Everything Carries Me to You (Axton and Leander Book 3) (6 page)

Leander said nothing.

When his discharge processed and Leander was outside for the first time in two weeks, the sun was bright and shining and beautiful.

He resented that the sky wasn't mourning with him, but he didn't dwell very long on that sense of betrayal.

He couldn't.

He had so much to do.

The first week back home was fairly easy. Leander was far more exhausted than he would admit, and his body didn't share his sense of urgency, it just wanted to sleep fourteen hours a day to heal up. His appetite was good and he was cooperatively taking his antibiotics and all else. There had been that push, his last few days in the hospital, to get the first phase of things done, and arrange all his people where he needed them to be: Sarah at his side, Christina as far away as possible, and New York in his pocket.

Yeah.

He could rest now.

Could he rest for now?

Leander's body didn't give him much of a choice.

There was a wolf bleeding out on the bed. Shock had set in and he wasn't moving.

Dana was bent over, arms hugging his own midsection, chest heaving. There was bile in the back of his throat. The smell of blood was hot and heavy in the air.

Axton was dying.

"Right," Dana said, as he straightened. "No time for hysterics."

He stepped outside the room and then swiftly returned, wheeling in an IV fluid stand and also a tray of medical instruments. Turning to survey the scene, Dana took in the amount of blood all over the bed--the floor--there was even spray on the walls. It never ceased to surprise him, even as a hunter who killed for his meals, just how much blood could come out of a sucking gut wound.

"Right," Dana repeated, for his own benefit. Briskly, he tugged up his surgical mask and snapped a pair of latex gloves on his hands. "Time to get to work."

And yet--he waited. He waited attentively, poised with a pair of disinfected tongs in his hand--but he waited.

Then it happened quickly, like wind rippling across a field of wildflowers. Axton went from wolf to man. It was his body's last ditch effort to survive.

Dana sighed, something loosening in his chest, and then moved fast.

When Axton awoke, he was groggy with sedatives, the sharp scent of disinfectant stung in the air, and Dana was sitting next to his bed reading a book.

Breathe
, Axton thought, and it was the first word that came back. No--others had come back in his drugged dreams.
Stay
, he had heard, not in his own voice, and then he placed the sound in his memory and he had thought:
Leander
. How long had it been since he had known his lover's name?

(
time
, Axton said to himself clearly;
the word is time and you have lost much of it
)

Man and wolf and
hunt
and
hunger
and forest and air and water and then the names for so many animals. And then the Latin names for them came, and then Axton opened his eyes.

"Ice chips?" Dana asked languidly, just barely looking up from his book to offer a cup.

Axton stopped. Maybe all his words hadn't come back yet. He did not understand how to answer that--but it wasn't that he did not know what ice chips were once he thought about it. It was that he did not know how to say all that he felt. When he finally decided it still took him a long time to speak. He had forgotten how to push air out of his lungs that way, how to force it up and how to shape his throat to make sounds, and how to move his mouth, how to hold his lips.

Mostly he coughed.

Then, low, raw:

"Why?"

Dana shrugged, mouth moving with his shoulders.

"Why what? Why did I shoot you, or why did I take the time to extract the bullets and sew you up nicely?" He reached over and picked up a plastic jar, rattling it. Bullet shells jangled.

"No," Axton managed, voice rougher than gravel. "
Why
. I was--" he stopped, shook his head, distressed. It hurt to talk, but it also hurt in a different way to explain. "--fine. Before."

"You were
feral
and stuck in one shape and out of your goddamn mind."

"Why bring me," Axton struggled to finish, "--back?"

"I did what I had to do," Dana said, snapping his book shut decisively. "And you didn't make it easy."

"You shot me," Axton croaked.

"Ooh, yes, and doesn't that hurt your pretty widdle feelings," Dana cooed, bringing his hand up to the base of his throat in a mocking, camp gesture. Then, in his normal voice: "Sucks, don't it?"

Axton didn't rise to the sarcasm and instead regarded Dana carefully.

