The Hockey Playing Alpha and His Human Ice Princess

Georgia

The whole campus went quiet like it was holding its breath, and I was the only one who didn’t understand why.

It starts in the afternoon, small at first, easy to miss if I wasn’t already primed to notice every strange shift in this place. A flyer taped to the dining hall door announces the evening’s study group is cancelled, no reason given. Then the intramural game scheduled for after dinner disappears from the activities board entirely, like it was never posted at all. By the time the sun starts sinking low and orange behind the tree line, the whole rhythm of the campus has changed. Students move faster between buildings than usual. Conversations drop to something quieter, more clipped.

”What’s going on?” I ask Mandi, catching her halfway through packing her bag earlier than she normally would on a Friday.

”Nothing. Just an early night,” she says, not looking up, her movements a little too brisk, a little too deliberate.

”Everything’s cancelled. The study group. The game.”

”Weather,” she says, dismissive, too fast, too smooth, the same practiced ease she used for coyotes weeks ago. ”Might storm later.”

I glance out the window. The sky is clear, and Mandi knows I can see that just as easily as she can.

By full dark, the campus outside our window has gone almost eerily still. No students crossing the quad, no lights burning late in the library, no distant laughter drifting up from the common rooms the way there usually is most nights. It’s like the whole school collectively decided to disappear indoors at the exact same moment, and nobody bothered to tell me why.

”You should stay in tonight,” Mandi says, appearing in the doorway of our room around nine, arms crossed, her voice flat, carrying none of its usual lightness.

”Why?”

”Just trust me,” she says, quiet and firm, offering nothing beyond that, no explanation, no excuse dressed up as a real reason the way she usually manages. Just the bare instruction, delivered with a seriousness I’ve never heard from her before, not once, not even when she was steering me away from questions about the twins or the howling.

”Okay,” I tell her, and I mean it, mostly, when I say it.

An hour later, alone in the room while Mandi showers down the hall, the stillness outside pulls at me in a way I can’t ignore. It’s not curiosity exactly, or not only curiosity. It’s something closer to a compulsion, some thread tugging at me the same way it did that first night I snuck into The Fang, some part of me that’s stopped being able to sit quietly indoors while something this strange unfolds just beyond my window.

I go outside anyway.

The night air is cold and sharp against my skin, and the campus stretches out empty in every direction, lamplight pooling along the paths without a single student crossing through any of it. My footsteps sound too loud against the cobblestones, the only sound anywhere except for the wind moving through the trees at the forest’s edge.

I walk toward the tree line without fully deciding to, drawn by the same pull that’s tugged at me since that very first night, the howling, the gold eyes at the edge of the dark. I stop a good distance back from where the grass gives way to the dense wall of trees, close enough to see, far enough that some small, rational part of my brain insists I’m still safe.

I see them almost immediately - shapes moving between the trunks, quick and fluid, too large and too fast to be deer or foxes or any ordinary wildlife that should occupy a forest like this. The forest is alive. These shapes move differently, low and powerful, cutting between the trees with a speed that makes my breath catch in my throat.

I should turn around. I know that, some distant, sensible part of my brain screaming at me to go back inside, back to the dorm, back to Mandi’s insistence that I stay in for a reason she never bothered to explain. I don’t move. I stand there, rooted to the spot, watching the forest breathe and shift in the dark, unable to look away even as every instinct I have tells me exactly how wrong this is.

Then the tree line breaks.

A shadow steps out from between the trunks, massive, far larger than anything that should exist in a New England forest, its outline barely visible against the deeper dark behind it except for the way moonlight catches along its shoulders, its powerful, coiled stillness. My whole body goes rigid, cold sweeping through me so fast my breath catches.

Two points of gold ignite in the dark, fixed directly on me.

For one disorienting heartbeat, my mind snags on Puck, on his eyes, on the heat that pools under my skin whenever he’s close enough to touch. The thought doesn’t finish.

It doesn’t move. It doesn’t lunge, doesn’t growl, doesn’t do anything a predator should do when it’s found something small and alone standing at the edge of its territory. It just watches, motionless, its golden eyes holding mine across the distance with an intensity that feels less like a wild animal sizing up prey and more like something ancient trying to communicate something I don’t have the language to understand.

I don’t move either. My whole body has locked into place, every muscle frozen, my lungs refusing to release. Time stretches strangely in that stillness, seconds bleeding into what feels like minutes, the two of us simply looking at each other across the dark while the rest of the world holds its breath right along with me.

Then, between one blink and the next, it’s gone.

Not retreating, not turning to lope back into the trees the way any normal animal would. Simply gone, vanished so completely and so instantly that if I hadn’t been staring directly at it, I might have convinced myself I imagined the entire thing.

The cold breaks over me all at once. My heart slams hard against my ribs, and I realize I haven’t taken a breath in longer than should be possible, my lungs burning with the sudden, desperate need for air.

I turn to run for the dorms, my legs finally unlocking, adrenaline flooding through me hard enough that I’m moving before I’ve even fully decided to.

Mandi is already standing in the doorway.

She’s pale, her face drained of all its usual color, her arms wrapped tight around herself like she’s cold despite the warm light spilling out from the hallway behind her. She doesn’t ask what I saw. She doesn’t ask why I’m out of breath, or why my hands are shaking, or why I look like I’ve just seen something that shouldn’t exist.

She just stands there, watching me approach, saying absolutely nothing about how she knew, somehow, exactly where to be waiting. And that certainty, the way she’s positioned herself like she expected this exact moment, plants a suspicion I can’t shake: whatever Mandi knows, her waiting here was never innocent.