Beneath the Surface

11

Degrading, disgusting, deplorable. To be forced to seduce yet another human when, if the fool of a halfa would but give her the chance, she could live forever and never, ever be forced to seduce another mortal to her bed. And yet he was still fighting. Pitiful, he didn't even realize that eh was; he was only wasting her time and the lives of the people he fought so hard to protect.

He would fall, one way or another.

But until then she had to recoup the power she expended on his behalf. Already she had drained more than a dozen unsuspecting mortals of their lives. She was incredibly lucky that most had been in the later middle ages and she had been able to disguise it as a lovers tryst gone horribly bad with the markers of a stroke, a coronary, an aneurism. One of any of a number of simple human ailments.

Frail, unnatural creatures; constantly striving to avoid death, and merely labeling their downfall, prolonging it with their useless drugs, surgeries. It made her sick to know that she had to consort with them at all, much less that she depended on them to survive. Even the halfa turned her stomach at times, knowing that beneath the power that roiled about him like a barely contained predator, he had started just like all of the others.

Human.

Sick, disgusting creature. She smiled. Soon enough, he would be out of his misery, and she would be enjoying the immortality that she well deserved.

xXx

It was, Tucker realized, a hopeless impasse. He had a serious decision to make, a task that must be carried out with no less than perfect precision. And he had absolutely no way of doing it. He had the knowledge, the will, the drive. But in the end, his magic failed him; he could find no spell that would accomplish what he wanted, what he needed. Nothing to give him incontrovertible proof.

That Sam Manson was alive.

He'd thought about, really thought about it. There had been the insanity of nearly seven minutes where he had debated whether or not he could go to the Manson's for help. Whether he should go to the Manson's for help. Sure, he could reveal the fact that magic existed and he as well as their beloved and possibly not deceased daughter were capable practitioners. He might even be able to show them a spell or two before they either laughed in his face or called the police.

With any luck he might be able to get out the demand for an exhumation cleverly disguised as a request. And then he would immediately be sent away to a mental hospital where he was shrunk three times a day for years before Jazz managed to find a way to get him out with endangering her own practice. Once she had one, that is.

Besides that, Tucker knew that he could never go to them anyway. Mrs. Manson was still too… broken. And her husband was little better. He knew this, he'd seen it himself. There was no way he could go to them, it was out of the question.

He could always do it the hard way, find a dark stormy night and dig her coffin up himself. But that would take too long and be too obvious. Without a court ordered exhumation he's be looking at a multitude of criminal charges on top of the inevitable psychiatric evaluation if he were caught. Clearly, yet another dead end. No magic, no Manson's, no backbreaking labor. It only left one option, one that Tucker had hoped to avoid.

Danny.

And he wasn't much better than the Manson's. Sick with grief, heart sore, spell stricken. The halfa was a walking advertisement for miserable. But, and Tucker knew it was the truth, he was also the best, the safest, the most sure way of getting the answers that Tucker so desperately needed. And, he thought with a pained sigh as he rubbed the bridge of his nose, lying his glasses on his desk next to his keyboard, depending on what the answers to his questions were, Danny being involved might be the best thing that could happen.

Depending. It would kill Danny if he did as Tucker asked and they found her corpse in the coffin instead of what Tucker was expecting. It would kill him, or drive him insane. Which would most likely end up killing everyone in Amity Park and then, by proxy, the rest of the world.

Ah, decisions, decisions.

With a sigh Tucker reached for his cell phone, eyes still closed against the headache that was building behind his eyes. At least he had an excuse to call Danny; even with Sam's death and the mess that Danny was buried in, Tucker knew that he was having way too many migraines than was healthy for him. It only meant one thing: it was time for a new prescription, and he could talk Danny into going along to pick out frames.

The number was dialed automatically, and Tucker waited patiently as it rang while he waited for Danny to pick up. He chuckled when he heard the mostly asleep grunt that Danny assumed passed for a hello. "Are you asleep?"

A rustle of blanket and Tucker imagined that Danny was pulling his blankets back over his head. "If I were asleep, dude, do you think I'd be talking to you?"

Tucker laughed this time. "I was headed out to the mall. Want to go with?"

"Is it actual shopping?" Danny asked.

"I need some new glasses."

There was a long silence and then a sigh. "Yeah. Give me enough time to grab a shower."

Tucker hung up the phone with an almost satisfied smile on his face. Phase One was complete. Phase Two, however, would be a bit more complicated, but Tucker thought he'd planned it fairly well by the time he pulled up in front of Danny's house and honked. The door opened immediately and Tucker laughed to see Danny darting out of the house, Jazz yelling from behind him as Danny tugged on a shirt and shouted back at her.

