A/N: Chapters will vary in length. This thing started out as a one shot and was written as such, meaning it's one continuous stream, and not nicely cut into chapters. I'm in the process of doing that, please bear with me.

Chapter 1

Gary Sullivan pulled up his rental car along side the curb in the rundown neighborhood and checked the address again. Number fifteen. He squinted at the sign next to the door, of which the letters were just a little to small to read from this distance. The garage door next to it was open, and he could see an old, rusty car standing inside with the hood open. Somebody was leaning over the engine, and he could only just make out the man's stained blue coveralls. Then he looked up at the windows above the garage. Dark. No life. He turned to his fiancee.

"Are you sure, Jazz?" he asked, "This is where he lives?"

Jazz was frowning, but she nodded. "Specter Detectors," she said, pointing at the sign next to the door.

Her eyesight, Gary mused, was better than his. They got out and Gary made sure to lock the door, checking it twice. Then he looked suspiciously up and down the street, at the group of teens hanging thirty yards away – shouldn't they be in school, he wondered – the boarded up house at the other side of the street and the small liquor store next to it, still closed at this time of day, but that particular fact didn't prevent some stragglers from hanging around at the entrance, waiting for it to open.

Gary hurried to his girlfriend and protectively stood next to her while she raised her hand to ring the bell. She stopped, and instead brought her hand to her mouth, staring at the doorknob. Gary moved closer to take a look at what she saw, and saw the reason for her concern: blood. Jazz didn't waste time, but started rummaging through her purse, muttering angrily to herself. With an 'aha', she pulled out her key ring and shifted through the numerous keys. Her apartment, her office, her parents' house Gary all recognized, but there was a new one on there he hadn't seen before. She stuck it into the lock and opened the door.

Gary followed her into the narrow hallway and up the stairs. He heard voices and laughter coming from the first floor, but he couldn't make out what the person talking was saying. He did recognize the voice though. Danny, Jazz's brother. Jazz looked back and smiled at him, and he could see the relief on her face. He didn't know what she had been expecting, but obviously she had automatically assumed something had happened to her little brother. He shuddered when he thought about the bloodstain. Maybe some gang war had been fought right in front of Danny's door, maybe somebody had gotten hurt and grabbed the door knob...

All thought about gang wars vanished when he entered what seemed to be a small office. Jazz had entered ahead of him, but he could easily see over her shoulder. Since she had stopped right inside the room, he was forced to stay in the door frame.

Two people were there, now looking up in surprise. A tall, black man was sitting behind a new looking laptop, his hands still on the keyboard. A web page was on the screen, but Gary couldn't make out the contents. The man looked tired, bags under his eyes, and his clothes were torn and dirty.

The other person in the room, half leaning over his friend to be able to read the screen, was Danny. Gary had met him at Jazz's parents at Christmas. The two of them had started off at some wary acceptance, Danny questioning everything Gary did but generally being pleasant and friendly. Gary suspected the guy wasn't normally that friendly with Jazz's affiliations, and that the other guest at the Fentons' Christmas celebration, Sam Manson, had something to do with him being more or less civil. Several times, he had seen her giving him a dressing down when he had made a nasty remark, and he had just stood there with his head hanging. He smiled in the memory of that.

Danny straightened. "Hi Jazz," he said casually, as if he wasn't surprised to see her show up at his place at ten in the morning, thousands of miles away from where she usually was. He laughed a little, and Gary thought it sounded silly. Then he started rubbing the back of his head.

Jazz stiffened, and Gary winced. He could feel her anger, and was glad it was directed at her brother instead of him. He wondered why she was angry with him though.

"Have you been drinking?" She asked, her voice cold.

She pointed at something Gary couldn't see, and he gave her a little push so he could enter the room. She stepped aside. The overflowing trashcan contained a sizable amount of empty beer cans. Danny followed her gaze and laughed again.

"No, Jazz," he said, smirking, "I'm high on something else."

He looked beyond tired. He was unshaven, his gray t-shirt was stained and torn, and his arms were full of scratches, cuts and bruises. He shifted a little and Gary saw that he had left bloody marks on the back of the chair the dark-skinned man was sitting on.

"What?" she said, incredulous.

Gary could practically see her mind racing, shifting through different types of drug abuse. Danny laughed again and leaned back against the shelves with books, crossing his battered arms.

"Relax, Jazz," he said, "It's nothing like that. I haven't slept in two days. Makes me lightheaded, that's all."

"Yeah, Jazz," the other man said, "You know he won't touch the stuff. I have a beer in here every now and then. We just haven't emptied the trashcan since... since forever, I think."

He looked at Gary, a questioning look in his face. "Who's this?"

Jazz half turned, but didn't take her eyes off her brother. "Tucker, Gary," she said, waving her hand.

Tucker got up and Gary shook his hand.

"Ah," he said, "So you're 'Jazz's newest who should stay away from her because she's too good for him'."

He used both his hands to quote that last part. Danny cringed and had the decency to turn red. Jazz glared at him.

