Everything Carries Me to You (Axton and Leander Book 3) (12 page)

Axton had expected to be under intense scrutiny, but he'd hardly gotten a courtesy glance and a few flared nostrils. They'd determined at a distance that he was a wolf, and that was enough. No one had eyes for him while they watched Dana make his way up the hill to the house.

It wasn't a surprise, given that Dana had taken off his sunglasses. When they stood at the top of the hill, Axton glanced up. Dana's blue eyes were cold and hard. He didn't want to hide his eyes from the crowd. Axton, meanwhile, cast his own glance politely downwards. He was about to meet an alpha wolf--obviously an alpha who took hierarchies seriously--and even in human form, direct eye contact would be read as a challenge, especially if it was done in front of the entire pack.

"Dana," the alpha said, with a nod. "Welcome back."

"Thank you," Dana said, looking Drusus right in the face. "
Uncle
."

Leander fucking hated the shower chair. It wasn't that he wasn't strong enough use it-he'd placed lots of emphasis on bodyweight endurance exercises for years now, and
some
of the weight lifting had to be useful eventually. He could haul himself around by his arms for a long time if he had to. He just hadn't expected that he'd ever have to.

Annoying. Everything was so fucking, fucking annoying.

In the hospital, they had labeled him a fall risk, but he'd
already
fallen; that was the problem. In love. He had fallen in love like a base jumper off a skyscraper, and, fittingly, he'd ended up hospitalized as a result.

Besides, Leander had a lifetime of being the sanest person in the room behind him. Everyone treading tip toe around his, what, emotional stability? That was insulting. It grated on him. Again, it was fucking annoying.

He was not delicate. He was not crazy.

He was also secretly obsessing over how to find werewolves, which occasionally gave him pause when he considered it from an outside perspective. It was very lonely, being the only one who knew, with no actual proof whatsoever. Sara had accepted his plans to find Axton up to this point, but she still didn't
know
. And for shit sure New York didn't know, either.

All that asshole needed to do was find the data Leander had asked him to find. Period. He didn't need to know some magical bullshit race of werewolves existed all around them, and oh yeah, one of them had kicked his ass.

Race or species. Whatever. Semantics.

On the other hand, New York might be the perfect asshole to tell about werewolves, because there was a good shot at convincing him that it was all one bad trip later.

Leander braced an arm on the lip of the tub and swung himself off of his chair. God, he hated this part, too. He had to raise his legs just enough to not jostle them, but not so much that he hurt himself. Pain he was willing to endure - but setbacks in his healing process he was not.

Fuck, this was so irritating. The chair was slightly too far from the water controls and he had to lean over precariously to turn them on.

Frowning, Leander settled back in his chair and let the water rain down on him, allowing himself to brood.

What if everything he was planning was for nothing?

Suppose he
was
crazy, and his memories of the past few months were greatly altered or outright false. Suppose his boyfriend
had
left him, and he'd lost a fight to the ex, and then his frail mind had constructed an elaborate fiction to salvage some sense of self-worth.

It would be wrong to not consider it, at least as a thought exercise. It made him very angry to consider, but he would have been suspicious of himself if he'd refused to do so. And anyway, so many things made him angry right now--what was one more?

His hair was getting too long. He'd wanted to cut it, Leander was pretty sure, before shit went to shit. He just hadn't made the time and then it seemed less important – but it was irritating now, the water darkening all the blond out as his hair stuck to his face, got into his eyes, as he reclined in his shower chair like an angry king about to order executions from his throne.

His thoughts swung back to his potential insanity. What if everything he thought had happened in the elevator was a lie? His memory was patchy, which he had of course attributed to all the damage he'd taken in the fight, but...he remembered Dana, sinister and strong, morphing out of his human shape and into an elongated, horrible...impossibility of a
thing
, neither man nor wolf. It wasn't easy to sort through those memories, to touch them and edge them forward, into the light. Part of him wanted to forget. Part of him
wanted
to be crazy, because the truth was worse--monsters were real, literal and actual monsters in grotesque shapes with all the intellect and evil of a human heart.

