Ch 13 Consequences

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:::content warning – Violence, death, suicide attempt:::

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Trinity's inner shadow shrieked within her, "My beast!" Destroying the last of Malak's dark chains binding their souls, she inhaled as great bat wings spread from her back while clawed hands reach the upward in a moment of evolution, then the pale gargoyle demoness leaped off her pillar to fly after her wolf's soul. In the mortal realm, keening, Trinity rocked Coen as her soul was tearing apart. Her wolf tried to follow her mate but her evolved demoness kept her wolf with them, hissing, 'Vengeance, my sister, we are one in vengeance!' Trinity felt the pieces of her soul collide with her body like a sledgehammer striking her chest over her heart.

Trinity staggered as she took two shaky steps away from Coen's corpse. She looked at her mate's blood dripping off her shaking hands and then sucked it off her fingers. Dropping to her knees, she shrieked inhumanly as her body began to glow and grow, stretching her leggings and top, and tearing them apart as she evolved physically. Sensing the shift in her soul through the bond she shared with his brother, Callen stood, growing to his warform, and ready to die to protect her while she changed. Coen's last gift to his brother doubled his power as an alpha.

His second stood to the side warily watching Trinity change into something unlike any walker or hybrid. "Master, we must flee," he begged, worriedly stepping between his master and the two teens, knowing they were about to attack again.

Lord Malak struggled to stand. "No, the Daughter of Darkstone will be mine!" His flesh as torn as the dead werewolf's. The blood pooled around his feet was his own this time. He never faced an enemy so willing to suffer to overcome him.

Great white wings unfolded, and a female gargoyle rose. Her eyes shining like the full moon. "It is time, my brother." She stepped forward and touched his shoulder.

Callen howled a challenge as they lunged at the two Shadow walkers. Callen's jaws clamped down on the assassin's head and it popped like a melon before the enemy could shimmer away to safety. Trinity jumped on Malak with her talons sinking into Coen' claw marks. Ripping bone and flesh as she sinks her fangs into Malak's throat, growling one word, "Submit!"

Malak's body went rigid as the gargoyle warform held him. Callen dug out the shadow walker's heart and then staggered to her side while Malak shuddered and convulsed. His inner demon fighting against both Trinity's demoness and her wolf as they shredded his dark soul to pieces. Her wolf was particularly vicious while her demoness laughed manically.

Trinity stared mercilessly into his eyes, "You took my wolf's mate, my shadow's beloved, and tried to change my baby brother into what you are... Lord Malak of the Dark Shadows, as a queen, my judgement is that your coven is forfeit."

"I will never yield to you, abomination," He gasped like a fish out of water as her talons and her power dug into his cursed soul, but he struggled to break free.

"Suffer," Trinity hissed. Malak wailed like a lost soul as her demoness forced him to endure the suffering of those he tortured and murdered.

"I need to drink his blood to reach those in his coven," she hissed at Callen.

His warform nodded and bit one of Malak's hands off, spitting it on the ground like an unwanted bone. Cupping his own under the spurting blood, he blew on it to cool it before offering Trinity a drink. She slurped and licked the blood from his palm, then he filled his cupped hand again. As he held the second palmful of blood up to her mouth, they sensed and heard the approaching wolves and sun-walkers.

"Guardians," growled Callen. His warform struggled to get out the spoken word.

"We must kill him before they arrive, or they will try to stop me. This evil ends this dawn," Trinity's deep voice in this new form sounds strange and seductive. "Through Malak's blood, I take his power... I feel the nearly four hundred who serve him. I'm going to punish them too." Her demoness chuckled at their terror of feeling their master dying. Metaphysically, the presences swirled around her like a thick fog; each walker was a shadow in the mist of the coven's blood bond.

"Those of the Dark Shadows, I am your new master, the queen of the day. All who have taken an innocent life and not made an attempt at redemption shall suffer the suffering they caused then join their old master in greeting the morning sun." Horror and fear crash into her like breaking waves, but she sorted through the ancient one's servants while her wolf continued to maul the dark shadow that was his soul.

"Times up," growled Callen, "Fly."

Leaping skyward, Trinity's gargoyle flapped her pale wings, flying up to greet the sunlight, she held Lord Malak before her as the sun struck them. He began screaming inhumanly and thrashing while he blistered. His body began to disintegrate in burning clumps. Through the coven bond, hundreds scream or shout as they burned with him.

