“It’s okay, Roy.” DJ squeezed his hands. “Just hang on, all right? You can’t go to sleep till medevac gets here. Don’t close your eyes.”
Roy nodded, his face tightening like even that tiny movement required a huge effort. “I felt better as a wolf. Should I change again?”
DJ thought about it, remembering Roy’s gigantic wolf sprawled panting on the sand, his thick white fur sodden with blood. “No. I don’t think it would help enough to be worth it. You can only shift while you’re conscious. If you turn into a wolf and then pass out, you won’t be able to change back.”
Roy actually managed to smile, which was more than DJ could do. “You could pester medevac into taking a wolf.”
“Where the fuck is medevac?” DJ muttered, scanning the sky for the millionth time. It was a perfect, cloudless, brilliant blue, and absolutely empty.
Roy followed his gaze. Softly, he said, “It’s a beautiful day.”
DJ bit his lip and concentrated on the sharp pain until the prickling in his eyes subsided. “Do you remember any of what I told you about being a werewolf?”
Roy seemed to try hard to recall. Finally, he said, “My scent name is Guinness.”
DJ surprised himself by laughing. Of all the useless, random things to stick in his mind! “Do you remember anything other than scent names?”
“They’re an important cultural tradition.”
DJ felt his eyebrows go up. “Now you’re just fucking with me.”
Roy didn’t smile again— he probably didn’t have the energy— but he admitted, “Yeah. That really is all I remember, though. Your scent name is Lechon. It means...” His voice trailed off, and he gave the smallest of shrugs.
DJ tried not to let his d
ismay show. Roy was drifting off again; he knew what lechon was.
“It’s Filipino roast pork,” DJ reminded him. “You had it last Christmas. Remember?”
Roy and nine other Marines who didn’t have relatives nearby had come over to spend Christmas with DJ’s family. While the guys sat around drinking beer and DJ’s parents oversaw the roasting of the hog, the little kids formed a posse and moved in on Roy.
Their appointed leader said in awestruck tones, “You’re so tall. Like a giant!”
“Only compared to DJ,” Roy had remarked.
But agreeing at all was his downfall; next thing Roy knew, he was running around and around the backyard while the kids took turns riding on his shoulders, yelling stuff like, “Giddy-up, Midnight!” and “Activate the mecha-laser, Death Falcon!” and “Run, Hagrid! We’re late for the Quidditch match!”
“Remember?” DJ repeated, when Roy didn’t reply. “Christmas in San Diego? Pig on a spit? Getting commandeered to play horsie by a gang of sugar-crazed five-year-olds?”
Roy made a non-committal noise that DJ interpreted as, “Not really, but I’ll say anything if it’ll make you shut up and let me sleep.”
“Okay!” DJ spoke loudly, before Roy could slip into unconsciousness. “I’ll tell you everything again. Pay attention now.”
“I am,” Roy said, not very convincingly.
For the fourth time, DJ began, “I’m a born wolf. My pack is my family. You’re a made wolf, and you need a pack. If you don’t remember anything else, you have to remember that. I’ll call my family and tell them I bit you and they need to adopt you into their pack, but you have to let them do it. If you don’t bond with a pack, you’ll lose your mind or commit suicide. You need a pack.”
“Can’t you be my pack?” As Roy spoke, DJ felt him instinctively reaching out with his latent pack sense, trying to create a bond.
Startled, DJ didn’t immediately raise his mental shields. There was no true bond yet, so the feelings he got from Roy were distant, something he understood rather than felt himself. He sensed Roy’s determination to hold on, the steely willpower that had kept him going this long, his trust in DJ, his fear of dying, and his relief that at least he wouldn’t die alone.
But most of what DJ perceived was physical sensation: an unbearable sense of drowning and a desperate hunger for air, tearing agony in his chest, overwhelming exhaustion and the near-irresistible desire to close his eyes and sleep, the coppery taste of the blood welling up into his mouth, and a bone-deep chill. And the one feeling that Roy clung to, the only one that wasn’t terrible and frightening, which was the warmth of DJ’s arms holding him.
DJ again bit down on his lip as he raised his shields, cutting Roy off. Roy flinched as if it had physically hurt him, though it couldn’t have. But Roy had to have sensed DJ, as DJ had sensed Roy, and it must have felt as if he was pushed away and locked out.
DJ was probably doing the right thing, but he felt incredibly guilty. Not to mention scared that it was actually the wrong thing, and frustrated and angry at himself that he couldn’t figure it out for sure. And that summed up this entire fucking nightmare of a deployment.
“I can’t now,” DJ said. “We’ll be in a pack together later.”