"You," she said, pointing at Danny, "Out. Where do you keep your first aid kit?"

Danny blinked, mock saluted her and gestured at the door. Jazz followed him out, leaving Gary to stare at Tucker. Tucker stared right back. Gary glanced around the room. There were two more laptops there, a new looking printer, several gadgets on a table near the window of which Gary couldn't make out what they were for and two strange looking rifles, thrown haphazardly into a corner. Tucker followed his gaze.

"Ecto rifles," he said, "The newest. Bought them last month. They're really effective, they can lock onto a ghost's ecto signature. The GIW uses them too but I enhanced these so they don't fire on... I mean, I enhanced them."

Gary sat down on the swivel chair at the table. He looked at the screen on Tucker's laptop again, but the screen saver was now swirling all sorts of green ghosts across the screen.

"So," he said, "You really do hunt ghosts."

Tucker nodded enthusiastically. "Yup. Doing really well too. We catch about five ghosts a week, and that's more than the GIW manage to do in a month. Nowadays, they prefer to call us instead of them because we act more discretely. Government agencies are still required to use the GIW though." He yawned. "This latest though... there's a ghost rat infestation in a warehouse at the docks. We can't seem to catch them all. Last night, I almost got overrun with them, and Danny saved me."

He leaned on the desk and looked at his torn clothes. "I got off lightly," he said.

Gary remembered Danny's arms and shuddered. Somewhere in the house a tap was turned on, he could hear the water swooshing through the pipes. Then the familiar clatter of a shower, and Jazz reentered the room, her face impassive. He smiled reassuringly at her, and her face softened. Tucker seemed to think their looking at each other got uncomfortable, because he cleared his throat.

"So," he said to Gary, "What do you do for a living?"

"I'm a doctor... well, I will be when I finish my internships." He glanced at Jazz. "I'm not nearly as brilliant as my... I mean, as Jazz, of course, but I'm doing alright."

The sound of the shower stopped and Jazz took off again. After a moment, Gary followed her, curious as to how his future brother in law lived. As he approached the door, he clearly heard Jazz's voice coming through the not completely closed door.

"... stop playing the hero, Danny, you don't know what these rats are infected with."

"I couldn't let them get Tucker, now could I. Come on, Jazz, I've had worse, this is nothing. It'll be gone in a couple of hours. Why are you so angry?"

"I don't know. This whole thing... I want to tell Gary, Danny. I don't want to keep secrets from him."

Gary, who had just been about to knock on the door, paused. Secrets? He struggled with himself for a moment. He shouldn't listen in on their conversation, but he had to admit it sounded intriguing.

"No way."

"Danny..."

"No."

Gary knocked. The door swung open when he touched it, showing brother and sister sitting on the bed in the tiny room. Jazz was busy wrapping bandages around Danny's arms, while he was looking at her with an annoyed expression on his face. Gary stared at him. His hair was still dripping, his chin still unshaven, and he looked clean. His chest was lined with scars. They both turned to look at Gary.

"Um," he said, "I'm interrupting..."

Danny impatiently drew his arms away from Jazz and stood up. He gave Gary a cold look and disappeared through the door into the tiny bathroom, returning moments later wearing a crumpled but otherwise clean blue t-shirt. He stood in the doorway, crossed his arms and looked at Gary.

"You were eavesdropping," he said.

"No I wasn't. You were talking so loud I could probably have heard you all the way downstairs."

Jazz now got up too and placed herself between her brother and her husband-to-be.

"Danny," she said, "If you would quit your hostile attitude for a moment you could let me explain why we chose to travel thousands of miles to visit you in person rather than tell you on the phone. This is Gary. This isn't Johnny 13. We're all adults here now, or at least, Gary and I are. You, I'm not so sure."

Danny scowled at that, but didn't contradict her.

"I wanted to do this in a more pleasant way, but I can see you're tired. You need to get some rest, so we'll leave and get to our hotel, and then maybe look around town for a bit. You're invited to dinner with us. We're staying at the Park View hotel."

Danny raised his eyebrows at that. "The Park View?" he asked, "Isn't that a bit expensive? You could just stay in Sam's apartment, you know, I have the key and she isn't here. She has a very nice guest bedroom."

"You'd know," Jazz smirked at him, "Thank you for offering Sam's hospitality, but no. We're perfectly alright in the Park View, and we're not short on cash."

"Ouch," Danny said.

"And neither are you, so drop the act," she continued, "I saw all those new computers, and those ecto rifles are very expensive." She took a step and stood next to Gary. Then she turned around at her brother, still standing in the bathroom door. "Dinner, Danny. Seven o'clock."

She didn't wait for his response, but grabbed Gary's arm and pulled him down the stairs. He felt Danny's gaze on them all the way down, and didn't relax until they were well away from the run down neighborhood. Something was bothering him.

"What's with all those scars?" he asked Jazz, half turning in his seat to look at her distressed face.

She waved her hand. "Ghost hunting is dangerous," was all she said.