Ink and Ice Read online

  Ink and Ice

  A Twin Cities Ice Book

  Erin McRae and Racheline Maltese

  Published by Avian30, 2020.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  INK AND ICE

  First edition. September 24, 2020.

  Copyright © 2020 Erin McRae and Racheline Maltese.

  ISBN: 978-1393802563

  Written by Erin McRae and Racheline Maltese.

  Also by Erin McRae and Racheline Maltese

  Website

  Newsletter

  Patreon

  Threadless Shop

  Twin Cities Ice

  After the Gold

  Ink and Ice

  The Royal Roses Series

  A Queen from the North

  Love in Los Angeles Series

  Starling

  Evergreen

  Doves

  Phoenix

  Cardinal

  Love in Los Angeles Box Set: Books 1-3

  Love's Labours Series

  Midsummer

  Twelfth Night

  Tempest

  Love's Labours Box Set: Books 1&2

  Standalone Novels

  The Art of Three

  The Opposite of Drowning

  Non-Fiction

  Self-Publishing for Perfectionists

  You've F*cking Got This!: Daily Motivation for People Who Hate That Crap

  Novellas and Short Stories

  Alpha Bodyguard: A Forbidden Omega Story

  The Anniversary Gift

  Backstage Beginnings

  The Hart and the Hound

  Off-Kilter

  The Omega's Reluctant Alpha

  Room 1024

  Sample and Hold

  Second Chances

  Snare

  Paranormal Passions (Anthology)

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also By Erin McRae and Racheline Maltese

  A Note on the Setting

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Also By Erin McRae and Racheline Maltese

  A Note on the Setting

  A SIGNIFICANT PORTION of this book is set on a group of islands in Lake Erie.

  While one of those islands—Whisker Island—is purely a product of our imagination, the others, including South Bass and Middle Bass, are perfectly real. South Bass, in particular, is worth a visit as it is the home of Put-In Bay, a lakeside village which has a small year-round local population and serves as a summer resort for the Ohio region. It is easily accessible by ferry in the warm season.

  Several smaller islands, not all of which are accessible to the public, also dot the area. These include Mouse Island, Turtle Island, and Starve Island. Due to their small size, rocky soil, and the extreme nature of the environment in the winter months, none of these islands have a known history of permanent human settlement either by indigenous people or by colonizers and their descendants.

  While seals are mostly saltwater creatures, freshwater seals do exist. The only true freshwater seal is the Baikal, which is native to Russia. Generally, what are termed freshwater seals are isolated colonies of saltwater species that became trapped inland and now persist in freshwater environments throughout Canada, Alaska, and Russia. To our knowledge there are no such colonies—or myths about such colonies—in Lake Erie.

  Chapter 1

  EIGHT MONTHS BEFORE the Winter Olympics in Almaty, Kazakhstan

  Lake Erie Islands

  AARON SHEFTALL WAS glad to be home for the summer, even if summer on the string of tiny islands in the middle of Lake Erie meant hard work, drunk people, and fish. So much fish.

  Growing up, Aaron hadn’t always appreciated how strange his life was. In the summers, his parents boated to and from the biggest island to work fourteen-hour days for the tourist crowd that wanted some fried perch and bottomless margaritas before the world turned cold. Then summer ended, the tourists left, and the one hundred or so full-time residents of the islands eventually became frozen in.

  Now though, at twenty-three, Aaron knew exactly how odd his life had been. His high school graduating class had contained four people, including him and his twin sister Arianne (Ari, for short). The two of them had boated or snowmobiled, as the weather dictated, to Middle Bass Island each day for classes. Whisker Island, where they and four other families lived, was much too small to have its own school.

  But all of it—the isolation, the brutal winters, the intense sense of community born of both—had served Aaron well; he wouldn’t have learned to ice skate if it hadn’t been necessary to get around in those winters. And he wouldn’t have picked up figure skating as a sport or moved into elite competition if he hadn’t been so desperate sometimes not just to see, but live, in the world beyond the speck of rocks and trees from which he’d come. Sometimes Aaron wasn’t sure the place existed at all.

  But in summers it did. Tourist publications called it the Key West of the Midwest, and their brief seasonal attention was enough to keep the islands going year-round. Aaron’s parents’ restaurant kept their freezers full and funded Aaron’s skating career. So in the off-season, while his fellow competitors were either on the road doing ice shows or showing off their beach bodies on social media, he was stuck here, in a place he loved and could never explain to anyone else, elbow-deep in raw fish.

  Aaron’s phone rang. More accurately, it barked; his ringtone was the sound of seals.

  The device rested on the shelf above the counter where he and Ari worked. In unison they both went up on their toes to look at the screen and see who it was.

  Ari frowned. "Your ex-boyfriend is calling."

