Dealing with the Dead
(all insecurities are half off)


4

Danny Fenton has attended four funerals.

The first of which was for a bird, Twitter. This was before Twitter, the social network, when the word was simply twitter: (n) the sound birds make. An American Robin, unnamed, built a nest on the Fenton's back porch under the roof overhang. This took place in their first home; forever referred to in past tense as the yellow house. Twitter began as a blue egg, watched eagerly by the two Fenton children who dared to summit a step-stool on their tip-toes. When the egg hatched it became a constantly chirping fixture, rivaled only by the parent robins that squawked at children who got too close. Jazz Fenton, six, became an expert at repeating bird noises. Danny Fenton, four, imagined his sister might someday become a bird, in the way most children imagine impossible futures as inevitable outcomes. He said "tweet, tweet" and in a moment, this became a form of address. A name for the hatchling. Twitter.

American Robins will first leap from their nest thirteen days after birth. Most of them survive this event. Twitter did not. Jazz remembered the way her heart stilled when she pushed open the screen door. Danny remembered only one sharp image; a baby bird, a dark lump of small feathers, unmoving. In Columbia Heights, Minnesota, the Fenton family gathered around a patch of unearthed dirt on a damp spring afternoon. Maddie Fenton placed a children's shoebox (plus one dead bird) into the ground. Jazz dropped yellow grass flowers and dandelions on top. Jack Fenton wielded the garden spade; Danny dropped buckthorn berries onto the grave, insisting birds needed to eat. He was exactly four years, three days, eight hours and fifty-one minutes old.

He did not attend another funeral until he was living in Illinois. Eighteen days, twelve hours, and forty-three minutes after he turned nine years old, he was dressed in fine black clothing, brand new, and saying goodbye to a photograph of his grandfather that was too young and unwrinkled to be his grandfather. His third funeral took place in a similar fashion in a similar location for his grandmother; precisely fifty-six days, two hours, and eleven minutes after his tenth birthday. His black clothes didn't fit as well the second time.

Danny Fenton's fourth funeral was his own. He decided to do it in his second year of high school. One-hundred and thirty-seven days, eleven hours, and twenty-nine minutes after his fifteenth birthday. He wore a black sweatshirt, dark shoes, and his darkest shade of mud-stained jeans. Like Twitter, the funeral took place humbly in his backyard (a different backyard) and had a similar number of guests. Tucker dug a small hole with a garden spade, measuring it six inches by six inches. Sam read a eulogy in the style of classic beat poetry. Jazz brought flowers (tulips, yellow) and exactly fourteen buckthorn berries. In the grave Danny placed a worn, folded piece of paper - his birth certificate. Sam gave him a lighter. When the document became ash, Danny got on his knees and buried it with the flowers and berries.

He thanked his friends for coming. They left. He remained.

There's a weight to dying, and unacknowledged it became a burden. He dealt with it as well as he figured he could, knowing someday he would die again, and knowing that for the rest of his current life he was already dead. What he was now - dead, alive, both and neither - meant many things, but in the end it boiled down to ceremony; two ceremonies. Two funerals.

Two for the price of one.

What a deal.


Danny found considering the many ways in which he would die an inevitable pastime; it was easier to think about not having a future than it was to plan for one. He figured he'd die young. He almost counted on it, if his lack of college applications and complete disinterest in the job market had anything to say about it. Danny guessed that he might die falling, careening towards the earth without enough energy to keep flying - he had almost died this way five times. There was also the very real threat that he might simply be beaten to death; this at least had the most willing contestants. Often he thought he might die on an operating table, and those thoughts made his breath stop and his heart freeze; he couldn't sleep when he thought of dying like that. He did, however, find time to cope with the possibility.

He did not expect to drown.

This is mainly due to the fact that he did not need to breathe. He hypothesized very few situations where running out of air occurred to him as a problem at all. Suffocation is a slow way to die, and with Danny's more permanent reserves, slow deaths were just unlikely. In fact, the only way in which Danny imagined his lungs might starve was on the infrequent chance he might end up off planet (again), lose in some kind of epic battle, and return to his human form in the worst place possible. In such an event, the terrifying vacuum of space presented a few more pressing problems than simple suffocation. That said, when confronted with the possibility of death arriving in a way he did not expect, Danny experienced terror.

