"Aw, man!" Danny moaned, collapsing back in his chair with a small huff.
"Dude," Tucker cried out. He dropped his game controller in his lap and flopped his arms across his stomach, laughing. "That was too easy! You stink at this game!"
Danny, frowning, reached over to Tucker's chair and touched the arm. The chair turned intangible, and Tucker fell through it onto the floor. "Hey!" he shouted at Danny, who released the chair and started laughing.
Sam, who was sitting on Danny's bed, was laughing too. "Dude," she gasped at Tucker, trying to imitate him through her laughter, "that was too easy!" She managed to lean over, holding out a hand, and Danny high-fived her. Tucker scowled up at them.
It was late on a Friday, sometime in July – it was summer vacation, so no one was bothering to keep track of what the date was. And not only was it a vacation from school, but it seemed to be a vacation from ghost-fighting as well. It had been a month since their run-in with Freak Show and the Reality Gauntlet, and more than two weeks since any ghost had given Danny and his friends any trouble. The Box Ghost had been around occasionally, but it had taken Danny only about fifteen minutes to get him back into the Fenton Thermos each time. Tucker and Sam hadn't even bothered to come with him, but just retreated to the FentonWorks Lab, waiting for Danny to get back so they could zap the Box Ghost back into the Ghost Zone.
Even Vlad Masters, a.k.a. Vlad Plasmius, hadn't come after Danny. He had gone to Singapore to conduct another business merger that would make him millions of dollars. He had left Danny a note telling him this, and warned Danny not to come after him while he was busy, leaving all kinds of ghastly threats as to what he would do to Danny if he came to Singapore and messed up his business deal. Danny had thought about going after Vlad, but decided that it wasn't worth flying to Singapore to get Vlad. So for the time being, Danny and his archenemy had called a truce.
So Danny and his friends, after their ususal late-night patrol of Amity Park, had crashed at Danny's place for the night, playing video games and generally hanging out. They finally felt free to enjoy the summer, and so they had decided to enjoy it – their way.
Danny got up from his chair and pulled Tucker to his feet. "Ready for another round of Hero?" Danny asked his best friend.
"Always!" Tucker cheered up instantly.
"Sam, you wanna jump in this time?" Danny asked.
"Nah, no thanks," Sam replied, distracted. "I'm trying to finish this new book I got from the goth bookstore."
Tap-tap-tap.
"What was that?" Tucker asked, nervous.
"I don't know," Danny replied, equally nervous.
"It came from your window," said Sam, rolling across Danny's bed to look out the window. "Danny, there's a girl out there!"
"What?" Danny started, moving over to look out the window. "That's impossible. How did a girl get outside of my window?"
"I don't know," Sam replied, "but she looks like she's about to fall! You'd better let her in."
"I guess." Danny went to the window and undid the latch to open it.
The girl clinging to the window ledge looked about the same age as Danny and his friends. She was skinny, with freckles and a long, thin nose. She had long, dark red hair, held back in a ponytail, and was wearing blue jeans and a black t-shirt. A backpack was slung over her back. Danny pulled open the window and the girl leaned in. "Are you Danny Fenton?" she asked him tersely. She had a thick accent that Danny couldn't place.
"If I am?" Danny replied, just as coldly. His eyes glowed green, a sure sign that he was wound up to attack if provoked.
"My name is Bridget Morrigan," the girl said, and she leaned a little further into Danny's room. "Please, let me in. I need your help."
Danny looked around at Sam and Tucker. They each gave him a slight nod. Danny trusted his friends and their judgment, especially Sam's. If they thought she was safe too, then she probably wasn't a threat. Danny stood back from the window and Bridget scrambled in over the windowsill, turning a somersault and landing on the floor with a thump.
Sam went over and helped the girl to her feet. "You're Irish," she noted.
"And proud of it," Bridget growled, dusting herself off.
"Wait," said Tucker, "How could you tell she was Irish?"
"The accent," Sam replied casually, with a faint smile. She always felt a little prick of warmth whenever she showed the boys up at something. Danny felt it too. Sam was pretty brilliant. It was one of the things he liked – er, admired, about her.
Sam sat Bridget down on the bed and then joined her. Danny and Tucker turned around the chairs they had been playing video games in, so they could face the girls. "OK," Danny said, staring at Bridget with his fists clenched on his knees, "you found Danny Fenton. Now, how can he help you?"
Bridget took a deep breath, and began. "I'm on the run, from the Guys in White. I've been on the run for at least two months. I just recently started looking for you. I figured this is one of the few places I can go where I'll be safe."
"Wait, wait, wait," Tucker interrupted. "You're on the run? From the Guys in White? Why?"
Bridget bit her lip. "My parents died, when I was really little. We lived in Ireland, in Dublin. I was sent to live in an orphanage. It was an old building, with lots of passages and cupboards in it, and I liked to go exploring. Especially since I didn't have any friends, really.
"One day, I noticed that kids in the orphanage were going missing. I asked the woman in charge about it, and she told me the kids were all adopted. But I didn't believe her. When kids were adopted, they told everybody, they were so excited. They didn't disappear in the middle of the night.
"So I decided that I would go find them. I started looking in every secret passage and corner and cupboard that I could find, looking for them."
"So did you find them?" Danny said, the truth beginning to dawn on him.
Bridget folded her arms across her chest. "No. But I found where they had been taken. I never found out what happened to them, and I'm not sure I want to know.