Suddenly, three gargoyles and two angels flew toward her, Callen yipped a warning, as he was tackled to the ground by two larger warforms. They are Guardians so he doesn't resist, just craned his neck to look skyward.

"Lady Trinity! Release him!" shouted one of the Guardians below, but she laughed mockingly.

"I am no lady, Alpha Commander Langley," she growled, then boldly declared, "I am the queen of the day."

Her words reverberated through the clearing as every sun-walker and hybrid dropped to their knees at the power her demoness radiated, even the alpha wolves found it difficult to remain standing. Callen chuffed, shaking off his restrainers and howled in victory as the last of Malak's disintegrating body thumps on the grass in front of him. Trinity landed with a thud beside him, the three gargoyle warforms land behind her and immediately fall to their knees, heads bowed. Trinity smiled at first as she looked around the kneeling walkers and hybrids. Her gaze became bitterly cold as it fell on Alpha Commander Langley.

She growled sarcastically, "So good of you to finally join us, Guardian, but you are too late to be of service."

Metheus forced himself to stand, folding his white feathered wings as he approached her, "Princess Trinity, Alpha Callen shift now... please."

The teen warforms glanced at each other, then shifted back into their mortal forms. Both were seriously wounded and covered in blood. Trinity's clothes were rags. The others rose and stood in a ring around them.

"What have you done, Trinity?" Metheus questioned, glancing at the smoldering remains of Malak and his shadow walkers in the golden light.

"She avenged my brother, her packmates, and the atrocities committed against my pack and her clan," Callen announced in her defense.

"That was for the high courts," Alpha Commander Langley started.

"The same high court who has let the Dark Shadows get away with murder and war mongering for nearly three thousand years?" Trinity hissed, "The same high court who declared the Pure Blood movement to be a harmless heritage preservation group, and hid that Malak's own grandfather was the one who started the war with the fae, and his father's hand in starting the Fourth and Fifth Great Wars, and most recently, left Malak himself free to order the murder my entire clan." She pointed an accusing finger at him, "I can still see all of his memories. I know what he and his have done!"

"He still should have gone to trial."

"Trial?" Trinity scoffed then revealed, "Well, three of the walker justices are now dust, as are three-hundred-four shadow walkers and day-walkers in his coven of evil. They have paid for the innocent lives they destroyed!"

There was a collective gasp at the number of vampires culled when she took over Malak's coven.

"By the moon! Three-hundred-four! Why?" demanded Langley. "That's the entire coven."

"Technically, there were nine here with Malak, so three-fourteen," Callen pointed out with a smirk; his green eyes glittered with hard righteousness. "They suffered the suffering they caused. You got a problem with that?"

"Explain yourself Princess," Metheus asked carefully.

Trinity felt that her grandfather and her great-aunt, Queen Levena were listening though him. "I only killed those who destroyed an innocent life and by their own admission, had not sought to redeem themselves. They were murders, slave-traffickers, kidnappers, and worse." She turned from her grandfather's day-walker back to the Guardian commanders, sneering, "Sorry about your personal assistant, Langley, but he was sending Malak's second every move the Guardians have made for the last fifteen years. You're welcome."

She glared at him in such disdain that everyone could see she her blamed him for the deaths of her family and countless others. "And it wasn't the entire coven, sixty-one are considered pledged loyalty to me and my Darkstone clan." They stood in silence, then Trinity glanced over at where Coen laid. "If you had done your job, none of this would have happened and my beloved and mate would still be alive."

Tears fill her eyes as she looked back to Metheus, quietly whispering, "May I take him home?" 

He nodded.

She shifted back into her pale gargoyle warform. Carefully, she lifted Coen's body into her arms.

"And where do you think you're going?" snapped Langley.

She glared down at him from her almost three meter gargoyle warform height, refusing to speak to him anymore.

"I believe she is taking her mate back to his family after she and her friends did our job," Alpha Nathaniel retorted before Metheus could. "Fly safe, Princess Trinity." He bowed to her, then looked over his shoulder at the other gargoyles and angels. He tipped his head at her and Callen. They inclined their heads slightly.