Danny was in the diner, discussing the different types of eggs on the menu, and while he sensed that things were off he'd been willing to wait for the right opportunity to get away from Dash. The waitress directed him to the back and he walked into the kitchen; the floor was wet. Walls of silver appliances surrounded him. He sighted a phone on the opposite wall (beige), took a step toward it, and without so much as a sound to mark the transition his foot landed in a running creek. The kitchen vanished, he glimpsed trees and the sky before water (loud, rushing) rose over his head with a sound like rolling thunder. Unnatural in every aspect of itself, the water swirled around him; his sneakers slipped on a bed of loose stones and he was swept upside down. The current pressed. The water was a familiar kind of cold, the kind that was more about the abstract chill than the reality. Danny's lips parted - an accident, his lungs filled with the wrong substance.

This is no cause to panic.

He doesn't technically need air.

Danny reach for his core, an energy that filled his chest and overwhelmed his senses for the split moment it took to transform. He activated it in the same way that he would stretch his legs or pick up a pencil, a muscular reaction rather than a forced command. His head down to his toes felt hot and cold at the same time, he closed his eyes, waited for the electric sizzle of energy to pass through his bones and make him lighter. He waited. It buzzed, definitely there, his core definitely active. Nothing happened. His lungs burned, his human body hit the riverbed and rocks dug into his back. His ghost half - try as he might - did not react. It was at this moment Danny realized he actually needed air.

This is cause to panic.

A stone struck him between the shoulders, breaking his concentration with a sharp jolt. He turned in the water, finding the stone and hooking his arm underneath it while water battered him from all sides. He tried to push off the rock, but was forced back down - the water kept him immobilized. Under. Drowning. Human. The stone dug into his stomach and his knees hit pebbles. His lungs burned, his throat ached; Danny opened his eyes (blackness with a lot of stinging) and slammed them shut again. He wrapped his fingers around a jagged curve in the rock, cutting his hands, and understood that he was going to drown. Years of facing his death on a seemingly day-to-day basis did not prepare him for the mind-numbing horror that sank into his gut.

He was going to die.

He was going to die and he couldn't even put up a fight.

White dots popped in his vision, he grew dizzy. Dimly, Danny thought of how this is what it meant to be human. To die without reason, without any power to stop it. Helpless. Unbidden, Tucker's voice entered his head, "You're not human, Danny," he bumped against his shoulder, grinning, "and that's totally fine."

Not human.

He dug his fingers into the stone and curled them, trying to keep still. Focused. He tried to activate his ghost half, reaching for the shift of energy and weight and buzzing fire in his gut, but it slipped away. Like trying to keep a marble from rolling off a quarter; one movement, and he had to start over. The current yanked at his clothes. His lungs burned, begging for help; he focused on them - the marble now balanced on a quarter which itself balanced on the tip of a pen - and grit his teeth. Lungs. That's all he needed, like phasing just his arm through a locker door. He narrowed the need to transform to that one area, threw all of his remaining brainpower into it.

For a moment he had it. A hot-cold jolt that sparked deep inside of his chest, making it lighter, softer. The hungry, oxygen starved dizziness in his head slowed - tricked for a moment to act like a ghost. His muscles burned, the water pulled his hair, and he lost it. A sick wave of nausea overcame him, he parted his lips, his mouth filled with water, and he hunched against the stone to try again.

In this fashion, Danny Fenton extended his life by exactly two minutes and twenty-nine seconds.

A buzzing filled his ears. His limbs grew heavy and his mind tired. The buzzing, a hum, grew louder and twisted into a tongue that was almost a language - it felt and tasted like ghostspeak, but garbled. Stars popped in his vision, hot and white, they formed into a circle in his mind's eye. Unlike the imprint of staring into the sun, this circle rapidly changed color. The pressure in his lungs faded. Danny didn't know if he was falling unconscious or seeing "the light at the end of the tunnel," approaching his second and final death.

The water seemed to fade away. He was weightless in the way that he couldn't feel his limbs. He floated in a black empty space, the colored circle the only thing to see. It grew brighter, bigger, filling a dark cavern…

It flickered.

Then turned off.

