Everything Carries Me to You (Axton and Leander Book 3) (42 page)

"Leaving hurt
me
," Axton said, "but I had to--"

"And I had to go to you," Leander said, "when I found you. No, I couldn't wait. Any more than you could stay, before."

Axton cocked his head to the side, more curious predator than confused puppy, and took in the sight of his lover beneath him, so coiled with tension and emotion that he could hardly breathe.

"You did what you had to do," he said slowly, "and I did what I had to do?"

"
Yes
," Leander said. "I've accepted that."

"Then you understand," Axton said, "that I have to go back."

Unhappy silence. Leander was blinking quickly and Axton had to look away.

"No," Leander said, in a single wet syllable, so honest that it hurt to hear. "I don't."

"I had to save you. You had to save me. But our future--" Axton said, "--our future still needs some saving."

"I don't want you to go," Leander said. "I don't know if I'll ever see you again--"

Axton exhaled sharply--the resolve that had carried him here was swaying. Tears undid him. Leander's tears--those could dissolve him completely, if he wasn't careful.

"We'll go together," Axton said.

Leander had been intermittently shuddering under him, from the tension, but now he stilled.

"Together?" he asked.

"Yeah," Axton said, vaguely thinking this was crazy but also realizing that it was probably the only way. If he tried to go back alone, Leander would probably just follow him.

"We refine the plan, whatever it is," Leander said, "together. Or we go implement the plan together?"

"Both," Axton said.

Leander sighed and his body went floppy, sinking into the mattress.

"Deal," he said.

The ghost of a smile pulled at Axton's lips, but it was sad, like it was a tragic haunting.

"Is that all?" Axton asked gently. "Is that all you needed to let go of the tension, the anger you've been giving off the past few hours?"

"The promise of together," Leander said. "Yeah."

"You by my side and I by yours," Axton said. "Yeah. I promise."

Silence. Their breathing almost synced up.

"I'm so tired," Leander said suddenly, blinking up at the ceiling. The tears had abated. "So tired and we can't really rest yet."

"No," Axton agreed, "we can't." He lowered himself and pressed a kiss, hard, to Leander's mouth.

"I love you," Leander said, when Axton pulled away. "God. I love you."

"I love you, I love you, I love you," Axton chanted back, and Leander surged up and threw an arm over him, locking their lips together once more.

"Don't leave me again," Leander said, "but right now, we have things to do."

"I won't," Axton breathed, "and I know." He swallowed thickly and tried to untangle their limbs--

Leander pulled him back in and pressed another deep kiss into Axton. Then they let each other go, rolling off the bed and onto their feet.

They both cleared their throats and looked away, taking steadying breaths.

"Soon," Leander promised, shakily. "Soon."

"I know," Axton said.

There was a pause as they both looked away and settled their breathing. Everything felt heavy and important and desperate and frail--and they would come back to that feeling, but right now they needed to run.

One of them sighed; then the other; then they were ready.

Axton pawed at Leander's chest, finding a chain around his neck, noticing something he hadn't before.

"You kept my ring," he said, oddly pleased, fingers closing around the chunky silver, the hunk of turquoise.

"Yeah, so I could give it back," Leander said. "It didn't fit and I wasn't going to alter it." He reached for the chain, ready to tug it off.

"No," Axton stilled his hand, "leave it, for a while. I kind of like it."

"Oh, feeling possessive now, are you? Want your territory marked?"

"Maybe," Axton said, "and maybe I want to be a thoroughly marked territory."

"I swear, I'll jump you later," Leander said.

"You'd better," Axton said.

"So," Leander said, striving for a subject change. "Do you know how to steer a boat?"

"Uh," Axton said. "What, is that my job all of a sudden? I hope not."

"It's not. Because I do," Leander said, smugly, recovering some semblance of his usual self-assured cockiness.

"Oh," Axton said, arching an eyebrow and hiding a smile, "are we comparing metaphorical dick lengths now?"

"No, you're just supposed to be impressed and aroused," Leander said.

"I'm impressed and aroused by you all the time," Axton said. "You just walk into a room and I'm like, 'wow. Look at that guy walk into the room. I have such a boner for how he walks into a room.'"

