The Trinity Sitch – Book 4: Heart of the Fury

Chapter 14: The Lioness

"What part of I am not doing that any more do you not understand?"

Drakken could have thought he never saw his wife this enraged before, but that would not have been the truth. In fact he had seen her his way many, many times, though it should be said that this was the first time since they had been married. That wasn't saying too much considering it had only been three months. What bothered him the most, beyond the fact Shego could do serious bodily harm even with her powers completely suppressed was that he knew she absolutely hated having her daughter see her like this and he had to admit he felt bad about that as well. Evil plans to take over the world or a self-centered desire to prevent others from doing so was one thing but something in him made him shun those thoughts when it came to 'his' little girl.

"Shego, dearest, beloved, sweetie, darling…" He could already tell he wasn't helping his case. She was angry and no pet names (he never quite got the fact she didn't like pet names) were going to help now. She had calmly ushered Amethyst to her room then picked him up by the front of his lab coat, slamming him against the wall of their home.

They had just come from the Pre-K center in Middleton, feeling fortunate that the three of them had been allowed to return to their home. The two remaining Global Justice agents were not officers and given the man they had assumed was their team leader turned out to be something else entirely they had no idea how to proceed. Technically Drakken had assaulted them, though in retrospect he had only shoved them out of the way to get to his daughter. They had been focused on what was going on inside and never realized he used something other than his hands to push them aside. They also never saw the little girl powered up so when the chips fell, all they had to go on was their standing orders that the Lipskys were to be left alone. There would be plenty of fallout over the agent Gryphen debacle to occupy them for some time to come.

Needless to say, Amethyst was not going back to that particular Pre-K tomorrow, or any time soon for that matter. Drakken's scar started twitching when he realized who Shego was likely to turn to now to begin the child's education.

The ride home was spent mostly drying Ammie's tears. She kept insisting that she didn't cry, but that was just a childish boast from an upset three-year-old who had just discovered something terribly frightening about herself. Despite himself, Drakken wanted to comfort the little girl as well, but in an unusual move, Shego had insisted he drive.

He was not about to mention the very expensive motorcycle that was left at the Pre-K, sitting on its side.

Once they were home Shego poured Ammie a tall glass of milk and calmly sat down at the kitchen table beside her and told him, in no uncertain terms, that he was now going to explain exactly what was going on.

So, he started with the point when he was freed from prison, by the very man who had just tried to take their child into custody. She listened to his story without comment. Her scowl started to deepen as he described his early attempts to decipher the book, her anger partly because managed to do this behind her back without her finding out about it and partly because she, like him, did not trust the occult, only hard science. Her eyes went wide when he got to the part about using the Trinity's computer to finish the translation.

In a slow, measured voice she asked, "How did you get on that ship?"

He hesitated for half a moment, seeing in her eyes that she already had guessed exactly how he had done it. Cringing, he told her, suspecting that he just might become the second person she had killed. Worse that that was the fact he suspected that at that moment his three-month marriage was at an end, utterly destroyed by a betrayal he then believed and still believed was absolutely necessary. Instead she sat there, listening to the rest of his tale, her eyes cold and emotionless, full of ice barely holding back flames of her fury. It was not until he got to the end, with his plans based upon what he had learned that she got up, picked her daughter up from the table, closed her in her room and grabbed him.

"You actually want me to help you steal a space ship just so you can check out a theory based on a book some old guy wrote two thousand years ago? Earth to Drakken! I am not stealing ANYTHING any more! And for that matter, just what the HELL did you think you were doing using Ammie to break into that ship? Do you have any idea what would happen if you were caught? They wouldn't just arrest you, they would come for me and do you know what would happen then? They would take her! They'd take her and even if I could escape and get her back somehow she would still spend her life on the run. I turned my back on everything I stood for because of her. You wanted the world and I did too until I found out she IS my world!"

Drakken was cowering now under her unbridled fury. He tried to protest but his words came out as a bare whimper. "But Shego, I love her too. I'm her Daddy."