"May I offer you a ride Alpha Callen?" the youngest gargoyle offered. Callen nodded, watching Trinity holding his brother and suddenly he couldn't speak past the lump in his throat. Langley stepped forward as if to stop them, but the other two warform gargoyles step between him and the youngest queen, their twitching tails betrayed their agitation.

Nathaniel put his hand on Callen's shoulder, "Take care of them. Take care of her."

The rush of wind from wings and the gargoyles were out of sight in moments. The werewolves howled in tribute as Langley looked around angrily.

"They're just kids who broke the laws of our kinds," he growled.

"No, they are not, Hugh, and if you think that you need to retire before you have to explain why you let a traitor run your office and share your bed for over a decade. The rest of you clear the bodies, I want IDs on all the remains, move out," Alpha Nathaniel ordered.

The Alpha Commander stared at him enraged, but could do nothing, he lost his authority because of the truth revealed by a sixteen-year-old hybrid.

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Funerals for everyone who died in the attack and after were held on the last sliver of the crescent moon and included Polly, who killed herself after they were rescued. Looking around, Camillia noted that Lindie wasn't there either. Callen stood unsteadily, unable to speak about his twin after their parents spoke.

"Coen was my beloved and my mate. I loved him and he loved me since..." Unable to say more, Trinity realized that she couldn't remember a time when she hadn't felt Coen's love as a part of her. Shaking, Callen remained a silent wreck, but Camillia held her head up and proudly told of how her brother tried to rescue her, avenged those lost, and then fought to the death to save his mate and stop the evil of one of the most powerful shadow walkers to live in a millennium.

As she finished, she took the shovel from her father and put a scoop of dirt over her brother's body. "This morning, we leave my brother on the hills we played on in life, so he may watch over our pack in death." Then Cami held the shovel out to Trinity, who sobbed as she did the same. Callen took the shovel next as Gabe clung to Trinity but Cami dragged them back to the pack town before the grave was filled because the dawn was glowing in the east.

Trinity went into the basement with Gabe then Cami came down with a tray of food and a glass of blood for Gabe. He refused to drink it and shook his head when Cami offered her arm.

"You're pregnant, I won't."

"You need to feed. Your shadow is still adjusting to, well, being a true shadow," Cami chided him. "And I don't care if Fang's spawn lives or dies, so drink all you want, I'll make more."

Reluctantly, he took the glass of warm blood instead and gulped it. "No one knew her name. They don't even know what they did with her body." He could not get past the guilt he felt over Malak making him kill the little, brown-eyed girl. They didn't even know her name because she hadn't known her name. In her memories and Malak's memories, everyone simply referred to her as 'pet' or 'doll'. Tears began to pour from his pale eyes in rivets. "It's not your baby's fault, like it wasn't her fault. Neither deserved to be killed." Without another word, he went into his room and closed the door.

Cami cursed under her breath and stormed upstairs. Trinity's sensitive ears picked up her shouting at one of the Guardians about wanting to go back and look for the child again. Trinity shook her head and dragged an overstuffed chair over to Gabe's door. She curled in it to rest and to watch over her brother. The toddler had been a gift, a sick and twisted gift from Lord Seth, master of the Fallen Night coven. He was one of the Lords who demanded Trinity be denied her status as a queen because of her mixed lineage. It had gotten so heated in the Council of Lords that a one-year recess was demanded to allow tensions to ease because the vampires were on the verge of a twentieth civil war between those who saw hybrids as the solution to the Infant Plague and the only hope for the future of the vampire species, and those who would rather remain pure and become extinct. Exhaustion claimed Trinity at last and she dozed off.

Something cold brushed her skin and she opened her eyes. The clock on the wall said it was almost noon. She got up and went to the tray Cami had brought hours earlier. Her shadow had become something more like a true demoness and it stirred agitatedly as she tried to eat a soggy jam and nut butter sandwich. Suddenly, she felt Gabe hurting. She shimmered to the front porch and collided with Cami who was rushing out the door with a blanket.

"Gabe, stop!"

Blurring after her brother, Trinity's gargoyle ripped her clothes to shreds as she tackled him and wrapped her wings around them to keep the sunlight off him. A little of the light seeped through the membrane but none of the fatal UV light. Gabe tried to struggle but her queen hissed at him, "Sleep!" He collapsed into unconsciousness. Dark blankets covered her as Gabe became still. Tears leaked down his blistered cheeks as Trinity tried not to sob.

