Disclaimer: I do not own rights to Danny Phantom or Thir13en Ghosts. If I did, Thir13en Ghosts would've been longer, and Dan would have made the DP series rated R for gore, violence, and language.

Nyaa.

=^n.n^=

Chapter 3

Danny gritted his teeth and blasted Billy in the gut, sending the ghost flying backwards. Quickly, he turned and did the same to the torso that was holding onto him. Jimmy's head whimpered and screamed as his torso let go of Danny and cowered a little.

"What is going on here?" Danny held onto the gash on his shoulder tightly. Where the hell had Dan found these ghosts, and how could Danny be sure that they weren't his victims?

"Oh, put on your big girl panties!" Dan mocked over the sound system, cackling. "These are just the two weakest of the group! If you're having problems right out of the gate, you are seriously going to make me cry. No wonder even that fruity pom gave up on you! Nooo potential…"

"Would you just shut up already?" The young halfa felt his spectral energy crackle and cover his fists in a thin layer of ice, but had to turn it on someone other than Dan as Billy flew at him again. Billy hit the rune-engraved glass and disappeared with a pained grunt.

Danny felt two hands wrap around his ankles and shuddered as his pupils darted to the corners of his eyes. Jimmy's torso tried to shake his legs, head groaning pitifully, before launching itself upwards and slamming him to the ground. The back of his skull bounced off of the floor and he started wrestling with Jimmy as the man's ghost started trying to grab at his throat.

"Get off of me! Get the hell off, you freak!" Danny turned slightly, pushing the torso up as a hand pressed his face against the glass.

Jimmy's head was right there, eyes wide in fear and – it made the halfa's stomach turn when he recognized it – pain. Even though this ghost was long-dead, he was still feeling the agony of his mortal wounds.

"Help me…" The Italian's voice quivered for a moment, his fingers clawing slightly at Danny's face. "Help… Help me!"

Danny let out a pained scream as intense, violent energy attacked him from seemingly nowhere. It set his joints on edge, as if something were trying to grate against the cartilage. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he thought he heard a chainsaw.

What the hell had happened to this guy?

"I said off!" Danny wedged his knees under the torso and kicked it off. As he jumped to his feet, he looked around wildly for Billy. The child ghost pulled himself together for a moment, appearing shakily and angrily long enough to fix the teen with a scowl, before losing focus and disappearing again.

"You know what this party needs?" Dan's voice sounded bored over the intercom. "Chicks. There are way too many roosters in this chicken coop. Plus, let's face it – neither you or Vlad could ever really get too far without a girl hanging around. Hopefully the slutty one doesn't distract you, though…"

"What?" Danny's voice was drowned out as the clocks began chiming again and the walls shifted. He had to jump out of the way as one glass sheet sliced near his arm, dangerously close to taking it off.

On the other side, Jimmy's torso could be seen hammering against the rune etchings helplessly, his screams muffled by the barrier. Billy appeared next to him and scowled hard at Danny before looking around for a new route to his 'playmate'.

Well, at least Danny was safe for the moment. He hoped that the new ghosts didn't find him too quickly.

No sooner had he thought this when he was bowled over, tackled to the ground by a definitely-feminine form. The girl couldn't have been too much older than Danny – maybe a sophomore, or a junior in high school at best. A man's necktie had been knotted around her throat, and her eyes and face betrayed her suffocation.

"You'll help me, won't you?" Susan sounded breathless. Danny sat bolt upright and shoved her away, trying to scoot back. She crawled after him, looking desperate. "Please? Love me, keep me safe…"

"Dude, I have a girlfriend!" Danny threw up his hands in case she tried to jump him again.

Her face instantly darkened. Without further warning, she had sucker-punched him across the face and tackled him, her delicate hands surprisingly strong as they locked around his neck. She looked furious, panicked and deranged all at once as she hissed, "It wasn't my fault! He walked in on us! I loved him, though, I swear! He shouldn't have killed me… We were gonna get married!"

"Susan!" A familiar woman's ghost blasted the young girl off of Danny's chest, slouching slightly from the pain of the effort. Jean straightened up slightly and waved an arm. "Danny, this way! Before she can reform!"

