Everything Carries Me to You (Axton and Leander Book 3) (2 page)

Axton did not fear for his life. He turned that feeling--that absence of fear--around in his head. Was it that he didn't expect Dana to kill him, or was it that he felt ready to die?

Both, Axton decided, and he tried to stir some life back into his legs. He was curled up tight, paws tucked all together and under his body. His weight was distributed wrong, and he knew that some instinct deep within him found the darkness uneasy. It wasn't the human terror of sudden sight deprivation, but the uncomfortable wolfish awareness that he was below ground but in something too big to be a den. Something smaller would have been cozy.

But Dana knew that.

How much time had passed? Axton had no idea. Under the best of circumstances he lacked a precise internal clock, calibrating to sunrise and sunset and the shift of seasons rather than estimating seconds and minutes. He felt a little light headed with hunger, just enough to feel a little mentally fuzzy. That was not so bad, not yet.

He blinked, just to prove he could. Nothing changed.

The general trauma of being initially tossed into a basement had worn off very quickly. It had helped, even, to let that overwhelm him, because it was a change from the guilt and failure that threatened to consume him. It helped, too, to have resigned himself to whatever was going to happen. Really, the worst thing about being locked up was the creeping dread of how
wearying
everything was going to be, how
long
everything was going to take. Dana didn't intend to move quickly.

Axton let himself feel the cold concrete floor; he let himself smell the damp scent of earth.

Dana didn't intend to move quickly.

In the numbness of Axton's heart, a desire grew. Perhaps desire was too strong a word--but there was a small twitch in his soul.

Axton would hurry things along.

There was no change in the darkness, but--it had to be a new day. Maybe several days? Maybe the waking and sleeping of his body was still somehow tied to the sun even if he couldn't feel it--

No.

Axton knew he was spending too much time unconscious for that to be the case.

Axton woke; Axton slept. Axton stood and carefully pressed his shoulder to the wall and walked slowly until he found a corner, and another. He stopped, then, because mapping the boundaries of his prison was tiring and more disheartening than he had expected. The darkness robbed him of his will to go on, and he hadn't begun his imprisonment with much will to speak of. Axton felt more and more of his already anemic desire to live leech out into the darkness. He wanted to sleep again, just to pass the time, just to escape the horrible monotony that was the lack of stimulus. But what if he got turned around in his sleep? Then he would never know the exact confines of his prison. Part of him hoped that there would be
something
to find--nothing so miraculous as a latch or a door or an escape, but at least an interesting scent that gave him some clue about the room's former inhabitants. Maybe some old rat droppings.
Anything
.

Either the oversleeping or the darkness was giving him a continuous dull headache.

And the thirst.

There was that now, too.

Time to go on.

Axton forced himself to keep going, cautiously and patiently. After all--he had the time. It was difficult to judge distance or dimension even as he was touching it, but at least now he knew, really knew, that the room did not extend forever as some part of him feared. His nose was the only useful sense organ left; he knew he had traversed the room when he pressed his nose to the concrete wall and smelled his own scent, battle weary and stale and tired.

Ah, then.

Nothing to find.

Axton lay his head down on his paws and closed his eyes.

What woke him most often now was the thirst. The nothingness of the room, the maddening darkness, the hopelessness of his predicament, and even his failure to protect his lover and his grief at their separation--gradually, he felt those less and less, until he felt none of it. The thirst was eating him from inside out, a parched and burning wasp burrowing through him and bursting free. He was only a shell that held thirst. The world was no longer empty of stimulus, but saturated with one beyond comprehension.

It was hard to think, to get past the distraction and pain of it.

Maybe Dana intended to kill him after all. Maybe Dana himself had met with some misfortune, some accident. Maybe Axton would die here.

Maybe eventually he'd pass out again and not feel so thirsty.

Small mercies.

When light finally pierced the darkness, it stabbed right through Axton's eyes and into his brain. It wasn't even very much light--it was dusk, and cloudy besides--but after the eternity of nothingness, it was wounding. There wasn't even any relief in having a break from the tedium. There was only pain.

Dana stood silhouetted at the top of the stairs, shoulders huge and foreboding, posture predatory. Even in his wolf body, he took up so much space.

In a corner of a basement, Axton squeezed his eyes shut and backed into the wall. Everything hurt.

Dana moved slightly and there was a dull thudding sound that made Axton look, squinting his eyes against the feeble light. His eyes were still not very useful, and it was his nose that made him say: ah.

It was food--some hindquarter that had been ripped off a buck.

Dana turned human, glared down the stairs, and closed the doors.

Axton left the meat on the stairs.

The exciting thing was that Dana had unwittingly given him a timer. Axton was well accustomed to the nuances in the scent of decay, the rate at which the microorganisms in meat changed the smell and taste and texture. Now he would be able to confirm that yes, time was actually passing. The world spun on even if he felt nonexistent.

The thirst did not abate, however.

Now, the basement had a limited palette of smells. There was the rapidly deteriorating meat in the corner, and the space where Axton had initially hunkered down when he'd first been trapped--it still smelled like sadness, from something in his limbic system going into overdrive to produce secretions that said
grief pain grief.
There was the farthest corner from the one by the stairs that Axton inhabited, which was the one he'd chosen to piss in. The smell was not pleasant, but it was as far away from him as it could get. These scents all colored the room in a sort of smoky hazy of eventual death. Decay was the base note to despair's perfume and everything else was just thinly layered over it.

It had become easy to sleep--or to experience a lack of awareness that was something like sleep--despite the thirst. Axton could feel his werewolf physicality, how every cell of his being craved food and water, and how his body was working tirelessly to heal up his slow deterioration. This in turn consumed energy, and he felt thirstier.