Danny hit the ground flat on his back, gasping. His limbs heavy, head pounding, chest burning. Innocuous water droplets trickled down his cheeks and sank into the cold water that lazed around his ears. He opened his eyes. Jupiter hung low to the horizon, Leo rising above it. Clouds obscured the constellations directly above. Danny breathed, his lungs miraculously free of water; his body protested his attempt to sit up, joints screaming at their abuse. He sat over his knees, huffing.

He found himself sitting in what was more of a really muddy puddle than a stream, though it carved a thin path down between the trees toward the lake. Beside his hand, a ghost fish emerged from the mud and swam around his head, then swished its tail and followed a stream that wasn't (was?) there, away from Danny. It dissolved into a white mist before passing the first tree, merging with the forest.

Danny's body shook. He hauled himself to his feet and wobbled; black mud oozed down his arms. He turned his back to the forest. The diner, illuminated by the moon and backlit by a parking lot, was close enough to stumble to. Danny landed against the back door and fumbled with the brass handle. His throat ached and he felt between fainting and vomiting, but Tucker needed him. A terror radiated from the building, like a bad smell mixed with an unpleasant hangover.

He tried to activate his ghost half, thinking that it was about time he used it. The right energy tingled from his chest down to his fingertips.

Nothing happened.


Blood browns after a while.

Danny wore white, damaged sneakers. The damp shoes had plenty of seams where a needle and thread pierced them, accompanied by strips of peeling grey tape. Along the front of the shoes blood oxidized to a muddy shade. Danny ran his fingers over the laces, a habit he'd picked up whenever he needed to bring his knees to his chest and think of nothing at all. He had dirt under his nails, some of it dried up his arm. Ring.

He pulled the phone cord taut, then loose, winding the plastic cord around his finger. It pulled his skin tight. The phone existed on the wall of the convenience store where in the diner it had not, an illusion that was so real and convincing Danny wondered about the booths, how real they seemed, how convincing. Nothing in their current setting even hinted at tables and chairs. He pulled his finger free; the cord bounced back to compact curls. Ring.

The phone (beige) was affixed to the wall and wedged between a classic gas station coffee bar (black, silver, foam cups) and a manual-spin postcard display (Andy Warhol, cat pictures, Sarah Winnemucca). Danny placed himself (damp) underneath the phone (against the wall) between the coffee counter and postcards (a cat with sunglasses nearest to him read "fish are cool…" and presumably elaborated behind the cover). Ring.

Adjacent to a wall of crackers and jerky, Dash positioned a box of baby wipes on his knees. He pulled one out, thoroughly cleaned his hands and wrists, then dropped the wipe on the floor. It joined a growing pile of seemingly clean wipes. Dash plucked the next one from the box, his eyes glazed over in the methodic task. He did not notice the bloodstains on his jeans. Danny didn't remind him. Ring.

In the aisle behind Dash between a rack of toiletries and chips lay the body. Danny could only see her from the shoulders up. Her hair framed her face in a gold and red halo. A shadow distracted the floor; Tucker, pacing outside. He went through the motions of someone who believed that stomping feet and determined scowling would somehow inspire a better plan. Ring.

They didn't have a better plan. They had a corpse. Ring.

All those ghosts and they weren't prepared for a dead body. Ring.

Ironic.

Rin-click. A throat cleared. "Hello?"

Danny plucked at his shoelaces. He considered letting the phone drop and dangle uselessly by his side. He considered leaping to his feet and slamming the phone back on the receiver. He considered lapsing into a silence only filled by his low breathing. "Who is this?" Annoyed. "How did you get this number?"

Danny scratched his nose. "I memorized it." He admitted and pressed his back against the wall, comforted by its solidity. "I, um, I don't - don't flatter yourself." He could feel the pause on the other line like a mosquito bite on the bottom of his foot. "I won't put your number in my contacts, but I still had to know it because - well, what if you're being crazy or - or… general, prank calls… I didn't memorize it because I wanted to or - " He bit down on his lip. He did not need help. "Please don't hang up."

Apprehension wrapped around his throat and constricted; Danny's gaze wandered over to the body and stayed there, familiarizing himself with the change of color from her hairline to her forehead to her nose and to her lips. Blonde, pink, red, brown, red, grey. He thought of how he must look, the damp boy on the phone with a dead woman on the floor. "Daniel."