Danny didn't need to be told twice. He got to his feet as quickly as possible and took off after Jean, staying near her as she led the way through the maze of glass walls and rune barriers. Each time he was afraid that she had gotten turned around, the mother narrowed her eyes like a fox before taking another glance at her surroundings and continuing onward.

Before he knew it, they were in a library of some sort – it wasn't big, but by some miracle, it had a door that could shut. He lost no time turning human and slamming it into place. When he turned back to Jean, she was doubled over slightly, pain evident on her face as she held her head.

"Jean?" Danny darted forward on auto-pilot, grabbing a chair from the table and wheeling it up behind her. "Here, sit down. How much energy did you put into blasting that… girl… off of me?"

"It's not a lack of energy, Danny. The mental trauma from my death made me like the others here, so I still feel the pain of my burns, even though I'm present enough to know that I have no more human body." Jean eased herself into the chair and leaned forward slightly, giving a huge sigh of relief. "I'm glad you're okay."

"Yeah, well… He's worse than Youngblood, but Billy's not the first child ghost I've had to fight." Danny frowned. "Definitely the worst. And what's with the… the guy without a head? Or the girl who tried making out with me?"

"One at a time, Danny. Let me explain what I remember from Dan's talks and the other ghosts." Jean hushed gently, chuckling at him. Danny gave her a confused look; adults were so odd sometimes, especially mothers. "Like I told you before, there are two ways to lie a ghost to rest, and the only way out of this house is to lay the other twelve ghosts through either violent or non-violent means. While attacking them until their signature 'fades', so to speak, is definitely the easier way, not all of these ghosts deserve to disappear as painfully as they died."

"Yeah… I can see why you'd say that… The headless ghost was pleading before he flipped out and attacked me. For a moment, I thought he had a chainsaw…"

"Jimmy. No, he wasn't attacking you, per se; we are ghosts that are classified as 'wraiths', and some of us are far-madder than others in death. Jimmy was killed as a result of casino debts in Las Vegas, sometime in the 40's or 50's, by my guess… He made a bet with a mobster, lost, and tried to run away."

Danny's eyebrows knitted together. "What… What exactly did they do to him…?"

"They tied him to a chair and sawed his body apart while he was still alive. Many parts were sent to others who had debts with the casinos as a warning of what would happen if they tried to get out of town." Jean glanced at the door sadly, as if she expected Jimmy to be there. He wasn't. "In the Black Zodiac, he's the Torso. His ghost has haunted the warehouse where his body was butchered for years. He's not inherently evil, but he can't communicate properly as most others can… for obvious reasons. When he latched onto you, and you felt and heard the chainsaw, that was him trying to 'explain' his demise to you."

"So… So I was living his death?" Danny felt the blood drain from his face.

"If he had attacked you, don't you think that you would still be in pain, rather than just shaken by what he put you through?"

Good point – his joints itched a little when he thought of the encounter, but as soon as Danny had kicked Jimmy off, no pain had remained for even a second. "He was trying to tell me to kill him?"

"Jimmy is too scarred to know what he wants. Wraiths can rarely face their deaths, even though they know they're dead on some level, and are aware of any part that they might have played in their deaths. Jimmy's one of the more close-minded ones; he was killed because he had a gambling addiction, and when he tried to skip town, one of his friends was murdered for not knowing where he'd gone. His guilt blinds him to the truth."

"Truth?"

"He was a man with a disease who made mistakes. It's the human condition." Jean shook her head. "I'm not condoning what he did, but I know that he was still a victim at the end of the day. He didn't deserve to die, especially the way he was murdered."

"Why can't he see that, then?" Danny was exasperated at the thought of someone like that actually thinking that they had what came to do them in.

Jean fixed Danny with a gentle-yet-stern maternal look. "When we're in pain, the human mind doesn't exactly remember the good points in life too readily, now, does it?"C

Another good point. Danny sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. "Alright, so we help him get over it. What about the other two?"

"Billy died while playing with a bow-and-arrow set that he and his friend found in one of their parents' closets. This was around the same era as Jimmy's death, I believe… back when Westerns were popular. He and his friend liked to play Cowboys and Indians." Jean rubbed her chin, closing her eyes while thinking hard. "I don't remember if it was a crossbow or not, but either way, they weren't supervised."