And Axton had never mentioned...man...wolf...hybrid...
things
.

If he
was
crazy, then, okay, at what point did the crazy start?

Could one impossible thing be true—that Axton was indeed a werewolf--and yet another one be fabricated? Or had he really managed to concoct all sorts of sense memories about living with a werewolf? The soft, sleek fur and how it threw sparks of red up in the air but slid so smoothly under his hand, or the obvious muscles lurking under that skin--hell, even the awful meaty wolf breath--had he made that all up just because his lover left him? If so, Leander was impressed with the depths of his dissociative capabilities. He should work in the movies. Of course, everyone in LA felt like that sometimes.

Leander shook his head, mostly to get his hair off of his face. It didn't work, plastered down by water that still rolled over his skin.

The problem was that this just wasn't a very compelling thought exercise. Leander went through it out of a sense of obligation, because it would have been stupid not to consider the possibility that he was an unreliable narrator. Actually, it was stupid that he hadn't examined it more closely before he started secretly plotting retrieving Axton from – well, from wherever the fuck Axton was.

But he didn't
really
doubt his sanity, and even if he did--what would that change? He'd still be acting the same way regardless of the truth or not. If he was crazy, then presumably his data collection wouldn't turn up anything useful. All his inputs related to remembered snatches of werewolf lore would fail to translate into any sort of meaningful population demographic.

If sane, proceed as follows. If not sane--proceed as follows.

Either way, Leander was looking.

The hot water was running out.

Fuck.

Leander leaned forward again and tried to not fall out of his chair.

To Axton's intense relief, Dana and Drusus had gone off into the house to talk. They'd charged some other wolf with keeping an eye on the new guy, which was fine by Axton. Anything that was not being in the same room as two wolves ready to tear into each other for pack control was fine by Axton. Uncle and nephew.
Sweet baby Jesus
, Axton thought, but it was a Leander expression.

Uncle and nephew, which meant that Dana's mother was--

"I know it's not the Four Seasons," the new wolf was saying, "but I hope you'll be comfortable here, and I'm sure that Dana--"

--meant that Dana's mother was now married to her deceased husband's brother.

"I'm sorry," Axton said suddenly. "I haven't heard a thing you've said."

"I know," the new wolf said. "But I figured I would keep talking anyway."

"I'm not sure what's happening here," Axton said.

"Let's start over again, son." The new wolf was older, lean and wiry, greying hair pulled back in a short ponytail. He had warm brown eyes and, Axton noted with interest, two silver studs through one of his ears. "My name's Jack."

Gay?
Axton wondered vaguely, but he was mostly just jealous. He'd never managed the trick of keeping piercings in between shape swaps. Most wolves didn't. Jack looked more like an aging hippie than anything, anyway.

"Oh," Axton said eventually, when he finally noticed Jack was holding a hand out. "Uh. Axton." Great, great. He'd already forgotten how to do human style introductions, for fuck's sake. He tried to make it for it with an enthusiastic handshake.

"So, as I was saying," Jack went on, gesturing at another house. "You'll be staying in there for now. A lot of the other roamers live there, on and off."

"Trackers," Axton said vaguely. Then: "Dana?"

"Dana's barely here long enough to rate a room," Jack said, laughter lurking in the undercurrent of his voice, "and yet he has a little shack all to himself down by the lake, pretty far from the rest of us. But for now, he'll be bunking down in that house there, too, sleeping close to you, yeah."

Axton's shot a quick glance up to Jack's face, desperate to catch any implication in Jack's words so he could deny it.

"To keep an eye on you," Jack finished innocently. "Wanna see your room?"

Was the fucker trying to not smile? Axton was suspicious.

Maybe he was just being paranoid? What had Dana even told these people?

"Look," Axton said finally, "not that I don't appreciate the hospitality, but...I expected to be tossed into a cell or something. Kept prisoner."

"Well, I wouldn't assume I had freedom to leave whenever I pleased, if I were you," Jack said drily. "Dana's vicious about bringing people back at the best of times."

