Everything Carries Me to You (Axton and Leander Book 3) (7 page)

It was starting to feel like he couldn't hate Dana properly, either. Axton had internalized most of the failure and he was, deep down, convinced that this was all is fault, anyway. Dana was merely the vehicle for the inevitable doom. Anger and resentment Axton still had for him, in tidal waves rather than bushels, but it was... the trouble was that so much more was wrong. The world, Axton knew, the world wasn't a place he was meant to be happy. He was all wrong for it. He'd never really gotten the hang of living life how he was supposed to, always wanting the wrong things and caring too much or too little about what everyone else said was important.

Axton sighed, closed his eyes, and regretted ripping out the IV. Sedatives, maybe there had still been sedatives.

Maybe he should have let Dana stay, so that the anger and resentment filled his horizon, so he wouldn't have been able to feel anything else. There were so many things Axton didn't want to remember. The last time he had spent so much time in a sickbed had been--well, yeah, the last time he almost died. It had taken an avalanche, a knife to the chest, and being kicked off a cliff...he'd broken his spine so many times, then. It had taken so much to heal, and he'd been half starved and so heartsick, because it had been the man he loved wholly and helplessly who hurt him. But Leander hadn't known that the wolf he stabbed and punted off the mountain had been Axton, and arguably he hadn't known, either, that Axton loved him...

But he was smart. The ghost of a smile tugged at Axton's lips. Clueless straight guy or not, Leander must have suspected by then... Right before the avalanche, Axton remembered, they had stopped laughing and talking to just look at each other, so close that they could see questions reflected in the other's eyes, and Axton remembered, too, the sweet roiling torment in his guts. He'd been so sure Leander had been about to ask him something important, maybe even intimate...

Axton blinked and came back to the room. He felt a sting of despair and then nothing. Nothing. Another beat of nothing--

Ah, there. His jaw clenched against the involuntary threat of tears.

This was no time for happy memories.

But he was going to have to learn to live like this. This was his life now. He would have to live with the loss and learn how to breathe even as the absence of Leander constricted his heart. The lazy, sloppy embraces and the heated kisses and the careful way Leander would look at him and read his moods in no more time than it took to blink--gone, all gone, forever. That was the bargain Axton had made: a life for a life. His life for Leander's.

And there was no moving past there, was there? The rest of his many years were bound by that pact. Axton was no longer a free man, even if Dana set him loose to wander. He had given his word, and he had given it to keep Leander safe. Even though they'd never see each other again, Axton was tied to Leander forever. He could never forgot, even if he had wanted to--the weight of the promise was there; a shackle around his leg that restricted his roaming even if Axton could have rid himself of the rush of
feelings
Leander's very name evoked.

Not that he could.

Not that he wanted to.

I love you
, Axton thought or remembered and he couldn't tell if he was hearing Leander in his memory or if he was trying to send the thought across miles of highway and woods and--

I love you, I love you
.

Stupid, stupid human shape, with stupid, stupid vivid sense memories, and stupid,
stupid
capacities for useless things like--

His jaw ached and his head hurt and one or two tears started to leak down Axton's face.

He had not cried at all, numb from the shock of seeing Leander hurt at first, and then putting aside feelings to get his things together to leave. And then he'd gone to Dana and turned wolf immediately, and hadn't been human since...

Axton buried his face in the mattress, pulling a pillow over his head. His body was coiled taut and tense and he was shaking with the effort of not making a sound.

Nothing. He wanted to feel nothing. He just wanted to stop, he didn't want to--

The first sob wrenched itself free of Axton's chest, and it was the wettest, the loudest. Muffled by the mattress, shuddering like a dying horse, Axton sobbed. It was the wildly uneven gasping inhalations of air that gave him away. The other sounds that escaped were tiny frail strangled whimpering things, hardly there at all. But the inhalations--those were desperate wet gulps of air that Axton sucked in only to choke back out again in small painful bursts.

There hadn't been time to feel the loss, not fully. And now there was nothing but time. There would always be time, now, and he hadn't even been allowed to stay wolf and mourn easier.

Axton cried himself to sleep.

