Dark Fangs: Forbidden Fugitives

Chapter Twenty-One

Rain still drummed the earth, the trees, and the two quiet shapes who made their way through the jungle that evening. They travelled east, towards the warehouse, keeping the beach to their left and the muddied dirt road to their right. 

     I don't even remember fully where I was when this happened, reflected Drake crossly, because I was so panicked I forgot which way I was heading, and to what part of the road. Despite the chill of the night and the frigid pelting of the rain, Drake still felt fury burning like a scorching flame in his stomach. He clenched his jaw, angry enough to crush his own teeth. Coco trilled at him from his shoulder, pressing against Drake's cheek, as if to calm him. Drake relaxed his jaw, muttering a half-hearted apology to his bird for apparently scaring him. 

     "I'm sorry guys," he eventually added. "I'm just..." He trailed off, and decided not to finish his sentence. There was no point in it for him. 

     A whine from Swifty caught him off guard. Drake halted, pivoted, and saw his long-limbed, soaking-wet dog was not whining again with extreme concern, but rather interest in something in the road. Drake advanced towards it and stopped short when he perceived a massive, heavy track in the road. It was like a T-Rex's, but...far, far more colossal. He crouched, furrowing his brows in realization. 

     That's huge. Much bigger than the Indoraptor's tracks. Drake felt dread knotting in his stomach. He placed a hand once more on the hilt of his dagger. There isn't a dinosaur on this Island that could make that large of a print.

     Except...

     A quick flash of lightning and a booming echo of thunder made all three of them jump a mile. Swifty shook herself and snorted droplets from her nostrils, trembling with her sodden tail between her haunches, and Coco curled himself closer to Drake's neck, his small body vibrating with daunted tremors.

     Up the road a ways, Drake could make out a mess of tossed, tilled mud and shattered foliage, and realized this must be the area where Jae had fled the jaws of the Indoraptor, and perished under his brutal claws and fangs that evening. His heart shuddered and his throat tightened as he fought against tears that were, without warning, evoked from out of the wreckage that black-scaled hybrid had created.  

     Am I going to find her mutilated body up the road? Drake wondered feverishly. Will there be a trail of blood? Entrails? Bones? Limbs?  Sickness suddenly overtook Drake's stomach. He clamped his mouth shut, afraid the bile rising in his throat was going to release itself along with a brutally lengthy amount of tears from his cobalt eyes. Beside him though, Swifty pressed her long muzzle against his cheek and nudged her cold wet nose into his hood to lick his cheek. Drake stayed crouched on the ground while the rain showered down on him and Swifty, its reverberating pattern somewhat elegiac and dark. Drake draped one arm around Swifty, clasping her silky, soused black and white fur and cried into her shoulder for a long, tragic moment. 

     Rainfall barraged over the earth for a seemingly infinitely prolonged amount of time. The sky never lightened, only becoming darker and darker aspects of grey, and blue whenever lightning decided to flaunt itself to the entirety of the jungle bush. Every now and then, there'd be just a slice in the clouds that a beam of moonlight could reach through to pool in the greenery of the Island, but those breaks in the cloudburst were becoming fewer and fewer.

     Sooner than later, Drake stood again, his head muzzy with grief and his eyes blurred with the somber glaze of tears. Swifty wouldn't take her beautiful and immensely worrisome eyes off her human master, and her rain-soaked tail swayed anxiously at her heels, rain drops tricking off the feathery tip.

     "I'm sorry," Drake rasped tearfully, dusting himself off, and only succeeding at dampening his hands. "I shouldn't...I can't..." I shouldn't be this upset, Drake finished in his mind with a pang of heavy despondency. I shouldn't be crying...I'm going to avenge Jae. I can't be distracted by my grief this terribly--

     Something  wrenched in Drake's chest, and he realized it was his heart. He clutched a hand to his chest, breathing raggedly as a new wave of dolorous mourn caught him off guard.

     "Screeee," Coco cried, launching himself off Drake's shoulder and out of the protective shelter of Drake's dark grey hood. 

     Drake didn't even notice Coco fly off into the storm as he dropped to his knees again, a burning pain searing his stomach and a pounding in his skull eliciting tears once more. 

     Coco flew swiftly through the rain, his sharp wings slicing through the large crystalline raindrops. His glassy obsidian eyes scanned the muddied road, until he found a shred of muddied cloth. He tilted his wings back and beat them heavily, landing atop the slice of fabric with a graceful sweep of his gradually dampening feathers.

     Drake tried to hold down an eruption of emotion in his throat but that only made him feel sicker. He finally had it. He yank the hood off himself and threw his head back, ready to scream--

     Coco fluttered down over Drake's head casually, a muddied ribbon from a torn shirt in his beak. Drake's throat closed abruptly and he choked, focusing through tears on the Cockatiel. The small bird dropped and settled on Drake's knee, letting go of the colorless fragment in his jaws.

     "What...what is this?" Drake croaked, lifting it between his fingers. 

     His blood ran cold. 

     It was a tattered, mud-stained scrap from Jae's silky, storm-grey sweater.