Everything Carries Me to You (Axton and Leander Book 3) (9 page)

There were animal studies, too, and Axton found himself drawing caribou and deer and moose most often. The focal point all of the pictures was the featured animal's neck and shoulders. Axton recognized the spot uneasily--it was where he would sink in his teeth to land the kill nine times out of ten. The occasional hunting trip wasn't enough to satisfy the predator that lurked in his bones, and Axton knew it.

As a rule, Axton did not draw the human figure. It occurred to him that if he was going to try his hand at portraiture, he should do it now, while his memory was still sharp...

Axton blinked and dropped his pencil. How long had he been staring into space for?

"What?" he said, looking up.

Dana leaned in the doorway.

"I said hey," Dana answered. "That's all."

Axton looked back down at his desk. He pushed his pencil around aimlessly.

"Hey," he said eventually. There was nothing else to do. He snapped his sketchpad shut.

"I just wanted to see what you..." Dana trailed off, then canted his head to the side and crossed his arms over his chest. "I just wanted to see you," he said instead.

Axton looked down at his desk some more.

"I know," he said.

"I know you know," Dana said. "That's why I said it that way."

Axton got up from desk and rubbed at his face distractedly while he wandered a few paces away.

"Dana," he said finally. "What do you want?"

"Why you gotta keep asking?" Dana asked, cocking an eyebrow up. "You thinking of delivering?"

"Goddamnit, Dana," Axton muttered. "This fucking sucks. Even if I play by your rules I don't want us to be prisoner and jailer forever."

"Not forever," Dana said, tilting his head. "Just 'til you settle down. Then I take you to my pack."

"And then what?" Axton asked, throwing his hands up.

"Then we'll see," Dana said, "how you do, how you integrate back into a pack of wolves."

"You're not a wildlife rehab center," Axton muttered, rubbing at his temples. "Jesus."

"Spare me, sweetheart," Dana drawled. "You might wanna have the same conversation over and over, but it's getting pretty tedious from where I'm standing."

"What do you want?" Axton asked more sharply. "Not what are you trying to accomplish. Not what you think is right. But what do you
want
?"

Dana regarded him quietly for some time before answering gently.

"It ain't that complicated, sugar."

"But it is, Dana."

"I want nothing of yours that you don't wanna give."

"But you
do
--"

"What I'd
like
between you and me is separate from what I been
asking
you for," Dana said. "On behalf of our entire kind."

"'Asking,'" Axton echoed dubiously.

"I did what I had to do," Dana said, uncrossing and then re-crossing his arms over his chest, "to bring you home, to keep you from forgetting everything you could be. Everything you are. I kept you safe, more ways than you know. I had to."

Axton pressed the heel of his hand into the center of his chest and looked away.

"I don't want to talk about that," he said evenly. And he didn't. He really didn't want to talk about leaving Leander. Not with Dana.

"Then we won't," Dana said. "So ask what you want. Ask what you mean."

"What would it take?" Axton pressed, looking up. "What do you want from
me
? From
me
. And not for werewolf kind. For yourself. You and me."

"This here living arrangement ain't about what I
want
," Dana said. "Sug. You have
got
to stop taking it so personal."

"But you would have it be personal," Axton said, throwing an angry glance at Dana like a burning dart, "if you could. Admit it."

Dana spread out his hands.

"If you want to be all offended that I still think you're a good looking son of a bitch, you go right on ahead," Dana said. "You got a lot of people in the world to be pissed at, then, if that bothers you. But this isn't about that."

"You expect me to believe that our history together doesn't have anything to do with me being here?" Axton asked sharply, shoulders up at a predatory angle. "Fucking really?"

"Yeah, fucking really," Dana said, leaning back against the wall, unconcerned with Axton's body language. "Sure, I got a soft spot for you. But I did my duty anyway. I didn't break your boy's legs outta jealousy. This isn't a 'you'll be mine or you'll be nobody's.' This is about your potential. You have a responsibility to your people to become the best version of yourself, and you're not gonna do that while you're doing unnatural shit to some human's dick."

