Danny paced the storage room for a bit then realized that, with his parents gone, Ember had no reason to come back to her lair; she could as easily be going after Colonel Greenbriar again. He needed some way of luring Ember back here. What was there here that could draw the ghost rocker away from her vengeance? Looking around, Danny noticed the fringed leather jacket Ember had claimed as her own. On the principle that the surest way to make it rain is to wash one's car, Danny went over and picked the jacket up. As he was about to slide his arm into the sleeve he noticed a small cloth tag stitched into the lining next to the armhole. It was about as invisible a place to put a tag as anywhere. Danny read what was on the tag, smiled, and finished putting the jacket on.

As he had expected the jacket fit him like a tent. The arms were too long, the hem was down below his crotch and he could almost wrap the front around him twice. Danny was normal sized for a fourteen year old. He was small compared to seniors like Dash Baxter but he had a final growth spurt to come which would even up the sizes. Ember McLain looked about 25 but as a girl - or girl ghost - she was about the same size as Danny. Maybe a little larger, but not by much. This leather jacket, if it was hers, would have fit her as badly as it did him. Of course he knew that already. The tag had told him who this jacket belonged to, and it wasn't Ember McLain / Patty Melt / or Sybil O'Shay.

After a few long minutes Danny began to wonder if there really was a telepathic link between Ember and her things. She was certainly taking her time showing up. He was about to hang the jacket back up and go looking for her when his breath run cold, frosting in the air. He spun around...

"What did I tell you about touching my stuff?" Ember demanded. She stood stiffly erect with her hands clenched in tight fists at her side.

"It's not really your stuff," Danny reminded her.

"It's mine!" the girl ghost repeated.

"Even if this jacket and that guitar are yours, that Gold Record plaque you incinerated was clearly "Patty Melt's". Why are you stealing Patty Melt's stuff?"

"There is no..." Ember left the sentence hanging in the air. Her jaw worked but no words came out, it was if not only did hearing the name "Patty Melt" hit her like a blow she couldn't even say the name. "There's just me, Ember McLain! " she finished after a pause.

"But what do you have against Groove Town Records?" Danny persisted.

"He hurt me?"

"Who?"

"Him... That...man..."

"The one downstairs? The one you beat up earlier today. He has a name, you know. Surely you know what his name is?" Danny wasn't sure if this was how his sister would go about things. He wanted to get some kind of rise from Ember, get her to admit to being Patty Melt before telling her to lay off Greenbriar. Until she admitted to being Patty Melt he couldn't be sure anything he said to her about Greenbriar would sink in.

"He's a shit, an asshole!" she screamed. "Have you ever met the man?"

"Yes, I have, tonight, and you're right, he's a horrible person. But he's still a person, Ember, and I've swore to protect all people from harm by ghosts, even a really awful one like him. I can't let you harm him."

"He deserves to die!"

"For what? What has he done to you, to Ember McLain? I've looked. There is no record of an Ember McLain signed on to Groove Town Records. Or with any other label in any other city in the US. You don't exist! Now Patty Melt, she existed. As did Sybil O'Shay before her. They had bands, released albums, played concerts. But Ember McLain, until your "Remember My Name" tour, never existed."

Ember was beginning to pant, which is pointless in a ghost since they didn't breath. It was still a sign of great emotional distress which Danny wasn't seeing because he was too obsessed with pushing ember's button.

"You tell me there's no ghost of Patty Melt involved, that there's only you, so why are you fighting Patty Melt's fight? Why are you trying to get revenge on a man whose name you don't seem to ever know? Why are you doin-"

Danny barely had time to throw his hands up in front of his face as Ember explodes with a massive fireball. He tried to extrude a shield to protect himself but the blast was eating away the shield as fast as he could form it.

Finally the withering heat subsided. Danny opened his eyes with a gasp, sucking in cool air, that he didn't really need but was a habit from his mortal side. He turned his hands to look at them, expecting to find them charred, burnt, and was surprised to find them only reddened, painful but not actually damaged. The jacket he had on, though, had burnt away down to the elbows and the rest was charred and brittle. The lengths of fringe were breaking off and falling to the floor as he moved.

"Now no one gets the jacket," he quipped as he slide it off. "That label I told you about? It says "The New York Theatrical Properties Company". It's a fake. A prop for the Hard Rock Cafe. I doubt that anyone in the rock and roll business has ever worn it. And no one ever wi-" Danny stopped speaking as he got his first real look at Ember. She was changing. Growing taller, skinnier, with gangly arms and legs, enormous hands, breasts and hips flattening; her face growing long with a pronounced chin. Her hair was changing from a floating green flame to lank, almost stringy black hanging down her back and over part of her face.