"YOU ARE NOT HER DADDY AND YOU JUST PROVED IT!" She screamed in his face, her skin turning redder by the moment, then started shading slightly green as her powers started to flare. "So, Drew, is that why you married me? Is that the reason you claimed to love me? Is she just the key to your latest scheme?"

"Yes she is!" he barked, grabbing her wrists and tearing her hands away from his coat. "She's all part of my evil plan to create a perfect world in my image. She's they lynchpin of my latest whack scheme to take over all of the Earth just so I can hand it over to a power-hungry demon from another planet! Falling in love with you was just a bonus!" he spat the last out, his own rage broiling.

"Love, you don't know the first thing about love. You don't even know it when it's thrown in you face. You once had friends, but what did you do? They laugh at you and instead of laughing with them you turn it all inside you and run away from them as fast as you could go. You find out you have a lot in common with Stoppable and what do you do? You open up a bag of freak on him and his friends the moment the holidays were over. Our worst enemy suddenly turns around and helps us set up some semblance of a normal life and all you can do is make faces when I try to return the favor and at least act like a friend!"

"A friend? Shego, you hate Kim Possible and that crybaby husband of hers."

"Yeah, I did once, and what did that get me? It got me kicked into your Diablo Bot control tower, electrocuted, crushed under tons of metal. If it weren't for my powers I'd just be dead. Why, cause I hated her so much I had to keep pushing her buttons until she got pissed enough at me to try to kill me. Then when we snuck away all I could do was to think how much I wanted to get back at her. That ate me up inside until someone told me all I had done was to, for a moment, make her just like me and even that wasn't enough revenge because she still went on to bigger and better things. I was the only one getting hurt and then I realized if I had spent half the energy I did hating her being her friend my life would have been so much better!"

"If you had been that way you would have married that boy right out of high school, you would have stayed a hero and you would have had a bunch of children with him and I would have never met you." Drakken spat with a little more venom than he meant to.

"Yeah, I'd have never met you and I still would have had Ammie and Neil wouldn't be dead!" she shot back, both her eyes and nose running freely.

His own rage was building, fueled by the jealousy he felt for the dead man. "Don't blame me for the choices you made before I met you. I didn't even know he existed until a few years ago. You never once mentioned him."

"Because you never asked about my personal life. It was all you you you! It was, like, 'Shego, got steal this for me' or 'Shego, let's destroy Wisconsin' or 'Shego, it's Friday and you know what that means!' Did you ever even consider I might want to go out on a date of Fridays instead of listening to you massacre some Oh Boyz song?"

"You never said anything about it." He growled.

"No? Then I guess you don't understand 'Oh no! Please no! You weren't listening! You never listen! Everything about you is tunnel vision!"

"I never held a gun to your head. There's no way in the world I can force you to do anything, Shego. If you didn't want to go, you would have blasted me and walked out. Oh, wait, I forgot, that's what you did the last time I was taken to prison! When you get it in your mind you're leaving, that's what you do!"

"Oh yeah! Well I guess it's time I get my stuff and do that again! I'm sick of sitting around waiting for you to come up with some new crap that does nothing but lead us to ruin. I'm sick of you and your stupid whimpering. Go take over the world on your own, Drew Lipsky!" She turned her back on him and stomped toward the stairs.

"Don't turn your back on me." He growled, an unusual iciness in his voice.

She almost made it to the stairs when the sofa suddenly scraped across the floor, barring her path. She spun around, shock and fear in her eyes.

"I don't think you were listening to me too well. What I know now is not some theory." He held up his hand, green fire burning around it as though he suddenly possessed her powers. "I have been learning to use powers that I would not have imagined even a few years ago. My eyes have been opened to a great many things and you know what? I have the power now to take over the world and there is nothing any of them can do about it now! Have you noticed what I'm doing with that power?"

She glared at him, the menace in her expression fading, replaced with real fear.