"You were afraid," he whispered finally. "I smelled it."

Dana glanced away, the haughtiness gone out of his face.

"I don't want you to die," he allowed.

"And
yet
," Axton objected, pushing himself up to his elbows and coughing with the effort.

Dana offered him the ice chips.

Axton stared at the cup for a long time.

How? Fingers. But how? Axton sat up a little more to free his arm and started at his hand. How, damnit, how? He wiggled his fingers experimentally and then tried to take the cup. He almost dropped it.

Patiently, Dana caught it and then he unwound Axton's fingers and then wrapped them around the cup securely.

"See," he said into Axton's ashamed silence. "You were far gone. You don't remember things."

"I remember," Axton said defiantly.

"No you don't," Dana said. "You probably can't even walk right yet and you're going to stumble around like a newborn calf when you try."

Axton clenched his jaw, but did not take the implied challenge.

"It's okay, though," Dana said. "Fine motor skills always return last but you're doing great. You'll remember how to use this body in no time."

"You've seen someone get stuck before," Axton said. It wasn't a question. He picked at the thin white sheet that was pulled up to his hips, and was distantly thankful for having some sort of cover.

"Lots of times," Dana said. "I've been sent to track down feral wolves more times than I can count. They don't always come back from it, neither. I knew I had to get you before you were too far gone. You spend too much time in either shape and it's bad for you."

"I've stayed wolf for longer than that before," Axton said sulkily. He did remember, clearly, what it was like to move and make decisions without words for his reasoning process. It was easy and beautiful and simple and he longed for it again already.

But he remembered, too, being able to recall Leander's face but not his name, and what it was like to forget even the word for what they had together.
Love
.

Axton did not like this new betrayal of his body. He felt uneasy in his human shape but part of him paused at the idea of changing back. He had never lost so much of his human memory before.

"Sure," Dana allowed. "But not like this. Not ever--" he paused, seeming uneasy, "...not after a big...event."

"Not after an emotional trauma, you mean," Axton said sharply, "and not after a stint in solitary confinement, what the
fuck
." Good. He had the word fuck back. That felt satisfying.

"I had to make sure you weren't going to run away," Dana said.

"That counts as
torture
in some countries, you know that?"

Dana shrugged.

"I just shot you," he pointed out. "This is an abnormal situation."

"And you couldn't have shot me once?" Axton seethed, now that they were back on the subject. "You had to just to keep on going?"

"I had to get your body to turn back to human," Dana said, voice low and suddenly cold as he leaned back in his chair. "And since we only involuntarily switch back when we're about to die, yeah, I had to keep on fucking going."

"So you had to use
all
the bullets?" Axton demanded.

"Look, I don't fucking know how much damage you can take," Dana said. "I ain't ever had to try and kill you before."

"Why didn't you let me stay wolf?" Axton asked, fully speaking the question that had been his first, finally asking the only question that mattered. His despair and his anger were not lessened by his increasing capacity for speech. If anything, they were sharpened.

"Ax, you were understanding fewer words than a pet dog," Dana said, rolling his eyes and throwing his hands up towards the ceiling. "Fewer words than a fucking house cat. You'd gone completely nonverbal. You didn't even know your own
name
. I had to take action before it got any worse."

"I was happier that way," Axton said.

"Well, too bad," Dana said.

"How does that even work--regaining the memory for words?"

"How the fuck should I know?" Dana asked, incredulous. "We don't exactly do research. Mostly wolves that go feral get put down. You know that."

"Seriously?" Axton asked. "
Seriously
? Never in my pack."

"I'm pretty sure that's because the Russian never lets anyone go feral in the first place," Dana said.

"The Russian?" Axton echoed, freshly incredulous.

"Yeah, your dad, obviously," Dana said.

"The Russian?" Axton repeated. He let himself fall back into his pillows. "That's the best we can come up with? No wonder we're a dying breed."

"No, look, it's ominous," Dana said. "Being known by one word is sinister and impressive. He's a legend."

