

Shane concentrates on keeping his fucking leg still. Vasilisa has caught Ollie's eye at the other end of the row and is very slowly lifting her chin. Ollie lifts his to match. She gives him a small, approving nod, and his tail thumps going against Dad's shoe.

"The first selection of the 2009 draft," the commissioner says, "belongs to the Boston Bears."

The Bears' general manager takes his time getting to the microphone. He's a big, cheerful man with a raccoon daemon riding on his shoulder, which tells you most of what you need to know about the Boston Bears.

"Well," he says. "We thought about this for almost a full minute."

The building laughs. Shane doesn't, because Shane can't feel his hands.

"The Boston Bears are proud to select—"

For half a second, right there, in the gap, he can't think of either of their names.

"—from the Kingston Frontenacs of the Ontario Hockey League, Shane Hollander."

It's good. It's so good. Mom is crying, which she never does, and Dad has him around the neck, and Hisashi puts his whole long head down on Ollie's for a second. It's the best thing that has ever happened to him.

On his other side, Ilya punches him in the shoulder, hard.

"Go," he says. He's grinning like it was his own name. "Go, number one. Do not fall on stairs."

"Fuck you," Shane says, which is probably on television.

Ilya laughs and gets him up by the elbow.

"Oliver," says Vasilisa. "Walk nicely. Tall, as you should."

"Yeah," Ollie says. "Okay. Yeah."

He knows how the next part goes; he's known since he was fifteen. Button the jacket. Hug your mom first. Don't run. He gets the first two backwards. Mom doesn't seem to mind. Her face is wet against his cheek, and then Dad is getting an arm around both of them, and Shane has to stand there for a second because, holy shit, it's him. They picked him.

"Go on," Dad says into his ear. "They're waiting for you."

Ollie comes down the steps at his left knee, each step measured, ears soft, tail low. When they come out of the stands onto the open floor, the noise in the building changes. It's still a roar, it just has a gasp in the middle of it now. Every camera in the place swings around. A little dog at the Montreal table ducks under a chair.

On the stage he shakes the commissioner's hand and the general manager's hand and the hand of the Bears' coach, an old guy with a face like a boot, whose border collie drops into a crouch and gives Ollie the full stare for about a second and a half before he remembers where he is and sits up, looking mortified. Somebody puts a jersey over Shane's head, and somebody else puts a hat on him, and he smiles, the good one, into the flashbulbs. Then there's a woman with a headset taking him by the elbow, and more chaos.

Ian catches him at the bottom of the stairs and shakes his hand.

"Congratulations, Shane."

"Thanks. Jesus. Thanks."

"And Oliver," Constance says.

Ollie looks up at her. "Thanks."

"What did I tell you?" Ian says.

"I know."

"Every day for two months."

"I know, Ian."

Ian actually smiles. Then he straightens Shane's hat, turns him toward the corridor, and hands him over.

There's a strip of carpet down the middle and a station every ten feet. The photo with the jersey. The photo with the jersey and the hat. TSN, the American network, radio, the league's own website. Yes, sir. It's an honour. Great organization, great city. Just excited to get to work. Ollie sits at heel at every single one, chin level, and gets asked to turn his head toward the light.

Ian stays three steps behind them the whole way, in his grey suit, with Constance beside him. She's narrow even for a greyhound, almost completely silent, and she's the only daemon down here who stands inside Ollie's reach without having to think about it first. Three years will do that. Every so often she says, "Chin, Oliver," barely moving her mouth, and Ollie's chin comes back up.

There's a TV bolted up in the corner over every station, showing the floor. Shane isn't supposed to be watching it.

The second pick goes while he's telling the American network how much he's always admired the Bears. It's a big winger from the Western league, who Shane knows is good, and who is not, on the best day of his life, Ilya Rozanov. Shane loses the end of his sentence and has to go back for it.

"Okay," Ollie says, very low, on the walk to the next station. "So he goes third."

"Third's fine. Third's still—yeah."

Third is a defenceman.

"You've gotten pretty close with Rozanov, right?" the radio guy says. He's got the look of somebody who knows it's a good question. "Surprised he's still on the board?"

Behind him, Ian clears his throat. Shane has been told exactly how much to say tonight, and it's less than he is going to.

"Yes," he says. "I thought he'd go second. Have you watched him play?"

"Of course."

"There you are."

Four.

Ollie has stopped turning his head toward the light. He's watching the TV, openly, and so is Shane. The camera has found the stands: Ilya, with Vasilisa on his knee, and next to them an empty chair.

"That's our seat," Ollie says. "Why are we down here?"

"Because we got drafted."

"We got drafted half an hour ago. That's done." His tail has started going against the carpet, short and fast, and not because he's happy. "She's sitting really straight, Shane."

"She always sits straight."

"Not like that."

Five.

"Two more, Shane," says the woman with the headset, "and then the sit-down with—"

Six comes down through the concrete, over the speakers, with the whole building behind it. It's not Ilya's name.

"I'm sorry, ma'am," Shane says. "I have to go back up now."

"We've still got—"

"I know. I'm really sorry." He looks around for Ian. Ian looks at him, and then at the TV, like a man doing arithmetic.

"He'll do the rest in the morning," Ian says. "Thank you, Diane."

Shane could hug him. He doesn't; Ian would probably bill for it. Ollie is already at the end of the corridor, where Constance, who was standing in his way, has somehow stopped being in it. He isn't running; he's walking very, very fast. By the time they get back to the stairs, they're on the seventh pick.

His seat's still there, between Mom and Ilya. He climbs back up to it in a Bears jersey over his shirt and tie, with the hat still on because he forgot about the stupid thing. Ollie folds himself back onto the aisle steps. Two rows down, a camera operator turns all the way around.

Nobody's gone anywhere. He'd half thought his parents might have left to find the Bears people, or a drink. But Dad is explaining something to Aleksei with a hot dog, and Mom has her purse on her knees like she's settled in for the night. She puts a hand on Shane's back as he squeezes past, and keeps it there until he's sitting down.

"That is such an ugly hat," Ilya says. "At least wear it other way around, like American boys in movies."

Shane turns it. Ilya looks at him.

"No. Worse."

"You fucking told me to."

"I was wrong. Is rare, but happens."

Shane turns it back. Ilya is still looking at him, smiling a little.

"Well?" he says.

"What?"

"First overall. How is it?"

Shane looks down at the bear on his chest. He hasn't really had a chance to. It's stitched on, thick under his thumb, and it's his. They put his name on the back.

"Pretty fucking good," he admits.

"Yes," Ilya says. "I thought so."

Shane can't stop the grin. Neither of them says anything for a few seconds, and then the speakers crackle and he remembers where they are.

"Who went seventh? I was on the stairs."

Ilya tells him. Shane knows the name, knows all seven of them. He's played against most of them, and a couple of them are good. One of them is a guy from the Soo that Shane has personally gone around four times in one period.

"That's bullshit," Shane says.

"Hm," says Ilya.

Aleksei leans forward to say something in Russian. Ilya answers, then looks at Shane.

"He wants to know if you ate."

"Yeah. Before."

"Before what?"

"Jesus. Before this."

Ilya translates. Aleksei considers it, then says something to Dad, who holds out a hot dog.

"Wrong answer," Ilya says.

Shane takes it. He tears it in half, gives the bigger piece to Ilya and eats his own before anybody can ask him anything else. Ilya looks at the hot dog, then at Shane, then takes a bite. Good. That's two of them.

Eight. Nine. Ten.

A Swede. A defenceman from Saskatoon with a mastiff, who cries on stage—the defenceman, not the mastiff. Every time a name gets called, the big screen over the floor cuts for a second to Ilya, and every time it's the same shot: Ilya, slouched, one arm along the back of Aleksei's seat, looking like a guy waiting for a bus he doesn't especially need to catch. Vasilisa sits straight up on his knee with the chain throwing light off her head, looking down at thirty tables like she's reviewing enemy troops and isn't impressed with their chances.

It's a hell of a show. From anywhere else in the building, Shane would buy it. From here, he can see her feet. All four of them are hooked into the knee of Ilya's trousers, hard enough to pucker the fabric.

Eleven. Twelve.

There are thirty picks tonight. That's it, that's the first round. Everybody after thirty goes back to the hotel and comes in tomorrow morning with the fourth-liners and the backup goalies, and Shane has been doing the subtraction without meaning to since he sat down. Eighteen left. Montreal needs a centre so badly it's a running joke on TSN. Montreal takes a goalie. Seventeen.

Ollie can't stand it. He gets up off the steps, slowly, squeezes along the row past Dad's knees and Mom's and Shane's, and puts his chin on the back of the seat in front of Ilya's knee. He breathes out, once, so the fur on her chest moves.

"Oliver," she says, without turning her head. "I am busy."

"I know. You could be busy over here."

She looks at him then. Ollie holds very still, except for the end of his tail, which he can't quite get under control.

Fourteen goes by. At fifteen she steps off Ilya's knee onto the top of Ollie's head, walks down his neck like a gangplank, and sits between his shoulder blades, facing the floor, back straight, chain blazing. Ollie lowers himself to the concrete an inch at a time so she doesn't have to shift.

"Good?" he asks.

She noses one of his ears into place. "Very good."

Her feet go into his ruff. Shane feels it, way off, through the bond: eight sharp little points.

The big screen finds them a minute later: Ollie, flat on the concrete across everybody's feet, with Vasilisa sitting on him like a throne. The building makes a noise Shane has never heard before. He has no idea whether it's good.

Sixteen. The points dig in, then ease. Vasilisa bends her head to the place she's caught, works a bit of fur free with her teeth, and sits up again. Ollie's tail moves against Shane's shoe. He's going to think about that for the rest of his fucking life.

Seventeen. Eighteen goes to a guy Shane played with at under-seventeens, who is fine, who is a perfectly fine hockey player, who has never once in his life done anything that made a building go quiet. Nineteen. Eleven left. The points dig in again, harder, and Ollie doesn't so much as twitch an ear.

Twenty. Twenty-one. Nine left.

Somewhere behind them a man is listening to the broadcast on a little radio, and Shane catches about four words of it—character, and concerns, and the daemon thing—before Mom turns all the way around in her seat and looks at the guy, and the radio goes off.

Twenty-two.

Dad has put the napkin away. Aleksei has stopped moving, and Tisha has his whole head pressed down on his thigh. Ilya hasn't moved. He hasn't shifted or twitched or scratched his nose, as far as Shane can tell, but the hand on the back of Aleksei's seat has gone white around the knuckles.

Twenty-three. Seven left.

"This is insane," Shane says. He's trying to keep his voice down. He isn't managing. "This is fucking crazy. Do they not watch hockey? What the fuck do they think they're drafting for—"

"Shane."

"—you should've gone second. You should have gone first. Half these guys couldn't take the puck off you if you mailed it to them in a fucking box—"

He's halfway out of his seat. He doesn't know where he thinks he's going. Down there, maybe, to shout at someone. A hand closes in the back of his jersey and pulls him down.

"I told you," Ilya says. He isn't looking at Shane. He's looking at the floor. His hand stays where it is, fisted in the brand-new Bears jersey between Shane's shoulder blades. "I said this. Is okay. Sit."

Shane sits. The hand doesn't let go. He starts to turn, to say something else, and feels Ilya's knuckles against his back.

Okay. He can sit. He can do that.

Twenty-four. Six.

Twenty-five. Mom reaches across both of them without a word and hands Aleksei a bottle of water. He holds it. He doesn't open it. After a while, Ilya reaches across with his free hand and unscrews the cap for him.

Twenty-six. Four.

Twenty-seven goes to a kid Shane has never even heard of. Three. Three left, and the points in Ollie's ruff are all the way through to skin, and the hand in Shane's jersey is shaking, very slightly, like an engine idling.

"The twenty-eighth selection belongs to the New York Admirals."

Shane blinks, jarred a little out of his outrage. What? The Admirals? The Admirals never have a first-round pick, everybody knows that. They trade it every single year for some thirty-four-year-old, because the Admirals don't want change, they don't want mess, and they definitely don't want kids. The man walking to the microphone looks like he knows exactly how weird this is.

"The New York Admirals are proud to select, from Dynamo Moscow of the Kontinental Hockey League, Ilya Rozanov."

The hand lets go. Ilya doesn't move. For a second, nobody in the row does. Then Vasilisa turns around on Ollie's back and says something in Russian, so quietly that Shane, who is close enough to count her whiskers, can barely hear it. Ollie turns an ear back toward her.

Aleksei gets Ilya around the head and kisses his hair. Tisha barks, once, and it goes off in the arena like a gun. And Shane—

"Twenty-eighth," Shane says. "Twenty-eighth. What a fucking joke. I'm going to write somebody a letter. I'm going to—but Ilya. Ilya. Scott Hunter."

"I know who—"

"Scott Hunter. He's a fucking rock star, oh my God, I can't believe you get to play hockey with Scott Hunter. You're going to be so good there. You're going to be even better than you already are, which is fucking nuts—twenty-eighth, what a fucking joke—"

"Hollander. Are you angry or are you happy?"

"Yes. Both. Fuck."

Ilya laughs. Really laughs, with his head back, and Shane gets a hand around his upper arm and squeezes. He needs to do something. Ilya's here, he's going, they're both going, and the stupid fucking hat is sliding into Shane's eyes again.

"Keep that on," Ilya says. "Is growing on me."

"Go get your own."

"Congratulations, Ilya." Mom reaches across Shane and takes Ilya's hand in both of hers, properly, the way she'd shake hands with somebody at work. "New York is very lucky."

"Steal of the draft, son," Dad says, leaning around her. "They'll be kicking themselves for years, the other twenty-seven. They probably already are."

Hisashi bends his long neck all the way down, until his head is level with the fox on the wolf.

"Congratulations, Vasilisa," he says gravely.

"Well done, the pair of you," says Maggie.

Ilya looks at his hand, in Mom's. He opens his mouth, shuts it, and looks at her.

"Thank you," he says.

"Thank you," says Vasilisa, at the same moment, and then she looks annoyed about it.

Then Ilya stands up and buttons his jacket. Aleksei reaches to smooth the hair he's just messed up, makes it worse, and tries again.