"There was a lab. A big one, underneath the orphanage. The Guys in White were working down there, doing…experiments. But then they saw me. I knocked something over, something small. But they all heard it. I managed to get away, back upstairs to the orphanage. I thought they wouldn't find me. But the next day they came for me. I threw some clothes in a bag, and I climbed out the window. I've been running ever since."
Danny, Sam, and Tucker just sat in stunned silence for a while. In one of her rare moments of sentimentality, Sam put her arm around Bridget's shoulders.
"You can sleep in here for tonight," Danny said. "Tomorrow, we'll talk to my parents. If you're really on the run from the Guys in White, I'm sure they'll be fine with letting you hide out here for a little while."
"Thank you, Danny," Bridget said, and for the first time, she smiled. She had a nice smile, Danny noticed. Pretty.
"Hey, no prob," Danny replied, spreading his hands, "as long as you don't mind sleeping on the floor."
"Nah, not a bit," Bridget replied, waving her hand a little.
Danny slipped out of his bedroom and ran down the hall to the closet, where he got a sleeping bag and a pillow for Bridget. He came back into the room and handed them to her. She unrolled the sleeping bag, spreading it out on the other side of Danny's bed from Sam and Tucker's sleeping bags.
"Bridget," Danny suddenly asked. "How did you know to come here? What made you think you'd be safe, in Amity Park, with the Fentons?"
Bridget was trying to smooth out a stubborn crease in her sleeping bag, not looking up. "I heard about you. Amity Park's been all over the news lately, with all of the ghost attacks. I know the Fentons have a natural uneasiness about government involvement in their ghost work."
"So why'd you come to me first?" Danny asked.
Bridget fiddled with the fabric of her sleeping bag. "I…thought…you might be more willing to help one of your own. Another teen," she added quickly. "You might be able to help me make my case to your parents. Jazz too, if she can help."
Danny smiled a little bit. "Well, we can try. I don't see why they won't help."
Bridget chewed her lips. "Thanks, Danny." She sat up on her knees, and reached across Danny's bed. She picked up the book that Sam had dropped, Ghosts of the Victorian Era. "Where'd you get this?" she asked Sam.
Sam blushed a little. "Goth bookstore a couple blocks over. You know it?"
"I owned a copy back at the orphanage." Bridget began leafing through the pages. "This is a very good copy. You must take good care of it."
"I just got it," Sam replied, a little confused by Bridget's knowledge of the goth world.
Bridget handed the book back to Sam. "Don't let me…keep you all up," she muttered awkwardly, and she crawled into her sleeping bag and lay down to go to sleep.
Danny, Tucker, and Sam sat down on the floor in a circle on the other side of Danny's bed. "Do you trust her?" Danny asked Sam and Tucker.
"A little. But I think there's something she's not telling us," Sam replied.
"I agree with Sam," Tucker said, "There's no way she just knew where to go. And…I think she must know…that you're Danny Phantom. It's a better explanation than the one she just gave us."
"What?" Danny gasped, louder than her probably should have. "There's no way she can know I'm Danny Phantom. No one knows I'm Danny Phantom!"
"Pipe down!" Sam hissed at Danny, grabbing his shoulders so he'd really get the message. "If she doesn't already know, you don't want to give it away now!"
Danny scowled and sat back. "Fine. But then, what do you think she's not telling us?"
"I don't know," Sam said slowly. "But whatever it is, I don't think it's anything bad."
"Maybe I should take a look," Danny said. He got up on his knees and looked over the bed to the spot where Bridget had fallen asleep. "Maybe if I overshadow her while she's asleep, and dreaming, I can take a look around."
"Danny, no," Sam interjected, putting out a hand to stop Danny. "Don't. If she's really on the run from the Guys in White, she's probably not inclined to trust anyone. But she trusts us. We can't just walk into her mind and take a look around."
"But I don't want to find out later that this is all a trap," Danny pointed out.
"Danny," Sam asked, grabbing Danny's shoulder and turning him around, "who's the better judge of character?"
"You are," Danny and Tucker muttered dejectedly.
Sam smiled. "Let her sleep. If you still don't trust her in the morning, you can overshadow her tomorrow night, and I won't try to stop you. All I ask is that you at least let her spend the night."
"Fine," Danny huffed, "she can spend the night." He turned around and looked at Bridget again, and his face softened. Then turned back to his friends. "Tuck, you up for another round of Hero?"
"Nah, man. We should probably go to sleep," Tucker replied.
"Okay," Danny muttered. Sam went off into Danny's closet to change into her nightgown, and Tucker and Danny quickly threw on their own pajamas. Tucker wore footies covered with pictures of circuit boards. Danny was wearing his usual pink-and-white striped pajamas.
When Sam re-emerged in her black nightgown, she and Tucker crawled into their sleeping bags. Sam put in her earplugs to drown out Tucker's snoring. Tucker silenced his PDA for the night. Danny slid under the blankets on his own bed.
Tucker and Sam drifted off to sleep right away. Danny, on the other hand, couldn't fall asleep. He turned on his side and put his elbow on his pillow, propping up his head so he could look at Bridget. She had pulled her hair out of her ponytail, so it was spread out in a dark red fan across the pillow. Her back was turned to Danny.
She was really kind of pretty, Danny noticed. She was skinny, kind of like Sam, her lips were really too thin, and she more leggy than most girls Danny knew. She looked strong though, despite the skinniness. And…she seemed more determined than anyone else Danny had ever met. Tougher. More…fiery. You could see it in the way she had glared at everything, and hear it in the way her voice growled.
But as Danny's eyes began to drift closed, and he began to fall asleep, he would have sworn that he heard this fiery girl let out a very small whimper.