"Ember?" Danny asked in confusion.

"You wanted Patty Melt, well now you've got her!" The ghost said. Where Ember had been cute in a delicate, rounded sort of way, this new ghost was... not unhandsome, striking in appearance and filled with such anger that Danny involuntarily took a step back.

"Ember?" Danny repeated.

"Ember's gone. There's just me." the ghost snarled and leaped at Danny swinging a flaming guitar that had suddenly materialized in her hands.

Danny ducked under the swinging guitar, then floated backwards, putting some distance between him and the ghost who used to be Ember McLain.

"What did you do to Ember?" Danny demanded of this new ghost.

"Nothing. I am Ember. You just made me remember what I was before. You bastard, you piece of..." Ember (Patty?) went on for a time calling Danny increasing foul names. "You made me remember!" She concluded. "Do you have any idea what it's like to die? Every bone in your body broken but you're not dead yet. Your brain keeps on thinking, feeling and all it can feel is the incredible pain of being smashed up. And then you start to die; your mind severing from your body, one painful connection at a time. Is it any wonder that ghosts never remember how they died? It would drive them insane if they did! But you... you had to make me remember!"

She came after Danny again, swinging her guitar by the neck like a club. He back away, blocked the guitar when he could, tried to maneuver around Ember when he could. Danny didn't have time to think, the ghost he had raised up was so crazed, so angry that she never slowed down for a second.

A lucky twist gave Danny a moment to blast the flaming guitar Patty Melt was wielding with a blob of sticky ectoplasm, plastering it to the ceiling of the attic. She wrestled with it for a moment.

"If you're Ember McLain, why don't' you look like her?" he asked during the brief respite.

"This is what I looked like, this is the real me. Ember is what I always wanted to be. Cute, not a monster like this. Who would want to go through life looking like this?"

"You're not ugly," which sounded lame ever as he was saying it. "I mean my father had your poster in his room when he was a kid. He must have thought you were good looking."

"Hah!" she snorted, still struggling with the gummed up guitar. "He was probably lusting after the Powercats. They were beautiful. I was just the front woman." She got the guitar dislodged and came after Danny again. "The only good thing about dying," she swing the guitar, catching Danny off guard and driving him to the floor, " is that you can choose to look anyway you want to. Now I'm the pretty one... At least until you called me back!" She teed off on Danny like a golf ball, he bounced off one wall and through the roof on the opposite side.

When his head stopped ringing he was floating outside Greenbriar's mansion and Patty Melt was baring down on him. He threw up a shield to block the flaming guitar and tried to think of a way out of this. In terms of sheer power this engaged Ember/Patty Melt had him whipped. She might run out of steam eventually but Danny wasn't sure he could play a defense game long enough for that to happen. He had the Fenton Thermos strapped to his back as he always did but the only way to get a ghost sucked into the containment device was to weaken them first. That didn't seem likely. Maybe if he could draw out Ember's personality again she wouldn't be as angry, and therefore not as strong as this Patty Melt personality...

"Ember, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have teased you." He called. "I'm sure if we had a moment to talk we could work out something that would make us both happy. Ember?"

"Ember's gone," the ghost of Patty Melt answered. "She's not coming back."

"But I have an idea how you can have your revenge on Colonel Greenbriar that doesn't involve killing him."

"I want him dead!" the ghost screamed back. They had been circling around the mansion as they talked, trading blows that slowed neither one of them down.

Danny suddenly did a somersault and flew directly at the ghost of Patty Melt. He wrest the flaming guitar from her hands and pushed her back when she tried reaching for it. "I won't let you hurt anyone! Let me talk to Ember," he told the ghost.

"Never! You awoke me, now deal with it!" She leaped forward and got a hand on her guitar. They wrestling silently over it before she ripped it out of Danny's grasp. She swung at his head almost immediately. Danny fell back over the woods to gain some time to think.

If he could lead her back to FentonWorks there was a 50/50 chance that his father, with the Mk4 blaster would knock the right ghost out of the sky. For a moment that seemed like better odds then he had here. Then he recalled there was a better than even chance that his mother would follow up and knock out whoever his father missed. If it were just his father he'd take the chance but with them together... No. He'd have to solve this problem here.