Axton screwed his eyes shut, like maybe the world would be less stupid if he ignored it for a second.

"Like, what, the Undertaker," Dana went on. "The Russian has a menacing ring to it."

"He hardly has an accent on his English anymore," Axton muttered. "He worked hard at it."

"Anyway, I think it has to do with the regeneration of neural pathways," Dana said. "Our bones change shape wolf to human and our skulls are completely different shapes, right, so you have to figure the brain tissue itself undergoes--" Dana stopped because Axton had opened his eyes and was staring at him in wonder. "What? It's like we have a reset button, neurobiologically speaking. I think that's also how we have two sets of muscle memory."

"What," Axton said. "I never expected you to use the word neurobiological in a coherent sentence. It's like the time you used the word quantum in conversation and I was too surprised to keep talking."

"I read too, asshole," Dana said, flipping up the book in his lap so Axton could see it was a medical text. "I just don't read fiction because I'm not a great big pussy."

Axton sighed.

"Is that how you know how to do all this shit?" he asked, gesturing to the IV stand.

Dana stayed quiet for a minute.

"I went undercover as a vet tech for a while once," he said finally, with great dignity.

"A
vet tech
," Axton said sourly. "Why would you even--no, you know what? I don't care."

"I was shadowing this little wolf hunter down South," Dana said. "Her best friend was a vet tech and I was gathering intel."

"Intel?" Axton echoed, narrowing his eyes. "What intel could you possibly get from a girl's best friend that's critical to the global werewolf cause?"

"Favorite hangouts, stuff like that," Dana said.

Axton paused.

"You pretended to be a vet tech for
how long
to figure out where some girl goes for fun?" he asked, skeptical and judgmental. "That sounds, oh, I don't know, stalker-y. And not terribly effective."

"Look, she was bagging rogue wolves all up and down the East coast," Dana said. "I mean, it was very impressive. I had to proceed cautiously. She was very dangerous. She would have been able to tell if I just shadowed her directly. Very dangerous."

"Oh my god, stop talking," Axton moaned. "This was easier when we couldn't talk. You have a thing for a werewolf hunter."

"I fucking do not," Dana said, bristling.

"This is the most pathetic day of my life," Axton informed Dana. "Could you give me more pain meds so I can pass out again?"

"Asshole," Dana said sulkily, but he got up to fiddle with the IV drip anyway.

Day slipped away and Dana did, too, leaving Axton alone in his room. The room, by this point, was nearly his entire life. How much time had he spent here--coherent time? By contrast, the time in the basement hardly counted. It had been longer, probably, but Axton hadn't been lucid enough to keep track. It would haunt him for a long while, nonetheless.

Being human again was unwelcome. It was even worse without Dana in the room: Axton hadn't been human since he had left Leander. His last vivid human sense memory was the press of his mouth against Leander's lips, and the muted scent of his skin buried under the sharp hospital air. The hair gel Axton liked to mock Leander for usually left a trace of lavender and black pepper clinging to his temples, even after filthy sweaty days hiking through the woods, but there--the scent had been nearly nonexistent, for all that he could pick up. The last important thing Axton had heard with human ears had been Leander's screaming all his rage and loss and crawling broken across the floor as Axton fled--

Axton made a conscious effort to pry his fingers apart. They were balled up in the sheets, clutching hard enough to bruise, maybe hard enough to bleed, if his nails hadn't been--

Neatly trimmed? Hm.

Well, that was great. How much time had he spent unconscious and at the mercy of his enemy? A lot, apparently.

There was no
reason
to stay human without Leander. Before Leander, Axton had mostly only gone human to keep up appearances and do general cabin upkeep. If you took away the need to show up in town on occasion, and if you took away the house and territory to care for--what use was this shape? He didn't need thumbs to hunt or howl at the moon. He didn't really need the verbal intelligence, either--it all translated to wordless logic and greater perceptive capabilities. Being human just made you restless and wordy and
lonely
. Better to run on four legs and forget what you were missing.