Page 4

I did not run from the locker room. I want that to be understood. I walked, at a normal human pace, down a service corridor that smelled of bleach and old popcorn, through a steel fire door and out onto the loading dock behind the arena. Then I put both hands flat on the cold concrete wall and stood with my forehead nearly touching it, and I counted.

I count when I am afraid, an old habit from before I had anything to count except sheep and winters. I do not need to breathe, but I breathe anyway, because it gives the lungs something to do, so I counted my breaths, seven in and seven out. The night air was minus nine and smelled of snow and diesel, and I filled my chest with it and waited for the smell of him to leave my head.

It did not leave.

Honey bread.

It should not have been possible. There was no bakery in that room. There was a twenty-six-year-old man with a dirty mouth and bruised knuckles, breathing hard from a game, standing so close I could see the tiny pulse ticking in his throat, and every cell in my long-dead body had stood up and said, there. That one. Home.

My eyes had gone red. I knew because of the way the world had sharpened, all edges and heat, every drop of sweat on his temple lit like a candle. I had kept my face turned aside while he talked. I had closed my eyes for as long as I could without seeming strange. And when he grabbed my collar, when his knuckles pressed into my chest, and I felt how warm he was, how alive, how loud his blood was moving beneath skin as thin as paper, I had only one clear thought.

Do not bite him. Do not bite him. Do not bite him.

So I had pushed him back and let him go and walked away. Respect yourself, I had said. What I meant was, respect what I could do to you.

The mouth on that boy. God help me. I had never heard anyone say so much and mean so little of it, and I had never wanted so badly to hear him keep going.

I pressed my forehead against the wall and counted seven breaths in and seven breaths out.

I should explain why I did not fight him.

He hit me three times tonight. I counted those too. The first was behind the net, a clean body check with everything he had, and I held it the way you hold a full cup of water, carefully, without spilling. The second was into the boards, and he put his elbow up in a way that would have broken a rib on any other man. The third was after the whistle, when he skated up and began to describe my mother in detail, in a voice so sweet and so filthy I nearly laughed, which would have been a disaster, because I have not laughed in public since 1974.

Every instinct I own told me to break his arm.

That is what people do not understand about my kind. It is not anger. It is arithmetic. A threat comes, and the body answers, fast and total and without any input from the mind. When Lex Pendleton put his elbow into me, the part of me that has been alive for a thousand winters calculated the exact angle at which his wrist would snap.

And then I let it go, and skated away, and did it again when he hit me the second time, and the third.

He believes I am ignoring him. He thinks he has found a man who cannot be provoked. I let him think so, because the truth is worse. In the language of his sport, an enforcer answers a hit with a fight. Gloves off, fists up, five minutes in the box. It is a conversation between equals.

We are not equals. If I dropped my gloves for that man, someone would go to the hospital. Or the morgue.

I chose this sport for a reason. Hockey is the only place I have ever found where a creature like me is allowed to hit things and no one screams. It is violent and cold and fast and has rules, thousands of small, beautiful rules, and I have spent a decade of my life learning to live inside them. Every night on the ice I take exactly the amount of force I am allowed and not a gram more. It is discipline. It is the only kind of prayer I have left.

And then a human came along and put his hands on me, and I nearly forgot every rule I had.

The phone buzzed in my pocket.

I looked at the screen. It said SABINE, followed by three of those small yellow faces she seems to attach to everything. I considered letting it ring.

“I am busy,” I said, in Russian.

“You are standing outside,” said my sister, in English, which she insists on speaking because she is taking a degree in it. “I can hear the wind. Also you are being quiet in the way you are quiet when something has happened. What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“You breathed.”

“I always breathe.”

“You breathe strategically. Maksim. Talk.”

Sabine is two hundred and sixteen years old, which makes her a child by our standards, and she is studying film at a university in Montreal, which she describes as “research.” I turned her in the winter of 1810, when she was dying of fever in a Petersburg hospital with nobody at her bed. She became my sister the way some people become family, which is by refusing to leave. She has not once let me be alone with a bad night in two centuries. I love her, and I would like to strangle her about four times a week.

I told her the game had gone poorly, which was true, and that I had been hit, which was not a story.

“And?”