He wore blood on his shoes.

"V-man."

Like war paint.

"Don't call me that."

Rust colored war paint, scratched and deteriorating.

"Sorry." He needed new shoes. "So, uh, how's the land contract going?" Danny searched for the right words. He didn't know why he needed to sound normal, but he absolutely completely needed to. In the casual tone of small talk and weather commentary, he tactfully added: "Have you ever killed anybody?"

"What?"

"I mean, like." The wall against his back dropped in temperature. Danny pitched forward, freezing. "You know how to hide bodies, like, after they're… dead."

Seconds stretched with the same weight as hours. Vlad's reply was terse and serious, but not accusatory. "I might be somewhat familiar with dead things." Danny tangled the phone cord between two fingers and set to pulling himself free. "Cool, cool. Cool. I might need - need that. A little. Not really. I mean I'm fine."

The line was silent for long enough that Danny thought perhaps no one was on the other end. But as the thought crossed his mind, he caught the tail end of what was a very long sigh. "Where?"

His shoulders sank. As predicted, Vlad used the same calculating intensity that made him creepy and unapproachable. Danny never thought that'd be such a relief. "Uh - a diner, no, gas station. Near the, um…"

"Algernon's."

"Yeah."

"Stay where you are."

Danny tugged on the cord. His toes were cold. "Yeah," he muttered. "Thanks."

Vlad gave him only a click and a dial tone. Danny dropped the phone; it bounced and dangled inches above the floor. He pressed his hands together and rubbed them, fighting the idea of cold. It didn't change anything; this was just how he reacted to feeling… to not knowing… to not…

Impossibly, ectoenergy hummed under his skin. The coffee machine that had been emitting a low hum ground to a halt. The metal nozzle fogged over with a layer of frost. Danny got to his feet and tucked his hands under his arms; he just needed to distract himself, that was all. Nothing was wrong. He looked at Dash, who ran out of new baby wipes and utilized old ones to scrub under his fingernails. Dash.

A bystander.

Innocent.

Shit.

Danny turned away, unable to piece together what he should even try to do about that. He walked to the woman sprawled on the floor, her head turned and cooling in a pool of her own blood. Her feet were neatly tucked and arms spread. Tracks of viscous blood like spiderwebs congealed in her hair and dried around split lips. He waited for guilt, pity, panic; something that would qualify as a reaction. Nothing. The fluorescent lights buzzed; Danny ran his shoe over a streak of blood on the tile and disturbed none of it. Dry. His head started to spin in the way that indicated a drop in his reserves. He blinked once, twice, and while the woman was still there and the lights just as fluorescent, Danny wasn't. He was in his body, in his head, and everything around him glazed over. His knees hurt, and his fingers itched, and his hair felt greasy - but these were distant, unimportant needs.

He was supposed to know what to do with himself. He was supposed to know what to do about Dash. He barely knew how to pull air into his lungs, he could hardly feel himself existing in the present moment. He needed to be in charge. To lead. Or to at least have Sam tell him what to do; she could pretend to have a plan where Tucker could only admit they were out of their depth. He wished he could have called her; but between them, Danny and Tucker could only remember that Sam's phone number had two sevens and a five in it. He didn't know what to do.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood on edge. He looked out the window and found Tucker framed by lamplight, his arms folded, eyes locked on the body. People have died around them before, not like this, but they've died. Tucker was usually the one calling an ambulance. Now he just stood. Lost. Danny walked around the body and jostled the door - the same bell that had greeted them rang cheerfully. The night air cooled his damp clothes and made him shiver. Tucker turned.

"Hey," Danny said softly.

"Hey."

"Cold out here."

Tucker shrugged and stuffed his hands in his pockets. "I'm used to it. My best friend is a living ice cube."

Danny snorted. He smiled, a fake and unimpressive attempt at laughing it off. He walked over to Tucker, unsure of what kind of reassurance there was to give. Tucker took his hand and turned it over, frowning at the blueish tint to Danny's fingers. "You don't look very good."

"I'm just - frazzled," Danny admitted. "I'll be fine."