"Alyosha," Ilya says.

Aleksei takes his hand away. He's smiling so hard that Shane has to look down for a second.

Ollie lifts his head, as high as it goes, and holds it there, and Vasilisa walks up his neck and steps across onto Ilya's arm without anybody touching anybody they shouldn't. She goes up to his shoulder and shakes herself once, so the chain settles. And the two of them walk down the steps into the lights, taking their time.

On the stage the man from New York holds out a jersey. Ilya looks at it. Then he puts his arm out flat, level with the lectern, and Vasilisa walks down it and steps off in front of the microphone like that's what lecterns are for. She sits and waits, facing the building.

He pulls the jersey over his head with the same face he'd use to read a menu, pushes his hair back, and holds the arm out again, and she walks up it and takes a moment to arrange herself against the new colours. He shakes the commissioner's hand, and then the hand of the man from New York.

And then Vasilisa leans out off his shoulder, twenty feet tall on the big screen with every light in the building on her, and says something to the man from New York. Shane can't hear it from up here. Nobody can. He can see the man's face, though. For about a second the guy looks like he's been slapped with a fish. Then he laughs, and says something back. Somewhere in the New York section, a few people start to clap.

"She was shaking," Ollie says, very low, from the floor. "The whole time. You couldn't see it."

"I felt it, bud."

"She took some of my fur."

"Like you mind. She could shave you bald to weave herself a warm rug and you'd thank her for the privilege."

"Fuck yeah, I would," Ollie says. "But since we're throwing stones, let's talk about Ilya—"

Tisha turns to Ollie, from way too close. Shane has completely forgotten that Ilya's brother is still very much here, and listening, with a grin that keeps getting bigger.

"Yes," Tisha says. "Let us talk."

Chapter 4

Rounds two through seven start at ten in the morning, and nobody needs Shane for any of them. He did the interviews Ian promised at seven, four of them back to back in a conference room off the lobby, with Ian standing behind his chair looking at his watch. Then a breakfast with the Boston people—also a meeting, but Ian told them they should get used to meetings over food; they are likely going to become depressingly frequent in the future—and then they’re done. They belong to Boston now. Boston’s people shook his hand over the eggs and told him to go and enjoy the city.

So they do Los Angeles. One day is all they get, and Shane isn’t even mad about it, because of what comes after. Aleksei and Tisha fly home tomorrow—Aleksei has work on Tuesday—but Ilya and Vasilisa aren’t going with them. They’re getting on the Hollanders’ flight to Ottawa. A week at Shane’s house. Then development camp, which is the same week in two different cities, and then they sign, two days apart, so each of them can be there for the other’s, if at all possible. There’s a part after that where Ilya has to go back to Moscow and wait on a visa, but Shane isn’t looking at that part yet. He’s got three weeks before he has to.

Today is what matters, and today feels like a dream, like something Shane made up that’s somehow happening in real life. Ilya goes in front, in the terrible sunglasses, carrying the parasol over one shoulder like a rifle, with Vasilisa sitting underneath it. She’s left the more dramatic jewellery at the hotel, but she’s putting up with the sunglasses, and she has instructed Ilya, at length, in how to tie a silk scarf around her head like an Italian movie star from the sixties. Mom helped; the two of them pulled up reference photos on Mom’s laptop and everything, and made Ilya tie it again and again. Shane is walking next to him, Ollie next to Shane, at heel, because it’s a sidewalk and there are people. Mom and Dad after that, Mom with the map and Dad with the water bottles. And two steps behind all of them, Aleksei and Tisha, like the world’s most anxious bodyguards, taking pictures of palm trees with a little silver camera.

They do the stars on the sidewalk. Every star has two names on it, the big one and then, underneath in smaller brass letters, the daemon’s. Vasilisa wants to know who each one is, and whether they are dead, and is not impressed by the answers.

She likes the cement better. Outside the Chinese Theatre the movie stars have left their handprints, and next to every pair of hands there’s whatever the daemon had: paws, hooves, a set of talons, one long smear that Dad says was a snake. Vasilisa makes Ilya crouch so she can get down, and then she goes along the rows trying her own paw in every print that’s small enough.

“Dog,” she says. “Dog. Cat, fat one. Dog.” Then she stops at one from 1936 and stands in it for a while. It fits. “This one. Who is this?”

Shane reads the name out. Myrna Loy. He’s never heard of her.

“Dead?”

“Probably. It’s from 1936.”

“Hm,” Vasilisa says. She doesn’t move, and Aleksei takes a picture.

The crowds don’t bother them. Shane had sort of thought they would. But Moscow is bigger than this, Ilya says, and adds, in a complicated tone, Moscow is bigger than anything. What gets him is the guys in costumes. There’s a cowboy, and a guy painted silver, and a guy in a cape whose pigeon daemon has a matching cape, and every one of them wants five dollars for a picture.

“Five dollars,” Ilya says. “For standing. He does not even do anything.”

“You get paid for standing next to stuff.”

“Is different. I am beautiful.”

Mom buys everybody smoothies at a place with a line out the door. They’re nine dollars each. Shane watches Aleksei read the board, do the math, and go for his wallet, and Mom says, “Absolutely not. How dare you insult me like this? Now you must have a sandwich too, to make up for it.”

Ilya’s has wheatgrass in it. Vasilisa leans down off his shoulder and sniffs the straw.

“Smells healthy,” she says. It is, quite possibly, a sincere attempt to be polite.

“It tastes healthy,” Ilya says, and drinks the whole thing in one miserable gulp.

They do the pier. Ilya goes all the way out to the end of it, to the rail, and it turns out he has never seen the Pacific. He just stands there looking at it. Vasilisa is up on her hind legs on his shoulder with her front paws in his hair, looking too. Neither of them says anything for a long time, and Shane doesn’t either.

Then they do the beach. The beach, however, requires some logistics first. Paws and hot sand? Not a great idea.

He gets the boots out of his backpack at the top of the steps. They’re Ollie’s summer ones, from the outfitter’s on Bank Street, the place that sells snowshoes and bear bells, where there’s one shelf at the back for working daemons: sled teams, search and rescue. They’re big-ass things, canvas up to the elbow, with rubber soles and a yellow stripe. They come in one colour. Ollie has winter ones too, for the salt, with a green stripe. Shane has had a pair of one or the other in his bag for years.

It’s hard to say who is more outraged, Ilya or Vasilisa.

“It’s sand,” Ollie says, apologetically. “It’s hell on my paws. Irritates my pads like nothing else if it’s small and gritty like this, and not nice smooth pebbles like God intended beaches to be.”

“I understand perfectly, Oliver,” Vasilisa says. “What I do not understand is why you did not tell us this. I would have something made. Silk slippers, something with pretty bows. Ilyusha. He has been keeping secrets.”

“Very serious,” Ilya agrees, gravely. “We come all this way. We trust them.”

“Silk slippers wouldn’t work, though,” Ollie says. “Not for the beach. The theatre, maybe, or opera or something. Sand gets hot; nasty stuff. Mine are rubber and fabric, but I know you have a thing about texture. We’ll think about it. Maybe leather, with bamboo for the outer soles—”

“Leather,” Vasilisa says, after she has thought about it. “Soft one. Can still have bows.”

“Oh, sure,” Ollie says. “Bows aren’t the problem.”

Ilya crouches down in front of him, with his hands behind his back like he’s in a museum. “Ollie. Show.”

Ollie doesn’t look at Shane, but he does freeze, spooked. Then he relaxes, and noses one of the boots across the concrete, and Ilya looks at it from about a foot away, the sole, the straps, the stripe.

“Like little goalie pads,” he says. “You look fantastic. I want four of these.”

Aleksei holds his hand out. Shane isn’t sure what’s happening, so he puts a boot in it.

Aleksei turns it over. He presses the sole with his thumb, and bends it, and checks the stitching where the canvas meets the rubber, and looks down inside the cuff, exactly the way Dad checks a skate.

“Good,” he says, and hands it back. “Good sole. Here, at top, make tight, or sand goes in. And after, check feet. Between—” He doesn’t have the word. He spreads his own fingers and points between them.

“Toes,” Tisha tells him.

“Toes,” Aleksei says.

“I will,” Shane says. “Thanks.”

He looks at the boot, and then at Aleksei, who works in a library. Maybe they get a lot of daemons in. Maybe it’s the floors. Maybe it’s that Aleksei and his little brother both have canine daemons, and he got very used to Ilya and Vasilisa, at least, doing mad shit when they were younger.

Tisha doesn’t have any boots. He looks at the sand, and then at Aleksei. Aleksei looks at the sand too, and then at the four of them: Ilya, who is six foot one, and Shane, who isn’t, but isn’t small either, and has Ollie. Shane sees him decide that whatever can go wrong on a beach in the middle of the afternoon is going to go wrong for somebody else. There’s a place at the top of the steps with umbrellas and plastic chairs. He says something short to Ilya in Russian, and points at it.

“He says go,” Ilya says. “He says he can see whole beach from there, and he is going to sit until his feet stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Just stop.”

Mom and Dad go with him. When Shane looks back from the bottom of the steps, Aleksei has a coffee and a paperback, and Tisha is flat out in the shade under the table. Every couple of pages Aleksei’s eyes come up, find them, and go back down.

So it’s the four of them. Shane kneels in the sand and does up the straps, tight at the top. Ollie holds still for it, but his ears have gone sideways, and Shane is right there with him. Stupid. The boots have been in his bag for years. He spent weeks finding a parasol for a fox, and it never once occurred to him that a fox has feet too. She’d have liked picking them out, and shoes are so easy to personalize with prints and details and things, without losing their function. He could have had a pair made, and waiting at the front desk right next to the parasol.

“You will simply have to carry me,” Vasilisa declares, into the brief silence. “Since you are appropriately dressed. This is what you get for your trickery.”

Ollie’s ears come forward. “I can do that,” he says, fast.

Shane pulls the last strap through, checks it with a finger, and sits back on his heels. Ollie comes in close to Ilya. Very close, close enough that two girls on a towel nearby, who have been not so surreptitiously whispering, actually gasp. He holds still, and Vasilisa hops down off Ilya’s shoulder and onto his back.

She makes herself comfortable, high up on his neck, so that her little head rests between his ears, silk and sunglasses and all. Ollie shifts his feet under her and looks back at Shane, and Shane can practically see it going on in there: some kind of harness, a little bracket between the shoulders. There has to be a way to attach a parasol to a wolf. They’ll figure it out.

Ilya, meanwhile, takes his shirt off.

“Is hot,” he says, to nobody. He doesn’t just take it off, either. He stretches first, both arms up over his head, and then he tucks the shirt into the back pocket of his jeans, which sit really low. Low enough for a white waistband with DOLCE & GABBANA printed all the way around it. Shane’s come in a three-pack. Mom buys them.

Shane has seen Ilya shirtless before. A couple of times, on Skype, and the first time he almost dropped the laptop, but he’d figured he had built up some kind of immunity since. It turns out the immunity doesn’t work in person.

“He did push-ups in room,” Vasilisa tells Ollie, loudly. “Forty.”

“Traitor,” Ilya says, and grins. “So what, I want to look good. Is America. Good place to be beautiful.”

“It’s working,” Shane says, before he can stop himself.

Ilya looks at him then. Shane gets up and knocks the sand off his knees, which gives him something to do for about two seconds. When he looks up again, Ilya is still looking.

“Good,” Ilya says. His smile has changed a little. “Was hard work.” He holds his arms out from his sides. “Hollander. I will burn.”

He will, too. Shoe misstep aside, Shane came prepared; he already has the sunscreen out of the backpack, from a Mom-approved brand, factor 50+. He’s had it out since the shirt came off.

“What else is in there?” Ilya says.

“Stuff.”

“He’s got everything,” Ollie says. “Ask him for something.”

“Scissors.”

Shane has scissors. They’re tape scissors, but still. He has band-aids, and a sewing kit from the hotel, and two more waters, and a granola bar that Ilya takes and eats in three bites while Shane does his shoulders, fast and even, like taping a stick, and not thinking about it. Mostly not.

There are phones and cameras pointed their way. There have been since they came down the steps, and now there are a lot more. Shane doesn’t blame anybody.

And then it all turns out to be too much for the girls on the towel.

Shane gets ready for it without even thinking. People come up to him all the time. But there’s usually a whole thing first: a pause, a little conference, somebody looking at Ollie and deciding if they’re allowed. These two are already on their feet. They’re smiling. A little kid somewhere is pointing. A fox in a silk headscarf, sitting on Ollie’s head, and Ollie in big dumb boots with yellow stripes: apparently that’s all it takes. One of the girls says oh my God, and gets her phone out, and takes about three steps straight toward Ollie, and Ollie’s head comes up so fast that Vasilisa has to put a paw down between his ears.

“Shane,” Ollie says. “What—”

“I don’t know,” Shane says, without moving his mouth. “I think they like you.”

“Me?”

“Hi,” the girls say, grinning. The one on the left is around their age and has braces. The other one is a bit older. Both of them are in teeny tiny bikinis, scraps of fabric that honestly make Shane a little uncomfortable. Their daemons, a tall gazelle with a mongoose riding on his back, don’t quite come up to Ollie and Vasilisa, but they come a few steps closer than is, strictly speaking, usual. “Sorry to interrupt, but oh my God. Can we get a picture? Are you guys actors?”

“Yes,” Ilya says immediately.

“No,” Shane says. “We play hockey.”

The girls look at each other. It’s pretty obvious neither of them has ever watched a hockey game in her life. They didn’t come over because he’s Shane Hollander. They came over because of the boots. Or, more realistically, because of Ilya’s six-pack.

“Two pictures,” Ilya says. He’s smiling, the one from the ads. “Then we go. We are expected.”

He’s so good at it. He ends up standing between the girls and Ollie without ever seeming to move there. He puts them on his far side, with their daemons a correct distance back, and he puts Shane on the other, and when a dad comes over with a real camera and a kid on his hip he does the same thing again, and again after that, half a step at a time. Nobody gets within arm’s reach of Ollie. Nobody notices they’re not getting there.