He could deal with this if he could just get Ember back. He wondered how his sister, the amateur psychologist would do that. She had read dozens of books on the working of the mind. She would surely have an idea on how to deal with the ghost of Patty Melt. Unfortunately he didn't read any of those books, he didn't have a clue what to do. He could try his Ghostly Wail. It was guaranteed to knock her down, but it was also guaranteed to knock him down as well. Hopefully he would wake up from the after-effects before Ember did so he could suck her into the Fenton Thermos. On the other hand the Ghostly Wail was pretty indiscriminate. If he wasn't careful it would not only knock out Ember/Patty Melt, but the whole Pinehurst mansion and part of the surrounding forest as well. That wasn't a good idea, though at the moment it seemed like the best idea he had.

His thoughts were interrupted as Patty Melt closed in again, still swinging her guitar once again like a club. Patty Melt was clearly a different person from Ember McLain. All she did was charge in for a physical assault. Ember would have laid back and used a variety of attacks, flame blasts, hypnotic blasts from her guitar. She was clever. Patty Melt was direct, pure, raw energy.

They danced back over the forest. Danny laid hands on the guitar again, pulling himself close to the rock ghost face. "Come on, Ember," he panted. "Don't be like this. We were friends, sort of," it was a bit of a lie but Danny wanted to appeal to Ember's amorous side."You always called me your Stud Muffin. Remember? Meat Puppet? Remember all the good times we had together?"

That last might have been over the top since he couldn't recall them ever having "good time." It was usually something like this, locked in a life-or-death struggle...

"Stop crying for your made-up girlfriend," the ghost of Patty Melt snarled. "You wanted me and now you've got me."

"Ember isn't made..." Then it struck him. Sure Ember was a made up persona, but so was Patty Melt. And if Ember always got twtchy when he said 'Patty Melt', what would happen if Patty Melt heard her real name. The name Jazz had found on the Social Security Death Registry...

"You're as much of a fraud as Ember," he shouted at the ghost of Patty Melt. "You're name isn't Patty Melt. And it isn't Sybil O'Shay. You're Bertha! Bertha Green. You must have hated your name and yourself from the day you were born, you've changed it so often!"

The guitar they were wrestling for exploded into flames, leaving Danny holding nothing. The ghost of Patty Melt plummeted towards the ground, but soared back up after a moment. "No! No! No!" she was screaming, her hands and arms engulfed in a giant ball of ectoplasmic fire. "I am Ember McLain. Ember! Ember!" Her hair was starting to float up in the air again, showing a green tinge among the black.

"No, you're not. You are Bertha Green. You had talent and looks but you're always hated yourself. Hated the name of Bertha Green," he shouted back to her. "Bertha Green was somebody but Patty Melt is nothing. Ember McLain is nothing. You've been a failure all your life because you wanted it that way. You had to fail because Bertha Green was such a failure!"

"No!" she screamed. "I'm not a failure. I'm somebody..."

"Bertha!" And with every repeat of her name the ghost of Patty Melt would spasm, shudder, become smaller, the fires surrounding her smaller and less intense.

"Bertha! Bertha!" he shouted, driving her towards the ground. "I'll never forget your name!" he said, making a play on Ember's 'Remember my name,' song.

"No!" the ghost screamed once more, then suddenly exploded in a great gout of fire. Danny threw up a shield and the flames parted around him like a tidal waves splitting on the rocky prominence. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness following the explosion he could see a huddled mess on the ground. It looked vaguely human but arms and legs were bent in ways they shouldn't be, the head and torso looked flattened. Danny felt himself growing nauseous look at this. This must have been what Patty Melt like after her suicide.

Forcing his stomach to behave, Danny knelt down beside the ectoplasmic form. "Ember," he called softly. "It's time for Ember McLain. Please come back, we miss you." He continued to call to Ember, speaking softly, for a long while until the amorphous pile of ectoplasm started to move. For a moment it's lines softened, blurred together, then straightened out. Black clad legs extended, ending in skull-tipped boots. Flaming green hair started waving from the other end. Hands grow out of a short-sleeved cropped T-shirt. A face, rounded and tattooed impressed itself from with the fluid goo.

"Ember, you're back!" Danny shouted.

"Yeah. Whatever. What did you do to me?"

"You have no idea how glad I am to see you, Ember," Danny said, "and I'm sorry I have to do this." He pulled out the Fenton Thermos and hit the intake button. With a brief squawk, Ember was sucked inside.

[]

Jazz Fenton was in her room reading aloud from a case study of a man with displaced aggression. The room was crowded with interested listeners, not one of which was human. She was just turning a page when Danny Phantom walked through the door.

