Page 5

“And there is a player on the other team. A human. He is loud. He has no manners. He says every thought as it arrives. He put his hands on me in the locker room, and I—” I stopped.

Silence on the line. Not the kind Sabine usually allows.

“What does he smell like?” she said.

“Sabine.”

“It is a simple question.”

“He smells like a man who has been skating for sixty minutes.”

“Maksim.” She said my name the way my mother used to, when I was a boy and I was lying about the goat. “What. Does. He. Smell. Like.”

I looked out over the dark lot. Snow was starting to come down, thin and slow, catching the light from the lamps. The ice on the puddles gleamed like glass.

“Honey bread,” I said.

I had never told anyone. Not in eleven hundred years, not even her. It was the winter before the wolves, in a low house with smoke in the rafters. I had been eleven and our mother had made honey bread for the feast of the first snow, dark and sticky and warm from the oven, and she had put a piece in my hand and kissed my hair and said, slowly, Maksimka. It will not last if you eat it like a wolf.

It was the last happy day of my human life. I have not tasted anything since, not truly, not the way I tasted that.

The line was so quiet I checked that the call had not dropped.

“Sabine?”

Something was making a small sound on the other end. It took me a moment to understand that my sister, who has faced down hunters and Soviet border guards and a professor who called her “Miss Volkova” with a sneer, was crying.

“Maksim,” she said. “Yelena told us. Do you remember, the night she taught us the rules? She said when you meet the one who is made for you, you smell the last time you were happy. Not a perfume. A memory. The place you are trying to get back to.”

“That is a story for children.”

“It is a story for us. The ones who cannot go home.” Her voice cracked. “Oh, my God. You found him.”

“I found a hockey player,” I said, “who has the manners of a raccoon.”

“Is he pretty?”

“He is loud. “

“So yes.”

I closed my eyes. I did not have a reply.

Her voice changed then. The laughter went out of it, and she was suddenly a hundred years older, and I remembered that she was the sister who had stayed awake with me through two centuries of things neither of us can say.

“Listen to me,” she said. “This is important. You remember what Yelena said about the bond?”

“I remember.”

“Say it.”

I looked at my hands. They were steady. They had been steady since the night I died, and they were steady now, and I hated it, because the rest of me was not.

“A mate must never be taken without a yes,” I said. “Not a look. Not a nod. A yes, freely given, with full knowledge. If I bite him before that, the bond does not fail. It turns. It becomes poison, for both of us.” I heard my own voice go flat. “The Karpov brothers tried it in 1802. The rest of the family had to bury them.”

“So.”

“So I will not bite him.”