Tucker shot him a glare that clearly told him he knew it was a lie. He sighed and rubbed his head, facing the store again to stare at the body. "Frazzled. Sure. And I didn't kill anybody, she's just sleeping. We're not in over our heads, we definitely have an idea of what we're up against now."

Movie popcorn. A brand new CPU in plastic packaging. Muddy shoelaces. Tucker had a scent - not in a way that actually smelled like anything, but in the way that Danny came near him and was reminded of certain comforts. The human version of an ectosignature; organic. Underneath all of the familiar was something else, something that stung like a swarm of biting ants. "I'm sorry." He winced; all the ants bit down at once. "I don't know what…"

"Don't apologise." Tucker didn't take his eyes off the body. "You didn't do this."

"I wasn't there."

"So?" Tucker clenched his fists. "It doesn't change anything."

Danny stepped closer to him. He touched his arm; Tucker flinched, looking at his hand. He frowned, shoulders dropping. "You're cold, Danny," he whispered, shivering. "You're falling apart. We're falling apart."

Ashamed, Danny propped his back against the glass and sighed, tilting his head up. The convenience store still had the same broken neon lights they'd seen when they came in to a diner. A bad omen. "I called him."

Tucker expertly rubbed his eyes without disturbing his glasses, fully exhausted. "Good," his voice cracked, "you needed to."

"We needed to."

"No." Tucker shook his head. He indicated the window. Directly behind Danny, a reflective halo bloomed with frost that grew visibly thicker. Danny jerked away from it and folded his arms tightly, hiding a glimmer of fear. "Oh. That. I'm just...off." Need to calm down. That's all.

"You're leaking."

"I'm having a bad day."

The softness that had entered Tucker's eyes from the moment he noticed Danny's frostbitten fingers vanished. He glared him down, lips tightly pressed together. "The last time you had a bad day the worst thing that happened was a broken plate, Danny. You don't have slip ups like this. Something's wrong."

"Well I can't ask him for help!" Discomfort sank down into his bones. All of his scars exposed, Vlad having put some of them there. Fear and anger warring in his gut and all he could do was reach in the fridge and pretend to brush it off. He removed a gatorade and could feel Vlad watching him all the way back to the volleyball game. Seeing what he was. What he really was. "It's not simple, Tucker! He's dangerous!"

Danny could only see his memories on the beach. People looked at him. The ball went too far. They watched, they talked, they guessed. His heart pounded, his breath caught. They would ask, they would know, they would never leave him alone - Tucker's voice snapped him out of it. The parking lot, the convenience store, his best friend. It all spun. "You'll have him hide a body for you and that's fine?!"

Danny swayed. He slumped against the store, shoulder crashing into a thick layer of glossy ice and glass. Beneath the ice, the glass was deeply scratched by some former incident. Danny stared at the scratches, his breathing slowed. Tucker grabbed his shoulder, leaning in. Danny blinked at him, disoriented. Wasn't Tucker supposed to be angry? A thumb swiped underneath his eye, catching a - tear? Danny blinked. "Eyes are glowing again." Tucker said softly, frowning. "You need to ask him for help. I can't do anything, I don't know enough."

Danny looked down at himself. His entire body glowed dimly, an aura that faded only when he scowled at it. Danny wiped at his nose and shrugged, scuffing the concrete. "I can't transform," he admitted, shame colored his cheeks.

Tucker's jaw dropped. He searched Danny's face, waited for a punch line. When it didn't come his hands flew into the air and shook. "Y-you didn't - tell me?"

"You were panicking. I'm sorry."

"You can't ghost?"

Danny smiled meekly. "I can't even."

"It's not funny!" Tucker stopped, he spun. The trees observed in silence. He stepped off the curb and paced between parking spaces. "Your eyes are glowing?"

Danny lifted his arms in helpless defeat. "I don't know. I have - the energy is here I just can't…" Danny sank in on himself, his throat tightened. His eyes changed color and glowed with the same dull light of a child's plastic glow-in-the-dark stars. "Don't make me tell Vlad. I don't want him to know that I can't… that… I can't let him know I'm defenseless."