"I have all these great cosmic powers, yet here I am in this itty-bitty living space. I tell you about these powers and all you can do is think I'm going to use it to terrorize the world. That's not why I was put on this path. I may be mad, but I'm not stupid. I don't pretend to know what Gryphion was doing by giving me that book, but I do know one thing, he was right, my job, my calling, my path is to protect you! Why? Because I love you, because I actually have been learning, because I now see something bigger than some silly notion that I can build some doomsday machine to ransom the world for power. You are so busy playing the lioness guarding her cub that you can't see that. Yes, I was selfish and boorish and a damned idiot and maybe I still am since I thought you finally, magically had come to love me, but now I see that all I am is the same fool in your eyes that I ever was."

He turned and waved his hand once more, the trap door to his workshop opening for him. With as much dignity as he could muster he walked down the stairs, closing the hatch behind him and pulling the sofa back with a gesture.

Sherry stood there, her eyes still watering. The green tint in her skin faded away as she stared at the sofa, now back in its proper place. She realized she was shaking slightly so she went to the kitchen table, sitting in the chair Ammie had been sitting in earlier. Her mind could not focus. What was she feeling? Of course she was right to be angry with him for using her daughter like that. What right did he have?

Was it the right she had given him when she agreed to marry him? Was it the right she had given him when she allowed her daughter to think of him as her father? She slumped in the chair and started muttering, not realizing she had slipped into barely remembered Hebrew.

She caught herself, halfway through the prayer. Why was she praying? She hadn't done that since her parents died, not since she was twelve. How could she pray when she had stopped believing in it a long, long time ago?

Then she realized what she was praying for. Her eyes went to a closed door across the living room. The other night she had sent Kim to occupy her daughter while she fought with Drakken. Now all that stood between her child and a screaming argument was a thin door, meant to simply cut off sight, not keep out words, especially when they came out at the top of her lungs.

She had screamed at him that he wasn't her father. Her heart started pounding. One day she knew she would have to tell Ammie about her real father, but not now, not as such a small child who needed a father figure in her life. As angry as she was with him, how could she do this to her?

Trying to build up her courage, she stood up. She focused on putting one foot in front of the other, willing herself to move across the room, her heart pounding harder and harder as she reached for the doorknob. With a deep breath she turned it.

Ammie was on her bed, a pillow covering her head, her tiny arms clutching a funny black and tan doll Kim had bought for her from a collector in Upperton.

"Honey?"

"Go away." She sobbed from under the pillow.

"Ammie."

"I said go away. You were mean to Daddy."

"Amethyst Nell Lipsky! I was not being mean."

"Yes you were. You said he wasn't my Daddy."

The words gripped her heart in ice. She had heard it, all of it. "Honey, I was angry with him. He did something very stupid."

"So if I do something stupid I'm not going to be your little girl? That's mean, you're mean!" She threw the pillow aside. Her face was puffed up and soaked with tears. Sherry rushed to the side of the bed, but her daughter just turned away from her. She gritted her teeth, trying to find the words.

"Ammie, your father loves you, he's just…"

"You said he's not."

She closed her eyes, wishing against all wishes she could take that back now. "Ammie, he is your Daddy. He was there the day you were born. He was the first person besides the doctor and me to hold you."

"But why…"

"Because I am mean. I've been a mean, nasty woman for a very, very long time and I said something so terribly stupid. I'm the one who's stupid and mean and now I've hurt you and him."

Amethyst threw her head down on another pillow, clutching the little doll, chewing on the tiny star stitched at its neck. Not knowing what else to say, Sherry just stroked her hair, gently taking the bands holding her pigtails up off so they wouldn't bind in her sleep. The little girl tried pulling away from her touch, but didn't try too hard. She was hurting, and that pain was hurting her mother as well and she didn't know what to do about that.

Softly, she started singing. There were no words, only soft sounds as she desperately tried to think of a proper song to sing to her. The only songs she really knew weren't for children. Hip-hop, rap, rock. She just mouthed toneless, shapeless words, trying to sooth her daughter.