"She looks like she's pissed," Tucker observed as Danny ducked into the car. "What'd you do?"

Tired blue eyes glared at Tucker. "Why does it always have to be me? I didn't do anything." Then he smirked. "I only said that her fiancé was a dork."

Tucker sighed. "Your sister is twenty-two. I'd say that if she wants to marry a dork, she can marry a dork."

Danny shrugged. "I know. I'm just giving her grief."

The rest of the ride was in silence, one of the two men nearly asleep, the other too tense to relax. For his part, Tucker had seen how tired Danny was, and knowing what had done it and why only made him furious. There wasn't anything he could do about it yet, but that would change. All he had to do was prove that his theory was correct, and then either snap Danny back to his senses, or take the succubus out on his own.

Snapping Danny back to his senses it was.

"Dude, wake up," Tucker said as he shook Danny's shoulder.

The halfa sat up looking around sleepily, eyes blinking lazily and brain still fuzzy to find that they were already parked, car turned off, and Tucker out of the car and leaning over him to wake him up. "You know, if you were a little more attractive and female, this could be pleasant," Danny muttered as Tucker stepped back with a chuckle.

"So, new glasses," Danny muttered as he followed Tucker through the crowds and into one of the stores, raising an eyebrow at some of the 'latest fashions' where they were displayed in the window. "Do people actually wear these things?"

Tucker shrugged. "People with no taste do. Like Paulina," and he grinned at his friend as Danny rolled his eyes.

"Look, Danny, I need to ask you to do something," Tucker shot out after he'd signed in on the optometrist's waiting list. "It's really important, and you know I wouldn't ask you for anything except I can't do it myself..."

"Tuck, you're my best friend," Danny said and ignored the way his best friend's face clouded as he said it, once again consciously forcing himself not to plural the word like he wanted to from habit. "Just ask, I'll do it."

"Maybe you should hear me out before you agree, Danny," Tucker said quietly as he turned to a wall of frames and poked at a few before sliding a pair off to look at and then put back as he realized they were in a tortoise shell pattern.

"What about these?" Danny asked as he pointed to a pair or rounded frames in black. Tucker was still silent as he tried them on a shrugged, putting them back. "Tuck, what's wrong?"

Tucker pulled another pair off, put them back, and then another. "I went to Sam's grave a couple nights ago. I ran a spell, Danny. It says that… that her coffin is empty." He spared a glance for the painful and shell-shocked expression on his best friends face before plowing straight into it.

"I need you to bring her coffin up so I can make sure that spell wasn't misreading it."

The silence was thick as Tucker looked away, unable to watch the emotions that flitted across Danny's face, and knowing it for retreat at the relief when his name was called. Danny said nothing as Tucker hurried away and, in fact, didn't even notice as his mind wrapped itself around the fact, the thought, the hope that what Tucker was saying was true.

And then it twisted inside him as he realized that an empty coffin didn't necessarily mean what he'd hoped. There were other explanations, other things that made even more sense than Sam not being dead, than the faint hope that she was alive. Even after her begging him to find her, to save her. Even if she really did need to be found, to be saved, that still didn't mean she was alive. Her spirit could be in danger, her ghost. Sam wasn't well loved by the inhabitants of the Ghost Zone, if she did happen to be a ghost. Neither was Tucker. In fact, the only person they hated more was Danny himself.

But it wasn't the only explanation. Maybe her parents had had her cremated and hadn't shared the information. But no, Danny remembered that the viewing had been an open casket, and Sam had been on display for her grieving friends and family. Just one more reason why he hadn't gone; seeing her again… At that point, it might have hurt more than helped, knowing as he did that the last time he had seen her was when he'd held her lifeless body in his arms. Before that, when he was staring at her as she stood next to her body.

Before that when he had kissed her, held her, tried to tell her that he loved her.

Danny bit his lip against the sudden tightness in his chest, the burning feeling behind his eyes. He rubbed his fingers over them firmly, telling himself that tears did no good, that he needed to stop, just stop. It helped, a little. Not much, but a little, and Danny found himself able to open his eyes without fear that he would collapse underneath the weight of the pain. No, he could push it back, bury it down, just for a little.

He'd pay for it later, but for now, he could hide behind the thoughts that his mind threw at him, the myriad possibilities to explain why Sam's coffin was empty, why Tucker was asking him to bring it up. The morbid need to look inside himself and know, to just know for a fact that it was either empty, or it wasn't. The fervent desire to drop to his knees and pray, beg, plead, anything that it was empty, that she wasn't in there.