  While it was definitely Huy calling, Aaron did need to object to that description. Their thing had been brief, and they had been friends before, during, and most importantly, after it.

  “He's my friend, not just...whatever. And we train at the same rink."

  “Still, he’s calling. He doesn’t call much, does he?”

  “No. And I’m not answering right now, I’m covered in perch.” Not that Huy would know that, and not that Aaron was embarrassed. But mentally shifting from summer restaurant help to chatty figure skater felt hard. Especially with an ex, no matter how amicable.

  After a few more rounds of barking seals—Ari shot Aaron a dire look; she had never thought the seals were a thing to make light of—the phone fell silent for a moment. Then it started barking again.

  The two of them both went up on their toes to check the screen once more.

  “Your ex-boyfriend is calling...again,” Ari proclaimed.

  "Would you stop calling him that?” Aaron mentally paged through the summer schedules of the Twin City Ice skaters and tried to remember where Huy was this week. “I thi
nk he's on vacation, it's probably a drunk dial?"

  Still, the repeated calls were odd enough that he peeled off his gloves and moved to the sink to wash fish bits off his hands.

  The phone barked again.

  "It’s still him,” Ari announced as Aaron was drying his hands.

  He grabbed the phone off the shelf and accepted the call. “What’s up?”

  “Where are you right now?” Huy asked urgently and without preamble.

  Huy Le, Canada’s top men’s figure skater who currently ranked third in the world, had a knack for both friendship and quad flips. He was usually energetic and outgoing, and Aaron had rarely heard him upset. He was definitely upset now. Aaron found it jarring. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a drunk dial.

  “The restaurant.” Aaron took a deep breath and tried to calm the sudden pounding of his heart. Something was wrong.

  “You’re working?”

  “Yes, I work all summer.” Aaron hoped he didn’t sound sharp but was quite sure he did. There were two types of people who skated: Those who could afford it comfortably and those who would always be struggling to afford it. Huy fell into the first category. Aaron did not.

  “Take a break.” The tone sounded suspiciously like you had better sit down for this, which did not lessen Aaron’s sense of unease.

  He pulled the phone away from his ear.

  “I’m stepping out for a minute; let Mom know?” he said to Ari, already on his way out the door.

  Aaron stepped out the kitchen’s back door and took a deep breath, letting his lungs fill with the fresh air. The sun was out, and the lake breeze blowing in off the water kept everything cool and somewhat damp. There was a bench by the door in the shade of the massive maple tree still in the process of putting out leaves. Summer came late to the islands and left early. Aaron propped his foot up on the seat to stretch while they talked.

  “All right, I’m taking a break. What’s happening?” He tried to keep the worry out of his voice as he continued to run through possible disaster scenarios in his head.

  “Go on the internet,” Huy said briskly. “Actually, no. Don’t do that. There’s video.”

  That was not remotely clarifying. Or reassuring. Had something happened to the rink? “Huy, what are you talking about? Is everything all right?”

  “Luke Koval had an accident. At the ice show in Regina.”

  “What happened? Is he okay?” Luke and Aaron weren’t close, but the world of elite competitive skating was like a family. Everyone knew and cared about everyone else.

  “Well, he’s not dead. But no, he’s not okay.”

  “How not okay?” Aaron asked.

  Huy paused. “It happened on a spin. A spiral fracture.”

  Aaron made an agonized noise and tried very hard not to imagine what that would look like, much less feel like. The physical pain would be agonizing, and an injury like that was career-ending. The fact was obvious to both of them, but neither said it out loud. Skaters—and, Aaron suspected, most competitive athletes—were superstitious.

  “Yeah,” Huy said. “Yeah, it wasn’t good. And obviously he won’t be skating for the rest of the season. Which means—”

  “The whole field just opened up,” Aaron breathed.

  It didn’t seem like the sort of thing that should be said too loudly. No one wanted anything bad to happen to a fellow skater, in part because you always knew on another day it could be you. But the reality was that the top U.S. men’s skater was suddenly and unexpectedly out of the running or the foreseeable future. In an Olympic year.

  Which meant opportunity.

  Huy made a noise of agreement.

  “I need to get back to Minnesota.”

  “My favorite ambitious murder kitten of the sea.” Huy sounded proud. “Yeah, you do.”

  “But—” Almost as soon as the idea had occurred to him, Aaron saw the obstacles. Of which there were several. But one was the most pertinent. “Is anyone there right now?”

  “If they’re not, they will be soon. Everyone’s going to want Luke’s—well, everything. Funding. Sponsorships. Grand Prix assignments....” his voice trailed off for a moment. Aaron knew what Huy was going to say next, because he’d done the math, too. “His Olympic team spot.”

  “That’s a really long shot,” Aaron said to try to contain the wild excitement that was building in his chest. Rushing back to training months early didn’t necessarily make sense. And wasn’t necessarily feasible. The restaurant needed every hand it could get this time of year...and training was expensive. His federation covered some of his costs, but not all of them; he wasn’t ranked highly enough.