It was the smell of sausage and fried eggs that woke him up.

Axton cracked his eyes open slowly. The room was filled with buttery light and he could hear distant birds trilling, and somewhere there was breakfast. The air was clean and the sky was clear.

For the space of a few heartbeats, Axton tried to will his body to die.

No. Nope. Still alive.

There were no creaks, no pops from his joints as Axton pushed himself up, but he felt there should have been. Once he rocked into a sitting position, he looked around the room like it was his first time seeing it. In a way, it was. His eyes were bloodshot and puffy, things that his body could have healed in the night if he hadn't kept waking up to leak more misery onto his pillows. Yet despair made Axton no less graceful and he pushed up and away from the bed like a dancer floating off a stage, the sheet falling from his hips and fluttering to the floor. Muscle memory had returned in the night, like a lover slipping back in under the sheets, and Axton walked with his customary silent certainty. He wandered over to the closet, feeling the pull of an absurd fairy tale like logic, and once he pulled the door open he found almost his entire wardrobe there. How many things had Dana somehow stolen?

Axton pulled on some pants and left the room, moving slowly as if in water, or as if in a dream.

The smell of food tugged him gently to the kitchen.

"Morning, sugar," Dana said, holding a pan of eggs.

Axton blinked at him.

"Normally, I wouldn't," Dana went on, making a face at the breakfast food he was scraping out of the pan and onto a plate, "unless I was undercover. But since I'd like to see you stay human for a while, hunting's out of the question..."

Axton stared.

How was this his life? Dana had made him breakfast.
Dana
. Dana thought that wolves eating cooked food was tantamount to species betrayal. Axton remembered how he had felt a long time ago, how he had desperately wanted Dana to do stupid human things with him for the simple pleasure of doing them, and marveled at how you could get what you wanted the wrong way, at the wrong time, and that made it terrible.

Dana handed him a plate of food.

Axton looked at the food, looked back up at Dana, and then stared into space for a moment.

Well.

He sat down.

Dana slid another plate of food down the table and took a seat across from Axton.

"So," he said. "You gonna talk? You were chatty yesterday."

Axton picked up his fork.

"There is no pack," he said, brow furrowing.

Dana raised an eyebrow as he was putting eggs in his mouth.

"Excuse me, sweetheart?"

"You. You're working alone," Axton said. "You have to be. You were lying when you said there were others."

Dana snorted and tipped his chair back.

"Why, just 'cause we out in the woods by our lonesome?" he asked. "Nah. There's a pack. I'm just not taking you there until I know you'll behave."

"Until I'm broken in?" Axton asked sharply.

Dana shrugged his hulking shoulders.

"Call it what you want, Ax. I'm just trying to make it easy for you."

"Yeah,
easy
," Axton muttered, spearing some eggs with his fork. "I agreed to reconditioning camp, not being locked up in your fucking basement."

"Still mad about it, I see," Dana observed. "I'm surprised that you picked that one to complain about first and not your beau."

"I don't want to talk about him with you," Axton said blankly. "Not with you."

"How long is it gonna take, Ax?" Dana drawled, and Axton was going to respond until Dana added, "How long until your boy gets with that sweet little lady that follows him around everywhere?"

Axton's breath caught in his throat and he dropped his fork.

"Oooh, found a sore spot, didn't I?" Dana cooed. He grinned. "You know it's just a matter of time, right?"

"I want him to be happy," Axton said, voice strained.

"Aw, bullshit," Dana said. "You want him moping and crying his eyes out for you."

"No," Axton said, pushing his plate away. "It's fresh. It hurts. But I want him to be happy, all the same."

Dana crossed his big arms over his chest and cocked his head to the side, looking Axton up and down.

"You're a good man, Ax," Dana said. "All the right feelings, but in all the wrong places."

"Wouldn't be the first time," Axton muttered. "Wouldn't be the first time."

Downstream, a majestic buck sniffed the air.

Partially hidden in some undergrowth, Axton shifted his weight onto his toes and stayed crouched down.

"This is stupid," he muttered.

"Quiet," Dana said, hoisting his rifle, lining up the shot.

