Disclaimer: I don't own any characters or canon-plot details of Danny Phantom or Thir13en Ghosts. Just the original stuff that is uniquely found here.

Nyaa.

=^o.o^=

Chapter 7

Shortly after the Great Child vanished, Danny remembered the Pilgrimess was still lurking around. Quickly, he whipped around, keeping his back to the walls. For once, he was glad that they had runes etched into them. That meant they were solid defense, like a tortoise's shell.

"Oh, look – the brat's learning! Maybe there's hope for me yet." Dan mocked.

Jean took up residence beside the young halfa. "You're doing good, Danny." she told him, her voice low to escape their captor's detection.

"Good? I've killed… er, re-killed… three people! I mean, sure, maybe Royce had it coming for what a jerk he was, but those last two could have just had… I dunno… lack of air circulation to their brains or something…?"

"The word you're looking for is retard, retard!" Dan barked. "And what's with this 'maybe' Royce deserved it? He was a jock, and he was a jerk, both of which begin and end with the same letters, so they can't be a good combination. He totally had it coming! You're in the clear for taking the afterlife of a bitter young soul – whose rage was almost completely justified, by the way, seeing as he was murdered and all in life!"

The guilt trip managed to peg Danny a bit, but he shook his head and dismissed it. He could worry about Dan congratulating him another time.

"Trying to pity the deaths of Harold and Margaret for their mental incapacities is redundant for just that very reason – having a mental impairment in life translates to close-mindedness as a wraith. You could have spoken to them for hours without hope of converting them to goodness… hm?"

Jean was cut off as Susan stormed over to them, fury burning in her eyes. Danny turned around… just in time to get slapped. Dumbstruck, he touched his stinging cheek and stared at her in confusion. "…I saved you!"

"I didn't say you could save me! I saw you kill the naked bitch, which means that you don't get to be nice to me!" she screamed, then slapped him a second time.

"For last time, Susan – I didn't kill Dana!" Danny caught her wrist as she attempted a third strike. "Dammit, why won't you fucking listen?!"

"Because I hate you!" Susan shrieked, kicking at him now. He tried to step out of her way and ultimately resorted to butting his forehead into hers, stunning her.

"Jeez! You know what? I am totally never having a fantasy about a popular girl again because of you!" Danny pushed her back and threw up his hands. "You're crazy! You attack people who are trying to help you and hurt people who care because you think the sun shines out of your ass! You might think you're being covert about this, but guess what – I know you want me to attack you. You cheated on your fiancé and he killed you, so maybe you're dwelling on the stuff you did wrong in life and want to be taken out the painful way. Whatever the reason, I officially do not care! I refuse to attack you, so come back when you've dislodged the stick from your ass!"

Susan's eyes were round. Whether she was still stunned from the head-butt or newly stunned from the sudden outpour of grousing from Danny was anyone's guess.

"Ye oughtn't worry about the opinions of men; they are the weaker of the species."

Danny jumped to attention and turned as a fireball smashed into his chest. He coughed as the inferno sank into his ribcage, burning with an obnoxious intensity. It felt as if it were infecting his very Core – his ice core. He sputtered some water. That couldn't be a good sign.

"Danny!" Jean turned pale as he fell to his knees, coughing as his lungs began filling up with water. She stepped between Isabella and Danny as the Pilgrimess appeared in the room, drifting slowly towards the group with an eerie grin spread across her face. "I swear to God, if you touch a single hair on his head…"

"You cannot hope to stand up to me, dearie; ye are far below myself and my power." The weathered old crone bared her snaggled teeth as her grin widened. "Ye have no idea how delicious it was, causing misery to those who hated me for my beliefs. After a lifetime of doing harm to no one? I can see why so many of your kind believe in evil – it is an amazing stress-reliever…"

"I have nothing against other religions, but 'my kind' believe in evil because people as dark as you walk the earth." Jean spat, trying to buy Danny a minute. She glanced to the side. Susan had vanished; they were alone. Jean could only pray that Isabella didn't hurl another fireball – she didn't know if she would have the reflexes to block it in time.

"Git bark…!" The gurgling was barely recognizable as words, but before she realized it, Danny had grabbed Jean by the arm and pulled her behind him. Focusing as best he could with his sense of drowning, the boy opened his mouth wide, water positively pouring from his throat, and forced out a Ghostly Wail as best as he could.