  “I know,” Huy said. “And I know the situation with your family and your island and your funding is complicated. But you really do need to think about getting back to TCI.”

  “Lucky you’re going to the Olympics anyway.”

  “Hush, don’t jinx anything,” Huy warned.

  Huy was too good a skater and too good a friend for Aaron to resent his medals or his consistency. Still, Aaron was glad they were only in competition with each other for international medals, not national team spots. This upset was a sliver of a chance for him, not a guarantee. Aaron would have to fight tooth and nail for a chance to go to the winter Olympics in Almaty, while a spot on the Canadian team was Huy’s to lose. But as Luke’s accident proved, those losses did happen.

  Aaron wanted to run inside and book his flights. Instead he sank down onto the bench.

  “I’ll work on it,” he said into the phone. He couldn’t promise more than that. Not to Huy, and sadly, not to himself. Not yet.

  “You should,” Huy said. “You’ve always been better than your results.”

  After they hung up, Aaron sat there feeling like he’d had the air punched out of him by Huy’s last comment on his skating. There was validation in it, but it also stung. Aaron had a potential—he knew it, the people around him knew it—and he wasn’t meeting it. And no one could figure out why.

  He needed to get back inside; Ari couldn’t deal with all that perch by herself. But first he needed to text his coaches.

  Katie Nowacki and Brendan Reid had won Olympic gold as a pairs team. After they had retired—and resolved one of the longest-running and highest-drama on-again-off-again relationships in figure skating by getting married—they’d devoted themselves to coaching and, in Katie’s case, to the bafflement of most of the skating community, dairy farming.

  Aaron texted Brendan. He would have preferred Katie, who understood his brain and life best, but Brendan dealt with all things logistics. If he’d contacted Katie, she’d have made him talk to Brendan anyway. That was how they did things.

  Aaron: Hi! I just heard about Luke’s accident. What happens if I come back to training early?

  Aaron didn’t even know if they were in the Twin Cities right now. Probably, because of Katie’s farm, but in the summers she and Brendan always seemed to be travelling all over the world for something for a week here and there. In either case, there wasn’t anything he could but wait to hear back.

  FOR THE REST OF THE day Aaron kept his phone muted and in his pocket so he wouldn’t be tempted to check for notifications every five minutes. He finally let himself dig it out and look that evening while he was at the dock waiting for his mom to finish refueling the boat so they could head back home after a too-long day. His dad was sitting next to him, checking his own phone for the weather forecast, and Ari was somewhere along the shore, probably making friends with more seagulls.

  There was, in fact, a reply from Brendan, and Aaron tapped on it hastily.

  Brendan: Hi! Good to hear from you. Hope your family’s doing well. Short answer: Yes, if you decide you want to come back early, Katie and I will be here for you. Longer answer: Before you make a decision, think about what your goals are, think about resources you’ll need outside of federation funding, and think about whether the extra training is going to be useful to you vs overtraining.

  Aaron bre
athed a sigh of relief at the first part of the message. As for the rest—Well. His goal was obvious: He wanted to make the Olympic team.

  More training vs overtraining was easy. Aaron could moderate himself once he got there. In part, because Katie and Brendan would make sure of it, but Aaron liked to think he was self-aware enough that he didn’t have to put the burden of saying stop on his coaches.

  Resources, however, was the question mark. Brendan meant Aaron’s own internal resources of determination and physical endurance, yes. But resources was also code for money and time. And time was more complicated for Aaron than most.

  He texted Brendan back.

  Aaron: Thanks! I’ll talk to my parents and figure some things out.

  Brendan’s reply came almost immediately.

  Brendan: We look forward to hearing from you!

  Aaron knew Brendan meant it, but there were times—like right now—he wanted a hell of a lot more handholding than that.

  THE RIDE BACK TO WHISKER Island was one of Aaron’s favorite parts of the day, and not just because work was over. In the middle of the lake, surrounded by water and sky, the world felt young and simpler. Tonight the lake was calm under a velvety lavender sky, silver-dark ripples spreading out to the horizon. Now that the sun had set, the air was cold, and the speed of the boat only amplified that.

  As much as Aaron wanted to savor this moment, he suspected it would be easier to start this conversation now than when they were back on dry land.

  “Something happened in skating today,” he said over the rush of the wind and the steady slice of the boat through the water.

  “What’s that?” Aaron’s mom asked. His dad was piloting, but Aaron knew he was listening too.

  Aaron explained Luke’s accident. He didn’t need to use any more words than Huy had; his parents knew the realities of skating as well as non-skaters could. Ari, in the stern of the boat, sat with her face turned out over the water, her curls whipping back behind her. Aaron was sure she was listening too and that she would have opinions.