She was halfway through the song before she realized she was singing the same Oh Boyz song Drakken always sung.

"Hello, Hello, Hello." She sang, her words clear now. She closed her eyes as she finished the chorus, biting her lower lip. Something Drew said earlier, something so unintentionally silly that it forced out a slightly choked laugh just played in her head.

A blue man with his hair pulled together with a tiny band, had just said 'great cosmic powers, itty-bitty living space. She tittered slightly, thinking of Drew as a Genie in a Lamp.

"Ammie, I've known Daddy for a long, long time. Yes, I was a bad, mean, terrible person and sometimes I did mean and nasty things to him."

"Why?"

"Because I was a nasty person."

"Aunt Kimmie told me you used to be a good girl before I was born. You weren't nasty."

She looked down at her daughter, silently thanking Princess for the tales she told the little girl. I hope Kimmie has girls some day she thought to herself. She kept lightly stroking her hair until she finally drifted off to sleep.

Silently she closed the door to Amethysts room, her eyes falling on the couch. Even without her powers active, she was still somewhat stronger than a normal woman her size. It took little effort to move the sofa, though it took her a bit since she didn't want to wake her daughter from her afternoon nap. The hatch opened with a simple tug. Drakken had either forgotten to latch it or didn't care.

It had never occurred to her to look under the sofa. She was not the cleanest 'housewife' in the world and if it wasn't in plain view, it didn't get swept or vacuumed. The very thought of herself wearing a pink, frilly apron, doing housework like some twenty first century June Cleaver still gave her the cold chills.

Drakken had his back to her, his cell phone pressed to his ear.

"…are you certain? Three degrees of phasic drift? No…are there any signs of other tampering? No…no…not since that lair was raided…no…I assure you, I made a promise I wouldn't do that again…yes, I do keep my promises to her…yes her! Keep me informed." He closed the phone, noticing her for the first time.

"What promises?" She asked, a little more coldly than she intended.

"If you must know, the promise I made to you that I wouldn't make any more clones."

"Then what were you just talking about."

He looked from side to side, obviously still angry with her. "That was Wade Load. It seems somebody has been making clones with the samples Global Justice stole from me when they raided my clone lab."

"Wait, you said you destroyed all those samples!" her anger started rising again.

"I destroyed all the samples I had of you. There were still others."

"Kimmie?"

"Yes, and the buf…him!"

"You mean there are clones of Kimmie and Stoppable running around?"

"Well, not any more, it seems Team Possible captured the clones. Load was just calling me to confirm some of the details, plus I'm sure he's checking up to see if I made them."

"Did…"

"No, Shego. I promised you and I meant it." He snarled at her.

"Drew, we need to talk."

"Why, so you can threaten me again, so you can ridicule me, mock everything I do?"

"No. I said some things…"

"She heard you, didn't she?"

"I…she…no…yes…"

"I see." He turned back to his work.

"Drew…"

"Yes, Shego…Sherry. We need to talk…about a great many things…but now isn't the time. Load told me something else."

"What?"

"It seems both Kimberly Anne and her husband have gone missing."

"Well, doesn't that make you happy?" She said, her old sarcasm slipping through.

"Normally, it would. Now, however, they are too important. You see, I have learned the identity of the demon I was telling you about, as well as why you are so important to Gryphion. Tell me, did you love that man…Amethyst's real father."

"What has that got…"

"Sherry, it has everything to do with it. Did you love him?"

"I…yes. Yes I did, but I only figured that out just moments before he died."

He nodded, accepting the fact she loved another man before him, if she even still did have any love left for him now.

"According to the Book of Arkon, he should have been what is called the Wisdom of the Effurien, or maybe Heart. I am still not totally clear on the proper translation of the term. Since he died before the full Trinity was assembled, the powers would pass to a soul that was joined with his."

"Soul? Joined? What are you talking about?"

"According to this, you are this Heart thingy…

"…and that is why we must find Kim Possi…whatever her name is now. According to my calculations, the Malendragma is on the move!"