"There are some--" Axton had been pacing and now he looked over his shoulder and bared his teeth, seething. "There are
many
of our people who would never follow me on a hunt because they think that what I've done to
your
dick is unnatural."

"Eeh," Dana said, shrugging. But he looked away, gaze going out the window instead of towards Axton.

"That's all you have to say to me about it?" Axton demanded. "Not even a fucking word while you shrug?"

"It's not an
ideal
quality in a leader," Dana said. "But as long as you start a family and don't flaunt it--"

Dana was cut off by Axton's forearm shoved against his throat as Axton slammed him against the wall.

Axton's snarl wasn't a sound that could be produced by a human throat. It was loud, then trailed low, a threat lurking at the edge of the shadows, a gun within arm's reach during a confrontation. His teeth were on display and he was inches away from Dana's face. He dug the blade of his forearm in, cutting off most of Dana's air.

"There's one thing I know for sure and even though it took me too long to learn, you can never make me forget," Axton hissed.

Dana tilted his head, and his eyes were flat and calm and blue as a rippleless sea even as they asked the question.

"
We are not wrong
," Axton growled. He shoved Dana into the wall harder for emphasis. "We are
not
wrong to want what we want. There is nothing wrong with
me,
and the fact that a good cock gets you hard isn't what's wrong with
you
."

Axton let him go abruptly and whirled away.

Dana coughed, trying to hold it in but hacking anyway, doubling over and trying to breathe.

"Ain't like that," he wheezed.

"Ain't like what?" Axton asked, copying the cadence as he had his back to Dana with his gaze out the window. He was breathing hard, too, because he was still furious.

"I don't need it like you do," Dana said quietly, looking up.

Axton smiled suddenly. There was no humor in it.

"Oh, Dana," he said, with terrible softness. "Really?"

"Really," Dana fired back as he straightened up, shoulders squared for a fight.

Axton smiled again, eyes downcast now. His long lashes cast shadows down his face. Dana could see the reflection of it in the window.

"Okay," Axton said simply.

Dana grabbed him by the shoulder and forcibly turned him around. Axton didn't resist.

"Don't you fucking talk down to me," Dana hissed. Everything about him threatened violence--his furrowed brow, the crushing grip he had on Axton's shoulder, the tension in all of his muscles. And yet Axton's body stayed relaxed, and his eyes were gentle.

"Hitting me won't make you feel better," Axton said. "I'm not gonna fight you. Not right now."

"Why the fuck not?" Dana growled.

"Because I can't hurt you," Axton said, "more than you can hurt yourself."

That earned him a right cross to the mouth, and then Dana stalked out of the room as Axton staggered back from the blow.

Alone now, Axton shook his head and recovered his balance. He brought his fingers to his ruined mouth and touched the blood that was staining his teeth.

Mmm. It had been a good hit.

But it was the kind of injury that healed easy.

Closeness, Axton suddenly understood, was closeness, whether it was fucking or fighting. And Dana would take whichever he could get from him, because in his own way, Dana was terribly fucking lonely, as least as lonely as Axton had felt when he'd been alone in his cabin for years.

Axton laughed and it took him a moment to realize that the sound in the room was coming from his mouth. It was less of a full hearty laugh and more of a disbelieving, half alive and kind of dead laugh--Axton pressed his back against the wall and then slid down to the ground, still wheezing out his unexpected mirth.

"Dana," he said to the empty room. He took a deep breath and let his head fall back, grinning now. "I should've known." Maybe he had always known. Maybe he'd always known, deep down, by how they had fought
around
the idea and never voiced it. Oh, he'd told himself they were fighting over labels--just semantics--semantics he cared about, but semantics nonetheless. How adorably naive of him.

"Oh my god," Axton marveled, massaging his face, "I didn't think I could feel bad for you."

But oh did, oh, he did, and wasn't life a funny thing after all?

Fucking hilarious
, Axton thought.