The result was something akin to a small typhoon. Isabella shrieked as she was thrown back into one of the rattling, rune-etched glass walls and pinned there. She could feel herself deteriorating at a rapid rate, as if she were reliving her death in extreme fast-forward. The resulting pain, while brief by comparison, was also much more intense and debilitating than merely succumbing to the elements in the stockades had been. In attacking Danny Phantom with an opposing element, she had given him the temporary status of force of nature – the very thing that had killed her.

Danny fell face-first into the floor, head spinning, as his voice finally gave out. He hadn't even had the wherewithal to go ghost, and that was obviously a bad choice, but he didn't regret it. He was alive. He was no longer drowning in his own melted ice element. On top of everything, Jean was okay.

"Danny? Danny!" He felt her roll him onto his back and begin shaking his shoulders. He grunted as light beamed onto his face, turning his head away. "Danny, don't you dare give in right now! Please. We still need you to survive!"

"What's with this 'we'?" Dan taunted the distraught woman. "You're already dead. You've already lost your children by dying in a fire, remember? Oh, wait – let me guess; it's different watching the kid die instead, right? What's the matter, Jean? Thinking of your precious baby boy?"

"Shut up." Jean hissed, trembling in pain. The thought brought her torture, but, yes, as a ghost obsessed over her family, she had imprinted on Danny as one of her own. She could never be with her own family. They were alive. That was why she maintained a measure of sanity without ascending.

It still killed her to watch 'her' child near death.

Danny suddenly let out a loud gasp, his icy Core making a comeback with a vengeance. He sat bolt upright and hugged himself, teeth chattering, as he experienced an entirely-new event: his 'ghost' tissue rebuilding itself at an accelerated rate. It felt like part of his heart had been ripped out, and now it was growing back with the addition of ice-cold pins and needles jabbing into the surrounding living tissue. His internal body temperature plummeted to a point that would kill a normal human.

Jean placed a hand to his forehead as Danny turned pale, lips growing purple. After a moment, she gave a small sigh of relief and smothered him in a hug. Danny didn't fight it; she was warmer than he was right now.

"Did you see the white light, Danny?" Dan mused, although some level of disappointment could be heard in his voice.

Danny didn't answer as the clock chimed. He just wanted to go home.

"Come on, Danny." Jean stood up and pulled him to his feet. "Come on." she repeated, pulling him along. "We need to hide while you heal."

"Heal?" he croaked, trying to stay his chattering teeth. He ended up biting his cheek and winced.

"Yes. Your body is healing right now – and I might add rather miraculously-so." Jean looked around before pulling Danny into a bedroom before its entryway was sealed with one of the shifting walls. They would be trapped in the locked room, but they would be safe until the next chime of the clock. "Here. Lie down."

"N-No." Danny's head felt fuzzy and jittery at the same time. "Can't stay. G-Gotta keep m-m-moving."

"You've already got ghostly aspirations. Now down." With surprising strength, Jean threw Danny into the bed and quickly bundled him up in the blanket. He tried to kick for a moment, but found his body didn't want to move and had to give up as he was swaddled like an oversized infant. "I dun feel good."

"I know you don't." Jean patted his shoulder sympathetically before placing both palms on the blanket. "Now relax. I need to focus."

Unlike other ghosts, wraiths didn't have a natural inclination towards any specific element in their Core – Isabella only wielded them at all because she had been a practicing Witch in life. However, they had trace amounts if they were killed in an appropriate way, with the drawback being that they were also highly susceptible to the same element in large doses.

She breathed in deeply, and upon exhale was able to transfer some measure of heat into the rolled-up blanket. It was snuffed out by the cold Danny's body was giving off now, but a second gentle wave came in time to replace it, followed by a third and a fourth.

Danny didn't notice any of it, though. He had slipped into unconsciousness.


Danny woke up to a loud crash. His eyes shot open, but he found himself unable to move. At first he thought he might be paralyzed until he recalled that he had been bundled up before falling asleep. He didn't even remember falling asleep, but, man, he was so… cozy…

There was another crash and he sat upright. Beside him, Jean had crossed her arms and laid her head to rest on the bed's edge, though she wasn't asleep.

"It's just George, Danny. He found us about ten minutes ago."

"George?" Danny frowned and looked about.

His eyes turned wide as he saw the ghost that had been released, which he could only describe as an African-American version of Hellraiser's Pinhead on steroids, and with railroad spikes instead of needles. As the man on the other side of the glass rose an arm to thump against the wall again, Danny cheerlessly noted another difference – one of the man's hands had been chopped off and replaced with a sledgehammer.