His bones ached, a familiar headache in his temples. He watched the ground; Tucker's sneakers marched into view, stopping inches from Danny's blood-smeared trainers. Hands fell on his arms, squeezing lightly. Warm breath spread across his nose; Danny looked up. Tucker was close, heat spilling off of him, a reminder of what it meant to be warm. Human. Tucker squeezed his hand. It hurt to hold, stinging like stepping into a warm house on a snowy day, and for the first time Danny feared that he wasn't going to get better. That his skin would turn purple and black, and that he would slowly freeze until the ghost inside of him killed whatever humanity was left. The gravity of the situation hit him right then; he could be dying. He had to do something, he had to - "Okay," Tucker said, his voice low. "We'll figure it out. You and me."

Danny blinked. "Really?"

"We've got this far, right?" Tucker grinned. "And you only died once."

Danny laughed, a hollow sound. It echoed and reverberated through the parking lot, even after he stopped. Danny paled, the echo grew and morphed into a deep rumbling growl. Sound bounced between the trees and circled them; the unmistakable bellow of a machine with an engine that was built to be quiet until it reach 100 miles per hour. Unconsciously, Danny moved in front of Tucker as a black sedan with tinted windows ejected from the road and slammed on its brakes. It moved with the elegance of a shadow, the headlights inactive and dark decorations. The tires screamed and spit dust into the air in great plumes, the car spun and then landed in perfect alignment with the handicapped parking space.

The driver's door opened.

Out of the door stepped a man. Despite the lack of both streetlights on the road and active headlights on the car, he wore sunglasses. His hair, which was long and grey, was braided neatly down his back. In one hand he held car keys and in the other he carried a sleek silver phone. He smiled at them, but it was not a smile so much as a show of unnaturally pointed teeth. "Evening." Vlad Masters shut the door, for all intents and purposes impossible to distinguish between a human being and a prince of hell.

Danny fell into a defensible stance without thinking about it. His knees hurt when bent to lower his center of gravity, and a breeze that stuck to his damp clothes made him shiver. Danny folded his arms to keep himself still. "Vlad."

"Daniel," Vlad greeted easily. A foreign raw ectoenergy stuffed the air; Vlad winced, and it faded. He stepped up to them, as completely unfazed by their meeting as he would be for the apocalypse. "I see you've mastered the art of sleeping with your eyes open."

A million responses came to mind, each sharper than the last. Danny held his tongue, he wanted to get through this alive. He ached for normalcy, for a ghost hunt that involved tangible ghosts, and he wanted sleep more than anything. "I told you I'd find out what you're planning." He said, letting his exhaustion show. "Is this it? Are you doing this?"

Vlad paused, he tilted his head with a carefully neutral expression. "Am I… doing what? Your phone call was exceptionally vague, son."

"Don't call me that." He lost control of his shiver, his shoulder trembled with it no matter how hard he held himself together. "I need to know if I'm kicking your ass or not."

Vlad looked him up and down, at his damp clothes (the second time that day Danny stood in front of him soaked); he took in the way Danny seemed on the verge of sinking to the ground and lying there until the sun came up. "You called me… to confront me in front of a gas station… to ask me if I'm… what, exactly?"

Tucker grabbed his shirt, but his fingers fell away when Danny marched up to Vlad. At age 17 Danny was nearly at his full height, and stood only an inch shorter than Vlad. Unbidden ectoenergy leapt into his eyes, angry and popping. His skin lit up, translucent, flooded down into his fingernails and made them glisten with starlight. "Someone's dead," Danny said quietly. "I can't afford to mess around right now. Tell me."

"You look faint," Vlad replied, an anger in his voice that reflected Danny's. "Unfortunately, Daniel, I am not the source of all your misfortune. I'm here, despite my better instincts, because you asked me to be." A shock like a dog's bite struck Danny's arm and he jolted, falling back. Vlad replaced the glasses. "I told you. I don't actively seek your company."

Danny rubbed his forearm. "I can get behind that."

"Then why am I here?"

"You owe me."

Vlad's sunglasses lit up with a furious fixation. "For what?"

"You're the one who strapped me to a table and decided to play coroner." Danny shook, sick to his stomach. A familiar taste in the air, like a storm about to break, but Danny was certain that he himself produced that feeling, that Vlad's presence alone exposed something volatile in him. "I'd say you owe me for it."

"You burned my house down for that!"

"That fire was a civil service."

"You killed my cat!"

