The Vampire Hockey Prince Who Could Never Drink My Blood

I put Grant Fenwick into the boards so hard that the glass shook in its frame, and for about two full seconds the entire Halloran Rink went completely silent.

That's not me bragging. I want to be clear about that up front, because I know exactly how it sounds coming from the new girl, the transfer, the only girl on Ashgrave Prep's varsity roster in the program's entire history. I hit him clean. Shoulder to shoulder, exactly the way my brother taught me in our driveway when I was eleven and he was fourteen and neither of us had any idea what either of our futures actually looked like. Grant Fenwick outweighed me by sixty pounds and I still put him into the boards clean, and the silence that followed wasn't because of the hit.

It was because of how he got up.

He should have taken a second. Everybody takes a second after a hit like that, a beat where your body remembers it's made of the same stuff as the boards you just met at speed. Grant didn't take a second. He came up off the ice in one motion, too smooth, too fast, like someone had cut the part of the video where a normal human being groans and checks his ribs, and for one full breath he stood there staring at me with an expression I didn't have a name for yet.

Then he grinned, said something about a lucky angle, and skated off like it was nothing.

I looked over at the bench out of pure instinct, the way you look toward a coach after any big hit, and that's when I saw him for the first time. Aurel Valcourt, sitting at the end of the row in a jersey that fit him like it had been tailored instead of issued, watching me with an expression I also didn't have a name for, except that it made the back of my neck prickle in a way Grant's smooth, wrong recovery hadn't quite managed.

He wasn't smiling. He wasn't frowning. He was just watching, the way you'd watch weather rolling in that you already knew the shape of.

I skated the rest of practice trying not to look at him again and mostly failing. Ashgrave Prep sits at the top of a hill in northern Maine surrounded by pine trees old enough to have watched the school get built, and I'd taken the scholarship here for exactly one reason, and it had nothing to do with hockey scouts or college recruiters or any of the things the letter they sent my parents kept talking about.

My brother Callum went to Ashgrave two years ago on the exact same scholarship, played right wing on the exact same team, and came home after one winter twenty pounds lighter with two small scars on his throat that the school doctor called a bug bite gone wrong and my parents called mono and nobody, including Callum, ever called anything else, mostly because Callum stopped talking about that winter at all. He doesn't remember most of it. He told me that once, quiet, almost embarrassed, like forgetting an entire season of your own life was something you should apologize for.

I told him, when he first got the letter two years ago, that I hoped he hated it there.

I was fifteen. He was seventeen. He'd been the good one his whole life, the one our parents drove four hours each way to watch play, the one whose jersey number our mom kept in a drawer like a relic before he'd even graduated, and I was so sick of being the sister who got mentioned second that when the acceptance letter came for him and not for me, I said something ugly and mean and I have never once taken it back, because taking it back would mean admitting I meant it.

Then he came home hollowed out, and I've spent every day since carrying that sentence around like a stone in my shoe I refuse to take out.

So when my own letter came this year, I didn't hesitate. Same scholarship program, same school, same number on the jersey, because I asked for it specifically, because if the ice at Ashgrave took something from my brother, I intended to skate on it until it told me exactly what.

Coach Hendrick ran us through drills for another hour after the Fenwick hit, barking corrections in a voice that suggested he'd rather be anywhere else, and the whole time I could feel Aurel Valcourt's attention on me from the bench like a hand pressed flat against my back. He never came out for his shift. I asked one of my new linemates about it afterward, a quiet girl named Priya who seemed like she'd learned a long time ago to answer questions in the fewest possible words.

"He doesn't play daytime practice," she said. "Nobody really knows why. He's just — Valcourt. It's a whole thing here. You'll figure it out."

I did not, in fact, figure it out that day, though the way she said Valcourt like it was a weather warning instead of a name stuck with me long after I'd showered and changed.

The locker room at Ashgrave is old in the specific way expensive things get old, dark wood stalls with brass nameplates instead of the cheap plastic ones my old rink used, and Coach had put me in stall number nine, my number, Callum's number, the one I'd requested on the scholarship form without telling anyone why. I sat down on the bench to unlace my skates and that's when I saw it, screwed into the wood above the stall, a nameplate that hadn't been removed.

MARSH, it read. My own last name staring back at me in engraved brass, except it wasn't mine.

Callum's stall. They'd put me in my brother's exact stall, two years later, like the school kept some kind of ledger of which families belonged where, and my hands went a little unsteady on my laces as I sat there looking at his name where mine was supposed to be.

I ran my thumb along the underside of the shelf out of some instinct I couldn't have explained, the same restless habit that's gotten me in trouble my whole life, always needing to touch the thing I'm looking at instead of just looking at it, and that's when I felt the scratches.

Letters, carved crooked and shallow into the wood underneath the shelf where nobody would see them unless they were sitting exactly where I was sitting, exactly the way I was sitting, running their thumb along exactly that spot.

I got down on the floor of the locker room, phone flashlight up, heart doing something complicated in my chest, and read the words my brother had carved into the underside of his own stall two years before he came home not remembering a single day of the winter that put them there.

DON'T SLEEP IN JANUARY.

I sat back on my heels and read it three more times, like the message might rearrange itself into something less unsettling if I just looked at it long enough. It hadn't been carved carelessly. The letters were deep and deliberate, the kind of thing you do slowly, late at night, with something sharp and a lot of fear behind your hand, not the bored doodling of a kid killing time between drills.

Callum has never once mentioned carving anything into a locker room stall. He's never mentioned January at all, not one word of it, in two full years of me asking careful, circling questions he always finds some way to sidestep. I've watched him change the subject so smoothly it took me most of a year to even notice he was doing it, a skill he definitely didn't have before Ashgrave, the same easy redirect Odette would give me the very next day when I asked her a question she didn't want to actually answer.

I photographed the carving before I left, three shots from different angles so I'd have it even if the light in my memory started to soften the edges the way memories do, and I sat there in the empty locker room a while longer, listening to pipes tick somewhere in the old building's walls, feeling for the first time since I'd arrived that I might have made a serious mistake asking for this exact stall, this exact number, this exact seat at whatever table my brother had sat at two winters before me.

I didn't feel like leaving. I felt, if anything, like I'd just been handed the first real thread of a rope I'd been hunting for since Callum came home twenty pounds lighter with two small scars he refused to explain, and some stubborn, reckless part of me had already decided I was going to follow it all the way down, whatever was waiting at the other end.