“From left,” Vasilisa tells the dad. “Is my good side. Oliver, chin up.”

Ollie puts his chin up.

It’s more than two pictures. It’s about nine. And then Ilya says, “Okay. Thank you. Have nice day, enjoy beach,” still smiling, and starts walking, and everybody just lets him. Shane couldn’t have done that with a stick and a penalty box.

“That was fucking crazy,” he says, when they’re far enough down the sand. “Does that happen to you?”

“It happen to you too, superstar. All the time. Wolf of Canada, pride of the program—”

“Not like that. They came right up. There’s usually a whole thing first.”

Ilya looks at Ollie, and then back at Shane. “Maybe they think he is actor. Very famous. Only plays villains.”

“Get fucked, Rozanov.”

“Now is romantic lead. You must be careful. Very demanding, these people.”

“Keep walking, Ilyusha,” Vasilisa says. “Some of us wish to see ocean.”

Shane is still laughing when Ilya hands him the parasol, so he can get his shirt back out of his pocket. He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t check what Shane does with it. He just hands it over, like there’s no question Shane’s got it. Shane puts it up and gets in step next to Ollie, and keeps the shade on the fox.

They go down to the water. Vasilisa leans out between Ollie’s ears and watches it come in, and tells him exactly how far back he’s allowed to go. Ilya walks next to Shane with his shirt over one shoulder. Every so often he gets out ahead and turns around and walks backwards, talking, with the sun behind him. Shane keeps reminding himself to look where he’s putting his feet; if he faceplants like a log, he will have to drown himself in ritual penance.

There are foot showers at the bottom of the steps, afterward. Shane kneels on the wet concrete and undoes the straps, one boot at a time, and does what he was told and checks between the toes. Ollie holds each paw up without being asked. He’s been quiet since the pictures.

“That kid waved at me,” he says finally, low, just for Shane.

“I saw.”

“I didn’t do anything. I just stood there, like always.”

“Yeah.” Shane runs his thumb over the pad. No sand. “Maybe it’s the boots.”

“It’s her,” Ollie says. “You can’t be scared of anything she touches.”

Shane looks over. Ilya is crouched by the wall, holding the scarf while Vasilisa shakes herself out. He folds it up the long way, neatly, and puts it in his pocket. Then he catches Shane looking, and smiles at him.

Shane checks the last paw.

By dinner the pictures are everywhere. Shane knows this because Mom’s phone goes off between the salad and the fish, and she looks at the screen, and says excuse me to Aleksei, very politely, and takes it at the table.

“Ian,” she says. “Yes. I’ve seen them.”

Goddamn it. Ian? Really? Shane has been a Bear for five minutes and his agent is already calling his mom. And Ian has never once, in three years, called when he didn’t have to. Which means somebody in Boston made him.

“No. No, I don’t think so. I understand what Boston’s people think. I’m telling you what Shane’s people think. Meaning me. I am Shane’s people.” A pause. “Then you can tell them to call me. Thank you. Goodnight.”

She puts the phone face down next to her water glass.

“Was that—” Shane says.

“That was nothing you need to worry about, baby.” Her voice is perfectly pleasant; it’s her eyes that aren’t. “I’ll handle it. You carry on exactly as you were.”

“But what did they—”

“Absolutely nothing of importance, value or sense. Eat your fish.”

Across the table, Ilya is looking at Mom the way he looked at the ocean.

There’s a thing after dinner, in the hotel bar, for the first-rounders. The league puts it on. Somebody slid a card about it under Shane’s door, and Shane filed it with all the other things he’s supposed to do and would rather not, right up until Ilya picks it up off the desk and reads it twice.

“We go,” Ilya says.

“We don’t have to. Nobody takes attendance.”

“Hollander. I am first-round pick since yesterday. I am going to party for first-round picks.”

“And I am wearing the gold,” Vasilisa says.

So they get ready. Ilya and Vasilisa go first. Shane sits in the desk chair in the Rozanovs’ room and settles in to wait an hour, quietly, because Aleksei is asleep on top of the covers with his shoes on and Tisha tucked between him and the wall, covered with a sheet even in this heat.

It takes nine minutes. He’d honestly thought there would be more to it, but Ilya takes a quick shower, changes his shirt, and does one thing to his hair with wet hands, and then sits on the edge of the bed with Vasilisa standing between his knees. She holds up one paw at a time, and he slides her bracelets on, thin gold rings, three above each front paw and one above each back paw, and does up every clasp with the same fast fingers Shane uses on his skates. He leaves her ears alone. She has her little gold loops in, the ones she always wears, and tonight that’s all. Then it’s a quick rub-down of her fur, and a few spritzes of some oil that doesn’t smell like anything and makes her coat lie flat and shine. They’ve done this every day for years. It’s just getting dressed.

Then they troop down the hall to Shane’s room, and that’s where it falls apart.

Vasilisa stands on the luggage rack and looks into the closet. There are three shirts on hangers.

“This is all?”

“I’ve got a suit. I wore it yesterday.”

“I saw,” she says, the way you’d say it about a car accident. “Oliver. Which one do you like?”

Ollie, on the carpet, looks at the shirts for a while. “The blue one?”

“They are both blue one.”

“The other blue one.”

Vasilisa shuts her eyes for a second. She isn’t angry. She looks like somebody who has been the only person who cares about this in every room she’s ever been in, and made her peace with it a long time ago.

“Dark blue,” she tells Shane. “Sleeves, you roll two times, not three. Top button open. No tie, you are not at funeral. And the shoes from yesterday, not those.”

“What’s wrong with—”

“Shane.”

“Okay.”

He’s all too happy to do what he’s told, honestly. It’s sort of great. And anyway Ilya, who is lying across Shane’s bed with his shoes hanging off the end, has started a story.

The story is about a photoshoot, in April, for Denis Simachev. “Is designer. Very cool, very Moscow. You would hate.” It was coats. Aleksei was supposed to come. Aleksei comes to all of them. He sits in the corner with a book and doesn’t say one word, and everybody behaves. But that day he had work, so he sent Svetlana.

“To guard my virtue,” Ilya says. “He said this, say the words with his mouth. I am seventeen, I am athlete, and he sends girl who is like this”—he holds a hand up, about level with his own chest—“to guard my virtue.”

“Did she?”

“Hollander. She made the stylist so angry his hands shake, because he is trying not to slap her. She brush Sila right on top of clothes, hairs everywhere. She made them stop everything so we eat. She sat in his chair. His chair, with his name on it. They bring her tea and she send it back.” He’s counting them off on his fingers. “By lunch they are so happy to talk to me. I am angel. I am easiest model in Russia. They gave me coat as present. Go with God, they say, only take the demon with.”

Shane is laughing so hard he does his buttons up wrong and has to start over.

And at the back of his head, the whole time, there’s the other thing, which is the way Ilya said he said this, with his mouth. Shane has had five months to learn this one. When somebody looks after Ilya, he complains about it, and the longer he goes on, the more he liked it. Aleksei couldn’t be there, so Aleksei made sure somebody was. Ilya has told the whole thing as a joke on himself, and he’s sort of glowing.

So that’s a thing to know. Ilya likes being fussed over. They can do that. Nobody can do it better than they can.

“I’m glad you weren’t there by yourself,” Shane says. “Nobody ever tried anything with me. Ollie, you know. But you hear stuff.” He gets the last button. “And mine aren’t like that anyway. Mine are, like, skates. And a bank.”

“Hollander.” Ilya gets up on his elbows. “Trust me. One of yours pays more than all of fashion ones together. At this level they pay in clothes. In exposure.” He says it like it’s a skin condition. “But whatever, is not the point. The point is—”

“The point,” Vasilisa says, “is that he owns one pair of good shoes.” She has been inspecting Shane. “Turn.”

Shane turns.

“Yes. Okay. Is not good. But is not embarrassing me.”

“That’s the nicest thing she’s ever said to me,” Shane tells Ollie.

“Sucks to suck,” Ollie says, smugly. “She said my drift was creative.”

Ilya is still looking at him. Shane resists the urge to check his buttons again.

“Blue is good,” Ilya says. “You should wear this one more.”

Shane looks down at himself, which doesn’t help. It’s a shirt. It’s been in his closet for a year. He wore it to a team dinner and to a thing for the bank, and neither one made him feel anything like this.

“Okay,” he says, and goes to find his room key before he can say anything worse.

So that’s how Shane ends up at the thing in the hotel bar. It isn’t much of a thing, as it turns out. The league has roped off half the lounge and put up a banner. There’s a table of hats, which nobody needs, because everybody got his on stage. There’s a photographer doing each guy and his parents in front of the banner. There’s a woman with a clipboard and a headset who checks them off at the rope, and her spaniel takes one look at Ollie and goes around behind her legs. The dads have beers and the picks have Cokes, because it’s America. Mostly it’s the dads’ party, to be honest. They’re working the room, shaking hands with other dads, finding out whose kid went where. Mom and Dad do one lap, and then Dad gets cornered by a dad from Thunder Bay.

Twenty-eight guys in a loose clump, with their labs and their retrievers. And then, over by the window, with nobody within ten feet of them, the first overall pick and the twenty-eighth, and a wolf, and a fox with gold on all four legs that jingles when she’s sitting on Ilya’s shoulder, but stops once she hops onto Ollie and his coat swallows the sound.

One guy comes over anyway. It’s the defenceman from Saskatoon, the one who cried on stage. His name is Cody Marchuk, he went ninth, and Shane played against him at under-seventeens. He crosses the ten feet with a Coke in his hand and his mastiff two steps behind him, and the mastiff sits down a careful distance from Ollie and looks at the carpet.

“Hey,” Cody says. “Hollander. Congrats, man.” Then, to Ilya, and you can see him decide to do it: “You too. Twenty-eighth is bullshit. Everybody knows it.”

“Thank you,” Ilya says. “Congratulations also. Ninth is very good.”

It’s perfectly polite. It’s the voice he’d use on a customs officer. Shane has had five months of the other one, the one that comes with smoke and insults at four in the morning, and had known in theory that there were two but not what it looked like from so close up.

“Your daemon is very large,” Vasilisa tells Cody. Him, not the mastiff.

Cody’s eyes go to her and then away, fast, to Ilya, like he isn’t sure he’s allowed. “Uh. Yeah. She is.”

Somebody should say something normal. Shane is the only one left. “Saskatoon’s a good barn,” he says. “Good—ice.”

“Yeah,” says Cody. “Well. See you guys out there, I guess.”

He goes back, and the mastiff goes with him.

“She wouldn’t look at me,” Ollie says quietly. “She’s twice my weight.”

“I know.”

“I liked this afternoon better,” Ollie says.

So did Shane. But it’s Cody he keeps watching. Somebody thumps him on the shoulder, and inside ten seconds he’s laughing at something, with his mastiff leaning on his leg. He isn’t upset. He isn’t even surprised. He came all the way across the room to be decent, the way you’d wave at somebody across a river. And Shane told him about his ice.

He picks at the label on his Coke. He could go over there in a bit. Ask where Cody’s camp is, or something. Something with an answer.

Vasilisa says something fast in Russian, not whispering precisely but clearly speaking in an undertone. Ilya’s mouth twists, smooths out. He looks at Shane.

“We have hat already,” he says. “Why do they give more hats?”

“In case you lose the first one.”

“Is not possible. Mine is terrible bright blue. You can see from space.”

Shane laughs. Ilya’s shoulders come down a little, and he turns the rest of the way toward him, away from the room.

People were weird with Shane before. He knows it isn’t helping that he’s been stuck to Ilya Rozanov’s side for two days like a tick. Yeah, and? It’s not like Shane isn’t going to save every one. Maybe especially tonight’s, with the blue shirt. He gets next to no time with Ilya as it is, and Ilya could have come to this thing without him, besides.

Ollie shifts in against Shane’s leg. Up on his back, Vasilisa has started complaining about the music. They’re staying until she hears something acceptable, apparently. It could take all night.

Go ahead and whisper; They’re good. They’re Shane and Oliver Hollander, they went first overall, and they’re Ilya and Vasilisa Rozanov’s friends. They’re fucking golden.

Chapter 5

Aleksei flies home the next day; that was always the plan. Only, when Ilya had first said it, he sounded breezy and relaxed. Things aren’t so breezy now. Shane can see the tension in Vasilisa, if not in Ilya, who is talking to Aleksei in Russian at a speed Shane doubts he could follow even if he spoke it. Vasilisa is grooming Tisha, aggressively, her sharp little snout going at lightning speed and her paws all but kneading him like a cat’s. The brothers are close, Shane knows. He’d be more worried if they weren’t a little tense right about now.

At the airport Aleksei shakes Dad’s hand. He does a strange, stiff little bow to Mom. He says, “Thank you for taking care of my brother,” which he has obviously been practising since Friday, and then he takes Ilya by the back of the neck and says something low in Russian, with their foreheads nearly touching. Tisha and Vasilisa stand nose to nose on the floor the whole time. Nobody looks at them. You don’t, at things like this; you find something else to look at for a bit. Then he’s gone, ducking through security, and Ilya is standing in the departures hall with a suitcase and a parasol box, looking at the place where his brother was. He has been eighteen for about two weeks.

Shane ambles over, as far into Ilya’s space as he’s comfortable going, and then a bit further, the rest of the way. He’s been learning. He bumps Ilya’s shoulder with his own. Ilya leans back into him, for a second, without looking away from security.

Ollie waits next to Vasilisa. Her ears are still pointed after Tisha, wherever he is by now, and her tail is wrapped tight around her feet. Ollie puts his head down and noses her flank, gently. She turns into him. He lies down around her and keeps curling in, then brings his tail over her back, until there’s almost nothing of her left showing. Just her nose, tucked under his jaw, and her ears, flat and down for once.

“Right,” Mom says. “Come on, boys, we have a flight to catch. Gate forty-one. Ilya, give David that bag.”

Dad gets the suitcase, Shane gets the parasol box. Ilya lets them have it, and checks his pocket for his boarding pass, and the whole business of going somewhere starts up again.

