Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Fandom:

Original Work

Additional Tags:

goalie ghost hunters 2, Hockey, Paranormal, Completely Healthily Coping With Prior Events, and a puppy!!!!, more procedural slow burn queerbait... unless???

Language:

English

Series:

Part 2 of leafs are haunted

Stats:

Published: 2026-08-17 Updated: 2026-09-24 Words: 92,535 Chapters: 6/7

cross the line

Summary

The Leafs are haunted. Luke and Cooper are going to fix that.

Notes

- welcome back!! thank you for giving this story a shot!! this part contains more of my favourite tv tropes and also the most egregious sin i've ever committed as a writer
- updates weekly, we play fast and loose with geography and nhl scheduling, and there are spoiler-heavy but detailed content warnings for the entire series here if you need them!!

Chapter 1: Dog Days

“My own first recollections of Maple Leaf Gardens somehow combined the cult of the hockey hero, and other more terrible rites of death and memory... For months after, the unnameable ghosts and solemn mysteries from somewhere high among those shadowy heights, with their flags and rafters and catwalks, haunted my dreams.” – William Kilbourn, Maple Leaf Gardens

 

“…not mentioned again in literature until the fifth century BC, but he is widely praised as an inventor, artist, and architect, though classical sources disagree on…”

Was that a footstep?

Cooper nudges his headphones off. Waits for another noise, then, when one doesn’t come, peeks up from behind the boards where he’s been ducked down, biding his time.

The ritual setup at centre ice is intact. The arena is silent. Not so much as a flutter of the banners overhead.

Cooper checks his watch. An hour, give or take, ‘til the staff start arriving for gameday prep and maintenance.

He’s supposed to be here by now.

Cooper’s not worried yet. Cooper is, if anything, approaching the border of pre-worried and getting the lay of the land, just casually, in case he has to start hanging out there soon.

He stands up. Moves as slowly as he can, conscious of the way every sound bounces off the hundreds of rows of empty seats, toward the mouth of the hall that leads to the Leafs’ dressing room. He could have sworn the sound came from that way, but peering down into the dark, there’s no movement. No other noise. Nothing.

Not surprising. The plan’s basically foolproof.

Cooper exhales. Starts on his way back to the bench, where he can keep an eye on the first floor entrances to the rest of the arena, across the rink. Any time, now…

The screen reader robot voice is still plodding along, tiny and distant, from where his headphones are sitting around his neck.

“…first invented masts and sails for ships for the navy of King Minos. He is also said to have carved the la—”

Cooper gets hit by a train.

That’s how it feels, and that would make more sense than what he actually sees when he looks up from where he’s been flung—what, how—straight into the platinum seats, because what he sees is—

Huh.

He’s not actually sure what he’s seeing. Whatever it is, it less resembles a ghost, more a massive, amorphous blob made of, apparently, the entire contents of the team store and dozen or so merchandise stands littered around Scotiabank Arena. Dozens of Leafs jerseys, hoodies, hats are most of its mass, but Cooper can see foam fingers, autographed sticks, and a team-monogrammed corkscrew all sticking out of its bulk.

Whatever it is, its lack of any discernable legs doesn’t seem to be slowing it as it heaves itself over the dividers between the benches and the rest of the arena, falling with a thud like a giant beanbag before hauling ass—though it doesn’t seem to have one of those, either—straight toward Cooper.

This is fine.

This will be fine. This thing is, if Cooper had to guess, haunted by decades' worth of Leafs fan angst over exorbitant pricing, which isn't great, but there’s a banishment sigil waiting, all Cooper needs to do is finish it.

He scans the floor for his multi tool, knocked out of his hand when he got thrown, and spies it halfway under a seat, just in time to see it absorbed by the merch monster as it advances toward him.

Well, that’s going to be a problem if Cooper survives long enough to have to be the one to deal with it.

“Do you have any unfinished business we can help with?” he tries, and the haunting does not reply, because it is a blob monster made out of Toronto Maple Leafs branded merchandise.

Option number two!

Cooper goes to turn and run, which almost works, except for that the haunting grabs at his ankle as he stands, tripping him straight back to the permanently-gross arena floor, adding another ache to his rapidly growing collection.

It’s almost on top of him, its massive form blocking out the light as Cooper struggles in vain to pull his foot free. If he can just make it to the steps, something to grab for leverage—

With a loud, dull sound, the top half of the monster explodes, raining down t-shirts and novelty jumbo necklaces all over Cooper. The shock’s enough to make the haunting release its grip on him, and where its—Head? Torso? Not either, really—used to be, Cooper sees Luke, still wielding the commemorative framed photo of the ’93 team that he used to smack the hell out of it.

Cooper has never been happier to see anyone in his life.

“Plan’s fucked,” Luke informs him, tossing the frame into the stands and helping Cooper to his feet, barely slowing from a run as he does.

“Yeah, no, I figured.” Cooper keeps up with his pace, betting that this thing won’t stay down for long. “You were supposed to lead it in here from the team store, not the room.”

“I did,” Luke says, and Cooper looks behind them to see not one, but two giant, shambling piles of haunted Leafs gear steadily gaining on them.

Well, that’s just unfair.

As one, he and Luke hop the railing, landing hard in the visiting team’s hall. Neither of them pauses to catch their breath despite the drop, both beelining for the ice.

“Ritual’s ready?” Luke calls, hurdling the boards as the merch monsters thump to the ground on their heels, one after the other.

Cooper goes to nod, but has to change to a head shake halfway through. “It absorbed my multi tool.”

“Just say pocketknife.”

Not even close to the time.

“Multi tool,” Cooper insists, because he’s right about this and always will be, but that’s not the point right now, the point is—think, think, focus—they’re being chased toward a ritual that Cooper needs to bleed to complete, with no way to draw blood, by one more haunting than they planned for.

Two hauntings. Two goalies, as well.

“The left one has a bottle opener on its shoulder,” Cooper says, without slowing down, and he and Luke have been doing this together for almost a year, now: the plan forms in an instant, unspoken except for Luke’s muttered, “Oh, fuck my life,” as they split up, Cooper picking up his pace and Luke doing the exact opposite.

Luke’s abrupt stop is enough to make the merch monsters pause, and that pause lasts long enough for him to lunge at the one on the left. He doesn’t do any better head-to-head with it than Cooper did—it bats him aside with one not-quite-arm, flinging him down the ice like he weighs nothing—but not before Luke gets in close enough to grab the bottle opener and toss it full-force in Cooper’s direction.

Cooper catches it one-handed and, in the same movement, jabs the sharp point of the corkscrew into his other palm, deep enough to draw blood.

“Hey!” he shouts, loud enough to echo throughout the rink, to draw the attention of both hauntings away from where they’re advancing toward Luke. “Not in our rink.”

Cooper drops to a knee, pressing his hand to the ice, and draws a line in blood, completing the pentagram that makes up the banishment sigil occupying the entire faceoff circle, directly underneath the monsters’ feet.

Not-feet.

Not anything but two piles of scattered, overpriced Leafs merch, once they collapse in on themselves. Harmless, now.

Cooper catches his breath. Feels the throbbing in his hand, belatedly.

Worth it.

From down by the blue line, Luke’s groaning as he picks himself up off the ice. “What happened to normal fucking ghosts?” he asks, as if anything’s ever been normal around their team.

“Money and excess are kind of classic themes for hauntings,” Cooper says. “‘A Christmas Carol’? ‘Casper’, arguably?”

Luke’s eye roll is obvious even from a distance, but so’s his grin.

He looks mostly unharmed, considering how far the haunting threw him. Mostly the same as he always has, still habitually sarcastic, perpetually dressed in black, never without the black nail polish that makes him look like he fell out of some 80s Satanic Panic PSA and into the NHL. Only mostly, though, because Cooper knows Luke Thibeault enough to see the changes in him over the summer, now that he’s got a soul again and no demon whispering in his ear. It’s almost a physical lightness, a spark of presence in Luke’s eyes that wasn’t there before. He's even got some colour in his face, elevating him to pale from downright corpse-like.

With a fist bump to celebrate another successful de-haunting, they set about covering their tracks, or at least obscuring them to something deniable. Cooper retrieves his multi tool from the piles of souvenirs. Luke uses the heel of his shoe to smudge the blood sigil into something less obviously occult-looking. A well-oiled machine by now, the two of them, and they’re heading out before the arena crew shows up to dismantle the rink for the Raptors game tomorrow.

Cooper looks up at the sky, just barely beginning to brighten toward the east.

The Raptors game today.

In the car, Luke fiddles with the radio—another change, though he still won’t let Cooper pick the music—while Cooper fixes up his hand with polysporin and a band-aid.

He and Luke have both accumulated a concerning amount of tiny and not-so-tiny scars by this point, side effects of the blood rituals that come with being the last line of defense against the endless parade of curses, hauntings, and general paranormal bad vibes afflicting the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Nothing they’ve got compares to Pacey. Their goalie predecessor-turned-ghost hunting mentor showed them near the start of summer, in the gym. He had all the usual scars that come with an athletic career and its inevitable surgeries and injuries, most of which were lost in how both of his arms were covered in tiny, fingernail-sized scars. Fourteen years of being the only one responsible for dealing with the Leafs’ hauntings etched into his skin.

“Never took down a demon, though,” Pacey teased as he rolled down his sleeves.

“Neither did we, technically,” Luke said, dry, and it made Pacey laugh, and Cooper remembered to as well, after a second.

It was a good offseason. A needed one. For recovering physically from their first full season of NHL hockey—they missed the playoffs, barely, after a dogfight of a final three weeks—and, equally importantly, for having the chance to train on the ghost hunting thing with someone who mostly knows what he’s doing. Cooper and Luke were thrown straight into the deep end by the trade a year ago, and they did alright, all things considered, but neither of them has made it this far with complacency. After a full summer of memorizing the early signs of a haunting, staring at occult rituals long enough for the shapes to be essentially burnt into the backs of his eyeballs—not literally, Cooper knows the symptoms of a retinal tear, One Totally Gross Medical Fact A Day: Daily Trivia Box Calendar, a classic—and brushing up on Leafs history stored in Pacey’s brain instead of his ten zillion highly disorganized shared files’ worth of notes, Cooper’s confident: the offseason was good. The season’s going to be better.

“You guys don’t need me to tell you you’ve got this,” Pacey said a couple weeks back, when Cooper dropped him at the airport for his flight back to St. Louis for, probably, his last season in the league. He patted Cooper on the back, friendly, ignoring the other travellers honking for Cooper to pull away from the curbside. “But you’ve got this.”

He’s right.

No excuses. No mistakes, this time.

The sun’s at least vaguely overhead instead of lingering by the horizon by the time Luke turns into the parking lot. They’re driving against traffic, arriving at the practice rink right as the morning commute kicks off in earnest. The merch monsters were a last minute, urgent development—with no time to get any real sleep before morning skate, maybe forty minutes all told ‘til the guys start showing up, the pit stop for coffees is already feeling like it was an extremely good call.

“‘Ready or Not’.” Cooper is up to around sixty examples of money-related paranormal media as he taps his access card, sending the doors sliding open. “‘Ready or Not 2: Here I Come’.”

“Not a chance sequels count.” Luke is walking backward to face Cooper, gesturing with his to-go cup. “Sequels are always ass.”

“‘The Empire Strikes Back’,” Cooper retorts, dragging his hand along the outside of the glass as he rounds the boards, a spring in his step. “‘Wrath of Khan’. I can list more.”

“Yeah, I know you can.”

They make their way through the Leafs’ facilities as the building wakes up. Cooper greets all the team staff getting the place ready while Luke hides behind him and sips at his sugary mocha monstrosity to avoid socializing, all the way to the equipment room that’s become their de facto ghost hunting hideout. It’s one of Cooper’s happy places, full to the brim of shelves and boxes of hockey equipment and, tucked behind those, his net, Gertie, and even more boxes of everything he and Luke need to manage the team’s hauntings, all surrounded by a wall plastered with info about prospective curses that Luke calls the conspiracy wall and Cooper calls Being Prepared, Luke. He didn’t even use any red yarn.

Today, they aren’t the first ones here.

There’s a woman standing at the back of the hideout, hands on her hips as she peruses the newspaper clippings and photos taped up across the wall. She barely turns around when she hears them come in, more of a glance over her shoulder. “You’re the new kids, huh?”

Luke is already starting forward, hostile ‘til proven otherwise, but Cooper holds out a hand to stop him. He knows this lady. At least knows who she is: Morgan McAllister, goalie for the Victoire, in net for Canada’s women’s teams at every international event Cooper can remember for most of his life. Goaltending royalty undisputedly, hockey royalty if you know anything about hockey. He knows the PWHL season starts later than the NHL, but can’t otherwise think of a reason she’d take advantage of that to be here. Isn’t sure if the Toronto-Montreal rivalry means that the Leafs and Victoire are supposed to dislike each other as well, so opts for assuming the best.

“It’s our second season here, actually,” he offers, stepping forward to shake her hand. “I’m a huge fan of your work, Ms. McAllister.”

“Call me literally anything but that, please,” Morgan McAllister says, but she returns the handshake, not unfriendly. She’s tall, square-jawed, with a shock of brownish-red hair even curlier than Cooper’s, and doesn’t look surprised in the slightest when Luke crosses his arms instead of offering his hand as well.

“You don’t work for the team.”

“Fuck, no, you guys are cursed as hell, I’d never do that to myself.” She doesn’t even hesitate, which, fair, but hey. “I was in town. Thought I’d give you a heads up while I’m here.”

Luke looks exactly as wary as he did when they first saw her. “About hockey or hauntings?”

Morgan McAllister smirks, so that’s their answer.

Cooper’s straightening up despite himself, tiredness forgotten in an instant. The Leafs are at the extreme end of the cursed scale, but from what Pacey’s said, goalies around the league are doing similar extracurriculars with their teams, largely self-contained. Still doesn’t really explain why Morgan McAllister’s here.

Pacey. The memory clicks, a long-ago Facetime call, an offer to reach out that Cooper never took him up on. “You’re the one who’s fought a demon before.”

The shade that passes over Morgan’s face is here and gone too fast for Cooper to interpret.

“So have you two, from what Tom’s said,” she says, and Cooper’s stomach twists, waiting for her to ask about how they managed it, but she only continues, “But this isn’t anything that bad. Just a warning. Both teams in Montreal are seeing hauntings that have more to do with you than us. One kept on erasing any preseason games against Toronto from the guys’ calendars. Another was this ghost of a teenage girl, she was drawing maple leaves all over the walls. My team, that time.”

“Ghost rivalry?” Cooper guesses, glancing over at Luke, who’s nodding, brow furrowed.

“That’s fan curse shit.”

Morgan cuts in, interrupting the brainstorming. “Whatever it is, my city’s got enough hauntings without tacking on yours as well. Okay?”

Cooper gets the message. Less a ‘heads up’ than a ‘handle your shit’. He supposes he and Luke wouldn’t be thrilled about a sudden influx of hauntings doing the Habs’ ‘Olé, Olé’ thing at them either. “Okay. We’ll look into it.”

“Good to hear.” Morgan gives them not a smile, exactly, but a marginally less disapproving look as she heads for the door, Cooper and Luke parting on either side of her.

“Where are you going now?” Luke calls after her, and Morgan doesn’t look back.

“Goalie stuff,” she says, then, “Cute hideout.”

Kind of unfair that all the other ghost hunting goalies get to be cool and mysterious. Cooper gets Luke, though—currently looking extremely offended at the word ‘cute’ being used in his vicinity—so he won’t complain.

He tosses his backpack toward a corner, gives the hideout a last once over to confirm everything’s still where it’s supposed to be. They’ll be back in here soon enough, now that they’ve got a new string of what sounds like, all things considered, pretty minor hauntings to stop.

“You wanted normal ghosts,” Cooper reasons on their way out, and Luke sighs, and they head together to the locker room, toward the sounds of their team.

Sometimes the preseason can drag a little, everyone chomping at the bit to see some real games. Now, with meaningful hockey only a couple of days away, there’s a new energy all through the FPC, loud chatter and a pervasive sense of hope that only exists at the very beginning of a new season.

The guys already in the room get even louder when Cooper and Luke walk in.

“Goalies!”

“Nope.” Luke veers off, hood up, to go sit in silence before they have to hit the ice; Cooper lets him go, splitting off to join the others where they’re congregating across the room.

“Hey, guys.” He ducks his head to accept head pats and friendly shoves hello. “Privyet, Arty!”

Their newest rookie, Artem—forward, makes up for lack of speed with some of the best hands Coop’s ever seen—waves, cheery. Cooper’s got a soft spot for him, partly because he’s a fellow Tall, a member of the very exclusive brotherhood of hitting your heads on doorways, and partly because Artem thinks Luke is the coolest guy ever. Which he’s right about!

“We were putting Arty on to the açaí bowls place,” Mikko informs Cooper.

“Mikko was monologuing about the açaí bowls place,” Law translates, winking up at Cooper as he pulls on his socks.

“Did you know açaí berries aren’t technically berries, ‘cause of the pits?”

Lunch, getting dressed next to his d-partner, kicks at Cooper’s heels, playful. “Get out of here with your berry slander, Kepley.”

“Aye-aye, cap.” Cooper gives a little salute, hops over Lunch and Law’s ankles on his way to his own seat. Only realizes once he’s there that he must’ve left his coffee in the hideout. No big deal: being around his friends is always the best kind of energy boost, especially with a new season right around the corner.

Today’s practice is an upbeat one, less granular skills work, more systems. The team looks a little different, new faces where Cooper expects to see Kev or Charlie when they’re drilling with PK2, but they’ve been gelling again throughout camp, learning each other’s habits. Cooper’s read six different season preview rankings online, and all of them have had the Leafs in a playoff spot.

No excuses, he thinks again, and flashes the leather, relishing in the comforting thud of the puck against his bandaged palm.

“Cooooop,” Seth catcalls, impressed in a way that Cooper’s pretty sure is exaggerated to gas him up, but not by that much—it was, he thinks, smiling under his mask, a really nice save.

Larsson beckons in him and Luke after practice wraps up, all three of them grouping by Gertie.

“Good effort, boys,” he says, the same no-nonsense way he hands out compliments and critiques, no difference. “My plan as of now is Cooper, you’ll take the home opener, Luke, you’ll come in for us in Ottawa. Sound good?”

It sounds great. First game of the season, in front of fans at home. No one will admit to the opener being special, but it is, of course it is, the opportunity to set the tone for the marathon ahead.

It sounds great, Cooper thinks, and then he looks toward Luke, takes in his slumped shoulders, the determined lack of expression on his face, and thinks, oh.

The worst part, probably, is that it’s not a surprise. Eye test and numbers alike, the fact is that Cooper’s been the better goalie all through camp, and not by a small margin, a trend bearing out from the tail end of last season. From, to be precise, the exact day they got back from breaking Luke’s deal, when Luke went from a genuinely impossible save percentage to hovering around a .900. Cooper would never be disloyal enough to comment on it. Their three-week freefall out of the wildcard spot kind of said it all.

It’s been a topic online all summer, all preseason, the idea of Luke Thibeault’s years-long hot streak finally ending. Devils fans feeling vindicated about the trade, Leafs fans coming up with justifications and blame in turn, sometimes both in the same comments. It’s luck, it’s a young goalie finally caving in the pressure cooker of the Toronto media, the end of last season was a fluke and the fact that it’s continuing is just an understandable slump after Luke’s father being found drowned, two months after the fact.

Cooper knows better than to comment on that, either.

Going by the dark look on Luke’s face as Larsson leaves them, Cooper doesn’t think the ‘why’ is so much Luke’s concern. They’re friends now. That doesn’t mean they aren’t competition, too.

“Hey,” Cooper says anyways, because the friendship part is always, always going to be more important than anything else. “I—”

“Don’t,” Luke says. Cooper watches his throat bob up and down, the tangible effort he makes to say, “It’s fine.”

Cooper doesn’t dignify that with an acknowledgement. “In the last fifteen seasons, the goalie who starts game one is only the one to finish out the playoffs seventy-eight percent of the time, so—”

“Coop.” Luke cuts him off again, and the effort’s still there, still obvious, but he waits out Cooper’s instinctive disbelief, giving him a chance to take in his face. The lack of deception there. “You deserve it.”

He’s not lying. He doesn’t think he’s lying.

Cooper swallows his argument. Doesn’t feel like lying back with an agreement.

It’s been a long day. It’s been a long summer, probably.

He lets himself into his apartment, the all-nighter setting in as he unlocks the door.

“Hi, Christmas,” he says through a yawn, dropping his bag by the door and scanning the walls for his hamster. Christmas the Second had fun visiting Sudbury with him for a couple weeks this summer, but he’s a city hamster at heart, and Cooper can tell he’s happy to be back in his apartment-scale hamster habitat, tunnels and tanks and climbing tubes that take up somehow more space than if Cooper had a human roommate. “You hungry?”

He sets about making them both their lunch. Thinks about continuing the article he was listening to earlier while he does, but he can’t afford to waste time. The team’s as haunted as it’s ever been. Maybe more haunted than it’s ever been, if it’s spreading all the way to Montreal, like Morgan McAllister said.

Instead of his WikiRoulette, Cooper opens the group of tabs that haven’t been closed since March, pulls up the latest of dozens of saved webpages about demons and sets one playing.

You deserve this, Luke said.

It’s not enough. Cooper’s got the rest of the day off. He won’t have this kind of prep time once the season kicks into gear, he needs to take advantage, so he sets up his laptop as well, hitting play on the next horror movie on his list without pausing the screen reader. This will work. If he gets as many facts from as many places as he can, there’ll be some grain of truth in all the fiction and conspiracy stuff, something that’ll be the right answer when he needs it most.

He serves Christmas the Second up his meal of pellets and veggies.

The teenagers on the screen are climbing into an underground tunnel to escape from a chainsaw-wielding clown. The timer on the air fryer is ticking down. The text-to-speech is telling him about a cursed lake in Australia.

Wild West: 1986 Cowboy Calendar, hanging by the bathroom door, catches his attention out of the corner of his eye. He repositioned it the other day. Re-repositioned it, technically, after reorganizing his entire collection before training camp. It’s still not right, but if he moves it now he’ll have to find a new spot for Star Wars Episode I Trivia Calendar for 2000 and the boxes won’t line up right and he won’t have room for the dailies on top of his dresser and it’ll all just be wrong—

Cooper’s better than he was last year, no excuses, so he doesn’t spiral.

He’s got the hero stuff down. The starting goalie stuff too, now that that’s what he is, at least for the time being.

Oh. Oh, he should probably be doing something about that, as well.

He drags Clown in a Cornfield onto half of his screen, and on the other side, pulls up the footage of the guys they’re playing in a couple of days, refreshing his memory on handedness and habits. Eats lunch while he does that, then, the sleepless night and full practice taking their toll, he sprawls out in bed, fiddling with his phone to find some useful white noise for a nap.

He's pretty much got the publicly accessible parts of Catholic exorcism rites memorized by now, and the Comic Sans pamphlet on spiritual deliverance from his dad’s church, and the cleansing ritual from the Wiccan Church Of Canada website, also somehow in Comic Sans. Tonight he focuses on the audiobook he found where someone’s translated a bunch of allegedly ancient Mesopotamian demonic banishments, which doesn’t feel like it should be relevant for any demons around the Greater Toronto Area but Cooper needs to have all of his bases covered and then some, this time.

It’s the same outside-of-time feeling that usually accompanies off days. Warm in the patch of afternoon sun streaming through his window, muttering along with the latest ritual to try to commit it to memory, Cooper feels his eyes growing heavier and heavier, the words blurring into one another.

Remember, he orders himself sleepily. Remember.

Remember.

Cooper’s plunging into icy water, fighting against waterlogged clothing dragging him down, against the heaviness in his own limbs and water filling his lungs.

He has to get to Luke. He has to stop this. He has to breathe, oh god, he still can’t breathe.

He’s going to die here, he realizes, but he can’t, he’s not done yet, people need him, and so he breaks the surface, gasping for breath; is on his hands and knees heaving for ten seconds, twenty, before realizing he’s not alone.

The forest is impossibly silent, pitch darkness for a backdrop as a figure, cast in shadow, wades through the shallows toward him. Not the same build as Joseph Thibeault or even as the blurry-edged form of the demon in Lake Swift Hawk. This figure is taller, broader.

Familiar.

Cooper stares up at himself, an identical Cooper looming over him, except for that it can’t be, this can’t be him, his face shouldn’t be capable of being so awful with hatred. This Cooper looks capable of hurting him. Looks like he wants to hurt him.

“You don’t want to die here,” the other Cooper says, cold, and Cooper is shaking his head, trying to crawl away, but the water is pulling him down, and he can’t escape his own words. “What’ll you give so you don’t have to?”

“No!”

Cooper wakes up mid-shout, to a dark room, in a cold sweat.

Just a dream. Just a dream.

Except it wasn’t, his brain reminds him, and he sits up, kicking away the blankets, trying and failing to do the same with the memory.

He should be used to this by now. He’s been having the same dream since March. Since Swift Hawk.

Since Swift Hawk, Luke’s been worse at hockey but lighter than Cooper’s ever seen him, and Pacey spent the entire offseason acting like Cooper accomplished something amazing, telling his goalie friends about it, apparently, and it’s a nice idea, but it’s just—

It’s not true.

Cooper’s replayed that night in his mind a thousand times, kicking himself over every way he could have done things differently. All he wanted to do was save Luke and get him away from that place, and he did those things, sure, but he did them without stopping the demon in Lake Swift Hawk, and only by offering up Joseph Thibeault to, presumably, get whatever was left of his soul devoured and drown a month later. And Cooper didn’t know about the drowning part, how could he have—he thinks, against his will, of the figure of Lake Swift Hawk, watching Luke’s father crawl desperately through the water before turning its gaze to Cooper—but he knew about the soul part. The soul part was his idea.

Cooper didn’t think he was the kind of person to have an idea like that. Doesn’t know, still, with all his replaying and revisiting of every piece of what happened in Swift Hawk, if it’s the kind of idea that changes you, or the kind that reveals what you’ve been all along.

A good person would have offered their own soul first, wouldn’t they?

He doesn’t know.

He’s supposed to know.

Cooper isn’t sure when he grabbed his calendar off the bedside table. Hugs it to his chest anyways, pressing his fingers to the neat, gridded lines, all tangled up with his sheets, squeezing his eyes shut to stop seeing the version of himself from the dream. From that night.

It was to save Luke. That’s it.

That’s not good enough.

What it came down to was that Cooper would have done anything for what he wanted, and even if what he wanted was something noble like saving his friend, Cooper’s way of getting it wasn’t something he’s proud of, wasn’t something he ever, ever wants to be desperate enough to do again. What does it matter if he does something good if he doesn’t do it right? Anyone can make things happen if they’re willing to be selfish and ruthless and mercenary about it. Cooper has to be better.

He doesn’t know what time it is. Late. His audiobook has either finished or his phone’s dead. He needs to find it and restart it, needs to get back to memorizing solutions, needs—

Across the apartment, there’s a clatter, something being knocked off a table.

Cooper’s first thought is that Christmas has somehow gotten out of his tanks, because it’d be more likely than someone doing a break-in, but no, a hamster isn’t strong enough to knock over anything big enough to make that sound, and as Cooper listens, alert, he doesn’t hear any of the telltale, rapid skittering of Christmas’ steps.

“Hello?” he calls, still sitting up in bed, grip on the calendar barely loosened.

No answer.

Could a haunting have followed him home? One hasn’t yet, but it doesn’t seem that far outside the realm of possibility.

There, again.

That was a footstep. A heavy one, not quite person-sized, but certainly not hamster-sized either.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Cooper says, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “So if you’re a ghost and you can communicate with me, now is a really good time for you to—”

He makes it a handful of steps before walking into a solid weight, nearly tripping over whatever’s in his way.

There’s nothing in his way.

Cooper blinks, hard, like maybe his eyes not being adjusted to the lack of light can explain why he just bumped into something that isn’t there.

Slowly, slowly, he reaches out in front of himself. Half-wonders if he’s still dreaming, because he’s staring down at empty floor, but his hand is pressed into thick, soft fur.

“Woah,” he breathes, and the thing under his hand moves, shifting so Cooper’s hand skims over… ears? More fur?

Tentative as anything, Cooper scritches the haunting’s head, and the haunting lets out a quiet, almost satisfied ‘boof’.

“Hey,” Cooper says, taking care to keep his voice soothing instead of as immediately and intensely thrilled as it wants to be, because it feels like there’s an invisible ghost dog in his apartment waiting for pets, and if there’s an invisible ghost dog in his apartment waiting for pets, scratch everything else, this is the best night of Cooper’s entire life. “Hey, there, bud.”

Still, nothing shows itself, but he feels warm breath and then a damp nose nudged against his palm, and the rhythmic thud of what he recognizes as a wagging tail against the floor.

Ghost dog!!

Cooper’s been having the same dream since March, but tonight, for the first time in its aftermath, he can’t help but smile.

---

The first game of the season is a huge production. Images projected on the ice. The roster getting announced one name at a time.

Artem is peering out toward the rink, watching the camera following Seth as he skates into place, the fans reaching a fever pitch in anticipation of the next ones out.

“You get used to this?” he asks, awed.

“Nope,” Luke says on his way past, and Cooper pats Artem on the back, cheery.

“Let’s go, rookie.”

The crowd gets extra loud when it’s Cooper’s turn to skate out to centre. That means something, in a place that sometimes eats its goalies alive. Feels right, like all the work he put in last year meant something.

It’s a nice change, starting the season with a homecoming instead of the flurry of early career callup-send down-‘psych, trade!’ uncertainty Cooper’s gotten used to the last couple seasons. Sure, the fans’ cheers carry the semi-magical weight of over a century of bitter disappointment and frequent humiliation at the hands of a corporately-owned sports entertainment entity that hasn’t won since there were only six teams in the league, but that’s hardly their fault. During the first game of the year, at least, Toronto loves their Maple Leafs, and Cooper can feel it clear as anything: the weight’s still there, because it’s always there, but tonight, it’s tinged with hope.

Cooper’s always been at his best when the lights are brightest. With a few assists from Gertie, they hang on for the win in OT, and it’s not glamorous, but it’s win one for the good guys, letting them start the season on a positive note. Eighty-one to go!

Even the hauntings seem to be easing back into the swing of things. The whole first week, nothing tries to kill, maim, or otherwise paranormally inconvenience anyone in a Leafs jersey. Cooper almost doesn’t believe it, finds himself waiting the entire homestand for some sinister apparition or ice monster, but there’s not so much as a ‘boo’ ‘til their game in Chicago, and even then, it’s more sad than scary.

“It’s in the pipes or what?” Larsson asks, squinting up at the ceiling of the Hawks’ visitors’ room while a stressed-looking maintenance guy shakes his head, at a loss.

“We’ve been looking all over, I got no clue what’s causing this.”

Echoing all around them, apparently sourceless, the sound of crying continues. It’s been following the team since they landed. Cooper’s sort of been anticipating this kind of haunting. A weeping ghost is a classic. A platonic ghost ideal.

He braces for it to turn deadly. It doesn’t. This ghost, whatever ghost it is, just keeps sobbing, at the rink and later at the Leafs’ hotel, and vanishes without so much as a flickering light when he and Luke draw out the banishment sigil, the first haunting of the season dealt with in under five minutes.

Well. The second haunting of the season.

It was almost as easy to figure out the identity of his late-night visitor as it was to handle this weeping ghost. Only one dog prominently associated with the Toronto Maple Leafs: T.C. Puck, the Bouvier des Flandres that was the personal pet of the owner of the team in the 80s.

“But then he was around the team so much that he became the first mascot!” Cooper finishes his update, tossing Luke the half-empty baggie of salt. “He was in team photos and everything, it was really cute. Um, and then…”

Luke is busy stuffing supplies into Cooper’s backpack, so it takes a while for him to look up and put together why Cooper’s hesitating to end the story. “The mascot died?” he asks, disbelieving, far too loud for a hotel hallway at midnight; when Cooper shushes him, he lowers his voice to a whisper without pausing for breath. “While it was the mascot, it died? Only the fucking Leafs, Jesus.”

“Anyways!” Cooper doesn’t want to dwell on the dog dying, despite the fact that the dog in question has been following him around for well over a week, now, albeit while invisible and only semi-corporeal. He’s not entirely sure Puck hasn’t followed him to Chicago. “Then they got a normal costumey mascot, and that was that, but now Puck’s back! Ghost dog!”

Luke looks real skeptical, but even he doesn’t go so far as to suggest trying out a banishing ritual anywhere in Puck’s vicinity. “Guess we deserved a couple freebies,” he reasons. “Like, ‘you dealt with all the fucked-up Paranormal Activity shit, congrats, here’s a ghost dog and a crying lady’.”

Cooper can’t help but smile. “Was that optimism?” he teases.

Luke scoffs. “I could be optimistic,” he says, haughty, and Cooper is a good friend, so he doesn’t burst out laughing at that.

It’s not, to be fair, as entirely absurd an idea as it would’ve been a year ago. If Luke’s not optimistic, exactly, the lightness Cooper saw in him all summer hasn’t gone anywhere with the season in full swing. He sits with Cooper on the plane, even jokes around with the dry, deadpan humour Cooper’s come to expect of him. They’re real friends, now, no pretending otherwise. Cooper feels so, so lucky.

Of course, if anyone other than Cooper tries to talk to Luke before one of his starts, they’re met with a withering glare, and he also does for sure also loudly call Castillo from the Sens an ‘ugly motherfucker’ for having the audacity to bump him in the net, but—Luke is still Luke, Cooper reasons, soul or no soul. Happier, Cooper feels confident in thinking, even if it’s in a mildly manic and unpracticed way sometimes, except for when it comes to hockey.

The hockey is. Not great.

Well. That’s unfair. Cooper, after starting two in a row, watches the way Luke takes the second half of a back-to-back and tries to be objective about things. Luke’s playing fine. No egregious misplays or embarrassing posters. Iffy positioning, but that’s always been a criticism people have had for him. The only change, really, is that before, the iffy positioning just made it look even more impressive when Luke saved the puck anyways; now, without impossible luck on his side, Luke looks mortal in the net for the first time.

They lose the Blue Jackets game, in the end. Luke allows three, unheard of for him—like, actually unheard of, Cooper looks it up, no one’s gotten three pucks past Luke in a game since he was sixteen—and he’s even more withdrawn than usual post-game, his dissatisfaction plain.

“It’s just a slump,” Cooper reassures, lingering in the showers with Luke after they’ve debriefed with their goalie coach. He tosses Luke a towel, and Luke drags it through his hair, rough.

“Doc asked if I’ve considered bereavement counselling,” he says. “Like I’m playing so shit I have to go to therapy about it.” Cooper thinks he’s maybe trying to make it sound like a joke. It mostly just sounds angry, in a helpless kind of way. “What do I have to be fucking bereaved about?”

Cooper swallows his ready facts about the utility of therapy, because he is pretty good now at recognizing when something is a ‘get it off my chest’ venting instead of a ‘give me advice’ venting. Cooper would be pretty messed up if his dad or stepdad got found as a decomposing, floating corpse in the lake where his creepy groomer demon lived, but then, his dad and stepdad aren’t violently evil abusers who spent Cooper’s childhood trying to force him into selling his soul, so, not exactly comparable.

Not optimism, exactly. Not as good as Luke deserves.

If Cooper had handled things better, in Swift Hawk, could he have figured out some way for Luke to keep his soul and whatever he’d gained from selling it? Could he have come up with some way out that didn’t end up with a person dead in a lake?

Even if that person deserved it, his brain finishes, and Cooper shakes his head, hard, trying to force the thought out. He’s not the kind of person who believes in revenge.

He didn’t think he was the kind of person to hand someone over to a demon, either.

Cooper sits up at night, listening to Puck’s snoring at his side, filling in the pauses in his screen reader’s voice.

They win at home. Get another point in Detroit. Another haunting there on the road, another non-issue: Cooper walks into the visitor’s room and finds the equipment guys mid-stress crashout, because every Maple Leafs logo has been torn out of every jersey they brought with them, like someone went wild with a seam ripper and rage issues.

“Wings fans suck at pranks,” Sonny says, watching the whole thing with his arms folded disapprovingly, full dad-stance.

“It’s not just us,” Jason replies, without looking up from his frantic restitching. “Whoever did this got into Detroit’s shit too, apparently they erased all their video of us.”

And, see, it’s not that Cooper particularly wants to have to deal with ghosts that want to murder him and all his friends, but another freebie like this one feels like pushing their luck.

“It’s the same kind of prank shit McAllister mentioned,” Luke says, speaking Cooper’s thoughts out loud. “Other teams, still about the Leafs.”

“Maybe we’re not doing the wards right?” Cooper thinks, racking his brain for some kind of explanation. Usually, hauntings this minor don’t have the energy to make it through and become a nuisance. It’s what the protective sigils around both rinks are for.

It’s a decent theory. Gets disproven easy when Cooper looks into it, because the sigils still look exactly like the ones in Pacey’s notes, minus a little bit of fading, and the arena custodians haven’t gotten any better at finding and erasing the ones he and Luke draw in the most inconspicuous spots they’ve been able to find.

If it’s not the wards, then…

Then, they’ve got nothing. This is always the frustrating part of the whole ghost hunting deal, when they’re in the dark. One-and-done hauntings with nothing in common except for the fact that they’ve been, so far, harmless, don’t leave a lot for Cooper to dig into.

The ‘so far’ is carrying a lot of weight.

“—and look what we just got to celebrate!”

Cooper looks on as his mom switches the camera around to show off the newly-framed newspaper article with a quote for a headline, ‘It’s Kepley’s net, and he can run with it’. It’s the latest addition to the family photo wall, which is three walls, at this point, and also the fireplace mantle.

“It looks great,” Cooper says, propping up his phone up against his water bottle, careful to keep himself in frame. This year was his first time not spending the offseason at home for as long as possible. They facetime a couple times a week, but it’s not the same, of course. He misses Syd and Owen. He misses his mom a little extra when she puts the camera back on herself, her face soft.

“I’m not surprised, of course.”

“Mom,” Cooper says, torn between pride and embarrassment.

“I’m not!” She doesn’t budge an inch, determined. “Anyone who couldn’t see how good you are and always have been needs to get their eyes checked. You so deserve this.”

Cooper’s stomach twists, a little, at her words. He had another of the dreams last night. Opening his eyes underwater, feeling the lake dragging him down. Watching Luke’s father plead for his soul.

His mom is the person who believes in Cooper maybe the most in the world. Not the only one anymore, though—whoever wrote that headline. Luke and his teammates. His coaches. The fans. All relying on him.

Cooper looks at the latest slasher movie he’s got muted on his laptop, the notes laid out on the table in front of him.

No excuses. Not optimism. Fact.

There’s a lot going on, and that’s the way Cooper likes it. He gets another win, watches Luke get his first of the season. Gets used to the team chefs’ cooking again. Spends days with the skills coaches and reviewing game footage and hitting the gym, and nights reading up on more exorcism rituals. Still has time to coordinate his and Luke’s costumes for the team Halloween party, even with all that, because Cooper would never half-ass a team bonding opportunity.

“I think we nailed it,” he decides, turning this way and that to admire his gold Starfleet uniform in the mirrors behind the bar while they wait for their second drinks. The polyester’s a little sweaty, not ideal for dancing, but as if Cooper would let that stop him.

“Easy for you to say, your costume’s a fucking shirt,” Luke grumbles, pulling a face as he blows his hair, brushed forward to mimic Spock’s bangs, out of his face.

Long-used to Luke’s Luke-ness, Cooper nudges at the base of Luke’s barstool, spinning him to face the rest of the party. “My Kirk would be more convincing if I had my science officer with me on the dance floor,” he suggests, and Luke actually cracks a smile at that, the defenceless one he gets when there’s no one to see but Cooper. “The Halloween spirit, Luke.”

“It’s October twenty-seventh, and I don’t dance.” Luke accepts his drink from the bartender with a nod before kicking at Cooper’s seat in return, no force to it. “You go back out there, though, I need the blackmail material to get the net back.”

Cooper laughs—it really is an inside joke, now, he’s like ninety-nine percent sure—as he leans back against the bar, staying right where he is. “Nah, I want to hang out with you for a while.”

Luke just kind of huffs at that, the very specific Luke Thibeault wannabe scoff which means he’s happy to have Cooper’s company-slash-social buffering utility but would rather die than say something that sappy out loud, and settles in next to Cooper to watch the rest of their teammates enjoying the party.

Cooper wasn’t joking. His and Luke’s Trek costumes are solidly top tier, compared to the field. Sonny and his fiancée Mari are Frankenstein’s monster and his bride. Lunch is shirtless and oddly shiny, explaining to everyone who’ll listen how, “I’m a hot lunch! Get it? Guys, do you get it?” while his wife Audrey, in a hairnet and apron, cafeteria lunch lady-style, pats him on the arm, consoling.

Aside from the actual couples, Cooper and Luke are the only ones in a couples costume. The team’s pretty young, generally speaking, and all the other young and single guys have made just about the same amount of minimal effort as each other. Exactly the same, actually, in some cases, because Cooper counts fully five different Batmans.

Seth, one of the Batmen, sinks into the barstool on Cooper’s other side, dejected. “More of us need girlfriends.”

“We’re young and whorish and that’s okay,” Krish reassures him, flinging his arms around Cooper and Seth both, halfway in their laps. He’s also a Batman, Cooper assumes, though he didn’t think ‘shirtless and wearing short-shorts’ was a feature of Batman’s design in any of the comic continuities, but then, he hasn’t read up on the lore in a while. “It’s the Halloween spirit.”

“I feel like none of you are clear on what the Halloween spirit is,” Luke drawls, leaning away from tipsy and clingy Krish.

“Oh, not to like, insult your culture, I love goths.”

“What the fuck does that—”

 Krish leans over to Cooper, unbothered by Luke’s indignant bluster. “So there’s a screening of the first Scream when we’re back from the roadie and a bunch of us are going, want to come? Are you into horror movies? Spooky shit?”

“Oh,” Cooper fights to keep from smiling too big. He has had one playing in the background of every meal he’s had for several months. He’s basically an expert, now. “I dabble.”

He loves being part of a team. Being around the guys is the third best feeling he knows—after playoff wins and getting a rare calendar off his ‘to buy’ list—and it’s the one he feels tonight, watching the new guys comfortably integrated into the whole, all of the smaller groups that inevitably form mingling together without even the excuse of hockey.

No one’s really dancing, but between Cooper, Lunch, and the open bar, they get maybe half the team at least out on the tiny, open space that passes for a dance floor. It takes a lot to get Cooper even remotely buzzed, perks of being almost twice the size of the ‘average sized adult’ all the infographics use to tell you how many drinks is too many, but he feels it anyhow, here with all his friends.

The music is deafening, the colourful lights and costumes making everything less-than-real, like the world in the bar has been compressed to 480p. Cooper sees it all in glimpses as he bobs his head: Krish being flirted with by the bartenders, JD balancing a tray of shot glasses as he navigates around the fourth line, Audrey twirling Mikko while Lunch looks on laughing, a face Cooper doesn’t recognize, covered in blood.

Cooper blinks. Revisits that last one.

At first glance, he thinks it’s one of his teammates committing intensely and admirably to special effects makeup, then that it must be a trick of the purple-blue lights. He’s not tipsy enough to be convinced by either, though, not while he’s standing here staring at the figure across the dance floor.

‘Covered in blood’ is understating it: Cooper’s first instinct is that the person is a woman, but it’s tough to make out gender, age, any identifying features, really, because—he blinks again, trying to make sense of it—half of the person’s face is missing, and not missing clean. He can see the jagged edges of exposed bone, something greyish-pink that looks horribly like brain, like whoever it is had her skull very forcefully and literally smashed in on itself.

No one could live through an injury like that.

The haunting is lingering at the edge of the room. Seems to recognize that Cooper’s clocked her, because she backs off, retreating toward the exit sign.

If his teammates notice, they’ll panic.

Cooper’s already pushing through the crowd. Not toward the ghost, though he makes sure not to lose sight of it, but toward Luke’s perch at the bar.

“There’s another one,” he says, ducking to half-yell into Luke’s ear before Luke can speak. “A haunting, it’s here.” He jabs his thumb in the ghost’s direction, watches Luke’s eyes go wide as he sees it. “You go left.”

They split up, each approaching the bloody-faced ghost from the opposite direction. It’s the kind of strategy they’ve gotten the hang of after a year and change of dealing with hauntings together. Usually works well to cut them off when they try to flee. It’s technically doing that now, Cooper supposes, except for that the haunting looks between the two of them and doesn’t run, doesn’t disappear, just slips, slowly and deliberately, through the door.

“One hundred percent a trap,” Luke says, which is probably true, but can’t really impact how they play this—it’s the best chance they’ve had to directly confront one of this season’s hauntings.

Cooper shoves open the door, trailing the ghost into the fire stairs.

The door swings shut behind them, muffling the music. The stairwell leading down from the second floor of the venue is steep, definitely not up to code. Almost definitely even less up to code with a ghost hovering halfway down, her back to Cooper and Luke, blocking the way out. From here, out of the crowd, it’s clear that she’s wearing a dress, a style that reads to Cooper as vaguely old fashioned, and that the dress is as torn and bloodied as the rest of her, one arm hanging limp as her side.

“We just want to talk,” Cooper says, first thing’s first. “We can fix whatever’s keeping you here, I promise.”

Slowly, slowly, the spirit turns around. One moment she’s on the stairs, the next, she’s a foot in front of Cooper’s face—“Shit!” Luke flinches—and even more gruesome up close.

Even this close, close enough that Cooper would be able to feel her breath on his face if she was breathing, the haunting doesn’t move to hurt him or Luke.

The haunting, he realizes, looks terrified. Her one remaining eye is wide, her posture seemingly on the verge of recoiling. It reminds Cooper, blood and gore aside, of how Luke was standing when he saw his father.

Luke, seeing the same resonance or not, has got an arm held in front of Cooper to stop him getting any closer to the ghost. Unnecessarily, because Cooper’s already stopped, hands up to try to make it clear that he’s not a threat.

“It’s okay,” he tells the ghost, calm as he can. Steadying the situation, same as he does in net. “It’s okay, see? We want to help.”

The ghost hesitates. Hovers in place, maybe an inch or two closer to Cooper and Luke. Still staring, her one intact eye fearful.

Okay. Unfinished business. “Did someone hurt you?” Cooper asks, opting for the massive, gaping wound as an obvious place to start.

The ghost nods.

“Who,” Luke says, grim at Cooper’s shoulder, and the ghost raises her arm and points directly at the two of them.

What?

Another split-second shift, and the haunting is hovering over their heads, a guttural shriek coming from its destroyed throat as she swoops down toward Cooper and Luke, one working arm outstretched.

Cooper’s already ducking as Luke yanks him down and out of the way of the haunting’s attack, except it’s not an attack, because she doesn’t circle back, instead flinging herself down the stairs and out the door at the base.

“Come back!” Cooper calls, and runs after the haunting, Luke on his heels, and it turns out they don’t even need a ghost to attack them, because Cooper trips over something invisible and goes flying, Luke crashing into his back and the two of them tumbling down the last few steps, crashing right through the door and landing in a heap outside.

Cooper can hear traffic. Can see graffiti on walls, a seeping trash bag in a corner.

No haunting, anymore.

“Fucking ow,” Luke cusses, face smushed into the ground, the rest of him smushed underneath Cooper, which is a considerable amount of person to be smushed by.

“Sorry, sorry.” Cooper rolls off of him, flexing to make sure nothing’s hurt too bad. They’re in a dingy, cramped alley between two buildings. More gross than creepy. The street’s visible ten feet away, the neon green lights off the bar’s sign illuminating a sidewalk half-blocked off by the same construction that is, as far as Cooper can tell, ongoing literally everywhere in Toronto at all times.

“You forgot how to walk?”

“No,” Cooper says, looking around as he helps Luke to his feet. Knowing already what, or who, he tripped over. “Puck, I told you to wait at home.”

Puck gives a cheery bark, not from anywhere near where Cooper expected him to be.

Okay, so this is maybe on Cooper. He didn’t look into behavioural training for invisible ghost dogs.

Luke brushes the dirt off his pants, shooting Cooper a very pointed stinkeye. “Your dog just helped a haunting escape.”

“Not on purpose,” Cooper argues, protective. “Does he look evil to you?”

“He’s—” Luke gestures to the apparently-empty spot where Puck is standing, probably, maybe. Then, “Oh, don’t give me that face,” which Cooper knows is him conceding.

They make their way out of the alley, only a little gingerly. Cooper forgets that they are currently dressed as the world’s most dishevelled Kirk and Spock until a group of girls walking by double takes and bursts out laughing, which is a little unfair, because hey, some people have travel-heavy jobs and have to celebrate Halloween on the 27^th, it’s not that strange.

More important things. Focus.

“What did she mean?” Cooper asks. “When she said it was us who hurt her?”

Luke shakes his head. Not annoyed anymore. It’s hard to be anything, really, after what they just saw.

Cooper doesn’t want to know what could have happened to someone, to result in injuries like that. He has to find out, anyway, if they’re going to get to the bottom of this.

So much for the post-party off day. Cooper tosses his scuffed-up Captain Kirk costume in the wash, sits on the floor of his building’s laundry room, and doubles down on his investigation. Another sad-but-not-scary ghost, another one-and-done appearance. Every instinct he’s got is telling him that the hauntings are connected, but he can’t find the link between them. Different genders, so they aren’t Leafs players. Fans, maybe? Angry because they died before the Leafs won? But the dress the bloodied ghost was wearing—Cooper looks up a ‘fashion through the decades’ webpage, feels confident that whoever she was, she was around before 1967, early enough to at least be alive for one or more of the Leafs’ Cups.

Huh.

He raises his new idea with Luke on the plane, on actual-Halloween. Whispering, because their team is all around them, but this can’t wait.

“Ghosts with some kind of issue with the Leafs have been appearing to Morgan in Montreal, to us in Chicago.” Cooper counts each city on his fingers. “Nothing in Ottawa or Columbus. Another ghost in Detroit, then in Toronto again. What do they have in common?”

They’re good at getting on the same wavelength, by this point. “Original Six teams,” Luke puts together, sitting up straighter. “You think it’s because of the Original Six?”

“Yeah,” Cooper nods, encouraged. “Yeah, or—if it’s not because of them, it’s got to be at least something to do with them, right?”

It’s a lead, or the closest they’ve got. Cooper dives back into the search with new enthusiasm, scanning results for every possible combination of the search terms ‘maple leafs woman crying chicago’ and ‘maple leafs fan injured face’ and ‘maple leafs ghost but in montreal’.

Nothing. Well, too much, really, decades and decades of news articles and forum posts, but nothing helpful.

“What are you?” Cooper mutters, rubbing at his eyes when they start to hurt from staring at his screen.

“Lights out?” Seth asks from across the hotel room, and Cooper blinks, startled.

They have an afternoon game tomorrow. He’s been neck-deep in lore files since they landed in Boston.

“Lights out,” Cooper agrees, only a little bit reluctantly. He owes it to the team to solve the hauntings before it gets dangerous. Owes it to them too, though, to give them a goalie capable of performing his best.

Good intentions, and all that. Cooper drifts off to another text-to-speech Wiki page, at a mostly reasonable hour, only to be jolted out of sleep to a still-dark hotel room and the sound of a scream from outside.

“Whassa—” Seth mumbles from the other bed, but Cooper’s already on his feet, only stumbling a little as he races for the door.

“Is everyone okay?” he asks, stepping out into the carpeted hallway, where a handful of his teammates have congregated a few rooms down, a handful of others poking their heads out from their doors. He searches out Luke automatically, finds him rocking the world’s worst bedhead, holding onto one of the hotel hairdryers like he expected to have to pummel someone with it. They exchange a look. He doesn’t know anything more than Cooper does. “What’s going on?”

Mikko, wearing Leafs-patterned boxer shorts and nothing else, steps forward from the group. He’s pale, almost grey. “Someone screamed.”

Law squints at him, obviously barely awake. “Yeah, man, we heard.”

“No,” Mikko says, “no, it wasn’t me, it was right next to me, and then I looked, and no one was there.”

Oh, man, was Cooper ever hoping he was wrong about the Original Six thing. He peers into Mikko’s empty room. Nothing. Of course, there’s nothing.

“Odds this is some Bruins fan who works for the hotel fucking with us?” Law offers.

“Someone’s sabotaging us ‘cause we’re everyone’s favourite,” Krish frets, and Artem looks at Luke, who shakes his head, no, the Leafs are barely even Leafs fans’ favourite.

Any additional speculation is stopped short when Lunch says, firm, “We don’t know what it was, just that no one here is getting eight hours unless we get back to bed now. It was probably someone outside.”

It’s good logic, except for that they’re staying on the eleventh floor. Still, no one questions their captain, everyone wandering back to their rooms, a few guys stopping to check on Mikko on their way.

Luke looks toward Cooper again, and Cooper shrugs, helpless. If the trend bears out, the ghost is gone already. Another one that got away.

“Do you ever think maybe we’re actually cursed?” Seth asks through a yawn, once Cooper has resigned himself to heading back to the room. He doesn’t wait for a response before dropping back off to sleep. Probably for the best.

Resignation and all, Cooper doesn’t sleep. He tries, sort of. Not that hard. Last time, his mistake—one of his mistakes—was having the facts and failing to piece them together, realizing the truth too late. He won’t do that again. Can’t.

This is going to keep happening unless he does something about it. To do something about it, he needs answers. He doesn’t want to wake Seth, so he grabs his backpack and slips out of the room, takes the stairs down to the hotel’s bar.

It’s 2 AM on Halloween: the place is still lively, people hanging onto the tail end of whatever party or afterparty they’ve since left in favour of a last round of drinks. Cooper feels underdressed in his sweats amid all the costumes, which Luke would hate, and vaguely Halloween-esque goth attire, which Luke would love.

A waiter, one of the few not dressed in either fashion, approaches the out-of-the-way table Cooper’s claimed.

“Can I get an espresso, please?”

“Martini?”

“No, just the coffee… thanks.”

Cooper’s good at this. He has the facts he needs to solve this haunting, he knows he does, pulls them all up on his phone and laptop now to brute force them into a solution. Maybe he should invest in some red conspiracy yarn.

He gets stuck in, resolving not to move ‘til he has an answer or ‘til the team starts appearing for breakfast.

A bunch of unrelated ghosts, in unrelated cities, only connected by having NHL teams at the same time. Cooper flips through the lore files again, skimming through the unresolved hauntings from the Original Six era. Nothing that resonates, not with any of the current apparitions or all of them.

The bloodied ghost pointed at him and Luke. Something to do with one of the hauntings they dealt with last year? Cooper reviews those older files, too. Is weighing the utility of going through the list of cursed graves again, seeing if anything rings a bell, when someone snatches his phone off the table.

“Hey,” Cooper chides; then, once he’s recovered enough to go from ‘phew, my phone got stolen by Luke and not a stranger in a Halloween costume’ to ‘hey, my phone just got stolen by Luke’, “Just ask.”

Luke looks not at all moved. “I did, three times. You didn’t even look up.” Cooper grabs for his phone, trying to catch him by surprise, but Luke just holds it out of his reach. Unmoved and unimpressed, now. “You don’t have to solve this whole thing right now.”

“Yeah, I do,” Cooper says, and holds out a hand, expectant.

Luke scowls. He’s so stubborn.

Unfortunately for him, Cooper is both more stubborn and better at being stubborn. “Luke.”

Luke holds out another three seconds exactly before groaning and tossing Cooper his phone, all huffy. “You’re being weird,” Luke informs him, sliding into the seat across from Cooper’s.

“You’re going to have to be more specific,” Cooper jokes, ‘cause he figured out a long time ago that some humorous self deprecation is pretty good for defusing most things people want to get on you for. He’s also figured out how to make Luke laugh, mostly, or he thought he had, but now, instead, Luke’s hesitating.

“Coop,” he says. More serious than Cooper’s expecting. “If there’s something…”

Cooper stares at him, surprised. Realizes—the crease in Luke’s brow, the downturn of his mouth—that Luke isn’t just being grumpy, he’s genuinely concerned. Cooper tries to see himself through Luke’s eyes, takes in the 3 AM coffee, the forty-three windows of haunting-related research open on his phone. Has his least favourite kind of realization, the ‘uh oh, you’ve ADHD’d yourself into a Concerning Behaviour and now everyone’s going to think you’re a weirdo’ kind.