"This doesn't seem like the best of times," Axton said.

"That's neither here nor there, and not for me to say," Jack said.

Axton hesitated. He was curious--more than curious, he was worried. He really
didn't
want to be around for a power struggle. If Drusus suspected that he was important to Dana, that opened up a whole host of unpleasant possibilities. Trouble could be more general, too--Ax had seen packs turn on a stranger if things were bad in the social structure.

"Look," he said cautiously, "I don't--what did Dana tell you?"

Jack shrugged his fluid shoulders and held his hands out, palms up. He had a carpenter's hands, like Axton did, despite the ever healing werewolf body, from years of habit and building things.

"Does it matter?" Jack asked.

"Yes," Axton said. "It matters to me."

Jack studied Axton for a moment, mostly through polite sideways glances as they stood next to each other. The wolf mannerisms translated gracefully.

"Come with me," he said finally. "We'll go down to Dana's place. He won't mind none."

"Are you sure?" Axton asked, but he followed Jack readily.

"I'm sure he's going to be talking to Dru for a long time," Jack murmured, "so we might as well. Try to look cheerful, would you?"

They walked away from the big house, away from the scattered wolves that looked towards them uneasily, away, Axton understood, from anyone who might want to eavesdrop.

Curious. Axton wouldn't have thought Dana would trust him to wander off, guarded by just one middle aged wolf. Then again, Jack's narrow hipped frame promised the same sleek strength that Axton's did, and probably nearly the same speed.

Whatever. Axton was willing to go anywhere that wasn't inside that house where Dana was a bundle of barely restrained resentment. Given that Dru wasn't holding back from throwing his position around and clearly wanted Dana to know his place, Axton wondered how long the situation had been going on.

They walked for a long time, and Axton wished he could relax. The day was overcast but still possessed of an understated beauty, and he was back in the woods now. Life thrummed around him and he could hear far off birds and smell rabbits and foxes in the underbrush. The familiarity soothed him minutely, but he was still wound up so tight that he jumped when Jack finally spoke again.

"Dru's decided to not tell the rest of the pack anything," Jack said. "Dana was pretty adamant, I hear. Just you and me and Dana and, if Dana wants, Helen."

"Helen," Axton repeated. "Is that--"

"Yup," Jack said. "Dru's mate."

"Dana's mother," Axton said evenly.

"I wouldn't use that tone around here about that," Jack said carefully, "if you wanna make friends."

"I don't want to make friends," Axton said, and he flicked his eyes up to Jack's face for a few seconds longer this time. "I don't want to be here."

"And that's gonna be obvious to everyone at this rate," Jack said. "Which is the opposite of what we're going for. And given how rarely Dru and Dana agree on anything, I'm kind of inclined to sign up for their plan just for the novelty value."

"How do
you
fit in here?" Axton asked, a touch belligerently. "All the tension, the shaky pack structure--that would make me uncomfortable even if I wasn't a prisoner. I don't understand how this pack is working. I don't understand at all." He was pushing. He couldn't push Dana for information, and he didn't know if he'd even be allowed to talk to the other wolves, so this was the only opening he had, the only place to apply pressure.

"I was a good friend of Dana's dad," Jack sighed, "and Helen went and got me a few years back, pleaded with me to come home. She's a very proud woman, and I...well, I didn't want Dana to end up dead because he was young and stupid and angry."

"Do you think he's wrong to be angry?" Axton's voice was low and quick, lashing out like a frog's tongue.

"I don't know
what
I think," Jack said sharply, "because I wasn't
here
for what happened. And I'm doing the best I can to keep any more of us from dying at each other's hands."

Stand down
, Axton thought to himself,
You made him angry
.

But Jack didn't bare his teeth or shove Axton into the ground--he just took a deep breath and looked away.

"I promised my friend I'd take care of his family," Jack said, "if anything happened to him. And here I am. I'm a wolf of my word. That good enough for you, son?"

"I'm a wolf of my word, too," Axton said, ready to fling the truth in Jack's face. "I traded my freedom for my human lover's life. That's the
only
reason I'm here."