The guest room is at the end of the upstairs hall, across from the bathroom, one door down from Shane’s. It’s where Mom keeps the sewing machine and the good towels. There’s a double bed with too many pillows on it, and a dresser, and a window over the back yard. Mom has cleared out two drawers. She has also put a round velvet cushion on the floor at the foot of the bed, brand new, from the Bay. They spent half of April picking out cushions to send to Moscow; she wasn’t going to have Vasilisa show up here and find nothing but carpet.

Vasilisa walks around the cushion once. She puts one paw on it.

“Is velvet,” she says. Then, to Mom: “Thank you, Yuna. Is very correct.”

Mom looks the way she does when a contract comes back signed.

Shane stands in the doorway, after, and it’s stupid, but he can’t get over it. He knew they were coming. He was on the plane. But Ilya’s suitcase is open on the guest bed, and Ilya is putting socks in a drawer, in Shane’s house. For five months Ilya has been something that happens on a laptop, a grainy balcony at four in the afternoon. Now he’s eight feet from Shane’s bedroom door and there’s a parasol box in the hall closet.

“You are staring,” Ilya says, without turning around.

“I’m not.”

“He is,” Vasilisa says. “Oliver also.”

Ollie is in the doorway too, under Shane’s elbow. “We’re just checking,” he says.

Ilya shuts the drawer. “Okay. Now show me your room.”

So Shane shows him their room. It’s kind of relaxing, which he didn’t expect. He’s been describing this room to Ilya in bits and pieces for five months, and now he just gets to point.

Ilya looks at the trophies. Shane figured he’d skip them. Ilya reads the little plates, and picks one up to check the date, and asks about a tournament Shane had pretty much forgotten until right now. Ilya remembers a goal from it. Shane remembers the hotel, because the fire alarm went off at three in the morning and they all had to stand in the parking lot in February. But once Ilya starts describing the play, he gets there.

“That one. Yeah. They kept leaving the back door open.”

“They did not leave it open. You made them move.” Ilya puts the trophy back. “I watched this many times.”

Shane looks at the little brass player on top of it. The stick is bent. It’s been bent for years. He should probably fix that.

Then Ilya notices the rugs, and sits right down in the middle of them.

There are two, thick wool ones, overlapping, and they take up most of the floor between the bed and the wall, because that’s where Shane and Ollie sit. They’ve done most things on the floor since Shane was little, because it’s the one place in the house where they’re the same height: homework, game tape, eating stuff Mom would be mad about finding upstairs. Ilya pushes his hand into the pile.

“This is good,” he says. “This is for sitting properly.”

Vasilisa gets down off his shoulder, smells it for a bit, digs at it, turns around three times and sits down. She’s pretty graceless about it, for her; doesnt sit neatly, with her front paws crossed and back straight. No, she’s a bit boneless, maybe a bit tired, lies flat on her stomach, then a little on the side, then curves into a C, then sort of flops all the way on the back and wiggles a little around, like she’s scratchign her back on the carpet. Adorable, sure—she could be stripping the skin of a bunny right where she is, and Shane would think it’s the cutest thing he’s ever seen—but weird.

Then it’s the books, and Shane braces, because Ilya makes fun of everything. It’s two whole shelves. It’s every book about wolves, or about anybody who ever had one, that he and Ollie could get their hands on since Ollie settled. The natural history ones. Jack London, obviously. Mandela. A kids’ life of Joan of Arc with the wolf on the cover. Bashō, which he doesn’t really get.

Ilya reads the spines with his head tilted. All of them. It takes a while. Then he pulls one out.

“This is good?”

It’s the Nansen. “That one’s really good. He tries to float to the North Pole in a boat. On purpose.”

“I borrow,” Ilya says, and puts it on the rug next to him. He doesn’t say one funny thing about the rest of the shelf. Shane keeps waiting for it.

“We read all of them,” Ollie says, a little bit like he’s expecting a fight.

“Of course,” Vasilisa says. “You should know your people.”

And then Ilya sees Ollie’s wall.

The setup came home from Kingston in May, in the back of Dad’s car with the hockey bags. The guy from Toronto drove up to install it again and mount the screen on a better platform. Dad built that out of cardboard first, then had a professional make the real one. Ollie’s bed got the same treatment, because it isn’t just a pillow. The carpenter, a family friend who built most of the furniture in the house, has had Ollie’s measurements for years. He worked out a heavy wooden wolf bed on little wheels, like a desk chair’s, that lock in place and unlock at the press of a paw. The Toronto guy was incredibly impressed. He asked if he could take some photos with his phone, and then stayed for dinner to answer Ollie’s many questions.

“This is it? This is the computer?” Ilya is already on his knees next to it. Then he stops, and looks over his shoulder. “Ollie. I can?”

Ollie blinks. “Yeah,” he says. “Sure. Go ahead.”

Ilya lies down on his stomach on a Ollie’s bed, with his chin on his fists, and looks at the screen from where Ollie looks at it. “Okay,” he says. “Show me.”

Ollie shows him. It takes about a minute: the strap, the switch, open Skype, message Vasilisa, a sentence coming up on the screen with one word wrong. Ilya has been on the other end of this for months. He’s never seen it from here.

"Good," he says. "Now tell me what is bad."

Shane knows what's bad. He has written about six emails about what's bad. The voice thing is good, and getting better. The switch is one switch, on and off. Ollie can't move the pointer, so he can't do anything the voice can't do, and he has to say scroll down nine times in a row to get to the bottom of a page.

"And tape," Ollie says. "I want to watch tape by myself. Stop, back four seconds, stop again. Right now that's nine words, and by then the play's over."

"So you need pointer," Ilya says. "Not with nose?"

"My nose is wet," Ollie says. "And it's my nose. You want to poke glass with your eyeball all day? And plus, I can't see what I'm touching. It's right under my face."

Ilya nods like that's obvious, now that he's heard it. "The pad does not feel paw well," he says. "Sila tried on my laptop. She has to lick her paw first, and then it works, and then everything is wet."

"They're doing one that works by pressing," Ollie says. "So fur doesn't matter."

"We're thinking something like a joystick," Shane says. "But his paws aren't great side to side. Forward and back, fine. Left, right…" He makes a face.

"Of course," Ilya says. "Is a running paw. Is made for forward." He looks at Ollie's front legs with real interest, like he's never thought about them before, which he probably hasn't. Nobody had, until this year.

"So for scrolling, they want a lever," Ollie says. "Forward, back. That's tape too. Stop, back, stop."

"And for pointer?"

"There's a camera thing. You move your head and the pointer follows. That one's actually good."

"So?"

"So I have to hold my head up the whole time, like this." He shows them. It looks terrible. "My neck's dead after twenty minutes. And it watches the ears. Every time I hear something, it thinks I moved."

Ilya looks at Ollie's ears, which right now are turned toward the hallway, where Yuna's on the phone.

"We thought the tail would work," Ollie says. "Nobody's using the tail for anything. But it's like the ears. It moves too much."

"Tail is free," Ilya says seriously, graciously not pointing out the obvious, which is that Ollie's tail has been wagging since LA. "But tail has opinions." He props himself up on an elbow. "The lever. How wide?"

"They asked how far apart I stand," Ollie says. "Which we haven't sent them, Shane."

"Good point." They were supposed to send the measurements last week. "Let's do it now."

Shane gets a notepad out of the desk, and Ollie plants his feet on the rug. Shane measures the gap with the pen, and then goes and gets the ruler, because they've been through this before, and California is going to want numbers. When he comes back, Ollie has lain down next to Ilya again, chin on his paws, and the two of them are looking at the screen exactly the same way.

Ilya has more questions. He wants to know how it can tell when Ollie has finished a sentence, and what happens when Shane talks at the same time. He wants to know who else it's for, and why Apple is even doing all this.

"It's a mass-market thing," Shane says. "They're not really building a setup just for Ollie. It's going to be a line for all canine daemons, and apparently that's by far the biggest demographic."

"It's the dogs," Ollie tells his fellow non-domesticated canid, somewhere between amused and resigned. "Even ahead of cats. Or rodents."

From there the discussion quickly gets too technical for Shane: the machine itself, the screen, the processors or chips or whatever the fuck. When Ilya crawls around behind it to read the label on the back and poke at the cables, Shane bows out and goes to see what his fellow Luddite is up to.

Vasilisa is in his closet, in the dark. He can hear the hangers moving.

"They will be an hour," she tells him. Then: "Four. Four blue shirts. And…" She stops. "Hm."

She comes out and sits down and looks at Shane for kind of a long time.

"What?"

"Nothing," Vasilisa says. "Is nice closet."

Shane sits down on the rug with the notepad. Ilya Rozanov is lying on his stomach in Shane's bedroom, arguing with Shane's daemon about graphics cards. Shane has nothing useful to add for the next twenty minutes. He types the measurements into an email, takes a picture of his drawing to go with it, and listens to the two of them while he checks it over. He'd be fine if this took all afternoon.

Downstairs takes him longer. With Mom and Dad he’s very quiet at first, quieter than Shane would ever have guessed he could be, and then at some point he relaxes, all at once, and after that it’s just—completely normal to have him around. He’s everywhere. One morning Shane comes downstairs to find that Ilya has unloaded the dishwasher, wiped down the counters and made breakfast, and is now discussing chores with Mom. She says he doesn’t have any. He says he would like some. She says that if he insists, they can sit down with the family schedule and see. He does insist. They make an appointment for after dinner.

The appointment is at the kitchen table. Mom brings the schedule in off the fridge. It’s a laminated grid with a column for each of them, and Shane’s column has been on it since he was six. Ilya sits across from her with his hands folded, like it’s a contract, and Vasilisa sits on the table next to the fruit bowl, like she’s his lawyer.

“Guests don’t have chores in this house,” Mom says. “But since you insist, you may pick one.”

“One is not serious,” Ilya says.

“One.”

“Come on. I can do shopping, if I take your car. Cooking, not everything, but breakfast, lunch, simple things. Floors. Bathroom. Windows, but I need newspaper. Laundry, ironing.” He isn’t showing off. He’s reading out a list. “I am fast. You will not notice me.”

Mom has stopped writing.

“Who does all that at home?” she says, lightly.

“Me.”

“And your brother?”

“Alyosha works.” The same two words as always. “When I am on road trip or injured, we pay a woman on fourth floor. But mostly me.”

“Since when?”

“Since we have flat.” He shrugs. “Alyosha helps when he can, but they have much less time than we do.”

“He is very good,” Vasilisa tells Mom. “His soup is terrible. But floors, very good.”

Dad laughs. Mom smiles too, but she has the look, the fine-print one. Shane is still stuck on you will not notice me. Ilya has been here two days. Shane notices every single time he leaves a room. The idea that he’s trying to be less trouble to have around is so far from anything Shane wants that he doesn’t even know what to say about it.

Then Mom writes Ilya’s name at the top of a new column, and one word under it.

“You may have the ironing,” she says, very pleasantly. “Nobody in this house has volunteered for it in Shane’s lifetime. And that’s all. One.”

“But is nothing, I can—”

“One, Ilya. And then you go out with Shane. You’ve both worked all year.”

Ilya opens his mouth, and shuts it. He looks at his name on the grid like he isn’t totally sure what he’s looking at.

“And me,” says Vasilisa.

Mom looks at her. Then she writes a second line. Vasilisa: supervises.

“Is correct,” Vasilisa says.

It’s odd, is what it is. Shane knew. He’s watched Ilya iron shirts on Skype with a cigarette going in a saucer. He knew Ilya does the shopping, that Ilya does everything, and he put it where he puts all the things Ilya does: in with the fox in diamonds and the expensive shoes and the insane hockey. Strange, and amazing, and probably exactly right for whatever species of fey prince Ilya is. It never occurred to him what it would look like for a real boy. What it would look like if Mom wrote everything Ilya does into the schedule, and then, in the column right next to it, put Shane’s. Shane: recycling. Shane: dishwasher, Tues/Thurs. Ilya and he are six weeks apart. Less.

After that it’s just normal. Ilya does the ironing at the kitchen table with the radio on, and Vasilisa lies on the clean pile and supervises, as per the schedule. He slots himself into every ritual in the house, sniffs out every habit there is and joins it. He’s there for the walk after dinner, the long loop down to the river and back, all of them and the daemons, which Shane has done every summer night he’s been home and has never once thought of as something he’d miss.

He’s there for road hockey in the driveway. Dad plays too, for about ten minutes, and then quits, because he’s fifty-two and the two of them are apparently trying out for the Olympics. Ilya puts the tennis ball between his feet right as he’s announcing his retirement. Dad laughs so hard he has to sit down on the bumper of the car, and Shane takes the ball off Ilya while he’s busy grinning at him.

“That does not count.”

“Keep your head in the game.”

“Your father distracts.”

“My dad’s retired. Show some respect.”

They play until Mom calls them in. Ilya has the quicker release, even with a tennis ball, even with a stick Shane had when he was sixteen. Shane is better at getting it off him than Ilya would like. The score is disputed. Ilya says a perfectly good goal went in off the car. Shane says it went in off Ilya, which it did, after it came off the car.

Later they get onto real hockey, and Ilya says Shane is better. Shane tells him he’s out of his mind.

“You see everything,” Ilya says. “Before anybody. You think is normal, because is you.”

“You scored half your team’s goals against us.”

“More than half. Yes. I can count.” He looks annoyed now, like Shane is being slow on purpose. “Is not only goals, Hollander.”

They end up watching game tape about it. Neither of them changes his mind. Ollie has a bunch of useful things to say about both of them, which is really annoying, and Vasilisa goes downstairs to see what Mom is watching.

Ilya is there for Dad’s crossword at breakfast, too, having the clues read out to him and answering with total confidence, wrong, in two languages, until he gets the hang of it, and then gets seven across before Mom does and the kitchen goes quiet. Shane is still no help. He gets the ones with numbers in them, and that’s about it. Ollie gets the capitals, and Maggie gets the rivers. Hisashi generally doesn’t participate and, when he does, knows everything about current events and pop culture. One morning Vasilisa gets a seven-letter word for a kind of silk before Ilya has even finished hearing the clue, and Ilya says that doesn’t count, that’s her job.