He didn’t mean to worry Luke. He doesn’t want anything to worry Luke, least of all him, not when Luke is finally supposed to have nothing more than hockey to worry about for the first time in his life. The whole point, Cooper’s only justification for what he did to Joseph Thibeault, was to save his friend. To give Luke a chance at a normal life again. It needs to have been worth it. Everything he did needs to have been for something.

Cooper’s mouth is open, a response on his tongue, when his gaze happens to land on the rest of the hotel bar, behind Luke.

There’s a group of costumed partiers. Two out of three Powerpuff Girls, a clown, and a Jason Voorhees, goalie mask and all.

Cooper’s breath catches.

He’s been watching horror movies all summer, readying himself for anything a haunting could throw at them. That’s what they were supposed to be for, for saving his team. The Leafs the good guys in the movie. The hauntings the bad ones.

Detroit, Chicago, Montreal, Toronto, Boston. New York too, Cooper would wager. Nothing to connect the cities except that they were each other’s only opponents for twenty-five years. Nothing to tie them or any of their hauntings together for anyone looking.

“What,” Luke says. “You know something, what?”

It fits. The crying, the injuries. The resentment of the hauntings toward anything and everything Leafs, the harmlessness of them in spite of that. It fits.

“We were wrong,” Cooper says, mind racing. “This whole time we’ve been looking at the wrong thing, we missed it!” He leans across the table, eager. “It’s not paranormal horror. It’s a slasher.”

---

It’s not like last year. This time, when Cooper summons the hauntings, he’s smart about it.

“Ready?”

He and Luke kneel across from each other, at either side of the faceoff dot in the dark, otherwise empty practice rink. He does one last check that everything’s in order before they start. Summoning sigil complete, elaborately intersecting lines contained inside a pentagram, but for one line. Photos of Leafs rosters from 1942 to 1967. A jumbo-sized tub of salt within reach, just in case.

“Ready,” Luke confirms.

“Okay,” Cooper says, steeling himself. When Luke drags his bleeding palm across the ice to finish the pentagram, he speaks louder, to the rink at large. “We want to talk to the spirits that have been following the team.”

No slamming doors, no sparks of light, but Cooper can feel it sure as anything, the change in pressure that means they aren’t the only ones here anymore.

Luke’s fingers twitch toward the salt. He feels the same thing.

“We know someone hurt you,” Cooper continues, addressing the hauntings that he can feel, even if he can’t see them yet.

No response. A flicker of curiosity pulses through the room. Trepidation, like they aren’t sure if they can trust him and Luke.

It’s fair. It’s more than fair.

“This person who hurt you,” Cooper says. “They were on the Leafs, right?”

There: the half-faced woman from the party, appearing on the other side of the glass where a moment ago there was only darkness. Next to them, a woman whose face Cooper hasn’t seen before, crying; what looks like a teenage boy, skinny and scared looking. One after the other, circling the ice, they appear, the ghosts behind every one of this season’s hauntings.

Cooper knew it. Relief, satisfaction at his theory being proven right is replaced, a breath later, with the horrible reality of it.

True Crime Calendar 2018. Almost a thousand convicted serial killers have worked as long-haul truck drivers, because crossing state lines for work is a perfect cover for finding victims across jurisdictions. It makes the kills harder to connect and to investigate. Kind of the perfect setup.

A player in the NHL, or in any of the major sports leagues, spends more time traveling across state lines than just about anyone else. Cooper looked up all the most common characteristics of serial killers. White males. Usually in their twenties to thirties. A player in the NHL tends to be those things, too.

A half-dozen hauntings, only hauntings because they were murdered in the cruelest ways possible by someone no investigation would’ve even looked twice at, because he, whoever he was, had the perfect alibi. Cities love their athletes.

The Leafs are supposed to be the good guys.

The weeping ghost’s sobs get louder. Emotions press down on Cooper, forceful—sheer mortal fear, heart-pounding adrenaline of a futile attempt to escape, pain, pain, pain, and still, always, the symbol of the person who hurt them, a blue and white maple leaf embedded at centre ice, on the fronts of jerseys, in film and in video and—

Luke winces, eyes shut, and the flood of feelings abates enough that Cooper can breathe.

“Shit,” Luke pants, obviously shaken up.

The hauntings stay looking on, silent, from behind the glass.

 “Why them?” Cooper asks, quiet. “What do they have in common that made someone pick them?”

“They were weaker than him,” Luke says, knowingly enough that Cooper aches, a little. “They couldn’t fight back.”

This, Cooper thinks. This is why he’s here, why the sleepless nights and distractions from hockey and weekly brushes with death aren’t an option. Someone needs to help. He can’t imagine coming face to face with something like this and not needing to help.

When he speaks again, his words echo, forceful. “We don’t know who did this to you,” he says. “We want to help find out, though, if you’ll let us. No one else will get hurt because of this team.”

Unbidden, Cooper remembers his dream. Remembers staring down at someone in pain, in fear of losing their soul, and thinking, good.

Never again.

Saving Luke or not, it was a compromise, the only option because Cooper wasn’t smart enough to find a better one. Not good enough, not anywhere near the standards he has for himself. The standards that Cooper can and will meet, this year. What happened last season belongs to last season. This is a new stretch of 82 games—and more, the Leafs are making the playoffs this year if Cooper has to drag them there himself—for Cooper to fix things. To prove that he is the good guy, that he can be the right person to save the team and everyone around it.

“No one else gets hurt,” he promises. Too quiet for an echo, this time, but the words linger all the same.

“No one gets hurt,” Luke echoes, and Cooper can feel him staring. Can’t parse the look on his face—awe, almost, but that’s more likely to be Cooper reading him wrong—so he grabs the stack of team photos instead, starts laying them out one by one as the hauntings float closer, watching, waiting.

It’s barely a week later that, heading in for off-ice meetings, Cooper walks into just one, the entire team and half the other staff gathered around one of the TVs that’s usually only showing the day’s schedule. Today, someone’s switched the channel to local news.

Peering over people’s heads, Cooper reads the scrolling headlines, MAPLE LEAF KILLER, FORMER TORONTO MAPLE LEAFS FORWARD ARRESTED FOR 60S SERIAL MURDERS, all over grainy footage of an old man, hair a shock of white, being led out of an orange brick building.

“…and if you’re just joining us, you’re seeing footage from just a couple hours ago, when Edwin Morris, who played three seasons for the Toronto Maple Leafs in the 1960s, was arrested at Pine Manor Assisted Living Centre as a person of interest for, we’ve learned from a press release since, more than seven murders over the course of his playing career. With more from the scene, we have…”

“This is fucking wild,” Donny breathes, eyes locked on the screen. At Cooper’s side, Luke is shaking his head to himself, it looks like, watching justice played out, the results of an anonymous tip that led the cold cases unit directly to a property still owned by Edwin Morris, to the trophies he kept, stolen parts of missing persons from fifty-odd years back.

Too little, too late, maybe. Something, at least.

Cooper holds out a fist, just barely.

Luke half-smiles, only a little sad, and taps their knuckles together.

Yeah. Something.

Grouped up across the room, the socials team is looking—well, approximately how Cooper would expect people who signed up to tweet about sports and are instead being bombarded with comments from horrified citizens and weird serial killer groupies on every platform to look.

“It never goddamn ends with this team,” Tatum’s saying, massaging her temples while Law rubs her shoulders, comforting.

“Bright side,” Seth offers, the only person not speaking at a respectful hush. “Maybe that was why we’ve been cursed so long. Our year, boys? Eh?”

Lunch sighs, long-suffering. “People died, man.”

Cooper would love for Seth to be right, for this to be The One that lifts all the hundreds or thousands of other paranormal trip-wires laced around their team. It’s a nice thought. Optimism. Worth a lot, in Cooper’s book.

No one gets much practice done, the day the murders are solved. The NHL doesn’t stop for history, though, and the Toronto Maple Leafs are, for better or worse, a thing of the here and now just as much as they are the past: the stands of the arena fill to the brim, the team hits the ice, and the hockey season goes on, taking all of them with it.

Cooper gets the shutout against the Kraken. Luke, two nights later, gets the 4-2 win, and Cooper can see those two goals nagging at him, but he also sees Luke in the room after, with their teammates hyping him up, laughing out loud and looking surprised at himself for doing it. He always looks surprised at being happy, Luke.

He hasn’t brought it up again, that concerned look he gave Cooper in the hotel lounge in Boston. Cooper’s been trying harder to be normal about things since.

What he knows is this: no matter how he feels about what he did in Swift Hawk, how determined he is to do better going forward, Cooper can’t regret it. Not when it gave him this, Luke as just Luke, no shadow lurking over his shoulder or guilt weighing him down.

Cooper won’t ruin this for him by making him worry. There’s nothing to worry about. Not with Luke and all of Cooper’s other friends safe, happy, together again. Cooper will take whatever weight he has to, hide it however he needs to, to keep them that way. Last line of defense.

Leaving Luke to pretend not to like being one of a team, Cooper doesn’t head for home after the game, making for the practice rink instead. He wants to do some more prep work, maybe get together a shortlist of cursed graves to visit. He can catch Luke up later.

Alone as he shoulders open the door to the hideout, Cooper can hear soft footsteps, padding along at his side.

“Hey, bud.” Cooper reaches out, waits for Puck to press the top of his head into his hand.

He didn’t disappear with the other hauntings, when Cooper and Luke resolved their unfinished business. Cooper didn’t really expect him to. The timelines don’t add up, and nothing about Puck’s behaviour has given Cooper any impression that he’s lingering around the team for any reason but that he missed being around it. Which is odd in itself—the wards typically keep out anything not driven by some kind of powerful, usually-violent emotion—but maybe it works different, for animals. Cooper thinks Luke might’ve been right. They’ve earned one freebie.

“What do you say, Puck?” Cooper asks, giving him scritches behind his ears. “Feel like sticking around to save the Leafs?”

Pucks springs up, paws against Cooper’s ribs with enough force to knock a smaller person over. Cooper just laughs, lets Puck play like a puppy, the two of them roughhousing as they head for the not-a-conspiracy board.

“Okay, okay,” he laughs, grabbing for his laptop. “Focus, buddy!”

Cooper’s always wanted a dog. It feels right, a step closer to the way the story’s supposed to go. Two buddies stopping ghosts, saving the day, all with a loyal and incidentally invisible canine companion at their sides.

“Our hero arrives in town,” says a voice from behind him, “ignorant of the ways of the world.”

That’s not part of the story.

At first, nonsensically, Cooper thinks that Morgan McAllister is somehow still here, or that another dead woman ghost is making an appearance, but—no. They’re long gone, and he knows this voice.

“Asra?”

It doesn’t quite compute in his brain. The team archives are under the same roof as the Leafs’ practice facilities, but they’re separated by two sets of glass doors and a concourse that may as well be a brick wall, for how little the two sides tend to interact. Cooper’s never seen Asra, the team’s glasses and themed-earrings-wearing head archivist, in the Leafs’ part of the building, and certainly not in the hideout full of ghost hunting supplies and half-finished research that absolutely makes him look like a delusional conspiracy theorist to any normal person.

Oh, no. He’s going to have to come up with a lie for why he has a delusional conspiracy theorist hideout in a converted closet at work to someone who’s invited him to her family game nights on multiple occasions. Cooper has played mini sticks with Asra’s sons.

Except—

Asra, instead of looking confused, is meandering through the mess of boxes, trailing a hand across the labels. STICK TAPE. STAKES (WOODEN).

“Barely six months later,” she continues, as though Cooper didn’t even speak, “he’s eliminated dozens of decades-old hauntings and used a demon that’s been feeding in the same spot for four hundred years to do his bidding and save his friend’s soul. ‘Hero’ was right.”

She can’t know that. No one outside of Cooper and Luke knows that.

Asra grins at Cooper, in on a joke that he’s not. She stage whispers, almost playful, now, “You’re attracting attention, did you know?”

That’s not how Asra smiles. Not how she walks, either, this slow, toying pace. In isolation, her face and her voice both are textbook signals for friendliness, but the only thing Cooper can feel radiating off of her, stifling in the cramped space, is malice, unhidden and unmistakeable.

Cooper has felt this before.

“You’re not Asra,” he realizes. Then, because ghosts can’t possess anyone with a soul and he’s confident Asra hasn’t sold hers, which means there’s only one answer left to him, “You’re a demon.”

The demon inside of Asra pouts, her lip jutting out too far as she puts on a childish voice. “Scary, right?”

Cooper watches Not-Asra circling him, turning to keep her in eyesight as Puck growls, low, at his side. Cooper fights back the urge to do the same. “If there’s something you need to be able to move on, we can try to help you,” he says, because everyone deserves a chance, and he believes that, despite everything inside of him screaming RUN. “But if you try to hurt my team—”

The demon looks downright delighted at that. “Don’t worry,” she says, a predator playing with its food. “I have no interest in hurting your sports team.”

Cooper doesn’t let himself show any fear. Hopes demons can’t magically hear the way his heart is racing. “Then why—”

“I wanted to see you,” Not-Asra cuts him off, keeps talking without waiting to see if he’ll stop. “And to offer a word of advice.” She pauses by the stack of boxes that make up Cooper’s desk. Closes the lid of his laptop with one finger, almost daintily. Waits for Cooper to look at her, then waits some more, drawing it out until he meets her eyes, bracing himself.

“Good boy,” she says, then, “Some hauntings are past saving, hero. Some people, too.” She cocks her head to one side, thoughtful. No. Mocking, all the motions of thoughtfulness with nothing behind them. “But you know that, don’t you?”

Cooper can’t bear to look at her, taking a step back despite himself.

She knows, he thinks, she knows what he did, how he threatened Joseph Thibeault into giving up his soul to feed the demon who had started the whole thing, how he stared down at him, helpless in the water, and thought, good.

It was to save Luke. It was still wrong, that kind of enabling of something evil, even if it was to save Luke.

Was it only to save Luke?

Cooper isn’t the kind of person to threaten to hurt someone and mean it. He isn’t the kind of person to go looking for revenge. He doesn’t want to be that kind of person. But if ever anyone’s deserved it—

No.

Cooper isn’t that kind of person. Not now, not ever.

“That’s not true,” he says, forcefully, shaking his head, hard, to force the thoughts out. “I don’t believe that.”

The demon has rounded the desk, moving behind his back; he turns to look at her, defiant, but instead, all he sees is Asra staggering in place, clutching her head.

“How did—” She accepts the hand that Cooper automatically holds out to steady her, blinking hard. Looks as confused as he’s ever seen her, nothing unfamiliar on her face anymore. “Cooper? Sorry, I must’ve zoned out for a second, I don’t…what were we saying?”

The demon is gone, vanished as soon as she arrived.

Cooper swallows, hard. Feels wrong-footed, off-balance. She didn’t—

He’s not—

Cooper needs to get Asra out of here before she notices anything, and make sure she’s alright, and find Luke and tell him what just happened, that there’s a demon here where they’re supposed to be rare and unheard of and she knows what he did and how uncontrollably angry he felt that night by the lake and—

“Cooper?”

It’s maybe the only thing that could stop Cooper mid-spiral, the worry in Asra’s voice. She just got possessed, without even the advantage of knowing what possession is. His friend needs him. That, Cooper can do.

He forces a smile, tries to project reassurance the way he’s best at. “Hey,” he says. “I think you got light-headed, there. Let’s go find a place to sit!”

As he helps a still-unsteady Asra out toward fresh air, back into the fluorescent lights and everything blue-and-white décor, Cooper’s heart rate slowly, slowly drops to something more normal.

There’s a demon lurking around the Maple Leafs. Bad, but not insurmountable, because nothing’s insurmountable. Cooper’s got the power of friendship, several terabytes worth of memorized trivia, and the world’s best ghost dog. Whatever manipulation she was trying won’t work on him. His last confrontation with a demon ended with a draw. This time is going to be different.

No more excuses. There are things to do. Cooper’s going to do them, and do them well, because he meant what he said, no one is past saving and no one is past him to save. This demon didn’t know what she was talking about. She doesn’t know him.

It’s a new season. Cooper’s better than he was before. He’s going to be better.

Ghosts or demons or anything else that wants to linger around his team—these hauntings don’t know what’s coming for them.

Chapter 2: Voulez-Vous

Luke’s the only one in his own head these days, which is still kind of a mindfuck.

There’s no snide comments, no one else’s sense of amusement as he works his way to a sprint on the treadmill, just the sound of his feet against the track, the whirring of the belt as it runs. His heartrate steadily picking up, the post-morning stretches cardio doing its job. Like a run is going to be the thing to get his season back on track.

He drags sweat off his forehead, settling into the familiar ache of a good workout. Finds himself staring out the floor-to-ceiling window of his building’s too-fancy gym without really processing the view. It’s early enough that the sun’s still low in the sky, scattered glitter all across the lake.

A lake.

It’s too fucking quiet.

Luke ups the speed.

The only other person in the gym this early is the same guy who’s here every morning, built to a truly stupid extent and always wearing a tank top that makes absolutely no attempt to hide that fact. The opposite.

Luke has noticed. He’d have to work out with a blindfold on to not. Right now, Muscles is by the squat rack, his back to Luke. He’s got airpods in, solidly in his own world as he drops down, lifts up, the sheen of sweat over miles of exposed skin catching the sun, glinting like the lake.

He reracks with a low grunt, straightening up, and Luke looks back toward the window fast, his throat dry.

Luke cuts his workout short and escapes. Whatever. It’s an off day anyway.

Back in the relative safety of his apartment, he chugs a protein shake and lingers under an ice cold shower ‘til he feels more normal. Once he does, he picks at the nails of his left hand as he towels off his hair with his right. The paint’s barely there anymore. Needs replacing.

Luke eyes the bottle of blue polish, still where it’s been sitting on the counter since he got it. It eyes him right back. He bought it because blue seemed like a happier colour than black, which should be the kind of thing he wants, now. Hasn’t been able to bring himself to use it yet, which is even more embarrassing than fleeing the gym ‘cause of a guy in a sheer tank top.

Luke’s the only one in his own head these days, and it shouldn’t still be as much of a mindfuck as it is.

Everything is different now.

Better. Better by a thousand, million times, no comparison, and better cleanly, too, by some miracle. Luke was worried, when a cop showed up at his door in June to tell him his dad was dead, that they’d figure out what happened, blame him and somehow drag Cooper into it as well. Worried for nothing: his dad was seen at work and around town multiple times, after the two of them left Swift Hawk. Acting same as he ever did.

“He ran a check on you in the system, a couple weeks before we estimate he passed,” the cop at his door said, once he was done with all the sympathies. “Unauthorized. Can you think of any reason why?”

Luke shook his head. He’d barely processed anything said after ‘your father has passed away’. Said then, instead of an answer to the question, “What happened?”

Accidental death, the cop told Luke. Joseph Thibeault was getting older. Probably slipped and fell in the water. People get complacent, living next to a lake.

Good riddance, Luke didn’t say, but felt, and then, when the cop left after giving him a even more condolences, he laughed so hard it turned into crying, full-body sobbing with relief so big he felt like it was going to kill him.

That part keeps happening. The feelings, just a constant fucking overflow of them, making Luke tear up and laugh out loud and sometimes both on a fucking dime, like the rest of him is getting the hang of having a soul again, the way it hasn’t since he was twelve.

He’s free. There’s nothing looming over him, nothing chasing from behind. He even forgot to slide one of the deadbolts on his door, the other day. Everything is so different, so much better than it’s ever been before.

Luke kind of figured he’d be different too. Better, somehow, to reflect that.

Instead he’s got Leafs-blue nail polish that he can’t manage to wear, and he allowed five in his last start and still wanted to punch Larsson when he pulled him for Coop, and he keeps stopping at store windows to look at wall art and new boots and a really cool skull-shaped pillow without buying any of it because he can’t make himself believe that no one’s going to destroy them next time he pisses them off.

He should know better than wanting, by now. That’s how he knows he’s not better yet.

Luke squints at himself in the bathroom mirror. He’s all choked up again. Feelings.

Fuck this.

He presses his face into the towel, scrubs away the evidence of tears. He’s got shit to do today. He shouldn’t have shit to do today, because it’s the literal only full day off he’s going to have for all of November, but Cooper asked, so Luke does his nails, black like always, and puts on his suit.

Cooper’s living in the busiest possible part of the city, near the arena. Luke doesn’t know how he gets any sleep. By the time Luke arrives, Cooper’s already halfway out the door, probably intending to meet him down in the lobby. He’s always been weird about letting people see his space. Luke never has; figures that the same way Cooper’s careful about Luke’s shit, it’s only fair to return the favour.

“Yeah, I’ll see you soon,” Cooper says into his phone, fumbling with his keys, still with his back to Luke. “Mhm, say hi to Maeve!”

Because of course Cooper stayed friends with the nice witches even after he and Luke—justifiably and semi-correctly, mind you—broke into their apartment and accused them of being evil witches, because Cooper.

Luke watches Cooper realize he’s arrived as he hangs up. He always looks happy to see Luke. Not a reaction Luke gets, most places.

“Luke! One sec. Be good, Puck,” Cooper says to the invisible, approximately dog-sized space in front of him. “Ah, you’re always good.” He calls into the apartment, “Bye, Christmas!” before locking the door, shooting Luke a bright smile. “Nice suit.”

Luke does a spin, mostly so he’ll get a chance to school his face post-painfully sincere Cooper compliment. By the time he makes it 360 degrees, Cooper’s already halfway down the hall, giving the rundown on career stats and trivia for every one of today’s inductees without checking to see if Luke’s listening. Trusting that he is.

Luke grins at Cooper’s back. Jogs to catch up.

Museums aren’t Luke’s thing. Never will be. The team requested a couple of guys to attend the pre-ceremony brunch at the Hockey Hall of Fame, though, just to show face, and Cooper, never not eager to help, even more gung-ho about it than usual since the season started, volunteered the both of them for the job. Anyone but Cooper, Luke would’ve told them to fuck right off, but it is Cooper, so Luke’s resigned himself to it. At least he’s only got to deal with caring about one person. He can’t imagine how people with multiple friends have time for anything.

For such a big city, a lot of the tourist shit in Toronto’s pretty central. Cooper’s got every inch of the core memorized, weaving them between street level and the maze of underground walking paths, avoiding construction and sidewalk closures so all Luke has to do is follow.

It’s already starting to get cold out, winter blowing in early this year, but Luke lingers in the entrance to the Hall anyway, reluctant to condemn himself to the horrors within.

There’s a sign in cursive, welcoming the new Hall of Famers. Luke assumes that’s what it’s doing, at least, because cursive.

“You’re playing so great!” The employee up at the front gushes to Cooper as she ushers them the right way. Luke sees the moment she looks past Cooper and realizes that he’s here, too, the glitch as she races for a politer option. “The whole team is!”

“That’s really kind of you, thanks,” Cooper says, and he doesn’t notice front desk girl blatantly checking him out, but Luke does, and isn’t better than being a little smug about it when Cooper turns to him instead, oblivious. “Ready?”

“Absolutely pissing myself with excitement, Cooper,” Luke says, and spares one last glance for the front doors before trailing Cooper into the event.

The cursive, it turns out, isn’t even the worst of it.

The Hall of Fame already looks like some kind of palace. Maybe a church, with the marble floors, gilded gold ceilings, and in the centre of it all, a massive, domed stained glass window, all rainbow colours—garbage design choice, not enough black—filtering the light down on a room full of middle-aged to old-as-fuck people reliving the glory days, and waiters in bowties weaving between them all with trays full of skinny glasses.

It’s exactly the kind of buttoned-up affair where Luke knows for a fact he doesn’t belong, and doesn’t want to belong, thanks. It’s embarrassing, same way it is every time the NHL tries to class things up. Like kids playing pretend and believing themselves, people dressed up all fancy and mingling and cursive while everyone here is only here because they were, at some point, good at being violent on skates.

“So the building used to be a bank headquarters,” Cooper says, looking around with his neck craned like he’s one of the hundreds of tourists shepherded through here every other day. “And the great-great-grandson of the guy who made the original skylight was the one who refurbished it a hundred years later, when they were turning it into the Hall of Fame.”

“Nepo-artist,” Luke says, mostly so Cooper will gape at him, scandalized.

“A full-circle family legacy, Luke,” he insists, “which is so important because so many printed records of events from the time are lost to history, so sometimes people are the only ones keeping the memories alive!”

Luke shoves his hands in his pockets, settling in to listen to Cooper’s history lesson. Not unhappy with that outcome, probably the most tolerable one possible at an event like this. In any case, he should probably enjoy the NHL, embarrassing stick-up-their-ass culture and all, while he’s got it.

“Mimosa?”

They’ve wandered further into the crowd by the time one of the waiters cuts in, offering his tray of champagne flutes. Luke had two beers last time the team went out and ended up getting teary-eyed when Cap did a toast, so he declines.

“I’m good too, thanks,” Cooper says, and the waiter nods, oddly approving.

“Good call, they taste weird today.”

After he leaves—guy’s apparently been sampling the goods, respect—Luke turns to Cooper. “Don’t not get free booze ‘cause of me.”

“Nah, it’s morning, I need caffeine.”

“I promise you don’t,” Luke says, but Cooper’s already distracted, spotting a group of the new Hall of Famers across the room and going full fanboy.

“Look, look, it’s Marc Arseneault and Dave Hardy!”

Luke follows Cooper’s gaze toward the two. Linemates from one of the 90s Panthers teams, if Cooper’s scouting report on the way here was right. They’re both huge, both burly like retired or not, they’re ready to hop right over the boards, or would be if it wasn’t for that fact that—Luke takes in their red eyes, just too relaxed smiles—they’re both also obviously stoned as hell.

Luke holds back a laugh. Drunk waiters and high hall of famers. Whatever it takes to make a stuffy event like this tolerable, he guesses, and that’s him thinking too soon, it turns out, because ‘stuffy’ is an understatement.

There’s some vaguely classical-sounding music playing faintly over the speakers. Between that and the low drone of dozens of barely audible conversations, the tenor of the place has skipped straight over mellow and landed on downright sleepy.

Luke’s not sure what the Leafs were hoping for in sending active players, except for being able to say in a press release that they did. Only a couple of the other attendees walk up to him and Cooper to say hi or give unasked for advice that hasn’t applied since the dark ages of their careers. Luke lets Cooper do the talking, munches on the little fried bites of god knows what that more waiters come passing around, even though he’d need about thirty of them to feel full. He thought this was supposed to be a brunch.

Maybe forty minutes pass like that, incredibly boring, and things don’t get any less boring when the crowd gets shuffled toward a low stage to listen to a series of excessively long speeches, as if they’re not going to spend twenty minutes before tomorrow’s Leafs game doing more speeches, and an hour before the actual induction ceremony doing them all over again.

God, Luke can’t fucking stand speeches.

He watches people yawning openly. A couple of current head office execs keep giggling, heads bent together in the back row. One guy in the audience, paunchy and balding, is fully nodding off, his mimosa teetering dangerously on the arm of his chair. At least if it spills it’ll be entertaining.

Standing at the back of the crowd, Luke stifles his own yawn. At his side, Cooper must be bored too, his initial enthusiasm collapsing under the weight of this absolute nothing of an event, because he’s holding one of the brochures from the entrance and has been rereading the same map legend for the last twenty minutes, minimum.

Up on the stage, the assistant commissioner drones on, “…and again, we wouldn’t be standing here today without the…” He blinks, slow. Seems to lose his train of thought for a solid five seconds, then to teeter on the edge of laughter before gathering himself. “…contributions. Without the contributions of these inspiring men and women…”

Yeah, fuck this, actually.

Luke taps Cooper’s arm, sharp. Doesn’t look at him, playing it cool as he heads for one of the side doors, waving off the staff member who seems ready to pounce at him and ask if he needs anything.

He doesn’t know where he’s going. Looks around and sees another marginally less pretentious hall of exhibits, framed pucks and trophies and photos. More museum shit. Away from the speeches, so automatically an improvement.

“They’re going to think we’re being rude,” Cooper says, but he followed, which means he hated it in there as well.

“I am being rude,” Luke says, and grins when it gets a laugh out of Cooper, even though he gives them out easy.

They amble away from the faint music and microphone feedback, through glass cases and pedestals. There’s an area blocked off with dividers, New Exhibit Coming Soon!; another with a painted backdrop of Maple Leaf Gardens from back in the day, for a kids’ photo-op.

Luke figures out, eventually, why this room’s so much quieter than the main hall: hanging overhead, acting as accidental insulation, are dozens of jerseys, a multicolour montage of retired numbers and legends of the game.

And, okay—

Luke doesn’t buy into sentimentality. Nostalgia is people overlooking how shit the past felt at the time, and old people expecting respect just ‘cause they’re old is one of Luke’s least favourite things on the planet, and there’s a whole lot of competition.

He can’t help, looking up at those jerseys, but to feel some kind of reverence all the same.

For all the shit parts, god, Luke just fucking loves hockey. And to be here, an invited guest in a place dedicated to people who feel the same level of irrational about this game, dedicate-your-life-to-it irrational…

It hits him, a little. For ninety-nine percent of people with that kind of love for hockey, the NHL is an impossible, unattainable dream.

Luke’s never imagined doing anything else. He’s never been anything but absolutely certain of hockey as his path forward, first in the delusional little kid way and then for good reason. Now, with that reason gone, it’s there again, that amazing-terrible openness. Nothing’s certain anymore. Not even hockey, and Luke’s got a soul again, everything’s better now, but he can’t help it, being greedy about hockey.

The two of them have been standing side-by-side, looking up at the ceiling in silence. Luke glances over at Cooper, at the way he’s biting his lip, lost in thought.

“What’re you thinking about?” Luke asks. He wouldn’t, if it was anyone else.

Cooper exhales. “Scary Demon Lady.”

Yeah. That checks out. He told Luke about the unwanted visitor right after it happened. Seemed mostly okay despite the fact that he’d just been face-to-face with a demon alone, without Luke there to have his back, but it’s been weighing on him in the days since. Weighing on both of them. Luke knows the protective wards are mostly just useful against the smaller hauntings, like mosquito netting, but it’s unnerving anyways, the idea of a demon marching straight into the practice rink and possessing their resident nerd.

They’ve been on the lookout, have redrawn the usual wards and then some, but nothing more haunted than usual has happened since. That fact’s not all that comforting.

“We know she’s around now,” Luke says, refusing to worry about a thing that, for all they know, might’ve just been stopping in. Who knows how demons think. Not him, clearly. “If she tries anything, we’ll stop her.”

“I know,” Cooper says, giving Luke a quick, reassuring smile before his eyes wander back up to the hockey sweaters on the ceiling. “What about you?”

Isn’t that the fucking question.

Luke goes through his options, too many to count. When does having a second chance start to feel like a real thing instead of a dream I don’t want to wake up from; when does every emotion stop feeling like it’s actively punching me in the face; when do I stop wanting things and get normal.

Luke shrugs.

“That was super convincing,” Cooper says, in that especially mild way of his that means, in Kepley, bullshit, Luke.

Annoying thing about it is that that’s all he says, just that, and Luke is already dangerously close to that terrible thing where Cooper takes four fucking words to convince him to dump all his stupid embarrassing feelings out in front of him, like, here, good luck making sense of this!, and then Cooper does.

Luckily—Luke thinks, because Luke is a well-established dumbass who still thinks luck applies to him and his team—that doesn’t happen, because there’s a dull thud from the other side of the gallery, and when he and Cooper turn toward the noise, it’s to see a woman on the floor, passed out near the washrooms.

“I know CPR,” Cooper says instantly, already moving toward her. Of course he knows CPR. Sometimes Luke forgets they’re friends and feels annoyed at how compulsively competent he is. “Call 911.”

The woman on the floor is one of the honorees from the incoming class. Isabel something, got to be close to sixty. Forward, maybe? Luke can’t remember Cooper’s facts right now, digging for his phone as Cooper takes a knee to check her pulse. Unnecessarily, it turns out, because they’re doing those things, the woman snores, loudly.

Luke doesn’t think dying people are supposed to snore.

Cooper looks as lost as Luke feels. “She’s… asleep?”

It happens in an instant: the woman goes from snoring, mid-nap but otherwise apparently unharmed, to lunging at Cooper, clocking him directly in the face.

“Woah, Ms. Cermelli, wait—” Cooper yelps, scooting away from her, clutching his nose. Isabel Cermelli doesn’t back down, keeps swinging at him while Cooper blocks instead of hitting back. “I was trying to help!”

Crazy old lady with night terrors?

No. No, Luke realizes, with a too-familiar sinking feeling, because her eyes are still shut, her face slack like she’s still asleep even as she throws punches, these odd, clumsy movements.

Luke has a brief internal debate between ‘hitting a girl is unsportsmanlike’ and ‘this woman is six feet even and seems fully intent on wrecking Cooper’s shit’, and lands on the option that doesn’t get the only person he gives a damn about hurt: he lowers the shoulder and tackles Isabel Cermelli into the washroom.

Her shout is more of a roar, wordless and furious as she hits the tile. Her eyes are still somehow closed, and maybe that’s what buys Luke the time to react first—while she’s still on the ground, he scrambles to his feet and away, slamming the door behind him.

“Get me,” he starts, and doesn’t have to finish, because Coop’s already dragging over one of the heavy wooden benches scattered around the room, lifting it onto its side so they can use it to barricade the door, and not a moment too soon.

The door shudders as Cermelli slams against it. She shouts something else—‘Where’? ‘Why’? It’s indistinct, like she’s trying to speak without knowing how to move her tongue—and throws herself into the door again and again, tirelessly. Not like anyone Luke’s fought in his life.

“The fuck,” Luke asks, once he’s sure that the makeshift barricade is going to hold. He’s already scanning Cooper, taking in his bloody nose from getting punched, speckles of blood joining the freckles across its bridge, and wishing he’d tackled the old lady harder.

Before Cooper can answer, there are more thuds from back in the main hall, accompanied this time by the breaking of glass, the sounds of something smashing.

Luke would love, just one time in this city, for the sinking feeling to be wrong. So much for lucky.

“We’re not even at the fucking rink,” he despairs, but Cooper’s already running straight toward the danger.

Luke groans. He grabs someone’s probably-historically-important stick off the nearest display, snaps it over his knee so he’s got something sharp to work with, and follows on Cooper’s heels.

He half thinks he and Coop have gone through the wrong door. The main hall, unrecognizable from the snoozefest it’s been all morning, has devolved into chaos, people running in every direction, pushing over tables and ripping the mic cables out of the floor.

They must have really not liked the speeches, Luke thinks, except it’s not that simple, because it can never be that simple. One look, and he can tell that something’s seriously wrong: even as they’re shouting, trashing the Hall of Fame, every face of every person in the room is bizarrely expressionless, completely devoid of feeling. Some have their eyes shut like Cermelli did. Others are moving their limbs at strange angles, their gazes unfocused, almost like they’re not in control of their limbs or faces at all.

No one seems to have taken notice of him and Cooper yet. Luke doesn’t feel like finding out what happens when they do.

“Move,” he urges, shoving Cooper ahead of him, and the two of them slide to take cover behind the deserted bar, out of sight and hopefully out of mind, whatever that’s worth when they’re dealing with, apparently, mindless zombies.

“Okay,” Cooper says, his voice gone all stuffy from his rapidly swelling nose. “Okay, so the entire Hall of Fame class and half the league’s executives are possessed.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Luke says, and someone from the room shouts, wordless, and throws a glass, shattering it against the wall behind the bar. He throws his arms up, shielding his face from the shards as they rain down.

“…They seem pretty possessed,” Cooper says, in that incredibly pointed understatement voice he does instead of telling Luke he’s being an idiot, which is usually fair, but for once, Luke actually isn’t.

“Yeah, no shit, but—” More breaking glass, this time from somewhere else in the room. “Only demons are powerful enough to possess people, we know that, and they’re rare.”

“And unless Scary Demon Lady has dozens of friends, that’s not what this is,” Cooper finishes the thought, offers a counterpoint, “You got possessed by a regular ghost.”

Luke prefers not to remember that, thanks. “I didn’t have a soul at the time.”

“And it’s unlikely every single person here sold theirs,” Cooper reasons out, and Luke nods. Exactly, he’d have recognized the absence in them, the emptiness he saw in his father all his life and in his own reflection until real recently; he’d feel it, he thinks, the suffocating presence of something that impossibly powerful. Besides, demons know how to possess. Whatever’s piloting these people can barely get the bodies to move right.

He knows by now what it looks like when Cooper’s mind is racing to solve a problem. It’s the same look he gets during games when he’s processing every minute detail of the play, a dozen other things at the same time. Luke plays on instinct; Coop plays on dissecting his own instincts down into their component parts. He sometimes mutters to himself under his breath. Doesn’t realize he’s doing it, Luke doesn’t think, not in net and not now, when his gaze goes from the shattered glass to the recycling bin tucked under the bar with them and his whole face lights up.

Cooper crawls past Luke, still safe behind the bar, and—Luke does a double take, because this is odd even for Coop—tips over the recycling bin, sending dozens of identical, empty beer cans scattering across the floor.

Wait. Not beer cans.

Luke picks up the one that rolled nearest to him. Looks at the label. Mimosa Beverage.

“They’re serving premixed mimosas?” he asks, judging extremely hard. Typical NHL, couldn’t class things up to save its life.

“Look,” Cooper says, turning the can in Luke’s hand so he can read the rest of the text. Nonalcoholic, it says, and Luke’s momentarily confused—the NHL didn’t even get real booze for the premixed mimosas?—and then he reads the next line. Contains 20 mg of THC.

Holy shit, the NHL didn’t get real booze for the premixed mimosas because they’re getting the entire place fucking stoned.

The league’s never not fucked up something fuck-up-able, but this is new, even for them.

“…People are on their third and fourth mimosas,” Cooper says, incredulous. “I saw Isabel Cermelli have five since we got here.”

“Everyone here is high as fuck,” Luke translates, thinking of the drowsy atmosphere from earlier, the presenter getting lost in thought up on the stage, and Cooper’s already nodding, already adding one plus one.

“It’s all over history, people across cultures have taken advantage of altered mental states to commune with spirits or deities or, um, collective memory. If getting high counts as one of those altered states, maybe it dulled them enough to make room for the hauntings to take over, at least partially, which means that whatever the hauntings want, they need to accomplish it before the high wears off.”

“Okay,” Luke clings to that piece of hope. “Okay, so we just have to wait ‘til they’re sober. Easy.”

Their waiter from earlier, the one who was helping himself to the drinks, chooses that moment, because fuck Luke’s life, to wander to the side of the bar, placing Luke and Cooper directly in his eyeline.

Of course, because fuck Luke’s life double, he’s one of the ones with his eyes open.

“Where is he?” the waiter shouts, diving right for them.

“Run, run, run!”

Luke’s already scrambling to his feet, aware of Cooper doing the same, to try to make some distance. Not enough of it: the waiter grabs him around the waist, enough force that he’d take Luke to the floor if Luke was any smaller than he is.

“Get off,” Luke snarls, his entire body going tense at being restrained. He hears Cooper calling his name, moving in to help, but can’t afford to wait for him, so he jabs his broken hockey stick—the blunt end, not the jagged one, because it’s not technically this random drugged and possessed waiter’s fault—into the guy’s gut, sending him doubling over for long enough to make a run for it properly.

“This way,” Cooper says, and Luke nods, panting more from adrenaline than exertion as they make for the front entrance. He can see the ticket checker’s little podium from here, the light of the street just beyond, but only until a mass of bodies fills the space between him and the door, the rest of the alumni and guests cluing into their presence and cutting off the exit.

Shit.

Luke stops up, skidding on the polished-shiny floor, exchanges a look with Cooper, and takes the only option available, sprinting further into the Hall of Fame.

It’s not a clear path, not by any means: the zombified hall of famers are coming after them from every direction, grabbing at Cooper and Luke to try to slow them down. Maybe not just to slow them down—Luke thinks, absurdly, that one of the zombies is trying to grope at him until he looks down and sees that they’re going for his pockets, trying to root around.

“Fuck— off—” he grunts, hitting out at anyone that gets close enough as he and Cooper struggle their way through the hall. More of the zombies are yelling now, some mostly coherent, others more wail than words, all of them shouting the same thing: “Where? Where?”

“They’re looking for someone,” Cooper says, tugging his jacket out of one of the zombies’ clenched fists. “Something?”

Luke will worry about what the hauntings want when he and Coop aren’t actively on the verge of being killed by them.

If they keep going this way, they’re going to wind up cornered in one of the galleries. Luke grabs one of the zombies by his shirt and flings him into another, domino-effect to buy him a second to look around, desperately, for a way out.

“The stairs,” he says, kicking another one in the knee to send him to the ground. “The party was all on this level, there shouldn’t be anyone upstairs.”

“For sure, just one second,” Cooper says, strained, and when Luke looks over at him, its to see him struggling against another suit-clad league exec that’s trying to, by the looks of things, climb Cooper. The size difference makes it almost comical, except for how the guy’s got his hands on Cooper, tightening around his throat.

Luke sees red. He grabs the zombie by the back of the collar, “don’t even fucking try,” hauling him off of Cooper, and punches him square in the face, hears bone crunch against the broken stick he’s still holding as he does. He briefly considers feeling bad about it, what with the whole possession thing, but if he’s recognizing him right, the guy works for Player Safety, and played for the Bruins, and is going after Cooper. Three strikes.

“Thanks,” Cooper says, massaging his neck. His nose is bloody again.

“Stairs,” Luke forces out in response, only the second that the latest effort bought them has passed, and there are no more than five feet between them and the way upstairs, but more of the horde has assembled directly in their path, lined up shoulder-to-shoulder, no way through.

“If any of you are still conscious in there, we’re going to help you,” Cooper tells them, trying with blood drying on his face and bruising on his neck to reason with the hauntings violently chasing them down.

No self-preservation, Luke despairs, even as he’s stepping up, planting himself at Cooper’s side so they’re facing down the zombies together. He doesn’t know how many retired, possessed NHLers he can take on at once, but he guesses he’s going to have to find out.

The first to move is a blonde woman, her eyes shut. She’s someone’s date, Luke assumes, not built like an athlete at all, not that that’s stopping her from lunging straight for him. Too much happens at once, then, Cooper flinging himself in front of Luke the way he always does, Luke protesting, already too late, “No!”, and blonde lady doubling over and getting flung full-force into the nearest wall by—

Nothing?

“What the fuck,” Luke says out loud, while another of the zombies cries out, going toppling into its buddies, bowled over by the same invisible force.

“Puck!” Cooper makes sense of it a second before Luke does, sounds overjoyed at the sight—well, the not-sight—of T. C. Puck absolutely laying waste to the crowd blocking the stairs, because of course a badly trained ghost dog from the 80s has sworn fealty to Cooper and followed him to a formal brunch event. “I thought you were at home!”

Luke has to hand it to the dog: dead or not, he’s got killer timing. He can hear snarling, can see possessed NHL alums and waitstaff getting dragged to the floor, recoiling from what must be bites. It shatters any kind of coordination the zombies had, leaves them running into each other and swinging wildly at nothing, completely disoriented at being attacked by something they can’t see. Distracted enough to forget to block the stairs.

Luke knows better than to question when things work out, because it doesn’t happen all that often for him. He grabs Cooper’s suit jacket, dragging him along ‘til he starts running on his own, and the two of them take the steps two at a time.

“Dog!” Luke shouts behind them without looking back, hoping Cooper’s dog is at least bright enough to follow.

They book it up one flight, another, bursting through a door marked ‘Hall of Fame Staff Only’ and emerging on a quieter floor, this one lined with more doors to what look, through the skinny glass windows in each, like offices instead of exhibits. The zombified alumni haven’t made it up this far yet, but it’s a temporary reprieve at best. Luke can hear shouts a floor down, more breaking glass, too.

They need to get out of sight.

“Further in,” Cooper says, and Luke follows, trying every door they pass on the way. Locked. Locked. Fucking locked. Goddamnit.

The slurred shouts from downstairs are getting closer.

Luke starts shrugging out of his jacket.

Cooper’s spinning in place, looking around the deserted hallway, but if there’s anything useful here, it’s stuck behind one of the doors. “Maybe I could pick the lock, if we find some kind of—”

With his suit jacket wrapped around his fist, Luke punches through the glass panel of the nearest door, reaches down, and turns the lock.

“Lock picked,” he says, and nods for Cooper to go ahead.

Cooper blinks at him. “You’re so cool,” he says, earnest in the way that Cooper Kepley and only Cooper Kepley is capable of being, not one speck of irony, and Luke is embarrassingly proud of the praise, cursing his new and humiliating emotions and attempting to keep them off his face as he ushers Cooper and—based on the heavy-ass weight that runs over Luke’s toes, fucking ow—his dog inside and shuts the door behind himself, turning the lock and sliding down against the door in exactly the nick of time.

“Where,” one of the possession-zombies croaks from maybe thirty feet away, right at the top of the stairs.

Luke and Cooper stay frozen in place, neither daring to breathe.

Shuffling footsteps make their way down the hall. Closer. Closer. A shudder of metal as whoever it is throws themself against one of the locked doors. Another, closer.

Luke scans the room. Only potential hiding spot in here is the desk. If this is one of the zombies with their eyes open, they’re screwed. If it gets through the door, they’re screwed. If it realizes they’re in here and calls for help, Luke wouldn’t bet money on the door holding. Screwed again.

The door shakes behind him as the zombie slams against it, testing. Don’t notice the broken glass. Don’t notice the glass.

Another shudder of the door on its hinges. Luke dares a glance to the other side of the room, where Cooper’s crouched with an arm around Puck, petting him silently, calming. For once, the dog doesn’t make a sound.

Luke holds his breath.

Slowly, slowly, with dragging footsteps, the haunting steers its stolen body back down the hall, testing each door on its way.

“Where?” Luke hears it calling, halfway down the stairs. “Where is he?”

Its voice fades, and Luke exhales.

So much for the suit. Broken glass crunching under his feet as he straightens up, Luke tosses his half-shredded jacket into a corner, yanks off his tie. Good riddance. “How long does it take to get normal after like forty milligrams of weed?” he asks, shoving his sleeves up by his elbows.

“The drinks aren’t technically made of the plant itself, just the psychoactive compounds,” Cooper corrects as he gets to his feet. Habit, Luke thinks, before he actually answers the question, “Depends on everyone’s metabolisms and tolerances. Multiple drinks that strong… probably a while.”

Luke drags his hands through his hair. Now that the danger’s at least slightly less immediate, the fight-or-flight adrenaline is getting replaced with the annoyance this ridiculous situation deserves. Only on the fucking Leafs. Only on his one day off.

He’s never listening to Cooper again, which is a blatant lie, but makes him feel better to think anyhow.

Cooper, instead of taking a break to indulge in bitterness, is already well on his way to investigating the haunting, which Luke probably should’ve expected.

“I looked up all the current special exhibits or traveling displays before we came,” Cooper says, because of course he did. “Nothing seemed haunted or even a little bit unusual, and I didn’t get to look at everything downstairs, but most of it isn’t strictly Leafs-related, so the odds of it being this cursed are low.”

Luke tries to wrangle his brain into cooperating. “It’s the building, then?” Place looks old enough for it, but Cooper’s shaking his head. “Bank shit?”

“Mm, only one death on the record from back then,” Cooper says. “But there’s always some percentage of museum holdings that aren’t on display, stuff goes between here and the archives all the time that may not be public yet.”

“Archives,” Luke echoes, a question, and Cooper grins, which means it was the right one.

They huddle by the desk, Luke looking over Cooper’s shoulder as he types on his phone.

“Hi, Asra,” Cooper composes out loud, enunciating every word as he types. “How’s it going? I hope Sami’s piano recital is—”

“Coop,” Luke reminds him, and Cooper gets back on track only a little sheepishly.

“Just wondering,” he narrates, “are there any cool historical ghost stories associated with any of the upcoming exhibitions at the Hall of Fame? Let me know!” He always matches how other people text him, tone-wise. Luke’s noticed it before, notices it again now. Not like there’s much else for him to pay attention to, ‘til Asra replies. “And now we wait.”

They wait.

Cooper busies himself with finding a box of tissues, mopping up his bloody nose. Luke leaves him to it and gets to scoping out the rest of their makeshift hiding place, still listening for any sign that the halfway-possessed old people are coming back for round two.

The place is boring as shit, even worse than the museum itself. There’s a filing cabinet. A desktop computer, old, with a sticky note clinging to one side of the screen, displaying a handwritten username and password right there in the open. Luke thought nerds were supposed to be smart.

He knocks over a half-full pencil holder, just to disturb the too-neat tableau of it all, and turns his attention from the desk to the walls. They’re decorated with framed black and white photos of hockey, not unlike the ones in the entrance to the practice rink. More artistic. One of a Red Wings player, arms up, celebrating a goal. Another of a goalie standing in front of their net, head down, taken from too far behind for Luke to recognize the team.

He lingers by that one, the goalie recentring himself after a goal. For or against. Doesn’t make a difference—can’t make it far in net unless you’re willing to move past the play that happened thirty seconds ago and onto the next one, a dozen clean slates a game. Luke’s always been good at it, before this season.

He’s not sure how long Cooper’s been watching him before he clues in. Watching in that particular, observing way Cooper’s got, same as he was down in the gallery, and now there’s no convenient old lady to distract him.

Start of last year, Luke found it jarring. Intrusive, a little, being watched that intently, almost like an accusation. He doesn’t know when he started finding it comforting instead, the weight of Cooper’s stares. It’s Coop trying to get a read on a situation, ‘cause it’s less intuitive for him than it is for a lot of people, but it’s also him checking on Luke specifically, making sure he’s alright.

“I thought I’d be in here one day,” Luke says. Explains, because he owes Cooper that much. “I knew I would be.” He doesn’t turn around, keeps his eyes on the nameless goalie in the frame. “Not going to happen, now.”

It’s not like Luke doesn’t deserve this. He deserves worse, probably. Play with fire, get burnt. Fraud your way to the NHL via demon deal, get mediocre the second you’re left on your own. It stings anyway.

It’s back, the feeling from this morning, this summer, overwhelm at the sheer openness of it all. Maybe they get got by ghost zombies. Maybe they get out of here and the season goes on as normal. Maybe Luke figures his play out. Maybe he doesn’t. Nothing’s certain anymore.

“I didn’t know you were planning on retiring this year,” Cooper says, carefully light. That prying, not-prying voice again, leaving the ball in Luke’s court.

Luke debates not answering. Answers anyway, ‘cause it’s not like it’s news. “We all saw me get fucking undressed by Malik on Tuesday.”

“Malik’s got two Rockets and it was a ridiculous shot.” Cooper doesn’t miss a beat. “Behind the net and nowhere near the crease, it was the lowest percentage possible. Sub-five, actually, I think three-point-six since the dead puck era. Ninety-six times out of a hundred, you make that save easily.” He’s picking up the pens Luke scattered, rearranging them in the holder as he speaks, entirely focused on the task. “The first goal, the third pair had a miscommunication and the defensive breakdown meant that Sonny wasn’t covering his guy, and the fourth was fifty seconds into a five-on-three when everyone on the ice was gassed… Three and five were your fault.”

Luke laughs, just one reluctant huff, surprised into it after being lulled by Cooper’s string of stats. Fucking Kepley.

Cooper looks happy with himself for tricking that laugh out of Luke. Doesn’t even have the courtesy to be smug about it, just waits for Luke to look in his direction and says, painfully sincere, “You don’t need a demon deal to be a good goalie, Luke.”

He’s so—

Cooper was the first person ever to put themselves between Luke and his dad, to protect Luke, and it’s overwhelming all over again, listening to him say that, to have someone who likes him this much, to like someone this much back, to not know what to do with it any more than Luke knows what to do about anything else, these days.

Humiliatingly, Luke has a lump in his throat again. He knows Cooper clocks it, too, his face falling in concern as Luke retreats to the other side of the desk, ducking his head to hide.

“Fuck me,” he says. Stupid fucking feelings. How do people do this soul shit for their whole lives? “This keeps happening.”

“I didn’t mean to make you sad,” Cooper says, gearing up to apologize, but Luke shakes his head.

“I’m not sad,” he says, almost laughing all over again from how ridiculous the idea is. “Not even fucking close.”

That’s kind of the whole problem. Not-problem. Can not having a problem be a problem?

Cooper’s got his head tilted as he listens, curious.

“I’m happy,” Luke explains, because they’re maybe going to get zombie-murdered, and because it’s Cooper. “I’m really fucking happy, I’ve been happy since March, and I—” He presses his fists against his eyes, hard. Admits, forcing the words out, “I still want to be the starter.”

It’s fucking—disgraceful, is what it is. It’s not as if Luke’s under any illusions about the kind of person he is, but the fact that he can sit here and be jealous of Cooper for defaulting into the number one role, can sit here and bitch about this season or anything in his life at all is shameful, even for him.

Cooper doesn’t look offended. Just perches carefully on the edge of the desk. “Yeah, the, uh, first thing you ever said to me was that we’re competition, so. That seems like a pretty normal thing to want.”

He doesn’t get it. “Last time I wanted something I traded my soul, tried to steal yours, and almost killed my dad, Coop.”

“Your dad wasn’t your fault,” Cooper says instantly, more serious than he mostly ever is, but Luke’s shaking his head, refusing the comfort.

“I still made the deal,” Luke says. “I shouldn’t still…” He trails off, struggling for his words. “I don’t know how to… to want normal. To want stuff how someone normal does. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

He’s a fucking mess. Hears himself and wants to bash his head against the nearest wall hard enough to stop having to.

Cooper is folding his bloody tissue in half again and again, thoughtful. Takes a while to speak. “What else do you want?”

What Luke thinks is, too much.

He wants to get a handle on all these overwhelming fucking feelings. He wants to buy stuff he likes and decorate his apartment with it and know that it’s his and no one can touch it.

He wants to never go back to Swift Hawk, to never even think about that place or anyone in it ever again. He also wants for every shitty person he went to school with to watch him being successful and fucking kick themselves, and for hell to be real so he can enjoy the idea of his dad rotting there after looking Luke up in his cop database and realizing he’d gotten so far away that he could never touch him again.

He wants to kiss a guy. He wants to do more than kissing, to have hands on him that aren’t a threat.

He wants to be the one to break the curses and win the Leafs a Stanley Cup. He wants to be the best, like the goalies on TV and in the Hall of Fame and his imagined games growing up, and he wants to prove to Cooper that he was worth saving, and he wants to not worry that everything he has is going to get taken away at any second. He wants to be a different person than the cowardly little kid he still feels like half the time.

He’s so fucking greedy, because everything is better, and he’s so happy, and he should’ve learned his lesson by now but instead he just wants and wants and wants.

What Luke says is, petulant, “I don’t want blue nails.”

It sounds stupid. It is stupid. He stayed painting his nails because it was an easy way to piss off everyone back home and do one thing to his body that was his own choice, but he started painting them because the mostly-congealed bottle of Black Out By Sally Hansen was what his mom left when she did, and Luke wanted so fucking bad to feel like he wasn’t the only person who knew what it felt like to spend his life terrified of Joseph Thibeault, except now he knows that Hannah Cahill didn’t choose any of it, that she wasn’t even herself for the nine months and handful of days of her and Luke’s coexistence, so even the fucking nail polish doesn’t get to be certain anymore. Was it a her thing or just another Lake Swift Hawk thing? Which of them is he even remembering?

He wants to stop expecting to hear sarcastic not-quite-comfort from the foot of his bed when he wakes up from a bad dream, and feeling a flash of hurt when he doesn’t. That’s what he wants.

Cooper says, simple, “Okay. I think the black looks good.”

This time, Luke really does laugh, choked up. “Me too.”

He feels a not-inconsiderable weight against his legs as Puck, taking it upon himself to be the world’s deadest therapy dog, leans against him. It’s not the worst feeling. It’s not bad at all.

“I think,” Cooper continues, “that it would be a lot less normal for you to have experienced all the things you experienced for as long as you did and come out unaffected. I think that wouldn’t make any sense at all.”

There’s no pity in Cooper’s voice. No uncertainty at all when he looks at Luke.