When Axton went out to hunt the next night, he ran harder than he had to, hurtling over rocks and undergrowth heedless of what his paws felt. He chased too long, and the healthy buck he'd picked was crashing through the woods with graceless desperation, flanks heaving so fast it hurt to watch, whites of his eyes showing.

And still Axton wanted the bastard to run. Axton wanted to run forever and he wanted something to chase--

With an unlikely howl, Axton jumped through the air and sunk his teeth into the buck's wildly pounding jugular. He bit bigger than he needed to, sloppier and messier. Usually Axton was death on swift and silent wings, but he ripped through the buck and shred flesh with his teeth and thrashed his head around like he was shaking a smaller animal to death.

The buck was dead.

In absolute terms, perhaps, his death hadn't taken that much longer than usual.

But afterwards Axton curled next to the buck's ruined body, and hid his face with his tail. He stayed there with the buck, quiet at his vigil until the cold light of dawn touched them, and he was haunted by his lack of mercy.

Axton lived off of the scraps in the pantry and fridge for a couple of days.

One afternoon Axton was so absorbed in doing dishes while squinting his eyes against the light that came through the window in front of his face that he didn't hear Dana walk into the room.

"So," Dana said, and he only smiled a little when Axton jumped.

"Jesus fuck," Axton said by way of salutation, and then he turned his back to Dana again so that he could look out the window some more.

"Hello to you too, beautiful," Dana said with mock cheer and an exaggerated kiss to the air.

"Fuck off, Dana," Axton muttered.

"I'll leave in a minute," Dana said, "but I'm just checking in with you."

"What?" Axton sighed, keeping his hands busy, gaze still out the window.

"I found your last kill," Dana said.

Axton's shoulders stiffened and then he stilled.

"I buried him," Axton said.

"Pretty ceremoniously," Dana agreed, "but there was so much blood in the dirt, spread so wide. The smell was--well." Dana crossed one foot over his ankle and watched carefully. "You usually kill so elegant, Axton."

The water ran over Axton's motionless fingers.

"Yeah," he said tonelessly.

"Almost eerily, respectfully so," Dana went on.

It nagged at Axton's consciousness that he was wasting water, and he really should turn the faucet off. It was better to think about water.

"So I'm just wondering," Dana went on, "why you, of all wolves, would slaughter something like an excited amateur and leave it to rot."

Axton stared hard at the faucet. Yes. He could move his frozen hand, and reach out, and turn off the water. He could do that.

"You didn't even eat it," Dana finished. Behind Axton's back, his eyes were gleaming.

Axton reached out and turned off the water.

There.

He turned around slowly.

"How do you know?" he asked, "that I didn't eat?"

"I unburied it," Dana said simply.

Axton felt one of his eyes twitch. He said nothing.

"Mmm," Dana said, watching Axton intently. "That bothers you."

"Yes," Axton said clearly.

"Ax," Dana said slowly. "They're
food
. You might as well have taken one bite out of a cheeseburger and then given it a proper burial."

"Just because they're food doesn't mean we should
hurt
them," Axton burst out. "We should hurt them only as much as we need to and we should kill them fast and clean because we fucking
can
. That's the burden of being on the upper end of the sentience spectrum. That's the responsibility."

"Lord above, remind me how I ever thought we could go join some random wolf pack together," Dana said, throwing his hands up and rolling his eyes skyward. "And not immediately get kicked out over this kind of bleeding heart bullshit."

"I don't really fucking know," Axton said. "I always said that was a shitty plan."
You fucking savage piece of shit
, he added silently. But that wasn't entirely fair--Dana wasn't cruel in his kills. He was efficient. Just that was it--Dana was efficient. Axton was elegant; he'd heard it more than once from more than one person. What drove Dana's method was the desire to kill in as few moves as possible. Wolves in the wild were efficient. But what dictated most of Axton's kills was a concern with inflicting the least painful damage possible in the shortest amount of time, even if it required more maneuvering. Axton killed quickly.

Mercy was a word for it, probably. Maybe.

"Look," Dana said, "I'm going to go out back later, and I'm going to light up a fire pit once it gets dark, and we are going to drink and get trashed and talk about the future."