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I wanted him in motherfucking bits.
But vengeance would have to come after I’d offered triage to those left behind. The singed monkeys and charred beagles and every other critter that’d already survived so much.
Cal and I worked side by side with locals and staff.
The Indonesian people operated under the law of karma and they arrived in droves, pulling ashore in their fishing trawlers or hitching a ride on a sea vessel, coming to our aid thanks to the plume of smoke announcing war.
Their good deed today would help a good deed for them tomorrow.
None of us spoke, too disgusted and deadened by what we shovelled from the layers of toxic ash, recognising severed tails, paws, and fire-ravaged carcasses.
I’d thrown up when I’d come across a cow that’d only arrived two days ago. A roof beam had snapped, thanks to the bomb’s power, hurtling down to harpoon into the side of the animal. It’d been trapped against the wall as fire chewed its way up its legs and along its flanks.
Dead while standing, its eyes were still open, a snapshot of blistering agony as it’d burned alive.
I’d stumbled to the corner and expelled the dinner I’d shared with Eleanor. It’d splashed on my boots, coating me in yet more filth, blending with guts and viscera.
I hadn’t eaten meat in fuck knew how long, and the stench of animal flesh made me violently nauseous. My mind and heart shut down, unable to associate the butchered remains with the creatures I’d tried to give a better life.
It was my past all over again.
The lab experiments. The domestic violence. The brother who tormented his own sibling.
Fuck, the guilt.
It nibbled its way through my chest until it took a knife and fork to my heart and ate it piece by piece. I bled guilt. I sweated guilt. My head pounded with culpability and utmost shame.
I couldn’t look anyone in the eye, even as Cal patted me on the back and hissed in my ear that this wasn’t my fault. That I couldn’t have predicted that my brother would bypass my scouts on the sea and instead of coming after me go after the most vulnerable.
But I should have known.
It was fucking obvious.
It was his M.O.
I’d been such a stupid bastard not to see this coming. And I blamed myself, not just for this carnage, but for being too goddamn busy falling in love with Jinx to put parameters in place to prevent such a thing.
I’d been selfish.
I deserved this pain, but the rest of these poor victims did not. Their broken bodies and obliterated hearts were on my hands, no one else’s.
In this instance, Drake had been smarter than me. He’d never entered my waters. Instead, he’d flown over them in a chartered Tomahawk and dropped two unrefined and highly temperamental bombs on Serigala.
My pilots had already tracked the aircraft to a private airstrip in Java. I’d sent guards to interrogate and find where Drake was.
Had he flown to Indonesia to do this or had he sat in his goddamn La-Z-Boy in one of our parents’ mansions and pressed a button on a mass animal massacre?
Fuck!
My anger gave me strength to keep striding over bloody debris and horrendous homicide. My guilt wrapped me tight until any other thought or emotion was deleted.
Eleanor was not allowed inside my head or my heart.
Any remembrance of our afternoon yesterday just didn’t fit with this reminder of how death always found me. How the Grim Reaper used me to find its next chosen, picking those I cared about to exterminate.
She’s not safe around me…nothing is.
High noon passed in a fugue of humidity and stench. The afternoon faded into twilight as more ships arrived, helping carry animal refuse out to sea to feed the carnivores of the ocean. Better their remains were used to sustain marine life than bury it in fire-scorched dirt.
The piles of mangled buildings were combed over by locals, earning my permission to take whatever they could scrounge. If a window hadn’t blown into smithereens, best they could find a good purpose for it instead of me smashing it to pieces in my rage.
So many years of my life.
So much hope that I was doing a good thing saving those who’d been brutally treated at the hands of humans.
And look at what I’d done.
I’d killed them.
All over again.
As night fell, our group of blood-splattered and dirt-smeared workers managed to set up holding pens for those creatures now homeless. I flew in extra drugs and supplies, acting as an unqualified nurse to provide emergency veterinary care for those beyond a simple salve and bandage.
Two out of my four vets had survived.
Two lay under a shroud in the rubble.
Their families would be notified. Their widows and bereaved offered substantial compensation. Three locals who were in charge of cuddles and feeding had also been killed.