“Whatever you want,” Cooper says. “Whatever you want to want, or don’t, or don’t know yet. It’s all okay. It isn’t like before.”

Luke’s words feel caught in his throat, the air punched out of his lungs the way it sometimes gets when Cooper talks like this, like he’s believing something hard enough to make the world believe it too, from sheer force of will. “We already have another demon,” Luke manages, and Cooper just shakes his head.

“Not like the last one,” he says. “It’s not going to be like that for you ever again.” There’s something behind his eyes, then, a weight, but only for a second. Only ‘til he smiles, just Cooper again. “I promise.”

It’s reflex for Luke to say, “You can’t promise that.”

“Too late,” Cooper says, brightly. “I did, that’s my guarantee as the starter.”

“Fuck right off,” Luke says, even as he’s smiling, helpless. He shoves Cooper’s arm, and Cooper lets him, warm to the touch like always. “Fuckin’ benchwarmer, get used to the ballcap.”

“Can I borrow one of yours?” Cooper teases right back—without pushing Luke, even as a joke, ‘cause he’d never—and for a second, Luke almost forgets that they’re cornered in a zombie-infested museum.

This is his life now. Hiding out in an office with a ghost dog and his competition in net-slash-only friend, having a small emotional breakdown while zombified NHL alumni tear the Hall of Fame apart just outside the door.

Cooper’s phone buzzes on the desk, and they both look down to see Asra’s contact photo.

Cooper grabs for the phone, thumbs flying over the screen, and Luke waits for the game-changing lore reveal. “…It’s a video of Sami playing piano.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Luke groans, but then another bubble pops up on the screen, this one a wall of text.

“Yes.”

“What?” Luke asks, watching Cooper instead of the screen, because he’ll get through it faster than Luke will. “Coop—”

“There’s an upcoming exhibit on in-arena experiences through time,” Cooper summarizes, still reading. “Asra recently pulled a bunch of stuff from the main archive and sent it over, including some items from the old Mutual Street arena, those are the only new things, the cause of the haunting has to be there, Luke! Now we just need to find out where in the Hall the artefacts are, and—”

“There’s construction shit,” Luke remembers, proud at being able to contribute to the mystery solving. “Downstairs, with the sweaters, part of the room’s blocked off.”

“Okay!” Cooper’s practically buzzing with energy, alive again now that they’ve got something to go on. “Whatever their unfinished business is, it’s in there. You know what we have to do?”

“Stay in here and wait them out ‘cause we still don’t know for sure that this is a Leafs issue?” Luke suggests.

Cooper gives him a Look.

“Yeah, figured,” Luke mutters, resigned. Not just resigned. He feels… settled, something quieted inside him that hasn’t been maybe ever.

Everything’s new and better. Luke doesn’t know if he is yet, still doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing in general, but in all the uncertainty, there’s this, isn’t there? There’s Cooper.

Cooper doesn’t think there’s anything irredeemably wrong with Luke, for being happy and still wanting more. Cooper thinks that Luke can want without that wanting having a body count.

Cooper, Luke realizes, is going to keep running headfirst into impossible shit, and maybe the one certainty Luke knows for a fact is that he’s going to be running in after him while he does it, because Luke’s no better than the fucking dog, really.

It’s something, that one certainty. It’s a start.

---

They take a gamble on the fire stairs, sneaking down to the main floor without drawing attention from any of the zombies.

“Okay,” Cooper whispers, behind Luke as they make for the entrance to the exhibit halls. “Now all we need to do is make it to the other side of the room without them noticing.”

They exchange nods, stepping through the door as one.

An entire exhibit hall full of zombies turns, in unison, to look at them.

“Where is it?” one of the Hall of Fame employees shouts, and it catches on, overlapping, slurred voices.

“Where is he?”

“Where is it?”

“Where?”

“I hid it,” Luke shouts back, and the hauntings fall silent, listening. “Upstairs, two lefts, bottom drawer.”

A beat.

The zombies swarm.

Eh, worth a try.

This doesn’t change the plan, which is still: get Cooper to the new exhibit, keep the bad guys off him long enough that he can Cooper the situation. Luke takes the lead, headfirst into the crowd to get to making a path, shoving at the zombies even as one makes it close enough to clock him in the head.

He can hear Cooper at his back, his nonstop, “Sorry! Sorry!” as he strongarms people out of the way, allergic to using his size advantage even vaguely aggressively.

Lucky for both of them, Luke’s got no such qualms. Zombified Marc Arseneault and Dave Hardy are lurching toward him, so he grabs them by the collars and knocks their heads together; darts into the gap they leave and starts taking people out at the ankles, sweeping their legs with his broken stick. Sharp end, this time, ‘cause the hero stuff is Cooper’s thing, not his.

Instant karma for that: One of the zombie-alums flies into Luke from behind, sending him sprawling without a chance to brace.

Luke thrashes against the guy’s weight, trying to get enough leverage to get out from under him, and the man—old, again, why the fuck are all these old people so goddamn strong?—yells right in his face, mimosa breath and all.

“Where is—”

Luke’s deafened by the barking directly in his ear as Puck flings himself into the zombie pinning him down. He watches a man in a suit somersaulting over an invisible 120-pound dog and decides he can live with the hearing loss.

“Coop,” he calls, forcing himself to his knees, regretting working out this morning. If he’d known he was going to have to fight a few dozen hauntings…

“Here!” Cooper’s at his side again, offering a hand to pull Luke up properly so they can sprint through the last stretch. He’s bleeding again, his arm instead of his face this time, both sleeves of his jacket torn, but Luke’s seen him worse, and he looks determined, not afraid.

They take advantage of the ghost dog-induced distraction to close the gap, dodging the last few stubborn zombies and knocking one of the dividers out of the way, past the ‘Coming Soon!’ signs and into the under-construction section of the Hall.

The upcoming exhibit is unfinished, the general emptiness of it a jarring change from the rest of the pristine shrine to the sport. Everything tucked behind the dividers is a half-finished half-idea, from the popcorn buckets and flags as mementos of old-timey game days, to the placeholder cards in open display cases, the ladder and unpainted wood and exposed wiring scattered throughout.

Luke doubles over, catching his breath. Wincing as he does, at the scratches from people clawing at him, the shiner-in-progress that he can feel swelling up. He can hear Puck out in the hall, sowing chaos, but that’s going to buy them minutes, at best.

“Okay,” Cooper pants. “Okay, I just need to find whichever of the artefacts the hauntings want, then we’ll be able to—”

“Where is he?”

Did Luke say minutes? He meant seconds.

“Oh, fuck me, how did you get out?” he groans, straightening up, resigning himself to doing this the hard way as Isabel Cermelli, somehow escaped from where they barricaded her in the ladies’ room, advances toward him and Cooper. She doesn’t answer the question. Does look pissed. Ghosts and their fucking grudges. “Alright, grandma, let’s go.”

She takes Luke at face value, grabbing the ladder and hurling it full-force straight at him, WWE style.

“Fuck!”

He and Cooper dive off in separate directions, Luke rolling straight into a run, charging for Cermelli to head her off so Cooper can search the sparse, half-displayed old shit.

“Nope,” Luke grunts, grabbing Cermelli around the waist and digging his heels in. He promptly gets elbowed hard in the gut, only manages to hang on through sheer stubbornness. Oh, those stupid fancy appetizers were a mistake. “Lady, stop.”

Not hearing or understanding him, the ghost controlling Cermelli contorts, twisting in his grip, and this time her elbow catches Luke straight in the mouth, sending him staggering backwards, tasting blood.

Luke usually dislikes men more than he dislikes women, but this possessed old lady trying to beat his ass is really challenging that status quo.

“Any day now, Coop!” he shouts, ducking as Cermelli picks up one of the display stands and hurls it his way, shattering the glass case behind him. Well, that sounded expensive. “Just do the fucking banishing, they’re coming!”

On his knees at the other side of the unfinished exhibit, rifling through old pamphlets somehow both frantically and incredibly controlled at the same time, Cooper shakes his head. “If we find what they want, we can put them to rest the right way,” he says, without even looking up. Somehow—mid-getting beat up, a million other things to dwell on—Luke finds space to feel jarred by the expression on Cooper’s face, the intense, uncompromising focus there. “We can help!”

“Not if we’re dead,” Luke argues, now caught in a stand-off with Cermelli, each of them on one side of the thrown ladder, both feinting this way and that, neither willing to cede ground to the other and leave a clear path to Cooper. “Coop—”

Even only from the corner of his eye, unwilling to look fully away from Cermelli, Luke can tell the second Cooper finds a potential answer, just by hearing his sharp inhale.

“This is wrong,” Cooper says. Luke spares a glance, sees him holding up one of the gameday programs arenas stopped giving out twenty years back. Luke’s only seen them in Asra’s archives before, scanned in Pacett’s lore files, never in person. “There’s only fourteen players listed.”

Luke dodges left, stops Cermelli making a break for Coop. Tries to focus enough to understand the point he’s getting at. Fourteen guys. Nowhere near a full roster, not enough for a game to go forward in any pro league. “Fourteen?”

“Ah, they carried less guys back then,” Cooper says, distractedly, still locked in on the program. “But even then, this is…” He breaks off, changes direction mid-sentence to echo the hauntings’ words, “Where is he.”

Luke knows that voice. That’s the potential answer becoming The Answer voice. It’s impossible for Luke to feel scared, hearing that voice.

The dividers screening off the unfinished parts from the rest of the Hall start to fall, one by one, as the zombies press forward, surrounding Luke and Coop from all sides.

“Someone’s missing from the program!” Cooper scrambles to his feet, joining Luke in the middle of the almost-exhibit, addressing Cermelli now, maybe all of the hauntings at once, his face lit up like the sun. “And now he isn’t going to be in the exhibit, and people are going to remember the team wrong without him, because what gets written down is what gets remembered! That’s it, right?”

The Hall of Fame class, waiters, and NHL head office suits stop their advance exactly in unison, every head turned to the gameday program Cooper’s holding above his head like a beacon.

Holy shit. That’s it? All this for one person?

Luke looks around, stunned. There are too many people here to only be possessed by the missing player’s teammates. But then—the exhibit’s on fan experience, and looking around the faces hemming him in, Luke’s reminded of the feeling of standing on the ice, faces all around him there, too, people he’s never met and never will who are going to remember him and his every play longer than he will.

Fans, then. Maybe just a haunting made of the emotions they left behind, enough care for a favourite player that traces of it are lingering even a century later, which would be heartwarming, except for how those traces just tried to beat the shit out of Luke. Yeah. Definitely hockey fans.

“We’ll make sure his name’s added to the display,” Cooper promises. “We’ll make sure people remember him.”

Cermelli turns to Luke. Somehow manages to look expectant even with her body being piloted by a ghost with no clue what it’s doing except that it has to protect a long-gone memory.

Luke draws an X over his heart, only a little sarcastic. “Promise.”

Slowly, deliberately, the haunting possessing Isabel Cermelli nods.

Luke’s been sucker punched too many times in his life to be stupid enough to let his guard down entirely, still tensed to spring if any of the zombies make any kind of a move for him or Cooper. For once, they don’t prove the paranoia right, just standing there watching as Cooper lays the program flat on the ground, open to the page with the team listed, to start drawing the banishment sigil in his own blood.

“Who needs a multi tool when you’ve got these guys?” Luke quips under his breath, and Cooper smiles, even roughed up as he is, and it’s not ‘til Luke registers the pure relief on his face that he realizes it’s not at the joke.

“I knew it,” Cooper says, fervent. “I knew I could help.”

Luke’s watching him, not the zombies anymore, but he feels it when the haunting dissipates, the collective exhale that shudders through the room as the tension dissolves.

A couple of thuds as the people who had the most mimosas fall over. The crowd at large starts murmuring, general confusion at finding themselves in a place they weren’t a couple hours ago.

Now, Luke thinks, sitting down heavily next to Cooper, then giving up entirely and just laying down on the floor, his face still smarting. Now, he can let his guard down.

Isabel Cermelli steps forward, frowning. “God, I’m so hungry,” she says. “Are you guys hungry?”

---

Luke still mostly regrets leaving the house on an off day, but he can admit: things could’ve gone worse.

The paramedics show up, a whole lot of them, mostly just passing out water bottles to the attendees from the event. Cops, too, once the bartenders start to sober up enough to realize what went down with the drinks, not that they’re going to do anything helpful about it.

“You don’t get it,” Luke hears one of the waiters insisting, trailing after one of the cops. “I was in my brain, but so were they! So were they!”

“Sure, sir, how about we get you a seat?”

Maybe more concerning for the NHL are the TV crews starting to descend on the Hockey Hall of Fame. Regular news, not just the sports channels, everyone eager to be the first to report on the NHL somehow drugging half their execs and several retired legends of the game and destroying half the sport’s material history. They’re going to get dunked on online for this for the rest of eternity, the newest addition to the list of embarrassing things the league has done. Luke’s got limited sympathy. More for the mimosa company that people who don’t know about ghosts are going to think invented a line of Purge-inducing super-weed beverages, but—hey, could be good for marketing.

“How could something like this even happen?” Cooper wonders out loud, next to Luke as the two of them stand outside the Hall, watching the PR disaster unfolding.

“You’re asking why the NHL is shit at everything it does?” Luke counters, lighthearted, but Cooper shakes his head, frowning.

“It’s a lot of coincidences,” he says. “The drinks getting switched before any of the ghost possessions could've happened. None of the caterers or organizers noticing. All of it happening right when a haunted exhibit was getting moved into the building.”

And when we were attending, Luke finishes the thought that Cooper’s not saying. Something like this, a couple weeks after another demon lurking around their team, threatening Coop? Cooper’s right. It’s a lot of coincidences.

Luke looks around the street. As if someone’s going to walk up wearing a sign that says ‘ASK ME ABOUT MY DEMON CONSPIRACY’. There’s a bunch of workers in NVBuild hi-vis vests by a manhole. Drivers looking impatient at the ambulances blocking traffic. Pedestrians pretending not to be taking pictures as they pass across the street.

A lot of coincidences. An impossible amount, though?

“If this was someone trying to mess with us, they failed,” Luke decides. Whoever or whatever is behind this, if something other than a faulty catering process is behind this, they have no idea the kind of shit he and Cooper have dealt with. “That took us, what, a morning? Too easy.”

This time, Luke’s confident that he can claim credit for Cooper’s smile. “It was.”

Luke shoves his hands in his pockets, content. “Want to get out of here?”

Cooper shakes his head, points over to where Cermelli is being helped out of the Hall. “I’m going to go ask her to sign my Legends Of Women’s Hockey mini calendar,” he says—why can Luke hear the capitalization?—pulling said mini calendar, which he’s apparently been carrying around with him all day, out of his pocket. He came prepared. Of course he did. “Did you know she has the highest career penalty minutes in women’s hockey history?”

Luke blinks the one eye he can blink, with the other still almost swollen shut, courtesy of Isabel Cermelli’s elbow. Yeah, he can buy that fact.

He watches Cooper go, fond, ‘til he can’t hear the trivia he’s telling Cermelli about her own career anymore; then, finally, Luke gets to head home.

It’s still early afternoon, the whole day stretching ahead of him. Open-ended, nothing for certain.

Luke lingers outside his building. Listens to the constant noise of construction somewhere in the distance, occasional bursts of jackhammering. One of the other residents of his building is out walking their dog, a chihuahua in a parka twice its size. Delivery drivers on bikes and the usual freaks out jogging in shorts despite it being November are swerving past them and each other.

Luke is in a torn dress shirt with a missing tie and a black eye, probably looking a fucking mess, and no one is giving him a second look.

Millions of people in this city, and Luke’s just one of them. No audience in his head, answering every thought he has, and he can think that truth without it hurting, almost, mostly.

He can do anything, now. Anything he wants.

He still doesn’t know who the fuck he is, how to be a person who wants and has good things. Doesn’t know his chances of getting the starting job, or of getting his play back to a high enough level for the kind of career he’s always dreamt of having. He wants those things, anyways, and is here to fight to get them, at least for now. Here with a friend who has his back, in a place where nine days out of ten no one tries to hurt him, and he’s got a soul, and feelings, and can even believe those things without crying, most of the time. It’s better than he ever expected things to be for himself.

Luke’s going to make the most of it while he’s got it. As long as he’s got it.

He wanders into the lobby of his building, waves off the concerned double take from the man at the desk at his appearance, and heads for the elevators. Luke’s not the only one waiting: the hot guy from the gym is there, Muscles, still in a tank top and shorts, watching some video out loud on his phone.

It’s all okay, Cooper said. Whatever you want, it’s okay.

Luke lets himself look. At the sharp lines of Muscles’ calves. At the smattering of freckles across his delts, the first thing Luke noticed about him weeks back.

There are worse things, he decides, than wanting.

Chapter 3: Miracle on Bay Street

Coach huddles the whole team up for one last pep talk before they roll out.

“Everyone,” he says, taking care to look every single guy in the eyes, except for Cooper, who makes sure he’s looking down when it’s his turn, and Lunch, who is busy also looking even more pleadingly around the team. “Just…” Larsson sighs, fighting a battle he knows he’s already lost. “Be normal, alright?”

The team fails at that within five seconds of leaving the arena, but it was a nice thought.

“I’m actually so sweaty right now,” Seth announces very loudly to everyone within earshot, including several dozen members of the public, plodding along in full uniform into the station. Cooper, wearing significantly more and larger padding than anyone else, sympathizes.

The general sweatiness takes some of the charm out of the ‘wow, these professional athletes are Just Like You’ public transit photo op, and its death knell comes in the form of Sonny taking a dozen attempts to tap his Presto card, the machine refusing to open the gates and emitting an extremely ominous failure beep with every try.

“They know we have cars, right?” he mutters, and Cooper leaves his own lane to help, scooting around Luke, who’s grabbing Artem by the scruff of the neck to stop him wandering off in the completely wrong direction. “How does anyone get around in this city?”

“Bikeshare!” Cooper suggests. Some people move to a city without reading detailed descriptions of all public transit offerings, which is baffling, but presents good opportunities for him to share facts that are useful as well as interesting, which always makes people more likely to let him keep sharing them for longer. “Or the network of interconnected underground tunnels! Card, please?”

Sonny hands him the transit pass. Cooper taps it again. The gates open immediately.

“…what was that about tunnels?” Sonny asks, only a little bit sheepishly, watching Cooper make his own way in.

“Mhm, oh yeah, the PATH, all caps.” Cooper nods, enthusiastic. “Fun fact, did you know there wasn’t a comprehensive public map of the whole PATH available ‘til 2025?”

He gets in four more transit facts before he has to stop to participate in high fives and selfies with the people they pass, and then they’re loaded into the subway and Cooper positions himself automatically so Luke can use him as a human shield from the rest of the crowded car, which turns out to be a good call when Mikko’s refusal to hold onto any of the handles or poles results, predictably, in him toppling half the team and more than a few extremely confused commuters the first time the subway stops.

“Normal,” Luke deadpans, peering around Cooper to watch everyone picking themselves up. “Ha.”

Even Luke can’t fully hide a smile, though, on a day like today, because a day like today can’t be anything but good.

The team makes it to the outdoor rink without any more near misses, heading into the square to a surge of cheers from the waiting fans. The air’s brisk, but it’s sunny out, enough that the waiting wouldn’t have been unpleasant. It’s one of the handful of perfect winter days the city gets in a year, both City Halls decorated with new snow that hasn’t yet gone slush-grey, holiday lights strung up and glowing faintly even in the mid-morning sun.

“Wow,” Cooper breathes, taking it all in. He’s been getting more starts than last season, playing the most hockey he ever has, and with that plus the general lack of sleep that comes with chasing down hauntings more nights than not, being physically exhausted is basically his new baseline. Exhaustion and all, it’s impossible not to feel energized when he comes face to face with the people who love his team. He’s never not aware of the responsibility of representing a thing as embedded into a community as the Leafs. It makes him a part of something bigger than he is, the same way the dozens of people out here on a December morning to watch their team are part of it.

“Cooper Kepley!”

“Woah, it’s him!”

Well. Maybe not part of it exactly the same way.

The team divvies up for the scrimmage under the eyes of the crowd. It’s a schoolyard pick that goes approximately by age as everyone commits to the bit, and this bit means that Cooper ends up circled up with all the old guys, listening to his captain go full ‘Miracle’.

“If we don’t kick their absolute kindergartener asses it’s because we messed up, boys.”

“Men,” Law suggests, and Lunch points at him, enthusiastic.

“Men, even!”

Cooper is twenty-three years old and only on Team Old because Luke is a highly statistically improbably young goalie by NHL standards, but he does all the supportive ‘woo!’-ing necessary before retreating to his net, across about half as much ice as usual. Once he’s there and has said hi to Gertie, who really suits the outdoor lighting, he lifts his mask so that he can grin at Luke—stuck on a side with Krish and Seth, who are loudly bickering over a team name while Artem looks mildly terrified of both of them—from across the rink.

Luke notices, because Luke is pretty good at not needing eye contact to notice Cooper, and gives him a little nod, a let’s go, his own face lighting up almost mischievously as they settle in on opposite sides of the ice.

They haven’t played against each other in a real game since juniors. This isn’t quite that, but it’s close enough, and they’re friends more than they are competition now, sure, but sometimes it’s fun to be both.

There aren’t a lot of goalies that Cooper doesn’t think he’s at least on par with, if not better than. Today, in a game with no real stakes, Luke is playing like he’s at the top of that list, freer, not second-guessing, like the goalie whose highlights Cooper used to watch and analyze. They go save-for-save, the play back and forth, nonstop once Coach blows his whistle.

It’s a high-scoring affair, basically shinny—smaller rink sizes magnify shot attempts and scoring chances by a factor of minimum 1.3, 365 Days Of Hockey Trivia For Puckheads!, 2014 limited print run that Cooper had to ship courier from a small business in Duluth—and Cooper relishes the chance to be so involved in the game, immersed in a way that makes every other worry and to-do item fall away.

By the end of the scrimmage, the score something like 9-8, the guys are mostly just goofing off, playing to the crowd and the sunny day. Cooper shows off, flashier catches than usual, and when he gets a goalie goal that Luke absolutely lets happen, both teams and the crowd alike absolutely lose it, dogpiling him and hooting like he’s actually accomplished something.

It’s a perfect morning, and the perfect cherry on top is the people Cooper gets to meet after. Off the ice, having swapped out his mask for a Leafs toque, he takes a knee, putting himself at a level, or at least closer to one, with the kid thrusting a jersey and sharpie into his face.

“Number nine,” he says. Doesn’t match anyone on the current roster. “Is that what you wear when you play?”

Rapid nodding. “Yeah!”

“Aw, that’s great!” Cooper draws a smiley face next to his signature. “Keep practicing hard, okay?”

The kid looks awed. That happens sometimes even with kids who don’t like hockey, ‘cause Cooper’s usually the biggest person they’ve ever seen; today, it happens nonstop, Cooper hemmed in at all sides by more excited kids, a fair few excited adults, too. One group of giggling teenagers holds out a calendar page of him and Luke in matching elf outfits for him to sign, but Cooper’s mostly sure it’s nervous giggles and not ‘laughing at you’ giggles, so it’s okay.

“It’s nice of you to take the time, man,” one dad says, lingering to shake Cooper’s hand after his kids rush off with their signed jerseys, both with KEPLEY on the back. “I mean it, Mark gets so excited every time you talk about the autism stuff. Kids looking up to a good goalie’s one thing, but it means a lot for them to look up to a good person.”

It’s a kind thing to say. A compliment that comes with weight, intended or not. Cooper and the fans here are all part of something, but there are different expectations, for him. As there should be. As he’s always been able to meet.

He remembers to smile, the way he’s supposed to. “Thank you,” he says. Truthful, like always. “That means a lot.”

Slow and steady, he makes it through the photos people need from him. Looking around, the usual guys have the most fans around them, first liners and anyone who gets in multiple fights a season. Cooper’s surprised to realize that his own crowd is right up there with Krish’s and Lunch’s in terms of size, only really dispersing once the team staff start gradually corralling guys.

Getting the guys back to the rink is going to be as much like herding cats as getting them out of it—knowing he’s got time, Cooper joins Luke by the food.

“This is the best, huh?”

“Yeah, ‘s alright.” Luke shrugs, like he’s not holding a hot dog in each hand and speaking through a mouthful of a vanished third. Like Cooper didn’t see him tossing pucks to the kids at the back of the crowd after the scrimmage, earlier.

“Smile, goalies!”

Cooper does as he’s told, giving a thumbs up and a smile to Tatum and her camera while Luke keeps eating, the only person immune to the fear of god that the entire team has been trained to have about the social media manager, by said social media manager.

“Thanks, Cooper, you guys look great,” Tatum says, pointedly, and Cooper opens his mouth to reply, finds himself cut off by a shout from somewhere across the square.

“Take action! It’s our city!”

Not a shout, Cooper figures out. It’s someone using a megaphone, their voice coming out of a portable speaker that crunches every word into something grainy, the audio blowing out with every hard consonant. Cooper thinks at first that it’s the usual ‘end of days’ people always outside the mall, but taking a closer look over the heads of the crowd turning to investigate the voice same as he is, these protesters look younger, carrying signs that say stuff like ‘SAVE OUR RINK’ and ‘SAY NO TO CORPORATIZATION OF PUBLIC GOODS’.

“What’s that about?” Cooper asks, curious, and Tatum looks up from reviewing her photos, following his gaze.

“Hm? Oh, it’s like, a whole thing, the city’s talking about leasing the rink location long term to some management company. Our events people are already thinking about new locations in case we can’t do the outdoor practice here next year.”

“They’re going to close the rink?” Luke asks, startling Cooper a little by speaking up, because he usually doesn’t bother doing conversation with people other than him and the team. Examining his face now, Cooper sees—concern? A frown, but a frown could mean anything.

“No idea,” Tatum shrugs. “But I bet they’d start charging admission, at the very least. It’d be different.”

Of all the things to make different. Cooper looks around the outdoor rink, the massive Toronto sign for tourists, the kids reclaiming the ice now that the Leafs are off of it, skating laps and laughing. The spot is as picturesque as it gets in this part of Toronto, like a platonic ideal of winter in the city. What can there be to improve?

The group with the megaphone can’t include more than seven, eight people. They keep doing their chanting anyways, never quite organized enough to have everyone speaking in unison.

“Save our rink! Our city, our ice!”

On the bus back, the team opting to suffer Toronto traffic rather than babysit the guys through transit twice in one day, the heat isn’t working, which makes the drive a chilly one. There are worse things, after a practice like that. At least no one’s complaining about being sweaty anymore.

Something’s off with Luke. Not him not talking, but the way he’s not talking, arms folded and frown still fixed on his face even when they’re blocks away from the square. Cooper works backwards, tries to pinpoint when Luke went from happy and stuffing his face with snacks to the way he is now.

“You care that much about kids getting to watch hockey on a school day?”

“I don’t care about anything,” Luke says, which Cooper definitely knows is untrue, but Luke seems wholly convinced on. “Ugh. Whatever.”

It’d be easy to chalk it up to normal Luke grumpiness—just the way he sounds, very little correlation to his actual emotional state, obvious if you know what you’re looking for—but something about the way he thuds his head back against the window, slumping into his seat, doesn’t let Cooper dismiss it so easy.

“You’re really upset about this,” Cooper realizes, surprised.

Luke looks at him like he’s trying to see if Cooper’s messing with him. Must realize he isn’t because he sighs, relents, “Hockey’s expensive.” An understatement, probably. He seems to be struggling for his words, downplaying them even as he’s obviously feeling enough to make him speak. “You all grew up with money, but it’s… outdoor rinks are the only thing about the sport that doesn’t cost thousands of fucking dollars. And now they want to charge people for them?”

The outdoor rink that Luke grew up skating on was a demon that fostered a dubiously sincere, definitely unhealthy pseudo-parental relationship with him and then spent eight years eating his soul, but Cooper can take his point. He never thought about money as a kid.

Well. He thought about it, specifically in the context of the history of the nickel as a unit of currency and the amount of allowance he’d have to save to buy the vintage Sudbury-North Bay Business Calendar 1913 that was sitting in the window of the antique store like a holy grail all of middle school, but his parents never worried about money in front of him, and he never had to ask for any of the skills coaching or extra ice time he needed before it was offered. Without a place to skate for free, demon and all, Luke never would’ve been able to play hockey at all.

Cooper hates the embarrassed look on Luke’s face when he talks about not being able to afford hockey. Cooper hates the idea of Luke feeling sad for any reason, really, so that night, with Puck snoozing at the foot of the bed and Christmas the Second skittering around somewhere overhead, Cooper bookmarks his spot in A Comprehensive Typology of Demons and Devils between Ifrit and Incubi, and instead sets out seeing what he can learn about the rink purchase.

Turns out, municipal governance proceedings are a lot more straightforward to deep-dive on than esoteric hockey ghost lore. A quick search tells Cooper that the leasing hasn’t gone through yet, currently just an offer on the table for the next city council meeting—that’s good!—and that it’s not just for the rink at City Hall, it’s multiple outdoor rinks, all in the densest parts of the city. Less good.

Handing over the free outdoor rinks to external management means, per the documents Cooper finds, novel revenue streams for the city, improved efficiency for the city, less administrative burden for the city. A lot of things, all allegedly for the city and with concern for the people living in the city, except for the link on the webpage for community members to submit responses and opinions is broken, and Cooper’s seeing a lot of spin, not a lot of facts to back it up.

The company doing the offering is a private equity firm, NVH Capital. Cooper looks them up next to see what they own, and finds that the better question would be what they don’t. In just the first couple pages of results, he learns that NVH Capital is the main source of money behind a shipping company Cooper’s used before, six different fast food chains, whatever NVBuild and NV Development Solutions are—construction companies, Cooper thinks, or contractors?—and a charitable foundation called Hearst to Hearts, which is cringey to a level that even Cooper, who doesn’t believe in cringe as a concept, finds incredibly cringey, but does point him to the guy behind the whole thing.

NVH Capital, he learns, was founded by Norman Hearst in the 50s, now owned by his son Jeremy, a multi-multi-billionaire who’s alternated the past couple of years between the five and six-spots on the List Of Canadians By Net Worth wiki page.

Bingo.

Cooper scrolls through Jeremy Hearst’s personal social media, trying to get a sense of the guy. He doesn’t post often, and when he does, it’s usually reposts of press releases from his companies or inspirational hustle culture quotes, nothing notably different from the kinds of things Cooper’s teammates put all over his feed.

The first thing to stand out is a photo of Hearst in a Leafs sweater. No—Cooper keeps scrolling, faster now—there are multiple photos of Hearst in a Leafs sweater, all with the same view of the rink behind him, the actual Leafs blurs on the ice. From the angle, how close he is to the ice, Cooper would bet he’s in one of the executive suites at the arena.

Cooper doesn’t really think it’s going to be that easy, but he knows he has to try.

He does the time difference math and decides it’s okay to call Pacey the next morning, while he’s out with Puck for his morning walk.

“Hey,” Cooper greets, watching the other dogs at the park react with excitement at Puck’s presence and their owners with extreme confusion at their dogs reacting to, as far as they know, nothing at all. “Do you know how I can talk to someone in the executive suites?”

Pacey sounds far more hyped than the question warrants, doesn’t even ask for a reason. “Yes! Something I can actually help with!”

Another thing that Cooper knew but didn’t fully understand until he got to the NHL full time is the extent to which Leafs games are a massive enterprise. Between facilities staff, security, game ops, TV crews, every home game is the product of a thousand cogs turning in a thousand machines, the stuff Cooper and his friends do on the ice a surprisingly small part of it all. And that’s not even accounting for all the ghosts!

Cooper ventures into a part of the machine unfamiliar to him; reaches out to the people Pacey tells him to reach out to and offers himself up to be the one doing pre-game visits to the VIPs in place of the roster of alumni the team usually sends to make the rounds.

Before the next game he’s not starting, Cooper shows up where he was told to and meets Nia from guest services, a woman in an ironed-perfect MLSE polo, scrolling through a calendar on an ipad.

She looks him up and down, briskly. “You volunteered for this?” Like that is an unbelievable fact.

“So, the way you just said that does make me feel like I’m going to regret it,” Cooper says, which is mostly just honest, but also an attempt at a joke. He’s expecting to get a smile for it, but Nia’s all business.

“This way.”

Leafs’ games are a business in themselves, and a place of business, too: that’s true in the obvious ways, the men in the platinum seats wearing suits instead of jerseys and talking through the entire game without looking at the play once, but also, Cooper learns, in the executive suites for the first time, in some hidden ones. He follows Nia through the halls of the arena, public-side instead of player-side, but still restricted, the halls to the corporate suites cut off from the normal ticketholders. As they pass the ones with open doors, Cooper gets glimpses of five people, a dozen, full suites of people talking and laughing and shaking hands as they wait for the game to start.

The only person in Jeremy Hearst’s suite is Jeremy Hearst.

Nia raps on the open door, tactful. “Mr. Hearst, a visit from the team’s ambassador.”

Cooper’s first impression of Jeremy Hearst is that he’s short, which is a thing that Cooper acknowledges he could feasibly think about almost everyone he’s ever met if he was taking himself as a reference point, but he’s not, and Jeremy Hearst is short anyway.

Short and…

And.

It’s odd. Cooper can pick out details about the man in front of him like he would about anyone else. Short. Brown hair, cleft chin, expensive suit. He’s left, all the same, with a disconcerting lack of an emotional read, and not for any reason that he can pinpoint, all of the tricks he’s adopted for picking up on the vibe of a person or place coming up blank.

Hearst’s voice, when he starts speaking, sounds friendly as anything, rising and falling in all the right places.

“I’ll be honest with you, I’ve never really had much time for team sports,” he says, instead of a hello, leaving Cooper wondering if he’s somehow zoned out and missed the start to this conversation. “But a few years back, a buddy of mine had glass seats for the final, so I figured, eh, why not?” Heearst shrugs, arms out in a gesture and matching facial expression that Cooper thinks is supposed to be self-deprecating. “Gave it a chance, went in with an open mind, and I was sold. Can’t compete with the pace, can you?”

His smile is dazzling, affrontingly white, with every tooth the exact same size and assembly-line straight.

“Yeah, hockey’s pretty great,” Cooper says, once he figures out that Hearst is waiting for him to respond.

The smile grows. Horizontally, not upwards at all, exposing more of the uncannily uniform teeth.

“It’s rare for a goaltender to play with the composure you do,” Hearst says, sweeping closer, flinging an arm around Cooper. Again, starting from the middle, familiar like this is their tenth meeting instead of their first. “Colour me impressed.” He waves Nia away without even looking at her. “Stay, have a drink, what do you say?”

“Uh.” Cooper hesitates, torn between saying something about the condescension—he looks toward Nia to apologize on Hearst’s behalf, but she’s already melted through the door, silently—and remembering why he’s here. With Nia gone, the latter wins out. “Thank you.”

“Good man!” Hearst claps Cooper on the back, ushering him into the suite, still grinning hugely. Cooper puts together why he’s having such trouble getting his bearings: Hearst’s smile is growing, but his eyes haven’t budged once. None of the top half of his face has, fixed in place by enough botox that Cooper’s left without half the signals he’s used to interpreting. “Drinks!”

Cooper lets himself be led toward the seats, bar-style chairs up by the front of the box, with a view of the ice. A really good view, too—Cooper almost wishes he really was just here to be a prop for convincing a rich guy to keep giving the Leafs money.

“Mr. Hearst,” he says, because nice view or not, he’s here for a reason. “I had a question, actually.” He thought in advance about how to put this, to not come off as attacking. Keeps his voice polite. “We had our outdoor practice recently and I saw that your company is leasing the rink, and a lot of the other outdoor rinks in the city, and I was—”

“—worried about us cutting off grassroots hockey initiatives by those very roots?” Hearst predicts, which, yeah, kind of nails it.

He must read that much from Cooper’s reaction, because he laughs, the first almost-unpolished sound he’s made this whole time. “I called it, see? You’re a good kid. So let me put you at ease.”

A waiter—do these suites have waiters?—slides two glasses in front of them, and Hearst picks his up, again without even looking at the person who brought it. “This isn’t some nefarious, profit-seeking corporation coming down hard on loveable local underdogs. I want to be clear, I’m going to be losing money on these rinks. But it’s a matter of safety.”

He sets the glass down, emphatic. He hasn’t even taken a sip. “Privatization’s a scary word, in some circles—” The way he says it makes it very clear what he thinks of those circles. “—but city resources are limited, and that’s just fact. Toronto Parks can’t efficiently maintain and manage the rinks. Hell, they’re closed half the time because they’re not safe to use. It only makes sense to outsource to a vendor that’s better equipped to provide the best services.”

Cooper would probably think that was a really plausible and well-reasoned argument, if he had no internet access or critical thinking skills.

“Private equity firms are kind of famously incentivized to make services worse,” he says. Politely, still, because his mother raised him right. “Cost-cutting and leveraging debt, right? Max profit over a super condensed timeline.”

Hearst’s smile hasn’t budged. Not one millimetre. “I’ll hand it to the leftists, they do get the talking points out there, don’t they?” Cooper can feel Hearst staring all over his face, waiting for eye contact that, in this case, Cooper doesn’t actually feel all that bad about not giving him. “How do you memorize the brief, word for word or just rote?”

Cooper likes being the kind of person to give everyone a chance, to make a point of looking for the good in them. This guy?

Cooper looks for the good. Cooper doesn’t see much.

“I should probably go visit the other boxes,” he says.

“You probably should,” Hearst says, a tinge of mockery to his voice, now—that, Cooper knows from experience how to recognize anywhere—and Cooper comes away from the whole thing with the distinct impression that the dislike is mutual.

People usually don’t dislike him, anymore.

The discomfort of the encounter lingers, back of Cooper’s mind all through the game and after. He doesn’t get Luke alone ‘til near midnight, when they’re making the rounds re-doing the sigils and standard protective stuff around the rink, both at opposite ends of the gym while Puck sprints off a case of the zoomies between them.

When Cooper gives the rundown of his encounter with Jeremy Hearst, Luke’s response is, “You shouldn’t have gotten involved, Coop.”

Cooper wasn’t expecting that. “You said the outdoor rink matters,” he reminds Luke, in case he forgot. He probably just forgot.

“It does,” Luke agrees without really agreeing. “But we’re already trying to make the playoffs, and to keep this cursed-ass organization from killing everyone on the team.”

And, in Luke’s case, to stay on the team at all. Luke plays it off like he couldn’t care either way, or tries to, but Cooper knows him. He’s seen how Luke’s been working even harder than usual, staying out on the ice after every skate to get more reps in, trying to get his play back to a level he finds acceptable. There are a dozen other goalies in the league this season with a save percentage the same or worse than his. None of those goalies were breaking records last season the way Luke was.

Cooper can be objective about hockey. No bias, no cutting slack because of friendship, Luke is an elite goalie. He has all the physical tools, all the instinct you need to stop pucks at the NHL level. The only thing he’s missing that he had from Lake Swift Hawk is the supernatural luck, and, with a meaningless scrimmage as an exception, he’s as in his head about it as he’s been since the end of last season. There’s nothing worse you can do as a goalie than put too much weight on every save. It gives you tunnel vision. Makes you make mistakes.

“Shit. There’s another missing one.” Luke glances over his shoulder, and Cooper realizes he’s been staring, blinks himself out of it.

“Uh, let me—” Cooper stands, padding across the floor to join Luke by the stationary bikes and take a look at what he’s pointing out. All of the protective sigils are starting to fade—that’s why they’re refreshing them, same as they do at least once a month—but the one at the base of this bike has faded faster than usual, almost entirely gone.

It would be a little weird if it was the first time it had happened. It’s the third in as many weeks, though, all in different locations, and Cooper chalked the first one up to him or Luke messing up in how they drew the wards, but at this point, after double-checking both of their work for weeks—

It’s weird. A lot weird.

He runs his fingers over the empty space where the protection sigil is supposed to be. Another series of tiny anomalies without an explanation, joining the steadily growing list. A ruined Hall of Fame brunch. A ghost dog. No connection between any of it, that Cooper can see.

“It’s maybe an issue with materials,” he says, making a mental note to look into it later. Luke doesn’t need more on his plate, and if Cooper can’t fix hockey for him, he can at least handle some of this, if there’s anything to handle at all. “I’ll buy us some new stuff. I wouldn’t worry.”

“’cause you’re too busy worrying about Bezos North?” Luke asks, not put off from his original point, and when Cooper neither confirms nor denies, he sighs. “We can’t save the whole city from every shitty rich person who wants to do shitty rich people things, Coop. We’re not vigilantes. We literally have no power to do anything about this.”

“I’m doing something about this,” Cooper informs him, because that much has never been up for debate, and will never be again. There’s a right thing and a wrong thing. He doesn’t give up when someone needs him.

He lets Luke get his exaggerated ugh out of his system before asking, “Would you like to help?”

“No, I wouldn’t, ‘cause it’s not my job and the hero shit is your thing, not mine.” Luke holds out for four seconds—Cooper counts—before looking skyward and giving even more drawn-out of an uggghhh than the last one. “What’s the plan?”

Cooper grins. “Working on it.”

And he is, and he does, in every bit of free time he has over the next week, and once that week of working on it has passed, Cooper isn’t conceding that Luke was right—Cooper’s right, pretty much always—but he can acknowledge, begrudgingly, that he maybe had a point about this being a little outside of their collective wheelhouse.

It would be better, Cooper thinks, if Jeremy Hearst and NVH Capital were something spooky. A poltergeist. Maybe an ice doppelganger. If the city’s outdoor rinks were just being haunted, Cooper would be able to draw a salt circle, blood-offering his way through some banishment sigils, and save the day. As is, the thing threatening them is just a very, very rich person looking to get even richer. That’s not something covered in the lore files.

Cooper doesn’t know how to fix this kind of problem. Yet.

He fills out the barely-functional feedback form on the City Council website, with links to sources for why outsourcing the city’s outdoor rinks to private equity is a bad idea. He doesn’t receive the promised confirmation email after hitting the ‘submit’ button. Okay. Next options.

He’s still got this season and the next on his ELC. There’s no donation he could make to Toronto Parks that would have any real effect, and he can’t lease the rinks out from under Hearst, because that’s a different stratosphere of wealth, which is kind of scary to think about, because Cooper feels extremely rich. He bought a five-hundred-dollar Lego set for Syd a couple weeks ago when he was doing all his Christmas shopping, and a bunch of new sticks for her and her team, and it barely made a dent in his bank account.

Luke, stretching out his hip on a foam roller while Cooper brainstorms at him before a game, says, apparently sincerely, “Your salary’s not enough. What if it was like, the whole team?”

Cooper doesn’t think of himself as a particularly sarcastic person, but he figures Luke’s probably not going to get offended, especially after a take like that. “You want me to ask all our friends to give me all their money?”

“They’d do it if you were the one asking,” Luke says, like that is even close to reality, but even if it was and even if Cooper did feel like committing the world’s most grievous misuse of goalie privilege, this season’s total salary cap is less than Jeremy Hearst makes in a year. Luke had a point about Hearst being out of their league.

More options. Cooper’s good at those. He’s got plenty of time to think them up when the flight to Washington is delayed on the runway for three hours. At least the heating’s working, unlike on the team bus.

Maybe, he thinks, tuning out the quiet rumbles of his teammates getting more and more exasperated with the travel delay, maybe he could ask Leafs ownership to lease the outdoor rinks instead, frame it as a PR move for MLSE.

But then—Some people are past saving, the Scary Demon Lady said, grinning with Asra’s face, mocking, but you knew that—that would be using one bad thing to fight another without really solving the underlying problem at all. It would be a compromise, a shortcut, not up to any kind of heroic standards.

There has to be a better way than that. There’s always a better way.

“There’s no better way,” Ivy says, bluntly, and Cooper resists the urge to slam his head down on the table in this extremely aesthetically pleasing bubble tea place.

It’s been days. A road trip started and ended—he played and won both games—without any clever solution except the idea to call his friend Ivy the second they landed back in Toronto, because in addition to being a witch in her free time, she’s smart and has a real world corporate-type job, which automatically makes her one of the most qualified people Cooper knows to deal with real world corporate-type problems like this one. At least, that was the plan.

“There has to be something,” he presses, refusing to give up, and Ivy sighs. Sympathy, not annoyance.

“There’s like, five total people who care about municipal budgets like that, Cooper,” she explains, stirring at her leftover boba. “And maybe, maybe ten other people who care enough to read those five people’s summary graphics about municipal budgets when they appear on the timeline.”

“There’s only two people on my team who know about the hauntings trying to kill us,” Cooper says. “The number of people who care about something doesn’t really have any correlation to how important it is, and this—”

“Um, sorry.”

No, not now, Cooper thinks, and feels awful for it as soon as he does, because the person approaching his side of the table looks incredibly nervous to be doing it, swimming in his Leafs hoodie.

“You’re Cooper Kepley, right?”

Cooper spares one last look toward Ivy and the dregs of his bubble tea before turning to smile at the fan the way he deserves. “I am! You’re a fan of the team?”

All the guy wants is a selfie. That is also all the dozen other people in the café want, now that the floodgates have been opened and it’s been made clear that Cooper isn’t about to be a jerk to the people actively supporting him and his friends.

“You’re so clutch, man.”

“I’ve been saying we gotta draft more Ontario boys.”

Nothing out of the ordinary, not from anyone. Cooper thinks he’s doing a pretty decent job at being enthusiastic when listening anyhow, but he might not be, because after he doesn’t know how long—less time than he usually spends, when fans stop him when he’s out—Ivy swoops in and links her arm with his.

“I’m so sorry, you guys, we’re going to miss our reservation! Happy holidays!” Her tone makes her impossible to argue with. Impossible to even want to argue with. Cooper takes notes.

“We don’t have reservations,” he reminds her anyways, helpfully, as she leads him out into the street.

“I know, babe.” Ivy pats his arm. “You don’t owe it to people to derail your entire night for them, though.”

Which. It’s really nice that she’s looking out for him, but the thing is that, yeah, Cooper kind of does, though.

When he gives answers in interviews about how seriously he takes the responsibility of wearing the Maple Leaf, it’s the truth. Not because people keep insisting he’s a local just because he’s from the same province, and not because of the history of the team, at least not solely. It’s because of nights like tonight, days like the outdoor practice, seeing how much people care. Just by putting on the jersey, his actions matter.

If there are people out there who get to take for granted being good and right, Cooper isn’t one of them. He never has been, not when he was the big weird kid who didn’t know how to react normally to things and not now that he’s got a city’s worth of people watching him expecting the best instead of the worst.

Whether it’s taking the time to talk to someone who looks up to him or finding a way to protect the rinks that kids like Luke rely on, getting it right isn’t optional, for Cooper. No one will get hurt if he can help it.

No one else.

Joseph Thibeault, drowning and already drowned, is a gaunt face that’s lifeless instead of just soulless when he stretches an arm toward Cooper and says, hoarse, “Some people are past saving, hero.”

Cooper wakes up gasping for air, halfway to a shout.

“Whuh,” Seth mumbles from across the room.

Cooper orients himself. On the road. Standard issue, two-bed room in a four-star hotel in Minnesota. Everything is normal and fine and everyone is safe.

“Just a dream,” Cooper says, and it’s not a lie even if it feels like one, and doesn’t matter either way, because Seth is already snoring again, face buried in his pillow.

Cooper fumbles with his headphones, knocked askew while he thrashed in his sleep. His medieval demon hunting audiobook has ended, so even when the headphones are back in place on his ears, he just hears silence, nothing there to drown out—no, bad word choice, not drowning, he’s not thinking about that—to distract him from the same nightmare he’s been having for months. Sometimes it’s Joseph Thibeault glaring at him, deadly and spiteful. Sometimes he’s pleading with Cooper to let him go while Lake Swift Hawk laughs in the background and Cooper stares down at him and hopes he hurts. Cooper doesn’t know which is worse.

He leans back against the headboard, waits for his heart to stop racing. It takes longer than it should.

When his mom called a couple days ago, the way she does before most flights, they talked like normal. Cooper thought he was talking like normal, only then, before they hung up, his mom asked him if there was something wrong.

“You seem stressy,” she said, honest like always, which is usually one of Cooper’s favourite things about her, except for when she’s wrong.

“I’m not stressy, Mom,” he said, and his mom didn’t push the point because she knows that Cooper knows himself best and doesn’t like being treated like he doesn’t, which is his second favourite thing about her, except for he knows her pretty well, too, and so he knew that she didn’t believe him.

He wasn’t lying. Nothing is wrong. He is fixing the hauntings and he’s going to figure out a way to fix the non-haunted rich guy problem as well, and he’s a good representative of the team and playing well in the biggest role he’s ever had at the highest level of hockey and whatever a Scary Demon Lady knows or thinks she knows about him or anyone being irredeemable and impossible to save, she just—

She doesn’t.

The room is too quiet. Cooper grabs for his phone, jabs at a random spot in his audiobook to get some useful background noise, then opens his messages with Luke and sends the first thing he thinks of, did you know Mount Everest isn’t the deadliest mountain in the world and actually isn’t even close.

No response comes.

That makes sense. It’s three AM, and Luke is asleep the way Cooper should be. Luke has probably been asleep since ten, solely to avoid making conversation with Artem in their room. Luke, Cooper reminds himself, definitely doesn’t need to deal with Cooper being self-absorbed and incapable of handling a bad dream. Cooper’s not either of those things.

He spends the rest of the night filling out another mostly-useless city council opinion form, and makes sure his team is feeling good going into the game the next day, and the game itself is one of his best in recent memory, the ice tilted the Wild’s way almost all game so Cooper’s the thing keeping the Leafs in it, no chance to lose focus for even a second.

“Send it, send it!” JD hollers, after Cooper’s handled a dump-in in the third; aware of Mullen closing on him from behind, Cooper lifts the puck up ice, winds up with a secondary assist on the resulting goal so that he ends the game with a career high in points on the season—two, thank you very much—as well as the win, against every odd.

“You’re a fucking miracle worker, Keps,” Mikko bonks their helmets together, once the team’s congregating around Cooper and Gertie to celebrate the win.

“That’s our boy!” Law slaps Cooper on the back, all affectionate, and Cooper’s teammates are looking at him the same way the fans at the café and at the outdoor rink were, like he’s as good as he tries to be, and they can’t all be wrong, can they?

He tries to use the thought as a spark, getting back to the drawing board as he takes the seat next to Luke on the bus to the airport.

Luke’s had a pep in his step all day, a good mood despite getting passed over for another start. He must’ve slept well last night. This has not, unfortunately, translated into more usable ideas. “Ask buzzcut and the hot one to put a curse on him.”

“Please don’t call our friends buzzcut and the hot one,” Cooper requests. He ignores Luke’s ‘your friends’, goes on, “We’re not asking Ivy and Maeve to put a curse on anyone, even if they deserve it, and even if we did, Jeremy Hearst owns NVH Capital but there’s an entire board and the rest of the company, the deal can still happen without him.”

Luke, to his credit, at least seems like he’s putting some real thought into it, this time. “Wooden stakes work on everyone?”

Cooper frowns at him, reproachful.

“It was a joke.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Cooper says, and Luke shrugs, unbothered.

“No, it wasn’t.”

Cooper hides a smile, not that well, and sees Luke looking smug about it, and that’s when there’s a massive bang, like an engine backfiring, and the entire bus lurches forward.

Cooper braces himself on the seat in front of him, one arm instinctively flung in front of Luke, who’s got a hand on Cooper’s arm like he was about to do the same, though he pulls back quick.

Cooper’s on high alert, looking up toward the front of the coach, out the window to try to get a sense of what happened. All he sees, thank goodness, is the bus rolling to a stop along the shoulder of the road. Bumpy, not particularly elegant, but not dangerous, either.

“Everyone good?” Larsson’s asking, out of his seat, as the driver, Eric, does the same.

“Must’ve been the engine, damn.”

Luke, at Cooper’s side, has slumped back into his seat, looking as relieved as Cooper feels, as their teammates laugh off the incident, pretending never to have been frightened with varying degrees of convincingness.

Across the aisle, Sonny’s shaking his head, already around to complaining. “They should’ve just let us drive, I swear.”

It snags on something in Cooper’s brain. Something else Sonny’s said. They know we have cars, right?, the day of the outdoor skate, when his transit pass wasn’t working properly.

That same morning, the heating on the bus broke.

There have been hours-long delays on every flight they’ve taken, these last few road games.

All that, and now a broken-down coach bus?

“Transportation,” he realizes, sitting back down, turning toward Luke. “There’s a curse, we were so focused on the non-haunted bad thing we missed a haunted bad thing and it’s a curse and it’s on transportation!”

The signs are obvious, in retrospect, and it’s not like discovering another one of the endless curses on the team is ever really a good thing, but the realization feels like a kind of relief, anyhow. Cooper knows this kind of haunting. He’s resolved dozens of them! A curse trying to stop them from getting Point A to Point B is less of a big deal than a curse trying to kill the entire roster, or a series of disconnected coincidences and messed-up wards. Basically a vacation!

Between the bus’ engine giving up the ghost and their flight being delayed four hours, they aren’t back in Toronto ‘til near morning. Cooper and Luke make for the practice facility bright and early, Cooper skimming through the lore files for potential causes—a train operator died recently who was a Leafs fan? Is that anything?—while Luke pulls up by the doors, cutting the engine and patting down his pockets for his passcard.

“No one’s died on a team flight or anything, right?”

Cooper shakes his head. “No, not that I see written down anywhere, which isn’t that surprising because the curse hasn’t been plane-specific or anything like that.”

In the rearview, Cooper catches a glimpse of another car pulling in at the far end of the lot, a nondescript navy sedan. Strange, at this hour, but not unheard of, with the amount of people and teams that use any of the rinks here. The driver starts getting out as Cooper’s phone starts buzzing. The family groupchat. Mom and Owen.

Cooper swallows down the automatic guilt. Feels Luke staring.

“Just my parents,” he says, silencing the chat, fast. “It’s—holiday planning stuff, they don’t need me to reply.”

“Why? You’re doing the day with your dad again?” Luke asks, and Cooper takes a second to process that they’re still on the topic, mostly distracted by swiping away notifications.

“Oh, no,” he says, without looking up. “No, I’m probably not driving up at all. We only have a couple days off, I need to figure the transit curse out and then the rinks and then hopefully do some more preparing for—”

The car jolts, just barely, as the person from across the lot, now directly behind Luke’s car, kicks the bumper and, apparently, screams at the top of their lungs.

Which. Sure.

“What the—” Cooper jumps, startled by the sudden and extremely over the top aggression.

“Are you fucking kidding me,” Luke jabs at his seatbelt, flinging his door open. “Hey!”

Cooper gets out as well, at least as much for the random stranger’s sake as for Luke’s. Not that random, it turns out: he recognizes her, he realizes, one of the people who works with the culinary team. Right now, she’s hopping on one foot, her face twisted up in pain and embarrassment, having very clearly not realized that anyone was still in the car, though the look on her face turns into full-on hostility as Luke stomps around the trunk, coming in hot.

“Hey, what the fuck is your damage?”

“Is your foot okay?” Cooper asks, speaking over the end of Luke’s probably rhetorical question, trying to turn the situation into a discussion instead of a confrontation. “Corrinne, right?”

People are usually happy when you remember their name.

“Oh, am I supposed to be impressed by you knowing who I am?”

Corrine, it turns out, is not happy at Cooper remembering her name.

Luke is practically baring his teeth. “Don’t talk to him like—”

“Ten years!” Corrinne cuts him off, uncaring. Caring a lot, it looks like, about something completely different. “Ten years, I’ve been coming in before dawn for prep, parking in the same spot every time, and then you two show up and start double parking here at ass o’clock on random mornings and now I have to walk from across the lot in the cold because all the other close spots are reserved for the players!”

She pauses for breath, but that breath catches, and Cooper feels certain, suddenly: this is a person who is not the kind of person to yell at people in a parking lot unless she is at the very, very end of her rope.

“I don’t know why you think that normal human courtesy doesn’t apply to you ‘cause you’re famous, but…” Corrinne trails off. Seems to lose steam, a little. “Fuck!”

“Only extremely situationally famous,” Cooper corrects, before his brain can remind him that this is Not A Correction Moment. “And, uh, in a narrow regional context.”