Vasilisa gets everywhere too, somehow. She climbs bookcases and gets in behind appliances. She burrows between the sofa cushions, pops up in most unlikely places and then dives back without warning. She is also, notably, a lot less particular about fashion here. Out in the world she’s elegant and refined, a little duchess in silk. Here, she’ll cheerfully roll around in the mud with Ollie, chase down every little critter in the yard, and come back with blood on her muzzle and a hop in her step.

Ollie doesn’t chase anything.

Shane notices on the third evening. Vasilisa has been working the hedge for twenty minutes, and Ollie has been lying at the edge of the deck for twenty minutes watching her, ears forward, his whole body pointing. He doesn’t go.

“You can, you know,” Shane says. “If you want.”

“I know.” Ollie doesn’t take his eyes off the hedge. “There’s a rabbit under the shed. I’ve known about it since May.”

“Since May?”

“It’s a pretty stupid rabbit.” He puts his chin down on his paws. “Mrs. Fournier waters her tomatoes right there, bud. Every night at seven.”

Yeah. A fox coming across the lawn with blood on her face is kind of funny. A wolf doing it is a headline. They’ve spent three years being the wolf nobody has to wonder about.

“It’s our yard,” Shane says.

“It’s our yard with a fence you can see through.”

Shane doesn’t have an answer for that, and he doesn’t pretend to. He just sits down next to him.

Chapter 6

On Wednesday it’s Canada Day, and they go down to the Hill for the fireworks with about three hundred thousand other people. Mom has bought Vasilisa a little paper flag on a stick. Vasilisa looks at it for a while.

“Red and white,” she says.

“It’s the flag,” Shane says.

“With this coat?”

She carries it anyway, in her teeth, all the way down Wellington Street, with an expression like a queen visiting the colonies. The performance lasts until the fireworks. The first one goes up, and the bang comes rolling back off the river, and the fox who talked back to a full arena in Los Angeles goes straight down the front of Ilya’s jacket. Ilya’s breath catches, just for a second, then he zips the jacket up around her without a word, like he’s done it before.

“We can go back,” Shane says.

Ilya bends his head and says something into his collar. There’s a muffled answer, and then Vasilisa’s nose comes out under his chin.

“No,” she says. “I wish to see. From here.”

“Okay,” Shane says.

Ollie gets up and plants himself in front of the two of them, side-on to the river, as close as he’s allowed, between her and the noise. Shane moves in until his shoulder is against Ilya’s, which he is allowed. The next one goes off, and Ilya’s shoulder pushes back into his, harder. Shane stays right there, and watches the sky.

He can’t sleep that night. Around one he looks out his bedroom window and there it is, down on the back deck: the end of a cigarette, and a lot of hair. He’s been looking at that on a laptop screen for five months. It’s thirty feet away.

He goes down.

Ilya is sitting on the deck steps with a saucer next to him. He’s brought a saucer out from the kitchen, of course he has, and he’s holding the cigarette out away from the house like the house might mind. Vasilisa is out of the jacket. She’s lying on the boards with her nose on her paws, not asleep, with nothing on, no silk, no jewels, not even a pillow to lounge on. Ollie goes straight past Shane and lies down around her without asking; she lets him.

“Mom knows you smoke, you know,” Shane says, sitting down.

“Your mother knows everything. She has said nothing. I think she is waiting to make appointment.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Shane glances at Vasilisa, then away. She hasn’t said a word since he came out. “Is she okay?”

“She does not like loud.” Ilya taps ash into the saucer. “Is fine.”

Okay. Lots of daemons don’t. Maggie spends every thunderstorm in Dad’s closet.

“So is it weird?” he says. “Being here?”

Ilya thinks about it for longer than Shane expected.

“Yes,” he says. “Not bad weird. Your mother gave me one chore. One. Today I ironed eleven shirts of your father—he has too many shirts—and at ten in the morning I am finished. I do not know what to do with hands.”

“You could just not do anything. That’s what I do.”

“I have seen. Is disgusting.” But he’s smiling, a little, at the yard. Then the smile goes somewhere else. “At home I am never finished. Is always something. Here is quiet. Not Ottawa quiet. Your house. Like nobody is waiting for anything to happen.”

Shane figures he means the chores. When it’s two guys and one of them is always at work, there’s probably always a next thing about to need doing.

“Maybe it’ll be like that in New York,” he says. “Once you’re back. After—”

“After is after,” Ilya says, not unkindly, and puts the cigarette out.

All right, don’t go there. Fair enough. He tells Ilya about the Sudbury bus, and the guy who thinks the Wolves thing is funny, and somewhere in there Vasilisa’s eyes close. Ollie’s already asleep.

They’re sitting close enough that Shane’s knee is against his. Neither of them moves it. Neither of them goes in for a long time.

The night after the fireworks, on the river loop, where there’s no fence and nobody watering anything, Ollie goes. He isn’t after anything. He just goes, flat out, down the path and into the dark, with a fox going like a streak beside him.

They don’t get far. They can’t. Shane feels it start about where the path bends, the pull, low in his chest, like a hand closing, and he knows the exact second Ollie feels it too, because the wolf up ahead of them breaks stride. Hockey gives you more rope than most people get. It isn’t a lot of rope. He grits his teeth through the first of it, because Ollie is having so much fun, and he’s not going to be the one who calls him back. Then he thinks, this is stupid, they’re not even doing anything, and he gets Ilya by the wrist and drags him down the path after them.

“They want to run,” he says. “Come on.”

Ilya looks at the hand on his wrist. Then he goes.

So that’s how it works, for the rest of the week: Ollie and Vasilisa tearing along the river in the dark, and the two of them jogging along behind like they’re holding the other end of a kite string, and Mom and Dad a long way back with the flashlight. Ollie comes home with burrs in his ruff and his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth, looking like the happiest idiot in Ontario. Shane picks the burrs out one at a time.

They’ve been competing at everything all week, and arguing about who won. There’s the driveway score. There’s a race to the end of the street that Ilya started without telling him, which absolutely does not count. There’s the rematch, which Shane won, and which Ilya says was uphill in Shane’s favour, whatever the fuck that means when they were running on the same street. Mom has banned competitive planking from the kitchen, after having to step over the two of them four times to get to the fridge. They’re pretty evenly matched at pull-ups and push-ups: Ilya is stronger, but Shane is lighter, and they manage about the same number of reps. Ilya can lift more; Shane can keep going longer. They’re both terrible at soccer, Ilya is better at basketball, and Shane is better at tennis. When Shane finally finds something he’s unquestionably better at, he can’t even enjoy it, because it’s so damn outrageous.

On Friday Dad takes the day off work and drives them across the river to Meech Lake. They’d talked about going to the cottage, but the fourth Terminator movie is still playing in the cinemas and Shane insists they see it before they leave. There’s no point driving all the way out there just to come back the next day. So it’s Meech Lake, with Dad and Maggie, and they’ve barely put the towels down when Shane finds out Ilya doesn’t really swim.

He stops with his hand still in his backpack, halfway to the sunscreen. “What do you mean, you don’t really swim?”

“I can swim. A little. We learn when we are small.” Ilya spreads his towel out. “Mostly I sit where is shallow. Splash around.”

Shane waits for the rest. There isn’t any. “Are you fucking serious?”

Ilya looks up from the book he’s just taken out. “What?”

A book. He thought they would sit on shore and, what, read?

“You don’t swim?”

“I just said—”

“Like, not even laps? At a pool?”

“No?”

“Jesus Christ.” He finds the sunscreen and sets it down beside Ilya with more force than necessary. “Jesus Christ, Ilya. Take your shirt off.”

For a second Ilya just looks at him, one finger still between the pages. Then his mouth starts to curl.

“Usually you are more polite.”

“You’re learning.”

“Learning what? To take clothes off? Trust, I know this, but I am happy to show—”

“Stop messing around, dummy, and get up. We’re doing this now, before you slip and drown—”

He doesn’t swim. A professional athlete, an NHL hockey player, doesn’t swim. Shane is going to have words with his coach, his teachers, with Aleksei—

Dad walks past with the bag and doesn’t say anything, which Shane appreciates. They can cover the basics today, and there are pools in New York, surely. Shane swims in Kingston. This is not a thing you need your parents around to arrange. He’ll sign him up into the local sports center himself. Hell, they’ll probably let him swim there for free, if they get to look at him shirtless.

“What do you do for conditioning when your knees hurt?”

“Bicycle.”

“You can’t just do the bike forever. Oh my God, Ilya, we’re hockey players. You want to wait until your cartrilege is worn down to fucking tissue paper?” He shudders. “Swimming is, like, the thing for conditioning, for recovery, for your joints, your fucking spine—Do your coaches just not—”

And he’s a smoker too. He’s a smoking athlete who doesn’t swim.

“And what if you fall off a boat? What are you gonna do then? Drown?”

“I will avoid boats.”

“Bullshit you will avoid boats, you Eurotrash disaster. You’ll be living in New York. That’s a coastal city. You’ll be on boats all the time.” All right, Hollander, calm down. This is fixable. He already knows the basics; all Shane has to do is build on them. “Shirt. Off.”

Ilya takes it off, grinning now, and folds it with more care than Shane has ever seen him give anything.

“Somewhere to put this, please? Before you throw me in?”

“You’ve got a towel.”

“I do not need conditioning,” Vasilisa says, sitting firmly in the middle of it.

“You can ride on me,” Ollie tells her.

“I do not want to swim.”

“Then it works out.”

She looks at him. He waits, tail moving, until she gets up with a sigh and follows him down to the water. At the bank he crouches to let her climb aboard.

Ilya watches them go, then holds out a hand. Shane takes it and hauls him up.

“So bossy,” Ilya says, sounding delighted.

“You have no idea. An athlete, a NHL player, Jesus Christ.”

It turns out knowing how to swim and knowing how to explain swimming are different things. Shane gets about as far as move your arm like this before discovering that Ilya will move his arm exactly like that, standing upright in the lake, and then look at him for further instructions.

“In the water, asshole.”

“You did not say.”

“Watch.”

He shows him. Ilya tries, gets a few strokes in, and stands up wiping his face.

“Okay,” Shane says. “But you’re lifting your whole head. You only need to turn it.”

“There is water in my nose.”

“Yeah, that happens.”

“I dislike it.”

“You’ll dislike it more when it’s in your lungs and you’re sinking to the bottom of the ocean. Back to it.”

Shane splashes him. Ilya splashes back, considerably harder, and Ollie turns neatly out of range before Vasilisa can get hit.

“Both of you,” she says.

“He started,” Ilya tells her.

“Do it again,” Shane says.

“The splash?”

“Yes, loser, the splash. No, the swimming.”

Ilya sighs extravagantly, pushes his hair back, and does it again.

He does listen, underneath all the bitching. He asks questions Shane has to think about, and when Shane swims a few strokes to work out the answer, Ilya watches carefully. The next time he tries, he gets it a little better.

“There,” Shane says. “Yeah. Like that.”

Ilya puts his feet down and looks back at him, pleased.

“Again?”

“Yeah.”

This time he goes without arguing. Shane follows alongside, watching, until Dad calls them out for lunch.

“Already?” Shane says.

“We have been here an hour,” Ilya tells him. “I have drunk most of the lake. More is medical emergency.”

On shore, Vasilisa steps off Ollie and starts drying her belly on Ilya’s shirt. There’s algae stuck in her tail; Shane is vaguely looking forward to that discovery.

“Your towel is there,” Ilya says.

“Yes.”

“Sila.”

“I have been very patient.”

Ilya drops beside Shane and steals half his towel instead. Shane lets him.

“We should come back tomorrow.”

“Will you let me have breakfast first?”

“You’re such a fucking baby.”

“Oh,” Ilya says, settling comfortably against his shoulder. “You like throwing baby into lake to suffer? I knew it. Like in movie. Good Canadian boy shows true colours. Thirst for blood both fierce and vast—”

The night before they fly out for camp, the last one in the house, Dad finds him on the back deck.

“You know you don’t have to go,” Dad says. “Not this year. Boston said it themselves. One more year of junior’s on the table, if you want it. Nobody would think less of you.”

Shane thinks about it. He gives it real consideration. A year ago they might have wanted it pretty badly. Another year of knowing where they were going and what everybody expected. Another year close enough to come home, and sit on this deck, and quit thinking about what he said and how he said it, and what Ollie’s ears were doing, and whether somebody had a camera. He might have asked for it himself, if nobody had offered.

Through the kitchen window he can see Ilya at the sink with a dish towel over his shoulder, drying a plate, saying something that’s making Mom laugh. New York to Boston is four hours on the train. He looked it up the night of the draft.

He looks down. Ollie is lying on the boards by his feet, and Ollie is already looking up at him.

“Kingston’s getting a new coach,” Ollie says. “We’d be captain.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s four hours, though.”

“Three and a half, on the fast one.”

“Oh, well, then,” Ollie says.

“No,” Shane says, to Dad. “We’re going.”

“Yeah,” Dad says. “I figured.”

They fly out of Ottawa on the same morning, forty minutes apart. They do American customs together first. Shane’s officer looks at his passport, and at the letter from the Bears, and at Ollie, and then at his own beagle, and waves them through without a single question. Ilya’s officer has questions. Ilya hands over his passport and a whole folder of documents from the Admirals, every one in its own plastic sleeve, and stands there answering for five minutes, with Vasilisa on his shoulder looking at the man like he’s a waiter who has brought the wrong thing. Shane waits by the doors with Ollie.

“What did he want?” he asks, when Ilya comes through.

“To know everything in folder without reading it.” Ilya puts it away. “Is fine. Now he knows.”

Then it’s one gate for Boston and another for New York. They stop where the concourse splits, with people trying to get around them, and Shane wishes like hell the flights weren’t forty minutes apart. He could have sat with Ilya until boarding, if they booked the next one. He could have bought a coffee neither of them wanted and complained about it for twenty minutes.

Vasilisa reaches down off Ilya’s shoulder. Ollie lifts his nose, and she touches it with hers.

“One week, Hollander,” Ilya says. “Try not to embarrass me.”

“You’re wearing sunglasses inside.”

“And still everybody looks at me. Learn something.”

He walks backwards for a few steps, grinning, and then the crowd has him. Shane watches until he can’t see the sunglasses anymore. Ollie bumps the back of his knee.