"Then it was the parents' faults for not locking their weapons up!" Danny threw up his arms. "Is that why he's attacking people? Some morbid form of teaching 'safety tips' or something?"

"A child doesn't look at the situation in such logical parameters. His friend was the one who shot him, so he blamed his friend… whose name was Danny. I'm sure that's why he's so violently fixed on you, compared to his usual bloodlust. However, Billy's like the other two – he thinks it was his fault because, in life, he wasn't a pleasant child. He didn't listen to his parents, broke dishes while playing indoors, acted out when he didn't get his way."

"He believes he deserved to die, too?" Danny pinched the bridge of his nose. "I have to deal with a suicidal, homicidally-enraged seven-year-old. Great. Just great."

"Then there's Susan." Jean looked at Danny. "She was killed by the love of her life because he caught her in the arms of another boy at a school dance. Susan was… apparently notorious for cheating in relationships, but I believe that she genuinely loved the boy who ended up killing her."

"She cheated on him! Why would she do that if she cared about him?"

"Because she accepted his proposal of marriage and turned down an athletic scholarship at a college just to be able to raise a family with him." Jean chuckled, looking amused with Danny's confused expression. "Those in your age group are not well-known for their rational decisions and amazing capacity for breaking habits, no matter how bad they may be. Smoking, drinking, cheating… that's the age when we all get in the most trouble for doing things we shouldn't."

"So I'm dealing with three ghosts that are going to try to kill me while I talk some sense into them." Danny crossed his arms and leaned against a bookshelf angrily. "This sucks! I mean, I really don't want to hurt anyone, but if those guys aren't giving me a break, and the ones coming up just get worse as the numbers rise…"

He pressed the heel of a hand against his forehead. He wasn't the sort to hurt an enemy purely because they fought, especially if he could help them change their ways, but he had to think about getting out of the prison alive! Of course, he also didn't want to hurt any otherwise-innocent souls… especially since he was already the main attraction of Dan's sick entertainment.

"You can't hide in here forever, though." Jean pulled him out of his thoughts gently. "Danny, I know you want to be the hero, but even the best heroes aren't perfect." She got to her feet gingerly and placed a hand on his shoulder. "There's going to be a time soon enough when you won't be able to reason with these ghosts. They only get more bitter and jaded as their power increases, and they're considered evil because of it. Be glad that you have the chance to save anyone at all."

Danny looked up at her, knowing that she was right. He couldn't hide; it was his duty as a person with superpowers to help those who needed it. He was a protector… right?

His mind started working as quickly as he could get it to. "So, I have to get them to listen to me without attacking them and while trying to play defense. I don't want to take damage if it's avoidable, since I'll most likely be taking punishment from the bigger and badder ghosts that are still locked up downstairs." He chose to ignore how much he probably sounded like Vlad at this moment. "Billy was accidentally killed by a kid with my name, so he'll most likely go postal on me anyway. He's the one that I should be the most worried about… Unless Susan tries jumping on me again." Danny frowned deeply at that thought.

"I'll be there to help you, Danny." Jean smiled at him. "I'm not as fragile as I look, and we wraiths can't kill one another, since we're used to taking a fair amount of damage. We're perfectly capable of hurting each other, however."

"Jean, you really don't need to – "

"Yes, I do. Besides, I want to." She made her way over to the door, ready for it to be opened. "You have my help whether you want it or not. I suggest that you just give in and accept it."

He heaved a sigh, shooting her back a flat look. Without turning around, she chuckled. "I saw that." He huffed again, crossing his arms and ignoring her comment.

"Fine… So, you'll help me. But at least stay behind me so you don't get hurt as much, okay?" Danny asked, walking up beside her. He put a hand on Jean's shoulder, looking up into the older woman's eyes. Even in death, he could tell that she still suffered from the angry burn that claimed half of her face. "I know you're a mom and all, but I don't want to see you get fried by some little… cowboy brat, or a crazy prom queen, or even a guy who's half a body."

Her small smirk never left her face. She really did look like she was a withered, albeit caring, person. "Okay, Danny. Lead the way."

=^ónò^=

Oh, noes! Danny's in deep! Well, at least he has an ally in this messed-up house, eh? Yeah… Messed-up house… .

Nyaa?