Corrinne looks very unimpressed. Now Cooper’s brain reminds him that this is Not A Correction Moment.

“We don’t think that,” he says, abashed.

Corrinne raises an eyebrow, giving Luke a run for his money in sarcasm. “You don’t think you’re famous?”

“No, I meant…”

Cooper looks out at the rows of reserved parking spots. They’re in all the prime locations, the only ones nearer to the entrance the accessible spots and the two spots now jointly occupied by Luke’s admittedly terrible parking job.

Cooper and Luke are usually here before any of their teammates or coaches to deal with hauntings. They park in the non-reserved spots near the door, not in the ones reserved for Leafs players, because—

Because Cooper never cared to notice that the nearer spots weren’t reserved, really. He didn’t even spare it a thought, too entitled and preoccupied with every other priority to consider that he was inconveniencing someone else.

He doesn’t correct or argue anymore. “I’m sorry about the parking.”

For her part, Corrinne looks at least a little disarmed by receiving a sincere apology. “Whatever,” she mutters, still shifting her weight off the foot she used to kick the bumper. “It’s not just you two. Half your teammates do the same thing.”

“If something like this happens again, you can tell—”

“Who?” Corrinne asks. “Who am I going to complain to about the star athletes being minor assholes?”

This time, she sounds less hostile, more just tired. There’s resentment in her voice, but a helpless kind, the kind that Cooper knows by now is prime fodder for a haunting to grow from, around this team. One person, big emotions, no real intent—it’s exactly the kind of curse that he can see manifesting into small transit inconveniences. A minor curse for minor assholes.

Corrinne, having said her piece, doesn’t seem interested in saying or hearing any more. She stomps off with one more withering look at Cooper and Luke both, heading in to start work on food prep.

Luke, who seems to have arrived at the same conclusion as Cooper, grabs a bunch of salt packets out of Cooper’s backpack and gets to ripping them open and spilling them on the parking spot, far more than it would take to stop a small, accidental curse like this one.

“I’m not that bad at parking,” he mutters, drawing a cleansing sigil in the little pile of salt and snow with the toe of his shoe.

The curse, as minor a curse as it is, seems well in hand, so Cooper leaves him to it, troubled by Corrinne’s words.

Cooper doesn’t want to be an asshole, minor or otherwise. He actively tries not to be, all of the time always. He knows that it’s the kind of thing that could give you an ego, the fans and the money and the knowledge of being one of the best in the world at something making it easy to feel someway above it all, but he’s not, he’s one piece that’s a part of something, it isn’t—

Cooper pauses, his train of thought rammed off the rails by a new one.

He’s part of something with everyone associated with the team, fans and guest services people like Nia and chefs like Corrinne.

He’s not part of it in the same way.

Fair or not, being a Toronto Maple Leaf, the current starting goaltender for the Toronto Maple Leafs, makes Cooper visible in a way that not a lot of people in the city are. He doesn’t have the money Jeremy Hearst has, or the connections, or the willingness to hurt people to get his way—anymore, he thinks, then, correcting it, at all—but he has that, eyes on him and his choices.

For worse, like when trivial decisions like where to park at the practice rink impact people’s lives, because he didn’t think to consider them.

For better, too, like when he’s got an evil billionaire trying to buy the ice right out from under the kids who don’t have any place else, a problem that not enough people have eyes on to solve.

Yeah. Cooper can work with this.

---

Open meetings at city council subcommittee meetings are, from what Cooper’s read, mostly just an empty, conciliatory gesture to make the public feel heard without incorporating feedback in any meaningful way. He shows up anyway, waits his turn in his folding chair, holding a printout of what he wants to say.

When they call his name, Cooper steps up to the mic. On his way there, he can hear people doing the wait, is that—, his own name being whispered, breaking the sleepy haze that the room sunk into maybe thirty seconds into the meeting. Someone takes out their phone to not-so-subtly take a photo of him. Another person does the same.

Cooper fights to control a smile.

If the city’s attention is on the Maple Leafs, Cooper figures, and he doesn’t get to be just another person, he may as well use the spotlight.

The subject of his appearance at the committee meeting takes up the majority of his media availability at practice the next day, exactly like he hoped for, and also winds up as a news headline, which is the best case scenario. PROPOSED LEASING OF CITY OUTDOOR RINKS IS AN ISSUE OF ACCESS, SAYS LEAFS’ KEPLEY.

He uses some goalie privilege, in the end, just enough to get his teammates to wear lapel buttons that say ‘Save Our Rinks’ during walk-ins to the next game. Most of them agree without even asking for details; a couple of the ones that do, Cooper is pleased to see, even post about it totally voluntarily, brief interruptions on their socials feeds of inspiring quotes and HD photos of themselves during games.

Cooper’s within earshot when, after morning skate, a beat reporter asks Luke his thoughts on the outdoor rinks issue.

Luke says, bluntly, “I think it’s fucking evil,” which, okay, not the talking points Cooper prepared for him, but very Luke, and enough of an attention-catching clip to make even more people look into the topic when they see it.

Cooper believes to his core, always has and always will, that when you give people an opportunity to do good, most of them will take it. He thinks—seeing the increasing number of posts about it, more articles, other GTA-born guys getting asked about it when their teams are in town—that it’s happening now. They just needed a chance.

When Cooper’s chugging down a protein shake, Coach wanders up beside him, arms crossed as he leans on the table. “Do you want to tell me why forty minutes of my check-in with management today was dedicated to questioning why my players are all of a sudden getting political?”

Uh oh. The Leafs belong to the community, but the Toronto Maple Leafs and all associated copyrights belong to an organization a lot closer to NVH Capital than to the people Cooper’s trying to help.

“Did they tell you to make us stop?” Cooper asks, wary.

Larsson shrugs a shoulder, stoic as ever. “If they did, I must have missed it. Language difficulties.”

But Coach Larsson is fully fluent in—

Oh. Tacit communication is not one of Cooper’s fortes, but he thinks he gets this message pretty clear. “Thanks, Coach.”

“Make sure you know what you’re doing.”

And Cooper does, is the thing. He doesn’t let up on the plan. Sees topics about the rinks trending locally on socials, clips of protestors like the ones he saw that day at the square racking up views. Even Pacey brings it up when the Blues are in town, using his whole postgame to talk about how much the local rinks always meant to him in his time here.

“Thank you,” Cooper says, shaking his hand, before their teams go their separate ways. “Seriously, that’s going to help so much.”

Pacey waves off the thanks. “I used to stress about leaving the team with anyone new,” he says. “But man, you’ve fucking outdone yourself.”

Cooper swells with pride. Tom Pacett is proud of him! He’s proud of himself. It’d all be more straightforward if Hearst was another haunting, of course, but Cooper’s good at other things too. He’s good at this, the purpose that comes with knowing he’s finding a better way where a better way was supposed to be impossible. Where people thought he couldn’t.

“It’s working,” he says, holding his phone between his ear and his shoulder as he sketches out protection wards on the parking spaces, the latest addition to their rounds. “It’s working, right?”

“I don’t know how,” Ivy says, incredulous, “but—I think it is? I mean, no one can stop the company from submitting a proposal, but at this point, with how much attention the issue’s got, it’d basically be electoral suicide for any councilpeople to go through with it.”

Cooper smiles so big his face hurts, even though Ivy can’t see him. “Luke!” he bellows, across the lot. “It’s working!”

“’cause I swore at them!” Luke yells back, and Cooper tosses a piece of chalk his way, fond, and can’t even bring himself to feel discouraged by finding three more protective sigils, faded within a week of being drawn.

He gets a total of three hours of sleep that night, between memorizing another chapter of his latest exorcism audiobook and trawling through Pacey’s old lore files for more on why the routine rituals might be acting up, and doesn’t mind it at all, because the plan’s working, and Cooper knew it would.

That’s how it works, he thinks, feeling steady on his feet for the first time in days and days. When you do the right thing the right way, hauntings get stopped, the team and the city both get saved, and you get to enjoy a hockey game with all your friends as a hockey game, nothing more or less.

Cooper tugs on his socks one by one, relishing the atmosphere of the dressing room, guys laughing and debating over ideal ways to spend the upcoming break. Nearby, muffled by the music, Cooper can hear the crowd growing, more high-pitched than usual with all the kids off from school.

He looks a couple seats over, speaks up to get Artem’s attention. “How about you, Arty? You doing anything fun over the days off?”

Artem shrugs. “Mm, video games, I think.”

“Oh, cool,” Cooper says. He didn’t know Artem was into gaming. He guesses he’s been focused on other things, a bit. “Next roadie, you and Luke should come to me and Seth’s, he always brings a console. It’ll be way more fun if we all hang out than you guys just sitting in your room!"

Artem looks a little puzzled. Not in a translation way. “He is, ah. Not sitting in room?”

Cooper doesn’t follow, at first—Not sitting in room, as in Luke was out and awake, when Cooper texted him that night and didn’t get a response?—but doesn’t get to ask Artem to clarify, because over by the entrance, there’s the sound of a small scuffle, a ‘wait, sir!’, and then Jeremy Hearst is stalking into the room, perfect suit and all.

“Who’s this?” Mikko asks, as the conversations around the room begin to trail off at the intrusion.

“What’re you—”

“I golf with the board,” Hearst says at a normal volume, and then, instantly ten times louder, with no warning, “And it’s an occasion!”

Cooper has to fight a flinch at the outburst—it’s jovial and incredibly aggressive at the same time, mismatched signals that make his brain hurt.

Hearst’s smile is already stretched almost to the edges of his face. “It’s not every day a professional hockey player fucks up a multi-million-dollar deal for my company,” he goes on, still at that half-yelling volume, echoing as the room has fallen silent. He’s looking at Cooper, now, hard, still pushing for eye contact Cooper won’t give him. “Feeling proud, Kepley?”

“More and more,” Cooper says, truthful. “I thought you were going to lose money on the rinks?”

Hearst’s lip curls, and he starts forward toward Cooper; makes it about two steps before Luke is in his way. “I wouldn’t.”

Cooper knew before Luke did that Luke isn’t, at his core, a dangerous person. Luke is, though, and always has been, very good at seeming dangerous, at believing it of himself, and making other people believe it too.

Luke, right now, planted between Cooper and Jeremy Hearst and glaring down at Hearst as if he’d like nothing more than to have his bluff called, looks dangerous.

Cooper sees Hearst’s Adam’s apple bob as he swallows and stops his advance; though, Cooper notes, curious, once he’s stopped, he looks up at Luke, and the expression on his face isn’t fear, but… interest? Recognition, Cooper thinks, though they haven’t met. Have they?

“Luke Thibeault,” Hearst says. “You’re taller than I was led to expect.”

Luke is, when he wants to be, dismissive and incredibly rude. “You’re short and ugly, but you can probably get compensation for them fucking up your veneers so bad.”

At that, Hearst’s face twists in anger, and Cooper takes half a step closer, ready to intervene if the anger wins out over the fear and he makes any kind of a move at Luke, until—

“Hi there,” Lunch slides into the conversation, smooth, a calming hand on Hearst’s shoulder. “Sorry to interrupt, man, we just all have our pregame routines to get through, so… Thank you for the support, though.”

Half of being the captain, at least in a market like Toronto, is stepping in front of the cameras and defusing the not-actually-a-crisis crisis of the week. Lunch is very good at it, his voice casual enough to disarm anyone, even Hearst, or at least make him pause.

When the pause happens, Hearst looks around the dressing room, and Cooper watches him realize that everyone else is watching him right back, and then that he’s the guy staring down their captain and both goalies. It’s very evident whose side they’re on, and very evident that it’s not Jeremy Hearst’s.

The pause stretches, the fuse burning closer to an explosion, and then—

Hearst bursts out laughing.

It’s not fake. A fake laugh would be less unsettling than this sudden eruption of genuine, if stiff-faced, humour.

“I was right about you,” Hearst declares, pointing up at Cooper and wagging his finger like he’s scolding a misbehaving kid. Still laughing. “You’re a good kid.” He sighs, shaking his head. The smile doesn’t leave his face, even as his eyes darken with—something. Cooper doesn’t know it. Looks away so he won’t have to. “A misguided one, though.”

With one more appraising glance at Luke, an amused ‘hm’, Hearst swats Lunch’s hand off his shoulder, wheels around, and leaves, without looking back.

A beat, and then Mikko—on his feet, along with a handful of their other teammates—whistles. “Who’d you piss off, Keps?”

“Imagine getting mad at Cooper.” Seth shakes his head, scandalized. He’s a good roomie. Cooper smiles his way, then turns it toward the others, because they’re looking at him like they need it, checking to make sure he’s alright.

“Thanks, Cap,” he says. It would take more than someone like Jeremy Hearst to frighten Cooper.

You can’t be a Leaf for long without getting good at shrugging off weirdness—the team gets back to what they were doing before a billionaire did a room invasion, content that Cooper’s not overly troubled by it. Luke’s the only one who sticks close, eyes still locked on the empty doorway like he’s expecting Hearst to double back to take them by surprise.

“Next time, can we stick to ghosts?” Luke asks in an undertone, just for Cooper’s hearing.

“You read my mind,” Cooper agrees, holding up his hand for a fist bump. If Hearst’s visit meant anything, it’s that they won, another bad thing—albeit a mundane one, this time—struck off the books.

Cooper doesn’t linger in the self-satisfaction. He’s got more important things to focus on. Tonight’s a divisional matchup, playoff implications, and pausing to savour a win too long is asking for a loss. After the game, then, he’ll get back to his research on demons, sneak in a couple more grave visits, maybe sit down with the steadily-growing list of unexplained incidents since October and try to dig up an answer for the protective sigils acting up. And then, of course, he’ll look more into Scary Demon Lady, and he’s got to remember to buy more pellets for Christmas the Second, and the rest of the existing team hauntings can probably hold until—

“Hey.”

Luke’s voice startles Cooper out of his brain and back into the room.

“Want to go out after the game?”

Cooper’s heart kicks up at that, because he thinks that probably no matter how many times he gets invited to things by friends, it’ll never stop feeling like the best kind of surprise. The feeling, an automatic reaction, is at odds with the things he knows he needs to accomplish tonight. So many things.

But Luke is asking, on-purpose casual enough that Cooper can tell he really cares about the answer.

Artem’s words from earlier flash, high beams across Cooper’s brain. He went out the other night, Luke, without Cooper, and didn’t respond to Cooper’s text. Didn’t say anything about it, before or after.

It’s one night. Cooper can afford one night off.

“I could go out,” he says, and the happiness on Luke’s face is enough to get rid of any lingering guilt over the decision. “Where?”

---

They aren’t part of the city in the same way as everyone else who lives in it, but Cooper can pretend otherwise, a night like tonight. He forgets about any post-game soreness easy, once he and Luke get into the holiday market at the old distillery.

“Look at this place!” he spins where he stands, trying to take it all in, the cobblestone streets, old red brickworks everywhere he looks, every inch of space decorated to look like a wintery wonderland. It’s still Toronto—more than half the crowd is just standing in assorted lines, moving between photo ops and stalls selling overpriced food and kitschy holiday stuff, and the weather’s veering toward bitter cold—but even those things seem charming, with twinkly lights on every lamppost and carols playing throughout.

The crowd’s packed in, moving at a shuffle. Cooper and Luke fall in, not in any kind of rush. Moving a little faster than everyone else anyways, once people start getting knocked out of the way in front of them as Puck goes bounding ahead, leaving a trail of incredibly confused visitors in his wake.

“We’re getting the spiral potatoes,” Luke informs Cooper, loud in his ear to be heard over the crowd. His breath is warm, kind of ticklish.

“I hear you, but pierogies,” Cooper counters, pointing to a food stall at the opposite side of the path.

They get both, a mutually-agreed-upon dietary cheat night, and wander through the market sharing the snacks while Luke points at the most abstract looking ornaments in sight and says ‘you’ for all of them.

Cooper gets a hang of the rules of the game, holds up an ornament of a little cartoonish goth character, side bangs and all. “You.”

Luke glares at him, his expression so comically offended that Cooper has to laugh, and almost chokes on a pierogi doing it.

They wander into a vintage store to get out of the cold, and Cooper gets distracted browsing through a shelf of leatherbound first editions before realizing he’s lost track of Luke. It’s easy to find him, a head taller than everyone else in the store: Luke’s over by a display of cashmere scarves, holding one—black, of course—and looking around like he thinks someone’s going to tell him to put it down.

When they leave, Luke’s wearing his old-new scarf, and Cooper feels prouder of him than he’s got any right to.

“It looks good,” he offers, instead of another goth joke, and Luke rolls his eyes.

“Weird, I bought it ‘cause I thought it looked like shit.”

It comes with an elbow to the side, no real force behind it, and Cooper matches it with one of his own, even less of a touch. He may as well not have bothered: the market is packed full enough that his arm and Luke’s are bumping with basically every step, jostled by the crowd.

Too big a crowd. Even with hats over hair and Luke with his scarf pulled up high, Cooper can tell that they’re starting to get double takes in the ‘I know those people’ way rather than just the ‘those two are comfortably in the ninety-ninth percentile for height across all demographics’ way.

Cooper is bracing himself to do more of the same, photos and high fives and awkwardly accepting compliments for as long as people need, except for how right then is when Luke grabs his wrist and yanks him, sharply, into one of the giant Christmas trees looming over the market.

Too taken aback to resist, Cooper splutters against a face full of tree, but it only lasts a second, and then he opens his eyes and—

“Woah,” he breathes. Luke’s dragged the two of them right to the base of the tree, so that they’re cocooned in the cavern made by the branches. It’s a tight fit—Cooper has to stay stooped over practically in half to avoid hitting his head and dislodging the lights—but they’re hidden here, tucked away from the crowds outside, surrounded by a colourful glow on all sides.

“We’re going to get in trouble,” he says, without making any move to leave.

Luke sits down with a little ‘oof’, leaning against the tree. “Good.”

Cooper joins him, of course he does. The cobblestones are icy cold through the seat of his pants, his head is ducked and kind of brushing against the lowest branches anyways, and it’s still just beautiful, rainbow lights in every direction.

“I feel so small in here,” he says, awed. “Like a hamster.”

Luke raises an eyebrow. “A ritual sacrifice hamster?”

“Way too soon,” Cooper informs him as seriously as he can, pleased when Luke snorts out a laugh.

Puck squeezes in between the two of them, flopping down with a sigh as Cooper gives him scritches and Luke pretends not to be doing the same. It was the right call to take the night off.

Luke’s still looking at him. Cooper can feel his eyes. “I can’t believe you actually stopped the evil rich guy.” He sounds—not that shocked, despite his words. Like it’s what he expected, from Cooper.

Cooper isn’t sure if they’re done joking around, so he decides to stick to teasing. “You’re surprised?”

“No,” Luke says, very decisively, then, rummaging in his shopping bag, “So it’s not wrapped or anything.”

The segue’s kind of lost on Cooper, at least until Luke pulls out a bundle of papers, A6 size, glue binding, that Cooper recognizes immediately.

“These were my favourite when I was little!” He grabs the calendar—The Official Guinness Book of Records 2000 Desk Calendar, out of print for years—from Luke and starts flipping through it right then and there. “This is the one when two guys went around the entire world in a hot air balloon! Oh, wow, wow, wow, wow.”

The pages are perfect, well, decades-old calendar-perfect, the edges just barely yellowed but everything else in mint condition, formatting consistent throughout, a border around the edge of the page and each day’s record perfectly centred. Cooper whacks his head on a tree branch, which is how he realizes that he’s been bouncing up and down where he’s sitting, overcome with excitement, and it’s embarrassing, the whole idea of accidentally being obvious enough about his special interest for Luke to notice is embarrassing—oh, if he finds out Cooper owns over four hundred calendars he’ll die—but only for a moment, because Luke doesn’t laugh at him, just looks pleased, with himself and at Cooper’s reaction.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Cooper says, stilling himself. Mostly stilling himself, still tracing the squared edges of his new prized possession.

Luke shrugs. “Yeah, whatever. You have the one like it at your locker. I wanted to.” Awkward, but not in a bad way. Not like Cooper’s messed up and been weird.

Shifting in the cramped space, Cooper pulls his backpack into his lap. He tucks his new calendar into the laptop sleeve, carefully, and once it’s safely stowed away, goes fishing for the results of his own Christmas shopping. Done for a month, of course.

“For you,” he says, holding out the tiny glass bottle. “It’s cruelty-free and apparently the formula is really good for your nails and nail beds, I don’t know how you feel about glossy versus matte finish but I compared a bunch of reviews, specifically from non-affiliates so they’re more trustworthy, although I think some of them may have been untagged ads.”

Luke is staring down at his new black nail polish, which is indistinguishable to Cooper from the black nail polish already on his nails, like it is very distinguishable, in a good way. “I’m not going to say you didn’t have to buy me something,” he says. “I should be rewarded for letting you drag me into your good person shit.”

“You do a lot of good person shit,” Cooper informs him. “I’m sorry to say you may just be a good person.”

“I’m sorry to say you’re delusional,” Luke counters, prim, but he’s holding the bottle in both hands, tight, and burrowing down into his new scarf to hide the look on his face, so Cooper knows he did good. “Get out of my tree.”

Cooper laughs as he starts to push to his feet.

Luke catches the end of Cooper’s sleeve, quick. “That was a joke, Coop.” Explaining, no sarcasm to it, like it’s not a big deal to have to explain if Cooper needs it.

Cooper’s never had a friend like Luke before. It makes his heart feel full-up, bursting at the seams.

“I know, I’m going to get us hot chocolate,” he reassures, instead of saying that, because Luke will get all shy about it. “Watch Puck, alright?”

“He’s invis—oof.” Luke thuds back against the tree, tackled by Puck and squirming under ghost puppy kisses. Maybe because of how hidden they are, maybe because of the presents, he’s laughing loud and unrestrained, his nose pink with the cold, the rest of his face lit up rainbow under the tree lights.

There’s not much Cooper wouldn’t do to make Luke stay this happy always; but then, he knew that.

Pushing through the branches, back out into the cold of the Distillery, Cooper rejoins the crowd, jogging over to join the line snaking around the nearest hot chocolate booth. He can’t stop smiling, thinking of his new calendar, of Luke picking it out for him. Probably that’s what Luke was doing, when he was away from his hotel room and not answering the other night. Cooper’s going to read the December trivia as a treat, then save the rest for when the new year starts and add it to the rotation. He’ll put it right on his bedside table, in a place of honour. People other than his family don’t usually buy him calendars.

“Next.”

Cooper steps forward, greeting the vendor with a wave and a smile. “Two hot chocolates, please! One with whipped cream.”

“Yep, just tap.” The lady behind the counter, wearing a Santa hat and looking decidedly un-jolly, nudges the card reader toward him, already turning to make the drinks.

Cooper rubs his hands together to stave off the cold while he waits. From somewhere in the market, probably one of the stages, there are carollers singing, mostly drowning out the clashing music from individual booths’ speakers, all of it together creating a sliver of the night cut off from the rest of the city and all its chaos.

Cooper thinks, safe in that sliver, that maybe he can afford to relax a little. He’s handled the supernatural stuff. He’s handled the non-supernatural stuff too, even when people thought he couldn’t. He’s going to bring Luke his excessively sugary drink because Luke should have nice things all the time, and they can maybe get more food from one of the stalls after, and maybe the team can afford a day and a half without him over the holidays, anyway. It’s not too late. He could text Mom and Owen that he’s making the drive for Christmas Day after all. Maybe he could make the drive minus the text and surprise them. Maybe he could even convince Luke to come with him, this year.

The woman behind the counter pulls his attention back, a to-go cup in each hand.

“Thanks,” he says, reaching up to take the two hot chocolates when the vendor sets them on the counter, only she doesn’t take her hands off of either cup, holding them in place so Cooper can’t pull them away.

“Uh.” Cooper looks up at her—did the payment not go through?—and finds her staring back, very intently.

Too intently.

“You saved the day again,” she says, all the end-of-a-shift apathy in her voice replaced with cheery, utterly empty pleasantness.

The last time he heard this voice, it was coming out of Asra, an intruder at the rink.

“You,” Cooper realizes, and doesn’t let himself take the instinctive step back that he wants to, because he’s surprised, not scared. Not this time.

“Me,” Scary Demon Lady says, through the mouth of another innocent person. She sounds amused, having fun with a joke Cooper doesn’t remember telling. “You truly can’t help yourself, can you, hero? Even when it’s nothing to do with you and your team.”

If she thinks Cooper’s that easy to intimidate, she’s wrong. “It was the right thing to do,” he says, proud.

“Mm.” She nods, thoughtful. Pretend-thoughtful. “Or it’s an attempt at penance.”

The rest of the Christmas market has gone oddly quiet. Is there no one behind Cooper in line anymore? Is there no one else to hear this?

Cooper doesn’t say anything, but the demon behind the counter looks satisfied anyways, with whatever response he’s inadvertently handed over.

“Yes, I think that’s it,” she says. “Stop enough of the scary hauntings and nasty, evil people, and you won’t have to think about yourself being just as bad.”

Her words cut, and even as they do, Cooper’s grasping for the facts at his disposal, thinking, demons are sadistic, they play with their food. Pacey said it and Cooper saw it for himself in Swift Hawk, the way Lake Swift Hawk took Luke’s pain and used it to break him almost past repair.

Cooper isn’t a frightened twelve-year-old with nowhere else to turn. He grabs both hot chocolates away from the possessed vendor, not bothering to be polite anymore, and turns his back, walking away.

Starting to walk away.

“Have you told your teammates that you wanted to kill your friend’s father in cold blood?”

Cooper freezes.

Humans can identify whether someone is smiling or not just from the sound of their voice, with something like eighty percent accuracy. Right now, behind his back, Scary Demon Lady is smiling. “That you willingly helped a demon come into possession of a human soul?” she goes on, voice light, like they’re discussing the weather. “That you fled like a coward, leaving that underachieving yet undeniably deadly demon to harm others, because you valued your own life and that of your friend more highly than anyone else’s?”

“That’s not what that was,” Cooper wheels on her without deciding to, the words pulled out the same way, angrier than he’d ever choose to sound, more threatening than he’d ever allow himself to be.

The vendor in the Santa hat barely raises an eyebrow. “Even now, you were willing to risk your teammates’ standing with the organization and put them on the wrong side of an incredibly powerful man, all for the sake of interfering with… what? An ice rink maintenance deal?” She licks her lips. Really, actually licks her lips. “How… calculated.”

“You’re wrong,” Cooper insists. He would’ve stepped up and taken the blame if management had made any real issue of the players speaking up about the rinks. He would never endanger his friends—the opposite, only ever the opposite—and he wasn’t using anyone, they wanted to help. He did the right thing. He didn’t compromise this time. It’s not like last time. It’s not like last time. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Oh, hero, I’m not judging you.” Her eyes widen, so, so innocently, like he’s hurt her feelings by misinterpreting her so gravely. “No, I’m helping.”

She leans forward on the counter, past the register, into Cooper’s space. It’s body language that says: trust me, listen to me, physical closeness to invite emotional closeness. Her voice is the same. “Those pieces of you, the ones you’re so terrified of indulging, are real. They’re effortless. I think you’d be happier if you embraced them.”

Cooper’s immediate reaction is somehow, despite everything before, to laugh. This can’t be her big play. He’s trusting, but not of her, and whatever else he is, he’s not gullible enough to fall for a ‘come to the dark side’ plea. “That’s never going to happen.”

Scary Demon Lady doesn’t look upset with his laugh. Instead, her eyebrows knit together in what looks like genuine pity. “You’re still fighting it,” she says, and Cooper’s next laugh shrivels up on his tongue, because the look of concern on her face is the same one his mom has been wearing recently on the Facetimes that Cooper’s been avoiding, and that his dad used to wear when Cooper was little and didn’t know how to not worry him.

It’s not like that. He’s not like that.

Like she knows exactly what he’s thinking, the demon behind the counter shakes her head, sympathetic. “I understand. It can be hard, reckoning with the truth that the hero they expect of you is a fiction.” She reaches out, lays a hand on Cooper’s jacket, over his forearm. When did he get close enough for her to touch?

“But once you do, Cooper,” she continues, her voice shifting to something fervent, the way religious people look when they talk about the end of days. “Once you embrace what’s so natural, what’s already inside you?”

The question hangs there in the muffled blur of the market, the possibility with it.

She laughs, almost bashful. “Well. There’s time for that, when you’re ready.” She squeezes Cooper’s wrist, touching bare skin for the first time. Her touch is scalding, molten iron against flesh. “I’ll be watching.”

As Cooper jerks his hand away from her, recoiling at the pain, every light in the marketplace goes out with a pop.

In total darkness, there are a few scattered screams; then, as the lights flicker on one by one, streetlights and string lights in turn, some relieved laughter, a few half-serious cheers.

The woman behind the counter, Santa hat askew, has collapsed into one of her coworkers, blinking like she’s waking from a trance. No idea that she’s just been used as a mouthpiece for a demon.

Cooper, frozen in place and clutching his burnt hand, realizes, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he’s dropped both hot chocolates.

She’s wrong. It’s not like that, it’s never been like that. He’s never been like that. She’s wrong.

She’s wrong, and the splattered drinks at Cooper’s feet, a dark stain spreading across the snowy ground, look like blood all the same.

Chapter 4: Bear Necessities

Luke sits in the car so long that the motion-activated lights turn off, sending the parking garage into total darkness.

He stays where he is even then, taking stock.

He decides that he feels… good. Last night was good.

He doesn’t usually fall asleep. Not that three times of anything is enough for a ‘usually’, but. He hasn’t fallen asleep at someone’s place before, and he did, and granted, that was probably due to being halfway through an NHL season and permanently jet-lagged, and he did have five extremely frightening seconds of not knowing where the fuck he was when he woke up, but before that, during all the rest of it, Luke was hardly even scared at all this time, even though this guy was touchier than the other two.

He splays out a hand over his ribs, fingers pressed to skin through his hoodie. All that touching, and Luke was barely scared at all.

He’s finally figuring this out.

He’s glad the lights are off. He’s smiling, all proud. Embarrassing.

Enough taking stock. He’s mostly got the feelings shit under control, these days. Only so much time and patience for it. More pressing, and less violently cringeworthy to think about: he wants to shower. He smells like a stranger’s sheets, which smelled like Febreze, so he’s going to clean up, eat something before heading to the rink for the PK meeting and hopefully a chance to get on the ice.

Luke tosses his keys in his hand as he heads into his building, sparing a nod on his way past for the older guy in his normal spot behind the desk by the door.

“Hold on a sec!”

Luke freezes, instinct, but manages to unfreeze in the same breath. It's not Swift Hawk, no one gives a fuck what or who he does with his free time, and no one could do anything about it if they did.

“Got a delivery for you,” desk guy explains, rifling around the shelving behind him.

Huh. Luke hasn’t ordered anything. He likes shopping at real stores so that he can hold whatever it is in his hands before making a choice.

“Here you go.”

Luke accepts the box—it’s heavy, takes desk guy a grunt of effort to heave it over to him, and both arms for Luke to carry it—with a “thanks” as an afterthought, already squinting down at the label to try and figure out who sent him something.

This time, when his body tenses up, it stays that way.

He recognizes the postal code on the return address. That was his postal code for the first fourteen years of his life.

No. No, not here.

He’s distantly aware of desk guy giving a concerned little cough, which is probably a fair reaction to one of the residents coming to a full stop in the foyer and staring down at a cardboard box like it’s about to come to life and kill him, but Luke doesn’t have it in him to give a fuck right now. Nowhere close.

He thinks, through a spiralling panic that he works very, very hard to shove back down, of the cop who came to tell him his dad was dead. He said something, didn’t he, about Luke’s father looking up his address in some cop database? If whatever’s in this box came from his dad after illegally as fuck finding out where Luke lives, Luke can narrow the options down, conservatively, to anthrax or a pipe bomb, one last ‘fuck you’ from his dad right when Luke’s been figuring his life out.

Luke is a paranoid freak, but not that much of a paranoid freak. His brain quits screaming enough to let him read the rest of the return label. The sender is Carmain & Ndala LLP.

He knows that name. Not as well as he knows the postal code, but. They’re a law firm, one of the ones that handles everything vaguely legal for everyone around the Swift Hawk and Laroque areas. House sales. Divorces. Estates.

Luke spoke to them exactly once, a couple months back, when they reached out about his dad’s will. Specifically about the fact that it didn’t exist, which meant that Luke got everything by default. He thinks that fact would’ve pissed his dad off, which is the only bright side of any of it.

The conversation began with that. Ended with Luke telling the lawyers to sell the house and give whatever it made to his one-time teammate and non-friend Kayla, because he’s already got more than enough money and using the last traces of his dad’s miserable life to let someone else get the fuck out of Swift Hawk felt right, and also like the most efficient way to wash his hands of the whole thing. Luke wanted nothing to do with it. Still wants nothing to do with it.

That was supposed to be how it ended.

He lugs the box upstairs. Has it somehow gotten heavier since he read the label? It seems to weigh a ton, sounds like it, too, when he drops it on the floor the second he’s through the door. It doesn’t immediately explode and blast Luke into meat shreds, so that rules out the pipe bomb option, he guesses.

Irritable now, the rest of the morning and all the self-satisfaction that came with it overshadowed by the unwelcome arrival, Luke grabs a kitchen knife out of his sink and slices through the excessive tape keeping the box shut. Inside, there’s another cardboard box, this one with a letter taped to the lid, addressed to him.

It’s all typed out, a full page long because of course they’re going to make Luke fucking read, like this isn’t bad enough already. He skips the boring parts, which is almost all of it. Following sale of the property and contents of the home, personal effects of Mr. Joseph Thibeault are enclosed, blah blah bullshit legalese, we once again offer our sincere condolences for your loss.

Okay. Okay, so that’s an answer, at least. It’s the shit they couldn’t sell. Whatever garbage his dad accumulated over the years. Not from him to Luke, not on purpose. It’s nothing.

Luke stands, back against the opposite wall in the entrance of his apartment, and stares down the box for god knows how long, anyway.

He doesn’t open it. No chance in hell of him opening it.

It’s just a box.

There’s no one to tell him what to do with it. He could toss it over the balcony. Burn the contents in a bonfire. Dump them in the lake.

A lake.

Luke ignores Lake Ontario outside his window and opts for grabbing the knife again and stabbing it straight through the lid of the box, a stake in a vampire coffin like one of Cooper’s stories. Making the dead stay dead, and the past stay in the past.

“Fuck you,” he says, for good measure, and no one replies and Luke doesn’t expect them to, and then the alarm on his phone goes off. “Fuck me,” he mutters, scrambling to snooze it.

He didn’t realize how much time was passing, between the garage and the box. No time for the shower he wanted at this point, or for the train, which means he’s going to have to drive, which means traffic, which means, half an hour later, he’s skidding through the doors of the Ford Performance Centre at a run and almost gets taken out by Carlton the Bear on his way in.

“Shit,” Luke dodges out of the way, edging around the Leafs’ mascot and sliding on the freshly cleaned concourse tile. Why the fuck is the mascot here and not at the arena? “Sorry.”

Whoever's wearing the costume today doesn’t even turn to look at him, and doesn’t reciprocate the apology for the shoulder check either. Dick.

Without even coming to a full stop, Luke books it to the team facilities. It’s mostly supposed to be off-ice shit today, special teams meetings and Larsson drilling systems into everyone’s skulls after a few too many defensive breakdowns. If Luke rushes—

The room, when he gets there, is only half full. No Cooper, the team dispersed between the day-to-day, unglamorous maintenance of the season and meetings like the one that Luke’s supposed to be in right at this very moment. Maybe not right this moment: before he can even drop his stuff, guys start trickling back into the room, all of them penalty killers.

Shit.

Luke sinks into the seat at his stall with a sigh. No point rushing, now.

Maybe, he thinks, one last attempt at optimism for the day, maybe no one noticed he wasn’t there.

Krish leans on the wall next to Luke, head propped up in his hand. “Morning.”

He’s looming. Luke can feel the looming. Not in a ‘you are in physical danger’ way like it’s been in some locker rooms, but in the ‘a Maple Leaf is about to do some Maple Leaf bullshit' way he’s become familiar with over the last season and a half, which is less ill-intentioned but also less predictable, resulting in either a haunting or some friendship bonding crap that makes him wish it had been a haunting instead.

Today, Krish looks far too happy. It’s going to be the friendship bonding crap. “She’s a wild one, eh, Tibs?”

Luke, who was expecting some ribbing about missing the meeting, startles as Brzezinski chimes in from his other side, a coordinated attack. “Makes sense, both our tendies can’t be celibate.”

“What the fuck are you two talking about,” Luke says, impatient, and Krish nods downwards, tapping at a spot on his own neck, with a shit-eating grin that matches Brzezinski’s.

Oh, shit.

“Fuck you,” Luke hisses, slapping a hand over the offending spot on his neck. A fucking hickey, really? Jackass. He never said it was okay to leave marks. He looks around the room, automatic, confirming that Cooper’s still not here. Then, ages too late, “There’s no ‘she’.”

His teammates are, as usual, clueless, too busy giggling at his expense to consider the shocking and unbelievable possibility that one of them isn’t into girls. Fine, not Luke’s fucking problem. He feels—too much. Annoyed that they keep defaulting that he’s straight. Proud, in a pathetic way that he thought he was immune to, that he’s been doing their friendship bonding crap well enough to earn more of it, finally getting the hang of how mean he’s allowed to be for it to still count as team banter.

Under all of it, unwelcome and traitorous, he surprises himself by feeling scared. Not of them.

He’s been—experimenting, he guesses. Trying out the whole wanting, having thing. Small shit, like growing out his hair. Starting to decorate his place. Trawling local tattoo artists’ Instagram pages to pick something for the offseason. Having sex.

Okay, kind of sex.

Okay, Luke has done hand stuff with three guys and traded blowjobs with two of them and then, last night, also made out with guy number three for like an hour before learning on the fly how to fuck someone. Only via apps, only guys on the same page about it being only once. Still counts.

He never said it was okay to leave marks. He never noticed that guy number 3 was leaving a mark. Which is exactly what he wanted, to get practice being in the moment and in his body enough not to be a paranoid weirdo about anyone touching him, and Luke had a good time last night, that was real, so why the fuck does he feel like he’s about to hyperventilate at the thought that he was caught up enough that anyone could have done anything to him, like one second to the next, he’s gone from a professional athlete hooking up, extremely normal, everyone does it, to a little kid with his arms pinned behind his back and his dad hissing horrible shit to push him into selling his soul and the only non-person who’s ever had his back is just fucking gone—

Krish and Brzezinski are still yapping.

“Do you think he only sleeps with other goth chicks?”

“Man, shut the fuck up.”

“No, I’m serious, does it, like, cancel out?”

“Leave the goalie alone, children.” Lunch swoops in, captain voice firmly in place, and Luke tries not to feel pathetically grateful at being rescued.

Lucky for him, that feeling lasts about two seconds, because as soon as they’re relatively alone, Lunch turns the captain voice on Luke.

“You know I gotta tell you it’s not a good look to show up late because you were hooking up.”

So, cool, this is just a thing they all know, now. “Do you, though?” Luke asks. Still focused, mostly, on how bad he wants to scratch off the skin on his neck where the hickey is. He needs to not draw any more attention to it, anyone else’s but also his own. Stop thinking about it. He was fine with the guy’s mouth on his dick but he’s taking issue with a bruise? Stupid.

Lunch is still staring. Kind of unsure, now.

Oh, this is going to be good. “What?”

Luke watches his captain look embarrassed in a way he’s never really seen him, kind of pre-emptively wincing at his own words. “Well, just…” More hemming and hawing. Then, pained, “You’re being safe, right? With the—”

“Stop talking,” Luke cuts him off, mortified, and of course, because Luke is in hell and fucking Justin Lim seems intent on them both staying there, he doesn’t, just keeps bulldozing ahead out of some misguided sense of responsibility.

“Look, I just know you’re not a fan of people touching—”

“Thibeault.”

Luke is saved from this particular fresh hell by being yanked into another one, population: one coach, currently standing in the entrance to the room, looking extremely unimpressed.

Fine. Great. Not Luke’s first time getting sent to the principal’s office.

From what Luke’s heard, the Swedish guys in the league are usually pretty fun. Maybe Larsson was different as a player, but as a coach, the guy’s all business. It’s not a bad thing. He’s not touchy-feely, which makes him and Luke two of two, on this stupidly affectionate team, even if it doesn’t feel like it right now, because Larsson leads him out to the mostly-empty hall and turns to face him, at which point his eyes drop to the, apparently, massive beacon of a hickey on Luke’s neck, and he sighs. Not even passive-aggressively, just a real tired, I don’t get paid enough for this.

Ugh. Luke yanks up his hood, burrowing as far into it as he can while still being present in the conversation on a technicality.

“I didn’t see you at the meeting this morning,” is how Larsson opens, so at least they’re only talking about Luke’s second-biggest fuckup of the day.

“Sorry,” Luke says. He’ll say whatever, to get someone off his back. People in charge love sorries. “Was that it, or—”

“No, that wasn’t it.” Larsson doesn’t look amused. “The team’s policy is you sit a game over something like this.”

That snaps Luke to attention.

He’s been working so fucking hard, optional skates and one-on-one sessions as often as they’ll let him with how paranoid the sports science people are about rest, trying to claw himself back toward being elite in net instead of just passable. He’s been playing better than he was at the start of the season. Still not what he was, not especially close, but—better, objectively, playable more often than the second halves of back to backs, even if he’s still earning every start.

Leafs fans and media are what they are. Luke’s seen the shit said about him online, some of it straight to his face in scrums. It’s eased off as he’s improved, but a healthy scratch is very last thing he needs right now, a kiss of death in the eyes of half the leeches following the team and maybe management too, why not?

“Coach,” Luke says, and immediately regrets how pleading it comes out. As if he’s ever given a fuck what any authority figure thinks of him. As if he’s come this far just to wind up begging again to another person in control of his life.

He tears his gaze away, but not fast enough to miss Larsson’s expression. It’s the ‘I’m not mad, just disappointed’. Like this really is the principal’s office.

Another sigh. Less annoyed, this time. “I truly don’t care what you do in your personal life,” Larsson says. “And I get that you’re young, whatever. But to miss a team commitment for it?”

“I didn’t,” Luke blurts. “It wasn’t. For that.” It’s the truth. It’s also the most plausible excuse Luke’s got to keep his career from blowing up more than it already has. “The lawyers sent a box of my dad’s stuff over, and I was…”

Staring at an inanimate object for fifteen full minutes because my brain isn’t so good at the fight/flight/freeze shit? Stabbing a cardboard box with a knife?

His accidental trail off into silence, flustered, is probably what saves the excuse. When Larsson responds, he’s measured as ever, the sympathy in his voice mostly well-hidden.

“I coach adults, not children,” he says. “I think punishment is an asinine way to lead a team, and to tell you the truth, our cap situation complicates the idea of sending you down for a reset. I want two functional goaltenders, not one.”

Okay. That’s promising.

“So here’s what I suggest. I won’t scratch you for missing a team meeting.” Even better. “As long as you speak to someone about the loss of your father.”

Oh, this again. Just fucking typical. Normal people with normal families think everyone’s like them. That every parent would be a loss.

Luke swallows down the bile in his throat. “Fine,” he agrees, blandly, because this wouldn’t be his first time doing anything for hockey. He’ll just do it on a technicality, talk to—

“Not Cooper,” Larsson says. “A qualified professional. Grief counsellors exist. Deal?”

Luke scowls.

For the first time, because all coaches are the worst, Larsson almost smiles. “If you see him, though, send Cooper my way, yeah?”

Luke makes a vaguely-affirmative, strongly resentful sound, enough to get his coach to fuck off and leave him alone.

The morning was going good, before the stupid fucking package. Well. Before the hickey. Well. Before Luke knew about the—

He kicks a wall. Not hard. An injury would keep him out of the net just as much as a healthy scratch and a reputation as a problem would.

He doesn’t need therapy.

Well.

He doesn’t need therapy for grief. He’s aware that he’s not, like, killing it in the mental health category, probably, but it’s been going alright. Despite people’s concern. Despite a lot of things. No one gives you the talk when you’re gay in Swift Hawk, Ontario, but that doesn’t mean Luke needs it from his wife guy captain, and he definitely doesn’t need him or a coach or teammates or anyone giving their opinions on his choices, like he’s some kind of shrinking violet distraught over his dead dad and manifesting it into hangups about touch.

Luke’s pretty fucking over having hangups about touch. They’re stupid. He’s bigger than just about every non-Cooper person he’s ever met, good in a fight even before he spent a year fighting a new, usually murderous haunting every week. There’s not a lot he’s got to be afraid of in any given social interaction, whether or not sex is involved, and the fact that he is anyways is because of a lot of things, but grief sure as shit isn’t one of them.

Who is he supposed to be grieving? The piece of shit dad who’s reasons number one-through-fifty for the hangups? The mother he spent a total of one day with, who he knows for a fact would prefer he never existed, justifiably?

Luke picks at the bruise on his neck. Doesn’t feel like he’s on the verge of a panic attack anymore, at least.

It feels gross, kind of. Occasionally terrifying, but not bad. Mostly good. The hickey. All of it. Luke likes how sex feels, physically. Likes proving to himself that he can handle being that close to someone. He doesn't know if it’s great sex, exactly, but it’s his, something he wanted and gets to have and choose, like more and more things in his life. That part’s good.

He tugs his hood up further so he won’t catch any more flack about last night’s experiment’s shit manners. Decides to put some distance between himself and the stupid, veering away from the locker room and toward the mess of halls that make up the rest of the practice rink.

In one of the empty hallways, he passes the Carlton suit, all seven-ish feet of deflated cartoon polar bear, slumped against a wall. He supposes whoever’s usually inside is on break or something; doesn’t know what the fuck they could’ve done to need a break since almost taking him out when he got here, like, ten minutes ago, but he doesn’t dwell, focused on the voice he can hear from the barely-used equipment room, the first non-problem in a morning that’s so far consisted of nothing else.

“—a lot of stuff in books about them mocking people, but I don’t know if that tells us anything about her purpose, really.”

Luke shoulders open the door, gets a view of Cooper sitting cross-legged in his favourite spot under the net.

The thing in him that always settles when he finds Cooper settles now, like the endless stream of bullshit that this morning has been is powerless in the face of one extremely friendly giant in a Leafs crewneck and gym shorts.

Coop’s surrounded by stacks of paper, maps, two different open laptops. A dozen things at once, the way he always is, more of late than before, though right now, his focus is intent on his phone, held in both hands.

“—and I think that’s going to be the most important part, because otherwise we’re always going to be playing catchup, right?”

Luke makes sure his neck is fully covered before making his way toward him. When he gets close enough—Cooper looks up and waves, bright, as Luke sits down next to him—he can see Pacett and McAllister, two separate squares on the screen. Demon shit finally severe enough to bring in the old people goalie cavalry. Not a good sign.

“Tell me again what she said,” Pacett requests, scratching his beard all thoughtful.

Cooper exhales. “I’d be happier if I embraced the worst parts of myself,” he recites. “Those worst parts of myself are the natural ones, and she’s watching me and waiting.”

Luke was having a really good fucking night, that night at the market looking at overpriced holiday trinkets with Coop, ‘til Scary Demon Lady reared her ugly head. Someone else’s possessed ugly head. Whatever.

She doesn’t seem like the friendly kind of demon.

Not that Luke’s was. Not that the lake was Luke’s at all, obviously, it’s just—

It’s just different. It feels different, nauseating, knowing that a thing as powerful as Lake Swift Hawk and infinitely less known to them is stalking Cooper.

McAllister’s become a regular at these little goalie chats, now that they’ve got a bona fide demon targeting one of their own. Luke doesn’t know if he likes her, exactly, but he likes that she knows what she’s doing. Anyone who’s gone 1-0 against demons is someone he wants on his side; she looks ready to make it two-nothing now, shaking her head as Cooper repeats the threats.

“She wants something,” McAllister says, zero doubt in her voice. “Demons aim to corrupt, they take advantage of people’s worst impulses, but they don’t do it arbitrarily.”

Luke tucks his legs in closer. No news, in any of what she’s saying.

“She can’t think Cooper’s the type to make a deal with her,” Pacett says. “Don’t they usually go for people who don’t know better?”

“Usually,” McAllister agrees, and Luke’s not the only one shifting uncomfortably, here, everyone very determinedly not looking at him. “Which means that if she’s putting in the work to manipulate Cooper, whatever she stands to gain from him being made worse is important enough to be worth the extra effort.”

The declaration hangs there, ominous. Everyone on the call, hell, probably everyone in the building would die for Cooper. If this thing keeps finding him while he’s alone, though…

Cooper, of course, is the one to break the spell.

“I’m not going to listen,” he says, as close to a ‘duh’ as he ever gets. “I’m not going to let someone Anakin Skywalker me.”

His matter-of-factness, maybe just his Cooper-ness, makes the threat of the demon distant and laughable, all at once. It’s Cooper.

Right. Cooper.

“Coach is looking for you,” Luke tells him, and it gets Cooper springing right to attention. Luke bets he was every teacher’s favourite in school.

“Oh!” He accepts the phone when Cooper passes it to him instead of ending the call. “I’ll be right back.”

“I’ll be here,” Luke says. Fat chance he’s venturing anywhere near the locker room until he has to. He doesn’t feel like getting lectured about punctuality or safe sex or dead dads any more than he has been, this morning. What he feels like doing, mostly, is tracking down Scary Demon Lady and making sure she never even thinks about getting close to his friend again.

“Why him?” Luke asks, watching Cooper leave. He thinks he might’ve interrupted someone mid-sentence. Whatever. This is more important. Cooper is the best and most selfless person alive. The worst impulse he’s capable of is somewhere in the neighbourhood of Luke’s best. It doesn’t make sense. “If she wants someone bad, there have to be easier options.”

“There’s power in true goodness,” McAllister says. Not quite a disagreement. Luke thinks of Cooper talking about the power of friendship, his stubborn insistence on believing in the Right Thing, how many times that stubbornness has saved them, and can’t quite disagree either. “If that goodness can be corrupted somehow, who’s to say the evil won’t be just as powerful?”

Pacett’s been quiet a while, but he pipes up now, addressing Luke. “No one’s approached you?”

Luke is halfway to a laugh before he realizes that Pacett’s not joking. “Not if they want someone good to corrupt.”

The other two exchange identical looks. If Luke didn’t know how to recognize pity before, he’d recognize it after this morning.

It’s not needed. No one seems to have figured out yet that Luke doesn’t need their concern, at least not anymore.

He feels like his life is finally, finally starting to make sense, to feel like a collection of things he’s choosing. Mail from beyond the grave and nonexistent grief getting in the way of his hockey and complicated feelings about a bruise different from the kind he’s used to can’t shake that.

After ending the call, Luke leans against the net. Wipes a thumbprint off Cooper’s phone screen. The wallpaper is a photo collage of Christmas the Second and T.C. Puck back when he was alive, a painstakingly equal number of images of both of them. Luke stares down at it, fond. Fond, and then guilty.

He doesn't know why he hasn’t told Coop yet. About the experimenting. About being into guys. Any of it.

He doesn’t actually think Cooper’s celibate, whatever their teammates say. He was into the witchy girl last year. He has, like, hundreds of saved photos of that girlband he likes. The team makes their assumptions, they get protective of him in a way they aren’t of each other, beyond just normal goalie stuff, but Coop’s not a kid. He’s the smartest person Luke knows. He could have anyone he wanted.

It’s not as though Luke thinks Cooper would be shitty about him or anyone being gay, either. It wouldn’t even need to be the whole coming out sideshow Luke hates on principle, he could just say it and it’d be done and Coop would probably be psyched to show off how supportive an ally he could be.

The thought puts a scowl on Luke’s face all over again, a nauseous twist in his stomach.

He doesn’t know. It’s embarrassing. That’s what it is, probably. If Cooper knew what Luke was doing, testing his own boundaries by having slightly-uncomfortable impersonal sex with random strangers, he’d worry about him like everyone else is, and Cooper’s allowed to worry about Luke, the only one who does it without making him feel backed into a corner, but it would still be embarrassing.

It’s all embarrassing.

It’s all unnecessary.

Luke is going to go home and toss the box of his dad’s shit straight into the nearest trash compacter where it belongs. His life is good now, and grief has no place in it, and anyone who thinks he needs them to get in his business and give their opinions about his choices has got another thing coming.

Action, not complaining. Luke gets up and, very intentionally, leaves the past where it belongs.

---

It’s pregame chaos, muffled music and a filling arena, when Luke lets Cooper in on the deal he made with Larsson.

“Are you going to do it?” Cooper asks, looking surprised at ‘Luke’ and ‘bereavement counselling’ existing in the same sentence, and Luke scoffs.

“No, why the fuck would I?” Coop looks less surprised at that. That’s on him for thinking too well of Luke. “I have no one to bereave about, and he’s not allowed to ask me for proof.”

Luke leans back in his seat, satisfied with himself, and shuts his eyes to get in the zone for the start he almost let slip away. Last two games, he allowed a goal each. Progress. He can do better.

He sits deep in his net, watching the play at the other end of the ice. Tracking the puck well, he thinks, or at least without second-guessing as much as he has been, at least until the puck is soaring straight under his outstretched blocker. 3-2, final score.

Luke doesn’t scream in the showers after the game, which is pretty big of him.

He knows he’s got natural talent for goaltending, ‘cause soul bargains or not, no one makes it pro without being an athletic freak, and he’s heard enough of Cooper’s goalie facts to figure there’s some advantage to just being generally big enough to cover more of the net. If this was hopeless, it’d have shown itself as hopeless the second he got his soul back. It’s not. He knows that.

It’s still humiliating, knowing that he’s a thing the team has to compensate for. More humiliating that everyone on the team is being as annoyingly decent as they have been since his rapid downward spiral last spring, all ‘you got this!’ and ‘the trend’s still a good one!’, even though Luke knows they’re all still baffled at how a guy goes from sub-one goal against a game to painfully mortal.

“We’ll get the next one, boys,” Lunch says to the room at large, and Luke pretends not to hear, headphones on as he makes his escape, feeling his captain’s gaze heavy on his back.

When Lunch isn’t thinking about his wife, he’s thinking about his team. The guy’s too much of a professional to give Luke shit for avoiding him, which is good, ‘cause make no mistake, Luke is avoiding the hell out of him.

Asking if Luke’s being safe. Fucking please.

Luke’s got more important shit to do than be ritually humiliated by his teammates interfering in his business, like shaking off the weirdbad experience with hookup number three, and gearing up for more starts so Cooper doesn’t get played into the ground before the playoffs, and also the fact that he’s maybe like seventy-five percent sure there’s something weird going on with Carlton the Bear.

It’s not like mascots are ever not creepy. The idea of some weirdly flexible guy in a giant polar bear suit as, like, accepted convention at a sports event is fucking deranged, objectively, and Luke’s saying that as a weirdly flexible guy who spends every sports event in a shiny goalie mask custom painted with a skull because he thought it looked cool.

The recent shit goes beyond standard mascot creepiness, he’s pretty sure. Nothing big enough to serve as absolute confirmation, just enough to raise the red flags Luke’s gotten good at spotting. Carlton showing up in the places he usually doesn’t, standing around by the entrance to the rink, by the breakfast table, in the parking lot. Carlton staring through the glass at a practice. No cameras set up to indicate that the whole thing has been contrived by the socials team for a prank.

After Saturday’s game, Luke gets out of the cold tub and nearly trips over the Carlton suit, sprawled out on the floor. Monday night, watching from the undignified little corner Montreal makes the visiting backup sit in as Cooper makes one of the prettiest glove saves he’s ever seen, Luke double takes, convinced he just spotted an oversized cartoon polar bear head in the crowd. On the second look, he’s gone.

Luke considers the possibility that he’s finally losing it. Then, because nothing can ever just be normal on his fucking team, he considers the more realistic possibility that the mascot may just be haunted.

“Who’s in the Carlton suit?” he asks, while they’re back home and using the night off to un-curse another cursed grave in the suburbs, because if anyone will know, it’s Cooper.