"I thought hunting was out of the question," Axton went on.

"And after two days of grocery store food, I'm sick of it," Dana hissed. "Now ain't the time to object. That was before."

"The full, I don't know, the full
anything
of it didn't hit me until now," Axton said. "This is ridiculous. We're werewolves. This is
obscene
. This--fuck it."

Axton stood up and glared at the buck, who immediately bolted out of the stream and into the tree cover.

Dana clicked the safety back on and tossed his rifle on the ground as he got up.

"You little shit," he spat, shoving Axton's shoulders. "Seriously? That's how you're gonna be?"

"Just let me change out!" Axton yelled. "Just let me turn! We can hunt that way!"

"You won't change back if you do that!" Dana shouted. "Just you, wolf, forever, losing your words and your voice and even the voice in your own head, getting feral and mad 'til you--"

"I'll change back," Axton insisted, as if they hadn't already had this fight a half dozen times already. "We'll hunt, we'll eat, and we'll change back."

"You're a lying son of a bitch," Dana said, scooping up his rifle again. "No, bud."

"Please," Axton blurted. "Dana,
please
."

Dana froze. The
please
was new--Axton hadn't tried that before. Axton had yelled, cursed, bargained. Axton hadn't--

Axton was breathing hard and he crouched down, on hands and knees, eyes on Dana's face the whole time.

"Please," he muttered again, forcing the eye contact.

Dana visibly wavered--he propped his rifle up against a tree, looked at Axton and then away, then back at Axton. Dana scratched his chin and shifted his weight from foot to foot uncomfortably.

"No," he said, but it had less weight.

"I swear to god, I'll let you empty out that whole magazine of bullets into my body," Axton breathed, "if I don't change back. But I won't run. I'll stay here, right with you. I'm not gonna bolt. You can find the deer and I'll bag it for you if you want. Please."

"Whole mag won't really kill you," Dana said.

"Depends what you hit," Axton said. "Remember what you learned last time you tried to kill me."

Dana looked up at the trees. Dana looked down at his boots.

"Please," Axton said in a tiny, pleading voice. "Dana, please."

"Don't take advantage," Dana said abruptly, wiping a rough hand across his face. "All right. But know I'm faster and stronger and I'll catch you any damn day of the week, son. Do it."

Axton didn't blink, but his body seemed to ripple in place. The gold eyes on Dana were in a human face one instant and in a wolf face the next, but Axton didn't look away even for a second.

"And don't you talk to me again in that voice of yours, neither," Dana muttered, slinging the rifle across his back. "Don't you dare."

Axton cocked his head uncertainly.

"You know what I mean," Dana said. "Now. Find a deer."

Axton killed silence soft and whisper swift. His paws made no sound as he crouched in the dirt, and his gleaming white teeth struck true when he leapt in the air at the buck's throat. The death was quick, and the buck had little time to suffer. Axton bowed his head to the kill and stood over it, head down, shoulders hunched.

He did not run.

The days fell into a predictable pattern: human, human, human, night, wolf. The wait for dusk was agonizing. Axton wanted no part with his human body or his human feelings. There was no privacy, either. Dana didn't stand over him all day, but Axton knew that if Dana was wolfed, he'd be able to hear just about everything that went on in the house. Of course, Dana wasn't going wolf much these days--there was at least something fair about extending there
no turning until dark
rule to himself. Axton suspected that Dana meant to lead by example, and he had to bite back a bitter laugh each time he thought of it.

So Axton paced in his room, and he knew the word for caged animals that did the same at the zoo:
stereotypy
. The exact dimensions of his cage were unknown to him, potentially expanding past his room, to the hall, past the house, into the woods--but Axton knew his cage ended before Leander's started, and that was the only boundary that mattered. Longing for Leander lived in Axton's chest, throbbing both dull and sharp in the exact spot Axton had been stabbed, near his heart. There was no scar on his skin, and Axton ached for one. He wanted memories of his lover scrimshawed onto his skin. His unblemished body felt like a blank canvas, as if his history had been removed, erased, wiped clean. The healing of his werewolf's body felt like a betrayal.