There were moments when the meat tempted him, but he held out long enough so that when he eventually weakened and wanted it, he felt too exhausted to climb up the stairs to get to it.

Axton had faded enough that he no longer had words, exactly, so he didn't think,
good
. But there was a soft, vicious satisfaction that washed through him, nonetheless.

Soon nothing would be able to hurt him, Axton realized, soon. It also did not come to him in words, but in the shadow of the feeling he'd always had when he was almost up to the top of the mountain, or when dawn was ready to break. The word was not
soon
, but the feeling was
anticipation
.

It was too long, but he sighed in relief anyway.

Small mercies.

His dreams became stranger and yet somehow thinner, more ethereal and disjointed. Sometimes he dreamed of Leander, their mouths crushed together. It was confusing even in the dream--Axton had a muzzle and a tongue that didn't work that way, and had things ever been different? They must have been, but the dreams left him more tired than even shuffling around the room. Eventually he stopped moving altogether.

Soon.

In time he lost Leander's name, but not before he lost his own.

There was the memory of his face, though, and his scent. Sound was hard and even when the man in his dreams moved his mouth, Axton did not always understand. Sometimes Axton wondered fleetingly what he was doing down here all alone, when somewhere out there was a person who made him feel like--

Then the thirst would awaken him, and Axton would maybe crack one eye open or maybe not, and then he would remember where he was and most of why.

Eventually there wasn't even hatred for his jailer left. There was only: this is how it is. And then: this is how it will be.

Soon.

It was just--he felt so
cold
, even with the burning in his throat.

Spinning. Nausea. Pain, briefly--but distantly. Darkness--no, not darkness. Eyes shut. Pain, less distant. Moving--
how why
Axton thought without words. He was lurching back and forth and--

Carried, he was being carried. Barely conscious. Familiar scent. No emotion tied to the scent any more. Sleep, he wanted to sleep, he wanted to be left alone. Wakefulness hurt. If he could just shut his eyes a little longer--if he could just not wake up--

Up, were they going up?

"Don't you dare fucking die on me," Dana snarled, but Axton did not understand. Axton did not know, either, how light he was in Dana's arms, how small he seemed, crushed to Dana's chest. His elbows, always sharp, seemed about to burst from his skin, and his fur was dull and matted as his flesh clung to his bones. It was more like carrying a bird than a wolf, and Dana was--

There was another scent, there, strong. It gave Axton a headache--he did not know the name for what that smell was. He did not know why he was being carried, or where, and--he knew that he knew the one that was carrying him, but that was all. No name for him either. No true association. Axton was past the point of making judgments. But Dana--

Dana was afraid. Axton could smell it, if not know it, and later and forever his memory of getting out of the basement would be like being on a lurching storm wrecked ship, barely holding back water, buffeted by currents and wind--but instead of the smell of salt, the tang of sea, the scent that the memory carried was fear. Axton would remember it later. Axton would remember it always, the ocean of fear.

Nameless, Axton swooned in Dana's arms and knew merciful darkness once more.

Flare of pain. Flash of wakefulness. Axton twitched. So much light. Too weak to run.

"Hold fucking still," Dana growled, inserting an IV into Axton's flesh. The words still meant nothing and the tone didn't mean much more, but Dana held Axton down and that, at least, conveyed the message.

The needle hurt. Axton could feel it just under his skin. He wanted to nose it, to lick this tiny new wound, but he knew that the one holding him down would stop him, and it would take too much energy to oppose him. Too much.

"I can't believe you went on fucking hunger strike," Dana muttered. "And you got stuck like that, didn't you? You probably can't understand a single goddamn word that's coming out of my mouth right now."

Axton had his eyes closed again, and all he knew was that everything hurt.

Dana eyed him carefully.

"Fucking faggot," he said experimentally.

Nothing.

"I bet your boyfriend's forgotten all about you," Dana tried again.

Axton was busy noticing the thirst again. It was a shame. He'd stopped feeling it for so long. He did not need words for the vague feeling of disappointment to wash through him. It would be better to not feel the thirst. It would be better to not feel anything. He'd been so
close
.

"Cats are an ecological threat and should all be eliminated," Dana said, "and hunting licenses should be greatly expanded."

Weakly, Axton's tongue darted out of his mouth to lick the IV site.

"Stop that," Dana said, annoyed, and he pushed Axton's head back. He studied Axton's face carefully for any sign of recognition. "You really
did
go feral," he said quietly. "You're gone. Part of you is just--gone. No words left. Just instincts."

Dana rested a suddenly gentle hand against Axton's newly protruding ribs.

"I didn't know," he said softly. "I wasn't gone for that long. I thought you'd eat. I thought--"

He trailed off, and in the resulting silence Axton heaved a deep breath and then slept again, lightly, not fully, ears stirring slightly at any sound. Dana trailed his fingers through the dry black fur for a while, looking at nothing in particular. It was a long time before he spoke, eyes unfocused.

"I wonder if I'll ever get you back."

Cold. Axton woke up to something cold pressing against his snout, and he did not like it.

Crippling thirst. No strength to struggle. A hand over his nose, now, blocking air. It would be better to not breathe. It would be better to just--
not
. Not anything. Silence. Void.
Rest
. Here there was only pain. Without words there were only sensations and memories, and even in memories, grief gripped Axton's heart. Mouth shut. Lie still. It can all be over
soon
--

Axton's jaw dropped open and he breathed through his mouth, sighing soft and defeated.

Dana slipped an ice chip into his mouth, and rubbed his throat until Axton swallowed. He followed with another, and then another, always making sure Axton swallowed.

"This is like pilling a cat," Dana said sourly. "A really stubborn,
stupid
cat."

Axton lapped at the ice cube that was held up in front of him.