“Trish!” is the answer he gets, no hesitation, proving him right. “Short lady, short black hair?” Cooper looks up from his sigil drawing, real expectant, like there’s any fucking shot of Luke knowing that information in advance, but he doesn’t look disappointed when Luke shrugs, just excited to explain more. “She knows so much about physical performance and clowning as an art form, it’s amazing. Did you know there’s an elite clown college on Manitoulin Island?”

Luke thinks about the implications of a remote island populated by clowns. “Horror movie,” he decides.

“Right?” Cooper grins, delighted by the idea. “And, actually, I was reading once about the history of why clowns are so scary and it all started way before they started being considered as children’s entertainment—”

Luke sits down next to him, finishes the rest of the cleansing sigil so he can keep listening to Cooper telling him about clowning as early political satire for as long as he feels like doing it.

Even when they’re hanging out in a cemetery in Brampton, being with Cooper is easy. Luke doesn’t have to worry about fucking up the way he fucks up most times he talks to other people, because Cooper doesn’t have a million expectations for him to let down. Or—that’s not true, because Cooper does expect things from him, but expectation feels less heavy when it’s coming from him, more like faith. Like when Luke does fuck up, or when he has stupid embarrassing baggage about touch, Cooper doesn’t think that those things are Luke being a fragile wimp or irresponsible jackass or anything that he can’t come back from.

Cooper’s a good friend to Luke without even trying. Luke wants, to an extent that feels more like need, to be good at being Cooper’s friend too, and so he doesn’t push it, when they never do get back to the Carlton stuff that night.

He can’t fault Cooper for not noticing the potential weirdness. It’s about the only thing Cooper’s not noticing, because even by Kepley standards, Cooper’s been doing the absolute most. More mornings than not, Luke gets to the hideout to find Cooper already there, already onto the next haunting. The book stuff is out of Luke’s wheelhouse, but he’s pretty sure the latest additions, all titles about demons and lakes and the actual occult, not hockey occult, are leagues above and beyond anything that came out of Pacett’s lore files.

Luke’s an ambitious guy. He respects it, the urge to get better all the time. To do more, and if anyone can pull it off, it’s Coop, but Luke sort of thought the intense focus would mellow out after the first month or so of the season, and it’s just. Not.

“It means so much to people,” Cooper says, after Luke watches him raise his hand to volunteer when the team requests someone to go do a dinner at the food bank, the latest in the never-ending PR ops that the franchise does to make itself important in the city. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Maybe, but Luke’s not sure when exactly Cooper plans on sleeping. “Because Scary Demon Lady is trying to turn you evil?”

“…and because it’s the right thing to do,” Cooper insists, with that tone he gets that means he considers the conversation closed.

Anyone who thinks you can’t be the nicest person on earth and also just absolutely pigheaded stubborn hasn’t met Cooper Kepley.

Luke does what he can. Opts, instead of adding another thing to Cooper’s plate with the steadily growing Carlton suspicions, to sign up before Cooper can for the monthly hospital visit, which means that Luke ends up spending an entire day trying and only mostly succeeding at not teaching any sick children how to cuss.

“You’re good with them,” one of the nurses tells him, offering him a bottle of water as Luke takes a breather in a corner from people looking at him like he matters.

“No, I’m not,” he says, automatic. He accepts the water, though, counts it as good luck that the nurse gets distracted by a small child gleefully shouting “FUCK!” from across the playroom—okay, so he didn’t succeed that much at the not cussing thing—and leaves him alone.

He tugs down his mask and takes a swig as Krish, the other guy co-opted into today’s visit, jogs over. He’s got a bunch of hearts drawn on his face in magic marker, a rare concession of his usual vanity.

“I really do appeal to all ages,” Krish declares. From anyone else, it’d be a joke. Hot people are delusional.

They spend another hour or so playing legos and doing crafts with the kids, which is kind of fun, if Luke ignores all of the extremely depressing context.

When they’re heading out, falling into step on the way to the exit, Krish says, conversational, “The little guys are inspiring, huh?”

“Not really,” Luke says, hands in his pockets. Kids can tolerate a lot, he knows that as well as anyone. He doesn’t see anything inspirational about them having to, with no other option.

A nurse pushes a cart of supplies past them. They make it to the parking garage in silence, which is too good to be true.

“Cap said we should lay off you,” Krish offers. Still casual as anything, but—it’s a question, Luke thinks. A mildly guilty one. “With the hookups thing.”

“You’re not capable of saying anything that would upset me, Beharry,” Luke says, flat, even as he’s internally reeling over the humiliating fact that Lunch is going around telling people to be careful with him.

Krish pulls a face. “Okay, rude. I’m being so considerate of your grieving process right now.”

“I don’t have one,” Luke says, and that, at least, makes Krish look thoughtful, for like, ten seconds.

“So I can continue chirping your, like, cannibal fuckbuddy for trying to demolish your neck the other day, or—”

Luke tells him to fuck off in a way that he assumes adequately falls within the boundaries of teammate-mean, too distracted over being forcibly coddled to think too much on it, and then he gets back to his place and learns that Cooper took it upon himself to redo all the protective wards at both rinks instead of resting, so the whole day was kind of for nothing, anyway.

“Seriously, Coop?” he mumbles, swiping away the notification, frustrated, before caving a second later and opening it to send a proper response. He kicks his shoes off as he types and overshoots the doormat, sending a sneaker thudding against the box of his dad’s stuff.

Luke glowers at it on his way past.

The box is exactly where it’s been since it got delivered, sitting there like a speed bump in Luke’s hallway. Decidedly non trash-compacted.

The contents, because fuck off, obviously Luke looked at the contents, were boring. A whole bunch of nothing. Folded shirts. A wedding ring. Photos of his dad and Hannah Cahill, because his dad was nothing if not a fucking creep, keeping them like trophies all these years.

Then again, they’re still sitting in Luke’s apartment, so.

He drops to his knees and takes them out again now. No good reason to—they’re ripped in half, his dad cut out of every one, but that just makes them pictures of a possessed woman. If any photos ever existed of her and Luke together, his dad didn’t bother keeping them.

Grief counselling. Luke stares down at the photos and almost laughs at the idea.

His dad’s not worth missing, and Hannah Cahill wasn’t Luke’s to miss in the first place, the only tether between them the fact that she had her life fucked over by the same guy who fucked over Luke’s. Not really parents, either of them, and so he’s got nothing to grieve, whether Larsson calls his bluff or not.

A sliver of white. One of the photos must’ve fallen, wedged under a corner of the box. Luke tugs it free. It’s from his parents’ wedding, the backdrop the hideous peach-coloured walls of the party room at the rec centre.

Hannah Cahill’s smile, in this photo, isn’t anything like the one in the yearbook he looked at all the time as a kid. Here, her smile is more of a smirk, almost through the camera, an edge of meanness to it, and all at once, the expression is the most familiar thing Luke’s ever seen.

He shoves the photo back in the box with the others, slamming the lid back on top. Past stays in the past.

More important things:

Luke does what he wants, and not a thing more. He reads the list Cooper made of Potential Demon Explanations. He pretends not to be eyeing the standings to make sure they’re still on track for playoffs. He stays out late so Artem, pointless through seven, can take shots on him instead of on Cooper. He accidentally-on-purpose starts a scrum when one of the Canucks doesn’t know how to back the fuck out of his crease after the whistle.

In Seattle, a free night before their game, he meets random guy number four, whose apartment has a bunch of pride flags on the wall. Maybe Luke should start screening for tacky interior design.

“Woah,” says random guy number four, this skinny, nerdy looking dude. “You’re tall.”

Oh, good, this one small talks. “It was on the profile.”

“Yeah, but.” The guy laughs, mostly at himself, and lets his hand go snaking around Luke’s hip. Luke’s skin crawls a little. Not guy number four’s fault. Not bad either.

Luke debates pushing through it. Decides—

“Let me do it,” he says, stepping out of the guy’s grip, backing him up toward the wall. “Hands off.”

It’s why this was the best way of doing the hookup thing. This guy has no idea who Luke is, is free to invent a version of him out of what he thinks he knows, that Luke’s a tall guy who takes control because he likes it that way.

Luke tries it on, being that guy, and it feels good and goes how he wants it to go and he barely retreats to the distant place in the back of his head at all, mostly, for most of it.

Still, he reflects, back in his clothes and pushing through the revolving door at the hotel later that night. It’s not as fun when he’s the only one doing the touching, which is frustrating. How can he want a thing and still be scared of it?

He jabs at the button for the elevators. Realizes, waiting, that his shirt’s inside out. Fucking great. At least the lobby’s empty.

There’s a little ping as the leftmost of the two elevators gets to the ground floor first. Luke heads over and stops in his tracks as the doors slide open to reveal, standing perfectly still, Carlton the Bear.

“Jesus fuck.” Luke refrains from clutching his heart like a scandalized old lady, but not by much. It never really gets less jarring coming face to face with someone in a massive bear costume. “Uh. Trish, right?”

Trish doesn’t move. Doesn’t say a word, just stands there against the back wall of the elevator, eyes two blank discs, smile fixed in place.

Luke takes a step back. “Are you not allowed to talk even off the clock, or…”

Trish takes one step forward, matching him exactly. Doesn’t react otherwise.

Mascots don’t travel with the team.

Luke moves back again, deliberate. Trish moves forward.

Luke… isn’t sure that this is Trish.

There’s an incongruently pleasant ‘ding’ as the other elevator arrives in the lobby, and Luke breaks the staring contest and sprints for it, no hesitation.

He’s betting on himself to be quicker than whoever or whatever is in the Carlton costume, diving for the free elevator as he hears padded footsteps behind him. He makes it there first, hammering on the ‘close doors’ button with a closed fist, knowing that he’s got seconds, if that.

“C’mon,” he urges as the doors start to slide shut, painfully slowly. Too fucking slow: an arm is flung forward from outside, blocking the doors, and Luke flinches into the corner, readying himself for what’s next, which turns out to be—

“Oh, hey.” Lunch looks surprised to see Luke there, zero concern about a haunted bear mascot that may or may not have just been preparing to chase Luke into a confined space. “Wasn’t expecting anyone else to still be out.”

Luke swallows, hard, still in fight-or-flight. Not a bear. Just his captain. Lunch went out with his in-laws like he does every time they’re in the Pacific Northwest. Luke knows that.

He peers behind Lunch, through the closing doors as he hits the button to take them to their floor. The lobby is empty.

What the fuck.

Luke sinks back into his corner, too shaken to be properly relieved. Immediately regrets not working harder to school his impression into something nonchalant, because Lunch turns to squint at him, and Luke has to watch as he takes in the messed-up hair and inside-out shirt and what Luke can only assume are giant letters floating over his head that spell out ‘JUST HAD SEX’ in flashing neon print, no hickey required. Goddamnit.

“We don’t have a curfew,” Luke says, defensive, and immediately regrets it. He doesn’t owe anyone an explanation. He’s an adult.

“I didn’t say anything,” Lunch says, real neutral.

“Good.” Luke folds his arms. Tighter, then, around himself, because—fuck, it’s all just a lot, tonight, the goodbad sex and the fucking bear. All of it. He shivers, a full body thing. Forces out a deep breath.

“Kinda jumpy there, bud?” Lunch asks. Not mocking, but worried, like Luke hasn’t been conspicuously avoiding being near him for the last week.

“Don’t—” Luke starts to scold, and what comes out is, “Don’t tell people.”

About him being scared, is what he thinks he means. Scared about sex. Scared in general. Whatever the fuck Lunch thinks Luke is at this point.

Luke sees Lunch’s forehead crease with concern. He doesn’t see more, because he escapes from the elevator at an almost-run the second the doors open, but fuck it, it’s not like he’s got a ton of dignity anyways.

The shadowy silence of his room feels like a cold compress, that much of a relief. Artem’s already passed out in the bed by the window. He sleeps like a rock. It seems like a good idea.

Luke lays down face-first on his bed, not bothering to change.

He has to do something about the blatantly haunted mascot, probably. He’s going to have to tell Coop, more shit for him to worry about. Tomorrow.

Luke rolls onto his back. Checks his phone for the first time in hours. He gets texts, these days, more than ever before. A link from Mikko to some restaurant he wants to try. Some article his and Coop’s goalie coach forwarded to them both about meditation. Thanks from the children’s hospital for the other day. A message to get home safe from random guy number four, which is a wild misread of their non-relationship, but an objectively nice gesture.

Too many nice fucking gestures. People in Luke’s business, more goodbad, more things he never asked for because they inevitably end with people pulling a Justin Lim and looking worried about him.

Gross.

Luke’s clicking out of his messaging app when he sees Cooper active. Texts him, half serious, go to bed.

The typing bubble appears instantly, and Coop replies with two thumbs up. Luke sends back two thumbs down, gets a read receipt and waits, but no reply comes.

It’s not like Cooper.

Luke is trying, he’s trying to be the kind of friend Cooper deserves. He’s just—shit at it, first of all, not sure how much of the friend stuff is pushing and how much is trust. How much of the pit in his stomach, the one that’s been there on and off since seeing Cooper utterly unaware of anything but his notes at a hotel restaurant at ass o’clock in the morning on Halloween, is justified worry and how much of it is just Luke being a clingy fucking freak who hates the idea of Cooper finding a better problem to focus on than him.

Luke watches him, the next day. Cooper plays the way he always does, a steadying influence in the net who knows when to freeze the puck to slow down the game and when to move it forward. Next game, back at home, Luke’s got the net, and he allows two, but locks it down in the third so the team can come back for the win.

Out for the third star saluting the crowd deal, Luke veers wide to avoid Carlton, who’s out on the ice posing for pictures, being cute and cuddly and all the stuff he’s supposed to be. He—she, it’s Trish this time, Luke’s almost certain—doesn’t show any sign of recognition of Luke from Seattle.

He’s less certain when Carlton’s standing outside the dressing room post-showers.

Even less when Carlton takes up a position by the door to the parking garage, watching blankly as Luke and Cooper pass.

“Listen,” Luke tells Coop, heads ducked together once they’re in the garage. He spares a glance over his shoulder, to where Carlton’s still standing in the exact same spot, unmoving. “I didn’t want to say anything ‘til I was sure, but…”

He trails off. Ahead of them, standing next to a sedan and rifling through her purse, is a short lady with a box-dyed, black pixie cut.

Luke looks back toward the exit. The lighting makes Carlton a silhouette, an oversized outline of a cartoon animal.

“Who’s that?” he asks, pointing at the woman ahead of them.

Cooper looks to where Luke’s directing him. “Oh, that’s Trish.”

Yeah, Luke figured as much.

He looks at Cooper, pointed. Watches Cooper realize in real time what he’s seeing, which is that Trish is on the far side of the lot, by her car, and Carlton the Bear is still Carlton the Bear, across the garage from the person supposed to be wearing the costume.

“Luke,” Cooper says, slowly. “Do you think there might be something weird about the mascot?”

---

Stakeouts always look less boring in the movies. This one looks like Luke and Cooper spending the night in a different equipment closet than the one they’re usually spending the night in, and that novelty is where the excitement begins and ends.

The shelves are full of hockey shit, including the Carlton costume, the body laid out flat, the head sitting next to it, separate, with its cartoon teddy bear smile. When they got here, Luke turned it to face away from their spot across the room, because the eyes were freaking him out.

The plan is simple: sit and stare ‘til the bear does something undeniably haunted, at which point—

“—we kill it,” Luke finishes, determined.

“Or help it resolve its unfinished business to move on,” Cooper corrects.

“It’s a bear,” Luke says, then, catching himself, “It’s a bear costume.” So much creepier.

They settle into the cramped quarters, Cooper running through the 101 of Carlton the Bear facts while Luke plays fetch with Puck and an actual puck, amusing himself watching it get snatched out of the air and seem to hover with every catch.

“So Carlton debuted as the mascot in 1995, against the Isles,” Cooper recites. “And mascots are kind of inherently uncanny, but he’s a really cute one, which was super intentional because his whole reason for existence was brand protection, actually!”

An hour in, Cooper’s moved onto mascot facts more generally.

“—and then there’s stuff like ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’, if we’re sticking strictly to horror, and also lots of furry lore that I didn’t dive into.”

“Let’s keep not diving into the furry lore,” Luke says, sprawled out and using Puck’s belly as a pillow as he does his eye tracking work, pausing every so often to check on the Carlton suit again. No movement.

By hour three, they’ve moved past mascots and onto real bears.

“Most of them leave you alone,” Luke says, shaking his head. “I used to see them all the time.” A couple of times, if any got too close, the lake would splash a fuckton of water on their heads. It’d always make Luke laugh.

“I mean, we got a couple too, back home, but polar bears are a whole different thing, Luke,” Cooper leans forward, a little kid telling scary stories around a campfire. “They’re hypercarnivores, one of the few species to actively see humans as food.”

“Yeah?” Luke never did the campfire stories thing, but he can’t help but be pulled in by this one. ‘Cause of the eerie silence of the rink around them. Probably ‘cause of Cooper.

“Yeah.” Cooper nods, very serious. “They’re really patient hunters. They sit by holes in the ice and wait for seals to surface. For hours, they just… wait.”

At the same time, they turn toward the Carlton suit.

Unmoving and inanimate, nothing out of the ordinary.

Hour five, long after they’ve resigned themselves to scrolling on their phones and showing each other any memes worth showing, Luke looks up from a compilation of whatever the fuck ‘Cooper Kepley-Core Moments’ are and realizes that the guy himself, never not a hundred and ten percent locked in to the even the most tedious parts of ghost hunting, has fallen asleep.

Luke sits up slow, careful not to make any noise that might disturb Coop or Puck, who’s snoring softly somewhere in the maybe four feet of open floor space. Cooper has nodded off right where he’s sitting, his head lolling forward in a way that makes Luke’s neck hurt just to look at.

Luke should wake him. There’s not a chance in hell Luke’s going to wake him. Sleep’s hard enough to come by during the season even if you don’t have a side gig as a hero hard carrying a backup when you expected to have a partner.

Luke can keep watch for the both of them. He’s done harder things. He does it now, the watching. He watches the Carlton suit ‘til his eyes hurt.

He watches, more of the time than not, Cooper.

Fast asleep, Cooper’s mouth is slightly open, his hair falling in his face. Gold-brown freckles darken the bridge of his nose and tops of his cheeks, like even in the middle of winter, he’s never not just out of the sun. He looks warm to the touch.

Luke doesn’t. Touch. Obviously.

He hugged Cooper, once, at a rest stop midway between Swift Hawk and Toronto. Didn’t even think twice about it ‘til he was already doing it, none of the hyping himself up he has to do these days before letting someone in his space. Chalked it up to new-soul emotional hysteria and raw gratitude.

He wasn’t scared at all, when he hugged Cooper.

Then, the realization coming with a double take: Cooper’s eyes are open. For how long? Luke scoots back, making more space between them, because Coop looks disoriented in that just-woke-up way, even if it doesn’t last long.

“Was I—” Cooper’s voice comes out sleep-rough, deeper than usual, and it’s usually deep. It’s…intimate, is the word Luke’s brain provides, a glimpse at a Cooper, freshly awake, that isn’t Luke’s to see. To hear.

Luke cuts him off more forcefully than he means to, thrown off by his brain’s bullshit word choice. This is what happens when kids do sports instead of reading, their mental vocabulary gets fucked forever. “Happens when you stay up ‘til two in the morning.”

He doesn’t mean to bring up the other night, in Seattle. It’s just that Coop’s never not responded to a text from him before, and Luke has to joke about it because he’s obviously not going to ask, because that would be pathetic.

Cooper doesn’t call him that, just counters, lightly, “You know that because you were also awake at two in the morning.” And it’s—

He’s never had a problem challenging Luke—it’s all he does, sometimes, is challenge Luke, for better and for worse—but Cooper says that and it’s there again, Luke fucking hears it clear as day, that odd, distinctly un-Cooper-like distance in his voice. Challenging not for its own sake, but so he won’t get challenged back.

Luke could almost pretend not to see it, when Cooper was rambling about polar bear facts or falling asleep looking like an extra-angelic version of himself, but it’s there. He didn’t go home for Christmas, and Cooper loves going home for Christmas. He didn’t reply to Luke, even when he was on his phone. Now this. Something’s bothering Cooper, and he’s not talking about it.

Luke’s a fucking hypocrite, he guesses, getting on someone else’s ass about having secrets.

He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do about it. Doesn't exactly relish the thought of hitting Coop with the ‘yeah, actually, I was out having kind of shitty gay sex with a guy whose name I don’t know because I’m trying to get normal about touch, oh yeah, I’m into men, by the way!’ while they’re alone in a literal closet and he just got caught watching Cooper sleep. Cooper has more important things to worry about. They both do.

So:

“Could’ve been sleep texting,” Luke says, like a coward.

Cooper tilts his head, his gaze somewhere around Luke’s shoulder. “Did you argue with Cap again?”

“I never argued with him.”

“You’re just not talking to him,” Cooper says, and Luke leans his head back against the wall, a small thud for an answer.

Whatever internal calculations Cooper’s doing, maybe just satisfied that Luke’s not going to pry anymore, he allows him the out. “Wake me up if I doze off again, okay?”

“Coop,” Luke says. “If you need to sleep—”

“I know how much sleep I need,” Cooper says, and he says it with more of an edge than he normally does. Like he’s insulted, almost, and of all the people Luke will happily insult on an hour-by-hour basis, Coop’s not one of them.

“I never said you don’t,” Luke says, surprised by the response, and the moment teeters on the edge of awkwardness, terse in a way that hasn’t existed between the two of them in forever.

“Something’s wrong,” Cooper says, and Luke—hypocrite, hypocrite—tenses up again.

“There’s nothing wr—”

“No, Luke,” Cooper interrupts, which he doesn’t do unless it’s important, him and his manners. “Look.”

And Luke does. At an empty shelf.

“Goddamnit.” He scrambles to his feet, on Cooper’s heels as they race into the hall, footsteps echoing in the empty building. “How long has it been gone?”

Cooper’s shaking his head, looking this way and that for any trace of the mascot. Too many doors, too many options. The thing could be anywhere.

From maybe twenty feet down the hall, Puck barks; Luke spins toward the noise in time to see a flash of white faux fur round a corner.

“Coop—”

“I see it!”

They take off at a run after Carlton, and Luke takes the corner at full speed, unwilling to let it get out of sight again, only—

It’s not out of sight. Carlton the Bear is standing in the middle of the hallway, backlit by the emergency exit sign, completely unmoving.

So, fuck this, actually.

Luke holds his ground, hears Coop approaching from behind him. Watching for the slightest twitch of a muscle, any indication that the mascot’s alive or anything close, and gets none.

“Trish?” Cooper calls, tentative.

No response. Worth a try.

Luke and Cooper exchange a look before, wordlessly, beginning to advance toward the costume. Beginning, key word there, because before they can get far, Luke’s leg nudges against something blocking his way.

“What’s the matter, bud?” Cooper asks, and Puck, who’s planted himself in between the two of them and the frozen-still mascot, just growls, low and threatening.

Smart dog. Smarter than Luke is. He edges around Puck, works up the nerve and then, once he’s close enough, lashes out and hits Carlton the Bear right in his oversized bear head.

The head falls off, revealing an empty costume; it’s upright for a second longer, impossibly, before crumpling to the ground.

Luke swallows. “Okay,” he says. “So, the mascot’s alive. Great.” He prods at the head with a foot. Nothing. Whatever was animating the suit is long gone. Because they scared it off or because it got what it wanted?

When Luke looks back to Cooper to figure out next steps, Cooper’s not looking at Carlton, but at the space where Puck is, or was.

“He’s not alive,” Cooper says, slow. He’s having an idea, putting disparate clues together in a way Luke would literally never in his life be able to. “That’s the point.”

“More details,” Luke requests, and Cooper obliges, starting to pace one side of the hallway to the other as he talks.

“Part of why the organization decided to switch to a costume mascot is because they didn’t want to deal with a real animal dying again, after Puck,” he explains. “A bear costume isn’t supposed to be able to die.”

“Brand protection, right,” Luke remembers, catching up. Then, “Why’d you say it like that? ‘Supposed to’?”

“They do minor redesigns of the suit every decade or so,” Cooper says, and the way his face is lighting up, Luke knows this is the crux of the new idea. “A thing that never changes would have no reason to come back as a haunting because it would never be gone, but if the original Carltons have been getting replaced just like Puck did, and Puck came back as a ghost…”

“You think this is Old Carlton,” Luke finishes.

“I think this is Old Carlton,” Cooper confirms. “Come on!”

A year ago, Luke would’ve asked some clarifying questions before following the guy who took the net out from under him off on a wild goose chase at an ungodly hour of the morning after a mostly-failed all nighter. Today, though, Luke’s spent enough time seeing Leafs-related feelings turned into a cornucopia of haunted vaguely-sentient bullshit to find Cooper’s idea plausible, and to know that if he’s going to follow anyone, it’s Coop, plausible or not.

He follows.

They’re on a tight timeline, leaving for an overnighter against the Pens tomorrow evening. Today evening, now, so they don’t even bother going home post-stakeout, lingering around the practice facilities ‘til the lights go on in the office across the concourse, where the team and Hall of Fame archives are.

Luke fucking hates the archives. He chugs a coffee and tries to stay out of the smart people’s way, while Cooper watches over archivist Asra’s shoulder as she looks up old records.

“Here!” She claps her hands, all excited, because apparently Cooper just attracts equally friendly and enthusiastic people like moths to a flame. “The first Carlton the Bear costume we have on file.”

“You’re the best,” Cooper says, always ready to be amazed by his friends. “Where is it?”

“No idea,” Asra says, cheerily enough that it takes Luke a moment to register what she’s saying. When he and Cooper turn to look at her, she shrugs. “The file we have is a record of sale. We can’t keep all of the material history of the team.”

Never mind, Luke is going back to hating the archives.

They end up leaving with less information than they wanted to, their big lead reduced to a receipt from a Leafs-run auction eighteen years ago. The original Carlton suit, game-worn—which, ew, who would want that?—was sold to George Copeland, and Luke’s bracing himself for being put to work on one of Cooper’s deep dives into the lore files to dig up something more on the mystery buyer, but, as it happens, all it takes is a Google search.

“‘Inside The One-Man Museum of Local Leafs Collector’,” Cooper reads. “It’s from a decade back, but…”

Luke leans in to read along with him, or after him. The article, a fluff piece in the Guelph Mercury Tribune, has a photo of George Copeland, an unremarkable looking older white guy, posing in front of an absolute mess of blue and white, Leafs memorabilia stacked up right to the edges of the frame. ‘Amateur collector’, one line reads, but nothing about this guy’s collection looks amateur to Luke.

“It say where he lives?” he asks, already reaching for his keys.

“Lived,” Cooper corrects, eyes flying over a new webpage as he reads, and Luke gets one second left to hope that doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means before the universe remembers that he’s a Leaf and hope is a mistake. “He died four years ago… passed away peacefully… loving father of—okay, this could be something, one second.”

George Copeland makes up for the inconvenience of being dead by having a daughter who’s alive, and local. Eight hours left ‘til the airport.

Luke and Cooper go to school.

The university campus is straight out of Luke’s wildest nightmares. Thousands of people in identical Aritzia Super Puffs, rushing between classes and blocking the icy sidewalks with lines for food trucks that reek of deep fryer oil. Everyone who passes looks around Luke’s age, more twenty-something year olds than he’s ever seen in one place at one time.

It’s all so… normal.

Luke can picture Cooper as one of them. He’s already got the backpack, his head down as he follows the map on his phone. He could be texting his friends, planning to meet up after class and study.

Luke hasn’t brought up the moment of weirdness from last night. He doesn’t know how to. Doesn’t even know if he should, even—Cooper seems fine. Locked-in on the current haunting, sure, but happy about it, and he made it real clear that he didn’t want Luke prying. Which is fair. It’s not like Luke’s been eager about people inviting themselves into his business, either.

“This way,” Cooper declares, looking up from Google Maps and forging a path through the crowd.

Luke follows, like always.

In the engineering building, after kicking snow off their boots on the steps, they go two floors up, away from the worst of the crowds. Up here, it’s mostly offices, posters for Engineers Without Borders or Queer Student Union on doors.

The door with the ‘Karyn Copeland’ nameplate is open, and inside, there’s a whiteboard with math all over it, a kettle plugged in on a bookshelf, and Karyn Copeland herself, sitting at her desk, scrolling through an email inbox.

Luke raps on the door twice.

“Hi, Professor Copeland,” Cooper says, with a wave.

“Oh, wow, someone actually came to office hours.” Copeland beckons them in, shows absolutely zero recognition of either of them as she does. Leafs fandom doesn’t run in the family, apparently. “This almost never happens. Please, sit.”

Luke does, shifting his weight in the slightly-off-balance armchair while Coop makes friendly conversation, all the ‘hi how are you’ stuff Luke never bothers with. Luke lets him do his thing ‘til Copeland seems acceptably buttered up, then cuts in with the lie, comfortably, “So, we’re studying sports artefacts.”

Maybe a new record for him: one sentence, and the professor’s looking at him like he’s speaking in tongues. “For CME525?”

“We came across some stuff about your dad when we were doing our research,” Cooper says, all trustworthy and reasonable. More reasonable than Luke, at least. “He had a really extensive collection of Toronto Maple Leafs memorabilia, including the original Carlton the Bear costume, and we were just wondering if you still have access to—”

“My father and I weren’t close.”

It’s instant, a wall slamming down. If what Luke said got Dr. Copeland suspicious, Cooper’s explanation, instead of smoothing things over, has made her withdraw entirely, her voice gone from open and friendly to clipped on every word. And her face—

Luke recognizes that expression. It’s the one he’s made every time someone has offered condolences for his dad since last summer.

Copeland’s knuckles are white. “Him dying and leaving me with the task of disposing of a shed full of collectable junk for a team that I couldn’t possibly care less about didn’t magically make us any closer.” She seems to collect herself, averting her eyes for a long moment. “I’m sorry, I don’t have an answer to your question.”

Cooper doesn’t get it. He keeps talking. “It’s really just one specific item that it’s really important for us to—”

“We get it,” Luke talks over him, standing up from his seat and hitting Coop on the arm ‘til he does the same. “Thanks. Sorry.”

Cooper’s a team guy: he trails Luke out, doesn’t comment on the unceremonious exit ‘til they’re well down the hallway, almost at the staircase.

“Hey,” he says then, catching up to Luke’s full-speed retreat. “Uh, hey, so that was our best lead.” It only comes out as a question instead of a reproach because it’s Cooper.

At more of a distance from Karyn Copeland’s face at the mention of her father, Luke’s coming around to embarrassment at his reaction. Not regret. “She said she didn’t know anything.”

“We barely asked any questions, we need to—”

“Cooper,” Luke says, louder than he means to, enough that Cooper stops and actually listens.

To what? Luke doesn’t know this lady. He knows that. He just—he knew. He squeezes his eyes shut, hard, trying to stop sounding so angry. He’s not, at Cooper. “She didn’t want to talk about her piece of shit dad, so we’re not going to make her, okay?”

He’s asking something stupid, blowing their one promising clue for this haunting on a whim. Risking the team, probably. Cooper’s the one who should be angry.

Instead, Cooper just nods. “Okay,” he says, simple. Trusting Luke’s call, just like that, because that’s the kind of friend he is. Luke doesn’t get choked up about it, because he’s good at emotions now. Fuck off. “We’ll find a new lead. Maybe some other auction records, or if we can track down the person who used to play Carlton—”

He’s grabbing the door, holding it open for Luke to pass through, when there’s a voice from behind them.

“Wait.”

Professor Copeland is jogging down from her office, stopping up in front of them. Looking only at Luke.

“He wasn’t,” she says, almost out of breath. Not, Luke thinks, from the jog. The words spill out in a rush. “He wasn’t a piece of shit. It was complicated.”

Luke fucking hates that word. He hates even more that she’s looking at him with the same kind of recognition that he felt in her office, not recognition because he’s in the NHL but because she’s looking at him and going, oh, this guy’s like me, we’re both messed up about our dead dads.

If Karyn Copeland’s father had any redeeming qualities, he was nothing like Luke’s; if she has any mixed feelings about anyone who raised her, she’s nothing like Luke. People keep acting like they know him, and they just don’t.

Luke looks down, shoving his hands in his pockets.

Copeland addresses Cooper instead. “My father’s collection is in his workshop at the old house,” she says. “I don’t know about any specific contents, but if you’d like to look around for your project, I can get one of the neighbours to open the place up for you.”

Holy shit.

Cooper looks as incredulous as Luke feels. “That’s—that would be amazing, thank you, I just—I thought you said you got rid of it?”

Professor Copeland makes a face, a thing that means to be a smile. “I meant to,” she says. “Straight to the trash compactor.” She shrugs, wry. “Couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

Luke thinks of the cardboard box taking up real estate in his apartment, a smirk in a wedding photo, and feels sick to his stomach.

Back outside, it’s quieter than before. People in class, probably, or hiding in a library somewhere, the cold too sharp to linger any longer than necessary. Cooper and Luke are quiet too.

“I didn’t realize how she felt about her father,” Cooper says, eventually, once he’s done thinking whatever he’s been thinking. He turns to Luke, offers a smile. “Good looking out.”

Luke wants to lean into the praise and flinch away, both things at once. “I didn’t know it’d make her show us the collection.”

“I know you didn’t,” Cooper says. “You were just being kind.” He’s looking at Luke that way he does. Admiring. Giving Luke more credit than he deserves.

“We’re going to miss the flight if we don’t hurry,” Luke says, digging his nails into his palms, safe in his pockets. Not letting himself notice the way Cooper looks at him, at the deflection.

He wasn’t being kind. Luke’s not that. He’d trade the ability to clock the way Professor Copeland felt in a heartbeat, if it’d mean the past staying in the fucking past.

I’ve been figuring things out, he thinks, almost whining, just in his head, to the nobody there. And now this.

This, to whatever extent a haunted and maybe-sentient creepy as fuck mascot possessed by a precursor, still-creepy as fuck mascot living in some dead guy’s shed can get encompassed by this, is going to have to wait, because the team’s expected in Pittsburgh.

He and Cooper make it to the airport with time to spare, Toronto traffic and all. On the plane, Luke keeps finding himself peering over the backs of seats, expecting to see a giant, round mascot head. Stupid. He forces himself to sink lower in his seat, a bad impression of relaxation. Hood up, headphones on. He picks at his nails.

When someone sits next to him, he thinks, pleased, Cooper; then, when the thought occurs to him, the fucking bear. It’s neither.

“You mind?”

Yes. “Whatever.” Luke shrugs, retreating further into his hood as Lunch makes himself at home. He still hasn’t called Luke out for avoiding him. This is worse.

Lunch nods over at Cooper, two rows up, who’s got his own headphones on, muttering under his breath as he scrolls on his phone. “He said it’d be good if I cleared the air with you.”

“Of course he did,” Luke says, resigned. Cooper’s never met a problem he couldn’t solve, Luke at the top of that list.

“I’m sorry about what I said the other day,” is Lunch’s opener. Which. What? “It wasn’t my place.”

Luke mostly does apologies to make people leave him alone. He’s not sure what to do with one delivered this sincerely. “Whatever,” he says again, after a moment. Then, more awkwardly than he thought he was capable of being, “You’re the captain. I was late.”

“Yeah,” Lunch shrugs, and Luke gets the weirdest feeling that he’s just as surprised by Luke almost-returning the apology. “I mean, we’re all accountable to each other, that’s the team part, but I meant more what I assumed. About the touch stuff.”

Luke guesses he physically recoils in addition to emotionally, mentally, spiritually doing the same, because Lunch shuts his mouth and makes this aborted hands-up gesture, like, ‘that’s all’.

It’s embarrassing. All of this is embarrassing and bad and people don’t generally make a habit of apologizing to Luke, which makes it more of both, and all of that is, probably, why he runs his mouth.

“It’s not like it’s wrong,” he says, defiant, and his voice comes out sounding normal, only undercut by the fact that he’s pressed into the edge of his seat, as far as he can be from this conversation while still technically in it. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t, like, know what I want.” It sounds like he’s asking a question. He doesn’t mean it to be a question. “I know what I want to want.”

Justin Lim is, annoyingly, a pretty decent guy. He says, “that’s good,” instead of laughing hysterically at Luke being an incoherent loser, then, still casual, conversational, “You know I lost my mom when I was twenty-two?”

Luke didn’t.

The plane hums around them. Luke forgets how loud the ambient noise of it is, every time, until he doesn’t.

Lunch exhales. Not like he’s feeling any sort of way. Just. “It threw things really out of whack for me for a long time,” he says. “I wanted any distraction I could get. Did a lot of stuff I like to think I wouldn’t have done otherwise, just to feel like I was in control of something.”

Luke thinks, against his will, of random guy #1. There’s not much to think about, because Luke’s pretty sure he was back in the far-away, out-of-body part of his brain for most of the encounter. Choosing it, wanting it, liking it, even, parts of it, and still that.

Lunch looks at him, all understanding, and says, “I know the grief stuff’s not fun to talk about, but…”

And there it is again, because it’s always fucking there, the past showing up where it’s not wanted, crammed down Luke’s throat ‘til he can’t breathe around it.

He doesn’t know if it’s some pathetic attempt to live up to Cooper thinking he’s worth helping. Maybe just a last straw after months of having people think they understand and years of people willingly choosing not to.

“My dad wasn’t a loss,” Luke says, before he can talk himself out of it. “It’s not—I don’t have grief. I’m not like this because of grief, I don’t want anything from back then to have anything to do with what I have now, it’s—”

Poison. He breaks himself off before he can say it. Stupid. Running his mouth.

He can see Lunch processing what he said, picking his words carefully. “…Your dad wouldn’t have been cool with the person you were with, that night?”

He’s doing the pronouns game, gender neutral on purpose.

Luke notices. Obviously, Luke notices. ‘Person’ instead of ‘girl’ shouldn’t be the kind of thing he should have to be grateful for, and he makes it a point not to be, usually, for shit that no straight person would think twice about, but—

It’s nice. Even Cooper defaults to assuming.

He chews the inside of his cheek, knows Lunch is waiting for an answer, or a few of them. Knows what he’s thinking, too: homophobic but overall present small town dad, a son not knowing how to act with him gone. Complicated.

Luke’s dad hated everyone, including but not specifically gay people. Kind of progressive, by Swift Hawk standards. There’s massive gap between the stereotype of the bigoted hick father that he knows Lunch is imagining and the evil-to-the-core piece of shit that Luke actually grew up around. Too massive to explain, or to want to.

“No,” is what Luke settles for, quiet. “No, he wouldn’t have been cool with the guy I was with.”

The truth is a stupid and insufficient olive branch, because Luke is generally stupid and insufficient at this entire friendship bonding crap ordeal, but he sees Lunch understand what he’s said and work real hard to keep his expression entirely neutral. Avoiding spooking Luke, like Luke can’t tell that he’s mentally reviewing every single Please Don’t Be Loudly Homophobic So Our Franchise Doesn’t Get Sued presentation he’s been mandated to sit through at every training camp ever.

He’ll hand this to his captain: he recovers quick. “Don’t know how serious it is with whoever he is,” Lunch offers, casual. “But you should bring him around sometime. It doesn’t even need to be the whole team, Audrey loves an intimate dinner party.”

Luke tries not to be a massive bitch about this conversation. It’s hard. “It wasn’t serious.”

“Fair enough,” Lunch says, and, oh god, he’s starting to smile, the Maple Leafs Bullshit smile. Luke never should have enabled the friendship bonding crap. “You never think about finding something serious?”

Luke will singlehandedly crash this plane. “I don’t like people.”

“You like Coop.”

Luke glares at him, sharp, and only allows the point when it’s clear Lunch isn’t implying anything egregious. “I don’t like people other than Coop.”

“You like the team,” Lunch says.

“Uh, says who.”

Lunch laughs. “Team likes you too, bud.”

Luke forgets about the whole ‘trying not to be a bitch’ thing and scoffs, staring out the window instead of anywhere even close to this conversation. Whatever.

“Hey,” Lunch doesn’t continue ‘til Luke meets his eyes, uncharacteristically serious. “You know every guy in the room considers you family, right?”

Luke forgets how to breathe.

“Don’t say that,” he says, when he can manage words. It comes out barely more than a whisper.

“Why not?”

Lunch understands more than Luke expected him to. Not this. Not for lack of trying. Still.

That night, arena loud around him, Luke watches from the bench. His team, looking like they might actually stand a chance not just at the playoffs, but at a decent seed. Cooper in net, his eyes following the puck, only the slightest tilt of his head to either side a tell that he’s aware of everything else on the ice, too.

Back home, there’s a haunting waiting to be solved. Multiple of them, and a demon that Luke doesn’t doubt for a second is biting off more than she can chew, going after Cooper.

The word echoes in Luke’s head, same way it’s been doing all day, since his captain said it.

Family. Family.

Lunch said it like it’s simple. It’s not. It’s just not.

Accepting that you can want things and have things and feel things without it coming at the cost of your soul or someone else’s is one thing. Already a mindfuck, but one that Luke’s been kind of getting the hang of. Part of being a person.

Accepting that being a person means that other people get to have opinions on you showing up late to practice or about how you’re coping with a death or if their jokes are hurting your feelings or whether you’re having shitty and kind of uncomfortable sex just to prove to yourself that you can is a whole different story, one that Luke doesn’t know how to be part of. Cooper’s easy to care about, impossible not to care about—Luke’s tried and failed. Everyone else is complicated, and annoying, and fucking terrifying.

Not that he cares. Not that—

Fuck.

He’s been figuring things out. He doesn’t know how to figure out that. ‘Family’, as though that’s a word supposed to exist anywhere near Luke.

A ripped-in-half photo of a parent he doesn’t know, a smirk and knowing eyes and quiet in Luke’s head for the first time in years.

It’s not the same. None of it’s the same. Luke never asked for this many people involved in his life and his business. Coach looking at him with sympathy, Karyn Copeland looking at him like she understands, Cooper looking at him like he thinks Luke will ever even come close to being the kind of storybook hero he is to the core. Family means expectations, and accountability, and people. It’s the kind of thing that traps you all over again.

Luke is never, never being trapped again.

---

They lose bad, the kind of game you burn the tape for without looking back. Below the team’s standards, ‘cause the team’s got standards, now.

Optimism, Luke thinks, dry, staring out the window as Cooper drives them out of the city and west. It’s barely countryside, skirting and then past Guelph, but they pass road signs warning of horses and buggies, signs about a farmers market come summer, and Luke finds himself waiting to feel some kind of middle-of-nowhere recognition. He feels the opposite. Swift Hawk’s empty, but it’s wilderness. This place is empty on purpose, snow-covered farmland with occasional windbreaks, more-occasional houses. Maybe in summer, market and all, it’s nice, but this time of year, it’s just flat.

Nowhere to hide.

Coop’s driving playlist gets them to one of the farmhouse-style buildings, where they pick up a set of keys from the neighbour Karyn Copeland told they were coming, and from there, it’s only a couple minutes’ drive to the house where she grew up.

Luke stuffs his pockets full of salt. Cooper slings his backpack over his shoulders. They exchange nods, ready, and make their way in lockstep down the driveway, through ankle-deep snow.

The property looks like shit. There’s a sun-bleached FOR SALE sign crooked on the lawn, the realtor’s name obscured by more of the snow, no attempt at shoveling.

“This must be the workshop.” Cooper nods past the house, toward a shed. It’s bigger than Luke was expecting it to be, freestanding with a garage-style door, shut with heavy chains that rattle, real ominous, when Cooper lifts them to unlock the place.

“Promising,” Luke deadpans, and Cooper spares him a smile, letting the chain spill to the ground, the lock with it.

They lift the garage door together, with a horrendous creaking noise, and Luke immediately chokes on dust.

“Jesus,” he coughs, while Cooper waves a hand in front of his own face, swatting away stale air.

It’s obvious straight away that no one has touched this place since George Copeland bit it. Maybe before. His workshop is windowless, fifteen-by-something, and there are long-dead cobwebs up in the corners of the open doorway, no heating to speak of judging by the way Luke can see his breath even as he steps inside, because despite all the dust and cobwebs he does step inside, because holy shit.

Luke plays for the most merchandized team in the NHL. He semi-regularly gets dragged to an archival warehouse. This is, bar not a fucking place on earth, the most Toronto Maple Leafs stuff he’s ever seen under one roof.

He doesn’t even know where to look first. The walls are hung with signed photos and blue and white jerseys, shelves crammed two layers thick with figurines still in their boxes. More shelves, standing ones, and boxes, and plastic bins, and when Luke steps into the workshop, getting a better look, they’re all crammed full to bursting with date-labelled pucks and toques and stacks of old gameday programs.

“Oh wow,” Cooper says, a few feet in, at the other side of the workshop from Luke. He holds up a massive Leafs tapestry, sending up another cloud of dust as it unfurls. “I think this is hand-woven?”

Luke leaves the granny crafts to Coop, fascinated by the lamp sitting real precariously on the edge of a little folding table. The lampshade’s shaped like a goalie mask, emblazoned with a fanged cat. Sick. “There a bear costume in that box?”

Cooper shakes his head. “We might have to search.”

Of course they will.

Luke looks into the workshop, the rows of shelves now looking like the chore they are, instead of a novelty. He can’t tell how far back the place goes—the shed is windowless, the parts furthest from the open door falling into shadow, then total darkness. He tugs at the chain hanging from the ceiling, but the bare lightbulb doesn’t show any signs of life.

“My emergency kit’s got a flashlight,” Cooper says, already heading for the door. “I’ll get it from the car, be right back.”

“There’s not one on the pocketknife?” Luke asks, dry, and Cooper turns back to grin at him before jogging out of the garage.

“Multi tool!”

Luke listens to his footsteps ‘til they fade, on cement then dirt then crunching through snow. He doesn’t even know where to start, turning back toward the collection. He’s the last person on earth who can shit on someone for a hockey obsession, but he can’t relate to the stuff thing, doesn’t see the appeal of hoarding all the merch and souvenirs and crap if you’re not also going to be on the ice playing the game. That’s the fun part.

He decides to start with what’s nearest, heading toward the workbench, which is at least enough in the light that he can see. It looks like pretty standard fare—stray hockey cards, some faded scribbles on notepads. A few scattered tools, like George Copeland last-minute remembered this place was supposed to be more than a Leafs-geek mancave.

There are photos pinned up on a corkboard over the workbench. One of them’s a copy of the same picture from the article Cooper first found, the one of Copeland posing with his collection. Every other photo is of his daughter. A polaroid photo of Karyn as a little kid with braces and a fucking terrible bowl cut. Another print of her at some kind of graduation, in a cap and gown, grinning at the camera with her dad next to her.

They look happy. Real happy.

Complicated, Karyn Copeland said.

Luke scowls and looks away, back down at the desk so he won’t have to see the photos. It’s depressing, is what it is. A kid wanting more from her dad, even when she wasn’t a kid at all anymore; the dad left alone in this dusty as hell, miserable place, not understanding how he screwed up, how easy it would have been to fix if he’d just tried.

He can’t help himself. Luke peeks up one more time, gets one more look at the photo of Karyn Copeland and her dad smiling with their arms around each other’s shoulders, and that’s the last thing he sees before the garage door slams shut, plunging the entire workshop into darkness.

“Hey!” Luke is at the door in a heartbeat. Too late, anyhow: he fumbles blindly against the sheet metal, feeling for a handle or something. Finds one, heaves upwards.

The door doesn’t budge.

Cooper’s there, then, almost as quick as Luke was, on the other side. “Luke?” His hammering on the door echoes, magnified in the enclosed space. “Luke!”

“I’m okay,” Luke calls, still disoriented by the complete lack of vision, the bone-deep fear clawing its way up his spine at being trapped somewhere he didn’t choose to be. Only thing that lets him stave off panic is the knowledge that Cooper’s directly opposite him, only separated by the door, already thinking of a way to help.

Luke leans his forehead against the metal. Fucking grow up and do something about this. He didn’t see what happened. The place is old and hasn’t been maintained in years. A chain or something probably snapped.

“Anything?” he asks, trying not to sound worried.

“This kind of prefab usually isn’t all that well-insulated,” Cooper says. He’s also trying not to sound worried. That’s worrying. “Try from the bottom.”

The bottom. Luke drops to a knee, feeling toward the hair-thin sliver of sunlight at his feet, trying to find any kind of a handhold. It’s too small. He tries to lift anyways, scrambling for purchase. Ends up pushing himself back to his feet, hands sliding up against the metal, useless.

“It’s not budging.” Cooper’s voice is strained with effort. If both of them combined aren’t strong enough to move this door, the door’s not going to move. “If I can find something skinny enough to use as a lever, maybe I can pry it open…”

Luke isn’t an invincibly perfect goalie anymore, but he’s spent his whole life getting good at knowing when he’s about to get hit. He hears a whisper of noise behind his head, is dodging reflexively before he even consciously knows the sound for what it is, the movement of a fist through air.

Tucking and rolling, Luke barely makes it out of the way of the massive punch thudding into the garage door, precisely where his head was.

The impact has heft, not like what it would sound like when a tiny, acrobatic person in a plush mascot costume hits something.

A growl, low and deadly, sounds in the garage. Not like a person at all, tiny or otherwise.

Like a fucking bear.

Muffled through metal, Cooper’s panicked hammering at the door fades into the background, all of Luke’s attention pinpointed onto the haunted, not-so-fake-anymore bear that he’s trapped with in a windowless death box.

Trying real hard not to remember any of Cooper’s polar bear supercarnivore facts, Luke stays crouched, frozen in place. He blinks hard, willing his eyes to adjust faster and make use of whatever negligible sunlight is seeping under the garage door. The most the light does is make the workshop into layered shadows instead of uniform darkness, barely anything.

Enough, though, that Luke can tell that one of the shadows is moving, maybe seven feet away from him, if that. Carlton is moving erratically, still flinging itself at the door. Not taking a swing like Luke first thought, he realizes, but reaching, desperately grasping, too much force behind it.

Distracted, is what it is.

Cooper’s frantic knocking has stopped—please fucking god let him be finding Luke a way out—but Luke bets on the noise of Carlton’s own movements being enough cover and starts crawling along the length of the wall, painfully slowly.

All he’s got to do is make it to the work bench. There are tools. Sharp things. Like fuck is Luke getting mauled to death by a haunted corporate furry without taking a chunk out of it first.

He glances behind him, toward the door. Can’t see the shadow moving anymore.

From somewhere to his left, there’s another growl. Was it from the left? He can’t tell, the sound seeming to come from everywhere at once. Luke barely dares to breathe, skin crawling with the sensation of being stalked. Seen without seeing.

Four feet, max, ‘til Luke makes it to the workbench.

He thinks that immediately before his knee lands on a fallen hockey card, and there’s the dragging sound of paper against cement, and the mascot lunges.

Luke makes it to the workbench, in the end, by being tackled into it by Carlton. Wood splinters under him as the tabletop breaks under their combined weight, tools scattering around them as they go skidding toward the shelves of memorabilia.

Luke is fighting before his back hits the ground, swinging at whatever faux-fur is in reach. It takes about half a second for him to realize something’s not right: his arms are the only things free, the rest of him pinned by a weight heavier than any person in any costume should realistically be. And the lack of give when his punches land, like he’s hitting straight into muscle, like—

“The fuck,” he gasps out, disbelieving, as Carlton the Bear roars down at him, teeth bared and hot, rancid breath on Luke’s face.

There’s something grotesque about it, the cartoonish harmlessness of a costume at odds with the way it’s morphing into something else, something almost-alive. A bear costume isn’t supposed to be able to die, Cooper said. It definitely isn’t supposed to be this.

“Get—off—” Luke struggles, pointlessly, against the mascot’s weight. It’s crushing his chest, hammering down blows that he can barely shift out of the way of. Escape plan’s fucked, off the table. Do something else.

He feels along the floor, desperate. No wrench, no screwdriver, nothing stabbable, just—fuck, what feels like a jersey, more hockey cards. The fucking dead dad and his fucking collection of fucking junk.

Luke heaves himself onto his side, clipped in the ear by another swinging bear paw, and the motion gives him a new line of sight to a new shadow, a shape Luke would know anywhere.

If he had an inch less wingspan than he does, he’d be fucked, but as is, he’s got just enough reach to close his hand around the base of the goalie mask lamp and use it to brain Carlton straight in the furry skull.

Whatever the mascot was expecting, it wasn’t that. It rears back, roaring in anger and pain, and Luke hauls ass to make it to his feet, raising the lamp to swing again with momentum on his side.

The bear cowers.

Luke hesitates.

What is he waiting for? It’s a half-alive abomination.

It’s also a motheaten-ragged, decades old costume, covered in dust and shrinking away from Luke, obviously terrified of being hit. It’s bizarre and pathetic and off-putting and, strikingly, all at once, like looking in a mirror.

Creepy bear suit aside. Obviously, creepy bear suit aside. Just—fuck, Luke looks at the mascot and feels it again, that awful knowing, recognition where he doesn’t want it to be, that the monster in front of him is very scared, and entirely alone.

It was made to replace T.C. Puck and got replaced in return with a more marketable version of itself, leaving the original Carlton to rot in an archives warehouse and now in some dead guy’s garage, a relic of a failure of a mascot kept here all this time, alone.

All it did was watch, Luke thinks, until he and Cooper started coming after it.

He tightens his grip on the base of the lamp. Lifts it a little higher. Every instinct he’s got is screaming, full-volume: fight back, get away, don’t give it another chance to hurt you. It's him or you.

It's him or you, the voice in Luke's head told him, a year ago, when he was trying to will himself to trade Cooper for himself, and the voice was wrong.

Oh, goddamnit. Goddamnit, Luke’s going to do something stupid.

Hardly even believing what he’s doing, Luke sets down the lamp.

He steps into the open space of the room, hands up.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says, and Carlton bares—ha—its teeth like, that’s nice, I want to hurt you, though.

Luke flinches, his fingers twitching to have something to defend himself with. “Don’t fucking start,” he snaps, and the bear goes back to cowering like it’s scared of him. Ugh, Luke doesn’t know how to do this. The hero shit’s not his wheelhouse.

He bites his tongue. Tries again. “You’re angry. I get it.” It comes out more awkward than it does reassuring. Sorry, bear. Luke’s what you’ve got. “You’ve been left here alone a long time, huh?”

As Carlton stands, he growls. Not an angry sound, this time. A wary one. Yeah, okay. Luke’s interpreting haunted bear sounds, now. Why not.

“You miss it?” he asks, encouraged by the response, and by the fact that he hasn’t been tackled again. “Being around the team?”

Screw the bear sounds: this time, the gesture small, still a shadowy blur, Carlton nods.

Luke swallows, hard. Okay. Okay. “I get that, too,” he offers. “I get it, caring about things is the fucking worst.” So is talking about them, turns out. First Coop, then Lunch. Now the mascot. Next thing, Luke’s going to be doing actual therapy. God forbid.

“I used to not,” he says. “But now I have a friend. I have a bunch of friends, and a dog, kind of. None of them know how to mind their own business, it’s so…”

He breaks off, words stoppered up in his throat.

It was easier, in some ways, when his soul was being gnawed out of him and all his emotions with it, because emotions mean caring means complicated, people looking at him with questions and chirping and apologies and concerns about him being safe and sad and hurt, and Luke’s the only one in his own head these days, so it’s quiet, but the rest of his life is noisier than it’s ever been, full of people. And sometimes they’re misguided—fuck, often they’re misguided—and their presence and persistence are overwhelming and frustrating and baffling, but god—

Luke can do anything he wants, now, and it would be okay, but what he wants, what he gets to have, is people up in his fucking business, people knowing he’s fucked up and caring about him anyways, and letting him care back.

It’s the most annoying thing in the world. It’s better than anything Luke could’ve hoped for.

He looks at the empty costume. Tells it the truth.

“You’re not by yourself,” Luke says. “You're not this, you're already not this. Your team cares about you. You’re at every home game, and there’s like, stuffed animals of you for kids, and they don’t look exactly like you, this you, but it’s still you.”

The bear takes a step closer. Luke doesn’t back up.

“You’re here, but there’s you outside of this place, too,” he says, then, again, “Both you. Still you.”

If Luke dies getting mauled by a bear mascot because he tried to use the power of friendship, he’s going to feel really fucking dumb.

Still, he doesn’t back down as Carlton shambles nearer, dull black eyes seeming to stare straight into Luke’s. This close, even in the dark, Luke can see that the suit is threadbare, stitches barely holding together.