"Hi, guys," he called out and in an instant the room was deserted.

"Danny, what did I say about walking unannounced into my room?" Jazz demanded.

"I knew you were having your PET'EM meeting and I hope everyone is still here, because I want to have a brief chat with all of you."

"He's going to hurt us, I know" a thin voice moaned.

"No, I'm not!" Danny asserted, walking over to plant a Fenton Thermos on Jazz's desk. There was a gasp of dismay from the invisible audience at the sight of it.

"Hey, come on out, guys, we need to talk about who's inside and why."

"He's imprisoned Rollo!" Another invisible voice asserted. "And for what? Doing what a ghost has to do!"

"No, it's not Rollo, though Rollo may not be around for a while. He's working for me."

"Snitch! Turncoat!"

"I heard that, Lord Faultless Roy. So come on out, I know you're here."

A ghost dressed in a 18th century frock coat, knee-length pants and hose stepped out of Jazz's closet. He smoothed down the front of his waistcoat. "That purple dress of yours," he addressed Danny's sister. It's really not your color, and how can you call it a dress when it's front is as backless as the back?"

Jazz reddened. "Stay out of my closet!" she snapped.

"Everybody, Everybody," Danny encouraged. "No fair hidden under the bed. That is so cliched. OK, look, Rollo isn't working for me exactly, but he is working with my approval. I made a promise to Ember here," Danny patted the Thermos. A muffled voice cried, "watch it, Dickhead!"

"What, I'm no longer your 'love muffin'?" Danny snickered.

"Bite me!"

"Anyway. Jazz I'm leaving Ember in your hands. You can let her out whenever you think she's learned her lesson and will behave herself." Sniggering from the ghosts hovering over Jazz's bed earned them a glare from Danny. They hushed.

"Ember's in here," Danny explained once the room had quieted down, "for trying to haunt someone. You know I've told you there's to be no haunting. Period. Well, Ember had cause, and I kind of don't blame her. But she was playing too rough. She was trying to kill this person, and not just discomfort them. I couldn't let that happen. We had a fight and here she is." He was about to tap the Thermos again, then remembered that Ember was inside and stopped himself. "But the guy she was haunting was a real dick so I made her a promise that he would never have a peaceful day in his life. With Rollo's help I'm keeping that promise. But the rest of you," Danny paused to look around the room at all the ghosts there, "no haunting, unless I say so. OK?"

And he walked out of the room.

After a moment of silence Lunch Lady Doris turned to look at Jazz, "what was that all about?" she asked.

"I have no idea," Jazz answered.

[]

A door opened with a great squeaking of hinges, then slammed shut. A heavy tread with the rattle chains proceeded down the hall. Colonel Greenbriar closed the book he was trying to read and shivered. First of all he knew that every door in his house was carefully oiled by his Cuban maintanence man. None of them squeaked - ever! And if he were to rush to the door and look out into the hallway he would find no one there, no chains, nothing. He'd given up trying. It had been that way for a week, Ever since that infernal ghostboy had been there. Squeaking doors, rattling chains and worst of all... Every frigging time he went to the bathroom there was...

"Take Care! I am the Ball Ghost, defender of all things round and bouncy. Heed My warning..." And there would be a pudgy translucent ghost hovering over him at his most vulnerable moment.

"There's nothing round or bouncy in here, so get lost," he had told it the first time it had appeared.

"That with which you set upon is round,"

"It's more of an oval," he argued.

"An oval is a kind of circle!" the ghost retorted, then shouted, somewhat randomly, "Take Care!"

"How long do you intend to do this?" he had asked on the third day.

"You shall never have a peaceful day for the rest of your life..." the ghost had replied.

"What happened to that other ghost, the little kid dressed in black. He seemed like a reasonable sort."

"He has no time for the likes of you...O-O-O-O-O-O!"

"You're the worst ghost, ever." Greenbriar said.

"But I am your ghost and I will stay with you forever!"

"I was afraid of that."


I was inspired to write this story after posting my previous story, "The Iron Fist of The Order" both here and on FanFiction. I was expecting the usual meager traffic of my other stories. I was astonished by the vast amount of traffic (for me) it generated. Eventually I realized it was because I had tagged the story as co-starring Ember McLain. While Ember had a juicy scene in the first chapter the story wasn't really about her or any one ghost. I felt as if I were sailing under false colors. And I vowed to make up for it by writing a story where Ember was the main co-star. I hope you liked it.