“Our gate’s the other way.”

“I know.”

“Then why are we going this way?”

They are, a little. Shane turns around, checks the boarding pass he has already checked six times, and goes to be a Boston Bear.

Development camp isn’t even in Boston. It’s in Wilmington, twenty minutes up the highway, at a practice rink that looks like every rink Shane has ever been in, except for the bear painted on the wall. There are thirty-one guys: this year’s picks, some from the last two drafts, college guys on tryouts, and two goalies who sit together at lunch and never speak. Shane is one of the youngest. He’s also on a poster in the lobby, in a picture from ten days ago, which is a weird fucking thing to walk past on your way to get your body fat measured.

The team puts them in a hotel off the highway, next to a Chili’s, two to a room. Shane has the key card in his hand before it occurs to him to ask who he’s with. He usually gets a single. Nobody ever explains why, and he quit asking years ago.

“Sorensen,” says the woman at the desk. “Second floor. Breakfast at six, bus at quarter to seven.”

Sorensen is a defenceman from Duluth, twenty-one, with a skunk daemon and a wet towel over the desk chair. He looks up from unpacking when they come in.

“Hollander. Hey. You care which bed?”

Shane doesn’t. Ollie does, because there’s more floor between the far bed and the wall, so they take that one. The skunk lifts her head out of Sorensen’s open hockey bag.

“I’m Nina,” she says. “Don’t let him put his shoes by the air conditioner.”

“I did that once,” Sorensen says.

“And now we know.”

Ollie looks at the air conditioner, then at the shoes.

“We’ll keep an eye on it.”

She climbs out, noses one of Sorensen’s socks off the bed, and drags it back into the bag with her.

“Sorry about the towel,” Sorensen says, and moves it to the bathroom. “There’s one hook in there. One. For two guys. Great design.”

By dinner Shane knows where Sorensen plays, what he’s studying, and that he has a girlfriend who keeps calling during meetings. Sorensen knows Shane is from Ottawa and doesn’t eat the skin on chicken. Neither of them has said one word about the wolf thing, about Ilya, about Vasilisa, or anything Shane had been trying to work out answers for on the plane.

It’s a little careful everywhere, at first. On the bus Ollie gets the space in front of the back seats, and the other daemons mostly settle somewhere else. In the room guys come over and say their names, and then find something to do with their hands. Shane can work with that. He’s spent three years working with a lot less.

Cliff Marlowe comes over while he’s taping his stick. Marlowe is twenty, and he was up with the big team for most of last year, and he’s at camp anyway, because they asked him to come and show the new guys where things are. He knows where everything is. He knows which vending machine gives you two bags if you hit it right.

“Don’t pay for laundry,” he says. “There’s a room downstairs. They forget to tell you. Coin’s on a string above the machine. You’ll figure it out.”

His golden retriever comes with him. She stops a few paces from Ollie, who is lying under the bench with his front paws tucked in.

“Hey. I’m Marnie.”

“Oliver. Ollie.”

“You got room under there?”

He moves his back feet. She ducks under the bench and lies down at the other end, with a sigh like she’s the one who’s been carrying the hockey bag.

Cliff, meanwhile, has picked up Shane’s tape.

“I was using that.”

“You finished.”

“I put it down for a second.”

“You’re going to have to be quicker, rook,” Cliff says.

On the ice, Shane puts a puck between Cliff’s skates and picks it up on the other side. Cliff swears at him, delighted, and spends the rest of the drill trying to get him back.

They skate twice a day. In between there’s testing, and video, and a guy who talks about nutrition, and a woman who talks about money, and a media session Shane could teach with a concussion. Then again, maybe it’s necessary, because a few of the other guys scoff and laugh at the examples like nobody would ever ask them something that stupid. Whatever. They’ll learn one way or another.

Breakfast is at the hotel. Lunch shows up at the rink in foil trays. At night the team takes them bowling, or to Fenway, or leaves them alone to find out that being in charge of your own dinner mostly means walking across the parking lot to the Chili’s.

He has been in NHL buildings before. Ottawa let him skate with the big club once when he was sixteen, for the cameras. He knows what they’re like. They’re quiet. They’re carpeted. Everybody calls everybody sir, and you get moved along fast if you’re standing where somebody important wants to walk. Here the GM wanders through the room eating a sandwich, with his raccoon going through somebody’s equipment bag behind him, and asks three college guys what they think of the place. One of them tells him the showers are shit. The GM says he knows.

The captain, a big guy called Hammersmith, is around for three of the mornings. He lives ten minutes away, and he comes in to lift before the prospects get the ice, and on Tuesday he stays to watch the first session, leaning on the boards next to Coach Mackey. He shakes Shane’s hand once, says, “Good to have you,” and asks how his legs are.

“Good,” Shane says.

“Give it a day.”

Jess, his daemon, is an enormous white dog. She comes over to Ollie, close enough to breathe on him, and looks him up and down.

“Getting settled?”

“Yeah,” Ollie says. “Thanks.”

“Good.”

She lies down with her back to him, like he’s just another sheep.

Daemons aren’t allowed on the ice. That’s the same everywhere, and Shane and Ollie got used to the pull a long time ago. What’s different is where the daemons wait. In Kingston, Ollie had a spot at the end of the bench, by himself, and he lay there for three years, not moving, watching every shift Shane took. Here there’s a pen. It’s a big square of rubber matting behind the glass at one end, with a low gate, and perches along the back, and a heated corner for the reptiles, and water bowls set into a trough so nobody can knock them over. Ollie takes a place along the side where he can see the whole sheet. The first morning there’s an empty patch of matting all the way around him. By the second, somebody has put an extra water bowl down right there, and two of the dogs come past him to use it.

One terrier stops in the gap between Ollie and the gate. Her legs go stiff. She shows her teeth, just enough that Ollie gets his feet under him.

Shane is waiting his turn at the blue line. He feels it go tight before he even looks.

Jess lifts her head. She says something Shane can’t hear through the glass, and moves her own paw out of the way. The terrier shuts her mouth and goes through. Ollie lies back down, slowly. Beside the boards, the captain hasn’t stopped talking to Mackey.

By the afternoon Ollie is sharing the water bowl with Marnie. Shane catches a glimpse of them between drills, her front feet planted wide, Ollie with a puck under his paw. When he looks again, the puck’s gone and Marnie is chasing it.

“Played with Marnie today,” Ollie says that night.

Shane is on the bed with an ice pack on his thigh. Sorensen is in the shower, having half a phone call over the water.

“Yeah, I saw. What were you playing?”

“Sort of hockey. You can’t pick it up, and you can’t lie on it. Apparently they had to make that a rule.”

“Sounds fair.”

“She came over and asked if I wanted in. They needed another player.”

“Any good?”

“Marnie? Yeah.” Ollie stretches his back legs out across the carpet. “Nina cheats.”

From the open hockey bag, Nina says, “I do not.”

“You moved the goal.”

“I straightened it.”

“You straightened it out of the way of the puck.”

“It was crooked.”

“It’s a shirt.”

“And it was crooked.”

Shane presses his mouth against his shoulder. Ollie catches him doing it.

“Don’t encourage her. She’s on our team tomorrow.”

“Oh, now you want me,” Nina says, and disappears back into the bag.

Shane moves the ice pack higher up his leg. He’d been thinking so hard about nobody giving them trouble that he hadn’t thought about what else might happen. Ollie is still looking at the bag, ears forward, waiting to see if she has anything else to say.

“Did you win, though?” Shane asks.

“Depends where the fucking goal was.”

By Thursday there are six of them in on it, and some kind of argument about whether the goal counts if the puck goes under somebody’s tail. Nina sits on a practice bib at one end and seems to be keeping score. Mackey’s border collie runs around the outside offering advice until Mackey tells him to either get in there or let them play.

Shane is halfway through a breakout drill when something goes through him, quick and happy, that isn’t his. He looks over at the glass, the way he’s looked over about ten thousand times, and Ollie isn’t watching him. Ollie has his back to the ice. His front end is down and his tail is up, and Marnie is trying to get the puck out from under his paw.

The pass hits Shane in the skate.

“Eyes up, rook,” Cliff yells, going by, and takes the next one flat on his tape. Shane catches him before the far blue line. He’s laughing, which makes it harder, but he catches him.

They call New York every night. The BlackBerry goes on the bedspread, on speaker, with Ollie’s chin right next to it, and Ilya picks up in a room that sounds exactly like theirs, right down to somebody else’s shower.

Ollie’s computer is in Ottawa. The Apple people are sending someone over with another setup once he’s settled in Boston, with the new improvements. He has the mic with him anyway, packed in a pair of Shane’s socks. The new product lead is adventurous, and Ollie doesn’t trust him. Until the rest of it arrives, he can either dictate texts to Shane or talk on the phone. The choice is hardly difficult, especially now that they’re in the same time zone.

“Oliver,” Vasilisa says. “Report.”

Ollie tells her about the game. He’s explaining how Marnie got everyone to agree to stop picking the puck up when Vasilisa interrupts.

“So this Marnie has taught you fetch.”

“It’s hockey, Sila.”

“With the dogs. With a little toy.”

“A puck,” Ollie says. “You’ve seen one. We play a whole sport with them.”

Shane rubs a finger along the edge of the phone. Ouch

“Vasilisa,” Ilya says, quietly.

“What?”

“He is telling you he had good day.”

Shane looks at the phone. Ollie does too.

“I know,” she says, less certainly.

“Okay. Let him.”

There’s a small rustle at the other end. Shane picks at a loose thread on the bedspread, giving her a second.

“So,” she says. “Did you win?”

“Today, yeah. Yesterday’s still under review.”

“By whom?”

“Me.”

“Good. What happened?”

He tells her about the shirt. She wants to know how far Nina moved it, and whether anybody else saw, and why they don’t use something heavier. Ollie gets as far as explaining Nina’s defence before Vasilisa interrupts again, this time to inform him that Nina’s defence is bullshit.

“Thank you,” Ollie says. “That’s what I said.”

“And this Marnie agreed?”

“She was on the other team. She thought it was hilarious.”

“Hm. Tomorrow you will move it and we will see how funny she thinks.”

Shane grins into the bedspread. “That’s your advice?”

“No. My advice is get proper goal. Why not benches?”

“We’re not allowed to move the benches,” Ollie says.

“Then shoes. Someone must have shoes.”

“People tend to be wearing them, Sila.”

“Ask.”

On the other end Ilya says something in Russian, and Vasilisa answers at about three times the length.

“What?” Shane asks.

“She is expert suddenly. She has never passed anything in her life.”

“I pass judgment.”

“Yes. Very generously.”

“And yours?” Shane says. “What’s Hunter like?”

There’s a pause on the line, long enough that he checks the phone.

“Is fine,” Ilya says. “Is cool.”

“Cool? He’s Scott Hunter.” Shane gets up on one elbow. “What’s he like to skate with? Did you get to? What did he say?”

“He says many things. Mostly again. Again, Rozanov. Again.”

“Jesus. I’d die.”

“I nearly did. You should see their stairs.”

He’ll talk about the stairs. He’ll talk about the food, and a faceoff drill they’ve been doing that Shane makes him explain twice. He won’t say much about Hunter, and it takes Shane until the bus the next morning to work out why.

“He’s shy,” he tells Ollie. “About Hunter. He’s fucking shy.”

Ollie looks up from between his feet. “Her too. You notice she didn’t say one thing about any of them?”

“Maybe she likes them.”

“She likes us,” Ollie says. “That’s never stopped her.”

Chapter 7

The most important thing about Shane signing his official contract with the Bears—other than the fact that he’s signing an official contract with the fucking Bears—is that it’s happening on Tuesday, July 14th. Ilya signs on Thursday. Originally, they were both supposed to sign on Thursday, in their respective cities, which are four hours apart by train regardless of how often Shane checks.

Aleksei and Tisha are back in Moscow. They have work. They can’t fly over again, and Shane and Ollie would sooner light themselves on fire than have Ilya and Vasilisa do this without anybody there for them.

“We could have Mom and Dad go in our place,” Shane says. “You know. In case.”

“Do you think they’d do it?” Ollie huffs, pushing his head back into Shane until he starts rubbing his ears again. “They’re pretty excited about our first contract.”

Shane shrugs. “I think we could swing it. They like them too, and it’s not like they have to fly home right after. They can come to Boston on Friday and we’ll celebrate then. But Ilya and Vasilisa won’t have family there at all.”

“And we’d have Ian.”

They consider this. Ian is alright. He’s good at his job, and he always calls back, and he got Ollie a chair at their first meeting without being asked.

“We should probably call him again,” Shane says.

Hopefully, it won’t come to the backup plan. Ian agrees that it ought not to come to that, and becomes considerably more helpful once he understands: yes, Shane is serious. No, he isn’t worried about the headlines. Yes, he thinks he can convince his parents to miss his signing so they can be at Ilya’s. He hasn’t asked them yet because he thought he should try Ian first.

Technically, Ilya’s ought to be easier to move. He’s signing in an office, like a civilized person, whereas Boston has a whole press thing planned. But—well. Shane doesn’t know whether asking would be a good idea. As stupid as it all is, Ilya’s position with the Admirals isn’t as secure as Shane’s is with the Bears, and he probably has better things to spend whatever leeway he gets on. Hell, even if Ilya and Vasilisa manage to save some of it, Shane and Ollie will spend it for them. They already have ideas about expanding Vasilisa’s pillow into a little sofa bed, carved from some dark wood that would look good with her fur. Mahogany, perhaps.

“With a drawer underneath,” Ollie says, looking at the picture on Shane’s laptop.

“For what?”

“Her things.”

She does have a lot of things. Shane saves the picture. Then he opens his IV doc and makes a note under V-Games: Presumably whoever makes the sofa could put a drawer in it, but remember to ask in advance.

All of which is to say that he’s thinking about the signing plenty, calling Ian about it more, and talking to Mom about it too. His roommate has heard enough of these conversations to have reached whatever conclusions he’s going to reach. He hasn’t brought them up, so Shane doesn’t have to explain. Everybody’s happy.