The mascot reaches an arm out, the movement clumsy, somewhere between human and animal. Not knowing how to be either.

Luke swallows his fear. Reaches back.

The instant his hand touches Carlton’s, the suit collapses, crumpling to the ground, nothing more than fabric. Luke feels its absence the same way he felt its stare when it was present. Feels certain: whether it was the touch or the fact that Luke didn’t run from it, the haunting animating the costume is gone. Put to rest, like how Cooper likes to say. No blood ritual necessary.

It’s kind of heartwarming, and then Luke processes what just happened and has to lie down on the ground to not have an out-and-out panic attack.

“What the fuck,” he gasps. He wants to laugh. He does, except for how it sounds humiliatingly like a sob.

The power of friendship. Luke did that, the Cooper thing, he helped instead of hurting even when it meant he could’ve gotten hurt himself. He wanted to do that.

Luke laugh-sobs again, incredulous. He doesn’t know how to sit with the awareness, not wholly comfortable, of difference in himself. If anyone had told him a year ago that he’d be choosing, on purpose, to risk himself like that for the sake of the thing haunting him…

Idiot, he can practically hear in the back of his head, the memory of the voice he used to know as well as his own vivid enough that he half-believes it, and the half-belief is enough to make his eyes sting with tears.

It’s like the sex thing. Like the talking thing, the grief thing, all of it mushed into one impossible feelings ball, rolling over Luke and flattening him into a smear on the floor. Goodbad. Bizarre. He chose this. He’d choose it all again, it’s just—

It’s big. It’s really big.

He lies there on the cement floor for a long time, amidst all the strewn-around contents of the workbench and knocked-over shelves.

It’s quiet. Dark.

There’s something under his head.

He thinks it’s another hockey card, at first, but the shape’s wrong. It’s one of the photos that was pinned up above the bench, the ones of the not a piece of shit, not great either dad and his kid.

Luke holds onto the photo, feels it creasing in his hand.

Karyn Copeland and her dead father. Lunch and his dead mother. A shed of old photos, a cardboard box of the same.

Luke has no real parents to grieve.

Laying here in the dark, alone, with himself more and less figured out than before, he grieves for one, anyway.

“Are you there?” he asks, into the empty workshop.

There’s no answer. No shadowy presence at the corner of his eye.

He didn’t expect different, really. Lake Swift Hawk wasn’t the kind of parent you grieve. It wasn’t a parent at all, except in all the ways it was, except that none of those things cancel out everything else.

Luke squeezes his eyes shut.

He meant what he told his captain. He wants nothing to do with the past, because the past was poison, was Luke making an imaginary friend out of a monster that was never going to be anything more than a demon feeding off of a kid who didn’t know any better, using him like it used and discarded Hannah Cahill. That’s unforgiveable.

He meant what he told the mascot, too. The past is in the past, but it’s here as well, and it was real, and Lake Swift Hawk used him with zero qualms and it also let him and Cooper walk away unscathed when they showed up to kill it, and it listened to Luke narrating every save he made on every team he’s ever played on, and before the deal, long before the deal, it sat with Luke by the water and splashed him ‘til he laughed, when he had nothing else to laugh about.

Luke doesn’t know if his dad found the lake someone else’s soul to feed on before he died. He doesn’t know what happens to it, the lake, if he didn’t. Doesn’t know what he hopes for.

Lake Swift Hawk doesn’t speak, now, and there’s no familiar weight in the back of Luke's mind, and so Luke just lays there in the silence, surrounded by junk someone used to care about.

This is what he chooses. What and who he has now, even if some piece of him is going to spend the rest of his life expecting to hear a deadpan rasp in the back of his mind.

What Luke has now, he reminds himself, is real, not something he has to imagine or mistrust. Family, Lunch said. Something to protect.

Luke laughs. For real, this time, and mostly at himself, even if it’s still a little rough.

So fucking embarrassing, all this feelings garbage.

There’s light, blinding bright and right on cue, as the garage door opens with a massive metallic creak, revealing Cooper, stood there with the sunset behind him, immediately a contender for the best thing Luke’s ever seen.

He looks frantic, scanning the workshop ‘til he spots Luke on the floor.

“You’re okay!” Cooper flings himself down next to Luke, skidding hard to his knees. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” Luke reassures, sitting up to prove it, somehow never entirely ready for evidence of just how much Cooper cares. He’s going to have scraped knees, Luke thinks, and then wants to roll his eyes at himself for worrying over a thing like scraped knees, as if they haven’t both been hurt worse. He worries anyways.

“I thought you were going to get mascot murdered because I didn’t stay close,” Cooper frets, doing his own worrying over nothing. He’s got both hands curled into themselves tight, like when he’s trying to hold himself together and not entirely succeeding at it, his gaze sweeping up and down over Luke, cataloguing. “I’m so sorry, I—”

Luke thinks, fuck it, gives in to the impulse and pulls Cooper into a hug.

It shouldn’t be a big deal. He knows how to touch people and even haunted mascots now, except none of those people or haunted mascots were Cooper; and he hugged Cooper once before, except he was basically in shock at the time, and his skin still smelled like lake water, and the hug lasted all of a millisecond before he pulled back.

This time, Luke holds on. He can feel Cooper freezing up in surprise just like the first time, his hands hovering over Luke’s back without touching, hesitant in a way that sort of makes Luke want to cry all over again. Not in a bad way.

“You can hug me back,” he says, and then and only then, Cooper does, wrapping his arms around Luke and holding tight, like he was waiting to be told he could.

Luke waits to fight through the instinctive proximity-panic that he’s been building up a tolerance to via strangers, but it doesn’t come. It’s just… it’s Coop, so it’s safe. It’s good, good because Luke’s no expert but he’s pretty sure this is objectively an amazing fucking hug, but also good just like everything else about Cooper is good, summer-warmth that Luke wants to close his eyes and sink into.

He’s figuring this out, at least, the touching stuff. It’s supposed to feel like this.

Luke presses his face into Cooper’s sweatshirt, relieved that there’s no one to see him smiling. “You were right.”

Cooper makes a small sound, his chin resting on Luke’s shoulder. “About what?”

Luke laughs as they part, mostly at himself. “I don’t know. Everything? The power of friendship. The hero shit. It’s worth the bad parts.”

It’s a trick of the light, almost, the way that Cooper goes still at that; just for a second, and then Luke’s phone is buzzing from where it fell, a few feet away.

Luke moves fast, before Cooper can. “I got it.”

It’s the right call. The notification is letting him know that someone called ‘8====D’ has sent him a photo. Classy.

He considers, for a second, just telling Cooper now. ‘By the way, you know I’m gay as fuck, right?’ Done. He wants to tell him, mostly so that he won’t have to keep not telling him, even opens his mouth to do it, and finds that he just… can’t. It was different, telling Lunch. Just different.

Luke’s got something to protect, now. It means he’s also got something to lose.

He’ll tell him soon. They’ve got time.

“It’s nothing,” Luke says, swiping the notification into oblivion. “Let’s get out of here.” He realizes, belatedly, that Coop’s still got his eyes on the floor, his expression somewhere between thoughtful and uncertain, same way he looked after Luke mentioned the hero thing. “Coop. You good?”

That seems to snap Cooper out of it.

“I’m good,” Cooper says. He smiles again, like things are going to be okay, and he’s never once given Luke a reason to doubt him. He pushes himself to his feet, offering Luke a hand to help him up and out of here, once and for all. “It’s nothing.”

Chapter 5: NSFW

Cooper forgot his gloves in the car, which he realizes somewhere around grave number two. Too late and too far to go back and get them.

His hands are bright red with cold, fingers so numb it takes him three, four tries to free the knife attachment of his multi tool. This thoroughly frozen, he sort of expects that when he goes to draw blood, it’ll be like trying to cut stone.

In the end, he bleeds just fine. So that’s something positive!

The graveside cleansing ritual goes easy, like the last one, and the next after it. Sheer luck, there being three curses in this one cemetery, one from a transplant from Gatineau who hated the Leafs with honestly impressive commitment and two from the standard ‘you ruined my life’ fans, a father and son buried forty-nine years apart but equivalently disappointed in their Maple Leafs.

“Good try,” Cooper remembers to say to the last dead person of the night, patting the headstone as sympathetically as he can on his way past. No one gets hurt, not even the hauntings trying to hurt the team.

By the time he gets home, it’s coming on two thirty in the morning, the downtown core as quiet as it ever gets, this late on a weeknight. Cooper supposes he must make it into the elevator and through his apartment door. He isn’t really aware of doing any of it: he’s exhausted to his marrow, for once doesn’t dig up more exorcism audios to fall asleep to, doesn’t even remember to say goodnight to Puck and Christmas before his head is hitting the pillow and then—

Like clockwork, Cooper is drowning.

He chokes on water and claws his way up to the surface the way he’s gotten used to doing, lungs burning. The air goes down sharp, cold biting at his throat as he finds his footing, waist-deep in the lake. That part is like clockwork, too.

One breath. Another.

This is wrong.

It’s Lake Swift Hawk. Cooper would know the feeling of this place blind, the pervasive malice in the air, the unspoken threat of finding himself in a demon’s home territory. It’s Lake Swift Hawk, except for how it’s not, it can’t be, because this lake is vast, nothing but foaming dark water as far as he can see in any direction, no land to retreat to. Where can he go? Where is there for him to go from here?

“Please,” he hears behind his back, and turns to see what he knows he’s going to see: Joseph Thibeault in the water at his feet, glaring up at Cooper with hate and fear.

Cooper glares back. Not with fear. It’s his fault. This man hurt Luke, this man made Cooper hurt him back. Gritting his teeth, Cooper wades forward, and Thibeault flings his arms over his face, “No, don’t hurt me, please,” except when he lowers his hands, it’s not Luke’s father shrinking away from him, it’s—

“Syd?” Cooper asks, horrified at his little sister being anywhere near a place like this. It’s not safe. He surges through the water, single-minded—he needs to get to her and get her out of here—but instead of reaching out to him, she backs away, her whole face scrunching up the way it does when she’s trying not to cry, the way it has all her life.

“Don’t, Coop,” she begs, terrified.

“I won’t,” Cooper says, not sure what he’s promising, helpless to do anything else, needing her not to be looking at him like that. “I won’t, Sydney, just come here, please.”

He’s not sure when he blinked, when things shifted, but now his mother, standing where Sydney was, is shaking her head as she keeps backing away from him, not letting Cooper any nearer. Why is her face doing that? She looks horrified, disbelieving. Disappointed. All those things that Cooper doesn’t want to recognize and does. “Why are you doing this?”

“I’m not, Mom,” Cooper says, tries to, but then she’s Owen, trying to take slow steps back, doing his calm voice like he thinks Cooper’s about to lunge.

“Please don’t hurt us. You don’t have to hurt us.”

Cooper would never. He would never. “Wait,” he pleads, because they have to know that, he has to make them know that, but no matter how much he tries to push forward, the lake is pushing back, never letting him get any closer to shore, and he can’t catch up to his family as they flee, one by one. His dad turning away like he can’t bear to even look at Cooper; the other baby siblings, barely tall enough to keep their heads above water, shrieking when Cooper tries desperately to get close enough to hold them up.

“Let me help,” he begs, as Asra shields her sons from him, as Ivy and Maeve take it in turns to cower at his approach, as his teammates take one look at him and run. “Please let me help, I won’t hurt you, I never wanted to hurt you!”

He doesn’t realize how loud he’s speaking, all his words falling on deaf ears, until the last one echoes, a cry across the endless lake, and Luke, on his knees in the water, eyes filled with terrified tears, looks up at Cooper and—

It takes Cooper too long to register when he’s awake, that it was a dream; before he’s even aware of himself, he’s desperately fumbling for the bedside table, grabbing for his headphones, for one of his calendars, he needs- he needs to fill his brain with something else, he needs to be touching something real and known and logical, something real, this is real, that wasn’t, none of that was real except for the parts that were.

He’s speaking along with the audio from his phone, a half-second delayed, mumbled echo that’s less a conscious choice, more the best he can do to make the words louder than the everything else. Cooper presses the spiral binding of his calendar along the length of his hand, eyes fixed on the boxes, gridded out in rectangles with the dates in the top left corner of each, starting on a Monday the first. Perfect rectangle month.

It’s embarrassing. Cooper is alone in his room and he still feels embarrassed at reacting like this, looking at himself from the outside in. He thinks, like he’s supposed to, what would you do if you got overstimulated like this in public, we have strategies for this. Thinks that and keeps seeing everyone’s faces. Terrified of him. Like they know.

A gentle weight on Cooper’s leg. It’s Puck, roused from his spot on the floor, settling his head on Cooper’s thigh, grounding him. Cooper doubles over, presses his face to the top of Puck’s head.

What’s already inside you, Scary Demon Lady said, at the market. Like she was there, seeing the look on Joseph Thibeault’s face when Cooper threatened him and took his soul. Cooper making someone afraid and relishing in it.

She can’t know. How can she know? No, not ‘know’, ‘know’ would mean she’s right about Cooper, and she’s not, he won’t let her be—

“Cooper.”

Cooper startles, all the noise rushing back in at once.

Warmups, the ice lit from overhead and bass-heavy hype music over the speakers.

The nightmare is a last night problem, a common side effect of an overabundance of the kinds of neurotransmitters the brain produces during ongoing stressful situations such as clinging to a playoff spot by the skin of your teeth and having an all-powerful demonic entity trying to manipulate you into embracing evil.

Today, right now, Cooper is a supportive backup, and the crowd is taking their seats, and Luke is next to him like always, though he’s not doing his stretches, breaking his own ‘talk to me before a start at your own risk’ policy to stare at Cooper, eyebrows raised. Not the first time he tried to get Cooper’s attention, then.

“I said, are we still hitting more of the leftover 90s curses tonight?”

Right. Right, those. “Uh, yeah, for sure, we can find some to fix.” Did Cooper remember to check them off the list? He usually remembers. “I did the Rossi graves last night.”

He’s still busy trying to remember if he updated the notes or not, but not too busy to clock the way Luke crinkles his nose at that. He makes that face when he’s caught off guard.

“By yourself?”

“Pacey did it by himself for years,” Cooper reminds him. “I couldn’t sleep, anyway.”

It sounds like more of an excuse than it is—it’s the truth, Cooper has never been the type to say anything but—but he’s relieved, anyways, when the others skate up before Luke can press any further.

“Hey,” Sonny says, grabbing their attention. “You think they’re fans?”

He nods over to the signs pressed up to the glass, so many of them that they completely obscure the people holding them up. The signs themselves aren’t anything new. People like offering candy for pucks, writing that it’s their birthday or first game, things like that. Sometimes they’re directed at a particular guy, usually a mix unless they’re in someone’s hometown or former team.

Tonight, every single one of the signs reads something like ‘Marry Me Marías’ or ‘CAME TO SEE GABE MARÍAS’ or an acrostic MVP/MARÍAS situation.

When the man himself skates past, stickhandling almost lazily, people start banging on the boards with renewed enthusiasm. Gabe tosses them a wink, and it hits like a sonic boom, shrieking drowning out the arena-level sound system so that the whole place sounds like a boyband concert instead of a hockey game. Cooper’s pretty sure he sees a girl around his age actually swoon before she’s caught by a middle-aged guy next to her who is fully in tears, his gaze not leaving Gabe for a second.

Luke’s response to the genuine and heartwarming shows of emotion from Leafs fans is an eye roll so severe it looks physically painful. For once, he’s not the lone cynic.

“Guy’s shameless,” Krish says, watching Gabe ham it up for the crowd. Krish is used to being the best on the team, in play and also in looks, so the bitterness is understandable, but he’s also a team player, so he adds, only a little begrudgingly, “Thank god he’s on our side.”

That much, Cooper can’t argue. Krish is a good 1C, but Gabe Marías is a no-doubt, generational superstar. Cooper can’t even pinpoint a single thing he does on the ice that’s exceptional, it’s just all of it, genuinely jaw-dropping levels of skill, the boyband shrieks really the only reasonable reaction.

Cooper doesn’t get intimidated easy, because he knows his skillset as a goalie enough to feel confident against anyone in the league, but he’s glad he’s not trying to save anything coming his way from Gabe. He’s pretty sure Luke feels the same way, tonight—he plays fine, probably, on the same upward trend he’s been on the last few weeks, but Cooper can’t bring himself to spend any real amount of time watching the Leafs’ net when Gabe is having yet another record-setting night in the blue and white, dancing around veteran NHLers like he’s soloing a late game at beer league.

The game passes almost in a blur, and by the end of it, the fans are near hysterical. Gabe does the Gabe thing and hams it up, beckoning for more applause with a hand to his ear as if it’s not loud and clear that the crowd is chanting ‘Marías’ instead of the usual ‘Go Leafs Go’.

It’s exactly what Gabe Marías deserves. He deserves more.

Cooper hops the boards, spinning his ballcap backward and joining the line to high five Luke for the win. Gabe—first in line, of course—skates by on his way past and snags his own high five, grinning like Cooper wouldn’t offer one willingly.

“What a game, man,” Cooper says. He tries to be specific with his compliments, usually, but he’d have to run through basically every minute the puck was on Gabe’s stick and half the ones it wasn’t.

Gabe somehow looks better after playing an NHL game than he did before. Cooper sometimes doesn’t really get it when people describe someone as glowing, but he does now, seeing Gabe’s face lit up with a huge smile, his entire bearing like he could play another full game and thank Coach for it.

“Couldn’t have done it without you,” he says charitably, with a hand on Cooper’s shoulder. He really means it, too, even though Cooper was just backing up tonight. He’s the best.

They part, Cooper finally reaching the end of the line of his teammates. Last one to Luke, he greets him with a fist bump.

“Backup,” Luke says, shaking out his hair, free of his mask.

“1B,” Cooper bats back, because that’s what they do, falling in next to each other to join the guys, everyone taking their time getting off the ice. Seeing Luke’s proud smile gives Cooper one of his own. Every win is meaningful to Luke this season, he knows, especially now that he’s been slowly getting more games in net, though Cooper’s still got the edge. Cooper likes a challenge. He’ll like a challenge extra if it means Luke feeling good about hockey again.

Feeling good in general, apparently. Cooper watches him in the room, making a big show of grumbling at the guys’ jokes, rolling his eyes with a smile when Lunch grins and whispers something to him under his breath.

That part, the whispering, is probably something to do with whoever Luke’s been texting with all secretively that he thinks Cooper hasn’t noticed. Not that he’s not allowed to not tell Cooper stuff! And to tell Lunch that stuff instead! This is exactly what Cooper’s wanted for him, really. Luke feeling safe enough to let the rest of the team see more of him, to quit denying that he’s got friends who love him, now. More than a friend, maybe, with mysterious texting girl.

He looks down, focuses on shedding his gear instead of letting himself try out his lip reading skills on Luke and Lunch, because that is content for Become A Spy In 365: An Activity Calendar For Secret Agents, not for social settings where everything is good.

This is what it’s for, all the sleepless nights in graveyards around the GTA. These are the stakes, Cooper’s friends and teammates being safe and happy. Things better for everyone. That’s what Cooper does.

Scary Demon Lady is set on making Cooper bad, something to do with tempting him into a deal, he presumes. Eating his soul, enjoying his Faustian downfall, all of it. It’s a bad plan on her part. Nothing she could offer is worth more than what he has already—he sneaks one last glance toward Luke, who’s peeling out of his gear, now—and nothing at all is ever going to make Cooper compromise again on doing the right thing, the right way.

Guys are getting pulled for media, dispersing to Dr. Nadia and her team, all the normal postgame routines. Cooper gets back into his street clothes, checking his phone while he tries, one-handed, to make his hair look less like he’s recently been electrocuted. He’s got a text from his dad, an update on timing for when he and Faith are bringing the kids down to catch a game during the Family Day long weekend.

Cooper can’t wait. He talks to his mom’s side of his family every day, usually—at least he has almost always, he’s just been extra focused these last couple days-weeks-months, and he doesn’t want his mom asking questions about why he missed Christmas because Cooper has got everything under control now same as he did then—and he hears from his dad at least once a week, at least over text, but he hasn’t spent any real time with anyone on that side since summer. He bets all four of the baby siblings have grown so much.

He shakes his head, forcing out the memory of his dream, the too-real picture of his brothers and sisters slipping underwater rather than let Cooper near them.

Excited to see you guys!!, he sends, and his dad replies with the words ‘thumbs up emoji’, because he’s never really gotten the hang of voice to text.

“Cooper, you ready?”

Cooper looks up, startled, to see Felix from the community outreach team looking at him with a thumbs up, waiting for a confirming one back. Cooper returns the gesture with a smile that is only a little bit forced. That’s what he forgot, not updating the curse list—he agreed a couple days ago, when the community people asked for a volunteer, to do a meet and greet after tonight’s game with a fan, this man who recently turned a hundred and has been watching the Leafs all along. Exactly the kind of person who deserves to be celebrated by his team.

Cooper believes that, he really does, and that conviction will give him the energy he needs to be a good representative for his team and not fall asleep on top of a centenarian. He rubs his eyes, blinking away the tiredness, determined. If Scary Demon Lady wants him to be evil—an image of dream-Luke flinching away from him, the look of fear on his face before Cooper jolted awake—he’s going to be the opposite.

Perfect timing, just like he’s perfect at everything, Gabe appears at his shoulder. “I can take the meet and greet thing. You get some rest.”

“Oh,” Cooper wavers, stops the automatic yes please from escaping. He doesn’t slack off on his commitments to other people, no matter how little sleep he got the night before. “That’s alright, it’s—”

“Hey,” Gabe cuts him off with a smile, reassuring. Cooper is, just like that, reassured. “You’d be doing me a favor. I love fan stuff.”

Why was Cooper going to argue, again? A hundred years old or not, every fan would want to meet Gabe Marías, and Gabe wants to meet the fan, and Cooper would never want to make Gabe sad.

“Thanks,” Cooper relents. Can it be called relenting if he barely put up a fight? Why would he put up a fight? “That’s really great of you.”

“What’re teammates for?” Gabe waves off the thanks, and Cooper watches him go, high-fiving the guys on his way out. Luke shoves Seth out of the way to high-five him twice. “No, you’re the best, bro. No, you are, I mean it.”

Yeah, Cooper thinks, fond. They’re so lucky Gabe’s on their side.

---

It’s the longest reprieve from an active haunting that Cooper can remember since he got to Toronto, which means it’s an opportunity to get ahead of everything else. He does cleansing rituals on a handful of additional graves—with Luke, this time, and Puck for good measure, running between the headstones and leaving pawprints in the snow—and makes a dent in more demonology readings, practically the entire Wikipedia article tree memorized, by now. He watches tape of upcoming opponents, then a recording of a sports podcast Gabe made a guest appearance on. Does the stretches the physios tell him to do so that he can move the way he needs to in the net, then spots Gabe in the gym. Counts down the days of all of it, then the hours, until his dad arrives in town.

Cooper goes to meet the family at their hotel, because his apartment’s too small to host everyone comfortably. That’s the truth, and also a good excuse not to have them or anyone over, because between the objectively excessive quantity of themed calendars, the printed-out pages of ghost hunting lore on every surface, and the amount of space dedicated to his varyingly haunted pets, Cooper’s home is very loudly Not Neurotypical in a way that he’s one hundred percent confident would make his dad concerned about Cooper’s ability to be normal and good at being an adult.

Cooper is both of those things, though, so he makes sure to arrive on time, and look presentable before knocking at the door.

He’s bombarded by the twins as soon as the door opens, Weston and Jonah both zooming straight for the hall so that Cooper’s got to scoop one in each arm to stop them making a break for it.

“Woah!” he says, hauling them up. “You guys have gotten so tall!”

“Cooper!”

Miles completes the attack by dashing in to give Cooper a huge hug around the legs, falling apart giggling when Cooper picks him up too. Miles is seven, the big brother most of the time in their dad’s house, but he’s always happy to get to be one of the babies when Cooper’s there.

Cooper’s happy to let him. Happy to see him, all of them—he’s closer with Sydney, a side effect of the fact that he mostly lived with Mom and Owen and that Syd’s old enough that they were closer to being kids at the same time, but these little guys are charming in a different way, so small Cooper almost can’t believe they’re related.

Hm. Guys, and—

“Hi, Rebecca!” Cooper peers into the hotel room ‘til he spots his sister, and waves as best he can with the three boys using him as a climbing structure.

“Hi.” Rebecca’s whisper is tiny, the absolute sweetest thing in the entire world. She’s always shy at first, hiding behind her mom’s legs as Faith laughs, fond, beckoning Cooper in for a hug.

“Hi, Cooper, how’s it going?”

“I’m great,” Cooper says, catching Jonah in mid-air and handing him over to his mom as he tries to launch himself off of his back, kamikaze style. “Was the drive down okay?”

“Oh, the usual chaos, with these ones,” Faith says, but her voice makes it sound like a happy memory instead of a complaint. She’s the exact and precise opposite of the fairytale evil stepmother. Cooper doesn’t think he’s ever even heard her raise her voice.

Weston has somehow scaled all the way up to Cooper’s shoulders, slapping two small and, wow, tragically sticky hands right over Cooper’s eyes. “Got you!”

“Aw, man, you did.” Cooper wriggles out of Sensory Hell and pries his baby brother off of himself, tossing him gently onto the bed and freeing up his eyes in time to see his dad making his way in from the connected room, his whole face lit up with a smile when he sees Cooper.

“Alright, kids, don’t break him, the Leafs need him back there.” He hauls Cooper into a hug, the only person Cooper’s ever met exactly of a height with him. “Hey, big guy.”

“Hi, Dad,” Cooper squeezes back, at least until someone decidedly not close to seven feet tall shoves himself in between the two of them, slapping at Cooper’s side to get his attention.

“Cooper,” Miles says, holding onto Cooper’s sleeve when Cooper takes a knee to be closer to eye level. “CooperCooperCooper, can you show me Gabriel Marías?”

Their dad rustles Miles’ hair. “Guy’s a hell of a player,” he says. “He’s got how many goals on the season, now? It’s something stupid.”

Cooper opens his mouth to share Gabe’s current tally, draws a blank—What? He’s had every statline in the league memorized every season since he was ten—and gets distracted from thinking any more about it by Miles flinging his arms out and spinning around, Sound of Music style.

 “I’m gonna play like him,” Miles announces, dreamily.

“You don’t want to be a goalie anymore?” Cooper teases. “That’s good, I need someone to take shots at me in summer.”

Miles shoots him a smile, missing front teeth and all, and then the twins go tumbling off the bed, knocking stuff off the side tables, and the evening becomes Operation Get Dinner Without A Child Breaking Things And/Or Themselves.

Cooper is good at this Operation! He gets everybody to the restaurant, and tells them all about the dietary accommodations and kids options on the menu that he looked up in advance before the waiter even has to. Cooper does that to be helpful, and also specifically so the waiter will mostly leave them alone, because dinner with his dad’s side always means holding hands while Dad says grace, and that is embarrassing in public because another side effect of mostly living in his mom’s house as a kid was all the atheism. Cooper’s good at this part, too, though: he bows his head like he’s supposed to and endures the fifteen seconds of self-consciousness so that no one will feel uncomfortable except him.

Most of the conversation at dinner is about Miles’ hockey, or the twins’, or asking Cooper for NHL stories. He prepared for this too, making jot notes of recent behind the scenes stuff that seemed optimally exciting for kindergarteners.

“And Marías stories!” Weston demands, almost knocking his fork off the table and Jonah out of his seat in his enthusiasm. “More Marías!”

“More Marías!” Miles chants, and Cooper’s dad looks just as eager to hear more Gabe stories, so Cooper obliges.

It’s not until the walk back to the hotel that Cooper gets more than thirty seconds to talk to his dad alone. Not that he begrudges the little kids the time! It’s just a nice kind of nostalgia, it being just the two of them, reminds him of rides to and from games as a kid.

His dad’s ambling along, apparently in a good mood, ‘cause he’s not even doing his ‘I’m in a large city and therefore am going to get pickpocketed any second’ checking on his wallet in his pocket every two minutes anymore. “So,” he says, when they’re done talking out Cooper’s last few games and ways he can improve. “Your mom mentioned the organization’s been keeping you pretty busy this year, eh?”

Hm. A little bit too much like rides to games as a kid. “I’m probably too old for you guys to need to have parenting conferences about me,” Cooper pushes back, careful with his tone. Thrown off balance, just a little. He’s done everything right all night, hasn’t he?

He should’ve known it wouldn’t be that easy to get his mom to overlook him answering her calls with texts or him staying in Toronto instead of going home for the holidays. She’s too hard to make not know things. Cooper can’t be mad at her for it—his parents have only ever wanted him to be successful, he knows that—but he also really, really does not feel like trying to explain, nothing is wrong there’s just a demon who wants to make me evil for reasons unknown and also last year I got so angry I wanted to kill a man and now he is dead and those two things and maybe all three things are not wholly unrelated.

His dad, sticking to whatever mission he’s been given by Cooper’s mom, says, “You’re our kid, it’s our job to worry,” but he sounds reassured by Cooper’s non-reaction anyway, like he was halfway expecting Cooper to meltdown in public over being gentle-parented and now that he knows that won’t happen, he can finally relax. It’s more conversational, almost a formality, when he says, “They put a lot of responsibility on your shoulders.”

Cooper sighs, just a little bit. He can tell when he’s being doubted. Not the same way that Scary Demon Lady does, but doubted all the same. To his dad, he thinks, it’s not just nostalgia. Cooper’s still a kid. He has no way of knowing that Cooper’s been playing two out of three NHL games a week while also protecting his team from a constant barrage of hauntings and even some billionaire-related non-hauntings and pretty much excelling at all of it, by every measure.

“I can handle it,” Cooper says, confident. “I have been, Dad.”

His dad holds his hands up, letting the matter rest once and for all. He’s easier than Cooper’s mom, for things like this. So long as Cooper does all the eye contact tricks and conversation strategies well enough, Dad doesn’t ask too many questions. “Fair enough. C’mon, tell me about that Panthers game before you drop us off.”

And Cooper does, and it’s a good night, hiccups and all.

He sleeps without any real nightmares, all the way through to his alarm—set to three hours earlier than usual to make up for taking most of the night off—before hauling himself out of bed to get back to work.

He doesn’t let himself linger on his neglected list of random Wiki pages before hitting play on the latest demon-hunting blog post. This one’s promising. A couple more and he’ll be onto an answer, he knows it.

The screen reader makes up the soundtrack of the morning as Cooper steps over Puck’s favourite sleeping spot—you can only trip over a the invisible ghost of the soul of a dead mascot dog so many times before developing some muscle memory—makes his first coffee, and changes over his calendars while the sun rises outside. The fact of the day on his 365 +1 Animal Kingdom Facts daily is about how orcas stay with their family pod their whole life. It feels like a sign. The fact of the day on his more recently purchased, limited print run Annual Witchcraft Calendar is ‘the veil is thin today’, which Cooper chooses not to let feel like a sign on the grounds that it is hardly a fact at all.

His orca pod, or one half of it, is waiting at the practice facility by the time he gets there. Earlier than his early.

“Morning!”

Cooper’s little brothers try to tackle him hello for the second time in two days. Oh, man, Cooper missed them.

“So mostly the guys in the lineup tonight aren’t at morning skate,” he explains, tapping his card and holding the door open for the others. They’re all wearing their Leafs stuff already, the kids regular-hyper instead of ‘we spent five hours in the car earlier’ hyper. “But a few of them will be around for you to meet, you’re going to really like everyone.”

Cooper can’t help but fidget with anticipation, watching his dad take in the Leafs’ practice centre like it’s hallowed ground. It’s kind of actively the opposite of hallowed, but—he’s been so excited to show his family how far he’s come. He wants his dad to be proud of what he’s doing here.

“Yo, they’re here!” “Mr. Cooper’s dad!”

Cooper blinks, taken aback at the sight of, if not everybody on the team, then a large majority of them, more than are ever present at a gameday skate, pouring out of the rink. “What’re you all doing here?” he asks, genuinely confused, and Law elbows him, smiling real big, on the way past.

“You think we’re not going to show out for our goalie?”

Oh. Oh, Cooper loves his friends so much. He guesses he hasn't exactly been subtle about being excited for his family to visit, but he never expected this, everyone going out of their way for him. Even when his teams have liked him in the past, it’s never been this.

He turns, slow, in place, taking in Coach shaking his dad and Faith’s hands, Seth somehow already wrestling with the twins, and—

“Hey,” Cooper kneels down by Miles, who’s tugging at his pant leg, eyes wide as he watches Gabe walk towards them. “You ready to meet Gabe Marías?”

Miles nods, mouth hanging wide open. Cooper can’t stop smiling.

“Gabe,” he says, as formally as he can. “This is my little brother Miles. You’re his favourite player.”

“His favourite?” Gabe presses both hands to his heart, seems genuinely moved by the sentiment. “Really?”

Miles nods again. Manages to speak this time. “I’m the oldest,” he says, chest puffed out. “And I’m pretty good at hockey, by the way. Not as good as you. But almost.”

Gabe laughs, crouching down and looking right at Miles, attentive as anything, all his focus on the eager little kid in front of him. “That good, hm?”

Gabe is that good. Better. The best guy. Cooper’s so focused on watching him grinning at all of Miles’ compliments that he almost misses Luke, who’s lingering at a distance, watching everything unfold like he’s not exactly sure where he fits into it.

“Dad,” Cooper says, waving Luke over as he does. “Come meet someone.”

Luke approaches with his hands in his pockets, though he’s got his hood down and no headphones on, which is basically a suit and tie, in Luke Thibeault. Luke, Cooper realizes, is making An Effort.

“Dad, Faith, Rebecca, this is Luke,” Cooper starts, then falters, on how to introduce him. No good reason for it, really, except for being thrown off by the Effort. The obvious option is ‘my friend’, but his family has just met a whole team of his friends, and none of them got a solo introduction. ‘My ghost hunting partner’ is very off the table. He decides, finally, on, “We share the net.”

His dad laughs. “We know who he is, big guy.”

Right. That makes sense. TV.

“Hi,” Luke says, and lets Cooper’s dad shake his hand before Cooper can tell him he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t even snatch his hand back fast the way he usually does.

“Luke,” his dad greets him, friendly, while Rebecca is brave enough to give a wave before hiding against Faith again. “Hey, man, thanks for looking out for Cooper. Means a lot.”

“It’s the opposite,” Luke says, and—

Huh. That’s interesting.

Luke doesn’t do a lot of expression in his voice, as a rule. Even with people he likes, his tendency, either as a holdover from years of soullessness or just a Luke-ism, is to sound mostly over the entire interaction, and to look it, physically. It’s why people who don’t know him find him intimidating. Why the Effort stood out.

Cooper isn’t people. Cooper knows Luke, the way emotions look on him versus the way they look on most other people. Luke’s expression hasn’t changed at all, not on his face and not in his voice, but between one moment and the next, not with any trigger that Cooper noticed, Luke’s hackles have gone all the way up, a distinct frostiness to the way he’s staring at Cooper’s father, who grins, oblivious.

“Fair enough!” He claps Luke and Cooper both on the shoulders, bracing. “I’m gonna go meet Gabe Marías, can’t let Miles do all the fanboying.”

Cooper watches him jog over toward where Gabe is still entertaining Miles, patient and, as always, incredibly generous with his time, always happy to encourage fans. Gabe is such a great guy.

Faith snaps Cooper’s attention back to his own conversation. “So, Luke,” she says, polite as ever, shifting Rebecca to her other hip. “It’s so funny Cooper ended up here with another goalie from the north, what are the odds?”

The odds are approximately two in thirty, so one in fifteen, depending where you bound North and assuming that the goalies on active NHL rosters haven’t changed since Cooper last checked; also assuming that you aren’t considering any priors like the disproportionately low ratio of Canadian goalies at the NHL level. Cooper decides the question was probably rhetorical.

Luke still looks pissed, all one-syllable answers and hands tucked back into his pockets, withdrawn in every sense of the word. That lasts all the way through Coop saying bye to Dad and the family, leaving them to grab food and check out the aquarium before the game later, and through Coach wrangling the team back to their actual jobs, and through Cooper and Luke doing their usual last-minute check on the wards, though what they find there is enough to get Luke talking again, at least.

“What the fuck is Scary Demon Lady trying to do?” Luke demands, holding up a handful of the dead, rotting maple leaves scattered throughout the hall. All the deciduous trees outside have been bare for months. “She’s going to the trouble of messing with the wards for this?”

“I don’t know,” Cooper shakes his head, running his fingers over the wards. It’s what he’s come to expect, these last few weeks, though the expectation doesn’t make it any less concerning: some of the sigils are, more and more, fading at faster rates than the others, already almost invisible. It has to be part of whatever Scary Demon Lady is up to, but it—the faded wards, the leaves—feel less intentional than it does a side effect. But of what? “Maybe she just likes unsubtle metaphor-threats.” Then, because he can’t not, “Threat-aphors.”

Luke ducks his head so he can pretend not to find it funny. Cooper lets him, happy just to make Luke laugh. Happy enough to mostly forget about his rapidly burgeoning headache, the lack of sleep catching up to him. It’s fine, he’s worked through worse.

Through all of it, the threat-aphors and the joking about them and the constantly fighting a yawn, Cooper waits for Luke to bring up whatever bothered him about Cooper’s family. He doesn’t, but that’s fine too. Cooper’s never needed anyone’s help to make things happen.

“My dad and everyone were excited to meet you,” he says, watching for Luke’s reaction.

Luke doesn’t give him one, aside from a scoff. “They were excited to meet Gabe.”

“Well, yeah,” Cooper allows—who wouldn’t be, that goes without saying and they both know it—then tries again, a new angle. “You know, Faith never used to watch hockey before she met my dad, but now she’s super into it.”

“‘cause it’s fucking fun,” Luke says, like duh, but when Cooper digs in his heels and lets the silence linger a little, he does what sixty-eight percent of people do, Psychology Facts For Every Day Of The Year, and fills it, in typically blunt Luke-fashion. “Is she as young as she looks?”

“Kind of,” Cooper says, easy enough. It’s nothing he hasn’t heard before. Faith is only twelve years older than him, which is a little weird, but his dad’s only twenty years older than him, so it’s not like their gap’s that scandalous. She’s always been nice with Cooper, even if she’s not a parent-y stepparent the way Owen is just by virtue of not having been around all Cooper’s life. It’s an unfair standard to compare her to. To compare his dad to, arguably. “I like her a lot, though.”

Luke makes a non-committal sound, to that, and it’s almost as weird as the malfunctioning wards. Luke doesn’t do non-committal, when he dislikes something or someone.

Cooper waits again, but either Luke’s caught on to his Psychology Fact or this silence is less stifling than the one before, because he doesn’t offer any elaboration, and doesn’t seem like he’s waiting for Cooper to ask, and by the time Cooper starts to consider it, it’s time to get changed for the game.

The room is as loud as it always is, Sonny’s terrible playlist and a dozen overlapping conversations. Cooper laces into his skates, trying to course correct his brain from worrying over Luke’s opinions on his family to being excited about playing in front of them. He knows after this morning that the guys will give it a little extra tonight, for his sake. He owes them the same.

Coach reads out the starters. An extra announcement comes with the names. “We’re just finding out, but Sam Margolis, the fan who was here the other night for his hundredth, has passed, so—we’re playing to honour someone important tonight, boys, yeah?”

It gets as solemn as can be expected, a room of amped-up athletes showing respect for an old man most of them haven’t met. Cooper was supposed to be the one at the meet and greet with him.

Donny calls out to Gabe, the one who actually did meet the guy, “Was he, like, sick when you met him?”

“He was a hundred years old,” Gabe says, which is fair enough. He stands, solemn—oh, Cooper hopes that he’s not too sad about it, Gabe doesn’t deserve to have to feel sad about anything ever—and addresses the whole room, stoically inspiring in a way that really should have a stirring movie soundtrack behind it. “Let’s get out there and win it for Mr. Margolis, boys. It’s what he would have wanted.”

And the team cheers, ready to follow Gabe into battle, or anywhere else he’d like to lead them. This, Cooper thinks, awed, is what everything is about. Someone like that. They’re so lucky to have him. Mr. Margolis was so lucky to meet him before he died.

It’s a lucky night across the board, really. Cooper’s following the puck easily, in sync with Gertie and buoyed by plenty of goal support. He puts a little extra on some of his glove saves, knowing that his family’s watching from the crowd, not immune to the novelty of that fact.

Everyone from both sides was there for his first NHL start during a short-lived callup back in St. Louis, of course, and Cooper knows that they watch every game they can on TV, even without being able to travel much between work and his siblings’ own hockey and school. Still, it’s different having them here in person. The kids will be so excited if they get shown on the broadcast, and seeing an NHL game live is the kind of thing that’ll help them become hockey fans for life, especially one where the crowd is this into it, near-feral in a way unlike any regular season game Cooper’s been a part of.

The chants ring out from puck drop to the final whistle, barely even dimming during the breaks in play. “Ma-rí-as, Ma-rí-as!” Cooper even spots a few of the guys joining in. Feels tempted to do the same himself, once Gabe starts tossing pucks and used towels into the crowd, basking in their praise. He looks—euphoric. Almost superhuman, under the lights.

With so much external motivation, it’s no surprise how well the game goes. The guys drag Cooper down to ruffle his hair in celebration at the win, whipping towels at his butt once he’s back in the room, and then Gabe comes back from being named first star and they switch to celebrating him instead, like he deserves.

Long after the ice is empty, Cooper can still hear the chants of Gabe’s name. He watches Gabe for a while, happy to see him happy, then remembers that he’s supposed to be meeting his family. Right.

He looks for Luke, because it’s his habit to look for Luke. Luke is on his phone. Texting, probably.

“Come wait with me?” Cooper asks. Not because of the texting. Not just, anyways. He wants Luke to like his family. A second chance will be good.

Luke gives one very understandable glance toward where the guys are still cheering for Gabe, then another quick peek at his phone, but nods. “‘course.”

They make it to the family room before anyone else arrives, so Cooper sinks onto the couch, yawning, while Luke grabs waters out of the fridge.

“You’re still not sleeping?”

Cooper tries to sit up straighter. “Oh,” he says, and ends up caught in another yawn, interrupting himself. “I was out with my dad and everyone.”

Luke’s face does a thing, not big enough or lasting enough to be called an expression.

“You don’t like them,” Cooper says, an observation instead of a question. He’s curious, really, more than offended, and too tired, after a full day and a competitive game, to aim for subtlety.

Luke’s lack of visible emoting feels, this time, like it’s on purpose. “I talked to them for like, thirty seconds.”

“Yeah, that’s how I can tell you don’t like them,” Cooper says, slow. “Faith doesn’t try to act like she’s my mom, if that’s what—”

“I don’t have a problem with your weirdly young stepmother, Coop,” Luke stops him, like that hadn’t even occurred to him as a possibility, and Cooper is only confused a second longer before realizing: It’s not that Luke doesn’t like them. Luke was talking to his dad, earlier, when the switch flipped in him.

Cooper feels… thrown, a little bit, not by Luke taking issue with a father figure but by him deflecting when asked about it. Since when has Luke had any issue being open about his distaste for anything?

“Why didn’t you like him?”

It’s not new to see Luke struggling for words. It’s more new to see him thinking about them as carefully as he seems to be thinking of these ones, a furrow appearing in his brow. “He talks to you like you’re…” He falters. Shakes his head a little, arguing with the words before saying them. “Not you.”

Cooper doesn’t say, well, I wasn’t, but he comes close.

He wants to laugh, a little bit. On his behalf, then, is why Luke doesn’t like his dad, and it’s so—sweet, really, so kind of him to want to defend Cooper like that, but it’s also just operating off a bad premise.

Luke thinks too highly of him, Cooper thinks. Luke has known him as a person who has a whole team’s worth of friends willing to give up their morning for him, as a person who is mostly good at fan interactions and media responsibilities and content for socials. Cooper’s dad has known him as a friendless little kid who was bad at knowing how to interact without being weird and annoying and offputting even in the way he moved his body, and if Luke was a friendless little kid because of cruel and unfair circumstance, Cooper was a friendless little kid because of Cooper.

Cooper wasn’t always this version of himself, is what Luke doesn’t understand. Sometimes—when he’s spending forty minutes of every morning memorizing facts of the day and making sure his calendars are coordinated, or when he has to watch other people’s faces to cheat-sheet the correct reaction to a joke, or when he stands there in a dream and watches everyone he loves fleeing in fear of him—Cooper still doesn’t feel like the version of himself he needs to be, and so how can he blame his dad for taking a while to be convinced of it?

What Cooper has had no choice but to learn is that you have to earn your way into being good at things and good in general, and it’s work that Cooper’s grateful to have gotten better at, but not work that he’s ever going to be able to stop doing.

It mattered, he thinks, for his dad to see him thriving here, on the ice and off. So that he could reassure Cooper’s mom, sure, but also… just. Just to see it.

What Cooper hasn’t yet learned how to do is say any of this. Not to Luke. Not if it makes Luke look at him different. He thinks too highly of Cooper, more highly than Cooper deserves. He trusts Cooper. Cooper doesn’t think he’ll be able to bear it if Luke stops.

Cooper chews his lip. He’s been quiet too long, and he knows that, because Luke sounds as regretful as he ever does, backing off the point. Maybe mistaking Cooper’s silence for offense.

“It’s probably just ‘cause you’ve said how Christian he is.”

Cooper can’t help but smile. “You don’t have to be polite.”

“Never gonna be that,” Luke agrees, and when he holds out his hand for a fist bump, it feels like a peace offering, so Cooper swallows a dozen different jumbled-up sentences—explanations and dismissals and prying, unfair questions like is me being me why you told Lunch about mysterious texting girl and not me—and touches his knuckles to Luke’s, which makes everything okay.

Everything is okay, but twenty more minutes pass, and his family still doesn’t show up.

Cooper’s the one checking his phone, now. No missed calls or texts, and the one he sends his dad doesn’t get an answer.

“You have a start tomorrow, you don’t have to wait,” he tells Luke, to keep himself from worrying.

Luke says, “shut up,” and doesn’t move from his spot next to Cooper except to stick his head out the door and ask a passing staff member to check the stands and make sure Cooper’s family hasn’t gotten lost.

Ten minutes pass.

Ten more after that.

Darryl from player support stops by to let them know that no one’s left in the seats.

Now Cooper starts to worry.

He wishes he had his calendars with him. Any of them, or just Puck, here to lay his head on Cooper’s knee and keep him steady. Instead, he traces rectangle shapes on his knees, then flattens his hands on the couch cushion, stilling himself, because this is still public, technically.

“The hauntings go after us,” Luke says. “Not people in the stands.” He stood up a while back, is still standing now by the side of the couch, like he wants to be ready to do something so Cooper won’t have to.

“I know,” Cooper says, eyes down. What if that’s not how Scary Demon Lady works? What if he put his family in danger by agreeing to them visiting? How could he have been so selfish, avoiding his mom for his own reasons but letting his dad walk his family right into a team whose hauntings have been less and less predictable all season?

Luke is pacing, and Cooper is focusing all of his effort on keeping himself still and calm and moving normal instead of nervy, and fifteen more minutes have passed by the time his phone vibrates with a text.

“It’s them?” Luke asks, and Cooper nods before he’s even read the text, seeing his dad’s contact name flash across the screen and exhaling in sheer relief, ready to laugh at himself for overreacting and being dramatic over nothing.

And then he reads the text.

---

When Cooper bursts into the waiting room at the hospital, half at a run and with Luke on his heels, he does it louder than he means to, enough that every head in the room turns his way.

“Sorry,” he says to everyone and no one at once, and a man sitting nearby gets up from his seat, his whole face lighting up with interest. Not here, not now.

“Are you the guys from Gabe Marías’ team?”

“Does it look like the fucking time or place?” Luke snaps, in between Cooper and the guy in a second, practically baring his teeth, and whatever gratitude Cooper feels disappears when he sees the look on the fan’s face. Hurt feelings because of Cooper not giving him the time of day, and he just wanted to talk about Gabe and Cooper loves talking about Gabe, everyone should talk about Gabe.

“It’s fine,” he tells Luke, then, to the man, “I’m sorry, yes, we’re his teammates, he’s really as good as he…”

Miles. Cooper’s baby brother. What is Cooper doing.

Shaken—all Cooper has been is shaken, he doesn’t even really remember getting here except for Luke driving at definitely-illegal speeds—Cooper walks further into the waiting room without a word. He’ll feel bad about it later. Right now, he sees his dad, over in the far corner; sees his dad see him at the same time.

“What happened?” Cooper asks, almost tripping over himself to get to him. “Dad, what happened?”

His dad looks shell-shocked. “Miles wasn’t feeling well,” he says. “We thought it was too many snacks, or excitement for the game later, but he—” His voice breaks, and Cooper feels like a little kid, the ground shaking under his feet. “I don’t know what happened, he just dropped, and—a woman walking by was a nurse, she did CPR until the ambulance got there, I don’t…”

Cooper doesn’t realize he’s taking a step back until he feels Luke’s hand between his shoulder blades, like he thinks Cooper’s about to collapse. Just like Miles did, Cooper’s brain says, a little bit hysterically, and bystander CPR doubles the odds of survival in out-of-hospital situations and rescue breaths have to be given at double the rate that you would during CPR on an adult and his little brother is so small.

He doesn’t want the answer. He needs the answer. “Is he okay?”

His dad is nodding before the question’s even out. He looks like he’s aged a decade since Cooper saw him this morning. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, they’re doing tests and all to try and figure out what happened, but kids are tough, Faith is back there with him now.”

Cooper’s twisting his hands. He makes himself stop. Not fast enough: his dad notices, sighs, pulls Cooper into a quick hug, steadying him. “Don’t worry,” he says. “Don’t worry, it’s all handled.”

“Stop, Jonah—”

“No, you—”

From the row of seats they’ve taken over, the twins are shoving each other, tiredness boiling over at the tail end of a day stretched hours longer than it should’ve been. Next to them, hugging her knees, Rebecca is tearing up, visibly overwhelmed.

Cooper’s dad is already breaking away from the hug, on his way to them. “Guys, c’mon,” he pleads, exhausted, and his voice is enough that Cooper remembers himself. The kids need the attention more right now. His family needs him.

“I can bring them back to my place,” he offers, trailing his dad over. Back under control, back to helping, the way he’s good at. “That way you can go be with—”

“No,” his dad doesn’t let him finish, still busy pulling the twins apart. “You’ve got the rest of the season to worry about.”

Like Cooper can’t handle both. “Dad, I can—”

“Cooper,” his dad cuts him off, sharp, and immediately looks guilty for it. Cooper watches him breathe in deep, putting a smile on his face. Finding Cooper’s eyes. Being Patient. “I really, really can’t do this with you right now, bud.”

Cooper has been good at inferring the real meanings under the things people say for years, now. The real meaning of this thing is: his dad doesn’t think that Cooper can handle watching three little kids during a family emergency, and he is being nice about not saying that to avoid hurting Cooper’s feelings.

Cooper’s feeling, singular, is: humiliated, he thinks. He thinks instead of knows, because his brain isn’t cooperating right now, curled up into a little ball at the base of his skull like a kicked animal, or at least a condescended-to one. He talks to you like you’re not you, Luke said, except his dad does talk to Cooper like he’s Cooper, just the version of Cooper that Cooper has spent most of his entire life trying not to be anymore. Succeeding, he thought.

“Mom!”

They all look up at Faith coming out of the double doors. For one terrible second, Cooper’s afraid to look too closely, to know the worst, but when he’s brave enough to scan her face, he sees that she doesn’t look good, just as exhausted as the rest of her family, but she doesn’t look distraught, either. Not like someone whose son is past hope.

“He’s going to be okay,” she says, cradling both of the twins as they sprint to her side. Her voice shakes. “He’s resting, he’s going to be alright.”

Cooper’s dad wraps her and the boys up in a massive hug, his shoulders slumping with physical, desperate relief.

Rebecca, off her seat but lingering, holding onto the arm rest, looks up at Cooper. Knowing something’s off, or feeling it.

Cooper tries to smile for her, reassuring, and must do okay at it, because Rebecca runs toward the others, snuggles in close when their dad lifts her up to join the hug.

Cooper is wringing his hands again. When did he start doing that?

This is good, he thinks, watching his dad and his family embrace from across the waiting room. This is good. Everyone is together, and that’s good, and Miles is going to be okay, and that’s good too. His dad can go home and tell Cooper’s mom and Owen that Cooper’s doing just the same as always and no one has to worry any more than they always will no matter how much Cooper does about it.

There’s things for him to do. Maybe he’ll go find the man from before and apologize for being inattentive and for Luke being short with him while he’s at it, and tell him some of the stories he wanted about Gabe. That’s a good thing to do. And he’ll go home and make sure Christmas the Second’s auto-feeder is still working, and then he’ll memorize some more demon lore, and then—

A rustle at Cooper’s side. Luke, his arm brushing against Cooper’s. He doesn’t get that close by accident. This is him checking in.

Cooper doesn’t need to be checked on. “We can go now,” he says, in the most normal voice he can. It is not his best.

“Okay,” Luke says, mildly enough that Cooper knows he’s accidentally made another person worry about him.

We can go now, Cooper said, but he stays standing right where he is, his mind racing, finally, toward something productive.

The odds of an otherwise healthy kid having a sudden cardiac event are less than one in one hundred thousand. The odds of any of the thousands of hauntings and curses percolating around the Toronto Maple Leafs ricocheting onto a kid at a game must be higher. Cooper and Luke haven’t fought an obvious haunting in a month. That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been one. That means Cooper’s missed something.

Oh. Oh, Cooper is so angry. He doesn’t even really know who all the anger is for. Whatever hurt Miles. His dad for thinking he’s incapable. Himself for missing a threat, proving him right. He wants to find whatever thing is behind this and—

He thinks of people in a lake, Joseph Thibeault and people who actually matter, all flinching away from Cooper’s anger. A dream but not.

Cooper squeezes his eyes shut, squashing down the surge of furious protectiveness he feels. Be better than you were. Not like last time. He can’t try to stop whatever did this out of vengeance. It has to be to help people, to stop it from hurting anyone else.

Okay, then. That’s the thing Cooper will do.

He’s not sure quite how he and Luke make it back to the car.

“Coop,” Luke says from the driver’s seat, quiet, but Cooper doesn’t want him to finish, doesn’t let him.

“Can you drop me at the rink, please?”

“It’s late,” Luke says, but he’s already indicating to change lanes as he does.

He doesn’t drop Cooper anywhere. He parks instead, in one of the player-reserved spots, getting out of the car and trailing Cooper through the deserted practice facility and to the hideout. His phone buzzes, loud in the silence, but without even looking at the screen, he sets it face-down on a box of supplies.

“Tell me what to look up,” he says, determined, to Cooper’s questioning look, and Cooper is not a good enough person to put his foot down and handle this without his friend.

They do what they’ve become naturals at doing, throwing themselves headfirst into the mystery.

“There’s stuff in Pacey’s old lore docs about hauntings that targeted kids,” Cooper directs, grabbing thick stacks of paper from the organized chaos of the hideout. “Look for the school day games, any incidents on those dates, I’m going to review the last month and see if we overlooked any warning signs.”

He sinks into his reading spot under Gertie’s empty frame, laying out his phone and journal pages and printed-out checklists of graves in front of him, going through all three at once. What has he missed? What has he done wrong?

Cooper reads through weeks’ worth of nothing. Curses and speculated curses and dates that the wards were renewed and—

“—if there’s nothing there, just leave them for me to double check, switch to looking for anything obvious happening on the fan side of things,” he says, handing off more notebooks to Luke. “Injuries, illness, unexplained incidents like Miles’—”

“Deaths?” Luke suggests, then, when Cooper looks at him, he shrugs. “People die around the team, no? Like the old guy?”

It takes Cooper a moment to place what he’s referencing. Sam Margolis, the centenarian who died a couple of days after getting to visit the team he loved all his life. Cooper didn’t think much of it at the time. No one did. An honour and a responsibility of being part of a thing people love so passionately is that they sometimes get to meet people in bad shape, healthwise. Hospital visits. Locker room visits, when the fans are healthy enough, like Mr. Margolis was.