Danny held up his arms, "Well how was I supposed to know you had one?"

"You didn't check before you commit arson?" Vlad pointed at him, the air popped around his body, shimmering and morphing. "I owe you nothing. We've been even for a year and I have not done a single thing to tip that scale. I don't want anything to do with you, I told you I'm - " He stopped himself and straightened, righting his blazer and fixing his tie. "No. I'm done. Good luck with your murder."

He turned his back. The storm broke.

"Fine! I didn't want your help anyway!"

"Danny."

"Not now Tuck."

"But - "

Danny twisted out of Tucker's way and followed Vlad back to the car. "I shouldn't have called you in the first place, I knew you'd be useless! You're just a heartless, stupid, empty - "

Vlad seized him by the shirt and slammed him against the car. Danny gasped, stinging, his legs shaking. He tried to transform - instinct - but nothing sparked to the surface. The ectoenergy burning in his eyes faded and his skin became normal and opaque. All of his resources fled, untouchable, uncontrolled. "Do not call me that." Vlad's teeth were terrifyingly sharp up close.

"What?" Danny struggled. "Which one? Empty?"

An ecto-gun whirred to life. They stilled at the familiar sound. Tucker planted his feet and aimed the lipstick blaster point-blank. "Let him go."

Vlad blinked at the tiny weapon. "You're serious?"

"Very."

The space around Vlad's body rippled. Waves that were heat and rage and terror morphed all around him, a vicious anxiety that clung to living things and dragged them down with it. The energy billowed, a vibrant fury, popping and sparking the physical air. Danny held his breath. The energy expanded, reaching for Tucker, wrapping around him with an invisible but electrifying power. The ecto-gun loosened in his fingers, his eyes went wide, Tucker gulped for air that didn't reach his lips -

If it wasn't for the bell chime, Tucker might have dropped his only weapon. Instead, Vlad's attack was interrupted by a mad-eyed teenager in a too-tight Danny Phantom sweater. Dash ran at Vlad in the same way a lemming runs off the edge of a cliff; with only a fear of what's behind, and no thought to what danger lay ahead.

Tucker fired.

The blast ricocheted off a shield that materialized in front of Vlad and struck Dash dead on. He fell.

Taking advantage of his relative confusion, Danny pushed Vlad off. He knelt next to Dash, but hesitated with Vlad hovering over them, "Pause."

"You don't always have to say it, Daniel. I understand basic secrecy," Vlad said, proving that he did not at all care about basic secrecy. He brushed off his coat and gave the teenager curled on the ground a snide look.

Dash groaned.

"It's friendly fire, you'll be fine."

"Pause generally means shut up, fruitcake."

"Oh, so now we're supposed to operate on the same page? Forgive me, I misinterpreted."

Danny held his tongue for Dash's sake; he poked his shoulder and earned a wince. He glanced at Tucker, who had shied away from the convenience store with a cautious look. Danny wasn't concerned; god forbid anything attack with Vlad present (that was, incidentally half the reason for calling him in the first place, not that Danny needed protecting). "Come on, Dash, you're fine. Ecto-blasts don't hurt humans, you know that."

Dash rolled over. He held his hand over his cheek and ear, where the blast had grazed. Danny frowned. "Hey? You okay?"

Dash pressed his trembling lips together with his eyes squeezed shut, and shook his head. Danny took his hand and slowly pried it back to reveal the red welt underneath. A stench rose, stomach-churning and familiar in a way that hit him full-force; burnt ectoplasm and human flesh. It was the same distinct smell that Danny's own wounds carried, unique to a specific kind of creature.

Dash peeled his eyes open. Even the pain-closed slits had something off about them, an almost-glow that flickered underneath his irises. "Fenton?" Dash's voice was hoarse.

Danny stared into his eyes, riveted, on the brink of witnessing the impossible. "Yeah?"

"Do you, ah, do you know how to tell if someone's alive or, uh… like, hypothetically, not?"

In that moment Dash's eyes flickered briefly, but unmistakably, supernaturally green.


It's nearly two am. What are you doing? Are you getting enough sleep?

-Carrie

Up next:
Excerpt 4
Vlad Masters
and the peculiar autopsy of Agnieszka Stawecka (Part 1 of 3)