"Hold on, Trin, we're getting a tent."

Trinity shifted her wings and poked her head out. "Just keep the blankets around me."

Cami, Callen, and Luna Ceresa held them as Trinity gingerly carried her brother back inside and to the basement. As they put Gabe back to bed and Cami dabbed his blisters with ointment while Luna Ceresa murmured softly, "I'm sorry, Trini, we're going to have to send him to Bloodstone... If it wasn't overcast today, he would have been mortally burned before you reached him."

"I'll pack," Cami stood as if to go upstairs.

"You cannot go with him, Luna Camillia. His shadow walker is unstable. If he loses control, he could drain you to the point of death or attack you and kill your pup," Epimetheus announced as he appeared in the door.

"So, what. I'm going with Gabe," Cami insisted.

"Camillia," her mother sounded shocked.

"Mother, I don't want that monster's spawn. Why should it live when only two... Two! Of the ten pups taken from our pack have been found and survived?"

"Icemaw promised to take it and make rep..."

"Screw them! He doesn't deserve to have a child in this world. Not after everything he's done," Camillia screamed at her mother. "They can't buy his way out of blame with all the diamonds in the Yukon mountains. I. Am. Going. With. Gabe." Camillia panted then confessed in a pained whisper, "It's my fault they turned him, I didn't protect him."

Trinity clung to her best friend and mate's sister, refuting her, "You did! You did. You saved him after they did this to him. You're my hero." Camillia still shook her head as Trinity added, "Thank you, thank you for saving my brother when I couldn't save yours."

They rocked together on the floor, weeping, as Callen stood behind Epimetheus. There was nothing he could do, nothing he could change so he turned and went outside, shifting to his wolf and running up the hill toward the pack cemetery. His wolf laid down by the fresh soil of his twins grave, trying to catch his breath. He eavesdropped on his parents and Trinity's guardian deciding on what to do.

As the afternoon wore on, Callen shifted to his skin and spoke to his brother, "Hey, Coen. Things aren't going too well... Epimetheus is taking Gabe to Bloodstone Coven, because Gabe keeps walking out into the sunshine. He suffers so much over how he was turned into a shadow walker, and I don't know how to help him. Trin and Cami are falling apart, and I don't know what to do. If you have any ideas, I could sure use the help. I... I'm in way over my head."

'Callen, come to the house. We're going to have a family dinner before Gabe leaves,' his mother summoned him.

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The new moon came and went but the turmoil in the Guardians Corps and Werewolf Council was nothing compared to that which overtook the Kingdoms of the Walkers. Over three hundred Shadow walkers and a few Sun-walkers died with Lord Malak, the Master of the Dark Shadows coven. The third largest single coven in the world ended at dawn weeks earlier, revealing an immense empire of corruption and evil. Weres, walkers, and mundanes in offices of influence were affected by the sudden shift in power. Many resented being revealed as being Lord Malak's allies. More upsetting to them was that the teenage hybrid who caused the problem was being protected, not punished. Those who supported the Pure Blood Cause were threatening civil war, and angry because Trinity Charlains proved beyond any reasonable doubt that hybrids were as strong, if not stronger than pure bloods.

Twenty-one of the Dark Shadows survivors, who were low or mid ranking vampires, and all used as slave labor, swore blood loyalty to the young queen vampire despite the fact she was a hybrid. Half of them had been forced to remain day walkers. They refused to follow anyone else and had begun moving to Darkstone Vineyard to be near the self-proclaimed queen of the day. Most of the remaining forty pledged themselves to the Bloodstone or other covens, only eight went renegade. Never had one so young held so much power, but those close to her, including Queen Levena, feared Trinity would go crazy from bearing witness to Malak's centuries of evil and her own grief over the loss of her beloved mate.

As the political turmoil continued, Trinity hid and grieved in the Darkwood, coping with the dawn that should have killed her and was now driving her insane. Her mortal was exhausted from lack of sleep brought on by nightmares and grief. She also couldn't feel her wolf or shift into her fur anymore, though her shadow-turned-demoness assured her it was merely sleeping.