Cooper looks back down at the papers arrayed in front of him. The cursed graves he worked on earlier in the week, all of them old. A hundred-year-old curse wouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary, around their team. It would almost be expected.

Tugging at the thread, feeling the familiar hunch that he’s onto something, Cooper switches to searching up everything he can find about Mr. Margolis. A brand-new obituary. Older social media posts from his kids and grandkids.

Was the hunch wrong? Everything he sees about the man and his team seems like he loved his Leafs, no evidence of the cynical bitterness that Cooper’s learned to associate with potential curse-sources. Mr. Margolis seems like he was a genuinely hopeful sports fan who happened to dedicate that hope to the wrong team.

Think. Think, Cooper.

If he wasn’t the originator of the haunting that hurt Miles, is it possible he was another victim?

“Phone,” Cooper says, too focused for manners; then, because he is better than abandoning manners just because of external pressures, “Thank you,” when Luke hands him his phone, obliging like he’s been all night. “Good idea.”

Luke looks surprised. “The dead guy?”

“The dead guy,” Cooper confirms, and gets to internet stalking.

The team always shares hashtags on the jumbotron during warmups. ‘Show us your photos at the game’, that sort of thing. That’s where Cooper starts, scrolling through the hundreds of photos shared during the Leafs’ recent home games. For every selfie or blurry shot of a favourite player taken through the boards, Cooper clicks through to the profile of whoever posted it, scanning any activity since.

There are. So many selfies and blurry shots through the boards. Enough that Cooper feels himself faltering, questioning his hunch all over again, just about ready to turn back to the lore files for a second look.

And then he sees Bianca Gomes.

Her in-game photo is from two weeks back, a shot of her with her arms around a tall, red-haired guy in glasses, both of them showing off their Leafs sweaters. leafs game with this one <3, is the caption, with all the hashtags to get shown up on the jumbotron. @josherwhite97 is tagged in the post.

The most recent photo she’s posted, four days ago today, is one of just the red-haired guy. The caption reads, Josh White, January 21 1997—

Cooper does the math.

Two days after he and Bianca were at the game.

“Luke,” he says, thrusting the phone in his direction. “Does he look sick to you, or—”

Luke shakes his head, switching between both photos. “He looks the opposite.”

Determined, now, Josh White’s beaming smile in the back of his mind, Cooper returns to his search with renewed energy. There, a family of four who went to the Leafs game last week and were a family of three by the next morning. And there, found by Luke this time, an account where the tagged photo is a blurry shot of Gabe from up above, and the very next post on the feed is a carousel dedicated to a dead sister.

Wait.

Cooper goes back to the first photo. Gabe, down on the ice.

Back again. Both kids in the family photo are wearing Marías jerseys.

Back to Bianca Gomes’ profile. She’s wearing Cooper’s number. Josh White is wearing Gabe's.

Mr. Margolis met Gabe right before he died.

Miles, Cooper realizes, slow, spent almost twenty minutes talking to Gabe the same day his heart stopped.

It’s a ridiculous theory. It’s obviously not Gabe, because Gabe is the best and Cooper knows how lucky they are to have him on the team, so he dismisses the idea, moving onto something more—

Wait.

Cooper frowns.

Why is he dismissing the idea?

He stares back down at his phone, trying to retrace his own mental footsteps. Two people dead and at least one who barely survived, all of whom were around the Leafs in the last week, all of whom were wearing Marías jerseys. That’s not nothing.

Gabe’s not nothing. He’s honestly mostly everything, the best and most important and kindest and most talented and—

“What?” Cooper says, out loud this time, exasperated with himself. That’s not how his brain works when he’s solving a haunting. That’s not how his brain works, period. He digs into the details. He remembers the details.

In the hotel room, a couple days back. A question Cooper couldn’t answer and didn’t dwell on. He has to fight himself to get the words out now. “How many goals does Gabe have on the season?”

Luke looks up from the endless string of tagged posts he’s been searching for the better part of an hour, half-awake. “Huh?”

“How many goals has Gabe scored?”

“I,” Luke starts confident. Falters. “I don’t know, the numbers are your thing.”

“I know that,” Cooper says, frowning. It’s just goals. Not even a fancy stat. “But I don’t. Know.”

Memorizing allegedly-trivial facts is one of the fundamental joys and needs of his life. Hockey facts are like—the perfect intersection of the things Cooper loves, soothing even to think of. He knows every one of his teammates’ careers arguably better than they do themselves. Every season. This season, especially. Justin Lim, 12-28-40, Seth Brzezinski, 20-9-29, Gabe Marías…

Gabe’s just the best, plain and simple, that, Cooper knows.

Except—no. No, ‘best’ is a feeling, not facts. ‘Best’ isn’t anything real at all.

Warring with his own instincts, Cooper grabs a container of salt from the stockpiled ghost hunting supplies, and starts to shake it onto the ground. Nothing fancy—why would he bother, why is he even trying any of this, how could he mistrust Gabe of all people like this, what’s wrong with him—just a circle around himself and Luke, and the moment the circle closes, Cooper feels a sensation like something washing over him, a film being scraped from his eyes.

For the first time in weeks, Cooper thinks clearly:

Gabe Marías is on the team, but he wasn’t always.

Luke, next to Cooper, is clutching his head. “Why don’t we know how much he’s scored?” he asks, eyes widening. “Why—Coop, is he a forward, or—”

“I don’t know,” Cooper says, and this time, saying it feels like a revelation. He’s been obsessed with Gabe Marías for weeks, same as everyone else, and he has absolutely no idea about anything to do with the man. What position does he play? What does his stride look like? Hell—when did he get to the team? It was via trade, presumably, because he hasn’t always been here, but a trade would’ve left a paper trail, Cooper would know who got sent back in return, and he combs through the team’s socials, every platform, and finds nothing about trading for Gabe, no footage of him at all prior to around a month ago. No mention of a previous team. No draft position or statline from juniors. Not one even slightly critical post, not anywhere.

Leafs fans, not being critical?

What do they know about Gabe Marías, other than that he’s the best and everyone loves him and that’s exactly how it should be, he’s so good, just the best—

“No,” Cooper says out loud, retreating further into the salt circle, almost crashing into Luke as he does. Smiling, despite everything. “No, but I know this, Luke, I know what he is!” He scans around the hideout for the book he’s thinking of. It’s at his place, probably, but that’s fine, Cooper’s got it memorized. “Incubus. He’s an incubus!”

“Was this in Pacett’s lore stuff?” Luke asks, baffled, and Cooper shakes his head, already talking again.

“No, just some extra reading I’ve been doing,” he says. “Incubi are charming and attractive and they prey on their victims without the victims even realizing they’re being fed on, and by the time they have sex—”

Luke looks a little horrified. “Who’s Marías fucking?”

“Nobody,” Cooper says, patient. “It’s not about the sex, with incubi, it’s the siphoning of energy and lust and emotion.” Oh no. Oh, Cooper’s not smiling anymore. “Luke, they make their victims love them!”

They stare at each other, the magnitude of the truth heavy between them. “The whole team.”

“The whole fanbase,” Cooper corrects, trying to run the numbers in his head. A couple dozen people in the room, a couple dozen more employees around the team. Tens of thousands of fans at every game. Up to a million more watching on TV or streaming from around the world. It must be like an all you can eat buffet, a constant supply of worship, giving a demon like Gabe his pick of victims to drain fully whenever he’d like. “There’s a demon feeding on the whole fanbase.”

Luke, arriving late to what Cooper’s already realized, looks stricken. “An incubus is a demon?” he asks, voice suddenly frantic, eyes darting around like he’s expecting someone to pop out of a box of pucks. “I thought Pacett said they’re rare.”

“They are,” Cooper says, and hears how hollow the words are, even to himself. Scary Demon Lady lurking all season, and now this. Two demons in the same city at the same time as each other, and as hauntings that shouldn’t be, and as fading sigils and a ruined Hall of Fame brunch and a ghost dog without unfinished business and a dozen other coincidences that are feeling less and less coincidental every day. “They… they’re supposed to be.”

He and Luke stand there, face-to-face in their salt ring, both struck silent at the prospect of facing down another of the only thing that’s ever been able to get away from them, and Cooper comes very, very close to feeling like he is in over his head.

Cooper promised, almost exactly a year ago, never to let himself feel that way again. Cooper has been preparing all season never to feel that way again.

He’s ready for this. He’s better than ready for this.

“They will be,” he says. Then, stronger, “They will be, here, we’re not letting one of them near anyone else.”

And right then, in the middle of everything, Cooper is just so glad, so sharply, for all the things he didn’t say to Luke earlier, when he was getting protective over Cooper’s dad speaking to him like a kid. Imagine willingly letting go of the ability to have Luke trust him enough that he looks like this at Cooper’s words, conviction more visible on his face with every one of them.

Even if Cooper hasn’t earned it yet. He will. He will.

Then Luke yawns, hugely, which makes Cooper yawn too, and remember that it is almost one o’clock in the morning, and Luke has the net for the second half of the back-to-back tomorrow.

“You need to sleep,” Cooper realizes, and it’s probably on him for not anticipating Luke’s instant retort.

“You sleep less than me.”

“I told you, I—” It’s not the same. Cooper recalibrates, picks a line of reasoning with a better chance of working on Luke. “Reaction speed actually gets measurably worse with even just a three hour sleep deficit.” On This Day In Science 1999 Boxed Calendar. “We won’t be able to stop a demon if we’re at less than a hundred percent. We have time.”

Luke is squinting hard at Cooper. Cooper lets him. “Don’t lie.”

“You know I can’t,” Cooper says. “Gabe—whatever his name is, if he has a name—he’s been finding his victims at events with fans. We have ‘til tomorrow’s game.” He finds himself being convinced at the same time that he’s convincing Luke. They can’t go after a demon with any chance of failure. No shortcuts. No rushing in without a solid plan. “I’ll drive you to your place, we’ll come back here and figure out a plan in the morning.”

Luke must be tired, because he doesn’t put up a fight, just tosses Cooper the car keys. “In the morning.”

Cooper ducks to pick up the scattered pages he was searching through earlier, shoving them back into a folder and the folder into a millimetre of room on the overcrowded shelf. By the door, waiting for him, Luke is checking his phone. Still angled away, like he always is these days, so Cooper doesn’t have to pretend not to be watching him, which means he sees it the second that Luke freezes, eyes wide as he stares down at his screen.

“Coop,” he says, and Cooper’s already on his way to him, shaking his head, a question.

Luke holds out his phone, wordlessly. It’s still open to Instagram, but the picture Luke’s showing him isn’t of someone at the game.

All the details at once: Cooper recognizes the username, a Leafs podcast whose host is sometimes at team pressers. The photo is from three minutes ago, at a bar or some place like it, that same host posing with a room full of blue-and-white-clad fans and—Cooper double takes, stomach sinking—with Gabe, smiling in the middle of them all.

Guest of honour!, reads the caption. Look who decided to stop by the live show :).

So much for being a hundred percent. God—so much for a plan.

For the second time tonight, Cooper is subject to Luke Thibeault Emergency Driving, which is probably great when you are on a deserted road ten hours from civilization, and feels significantly less great when you are on a busy city street with a trail of furious drivers honking and flipping you off left in your wake.

Cooper tries to share as much relevant demon lore as possible, months of preparation crammed into a—he glances at the GPS—nine minute drive, and counting. “So demons won’t go down to a normal banishment,” he says, rapid fire, “they need specific words and a blood sacrifice won’t do it either, and I think salt will work on their effects but not on them, and they all work differently so we can’t assume that we know Gabe’s weaknesses or—”

“How much time have you spent on this?”

Cooper doesn’t answer, distracted by staring down, checking on posts from the event again. Every minute, it seems like, Gabe is in another selfie with another adoring fan, his face lit up with what Cooper can recognize now as the satiation of a good meal.

Cooper hates him, hates him so angry, and frightens himself with the strength of both feelings. This is just like the dreams. Just like Scary Demon Lady wants from him.

He can’t do this for vengeance. They’re not chasing down Gabe because of Miles, they’re chasing him down because it’s the right thing to do. Because of everyone else that he has hurt and will hurt if he’s allowed to keep deceiving everyone.

The restaurant-bar hosting the podcast event is just off the lakefront, a couple stories high, with an exposed brick aesthetic and a patio area dotted with heat lamps, crowded despite the barely-spring cold coming off the water. Peering through the door, Cooper can see what he assumes is a podcast setup on a tiny raised stage, but no Gabe in sight. By the looks of things, the recording is done, everyone dispersed, and between attendees at the event and random bargoers, the place is packed full. Even from his vantage point, scanning the crowd, Cooper sees no sign of Gabe.

“Take the first floor and the patio, I’ll take upstairs,” he instructs, and Luke breaks off without arguing, the two of them splitting up to try to cover as much ground as they can.

No one else gets hurt. Cooper repeats it like a mantra, willing it into truth as he wades into the crowd. No one else gets hurt. Not because of me.

The music is loud, something guitar-heavy and grating like the dad music Sonny always inflicts on them in the room. It’s an excuse for Cooper not to hear the multiple people who say his name as he makes his way past the tables full of people, the crowded barfront. He’ll apologize after he’s gotten rid of the demon they don’t know is trying to kill them.

The staircase is blocked off with a rope, but the staff are too busy to pay attention to Cooper hopping it and making his way to the second floor.

He can still hear the music from downstairs. It’s the only sign of life; the upstairs part of the bar seems dedicated mostly to overflow, maybe to private events. It’s deserted now, tables with chairs upside-down on top, casting strangely-shaped shadows at every angle, across the spots where the lights from outside glint off the mopped-shiny floor.

No demon. Not out here, at least.

A sound. Faint, not like the muffled noise from the bar below.

Cooper walks the perimeter of the room, quiet as he can. There’s an open doorway around the other side, the way into a secondary kitchen or area for the waitstaff. Cooper doesn’t get a chance to find out which, because once he makes it there, he finds himself face-to-face with Gabe, except Gabe’s not alone.

“You’re my favourite player,” says the girl, Cooper’s age, maybe younger, that Gabe’s currently got his arms around. Her eyes look completely glazed over, a look on her face that would be pure awe, if she wasn’t so out of it. “You’re so—you’re so—”

“Tell me about it,” Gabe urges, and looks over the top of her head, straight at Cooper, and grins.

No surprise on his face, not like he’s been caught. Like Cooper’s just more of the audience he loves so much.

Cooper feels sick. “Let her go,” he orders, focused on Gabe’s prospective victim. He knows the hollowness in her face, saw something similar in Luke every day last year, in Luke’s father as he threatened them on a dock on the shore of a different lake. She’s having her soul drained as they stand here. There’s a pang in Cooper’s chest as he realizes that Mr. Margolis and the other people Gabe’s killed felt the same thing, before they died. That Miles would’ve felt it, if Cooper had left him speaking to Gabe for any longer.

Gabe doesn’t loosen his grip on the woman he’s draining. “Huh. Usually it takes longer for people to catch on.”

Now that Cooper knows what he is, the demon’s person-illusion seems to be peeling up at the edges, almost flickering in the light. Just like with Lake Swift Hawk, just like with Scary Demon Lady, Cooper can feel its presence like something tangible, an oppressive weight in the air—Gabe’s is lesser, somehow, than the other two demons Cooper’s encountered, but he doesn’t have time to take comfort in that fact, not with an innocent person at risk.

Field test time. He reaches to his pocket for his multi tool, ready to draw blood and put his memorized, demon-specific exorcisms to the test. Before he can even touch the metal, Gabe waves a hand, and multiple chairs go flying off of the nearby tables and toward Cooper’s head, and it’s only Cooper’s abnormally good reflexes that let him hit the deck in time.

“None of that,” Gabe says, his voice steely; then, when Cooper goes for his multi tool again, more chairs clatter toward him, making contact this time, legs jamming into the space between Cooper’s shoulders. “Move and I’ll kill her painful.”

Hiding his wince at the pain, not wanting to give Gabe the pleasure, Cooper gets to his feet, but no further, unwilling to test Gabe’s resolve. Field test going bad. Think of something new. Think, think.

“Good,” Gabe says, approving. One arm still wrapped, possessive, around the dazed-looking girl's chest. "Kendall here is my biggest fan, you know that? The athlete thing is so underrated.” He tugs her closer, seems to stand straighter, stronger at the adoring look she gives him. “I had to do the lust stuff for ages, ‘til I caught onto the popstar gig, and that was fun—I mean, the stories I could tell, the pick me losers who’d line up for days just to watch me front row—but sports fans? Whole new level of obsessive. And Leafs fans?”

He grabs Kendall by the hair, yanking her head upwards, shooting Cooper a warning look at his start forward, ‘til Cooper stills again.

“I’ve never seen a group of people more desperate for a hero,” Gabe finishes, self-satisfied. He seems to glow with sheer, greedy pleasure as Kendall starts to slump forward. He holds her up, uncaring. “I’m that, to her. With all her soul, she worships the ground I walk on. Her and the rest of the city. And who could blame her?”

She’s going to die, right here in front of Cooper. “I said let her go,” he orders, and Gabe ignores him, so Cooper gives up on negotiating, starts, “Vade retro—”

More chairs go flying at him, tables too, and Cooper means to bat them aside, willing to take whatever pain he has to to get himself and Kendall out of this, but the furniture seems to have a mind of its own, hovering instead of falling to the ground, hitting at Cooper’s head so he’s got to fling his arms up to protect himself as the tables shove him this way and that, unnaturally forceful.

“Vade—” Cooper tries again, “Vad—”

In Gabe’s clutches, Kendall goes completely limp, and Cooper’s brain goes blank. He can’t let anyone else get hurt. Never again, not because of him, not when he knows he can do something to stop it, he has to be able to do something to stop it.

He shouts, desperate, “Just take me instead!”

Gabe pauses.

It doesn’t occur to Cooper to feel scared. “It’s got to be worth more, right? If I know what you are and let you feed anyway?”

Gabe is watching him, appraising. “You’re going to try to fight me off. My meal will get away,”

“I won’t,” Cooper promises. He just has to hold out ‘til Luke makes it up here. He can last that long. He can survive anything. Power of friendship. “Let her leave, I won’t fight. You’ve been my teammate, you know I tell the truth.”

There’s a crawling sensation down his spine, and Cooper gets the uncanny feeling that Gabe really would know, somehow, if he was lying.

When Gabe realizes that he’s not, he slowly, one finger at a time, releases his grip on Kendall. “Go away,” he tells her, dismissive, eyes locked on Cooper, and Kendall does, wandering, still in a daze, toward the doorway, then around the corner, toward the stairs.

Easy. Easy, that’s one person saved.

Cooper stands his ground, shoulders square to Gabe as he closes the distance between them. He looks like Cooper’s teammate again, the illusion back firmly in place, entreating Cooper to trust him, of course to trust him, always to trust him.

Cooper feels disgusted by him.

Gabe smiles at that, too. “I can feed off you the old-fashioned way, if you want,” he offers, once he’s maybe a foot from Cooper. “I can be whatever you want me to be.”

What Cooper wants, right now, is to run away from the presence that he can feel prying at his mind, like the air around him is trying to press inward, but he can still hear the fleeing girl’s footsteps, not far away enough to be safe. An innocent person. This is what a hero is supposed to be for.

Gabe’s smile is growing as he realizes that Cooper meant it about not fighting. “Oh, you are special,” he purrs. “You deserve something good.”

And then Cooper must be dreaming, because his evil incubus teammate isn’t in front of him anymore, but Scully from, specifically, season four of The X-Files is, scene-perfect right down to the outfit.

“That’s TV,” Cooper says, even as his heart kicks up in his chest. Incubi function by tempting their victims. This is textbook. Fact. “You’re not real.” And the low blow of his childhood crush being thrown at him doesn’t change that, but does get even lower as Gillian Anderson's face shifts, blurring and refocusing until she’s Ivy instead, smiling up at Cooper, familiar and welcoming.

“I don’t look real to you?” she asks, playful, and she’s The Most Beautiful Woman In The City, that’s always true, but Cooper turns his head away from the expression on her face because it’s all wrong, that’s not how Ivy looks at him, and she—not she, it’s not her, it’s Gabe, it’s a demon—is disrespecting the real Ivy horribly by using her like this.

“It’s not like that anymore,” Cooper says, eyes determinedly averted. “She’s my friend.”

“Mm,” Ivy hums. Cooper’s skin crawls at the amusement in her voice. She’s laughing at him. Why? “Sometimes a friend is just what you need, though.”

The next voice to speak isn’t Ivy’s anymore. It isn’t even Gabe’s.

“Coop.”

Cooper turns to look, because he has to, because Luke is the one looking back.

There are exactly two-point-four inches between their heights, which is negligible, especially compared to how much Cooper typically has to look down to see anyone else’s face. It makes it startling, Luke standing as close as he is, right in Cooper’s space, wearing a crooked grin like he’s surprised to find himself there, but not upset about it.

Not that it’s him. It’s not him.

Gabe is confused, is why this is happening. He’s rifling through Cooper’s mind and pulling out the wrong thing, wires getting crossed.

Gabe-Luke smiles bigger when Cooper thinks that. “Hey, Coop,” he says, in the voice that Luke only really does for Cooper. Softer, no fake boredom but not Effort, either. Just Luke.

“Hey,” Cooper says, and it’s not Luke, but it is, he can see him right there up close and how could it be anyone else, how could Cooper not pause whatever he was doing before—what was he doing before?—to make sure Luke has everything he wants and needs? It’s Luke—

—It’s not Luke—

—it’s just Luke, except for how Luke is, huh, looping the drawstring of Cooper’s sweatpants around his finger, not at all like he is about to snap the waistband or do any number of normal locker room shenanigans.

Cooper feels weird. He’s done so much work to get good at identifying and naming feelings, his and others’. This feeling is. Weird. Lives in a different place in his gut than most of his feelings.

He finds his voice. “Uh, what’re…”

“It’s alright,” Luke soothes, then steps with Cooper when he tries to take a step back, still holding onto him. Staying close, speaking even softer, narrowing the whole world down to just them. “Hey. It’s just me.”

Cooper can’t think, his head stuffed with cotton, muffling all his thoughts. “I know,” he says, because he does, it’s Luke, so why is Cooper so certain he was supposed to be doing something else right now? “But we’re not…”

“We’re not what?” Luke asks, and his hand isn’t toying with Cooper’s waistband anymore, it’s dragging up Cooper’s chest, slow and unmistakeably possessive, not at all like how any of Cooper’s friends touch him.

The crossed wires spark.

“I,” Cooper says, staring down at Luke’s hand, not making sense of it. “Luke? You…”

“Shh,” Luke soothes, and his hands are on Cooper’s face now, pulling him right in front of his own, holding him in place when Cooper instinctively recoils. “Shh, just look at me, Cooper. Only at me.”

Except Cooper doesn’t want to look at anyone this close, not right in the eyes, not even Luke, and Luke knows that, and Luke doesn’t complain about Cooper not liking eye contact or think that it means he’s not listening or caring, and Luke would never force it like this.

The momentary clarity is enough for Cooper to grasp for the truth again—this isn’t Luke in front of him, it is a thing that wants him dead—and what comes with the truth is almost enough to make him regret knowing it.

Everything hurts.

Cooper staggers, barely staying on his feet. He feels like someone is dragging an ice scraper along the inside of his ribs, carving away at a piece of him he didn’t know existed until right now, when it’s being taken. This is what Luke described, Cooper realizes, the same emptying of his soul condensed into the span of—how long has it been, thirty seconds, ten minutes, an hour? It burns, being devoured from the inside out, and Cooper has the clarity left to think: Lake Swift Hawk really was restraining itself, if it drew this out over eight years.

“Cooper!”

Luke’s voice again, from further away this time, and Cooper isn’t sure whether to dread or feel relieved at slipping back into the illusion, except then he hears Luke shout, “Get your fucking hands off him, you piece of sh—” before being cut off by a thud, and he uses everything he’s got to tear his gaze away from Gabe in front of him and see Luke, real Luke, here like Cooper knew he would be, fighting off more kamikaze dining chairs at the top of the stairs.

Too many to fight. Too far away. He won’t get here in time.

When Cooper looks back at Gabe, the incubus doesn’t look like Luke anymore. He doesn’t even really look like Gabe, or like a person at all: the demon in front of Cooper is a puppet made of skin, its distorted features shifting by the second, lumps of flesh shifting around his face as he clings to Cooper with both claw-like hands. He sees why Scary Demon Lady prefers to possess people, if this is what a demon made physical looks like. The only thing Cooper’s ever seen comparable to it was Lake Swift Hawk, and this demon is more and less human at once—it has more of a face, enough that Cooper can see its eyes rolling back into its head, a twisted version of the same ecstasy that would be on Gabe’s face as the crowd cheered his name.

It occurs to Cooper, huh, that he may be about to die here.

His knees start to buckle, no pretty illusions to distract him now that the incubus doesn’t care if he sees it for what it is. Somewhere in the distance, he can hear Luke shouting, “Get away from him!” It was nice of him to come. It was Cooper’s fault for making it so he had to. The plan wasn’t good enough. Again, he wasn’t good enough.

Still, Cooper feels a kind of peace. Luke’s not going to get to him in time, but he’s here, he’ll be able to stop Gabe from getting away and protect everyone, Miles and kids like him, and this will have all been worth it and Cooper can know he did the right thing. He never gave in. He never let himself stop believing in better.

So there, he thinks, and hopes that somewhere, Scary Demon Lady can hear him and know that she lost. You were wrong about me.

Cooper closes his eyes, feels the world slipping away, and, without warning, gets ripped out of the incubus’ grip and flung backward through the air.

He was expecting having his soul eaten to death to feel less like being physically tossed around the room like a ragdoll. Logical conclusion: he’s not dying? Not anymore, at least.

Arms catch him, stopping him from falling backwards.

“Luke,” Cooper says, and Luke is clinging to him, taking all his weight, and—it’s him, it’s the real thing, but Cooper feels a flicker of it anyways, that same Weird that flickered in his gut when the demon was touching him with Luke’s face on, but Cooper doesn’t get to dwell on it because that demon, now, is on the ground, writhing in pain.

The misshapen lump that makes up Gabe’s face opens up, and he screams.

“How did you…” Cooper asks, disturbed.

“That wasn’t me,” Luke says, all his attention still locked onto the threat, even if it doesn’t look like much of a threat anymore, and then it’s like a sound wave, a silent sonic boom, and the two of them are hunching down helplessly, covering their ears as a voice drills itself into their minds.

“It’s impolite to play with someone else’s toys without asking.”

It’s a woman’s voice, is a thought that Cooper has and discards pretty much instantly, because it’s only a woman’s voice in the same way Siri or the AI voices that narrate YouTube top 10 lists are women’s voices. An impression, all the right emphasis in all the right places and still something inhuman to it, wrong in a way Cooper can’t name.

It’s her.

Cooper knows it, but can’t make sense of it. Scary Demon Lady is helping them?

She says, in that same piercing voice, turned on a dime to something cartoonishly pleasant, “So ask.”

Gabe, a sweating, trembling mess on the ground, looks like he thinks he’s being mocked—Cooper can recognize that feeling anywhere—but when the silence drags on, he seems to gather himself, swallowing visibly. “Can I—”

“No.”

And he’s screaming again, choking on sobs, pieces of him seeming to disappear even as Cooper watches in horrified fascination. He’s never seen anything as powerful as a demon, and one is being torn apart in front of him, by a thing that’s not even here.

The pressure lifts so quickly and unremarkably that Cooper only registers it on a delay. The noise of the bar seems to fade back in, music and voices. Cooper didn’t realize they’d been silenced.

Scary Demon Lady is gone as soon as she arrived, leaving him and Luke and a dying demon.

“You,” Gabe croaks out, none of the unshakeable self-assurance left in any part of him. “You’re protected by one of the great ones?”

Cooper’s immediate thought is, absurdly, Wayne Gretzky? before realizing that ‘great ones’ was plural, and also that as far as he knows, he is not currently being protected by any retired hockey legends, and also, what?

“Who?” he asks, completely thrown off. Great ones. Great demons?

Gabe squints up at him. He’s staring, prying, and Cooper looks away to avoid his eyes, but it’s too late. He sees, in his periphery, Gabe’s eyes widen. “You don’t know,” Gabe says, before bursting out laughing. Real, genuine laughter that seems to knock the air out of him, even as his face is twisted with pain. “Oh, you idiots, you’re so dead.”

The sound of shattering glass, then, as Luke smashes one of the little candle holders against a tabletop. He keeps a hold of the largest shard, and uses it to slice his palm, the motion harsh.

“It won’t work on a demon,” Cooper reminds him. If it was as easy as a bit of blood, their visit to Swift Hawk would have gone a lot different.

“Look at him,” Luke says, flatly, without even pausing. Cooper’s got to concede, watching Luke start to draw out the banishment sigil, that he’s got a point—whatever Scary Demon Lady did to Gabe, it seems to have left him diminished, somehow, flickering at the edges before Luke’s even halfway done the ritual.

“That corner should be more rounded,” Cooper offers, instead of focusing on the part of his brain that is still horribly woozy, or the part currently debating, with a horrified kind of fascination, exactly what a greater demon must be capable of, to be able to reduce one of its own to this. What a great one must be, and the pieces connect, another idea starting to take shape.

Luke, still drawing, makes the adjustment wordlessly, and Gabe starts to fade right in front of Cooper’s eyes, dissolving, reforming, struggling against being unmade. Helpless against whatever was done to him to make him vulnerable.

“Idiots,” is all he’s saying, now, either consciously or because it’s the only word left to him. “Idiots, you don’t know…”

“Fuck off,” Luke snarls, squeezing his fist like he thinks he can wring out more blood. It looks painful, skin red and knuckles white with tension.

“Luke,” Cooper says, alarmed. “Let me—”

“You fuck off too,” Luke snaps, and the anger in his voice is unexpected enough—it shouldn’t be, Luke always gets heated when they’re in danger—that Cooper misses it, the second between Luke’s blood hitting the centre of the banishment sigil and Gabe disappearing once and for all, and then it’s just Cooper and Luke, standing in an empty restaurant.

Both alive. Both with souls intact.

Close one, this time.

Cooper exhales, leaning against the nearest table to wait out the dizziness. He’ll be okay. “Thanks.”

Luke, his back to Cooper, grabs a fistful of napkins out of the dispenser on the table, wadding them up against his bloodied hand to stem the flow. He’ll be okay, too.

The big thing, under all of it: There was an incubus demon, and now there’s not, because of a demon called a great one. Cooper’s dizzy, but not so dizzy that he can’t put two and two together.

“It’s the lake,” he says, brain going a mile a minute. “Great ones, the Great Lakes, that has to be what he meant.”

He doesn’t know why it didn’t occur to him before, except that conceptually, Lake Swift Hawk was a contained thing, a lake where you could stand on one shore and see the other. It made sense, somehow, that a demon could claim it, be it. Lake Ontario, though—smallest of the five Great Lakes and still one of the largest in the world; also one of the most fatal, with hundreds of deaths in the last decade, half of them unidentified at recovery and forty percent of those still unidentified two months later, Lifeguarding Society 2024 Water Safety Calendar—is too massive to comprehend, less a singular thing than an ocean’s worth of entirely distinct places.

The kind of demon that could occupy a lake like that…

Luke is still turned away, not seeming to realize how big a deal it is that Cooper’s put together the identity of the demon that’s been threatening him all season. Knowing what she is means that he can research and find the facts, which means he can stop her, whatever it is she’s planning. This is it! “It’s her, Luke,” he tries again, emphatic. “Scary Demon Lady is Lake Ont—”

“What the fuck was that?” Luke interrupts, cutting him off mid-major and almost definitely lore-significant revelation, wheeling around to glare at Cooper.

Cooper blinks. “What do you mean?”

“Tell me you weren’t just standing there letting that thing kill you,” Luke says, and something in his voice—Cooper clues in, belatedly, that this isn’t Luke being heated in the midst of a haunting, angry at the demon impersonating a teammate. This is Luke being angry at him, upset like Cooper has only seen him maybe a handful of times. Almost disturbed. “Tell me I saw that wrong.”

“He… was going to hurt someone,” Cooper says, confused at the disproportionate response. No one’s dead. It turned out right. “I had to.”

“Those were not the only two options,” Luke says. “What the fuck, Cooper?”

Cooper’s instinct is guilt—people don’t usually look at him this way anymore, and when they do it means he’s messed up, except usually he knows how he messed up so he can fix it and now he doesn’t, which is so much worse because it means he did bad and is being stupid about it—but Luke’s reaction being so out of nowhere stops the guilt from hitting full force. Facts, truth instead of feelings: this is most likely a misunderstanding.

He just has to explain things to Luke, clearly, so he’ll get it. “Look, we still have no idea what Scary Demon Lady is trying to do, but whatever it is, she wants me to be evil, like she is. The only thing that makes sense is for me to do the opposite of that, right?”

Luke doesn’t look calmed even a little bit. “The opposite of being evil isn’t being dead.”

Cooper can’t tell if Luke is being deliberately clueless. This is confusing, getting more confusing instead of less, twisting into something ugly in his stomach. He’s acting like Cooper wanted this. “I wasn’t trying to be dead, I was trying to save someone’s life.”

“By sacrificing yourself?” Luke demands. “You should have waited ‘til I got here.”

“Gabe wasn’t waiting,” Cooper counters, because that fact is huge and obvious and can’t just be skipped over the way Luke’s doing, that’s not how facts work. “I’m not going to stand by and watch the people I’m responsible for get hurt.”

“We’re,” Luke corrects. “That we’re responsible for.”

Luke doesn’t ever fight by halves. Cooper’s not sure he knows how. His words come out jagged, primed to hurt like they haven’t been at Cooper in a long time, most of a year.

It works. They hurt.

“That’s not fair,” Cooper says, quietly. He misspoke. That’s all it was. Luke should know that. He thinks, habit: when someone is trying to hurt another person’s feelings, usually it’s coming from a place of hurt, from trying to protect their own, and so you don’t have to let it affect you. Thinking that is not the same thing as feeling it, today.

Luke’s hands are shaking. They haven’t done that in a while, either. Cooper can’t tell if it’s from leftover panic or from anger. Either way feels like a failure. “You said it.”

“Not like—” Cooper stops himself too late.

“Not like what?” Luke asks. “Not like you deciding you’re just going to be doing the graves and wards and confronting the bad guys by yourself from now on without telling me?”

“Like you spending all your time texting your new secret girlfriend and going out on the road and not telling me,” Cooper retorts, without consciously deciding to. He can see Luke surprised at the forcefulness of his voice. Cooper is also surprised. Not enough to regret it. “Like that.”

Deserted as it is, the upstairs of the restaurant hasn’t been soundless at all—there are voices from the main floor, muffled music, both have been a steady backing track to the entire argument. So there’s no real silence after what Cooper says. Just what feels like one, Luke going visibly tense in the aftermath. Cooper finding himself breathing heavily.

Slowly, undeniably, Luke’s face is going bright red. He’s ghost-pale enough that it stands out, blotchy and furious. “That’s different.”

Cooper’s throat feels dry. “How?”

“It just is,” Luke says, and then, going even redder, “And it’s fucking—none of that has anything to do with you, by the way, so I don’t know what you’re thinking but don’t act like I ever—”

“I’m not!” Cooper protests, embarrassed without entirely knowing why.

“It sounds like you are!”

Luke is not the only one whose face has gone all hot, now. Cooper didn’t… he really didn’t mean to say that, about the texting. What right does he have to get mad at Luke for having other people in his life?

As much as Luke has to act like Cooper’s been the one keeping things from him, Cooper’s brain supplies, then he’s annoyed about it all over again, and Cooper is not a person who gets annoyed, not with his friend, even when his friend is acting like Cooper is in the wrong when it’s the opposite, completely the opposite.

“Okay,” Cooper says anyway, calmly, because he is a good goalie and a good goalie is calm, and also when you are the size Cooper is you don’t just get to get mad at people. Bring the situation back under control. “Fine. I don’t want to argue. Can we please focus on the important things right now?”

Luke responds the exact opposite of the way he’s supposed to, angrier and more incredulous instead of reassured. “More imp—do you get that you not getting killed is important?”

He’s not listening. As if Cooper is the one who doesn’t understand things. “No, it’s really not.”

Luke gapes at him. “Cooper!”

“It’s not, Luke!” Cooper insists, losing a handle on his temper. He’s right and he keeps being right and Luke isn’t listening, why do people keep not listening to him? “Objectively, it’s not, there’s so many people relying on us and all of them are in danger and the thing putting them in danger is a demon powerful enough to control one of the biggest bodies of freshwater in the entire world and I would be doing exactly what she wants if I put my own safety ahead of protecting them.”

“You can’t protect anyone if you’re fucking dead,” Luke spits, and Cooper reels, sways in place like he just got punched.

So that’s it, then. ‘You can’t’.

It’s not new to Cooper, being doubted. It feels different coming from Luke, a whiplash feeling that it takes him a moment to identify as betrayal, that leaves a bitter taste on his tongue. After everything Luke said about Cooper’s dad, he’s no different when it comes down to it. No matter what Cooper does.

“I can protect everyone,” Cooper says, slow and deliberate, he has to be those things, so he won’t explode. He knows himself and what he’s capable of, and he doesn’t need Luke or anyone to tell him he doesn’t. “I have been this whole time, and I’m going to keep doing it, because they didn’t sign up for any of this.”

Luke has been shaking his head the entire time Cooper’s speaking. “Neither did we.”

Cooper snaps, fed up, “Then leave,” and takes an unthinking step forward as he does, and Luke—

Luke flinches.

In that split second, dream and reality blur into each other and Cooper is standing in the lake, staring down at his family, his friends, his team, feeling the same hateful anger for all of them while they look up at him in terror, cowering away from him, the way Luke just did.

Horrified at himself, Cooper trips over his feet in his haste to back up, practically flinging himself flat against the far wall, trying to be less of a threat in any way he can. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

He can’t bear to look at Luke, can’t look anywhere near him, but hears the embarrassment in Luke’s voice. “Don’t.”

“I wasn’t going to—”

“I know you weren’t,” Luke says, too fast. “I wasn’t…”

Scared, he doesn’t say, because he was, and they both know it.

Scared of Cooper.

And Cooper is scraping his fingers against drywall, wishing he could burrow his way inside, thinking of his teammates as a kid, can’t you just be normal, his dad, I can’t do this right now with you, and Cooper didn’t mean to make himself a threat to anyone, he’s not, he’s not, but then he thinks of the demon that’s been dogging his steps all season, a demon that, if he’s not wrong, is possessing a lake fifty times the size of the one that laughed in his face a year ago, telling him the hero they expect of you is a fiction, and doesn’t know anymore.

She said it with the absolute certainty that she’d be proven right. That, for him, it was only a matter of time.

Chapter 6: The Path To Hell

LUKE

The leadup to the playoffs is like watching a storm roll in across a lake; no poetry to the metaphor, just a shift in air pressure, as tangibly electric in one case as in the other.

In the week between the regular season and the games that matter, Luke can’t leave the house without seeing Leafs flags on cars, the logo on hats and sweaters on every other person that passes, the whole city crackling with… excitement? With what would, for a normal team, be excitement, but it’s the Leafs and the city knows their team, so it’s mostly just tension, the ‘it’s our year’ hope and ‘how are they going to fuck it up this time’ cynicism doing the unstoppable force, immovable object dance.

Luke’s not drinking the kool-aid. Not all the kool-aid. It’s his first time in the NHL playoffs, he knows they’re a different beast. Still—they secured home ice advantage by a two point margin. The team’s as hungry as the fans, maybe more.

Big maybe. Luke, cross-legged on the rug in the players’ lounge, looks up at the TV, livestreaming the pre-playoffs presser happening a room away. It’s been going on for ages, the three of them—captain, first line centre, best goalie—all in a row, speaking in turns. Luke’s been paraded out there enough to know the solid wall of cameras, phones, and mics raised just off screen, the couple of old-timers scattered throughout with notepads and pens hovering above the page in anticipation.

Here in the lounge, there are only a few of the other guys still milling around after the morning’s off-ice sessions. Brzezinski taking pictures of the screen at fucked-up angles, giving everyone double chins. No one aside from Luke is more than half-watching the presser. So. Maybe more of the kool-aid than he’d like to admit.

One of the Sportsnet guys is the next to pipe up with a question, barely discernable in the shitty audio quality. “Coach Larsson is keeping his cards close to his chest with regards to who’ll be getting the net game one, but Cooper, you’ve started more games this season than at any point in your pro career, do you feel you’ve earned the role? That you’re ready for that responsibility?”

Cooper is nodding along, listening real attentively to the whole pre-question monologue instead of tuning it out like Luke does. “I think everyone on the team is ready for anything that comes. Whichever of us is in net, Luke and I want the same thing.”

A beat of expectant silence.

“Oh!” Cooper blinks. “Uh, for the team to win. Go Leafs go.”

It’s as Cooper a response as he could’ve given, and it gets Lunch reaching over to mess up his hair, chuckles from the gathered reporters, everyone present just helplessly endeared.

Luke almost is too, a room away, until he remembers that he’s still pissed at Cooper, and then he’s pissed at him all over again for that fact, because being pissed at Cooper for his complete lack of self-preservation is the last fucking thing Luke needs to be right now. They’ve got bigger problems.

There was a demon right here on their team, the latest and most concerning of the mostly-innocuous, not-so-innocuous anymore shit that’s been dogging their heels all season. Luke’s confident that Pacett and McAllister could tell something was up with him and Coop when they called to update them on the whole Incubus-Great One situation, which would’ve been worth it if they’d had any solutions to what was happening, but they didn’t, so it was just embarrassing.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” McAllister said, her whole face creased into, like, three frowns at once. “What would have drawn a lesser demon into Lake Ontario’s territory? Tom—”

“You know I would’ve told you if anything like this happened before,” Pacett said, shaking his head at her unasked question. From the looks of the call, he was in an airplane bathroom, the camera glitching every other second. “I’m more—okay, the greater demon’s Lake Ontario. There’re a dozen cities on the lake, both sides of the border. What the fuck would it be doing targeting a team from the least popular sport?”

And after the most painfully awkward brainstorming session of all time, the olds keeping up the conversation while Cooper and Luke both pretended in the name of either professionalism or sheer dire necessity that they hadn’t yelled at each other in a casual dining restaurant like forty-eight hours before while talking to everyone present but each other? At the end of all that, they knew just as much as they did when they started.

At the end of the days that have followed, Luke knows even less.

Like they’ve been doing for months, the protective sigils he and Coop maintain around the rinks have been disappearing faster than usual. It’s meant more busywork for the two of them—they usually only have to deal with the hauntings powerful enough not to be caught by the wards, and now every free second between practices and travel has been spent dealing with the small, insignificant hauntings that are slipping through. Pucks that start hovering half a centimetre above the ice. Plays scrawled on the whiteboard in what looks like blood instead of marker. Tiny hauntings, all easily dealt with by a banishment scrawled in a handful of salt, no blood sacrifice even needed.

There’s no intention to any of it, not that Luke can make out, and that’s maybe as disconcerting as anything. The scattered micro-hauntings, the demonic presence going from zero to two in the span of a year, Lake Ontario wrecking an incubus’ shit for fucking with Cooper… unless her big evil scheme is to tire Luke and Cooper out with a dozen sidequests, which would be too easy for anything in this goddamned city, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to any of it.

“They’re wrong,” was all Cooper said, after the call with Pacett and McAllister. Not looking at Luke, still. “Lake Ontario didn’t kill the incubus for being in her territory. He was in her territory for weeks, feeding.”

She didn’t kill him, Luke finished the part Cooper was leaving unspoken, until he tried to kill Cooper.

Some intention, then, and Pacett was right. There’s no good reason why something as powerful as the kind of demon that claims a Great Lake as its home base should be targeting a hockey team. Targeting Cooper in particular. No good reason, and no good that can come out of whatever reason there is.

It’s not just the playoffs, the feeling settling in over the city. Luke knew this feeling intimately even when he had hardly any feelings at all: something’s coming.

In the distance, the storm crackles.

Up on the TV, the presser’s still going, cycling through the last few questions. Reporters ask Lunch how the team’s going to manage the lack of postseason experience on the roster, as if a veteran-heavy room was doing them any good before the retool, then ask the entire group if the mood around the team is being affected by the recent newspaper vandalism incident, as if anyone under, like, fifty still reads the news.

Luke mostly tunes out at that point. Gets lucky, a few minutes later, that he hears Cooper and the guys heading away from the presser before he sees them, enough for Luke to look busy, grabbing his phone and bag like he was just on his way out.

He plays it cool while the others make small talk—“Get some rest, eh?” “For sure, you too.”—and times it right, straightening up just as Cooper’s heading his way. Casual.

“Hey,” Luke says, like a massive dweebass fucking loser, falling short of casual by a mile. “Good interview.”

It wasn’t. It was basically a hundred percent average, questions and answers that could’ve been swapped out for almost any pre-playoffs presser in the league, not even worthy of comment, especially not the kind of stilted, nothing compliment comment Luke just made.

Usually, when Luke says something dumbass like that, Cooper will have some wry remark or a ‘well actually’ to counter with. Now, he just shoots a bland, fleeting smile in Luke’s vague direction, his eyes averted more than usual. “Thanks.”

Luke was worried, after he ran his mouth enough to make Cooper raise his voice for the first time presumably ever, that they’d keep fighting and he’d have to finally learn what it was like to have Cooper Kepley look at you like he hates you. A waste of worry, because instead of any kind of hostility, Cooper hasn’t stopped biting his tongue around Luke for damn near a month, doing the world’s worst impersonation of himself while keeping at least two feet between them at all times, since Luke flinched away from him.

If Luke’s pissed at Cooper, he’s more pissed at himself, for that flinch.

He knows Cooper would never in a million years hurt him or even think about hurting him. He knows that to his fucking bones, knew it there probably months before he was ready to let himself believe it. Doesn’t know how to explain to Cooper that wincing away from him was body, not brain, some stubborn muscle memory that’s refusing to grow up and move on along with the rest of Luke. It’s not you, it’s me. That, but the truth. That, but not… how it sounds. Not laden like it is, when one of you is straight and the other is Luke.

Not, Luke reminds himself, a little despairingly, that Cooper even knows that part yet. It’s a tough thing to casually work into a conversation when you’re barely talking and simultaneously pretending like everything’s normal; ‘by the way, I’m gay, let’s be friends again!’ like some weird manipulative guilt trip designed to erase the fact that Luke almost had to stand there and watch Cooper fucking die—

Luke can be mad at the both of them. He is mad at the both of them, but they’ve got the rest of today off before they get ready for game 1, and it’s Cooper, so Luke tries.

“Did you want to—”

“I was going to go to the Sceptres game,” Cooper’s already saying, before Luke’s even done asking. “I don’t usually get to, so.”

“Okay,” Luke says. Knowing the rebuff’s not on purpose, that Cooper doesn’t do passive aggression. “Whatever.”

He shoves his hands in his pockets. Cooper watches him do it. Doesn’t invite Luke to join him the way he usually would, so Luke doesn’t volunteer his plans either, because excuse or not, weirdness or not, Cooper would drop his to help, and whether or not Luke is currently pissed at him, an afternoon off from paranormal shit is the least Cooper deserves. Luke doesn’t want to watch him in danger again. Not this soon.

He watches Cooper hesitate. Picking his words and discarding them.

“See you?” is what he lands on. Like it’s a question. Still keeping a determined distance, holding himself like he thinks Luke’s going to flee otherwise.

“Yep,” Luke says. “Have…”

Cooper’s already on his way out. For once, the one running away first.

“…fun,” Luke finishes. Standing there alone.

Luke almost wishes they were still fighting. That was better than whatever the fuck this is.

Behind him, the others are scuffling, loud as ever.

“Post it, post it!”

“Do not post me with a double chin!”

God, life would be so easy if Luke was a forward.

He grabs his things, for real this time, and heads out of the lounge. Cooper’s got an afternoon off. Luke’s got to get to work. Other work.

It’s probably because of that, thinking of the side gig he never asked for and has only recently and reluctantly admitted to giving a shit about, that Luke registers the snippet of conversation he hears as he passes the reporters, filing out of the media room.

“—some kind of a prank, I guess, but the fact that it made it to print…”

“It’s horror movie-esque, Paul, I don’t know how you don’t find it threatening.”

Luke’s next step falters. More of the news shit they asked about during the presser. It could be nothing. It’s usually not nothing, around here. Last time, it was a whole-ass demon.

Decision made, he turns on his heel, stalking back toward the herd of press.

“Hey,” Luke says, and they all turn to him at once, faces lighting up like they think he’s about to give them something newsworthy, like they haven’t been farming clicks off the ‘THIS GUY’S COP DAD DIED AND NOW HE’S MID AT HOCKEY’ shit all season. “What’s happening with the news?”

He’s immediately validated on wishing he’d avoided this conversation: the news, it turns out, isn’t even on, like, a website. One of the old white guy reporters—distinct from the middle aged white guy reporters who make up the bulk of the crowd in that their questions are usually openly hostile instead of veiledly hostile—hands Luke an actual physical newspaper, an antique with yesterday’s date on the front page.

“Sports section,” he advises, and Luke unfolds the paper to the pages in question, headlined with a photo of Artem, mid-celly after his breakaway in game 82. Actually-headlined, over the photo, with massive, bolded text that reads, IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN.

“You wrote this?” Luke asks the group at large, and gets head shakes in return.

“None of us wrote any of it.”

It’s not just the headline. The entire text of the article, same as the next article under the fold, and the tiny stub of an article cut off at the bottom, reads, IT’S HAPPENING IT’S GOING TO HAPPEN IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN IT’S GOING TO HAPPEN AGAIN.

He understands the desire to dismiss it as a prank. Less a reaction to it actually feeling like a prank, closer to a need to explain away the sickly sense of unease that seeps in when Luke reads the words.

He doesn’t want to be holding this newspaper anymore.

Too aware of the dozen or so reporters with their eyes on him, waiting for a reaction, Luke keeps any hint of expression off his face.

One of them’s extra enterprising. “Feels pretty ominous, right?”

“I’ve heard worse,” Luke says, and shoves the newspaper back toward the nearest press member before making for the door. This doesn’t change his plans for today. Just makes them more urgent.

The Leafs’ practice facilities are thoroughly deserted, not a soul for Luke to have to brush off on his way to the hideout. Once he’s in, the light in the commandeered equipment room takes a long second to turn on, enough for Luke’s imagination to run away with him. Not enough that he doesn’t feel stupid, once the room’s lit up and it’s just crammed full of boxes and ghost hunting shit, same as ever.

He’s not used to being here alone, without even Puck underfoot, that’s all. Still rattled by the article. Rattled by a lot.

Luke dumps his stuff by the door, heading into the makeshift workspace. A sign of desperate times: Cooper has actually broken out the red string, recently, a slightly-fraying thread connecting a series of photos and torn-out pages of books and sticky notes in Cooper’s blocky print. Small curses/hauntings (Puck?)? Hall of Fame zombies – accident?? Demon hiding around the team??? Another one in the centre of it all that’s just ???????????

Luke grabs the notepad and scrawls his own, LAKE ONTARIO TRYING TO USE COOPER FOR SOMETHING. He underlines it again and again ‘til the paper rips and sticks the torn-up sticky note on the wall anyways, even if Cooper obviously didn’t think it was important enough to include, because Cooper’s a fucking hypocrite who would set himself on fire to protect the team as if losing him wouldn’t—

As if losing him is even an option.

Determined, now, ready for more doing, less sitting around and bitching about it, Luke sits down hard on the floor and drags over the nearest stack of papers. He’s not moving ‘til he finds something helpful.

That would be real motivational, if anything here was fucking helpful.

Luke doesn’t know what he’s looking for. A convenient explanation for why demons are flocking to the team and bringing random minor hauntings with them? That kind of a needle in a haystack.

He makes it through a stack of printed-out screenshots, a scanned page of what looks like handwritten notes by Pacett, and a list of dealt-with cursed graves—did Cooper check all of these curses off?—and they’re all just words, nothing jumping out at him as strange or suspicious. His brain doesn’t work how Cooper’s does, remembering details and knitting them together well enough to notice when something doesn’t fit.

Luke stretches out his legs, rolling out his neck. He’s just going to fucking have to notice, though, isn’t he? If he’s no good to Cooper and the team on the ice, he can at least make a difference here.

The search is boring, and more boring ‘cause Luke’s slow at it. He’s not sure how much of the morning he passes in a haze of documents and Cooper’s partially-thought-out theories, is fighting to stay awake by the time he’s halfway through a stack of old fanmail sent to the team. Sort of just hoping someone will have doodled demonic symbols in the margins, barely registering the actual words anymore, when he processes what he’s looking at: a greeting card, generic winter scene on the front, blank inside except for one handwritten line: IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN.

Just like in the newspaper. He blinks, sitting up straighter. Reads it again. There’s no signature, no return address like every other fan letter has had. It looks like one of those fucked-up bragging notes serial killers send to detectives in movies. The phrasing can’t be a coincidence.

Luke grabs for the folder that the letters were wedged into. The label on the front says 1993.

Why the fuck are today’s newspapers echoing a random fan letter from, like, the Jurassic era?

Cooper keeps a list, Luke remembers suddenly, promising leads and prospective hauntings. Half of it about his CHUM witch obsession, sure, but maybe he’s got something about weird recurring phrases, too. Luke scoots on his knees a couple feet over, retrieving Cooper’s notes from their place right in the net.

“C’mon,” he mutters, flipping to the most recent page. “C’mon, something…”

His words trail into nothing.

Right there on the page, in Cooper’s handwriting, is IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN IT IS GOING TO HAPPEN. THE TORONTO MAPLE LEAFS LOSE AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN AND—

Oh, fuck no. Luke drops the paperclipped pages and gets to his feet, yanking a book off the stack wedged onto the nearest shelf at random. It’s got to be over fifty years old, crinkly-thin pages and a beat-up cover. Every page, first to last, is filled with the same text.

—AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN AND—

Luke slams the book shut, moves ‘til he’s got the wall at his back. Sticky notes flutter to the ground behind him, falling off the conspiracy board, and Luke catches glimpses of their text as well—

—AGAIN AND AGAIN IT IS HAPPENING IT WILL HAPPEN ALWAYS AND AGAIN—

Scrawled out promise-threats where he knows they weren’t the last time he looked, the world being rewritten around him.

He feels it, then, clear like he’s seeing it in the room in front of him.

He’s not alone here.

“If it’s you,” Luke starts, and knows even as he’s saying the words that it’s not. Lake Swift Hawk’s presence was cold, and snide, and generally and intentionally ominous. Never unsafe, though. The opposite.

For the first time, in this place he and Cooper have made their own, Luke doesn’t feel safe.

There’s no answer to his non-question, just a sourceless weight bearing down all at once, like someone’s cranked up the gravity in the Leafs’ shittiest equipment room by half, forcing Luke to lock his knees or sink down under the pressure.

No demons in sight, nothing to even attempt to fight.

Luke makes a judgement call. He runs.

His footsteps echo in the empty halls, and he hammers a fist against the automatic door button ‘til the door slides open, airlock-style, letting him out of the Leafs’ part of the FPC.

The concourse is just as deserted as the rink itself, only the lingering smells of sweat and stale popcorn from concessions left in their wake. Only those, and the strange rippling movement, almost a wave, fluttering across the wall opposite Luke, the one plastered with black and white photos of hockey history.

Luke takes a step back, breath caught, when he realizes what he’s seeing: the eyes of every person pictured are following him, 2-D heads turning to track his movements, and—he rubs at his eyes, willing himself to be seeing wrong—the letters on the fronts of their sweaters are moving too, rearranging themselves into new words, new sentences. IT’S HAPPENING—

From behind Luke, a noise; he whips around, fists up.

A short guy with a mop looks at him, just as startled.

One of the janitors. Coop would know his name.

“Didn’t mean to startle you, there,” he says, smiling all tentative, like he’s waiting for them to joke about this together.

“You didn’t,” Luke says, too snappish, and he can see the guy thinking, woah, Leafs player thinks he’s too good to make conversation with a janitor, but mostly he can see a thousand completely normal black and white photos, nothing haunted about them.

He leaves embarrassed, and mad about it. Kicking himself for his overreaction to what was, in the brisk sunlight of the afternoon outside, obviously just the latest of the stray hauntings. Overactive imagination, like always.