"Yeah," Leander said, "but--"

"You know, I'm not even kidding," Axton said. "I
do
like how you walk into a room."

"And I'm grateful for that every day," Leander said, "but you should also be impressed and aroused by how I am captain of this big ass boat, and you're not."

"This is a
yacht
," Axton said, "When would I learn to drive a yacht? Small boats, sure. Sailboats, maybe. Anything with an actual tiller, I've got a shot. A power boat? I'm not a werewolf crab fisherman. A big ass pleasure yacht? I've never planned to be on one in my life. I live in the mountains in a log cabin, for fuck's sake."

"Exactly why I get to be the captain," Leander said. "Also, keep in mind that I'm the stronger swimmer and one who can surf."

"Do you know how to fix the engine?" Axton asked.

"Not even remotely," Leander said cheerfully.

"So it's like you and cars," Axton said. "Like how I'm not even sure you can change your own oil, but you can--"

"I can drive the fuck out of some cars," Leander said.

"I know. I've been with you on those empty desert roads where you like to be terrifying."

"You haven't seen anything yet," Leander promised.

"I'm sure I haven't," Axton said.

"At one point we considered helicopters," Leander said, "but--"

"Not enough time to learn how to fly one?"

"Nah," Leander said. "New York could do it. Just--then we'd be stuck in a helicopter with New York."

"New York can do that?" Axton asked. He was maybe a little impressed.

"New York can drive
anything
," Leander said, with a note of pride. "Drive, fly, sail. You name it."

"Why?" Axton asked.

"Because he's a rich guy with more money than sense, obviously," Leander said. "Who else has time for that shit?"

"You?" Axton asked. "Guy who knows how to stunt drive
and
jump out of speeding cars?"

"Well," Leander allowed. "I mean, yes. Point. I would like to say that I learned some of that for the movies, but point."

"And the stunt driving?" Axton asked.

"Okay, so, what, New York and I took courses for my birthday once," Leander said, "which
sounds
frivolous, sure, but which has been useful in my life."

Axton arched a silent and judgmental eyebrow.

"Don't look at me that way," Leander said. "It's going to come up before all this is over, and you are going to be impressed and aroused all over again."

"I mean, here I was, feeling bad for being the one existing on the fringe of society," Axton said, "thinking I was the bad boy component of this relationship, the one who should feel bad for dragging you from light into darkness, and the whole time you've been hiding this hooligan past."

"I do not have--I mean, a
little
," Leander allowed, "
maybe
. Whatever. Look, you can't room with a guy like New York for several years of your life and not end up in a car chase or two with some low level Armenian gangsters, is all I'm saying."

"I'm not even going to ask," Axton said.

"Good," Leander said. "Let's get out of here. I have a ship to captain."

There was a pile of discarded bobby pins and hair ties in a bowl, along with some shiny blond hair.

"How do you keep all of that up under the wig?" Axton asked, fascinated and watching the way Sarah shook out her heavy dark waves. She just had
so much
hair. It baffled him.

"Magic," she said promptly, and already she was twisting her hair back up, sight unseen, into a bun. "How do you change into a dog?"

"I do not change into a dog," Axton said.

"Wolf. Whatever. You act like a dog."

"I do not," Axton said. "I am not a dog."

"Like a dog," Sarah said.

Axton waffled, mostly because he missed the way Leander could scratch behind his ears just right.

"Fine," he agreed. "Like a dog, sort of. Behaviorally."

"Are you going to tell me about it?" she asked, her keen eyes set upon his.

Axton slid onto a stool that was molded into the floor. They were inside the ship's galley. He thought about her question.

"No," he said finally.

"That's so fucking unfair!" Sarah swore. "Do you have any idea what I've been thr--not that you've been having a picnic this whole time or anything, I'm sure, but...I mean, the sanity questioning has been rough. You know, 'what if I'm crazy,' but also, like, 'oh god, what if Leander's gone crazy, that's so sad, the sudden mental illness is sad, what's the onset age for schizophrenia again?'"