On Tuesday afternoon, Shane puts his phone facedown on the bed and decides to leave Ian alone until tomorrow.

Ollie looks at the phone.

“He said he’d call.”

“I know.”

“He might not have anything yet.”

“I know.”

Ollie lies down with his chin on the mattress. Shane opens the sofa tab again. When the phone rings, they both jump. Ian has good news: Boston has agreed to move the signing to Tuesday, a week from today. He’s also confirmed with Ilya’s agent that the Admirals can release him in time to come up.

“And they’re okay with it?” Shane asks.

“They offered Tuesday.”

Shane blinks. “No, I meant the Admirals. They’re okay with Ilya missing his stuff?”

“Ah,” Ian says. “Yes, Shane. His agent checked. He’ll catch up on Wednesday, and you’ll finish yours when you get back. You still have testing Thursday morning, mind. They know when you need to leave. I’ve updated your schedule and emailed it.”

Ollie has got up again. Shane gives him a thumbs-up, which gets him a hard nudge under the elbow. He puts Ian on speaker.

“Sorry. Could you say the bit about Ilya again?”

Ian says it again. Ollie’s tail starts going.

“Perfect,” Shane says. “Thank you. Seriously. I owe you one.”

“Have your mother book the flights.”

“We can take the train if—”

“Book the flights, Shane. You’ll have more time.”

He hangs up and calls Mom, who says she knows; Ian has copied her into the email. She’s looking at flights now. Yes, all three of them. Yes, a hotel for Thursday night, so they can see Ilya off on Friday. Does Shane want to give her a minute to book it?

He does. Of course he does.

The email itself is just the sort Shane likes: short, clear, all the important information in one place. Dates, times, addresses. A woman from communications has added that she looks forward to meeting his family. Shane reads it twice, holds the phone for Ollie to read, and forwards it to Ilya.

yes hollander. tuesday. i will be there.

A minute later: We have put it in the calendar. Both of us. В.

Mom and Dad fly in on Monday night. On Tuesday morning, before any of it starts, Mom gets Pavel Zharkov up against a wall.

Zharkov is thirty-six. He’s been a Bear since Shane was in elementary school, and he plays defence. He has a house in Newton with a wife and three kids in it and, as of September, a room over the garage for Shane. He is very large and very quiet, even when he’s ruining some guy’s month. You can clearly see him start shit without apparently saying a word. His daemon is a big black dog with a beard called Vera, who lies under his chair with one paw over the other. Mom wants to know about the bathroom situation. Mom wants to know about curfew. Zharkov answers every question like he’s giving evidence. Then he gets out photographs, of the room, and the yard, and then, showing a level of cunning you wouldn’t guess from the general henchman look of him, his kids, and after that Mom is pretty much done for.

“Lena says call,” he tells her. There’s a phone number on the back of one of the pictures. “She has questions also.”

Mom puts the picture in her purse. “I’ll call her tonight.”

There’s a table with a cloth on it, and the contract, and four pens for some reason, and way more cameras than you’d think you need for a guy writing his name. Ian has been through every page with him twice. Shane knows what he’s signing. He knows what he’ll actually get, too, which is a lot less than the big number, and still a completely insane amount of money.

The woman from communications shakes Mom’s hand, asks how their flight was, and comes over to fix Shane’s collar. His phone goes while she’s doing it. He’s in the dark grey suit Mom took him to buy in May, and the blue shirt. The other blue one. Ilya said he should wear it more, so here he is, wearing it more.

in taxi. do not start without us. And a minute later: He means you should start if you must. В.

He holds the phone down for Ollie, who reads both and shoves it back with his nose, looking pleased.

They come in during the GM’s joke. Ilya, at the back, by the door, with the sunglasses in his hand, and Vasilisa on his shoulder with a flash of dark blue at her throat. Shane’s heart skips, stumbles, then goes racing to make up for it. Ilya lifts two fingers off his folded arms, the smallest wave in the world. Shane’s face does something that has nothing to do with professional hockey, and the photographer nearest the table takes about twenty pictures of it.

Zharkov stops. Fully stops, halfway through the turn. Under his chair, the black dog gets to her feet. It can’t be more than three seconds. Zharkov nods, once, a few millimetres. Ilya nods back, exactly as much and no more. And Vasilisa, who talks to everybody, who has never met an uncomfortable situation she wouldn’t escalate into a catastrophe, sits on Ilya’s shoulder and looks at the black dog, and doesn’t say one word. Then Ian puts a hand on the back of Shane’s chair, and Shane turns around and signs. Flashbulbs. He does the smile.

Afterward there are questions. He names the Frontenacs and his coaches, and thanks the Bears, and says he’s looking forward to earning his spot, which is the approved answer and also true. By the time he gets loose, Ilya has got hold of a bottle of water from somewhere and made Dad laugh loud enough that two reporters have turned around.

“You signed like you are confessing to police,” Ilya tells him. “Very serious. Very guilty. Next time, smile with teeth.”

“I was concentrating.”

“On your name? You have had it eighteen years.”

Vasilisa has come down to Ollie. She rides him along the front of the table, looking over what’s on it, and he stops when she wants to look at the pens.

Up close, the blue at her throat is a ribbon: dark silk, tied in a small flat bow, held with a gold pin with one dark stone in it. No chain, no bracelets, just disrete loops in her ears and one satin ribbon, the exact same shade of Shane’s shirt. She catches him looking, and lifts her chin a little, the way she does for cameras.

“Four,” she says.

“In case I want spares, I guess,” Shane says.

“Good. I take Ilya’s.” She picks one, with her nose. Shane puts it in its little box and hands it to Ilya, who reads what’s engraved on the side for a second before it goes in his pocket.

Ollie waits until Mom has Ilya cornered about whether he’s eaten.

“The dog wasn’t angry,” he says, low.

Shane looks down. “Zharkov’s?”

“I was watching her. You know what it looks like when one of them gets up at us. It wasn’t that. Her tail went down. Her ears went back.” His own ears are sideways, the way they go when he’s working something out. “She looked like she’d got caught at something. And then she just looked sad. And she wasn’t looking at Ilya, she was looking at Sila.”

Shane had been braced for something else. He thinks about it. Everybody knows the Bears are the Russian team, and the Russian team sat there in Los Angeles and passed on the best Russian in the draft. Zharkov just had to stand in a room with that. Shane would look like shit about it too.

He asks anyway, on the concourse. “Do you know Zharkov?”

“Everybody knows Zharkov.”

“I mean, have you met him?”

“Briefly.” Ilya puts the sunglasses on. “He is very good defenceman. You are lucky.”

“Yeah. I think so too.”

Ilya hooks two fingers through the handle of the garment bag Shane is carrying and takes it off him. “Come. Your mother has found restaurant. We must arrive before she orders vegetables for whole table.”

Shane lets him have the bag. He’d been holding it high, to keep the bottom off the floor, and his arm was starting to ache.

Getting to New York takes a little more arranging. Ilya signs at noon on Thursday.

Boston still has him down for the last of his testing on Thursday morning. Shane would like to do it on Wednesday, or very early Thursday, or after they get back, if that would be better. He puts all three options in an email to the strength coach, reads it to Ollie, takes out one of the apologies, and sends it.

The coach calls him ten minutes later.

“Seven okay for you?”

“Yeah. Absolutely. I can do earlier.”

“Seven’s fine. We’ll do an hour, finish up Monday.”

“And it’s okay if I leave at eight? Because I have to get to the airport, so I can’t really—”

“That’s why we’re doing an hour.”

Mom books the nine-thirty shuttle out of Logan and a hotel in New York for Thursday night. Dad sends them the flight number and the office address. By Wednsesday evening he and Ollie know which bridge he would prefer the cab to take, depending on the traffic.

He gets to the rink at six forty on Thursday, flies through his tests—the usual stuf, bikes, jumps, endurance. At seven fifty-five the coach puts his clipboard down, and Shane says he can fit something else in if it’s quick.

“Go shower, Hollander.”

“Okay. Thanks so much for this. Sorry about—”

“See you Monday.”

Mom and Dad pick them up from the rink, and they make it to the airport with plenty of time, but not enough for Shane and Ollie to start revising the travel arrangements. Before long, they’re filing onto the plane. Mom has booked them into one of the rows with spaces for larger daemons: a wide, low padded berth beside Shane’s seat, with room for Ollie to stretch out without putting any part of himself in the aisle. There’s a charge for reserving it, which Mom has paid, and a cushion, which Ollie rearranges three times before lying down. Hisashi has room for his legs. Dad opens his newspaper. Shane gets his bag underneath the seat and takes an elbow in the ribs from Mom.

“Your seat belt, sweetheart.”

“I know.”

Across the aisle, a small brown hare sits in the middle of an identical berth. Ollie looks over, and the hare goes so still that Ollie looks away again. The woman beside him watches Ollie settle like he’s a suspiciously nondescript suitcase somebody set down and walked quickly away from.

Ollie draws his back feet in. Then his tail.

“You’ve got room,” Shane says quietly.

“I know.”

Before they push back, his phone goes. Where are you? He holds it where Ollie can see, types plane. see you soon, and waits for it to send.

“Tell them we’re on time,” Ollie says.

He adds on time, waits again, and turns the phone off.

Somewhere over Connecticut, Ollie shifts onto his side. The cushion is good; he’s warm and comfortable, and Shane is starting to feel like he could sleep, which would be great. He yawns, and Ollie follows. The woman across the aisle sits up abruptly. Ollie shuts his mouth and stops with one back leg still tucked under him.

“I know you’re sleepy, bud,” Shane says, a little sharper than is probably polite. Or helpful. You can’t bully somebody into not being afraid, and she hasn’t actually said anything. “A power nap sounds like just the thing.”

He couldn’t nap now if someone hit him in the head with a frying pan, but he’s made the point. Ollie stretches his leg out, gives him a little grin, and settles back into the cushion.

“Big day,” he says, eyes slipping shut. “Better get some snoozes in while we can.”

They land at a quarter to eleven. There’s more than an hour. Shane checks the time again while they wait for a cab, and again when they get in. The driver says noon should be fine. Then they get onto the bridge and stop. Shane watches the meter, and the clock on the dash, and a guy on a bicycle who passes them, and then a guy walking who passes them. Dad says something calm about how they’ve got lots of time. Mom doesn’t say anything, which is how Shane knows they don’t.

He calls the number Marina sent with the address. He has gone over what he’s going to say twice by the time she picks up.

“We’re nearly there. We’re stuck on the bridge. Could you tell Ilya—”

“He knows. Where are you exactly?”

Shane tells her. She tells him which entrance to use, and that she’ll call down to the desk.

“If we’re a few minutes late—”

“Then you’re a few minutes late. We’ll wait.”

“I know, but I don’t want to hold everybody up.”

“You’re fine, Shane. Get here safely.”

At eleven forty-nine, six blocks short, Mom hands the driver a bill and says, “We’ll walk.”

They walk fast, crowds notwithstanding. Ollie stays beside Shane, and when someone comes toward them, neither of them moves over. There’s a moment, every time, when Shane would usually turn sideways or Ollie would drop back behind him. They let it pass. The other person moves.

Both of them know what they’re doing; it’s probably fine. It’s not like they’re making a scene. Ollie isn’t snarling, he isnt stalking forward with his hackles raised and head low. They’re just—walking. Firmly. You cant begrudge that. You especially can’t begrudge that in New York where everyone seems to be perpetually late and pissed off about it. So they walk as they please, takign the space they need, and if people move out of their way, so be it. Mom and Dad follow close behind. They make the next light, and the one after that.

“Excuse us,” Shane says, passing through a gap that wasn’t there a second ago.

Ollie’s ear turns toward him. Shane doesn’t look down.

In the elevator, Dad checks his watch.

“Made good time.”

“Yeah,” Shane says.

They come out of the elevator with two minutes to spare, Shane with his collar sticking to his neck and Ollie with his fur standing on end.

Ilya doesn’t get a press conference, the lucky bastard. No crowd making an embarrassingly big deal out of nothing. He gets to do it in an office, like a fucking adult, like a professional. It’s a conference room on a high floor: a long table with a stack of paper on it, a wall of windows looking out at a parking structure, three chairs lined up along the near wall.

Ilya is right by the door. He has his phone in his hand, and he puts it away fast when he sees them.

“You made it.”

“Told you.” Shane has to stop and get a real breath. “Fucking bridge. Sorry. Hi.”

Ilya looks at him, and then down at Ollie, and starts to smile. “Ollie. Your hair is up. Who did you eat?”

“Nobody. I said excuse us.”

“Good,” Ilya says. “Is about time.”

Ollie’s tail thumps the carpet, once.

Vasilisa comes down Ilya’s arm and onto Ollie’s back as he drops. She’s fairly sedately dressed, for her, in nothing but a band of black velvet around her neck with little stones sewn into it. She licks his ear once, and bites it, and then stops and puts her nose in his ruff.

“You are very warm.”

“Six blocks.”

“Then lie here. There is cold air.” She looks up at the vent in the ceiling, and settles between his shoulders. Ollie stretches out under it with a sigh Shane can feel in his own chest.

“Sorry,” Shane says, looking past Ilya at the people around the table. “We can do introductions after, if you need to start. We’ll just—”

“You’re on time,” says the woman with a pen in her hair. She’s putting sugar in her coffee. “Come in.”

Ilya catches his sleeve and pulls him the rest of the way through the door. “Come. Meet Marina.”

Ilya’s agent is a woman. Shane didn’t know that was allowed. Her name is Marina Reznik, and she switches from Russian to English halfway through putting her coffee down.

“Shane. Good to meet you. You must be Yuna.”

She shakes his hand and Mom’s in quick succession. On the table, her mongoose, Yasha, watches Maggie climb up by way of an empty chair, then pushes a folder out of her way.

“I’ve heard all about Ottawa,” Marina says.

“We loved having him.” Mom looks at Ilya. “Both of them.”

“I understand there was a drownign attempt. Very exciting.”

Ilya rolls his eyes. Shane has his breath back enough to enjoy it.

Murdock, the coach, is grey-haired and soft-spoken. His heron is called Ruth. Shane catches both names, shakes the hand he’s offered, and is doing fine until Murdock steps aside.