"He… uh… I'm not gonna be able to 'bring him to his senses' the nice way, am I?"

"No, you're not." Jean sat up and sighed sadly as she looked at the man waiting to gain entry. "George is known as the Hammer." – Danny bit his cheek hard to keep from making any 'Hammer time' pop-offs. – "He lived in the 'Old West' era, while railroads were still being built everywhere. He was accused of stealing, and the accuser got a posse who went to his home while George was at his smithy. They raped, hanged and burned his wife and two daughters."

"What?!" Danny heaved as he felt the urge to throw up.

"Shit just got real for Danny." Dan commented.

"Suffice it to say, George wanted revenge." Jean continued, "And he got it. He killed those who had murdered his family, but… well, racism was still strong, even in the West, and his was the only 'colored' family in a small white town. What you see before you is what happened to him before he was chained to a tree and died."

"That happened while he was alive?" Danny hadn't taken his eyes off of George as the wraith scowled inside. Sure, no one deserved to die in any of the ways these ghosts had, but there was something so much more horrific about the Hammer's circumstance. His was so much more unjust. "Why… Why do you say I won't be able to reason with him?"

"Because he hates white people for the events leading up to and including his murder. They killed him in such a horrible way because of his skin color." Jean pointed out. "During that time, had a white man done the same thing to a white posse, he would have been seen as justified; had it been a white man to a black posse, it would have even been seen as empowering, even. To him, it's still a time of great racial segregation. Revenge is what fuels him. Revenge is what blinds him. Like the last two ghosts to be released, he is mad in his own right."

Danny stared at the angry ghost as he flickered in and out of sight momentarily, eyes fixed on the young halfa with a look of murderous intent. "The last two are stronger than this guy…?"

"They are a psychopath and sociopath, respectively; the Jackal, Ryan, and the Juggernaut, Horace." Jean sighed. "I suppose that I should tell you about them now, so you can try to plan your defense or attack."

"Yeah… Defense." Danny felt like a part of his heroic persona was dying. He didn't want to dispatch any more of these ghosts, but perhaps they were more like Ryan and Isabella than Harold and Margaret. Perhaps there was some evil in them, so that he could convince himself that it was self-defense, or good for the world at large – anything to let him sleep at night, which he wasn't sure he could do otherwise.

"The Jackal's name is Ryan, and he used to be the son of a prostitute in the late 1800's. He gained a disease that made him attack women – usually prostitutes like his mother, although the occasional deviance wandered into his path, like stray animals or runaways."

"So he was a bad guy, right?" Danny cut her off, hope faint in his voice.

Jean shook her head sadly. "He tried to get himself treatment at an asylum, but they just caged him… literally, after he began chewing through a straightjacket they kept him buckled up in. To keep him from escaping and hurting the staff and other patients, they put his head in a cage. One night a fire broke out, but by that time, Ryan was far too much like an animal, especially in that he feared and hated humans above all else. He… He decided he would rather take his chances in the fire and perished."

"What about the other one? The… The Juggernaut?"

"Horace… well, he was ostracized as a child for his tall stature and inability to empathize with others. His father decided to isolate him from a bullying world rather than teach him how to get along with people, so Horace grew up working in a junkyard, where he could break apart machinery with his own hands. After his father died, he upgraded to hitchhikers, and eventually died in a police shootout. It took so much time and ammo to bring Horace down that one officer unloaded an entire clip into his forehead… 'just to be safe'." Jean rubbed the back of her neck tiredly. "I wish I could lie and tell you that these ghosts used to be villainous, or naturally evil, but… it's just not true. Things were done to them that just twisted them the wrong way and made them what they are. There's a reason wraiths are notorious spirits to get rid of, even among the dead community – they were either born or driven mad in life."

Danny put his head in his hands. Maybe Dan would continue not to press the damn button that set the clock off. Maybe he could just stay in here forever, and rot in his own misery. But what about Jean, then, trapped in this box with eviler, stronger creatures than herself? What about his friends and family outside in the world? Even that pompous billionaire Vlad was counting on him to get out and hunt Dan down. Strange how the situation made him see even his archenemy in a new light – that made things really unfair.

"Alright." he said softly, getting to his feet. "Alright. I know what I have to do." Eyes glowing angry green, he scowled at the nearest camera. "Go ahead, Dan! Push the fucking button!"

Dan chuckled darkly. "Good to see you're growing up, Danny-boy."

=^T_T^=

The dark times cometh, and so nears the end. You could officially call this the final arc! …I'm sorry.

Nyaa.