"I don't know what to say," Axton explained. "How do I? I don't know. I don't know how it works. I've been like this my entire life, so it's not a process I examine any more than you do breathing. I could show you, but it's fast, and there's not much to see that would explain the mechanism. I could tell you some stuff about us--"

"'Us,'" Sarah repeated pointedly.

"About
werewolves
," Axton said, leaning forward and enunciating with exaggerated clarity. "I'm a
werewolf
. There. Does hearing it out loud satisfy you?"

Sarah slid the last pin into her bun and lowered her hands.

"It's a start," she said. She considered it further. "But kind of, yeah, actually. You know that you have weird predatory shoulders when you lean over things like that, right?"

Axton straightened self consciously.

"No, keep on doing it," Sarah said. "It's kind of hot. I was just pointing out that you look pretty wolfy, once you stop to think about it. Once you know what to look for."

"How much have you figured out?" Axton asked quietly.

"A fair amount," Sarah said. "By working backwards from what Lee seemed to know."

"Yeah?" Axton asked warily.

"We focused on finding small settlements on the outskirts of rural towns," Sarah began, "with fewer doctors and dentists than the national average for the relevant population density, and then we cross referenced that with unusually thin populations for certain prey animals, and overlaid that data with the registered hunting licenses."

Axton blinked, impressed.

"And you found me?"

"Lee tweaked the parameters with a few other factors," Sarah said. "And then we narrowed it down to a few likely areas. Lee cut me out of the process then, but it's not like New York was subtle about drumming up funding for wolf research and conservation, and the vet papers, and the pet plane ticket...but Lee never told me anything so I stopped asking. And like I said, he cut me out of the research stuff early and had me focus on other logistics."

"Like getting a boat," Axton said.

"No, that was easy," she said. "New York practically ordered us to take the boat, once Lee brought it up. But to answer your question, I figured out that if you were a werewolf then most werewolves must live in the middle of nowhere, probably don't get sick too often, and since we're tracking game populations, they eat the expected prey animals."

"All correct," Axton said, musing. "I had no idea we were that easy to figure out."

"Easy?" Sarah echoed, incredulous. "
Easy
? Leander is a fucking genius. And even then, Leander alone would have taken years to shift through all that fucking data and arrange all the other shit. Luckily, he worked with an organizational mastermind." She stood up straighter and preened.

"And a millionaire, apparently," Axton noted.

"What, New York?
Millions?
Peanuts. Don't make me laugh, Axton."

When Leander wandered into the galley to join them, Sarah stood up on tiptoe to drop a white captain's hat on his head.

"Oh Captain, my Captain!" she said.

"Quit being ominous," Leander said, but he adjusted the hat on his head, pulling it down firmly. "I don't want to get shot."

"Since when are you superstitious?" Sarah asked.

"Oh, judgey-judgey. Like you didn't buy a Ouija board the week that you figured out Axton was a werewolf," Leander said.

"What?" Axton said.

"You knew when I figured it out?" Sarah asked.

"You were really angry with me that week," Leander said. "You are not subtle. I just couldn't react."

"Well, I don't know," Sarah said. "I gave it away without using it. But I mean, it's natural to wonder. Right? If there are werewolves, what else might there be?"

The humans in the room looked at Axton expectantly.

"Uh," he said. "For me it's a purely physical change, guys. I don't know what you want me to say."

"See," Leander said, as if they'd been arguing about it.

"Whatever," Sarah said, with an impatient hair toss. "Captain, have you entered our course yet?"

"Departing from the twenty first most boring city in the United States," Leander said easily, "and heading for Maine. Yes."

"I'm going to go my room and sleep for ten hours now," she said. "Don't wake me up with your sex noises. In general, yes. Tonight, no. I'm tired."

"I try to not make frivolous promises," Axton said, deadpan.

Sarah grinned.

"I have to go back to the helm," Leander said apologetically.

"Mm," Axton said, plowing through the ship's rations. The fridge was thoughtfully stocked with a pile of raw meat.

"Since it's a given conclusion that we're going to get busy tonight," Leander said, "I thought I should ask, just to make sure, if there's anything I should know, any triggers, or..."