Back at his apartment, door quadruple-locked like he hasn’t felt the need to in months, Luke sits on his balcony and takes in the view of Lake Ontario that tacks on two hundred extra bucks a month to his rent. The view that is, apparently, trying to corrupt Luke’s friend and do who knows what to their team.

Things to protect. Things to lose.

There’s a fog descending over the lake. Making it look like it goes on forever. Luke doesn’t know if Scary Demon Lady is Lake Ontario or just in it, using it as a way into the world. Doesn’t know if those kind of distinctions even matter to something as other as a demon. It would've been real convenient if Lake Swift Hawk had explained literally anything ever, not that it had any reason to, and not that Luke would be dumb enough to trust it if it did.

“You were kind of fucking useless, you know that?” he says to the empty space where it used to be.

Luke wraps his arms more tightly around himself, unconsciously. He closes his eyes, leaning back against the sliding door. It’s cold. Grounding. Not enough, apparently, because the thought that comes front of mind is, whiny like a little kid—

He wants Cooper to hug him again. That would probably fix at least half of the problems happening in Luke’s brain, if he could just sit and let Cooper hug him for maybe like eight hours, and then when that was done they could be done with this stupid not-fight and do what they do and solve the rest of the leftover problems together and both of them could stop with the not telling each other shit and Cooper could go back to looking at Luke like he doesn’t even have to think about it. He doesn’t look at anyone else that easy. No one.

It’s embarrassing even to think. Disparate feelings getting mushed up into one big confused wad of stupid. This having a soul thing is not for the faint of heart.

No one’s ever accused Luke of being that. Fuck that. He turns away from the window and the demonic Great Lake outside it, grabbing for his phone as he does. No messages from Cooper. Fine. Whatever.

His thumb hovers over the screen for a second’s hesitation before he gives in and opens the notification that is waiting. It’s just a ‘hey’. Luke can work with a ‘hey’.

It’ll be something, at least, out of this waste of a day. More than a hug, if not better. If not—

It’ll be something. Clear his head, work out the pressure built up inside him, if not the pressure rolling in from all directions outside.

hey, Luke sends back, and looks away from the letters on the screen before they can rearrange themselves into something he doesn’t want to see.

 

COOPER

The atmosphere at the Sceptres game is great, a crowd reacting to every play, the rink small enough compared to Scotiabank that the reactions sound bigger than they are instead of smaller. They’re a cyclical thing, crowd reactions like that. Feeding into themselves. Positive feedback loop, like oxytocin or exothermic reactions. Learn Every Chemistry Fact You’ll Ever Need In 365 Days, promotional calendar from a regional chemists’ conference that Cooper got for free at a yard sale his first year in the A.

At one of the breaks in play, the jumbotron shows Cooper up in his box, and it gets another cheer, one of the biggest. Cooper does his friendliest thumbs-up and smile, showing off his jersey. The camera lingers on him too long, all the way until the ref drops the puck.

A small whine from next to him, his Puck picking up that something’s off-kilter.

“Don’t worry,” Cooper says, holding out a hand so Puck will nuzzle up for pets. He likes being at any rink, Cooper’s learned. He won’t ruin this one for him—at least one of them deserves to enjoy being here.

The hockey’s as good as the atmosphere. Cooper’s not as focused on it as he’d like to be. It’s just priorities.

After the game, he makes his way into the players-only part of the rink and waits by the locker room. Not Toronto’s.

Morgan’s out of the visitor’s room quick, scraping wet hair into a braid as she looks around. Her team’s got a quick turnaround back to Montreal, and she agreed to meet with Cooper when he asked, but they’re on a time crunch. It’s okay—Cooper knows why he’s here.

“Hey!” He calls out, then, when she jogs over, “You locked it down so good in the last ten minutes.” He offers a high five, one that Morgan returns, raising her eyebrows.

“Where’s the Toronto loyalty?”

“Oh, I’ll deny I said anything if people ask,” Cooper plays along, and that finally gets Morgan to crack a smile, and for just those few seconds, it’s just two goalies joking around after a game, bonding over goalie stuff.

“You’re not here to compliment my hockey,” Morgan guesses, then, because they’re both too smart to pretend like they don’t know the other goalie stuff Cooper’s here for.

“You met a demon before,” Cooper says. He sees Morgan react and try to pretend she didn’t. He spoke too bluntly. Realized too late. Focus, Cooper. Read the signals. “Sorry.”

Morgan shakes her head, turning down the apology. She doesn’t look surprised, just resigned. “I figured this conversation was going to happen sooner than later.”

Not like she wants to talk about it, but not like she’s against it, either. That’s something. “How did you get rid of it?” Cooper asks, and Morgan exhales, heavy.

“I didn’t.”

A group of her teammates head out of the locker room, laughing. Not paying him any attention, but when Morgan gestures for Cooper to follow her away from the noise anyway, he does.

“It wasn’t anything to do with hockey,” she starts, once they’ve found an empty room, a tiny kitchenette probably mostly used when the Coliseum is hosting concerts, and settled into two of the mismatched chairs scattered around the place. One of the overhead lights is humming, flickering every few seconds. “Just the water, like Thibeault’s. Like this ‘great one’.”

Cooper remembers that much from last year: bodies of water as paranormal gateways. Maybe explains some of why there are so many hauntings around ice rinks, aside from the Maple Leafs of it all. If he’s right about the great lake, Lake Ontario thing, it’s a promising thread to follow. “You lived near a lake, too?”

Morgan half-smiles, wistful. “I lived by the ocean,” she corrects, which Cooper knows, or should have known, but he doesn’t get a chance to apologize because Morgan continues, without any kind of preamble or fanfare, “My younger brother died when I was sixteen.”

“I’m so sorry,” Cooper says. He can’t help but think of his own little siblings. Miles is as good as new after everything that happened with the incubus, but even the idea of something happening to him, to Syd, to any of the others, makes Cooper feel ill.

It’s not surprising, really, that Morgan’s not the kind of person who wants any comfort on the subject. “He was born with heart issues. No one expected he’d make it as long as he did.” Whatever callousness is in the words, Cooper recognizes from Luke’s voice as the kind built up as scar tissue over time, not from indifference but from the opposite. He doesn’t push it.

“Will really loved rocks,” Morgan goes on, her face softening as she does. “Since he was little, he collected anything that had a fossil in it. Imprints of shells and things. Little nerd.”

Her smile doesn’t linger after that.

“I kept going out to find them for him after he passed,” she says. “I mean, not for him, but.”

“For him,” Cooper confirms, and Morgan nods.

“One night, maybe a year after he died, I was on the beach,” she says. “And so was he.”

Cooper is too aware of the faint buzzing of the ceiling lights. The total silence, otherwise.

“Your brother?” he asks, more hushed than he means to.

“The demon pretending to be him,” Morgan says, and Cooper has to stop himself from recoiling in his seat, feeling sick at even the thought of it. “It told me it could bring him back for real. Give the demon my soul, and Will would be here again. What kind of older sister wouldn’t take that deal?”

If it was Cooper’s baby siblings…

Cooper wants to say he wouldn’t have listened. Of course, he wouldn’t have listened. He knows better.

He’s afraid, he realizes, to hear Morgan’s answer. “Did you…”

This time, Morgan’s smile is wry, humourless. “No,” she says. “No, I turned and hightailed it home because I thought I’d just met the devil. Only good thing I ever got out of Sunday school.”

Maybe Cooper should’ve listened more to his dad.

“If it had needed to stop me, it could have,” Morgan says, like she’s reading his mind. “And there’s not a damn thing I could’ve done about it.”

Cooper thinks, like he’s thought a million times, of staring down Lake Swift Hawk, of the acuteness of knowing that he and Luke were being let go, not escaping. Not winning. Not doing anything at all, really. He thought—if Morgan had defeated a demon, if there was at least some kind of proof that winning was possible, not just surviving by a fluke—

Morgan shakes out her shoulders, seems to physically step out of the trance the retelling put her into. “I’m sorry I don’t have a better story for you.”

“No,” Cooper shakes his head, automatically defaulting to reassurance. “No, it’s alright.” Then, because reassuring or not, he still has to solve this, “if you could just—if you remember anything it said or did that could be some kind of weakness, could you let me know, please?”

He wishes, right then, that he was still bad at matching faces to emotions. It would be nice to not see the painful amount of pity in Morgan’s expression.

“Kid.”

Cooper is still shaking his head, faltering in his so-close-to-their-eyes-people-mostly-can’t-tell eye contact. If he just explains, she’ll get it. “Just ‘cause I’ve been doing a ton of research so I know I’m close to a breakthrough on how to get rid of this one, all I need to do is—”

“You can’t get rid of a demon, Kepley,” Morgan cuts him right off, none of the hesitation that most people usually show to break rules of politeness.

“We got rid of the incubus,” Cooper argues, or tries to.

“Lake Ontario got rid of the incubus, and from what I hear, you’re lucky she did,” Morgan says, and Cooper stiffens, but she’s not done. There’s something familiar to her whole bearing, now. The moment when the goalie you are on the ice slips into the person you are off it. For Morgan, it means her voice drops to something low and urgent, a general giving orders, almost forcing him to understand.

“Listen. They live off of the worst parts of humanity, and they encourage those same parts, and they’ve been doing both of those things for thousands of years. You can disrupt their plans, maybe, or refuse to cooperate, and maybe, maybe, if you’re lucky, you catch them by surprise enough that you survive doing it. That is the best-case scenario here. We’re not getting rid of anything.”

Cooper hasn’t made it this far by being the kind of person to give up when things get difficult. “I don’t believe that,” he says, firm, and Morgan opens her mouth to agree or argue, but Cooper doesn’t get to find out which, because there’s a shout from down the hall.

“Someone get us out!”

Morgan’s taking off at a sprint toward the call for help even faster than Cooper is, which doesn’t happen often. He catches up to her at the entrance to the home team’s dressing room. The source of the scream, that much is obvious from the panicked knocking from behind the closed doors, and also from the fact that said doors are covered in maybe three inches of solid ice.

Cooper walked past here not even fifteen minutes ago. This isn’t possible.

“Is anyone there? Hello?”

“We’re here,” Cooper calls back to whichever Sceptre is currently speaking, hoping his voice comes through less muffled than hers is. “We’re here, we’re going to get you guys out.”

The ice is making a liar of him even as he’s speaking, because Morgan’s ramming her shoulder into the doors, trying to shove them open, and they aren’t budging.

“Frozen shut,” she says, quiet so only Cooper can hear, and that’s probably for the best, because another voice comes from the Sceptres room, this time with a distinct note of panic in her voice.

“You need to hurry, it’s—I think the AC’s malfunctioning or something, it’s freezing in here.”

Even in the seconds it takes Cooper to process that decidedly not ideal development, the ice coating the doors is getting thicker, crystals spreading outside of the doorframe, along the wall, towards the floor.

Hang on.

Cooper’s seen this before.

“It’s not just the ice,” he says, reeling as he recognizes what’s in front of him. They resolved this one. This one’s done. “It’s not just going to be ice like this, we need to look out for—”

“Them?” Morgan asks, and when Cooper turns to look where she’s looking, he sees what she does: two familiar figures, one doppelganger for each of them, both entirely made of ice.

The ice monsters that shouldn’t be able to exist here are blocking the only way out. From inside the dressing room, which is dropping to more dangerous levels of cold by the second, what sounds like most of the Sceptres roster is trying desperately to escape. It’s too many problems to deal with at once. This is when Cooper’s at his best.

“Steel,” he says, remembering. The ice monsters were vulnerable to iron, fairy logic. Problem: he doesn’t know the functional layout of this place the same way he does the Leafs’ rink, so skate blades might not be on the table. Though. The table. Hm. This could work. “Puck, the kitchen, where we were!”

“Say things that make sense!” Morgan barks, which is fair. Cooper probably could have explained the ghost dog thing earlier. Or at all.

Priorities. He and Morgan brace up next to each other, guarding the door as the doppelgangers start to advance. He’s not used to doing this kind of thing with someone other than Luke. Monster-fighting chemistry is the kind of thing that usually develops over time. “Do you want to hold them off or—”

“Get that door open,” Morgan orders, and goes charging at the ice monsters, zero hesitation.

She is so cool and so scary. Cooper will get the door open.

He crouches in front of the lock, rapidly getting more encased in ice, and tries to think past the sounds of Morgan McAllister in pitched ice-doppelganger combat. He doesn’t have his multi tool, because anything with a knife attachment is an arena security no-no, so picking the lock is out—one of these days, he thinks longingly—and if the entire team combined hasn’t been able to break down the door, he’s not going to have any more luck on that. Can’t get through the spooky haunted ice. Have to go straight to the source.

One of the women from inside asks, through obviously chattering teeth, “Are you getting a custodian or something?”

“Mhm,” Cooper says, picking at one of his cuts from the last time he went out curse cleansing—it hasn’t even at a chance to heal over, yet—until he draws blood, enough to start drawing a banishment sigil. “Yeah, I am doing specifically that for sure.”

Morgan arrives next to him by being thrown into the wall with excessive force. Not all that hurt, visibly. More annoyed.

“They’re reforming,” she grits out, heaving herself back to her feet like she’s bracing for round two.

“They do that,” Cooper says, mostly focused on not screwing up his ritual drawing. But—there, out of the corner of his eye, he spots it, the piece of metal hovering through the air, getting closer. “Oh, perfect, next to you, they’ll stop reforming if you hit them with the—” The hovering utensil gets closer. Well. Cooper supposes he could have been more specific in Puck’s instructions. “It’ll work.”

“This is a spoon,” Morgan snaps, then, with a double take, “Why the hell is there a floating spoon—”

“It’ll work!” Cooper says, and it’s a bit of a leap of faith because he doesn’t know the exact percentage iron in the alloy that makes up mass-produced spoons, but he must sound convincing enough, because Morgan grabs the spoon from Puck right as the doppelgangers are bearing down on the two of them, surging to her feet.

“Back off,” she stabs upward, full force, through the nearest monster as she stands, then swings to slice—to scoop?—through the other one in the same movement. One after the other, the doppelgangers explode into icy water, drenching her and Cooper both.

Shivering, now, Cooper presses his hand, dripping with blood-tinged water, against the door, finishing the sigil.

The door bursts open, its icy covering exploding just like the monsters, and the Sceptres roster comes spilling out.

It goes how it usually goes, after that. The facilities staff show up, speculating about a burst pipe or a freak coolant leak. Cooper and Morgan get thanked for trying to help, politely ushered out of the way so the team can get checked up after almost getting deep-frozen. All’s well that ends well, almost, kind of, except for how Cooper doesn’t think even he’s optimistic enough to think this is an end of anything.

Mind churning over the possibilities, he remembers to pet his dog. Spoon thing worked. Cooper didn’t doubt him for a second. “Good boy.”

Morgan, standing against the opposite side of the doorframe, is frowning. Further into the parking garage, her teammates are filing onto their bus, but she’s watching Cooper. “…how long have you had a ghost dog?”

“His name’s Puck,” Cooper says. “T.C., technically, but—” Lock in, Cooper. A haunting. A familiar haunting. This is wrong. “I’ve seen those things before.”

Even in the context of Cooper’s objectively excellent memory, the very first haunting he and Luke defeated together is something he’ll never forget. Partially because it was his induction into ghost hunting as a theretofore unmentioned part of goalie responsibilities, and also because it’s where he got his hamster.

He and Luke have taken on a lot of hauntings since that first one. None of them have ever come back.

The disturbed look on Morgan’s face is not giving Cooper much hope that this is a normal thing he’s just overlooked. “You’re saying the ice monsters came from the Leafs?”

Cooper nods, mind racing. “How is that possible?” Hauntings aren’t contagious, as far as he knows, and even if they were, the Leafs and Sceptres don’t share an arena, don’t share ownership, don’t share anything but a city and a sport. He’s been working under the premise that the weirdness with the hauntings all season has been self-contained, like everything else, but if it’s not… “The Leafs’ hauntings are affecting all Toronto hockey, now?”

“How confident are we that it’s just hockey?” Morgan asks, slow, and it takes Cooper a moment to catch her meaning.

No. But that can’t…

He fishes out his phone, navigating to his sports aggregator. He sees exactly what he was hoping he wouldn’t: it’s a triple header, the Sceptres this afternoon, then tonight, in a couple hours, the Raps’ second game of the first round of playoffs and, down the road, an early season Jays game.

That means traffic, bumper to bumper in the entire core. It means an arena and a stadium and a dozen sports bars filling up with people as they speak; an estimated five hundred thousand people move through Union Station on a day with a single major sporting event, and this is three of them, which means, Cooper realizes, that if Lake Ontario really is doing something to make the team’s hauntings go haywire, this is the perfect chance to do as much damage as possible.

“Morgs!”

Morgan’s coaches wave her over toward the bus, idling, ready to get everyone on board back to Montreal. Cooper sees her waver.

“It’s okay,” he says. Saying the words lends him some of their conviction. He won’t let someone worry about him more than they need to. “Go. I’ll get Luke. We’re good at this.”

Morgan is staring at him, hard. Cooper feels it even without meeting her eyes. If she tries to re-open the conversation they were having before the doppelgangers, to tell him how hopeless it is to think he can fight and win against a demon, he doesn’t know what he’ll do.

Instead, all she says is, “Be careful.” More like a warning than well-wishing, like she’s been going up against hauntings too long to put much faith in the latter.

“I won’t let anyone get hurt,” Cooper promises.

They part, the team—the city too, maybe—back in just Cooper and Luke’s hands.

Luke’s not answering his phone, but he lives close to the Coliseum, so Cooper drives straight to his place. He’s betting that the not picking up the phone is because Luke’s napping or something, not an on-purpose ignoring.

Betting. Hoping.

Everything is fine, of course. Basically fine. Cooper’s been respecting Luke’s space, which means they haven’t argued again since the day Cooper forget himself and made Luke frightened of him, which means Cooper hasn’t kept making things worse, which means he hasn’t irredeemably ruined his friendship with Luke by proving every terrible thing Lake Ontario has been implying about him right. And it’s going to stay that way.

“I’ll be right back,” Cooper tells Puck once he’s squeezed into a spot on the curb, cracking the window even though he’s not sure ghost dogs need to breathe, or whether Puck is physically and/or metaphysically constrained by the existence of walls or car doors. He’s not nervous, because he’s been to Luke’s place a dozen times before, and everything between them is fine. So being nervous would be silly.

Dmitri, the concierge at Luke’s building, knows Cooper by now, and only spends three minutes and forty seconds telling him about his daughter’s recent wedding before buzzing him in. Cooper forgoes the elevator, taking the stairs three at a time up to Luke’s floor, the quickest route. He mouths his list to himself as he goes.

Save the team, save the city, make sure Luke and everyone else we’re responsible for is okay. Do things right. Keep doing things right.

Cooper shoulders open the fire door, bursting out onto Luke’s floor, and sees that, oh, Luke is already outside of his place. Luke is—

Oh, Luke is—

Cooper’s brain does details, all of them at once, each oddly disconnected from the whole. Luke is right there and he is, yep, definitely pressing someone against the door of his apartment, and they’re definitely kissing, and the someone’s hands are pressed up against Luke’s chest and Luke’s hand is curled around the nape of the someone’s neck, Luke’s fingers pushed through their hair, holding them in place, and so this is who Luke’s been texting, then, this stranger with Luke’s hand right there on their neck, right there like that.

It’s weird. Cooper knows Luke’s tall, by most standards, but now he looks big. Different, somehow, like Cooper forgot that Luke is A Man With A Human Body and not just Luke as a concept until right now when he’s seeing him with his shoulders stooped, curved over somebody, leaning down to kiss them. To be kissed back.

The door to the staircase, slow and heavy, finally slams shut behind Cooper, loud like a shot in the quiet of the hall, and Luke and the stranger spring apart.

Cooper sees the moment Luke realizes it’s him.

“Coop,” Luke says, his voice all breathless like he’s just been working out. He has not been working out.

“Hi.” Cooper waves, automatically. None of the rest of him moves even at all.

“Uhhh.” The guy Luke was kissing—Cooper blinks at the realization, registering literally anything about this other person for the first time. Luke kisses guys?—is looking between the two of them, his face red. He coughs, uncomfortably. No. Guiltily. “For the record, I didn’t know he had a boyfriend.”

Oh, that’s not—

“He doesn’t!” Cooper rushes to say, but not as quick as Luke rushes to say, even louder, “I don’t!”

None of Cooper’s usual eye contact tactics are cutting it right now. He feels like if he tries to look anywhere even close to Luke’s face his skeleton is going to crawl out of his body and leave the rest of him behind in a pile on the floor.

Nobody is talking. Kissing guy is the first to break the silence.

“…okay,” he says. “So I think I’m gonna go.”

Luke doesn’t try to stop him. Cooper assumes. He’s still looking at the floor. Wow, great floor. Very consistent grout.

On his way past Cooper, kissing guy gives a very awkward arm pat and a mumbled, “Sorry, man,” like he still mostly thinks he has been caught unintentionally facilitating Cooper’s boyfriend cheating on him, which is probably a really funny misunderstanding that Cooper should clarify Right Now, except for how Cooper doesn’t want to look at him either, this stranger who was that close to Luke. That close and touching.

They’re back to nobody talking, him and Luke alone in the hallway.

Talk, Cooper.

Cooper is calm under pressure, because Cooper is an extremely good goalie. A good and calm one. Right now he is those things. “I’m sorry,” he says. Can’t quite land on the right way to make his voice sound. “I didn’t know you had a. Guest.”

Luke looks like he is equally on the verge of laughter and murder. “I don’t usually.”

“Oh,” Cooper says.

“At home,” Luke corrects. “I don’t usually at my place, the—guest. Is usual.”

“Okay,” Cooper says. He manages to look at Luke’s chin for 0.5 seconds this time, and the effort that takes makes his ‘okay’ come out way too upbeat, uncalibrated completely from the appropriate emotional tenor of this conversation. This is so good. Luke has a boyfriend who can now be Cooper’s new friend and they can all three of them hang out together. This is great news.

“As in the kind of guest,” Luke corrects himself again, fast, more flustered than before. Why does he keep doing that? “As in men, not him. I don’t know him.”

“Okay,” Cooper says, also again. Okay, so kissing guy isn’t sticking around. He feels overwhelmingly relieved in a way that makes him want to cry for how out of place it is, and overcorrects for it terribly by looking up toward Luke’s eyes without considering that Luke is already going to be looking back at him, and then they’re just staring at each other, silent.

Luke’s mouth is very pink.

Cooper looks back at the floor. Exceptionally even grout. Grouting dates back to ancient Egyptian building techniques but was first formalized-slash-industrialized as such in 1802 during repairs at a harbour in England. That one comes straight from Wikipedia. Or elsewhere. Somewhere, probably.

Luke makes a very small sound. Cooper peeks up to make sure that he’s alright, and sees Luke pressing the heels of his palms very, very hard into his eyes. He makes sure he’s looking down again by the time Luke is done.

“Why are you here?” Luke asks, in a very carefully calm voice that is not like any voice Cooper’s heard from him before.

Oh. Cooper knows that answer. “Right,” he says. Focus. This is a thing to focus on. “Right, something’s not right. There were—the ice monsters from last season, at the Coliseum. Morgan thinks stuff could be happening in other places too. We—uh, we have to go.”

Luke is a good ghost hunting partner, even if they’re in a not-fight right now. He doesn’t ask questions. They go.

This is routine, now, the same way hockey is. Piling into the car, flooring it toward the latest haunted place, briefing Luke on the relevant lore while Luke buys them seats in the nosebleeds and checks that they’ve got ritual materials and something stab-able on hand.

Cooper says things like: from what I remember, there’s nothing in Pacey’s lore files or mine about hauntings returning once they’ve been cleansed, which makes sense practically, because most of them are energy accumulated over decades so they wouldn’t have had time to re-accumulate yet, so to me this doesn’t feel like something disconnected from the rest of the more-unexplained-than-usual phenomena happening all year but more like an escalation in the same way the incubus did, though what exactly it’s escalating is still unknown, a known unknown, to be precise, like in the two-by-two matrix on the cover of Project Management Calendar 2011 For Project Management Professionals.

Cooper thinks, as he is driving and preparing and saying other things, things like: Luke's long fingers curved where his hand was resting on the back of the stranger’s neck, chipped black nail polish peeking through someone else’s blond hair. Cooper cannot think of anything else.

The Jays game is underway by now, top of the second coming up, so they head toward the Rogers Centre. Even with two other teams in or starting the playoffs, the stadium’s packed full, the game up on every screen in every restaurant they drive past.

They’re not going to get parked anywhere close. Cooper spies an intersection completely stalled up ahead, calls an audible and veers into the mostly-full lot a lane away, stopping the car as soon as it’s vaguely within the lines.

“So we think the ice monsters are in the ballpark, or what?” Luke asks, as they’re speed-walking the five or so blocks between them and the stadium, Puck clearing a path ahead of them by shoving some very confused pedestrians out of the way.

“I don’t know,” Cooper says, trying to pay on the mostly dysfunctional Green P app so he won’t get a ticket, and also to not trip over his own feet, and also to dwell on anything but how much he has a bad feeling that the answer’s going to be ‘or what’. “Nothing’s working the way it’s supposed to.”

That much makes itself clear before they’re even in the building: There are no security guards at any of the gates, just empty roped-off lines and unsupervised metal detectors. There are a couple of stadium staff with their ticket scanners, but their backs are to Cooper and Luke as they jog up to the doors. They’re distracted, necks craned to peer inside, up the stairs.

“Hello?” Cooper tries to get someone’s attention. One of the polo shirt-clad employees waves him and Luke in without even asking to see their tickets. “Everything okay?”

“Tech issues,” is all the answer they get. That, and—

“Is that music?” Luke asks, face all scrunched up and confused.

It is music. Loud music, blaring through every speaker in the stadium, like they’ve messed up their dates and the place is hosting a concert instead of a baseball game, except Cooper’s never heard of a concert that just plays The Hockey Song on repeat.

The song is twangy and twee, already a little absurd at a hockey game. At a baseball game, it’s completely nonsensical, and all the Jays fans Cooper and Luke pass as they push their way through the crowd seem torn between annoyance and amusement, not sure whether to laugh as the song finishes and immediately restarts.

“What the fuck kind of glitch,” a man’s complaining as Cooper finally makes it to the edge of the observation deck, getting a view of the ballpark. The players are milling around, the game seemingly stopped entirely, probably because of the music, or because of the scratch of radio static that interrupts it now, the old-timey radio voice that rings out over the field.

“It’s going to happen again, no way out of it this time, folks!”

Another burst of static, and then more of The Hockey Song, to a groan from the gathered fans.

It’s like Cooper and Morgan suspected. Not just hockey, and not just ice monsters, either. He knows these broadcasts, pulled out of time. He had to watch his friends get almost-murdered by them last Christmas.

“It was like this last year,” he says, turning to Luke, who’s gone paler than usual.

“It was like this today,” Luke says, and Cooper follows his gaze toward the massive screens over the outfield, currently scrolling with white text over an eye-stinging blue. IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN IT WILL ALWAYS AGAIN HAPPEN ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS.

Last time, they banished the haunting with a more viral piece of content. This time, there’s a captive audience, and no time for seasonally-appropriate novelty costumes.

“We have to stop the music,” Cooper says, the only idea that makes sense, and Luke nods, beelining to the nearest, highly confused-looking stadium employee.

“Hi,” Cooper starts, watching them look somehow even more confused as they recognize him and Luke, and Luke interrupts, impatient, “Where’s the music coming from?”

“Uh.” The employee looks frazzled, enough that Cooper knows before they do that they’re going to fall for Luke’s primary lying strategy of ‘say something audacious enough while being a recognizable public figure and people just assume you have a valid reason for whatever it is you’re doing’. “The master sound system’s a couple levels up, security went up there to try and help deal with it a while ago, but no one has come back yet. Are you really Kepley and Thibeault—”

Cooper and Luke are already running, another play of The Hockey Song kicking off again, earsplittingly loud.

It's easy to find the soundbooth, not because the room is marked in any way, but because there are maybe fifty people standing outside it, all of whom turn as Cooper and Luke draw near and say, in unison, “IT’S GOING TO HAPPEN AGAIN.”

 “…found the people solving the problem,” Luke deadpans. Luke likes to stop himself getting scared by making jokes that don’t sound like jokes. Cooper’s not sure he’s even aware of the tendency. It’s endearing. It’s very Luke. It’s happening again. It’s always going to happen again. It’s going to happen again it’s going to happen again and always it’s going to happen like this again and again and again and it’s—

A heavy pressure at Cooper’s middle: Puck, who must be standing up on his hind legs, leans his paws on Cooper’s ribs and barks directly into his face.

Cooper startles, pushed forcefully out of a trance. He looks around, disconcerted—Stompin’ Tom Connors is still singing about the good old hockey game, making it impossible to know how much time has passed, but the size of the crowd has grown by a dozen or so, security guards and concessions workers and headset-wearing tech crew all staring blankly into the soundbooth, toward the music.

Luke.

“Luke,” Cooper’s saying, finding him fast, thank goodness. He’s standing at Cooper’s side, eyes glazed over, as enchanted by the broadcast as everyone else. Cooper tries again, more urgently, “Luke,” tugging sharp on his sleeve, the barest touch he can manage while still getting his attention.

Luke blinks wildly as he comes back to himself. “Wha—”

“Cover your ears,” Cooper orders, loud, already busy rifling through his backpack now that he’s made sure Luke’s okay. “Don’t listen to the music.”

It’s a good thing that neither of them, for probably separate reasons, ever leaves the house without their headphones. Cooper pulls his on, the noise cancelling instantly helping clear his head a little more; when he hits play on his paused Wiki, volume cranked to the maximum so he can’t hear anything else at all, he can think straight for the first time since The Hockey Song started.

Luke, his own airpods in, elbows his way through the crowd, Cooper trailing in his wake, up to the sound system at the very edge of the room. Up by the mic, where the in-arena announcer’s still sitting, as hypnotized as everyone else, there’s an amazing view right out over home plate, where Cooper can see players tossing the ball around, trying to stay warmed up during the stoppage.

Luke hits Cooper’s arm, a question. Cooper opens his mouth to speak, remembers, and instead draws a symbol in the air with his finger, waits for Luke to nod that he understands.

Tasks split up, they get to work wordlessly, Cooper trying to make sense of the panel of switches and buttons to find the right one to shut off the music, while Luke grabs a pen out of the announcer’s slack hands and starts scrawling banishment sigils on every surface in reach.

No one even needs to get into a gratuitously revealing elf costume to defeat the spooky broadcast, this time. As soon as the sigils start mounting up, the people filling the hall start to stir, and when Cooper finally locates the right dial, twisting it all the way left to kill the volume, it’s like nothing ever happened, everyone present jumping right into action—the PA guy apologizing for technical difficulties, the security guards starting to usher the others out.

Cooper slides off one side of his headphones, cautious. No more Hockey Song. This is, with all due respect to Stompin’ Tom Connors, an incredible relief.

“Easy,” Luke declares from next to him, and Cooper turns to grin at him, halfway to a smile and a fist bump, and it’s such a great moment of seamless teamwork that Cooper almost doesn’t even think about how they haven’t really talked in a month and he knows how Luke looks when he kisses a guy now and things are fine between them except for all the ways they aren’t.

Only almost, though.

They both look away, fast.

There’s space enough between them that a Cooper-sized person could be tagging along on their way out.

“What’s doing this?” Luke asks, back to safer, more necessary conversational ground as the two of them book it down the cement walkway, spiralling down toward ground level. “Why’s our old haunted shit affecting the Jays all of a sudden?”

Cooper shakes his head, picking up the pace. “I don’t know,” he says, the words stinging as they come out. He’s saying them too much, today. “I don’t know, the same reason there was a demon on our team and the wards have been acting weird all season. Something’s changed.”

It’s dark outside, the sky navy and the air biting cold, one last gasp from winter before spring forces its way in. Cooper catches his breath, takes in the road work nearby, the distant honking from backed-up traffic. A couple of heads turn as passers-by note him and Luke—people out tonight, in this place, are sports fans by and large. If Cooper and Luke linger too long, they’ll start getting mobbed.

“If it was at the Coliseum and here, it’ll be at the arena, too,” Cooper says. “But the car—”

“We could walk faster in this traffic, we’ll have to run it,” Luke doesn’t wait for him to finish the sentence, shaking his head. “Is Puck…” Puck barks, eager, and Luke doesn’t even pretend to look exasperated instead of fond, by this point. “Yeah, figures.”

He turns to Cooper, and it’s there again, that tempting sense of almost-normal, for the first time in a month. Cooper and Luke, ghost hunting goalie tandem extraordinaire. No one is scared of anyone, and no one is thinking about anyone’s not-boyfriend every time they look at each other, and everyone is going to be safe because Cooper is going to make it that way.

“Ready?”

Cooper nods. Forces himself away from overwhelm, because he knows what he needs to be right now, and it’s not that. “Always.”

They run.

 

LUKE

Luke was not fucking ready for this.

Sprinting down Bay alongside Cooper, wind stinging his face, Luke is seriously weighing the prospect of throwing himself directly into traffic. Cons: pain, death, worse delays for everyone. Pros: he wouldn’t have to exist anymore in a world where Cooper walked in on him making out with some guy he met literally five minutes prior and has barely been able to bring himself to look at Luke since.

When Luke wished he could come out to Cooper without having to Come Out, he didn’t mean this.

He’s embarrassed. Just—really fucking embarrassed; simultaneously wants to act like it never happened and to, like, apologize, which is stupid because despite random guy number seven’s concerns, Luke and Cooper are not like that and are obviously never going to be like that because Cooper is straight and Luke isn’t a masochistic fucking idiot. Just a regular idiot.

Luke feels guilty. Luke doesn’t know why he feels guilty. Truly the last thing he needs is latent internalized bullshit over being gay to add to the rest of his non-latent internalized bullshit over literally everything else in his life.

It’s a relief, honestly, that a greatest hits of haunted Maple Leafs shit has chosen tonight to hit several different fans at once. They are, if nothing else, a diversion, and god fucking knows Luke could use one. That, or a lobotomy. Or he could revisit the traffic plan. He’s not picky.

Cooper’s face, when he saw.

Shit. Fuck. Shitfuck goddamnit.

The running to save the day situation is also helpful, because it means Luke doesn’t have to not look at Cooper, or to notice how Cooper is still not looking at him, to match.

“This way,” Cooper says, eyes steadily forward as they get closer to Scotiabank Arena.

They run that way.

Here, at least, they don’t have to go through the regular gate. Players’ only entrance works even when the building’s turned over for the Raptors instead of the Leafs, and the security guy’s the same one there for their games. Cooper knows his name too, of course, but he’s cop-adjacent enough that Luke doesn’t feel bad for not.

“Didn’t know you guys liked basketball,” the guard says, waving them in.

“Oh, you know,” Cooper says, sparing a painfully forced smile that security guy is stupid enough to fall for. Luke knew he was valid in not liking him.

Getting in the building’s easy, but they’re maybe two steps over the threshold when Luke realizes that’s going to be where the easy part stops.

It’s not like at the stadium, the mostly-routine atmosphere of an early season game in a baseball season that has, like, fifty million of them. The arena tonight is in full playoffs mode, cameras around every corner, the crowd deafening even at a distance from the court. Luke is a hockey guy, not a sports guy in general, but the Raps have actually won something in living memory, and it’s earned them genuine enthusiasm from their fans, none of the begrudging codependence that usually accompanies Leafs fandom. Plus, they get to regularly wear their black alternate jerseys. Luke’s jealous.

The place is crawling with people, and he and Coop aren’t the tallest ones in the building tonight, which is an incredibly rare occasion, but they’re still tall enough to be recognizable, which is a problem.

“The Leafs!” Someone Luke doesn’t know, an employee, jogs up to them. “They didn’t tell us you were coming, we need to get you into the broadcast.”

“Did no one in ops help you with seats?”

“Hey, catch!”

Someone else tosses Luke a basketball—he catches it, more habit than intention—and snaps a photo of him and Cooper, who at least manages another smile and a thumbs up.

If there’s an out-of-place haunting lurking in the midst of this chaos, Luke doesn’t know how he and Coop are supposed to find it before it starts trying to murder people. They manage to slip away from most of the overeager employees, who are occupied with keeping a playoff game on the rails, but even then, searching desperately through the family rooms, the offices, the deserted Leafs locker room, they find no sign of any of their old hauntings making a comeback. No new ones, either.

Increasingly desperate, startling at every noise or particularly loud shout from the distant crowd, Luke and Cooper resort to searching through the part of the arena they definitely aren’t supposed to be in, the industrial-looking bay where the disassembled rink waits, in pieces, before it’s needed again. The zamboni’s parked off in a corner, the rest of the space filled with the boards laid flat on their sides and two nets, empty frames looking more black than red in the dim light.

Luke can hear his footsteps, Cooper’s, and Puck’s softer ones. There’s an echo in here, making it sound like they’re being followed, but looking around, Luke sees no one else, dead or alive.

He bounces the basketball the employee handed him, the slap of plastic against cement practically an invitation to any hauntings listening and lurking.

Nothing, still.

“I guess the wards are holding up?” Cooper says, not like he especially believes it.

“They weren’t at the practice rink,” Luke says. He knows better than to expect luck, in this building.

“Well, maybe…” Cooper flounders, seems to be trying to come up with a plausible excuse for optimism. “If it’s poltergeist stuff like at the gardens, we can handle that easy, or, uh, sad ghosts who need to be put to rest but don’t want to hurt anyone, those aren’t that bad…”

As Luke’s listening to him think out loud, he feels a prickle on the back of his neck and whips around, ready to have to throw a punch.

Nothing. Just a bunch of metal brace-looking things, he doesn’t know what for. But it hasn’t gone anywhere, the awareness of being watched. Being stalked.

His instinct is to force down the feeling, an unwanted artefact of childhood, but—no. It’s not just from back then. Luke’s felt this more recently, too. He lets himself feel it now. Places it.

“…what’s the Raptors’ mascot?” he asks, with a sinking feeling.

Luke will hand one thing to the Leafs hauntings going city-wide. They’ve distracted Cooper enough from the awkwardness of the last month and supercharged awkwardness of tonight that, for the first time since their argument, he fixes Luke with his most skeptical, I’m too polite to say it but I can’t believe I have to explain this to you look. God, Luke has missed that look. “I mean, Luke, what kind of question is—”

They both watch as a large, bright red raptor mascot suit breaks from behind the zamboni and sprints past, making straight for the dressing rooms.

“Oh, goddamnit.”

Luke and Cooper chase after the haunting. This is why professional athletes have to do all the ghost hunting, Luke thinks, gritting his teeth past a stitch in his side. Why can’t there ever be slow hauntings? Relaxed stroll hauntings? Why is it always a fucking chase?

He doesn’t want to know what a semi-sentient dinosaur mascot can do to a bunch of unsuspecting, mostly-uncursed basketball players. Luke dives for the tackle, hauling the raptor to the cement floor right before it reaches the doors to the rest of the arena. Realizes to his dismay, now that he’s all wrapped up in it, that instead of soft mascot material, the thing he’s wrapped around is rough to the touch, like it’s got scales.

The second thing Luke realizes is that he fucked up: he tackled the raptor around the legs, which means that its upper body is entirely free to twist around, opening its mouth and baring a set of too-real teeth, massive and curved, primed to tear Luke’s head off.

“Oh, shit!” he yelps, scrambling backwards as the jaws snap shut exactly where his head was a second ago. “Cooper!”

He hears Cooper yell something, can’t make out what it is through the gnashing of teeth as the raptor mascot charges toward him on all fours, a human-dinosaur-costume Frankenstein straight out of a nightmare.

Then—the basketball he dropped mid-chase is rolling toward where Luke’s cornered on the ground, too fast and too targeted to be just leftover momentum. Thank you, Puck, Luke thinks, deliriously grateful, and grabs the basketball, shoving it straight into the mascot’s gaping jaws as it lunges at him. Eat that, fucker.

The raptor tears the basketball clean in half.

Well, Luke thinks, worth a shot.

He braces himself, ready to at least get a few punches in before he dies painfully and terribly—not ideal, still lived longer than he ever really expected himself to, at least he won’t have to address the ‘so about how I was just making out with a dude’ thing with Cooper—and then hears Cooper yell ‘duck!’ and obeys without a second thought, flat on the ground in time to watch Cooper run in, carrying one of the nets, and slam straight into the mascot, pinning it down with the crossbar across its chest.

The raptor’s arms, shrunk down to real-raptor size, flail helplessly as it snaps its teeth up at them, struggling to get free. Cooper’s leaning his entire weight on the net—it’s not going anywhere.

“Good job, Gert,” Cooper says to the net; then, to Luke, presumably, as he drags himself to his feet, a little stunned at still being alive, “Is this what Carlton was like?”

“I mean.” Luke makes a face. He doesn’t know how much good the power of friendship’s going to do for this one. He’s spared from trying when the raptor costume chooses that moment to open its mouth and start speaking.

“IT’S ALWAYS GOING TO HAPPEN LIKE THIS,” says a voice, ancient and horrible, straight from hell and scraping against sandpaper on the way out. “IT WILL ALWAYS HAPPEN AGAIN IT IS ALWAYS HAPPENING AGAIN.”

Luke is real fucking sick of the cryptic messages, actually.

“That part is new,” he says. “You got it?”

Cooper nods, determined, shifting his weight to pin the mascot down more sturdily. Luke lets go, moves around the raptor in a wide arc, careful to stay out of the reach of its teeth. He times it carefully, less than keen on the idea of losing a limb—not yet… not yet… now—and kicks out, knocking the raptor’s oversized head straight off.

The costume disanimates in an instant, nothing more than a bright red onesie being squashed under the weight of a Cooper and an NHL-standard net. From further into the arena, out under the lights, the crowd erupts into cheers, celebrating a winning play.

---

Somehow, night of a thousand hauntings and all, escaping Leafs fans ends up as the most impossible task of the night. They’re everywhere, even when they’re supposed to be taking the night off to be a fan of a normal team, and if Luke’s been holding off on drinking the ‘this year is different’ kool-aid, these people apparently haven’t.

It’s one person first, as Luke and Cooper join the throng of people shuffling painfully slowly out of the arena. “Hey, go Leafs!”

“Oh, thank you,” Cooper shoots them a smile, but it’s not his usual. He’s preoccupied, Luke knows, with the lack of explanation for anything they just faced, the lack of any reason why it can’t all just happen again tomorrow, rendering all of their protective wards and preparation useless.

“Fuckin’ right, Kepley!” someone else hollers, and that opens the floodgates.

“Dude, it’s the Leafs’ goalies—”

“Please beat Boston this time, I fucking beg you—”

The crowd shoves forward again, taking Luke with them. He looks at the crush of people surrounding him and Cooper, the impossible hope on the faces of the ones who’ve recognized them, despite literally fucking everything about the Toronto Maple Leafs, and thinks, against his will, IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN.

He’s been done, though, with listening to ominous messages from creepy voices in his head and outside it, and he’s especially done with this many people touching him, accidentally or on purpose.

Luke doesn’t let himself second guess, just grabs Cooper’s wrist and pulls Cooper along with him, carving a path through the Raptors’ crowd.

The blatant misuse of the size advantage gets people throwing him dirty looks instead of star-struck ones—whatever, as if Luke gives a fuck what anyone outside of his friends thinks of him—but there’s a bigger problem, namely that even once they’re out of the arena and into the train station, there’s nothing but people, the sports crowd joined by everyone else out for the night.

“This way,” Cooper says, and Luke let go of him the second they made it away from the loudest fans, but he has to hold on again now, hooking his fingers in the strap of Cooper’s watch and letting himself be led through the station, past the row of doors and LED-screens plastered with ads.

Luke thinks, momentarily, that Cooper’s taking them to the subway, but they veer right, away from the turnstiles overflowing with people, and into a tiled hall, lined with stores that are mostly shuttered, this time of night.

“The PATH’ll get us near my place,” Cooper says, pulling Luke into a speed walk. “We can wait things out there, then go back for my car.”

It’s as good an escape plan as any, except for the fact that they aren’t the only ones using the walking tunnels. A group of teenagers who must’ve left the Jays early stops up, shoving each other to get a better look at Cooper and Luke.

“No way, it’s the goalies!”

More heads turn, not everyone present, but enough of them that it’s Luke’s turn to decide on Plan C, tugging Cooper almost at a run through the first door he sees, marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, letting it swing shut behind them.

They round a few more corners, enough for Luke to be able to tell that they aren’t in the underground mall anymore, at least not in the public part. It smells like cleaning supplies in here, the clean white tile replaced with shoddier, speckled flooring. The residual haunting feeling, leftover from the arena, prickles down Luke’s spine. He shakes it off.

“We can wait in here,” Cooper declares, sinking down right there on the floor. “Good idea.”

Luke copies, the night-long rush of adrenaline finally, finally easing up. “Not worried about getting in trouble?”

“Oh, mostly always,” Cooper says, and from anyone else, it’d be a joke, but from him, it’s just honest, and Luke feels it again, that desperately lonely I missed you, which is so fucking stupid because they see each other every day, they’re sitting there slumped against the wall together right now, shoulders pressed together as they catch their breath, Cooper warm and real and safe against Luke’s side.

They’re still holding hands.

They both realize the proximity at the same second.

Luke freezes; by the time he has, Cooper’s already dropping his hand like it’s scalded him, scooting away to make space between them, and Luke has this spiralling, drawn-out moment of oh god I ruined everything before Cooper’s yelping,

“No! No, that wasn’t because—I moved because you don’t like when people touch you without asking, not because you’re gay!” His eyes widen. “Not that you’re gay! You could be lots of things! And I don’t know them unless you want me to. And that’s fine!”

Okay. Okay, so they’re doing this.

“Don’t be fucking weird about it,” Luke orders, harsh. Like his heart isn’t trying to shatter his ribcage from the inside out.

He’s never been scared of being gay. Inconvenienced by it, in hockey contexts, by the higher odds of someone being a dick about something none of their business, but even then, like, whatever, he had bigger, infinitely scarier dad-shaped, demon-shaped problems than idiots’ opinions. People like him or they don’t, and if they don’t, well, fuck it, not like it’d be anything new. Luke would choke himself to death with his own two hands before changing himself to fit someone else’s expectations.

He’s never been scared of who he is, but he’s scared now, faced with the possibility of driving a wedge between himself and Cooper. Anyone but him. Luke can lose anything but him.

“I’m not,” Cooper vows, as serious as Luke’s ever heard him. He looks right in Luke’s eyes as he says it, and it’s that, the intentionality of it, that makes the terrified tangle inside of Luke unravel, just a little. “You’re my best friend, of course I’m not going to be weird about it. I just…” He hesitates, eyes flickering down before he visibly forces them back up. “I didn’t know. You didn’t say.”

My best friend, is what Luke’s brain opts to take from that.

No one’s ever called him that before.

Fuck, does Luke like being called that. He likes it so much, he has to fight not to grin like an idiot right then and there from blunt, childish happiness, all of the worry from a minute ago falling away in three words.

He’s someone’s best friend. He’s Cooper’s best friend. Luke could take on every haunting in the city right now, singlehanded. Blindfolded, and nothing could touch him.

“It’s not like you had to come out as straight,” he musters up enough pettiness to say. Cooper looks suitably chastened at that, so Luke takes pity. “It’s not new. I didn’t need to give my dad more shit to beat me up for. Then, you know hockey.”

T.C. Puck noses at Luke’s hand, giving comfort instead of just wanting pets. Maybe a bit of both. Fuck, the leftover pressure of the hauntings is lingering tonight. The weight.

“I’m sorry,” Cooper says, eyes on where Luke’s hand is resting atop Puck’s head.

Luke raises an eyebrow, wry. “On behalf of, like, all straight people, or…”

“No, just the hockey ones,” Cooper says, and he says it playful, if still a little tentative, putting the ball in Luke’s court after their fight.

Luke wants to be playful too. Can’t, quite yet.

“I thought he was going to kill you, Coop,” he says. “I thought you were going to die in that fucking bar.”

Luke knows fear. He thought he knew fear. Knows now that he didn’t, really, not before he ran up a flight of stairs and saw a demon feeding on Cooper.

And Gabe had looked fucking nightmarish, an inhuman flesh monster because non-lake demons were gross as hell, apparently, but Luke had barely spared him a glance, barely aware of a thing but the sight of Cooper, barely conscious, his face ashen grey and hollow as his soul and life were drained away.

It hadn’t made sense, seeing that. Wouldn’t click properly in Luke’s mind, warped logic like a nightmare he couldn’t wake up from. It was Cooper, he’s the hero in the kind of story Luke has only started believing in again because of him, he’s—immortal, kind of, at least in Luke’s mind, at least he was before that night in the bar. Cooper is and was so much more than all of the bad things stupid enough to try and go against him, and Luke was certain, for thirty unthinkable seconds, that he was going to have to watch him die the same awful death he saved Luke from.

“Yeah,” Cooper says, real quiet. “I thought that too.”

Puck ducks out from under Luke’s hand and thuds into Cooper’s chest with a pained whine, sending Cooper back against the wall with the force of him.

Luke relates.

“You can’t,” Luke says, because it’s less acceptable to desperately fling yourself at your straight best friend to reassure yourself that he’s alive and breathing when you aren’t an invisible ghost dog; and maybe later he’ll be embarrassed by how fast he says it, how needy it sounds, but now he just—has to. “You can’t ever do that shit again.”

Cooper’s jaw locks. Not stubbornness for its own sake, but—conviction. Unwavering. “I’m not going to not help people.”

“Help people,” Luke says, because he’d never expect otherwise, not from Coop. “Do whatever you want, if you want to do more graves and do extra research and figure out how to stop demons, that’s fine, but don’t do it without me there to have your fucking back.” He shoves Cooper’s arm, hardly anything to it. “Last time I checked we’re still sharing the net. You haven’t won yet, asshole.”

Cooper frowns. The expression is sulky, petty in a way that, despite everything, almost makes Luke want to laugh. To tease more, to provoke that pouty jut of Cooper’s bottom lip. Not a storybook hero, right then. Just Coop. “I’m not an asshole.”

“So don’t act like one,” Luke retorts, so fucking fond he could puke, then, relenting, “I shouldn’t have yelled at you, before.”

Cooper’s already shaking his head, refusing the apology. “I shouldn’t have made you scared.”

“I’m not scared of you, Kepley,” Luke says. More forceful than he strictly needs to, fine, but he needs Cooper to hear him, to understand how much he means it. Whatever shit Luke carries with him and probably always will, it’s his. He’s here anyways. He gets a chance to be here because of Cooper. “There’s nothing scary about you.”

Usually, whenever Luke or anyone else says something even a little nice to him, Coop lights up, gets lifted by it in a physical way that Luke doesn’t think anyone else does. It makes Luke want to say nice things to him an embarrassing amount of the time. It’s also why he registers, now, when Cooper doesn’t—instead, Cooper seems to curl in on himself, head ducked low. He looks like he’s wrestling with his words, his fingers all splayed out and twitchy before he curls those in, too.

“What if you’re wrong?” is what he says, finally. Like it’s the thing he’s been Not saying all this time, or part of it. “What if Scary Demon Lady, Lake Ontario, whoever she is, what if she knows something that we don’t and she’s right about me being like her and everyone’s going to be in danger because of me?”

If it wasn’t for literally everything about Cooper’s everything, right now, Luke would think he was fucking around. That’s how out of left field the concern is. Cooper, anything like a demon? “That’s not going to happen.”

Cooper looks at him again. No playfulness left, just an abrupt kind of urgency, intense in a way Cooper almost never is. “If it comes down to choosing between me and the team, you need to promise—”

“No.” Luke cuts him off, flat.

“Luke,” Cooper argues anyway, because of course he does.

“I said no.” Luke refuses to hear it. Fuck that forever. He didn’t come this far to lose anything or anyone he cares about. “I choose both.”

“You might not have a choice.”

“Then I choose you,” Luke says, and means it, would mean it gun to his head, end of the world, and that, finally, gets Cooper to pause for longer than a second. A lot longer.

He looks as unsure as Luke’s ever seen him, withdrawn inward. Withdrawn away from Luke. Luke can’t fucking stand it, not now that everything’s finally out in the open between them, finally back on the way to being good.

“But there’s always a choice.” Luke means that, too. Doesn’t know when he started believing it—probably, somewhere in him, that first second Cooper walked into that first room on that first day—but god, he does. It’s the two of them. They’ve faced down every impossible thing so far. Why not this, too? So the demon’s a great lake. Still just water. “You said it yourself, Coop. There’s always a better way. Right?”

Cooper’s watching him closely. Intently. Luke can’t read the look on his face. “Right.”

The moment fizzes in place, teetering into an uncertain, not-quite-awkward trepidation.

Cooper’s the braver of the two of them, always. “Is it okay if I—”

Luke nods, tries not to feel pathetically grateful for it when Cooper pulls him into a hug. It’s quick this time, real deliberate as a reset of things between them after all the weirdness of today, of the last few weeks. He hugs back, tight. Not for as long as he wants to. It’s enough. Whatever Cooper wants is enough.

“We’re good,” Cooper says when they part, a question. He’s got a hand up by the nape of his own neck, apparently unconsciously. It’s a nothing gesture, over in half a second. Luke only notices because it’s not a usual one, for Coop.

“We’re good,” Luke confirms, settling back against the wall. The hug worked, he thinks, erasing the tension he’s been carrying all month and bringing them back to what they are. Best friends, the two of them sitting here with their undead ghost dog. That hasn’t changed. It won’t, so long as Luke’s got a say.

He reaches out blindly ‘til his palm lands somewhere on Puck’s back. Doles out scritches, relaxed for the first time all day. “What now?” he asks, because things are better between him and Cooper, but not better everywhere else, not yet. It’s still lingering, pressing down on him, the pressure in the air that comes with a haunting. Dread, impossible to shake off.

Cooper shakes his head, just slightly, brow furrowing as he sinks back into the problem. “Curses don’t just change targets,” he says. “Hauntings don’t just… grow to other teams in different leagues. Something bigger is going on.”

“You think this is part of whatever lake lady is planning,” Luke puts together.

“I think it’s an effect of it,” Cooper says. “Like Gabe, and like Puck, and like all the little things going weird. I think if we try to follow all of these threads, we’ll end up overlooking the thing holding them all together.”

“Okay,” Luke says, resolute. They’ve dealt with worse. Not all at once, not like tonight, but fuck it, it hasn’t stopped them yet. Hero shit. Their whole deal, him and Coop. “So we do it how we did with Swift Hawk, right? Everything we know and how it all fits and where the gaps are, we map it out, and— Coop?”

Cooper is, abruptly, lurching to his feet. “Map,” he breathes. So, just, fuck context, apparently.

“What?” Luke pulls himself up, dislodging Puck where he’s leaning against his knee. Cooper’s walking forward like Luke’s not even there, toward the mouth of the hallway they stopped maybe ten feet into.

“There’s not supposed to be anything here,” Cooper says.

Luke stands next to him, staring down the empty hall. Emphasis on the empty. “…there isn’t anything here.”

Cooper’s shaking his head before Luke’s done speaking. “No, there’s not supposed to be more PATH,” he insists. Eyes lighting up, even as confused as he still is, with the look that comes when he’s finding an answer that no one else could have. “I know the maps. The maintenance tunnels run parallel to the main walkways. This hallway shouldn’t exist.”

The feeling, it occurs to Luke too late, the one that presses down around every haunting, the one he hasn’t been able to shake since leaving Scotiabank Arena, isn’t a leftover from the arena at all. It’s everywhere, down here, and it’s familiar, the same stifling weight he felt in the hideout. Like a presence, but more, deeper, radiating off every inch of the hallway he and Cooper have sheltered in.

The underground hallway, not on any official maps, five minutes from where the Leafs play.

And the playoffs are coming, a hundred years of history coming up against another roll of the dice, but it’s not just that, the sensation Luke gets of staring down an oncoming storm. He doesn’t know what’s coming, only that something is; and whatever the storm is made of, it’s not coming over the horizon, but from under the city’s feet, and soon.

It’s happening, Luke thinks, and looks down the length of the tunnel, unremarkable tile continuing from where he and Cooper stand, extending further than he can see, all the way into the dark.