Sorry for the delay! Don't own Danny Phantom!


CHAPTER 4

His lips pursed. "So it's eternity for you as a... like that?"

"Well, not really... I know I'll be changing places soon with someone else... "

He woke up violently, his heart threatening to create a crater in his chest from how madly it was pounding. Cold sweat trickled down his face, down his naked torso, making him feel sticky. Everything was silence and darkness. A faint sea-scented breeze came in through the open window.

It was a dream-omen he'd just had. He could swear it on his grandmother's grave.

He phased through the wall to check on his parents, everything was fine. He phased through the other wall, Jazz was soundly asleep on one of those boring foreign theses she consulted for her second doctorate. He ignored what time it was, but he put the volume on her nighttable and tucked her in. Everything seemed to be in order.

With a deep sigh, he went back to bed. That uncertain, vague situation was killing his nerves. He like, needed to get married or something. To think of other things than ghosts and menaces.

He woke up rather early the following morning, early enough to be able to go and get some breakfast in the hotel's dining room. He picked some toast, orange juice and coffee, and felt like he was starting to live again. Which was a rather odd and tingly feeling.

His table just happened to be near a counter where a couple of waiters were perched waiting for someone to call them. In the meantime, they talked about something which had recently happened in the whereabouts. Danny wasn't paying attention to them, but, halfway through the cup of coffee, his ears caught the words sand castle and he decided he'd overhear.

As the waiters talked, his eyes widened and his fears rose again. They were talking about a couple of tourists and some locals seeing the Sand Castle. The extraordinary thing was that no one had seen it for thirty years or so, and the last time it was spotted, something terrible had happened, but the waiters didn't talk about that. They just felt sorry that it should happen during touristic season, because it massacred Sandville's reputation- since they agreed something was bound to happen now the castle was again haunting the cliffs.

Danny left the dining room feeling a bit miserable, as if he carried the weight of preventing some impending danger from which he knew or suspected nothing, from happening.

"What a way to start the day," he thought grimly.

Once again, a gray day. The beach was covered in a hazy cloud of sea mist, which made the waves look totally non-desirable. Nonetheless, there they were, Jack and Maddie, chasing eachother around as though they were many years younger, somewhere cool like the Caribbean.

Danny didn't partake much in his parent's bliss, though. He felt he wouldn't drop the uneasiness and anxiety until he was back home, and home was at least two weeks and a half away from him. He sighed.

"Hey Jazz, do you think they'll mind if I go stroll a bit around the main street?" Danny asked, but he got no response. "Hey Jazz," he tried again. He was alone, Jazz was nowhere to be seen. Alarmed, though not yet panicking, he stood up and dusted the sand off of him. He didn't scream after her, in case he could worry his parents, he just chose to follow her footprints on the sand, which led him into the mist, to his right.

His ghost sense vaguely informed him something was lurking around, and made him shiver, and walk faster. The cloud of sea mist got denser and denser, until he could barely distinguish Jazz's footprints. Still, after a short while his vision began to improve, and almost as soon as he was in, he was out of the cloud, completely damp and chilled, but out into the dull day's clarity. The vision that flooded his sight made him widen his eyes in shock and dreadful anticipation.

Before his very eyes, tangible like he had never seen it before, stood the Sand Castle.

It was a few hundred meters ahead of him, towering over him like a colossus, like a threat. Its otherwordly, astounding presence was tingling his ghost sense constantly, and as his eyes drank in the wonderful sight of it, he almost forgot of the evil it seemed to exhude. It was needless to say, he had never seen such a thing before.

Danny hardly felt how the Castle was leeching his attention, leaving him too awestruck to pay attention to his surroundings. Luckily for him, his ghost sense was madly trying to stir him back into his normal state of alert, and it finally succeeded. He shook his head, dissolving the slight spell, and began running towards the place where Jazz's footprints seemed to lead. As he drew closer to the Castle, which had no gates but an atrium, he slowed down and crept silently in order to hide behind some rocks, which shielded him from the scene which was taking place there that very same moment.

"Why do I have the feeling that I'm a dead guy if whomever is there gets its hands on me?" Danny thought, nervous, as he peeped from behind one of those large rocks that protruded from the sand.

The atrium was like a wall-less, roofless room, in which every single piece of furniture or detail of the tiles on the ground was thoroughly made of sand. In the center of it, Danny saw a large table or sand-made stone, which acted as an altar. By the altar stood a medieval-looking hooded figure, and around it danced sand grains in a frenetical waltz. On the altar, Danny could see a woman lying, though he couldn't know who it was or whether she was sleeping, unconscious, or dead. He congratulated himself on remaining human, because if he had turned ghost, he would have surely been detected. Although the Sand Castle was of a rare composition, he had no doubt about the hooded figure- it was a ghost. As it went on with its ritual, the sand grains eventually gained an order and, forming a long string, opened the gates of the Castle and Danny saw with horror how, from within it, emerged Jazz.

In that moment, Danny knew what the previous day's unwell-ness had been about. He had somehow feared something like this could happen. Jazz walked like in a trance towards the It figure, eyes completely white.

His lips pursed. "So it's eternity for you as a... like that?"

"Well, not really... I know I'll be changing places soon with someone else... "


A/N: OH! The agonizing suspense... What will happen now? Only a tidal wave of reviews can convince me to update it as fast as possible! :P

Anyway, haha, kisses to all of you who're reading, even to those reluctant to constructive criticism xD