Scott Hunter is at the far end of the table. He’s wearing jeans and a nice white shirt, open at the collar, with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. He has one hip against the table and a cup of coffee in his hand. His hair is still damp at the temples. The general manager is saying something, and Hunter tips his head to listen, smiling a little. Jesus Christ.

Shane knows Hunter’s height, his weight, how much of him there is under the equipment. Apparently he did not know what his forearms look in a nice shirt, what his chest will look like with a stretch of bare skin at his throat.

He looks so comfortable. Six foot four of him, leaning against the table like he has nowhere else to be, while somebody talks at him and his daemon sits motionless beside him. And people call Ollie scary. Between Scott Hunter’s Ken-doll-perfect smile and the dead eyes of his giant fucking raptor, Shane would like to lodge a complaint. Ollie is a little bunny rabbit compared to a golden eagle the size of an oven who looks like something people used to sacrifice goats to.

There’s a shift from last year’s playoffs that Shane has watched so many times he knows what the commentator is going to say before he says it. Hunter loses his stick, takes a hit that should put him through the boards, gets the puck back with his skate, and holds off two guys until his winger comes down to help. Never looks hurried. Never looks like he’s doing anything except exactly what he meant to do. By his next shift he’s back out there, and the other two are still getting looked at. Shane wants to play like that. Has wanted to for years: strong on the puck, head up, with enough time to make the right decision even when there isn’t any. He watched Hunter lift the Cup last year and thought, that. All of that.

Hunter laughs at something the GM says. Shane pulls at the hem of his own shirt, which came out of his gym bag this morning, and wishes he’d brought the other one.

Jay, the eagle, lifts his head. He has one foot tucked into his feathers. His eyes pass over Ollie without any particular concern and settle on Vasilisa stretched along his back.

“Comfortable?”

“Yes, James. Very.”

“Good.”

He tucks his beak down again. Ollie looks up at Shane. Shane has no explanation for him. Apparently they know Scott Hunter’s fucking eagle.

Hunter comes over. He goes to Mom and Dad first, which Mom is going to remember.

“Mrs. Hollander. Mr. Hollander. Scott Hunter. This is James.”

“David,” Dad says, shaking his hand. “We know who you are, son.”

No shit they know who they are. Scott Hunter and Jay. Shane has a poster of them on the back of his closet door in Ottawa. It used to be over his bed, until he moved it, which now feels like considerably less of an improvement than he thought at the time. Vasilisa was in that closet.

He looks at her. She appears to be enormously entertained. Shane is going to die in this conference room, and she’s going to tell everybody why.

“Hollander.” Hunter holds out his hand. “Heard you had a hell of a camp.”

“Thank you, sir.” Shane takes it. “You too. I mean—hell of a season. The Cup and the Hart and—yeah.” All right, Hollander. God’s own truth, but rein it in before Ilya starts laughing. “The final game was fucking brutal,” he adds. “Ollie almost chewed through the side of the sofa.”

“A cushion,” Ollie says.

Hunter laughs. Shane can feel it in the hand he is, apparently, still holding.

“Your folks send us the bill?”

“No,” Shane says. “No, he didn’t actually—”

He sees Hunter’s face. Right. A joke. He knows about those.

“Probably should’ve,” he manages, and lets go of his hand.

He has several things he could ask him. Actual hockey questions, good ones, things he has wanted to know for years. He can remember none of them.

From the chair, James turns his head toward Ollie.

“Oliver?”

“Ollie’s fine.”

“Good to meet you, Ollie.”

“You too. Hell of a game.”

“Thank you.”

Ollie sounds normal. Shane is going to ask him how he did that later.

James settles his feathers and stays facing them. Nobody is staring at Ollie, or making a point of not staring, or waiting to see what he does next. Hunter has turned to Ilya, and Shane is left standing there trying to remember whether he said it was good to meet him too.

“You get breakfast?” Hunter asks.

“Yes.”

“What’d you have?”

“Eggs. Bagel. More bagel.”

“He ate, Scott,” Marina says, pulling out a chair. “Come sit down.”

Hunter nods, reaches into his pocket, and puts a protein bar beside Ilya’s folder. Ilya reads the label. Then he puts it in his jacket, looking pleased in a way he’s clearly trying to keep under control. Shane recognizes it: the face that must have gone with is fine, is cool over the phone.

Hunter moves his coffee out of the way of Marina’s papers. Ilya says something to him that Shane doesn’t catch, and Hunter bends his head to hear. He stays there while Ilya finishes, one hand on the back of his chair.

Shane finds it a lot easier to breathe in here, all of a sudden.

“So,” Marina says. “We sign. Family sits there.”

She means the three chairs along the wall. Shane drags them forward a couple of feet first, so that Ilya won’t have to turn around to see them, and they sit: Dad, Shane, Mom, with Hisashi behind her. Ilya looks at the three of them sitting there. Then he looks down at the paper.

There are two copies. Marina slides the second one down the table, and Vasilisa leaves Ollie, goes up the empty chair next to Ilya, and sits down in front of it. Somebody has put little coloured tabs along the edge of hers.

The general manager watches the fox. Then he looks at Ilya, who has opened his own copy to the first tab.

“We have been through it already,” Ilya says, pleasantly. “We only check is the same.”

Shane has watched her argue about fabric, and order things off websites, and type her own messages. This is different. This is a man in an office, with a job to do, waiting for a fox to finish reading. She puts one paw on the page and bends close to the print. Ilya reads next to her. Sometimes one of them turns a page before the other one does.

At the third tab she looks up.

“Escrow,” she says. To the general manager. “This number can change?”

The general manager looks at Ilya. Ilya looks back at him, politely, like he’s also waiting to hear.

“It’s, uh.” He clears his throat. He says it to her. “It’s a percentage the league holds back. Against revenue. You get some of it returned at the end of the year.”

“Some.”

“Usually.”

“You have a better number than Marina has?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Then we use Marina’s,” Vasilisa says, and goes back to the page.

Scott Hunter is looking down into his paper cup, and his shoulders are shaking.

When she’s finished she doesn’t go back to Ilya. She walks to the end of the table, hops across to the back of Hunter’s chair, and settles in against the eagle’s side. He moves his wing to make room without looking at her.

“James,” she says. “Foot.”

The eagle lets out a breath. He lifts the foot he had tucked up, the size of Shane’s hand, with talons like something off a construction site, and holds it out. Vasilisa takes one talon in her teeth and gnaws on it, thoughtfully.

On the floor, Ollie makes a very small sound.

“She does way worse than that to you,” Shane says, under his breath.

“It’s different,” says Ollie, which, yeah, is fair. “He could snatch a cow from the air with those claws, oh my God—”

They met ten days ago. Shane counts. Ten days, and she has a spot against Scott Hunter’s eagle, and Ilya has a captain who walks around with food for him. Shane wanted this for them so much that he mostly hadn’t let himself picture it. He moves his foot over against Ollie’s side, and Ollie leans into it.

Ilya takes a pen out of his jacket. It’s the one from Boston. He tries it in the margin of a spare sheet, and signs where Marina points. It takes four seconds. Shane sits very still for all of them.

The pictures take longer. The kid from the website wants one with the GM, and one with Murdock, and one of Ilya by himself, which turns out to mean Ilya and Vasilisa. She comes across to his shoulder for those, lifts her chin for the camera, and goes straight back to the eagle when the kid is finished. Mom waits until he’s done, and gets up with her own camera, and reaches to fix Ilya’s collar first, and finds Scott Hunter’s hand already on its way there.

They both stop. They look at each other. Hunter takes his hand back. Mom fixes the collar. Ilya stands there and lets her.

“Shane,” Vasilisa says, from the chair-back. “You also.”

“It’s Ilya’s picture.”

“It is, in fact, my picture.” She looks him over. “Sleeves.”

He looks down. One sleeve is rolled three times and the other isn’t rolled at all. Fucking locker room.

“You came from Boston like this?” Ilya says.

“There was a schedule.”

“I see. No time for second arm.”

“Two,” Vasilisa says.

“Two. I know.” He fixes them. “Do you want me in the picture or not?”

Ilya gets him by the back of the shirt and pulls him the last step in. “Yes, Hollander.”

Vasilisa hops back across to Ilya’s shoulder. Ilya’s hand stays where it is, between Shane’s shoulder blades, while Mom takes it. Shane gets his own arm around Ilya’s back and manages to look at the camera. It’s easier than he thought it would be. He spent the whole morning getting here. He’s allowed to stand here now.

Mom takes three. Then Dad asks the kid from the website to take one of all of them, and there are chairs to move, and somewhere to find for Hisashi.

“You’re the captain,” Mom says to Hunter, when it’s done. She has to look a long way up.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good,” Mom says. “You and I will be having conversations in the future, young man. But it’s been a pleasure thus far.”

“Yes, ma’am,” says Scott Hunter.

When Shane looks around, the heron and Hisashi are standing side by side at the window, looking out at the parking structure, like two pensioners at a bus stop. He has no idea when that happened.

On the way out Hunter stops Ilya by the door and gives him a card. It’s a plain white card with a number written on the back in pen.

“That’s my cell. Not the team’s. Anything comes up while you’re over there, you call that.”

“Is only paperwork,” Ilya says. “Marina has everything.”

“I know. Call anyway.”

Ilya turns the card over once, and puts it in his inside pocket, next to the protein bar.

Shane figures that’s what a captain is for. It’s a long way to go and wait on a visa, and it’s the guy’s job to say call me. He’d like to thank Hunter, which would be a fucking weird thing to do. For what? Being decent to his own player? Liking Ilya, which is the easiest thing in the world? He settles for telling him it was good to meet him, and means it a lot more than he expected to.

In the elevator, Vasilisa leans down off Ilya’s shoulder until she’s level with Shane’s ear.

“He is very good captain,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“You have excellent taste.”

Shane stares straight ahead at the floor numbers. Next to him Ilya starts laughing, and he doesn’t stop until the doors open.

Ilya flies out on Friday.

He has one suitcase, and the parasol in its box, and Shane’s Nansen in his jacket pocket with the boarding pass stuck in it about a third of the way through. Vasilisa’s gold is packed. She’s tucked in against his neck with nothing on, the way she is on the back deck at night, and she has been there since they got in the car.

Mom has packed him food for the plane, in a paper bag with his name on it, and keeps checking he hasn’t put it in the suitcase. He shows her where it is, twice, very patiently, and after that he just carries it.

There’s time for coffee. There’s too much time, once they’re sitting there with nothing left to organize. Ilya asks about the testing Shane still has to finish. Dad asks how long the flight is, which everybody already knows. Vasilisa sits on the chair next to Ilya’s, facing Ollie, who has his chin on the seat by her paws.

“Keep the book,” Shane says, when he catches Ilya pushing it further down into his pocket. “Till you’re done. There’s no rush.”

“Good. I was going to read very fast in line.”

“Shut up.”

Ilya smiles at him over the coffee. Shane looks down at his own, which he didn’t want, and bought anyway.

Then the board gives them a gate.

Dad shakes his hand, and then gives up and hugs him. Ilya’s free hand hangs there for a second, stuck between the paper bag and Dad’s shoulder. Shane has watched Aleksei grab him by the back of the neck about fifty times, and it’s never looked like this. Then Ilya puts the hand on Dad’s back. When Dad lets go, Ilya looks at the floor and says thank you, quietly.

Mom hugs him too. Then it’s Shane.

He puts his hand out. It’s stupid the second he does it. Ilya has been in his house, at his kitchen table, on his bedroom floor. Shane has Ilya’s cigarettes in his sock drawer, because Mom would have found them in the laundry. And he’s offering to shake hands, like a guy from a bank.

Ilya looks at the hand. He takes it, and pulls Shane in by it, and thumps him once between the shoulder blades, hard, right where he grabbed the jersey, and holds on. The paper bag crunches between them. Shane, in a great feat of strength, does not swoon in his arms like a Victorian maiden. It’s really fucking close, though.

“Six weeks,” Ilya says, right by his ear.

“Yeah.”

“You have much to do. Practise shot. Buy better shirts.”

“You buy them. You’re the one with all the opinions.”

“Terrible idea, Hollander. I will.”

Shane laughs into his shoulder. Ilya is going to turn up in August with something completely unreasonable, and Shane is going to have to wear it, and that’s such a good thought that he manages to let go of him, to let him get on that fucking plane.

Ilya puts the paper bag down on top of the suitcase. Then he crouches in front of Ollie, right there on the airport floor with people going past on both sides, with his hands on his own knees where everybody can see them, and waits until Ollie is looking at him.

“Look after him,” he says. “He needs help. You have seen.”

“I’m right here,” Shane says.

“Yes. Is part of problem.”

Ollie huffs. His ears have gone sideways. “I always do.” It comes out rough.

“I know. And the dog, with the puck. Have fun first, win second. But—second is important too.”

“I will keep you posted for sure.”

“Good,” Ilya says, and gets up.

Vasilisa comes down and puts her forehead against Ollie’s nose. He shuts his eyes.

“Six weeks, Oliver,” she says. “Do not get fat. And you will write. No excuses about computer. You have a secretary.”

“He’s pretty unreliable.”

“I have no use for excuses.”

Ollie makes a small noise, somewhere between a laugh and a whine, and noses the top of her head, between her ears.

Then she looks up, a long way up, at Shane.

“You write to Ilya,” she says. “Oliver writes to me. But you may write to me also. I will answer, if it is interesting.”

“Okay,” Shane says. His voice does something stupid. “Yeah. I will.”

Ilya holds his arm down for her. She goes up it and onto his shoulder.

“See you in September, Hollander.”

“August.”

“August,” Ilya says. He picks up the suitcase. “Yes. August.”

He doesn’t look back, going through security. Vasilisa does. She sits up on his shoulder, facing backwards, and watches them the whole way down the line, until somebody’s luggage cart gets in the way.

They stand there anyway. Mom and Dad have gone a little way off and are pretending to read the departures board.

“Six weeks,” Ollie says.

“It’s nothing. We did five months.”

“We didn’t know what it was like, then.”

Shane puts his hand down, and Ollie’s head is already under it.