Please, Danny.

He had to. There was no getting around it, he had to. And as Danny realized that he had already made up his mind he looked up to find Tucker standing back in front of him, worry on his familiar features, his green eyes cloudy and concerned. He smiled faintly, nodded his head. "I'll do it. For her."

Tucker smiled, some of the worry disappearing. "Thank you."

Danny nodded and glanced at a pair of frames clenched tightly in Tucker's hands, realizing his friend was still wary of him. He laughed. "Are those what you're getting?" he asked, and Tucker nodded holding up a pair of black metal frames shaped into slightly rounded rectangles.

"Big change, huh?" Tucker asked, and as Danny made a face he laughed. "This is a pretty messed up day, isn't it?"

Danny shrugged. "Seems pretty normal for me. So a couple days, huh?"

Tucker mimicked Danny's shrug. "That's how long it took me to buck up the nuts to ask you."

xXx

"You look like you, but you don't," Danny muttered as he followed Tucker down the winding roads of the cemetery, floating along where his friend was walking, having turned down taking the aerial route. "I can't believe you got them that fast."

"That's what happens when they do the grinding in the office instead of having to ship the lenses in from somewhere else," Tucker explained as he self-consciously adjusted the new glasses where they sat across his nose. "Do they look bad? Because you keep staring at them."

"No, no," Danny answered quickly. "They just look… different. They look good. Your girlfriend from college isn't going to be able to keep her hands off of you."

Tucker flushed. "She's not my girlfriend."

"Right," Danny drawled knowingly. "I remember saying the very same thing about Sam many, many times. And look where it got us."

"She's not your girlfriend."

"That's a technicality," Danny said, forcing the euphoria he was feeling over the possibility of Sam being alive to beat back the uncertainty and fear of what he was about to do. "When we get this dealt with, it won't be a technicality anymore."

"Uh-huh. Sure." It was Tucker's turn to be skeptical.

"Alright," Danny admitted. "So maybe I was thinking that girlfriend would be a little weird." He watched as Tucker rolled his eyes and then said, loud and quite clear, "I was thinking wife was a better thing."

Tucker stopped dead in his tracks sending Danny plowing into him and the both of them falling to the ground with matching thuds. "You were really going to ask her to marry you?" Tucker asked as he scrambled back to his feet and checked his pockets to make sure nothing had fallen out or broken.

Danny shrugged as he lifted back into the air and floated once more. "I love her. I can admit. I figured the logical next step was convincing her that we should get married."

Tucker rolled his eyes as he dusted himself off, almost relieved to hear Danny talking like Sam was alive. It made him more confident in what they were doing, raised his own hopes, even though he was absolutely positive that he was right, that Sam wasn't in that coffin and that she was alive. Even if underneath it Tucker could hear the edge of desperate hope in Danny's voice, the sharp way he was refusing to contemplate the fact that Tucker might be wrong, that Sam might actually be in that coffin.

He stopped walking abruptly, feeling the chill as Danny phased through him and shivering at it. "Warn a guy next time," he heard Danny mumble as they both stared down at the dark headstone in front of them.

"I saw what you did," Tucker said softly as Danny turned red and rubbed the back of his neck, muttering something about ghosts and fighting before Tucker managed to cut him off. "Not that," he clarified. "What you did for her."

"Oh," was all Danny said as he knelt in front of the stone and ran shaking fingers over Sam's emblem where he had melted it into stone. "Tuck, I don't know about this."

"Let me show you what happens when I spell the coffin before you change your mind," Tucker said into the silence that followed. "If that doesn't convince you, we'll go home and forget about this."

Danny nodded and waited, watching as Tucker again summoned a bobbing witchlight to his shoulder with murmured Latin, and pulled a small vial from a pocket, uncorking it and letting the contents trickle to the ground above Sam's grave. "Monkshood, nettle, oak sap. Lemon verbena, coriander. One of her hairs," he said quietly as it saturated the ground more thoroughly than such a small vial should have been able to.

What Tucker said—sang—next Danny didn't recognize or understand, knowing it for the spell as faint trickles of light danced at his fingertips and dropped to the potion before fading into the ground as Tucker stopped, opened his eyes, and looked at Danny evenly. "Now, we wait."

It wasn't long, a fact that Tucker could attribute to the fact that the spell had been run once before and the residual effects of the original casting was giving the new casting feedback, but as a wispy shape rose from the ground he watched Danny step back startled, and let the witchlight at his shoulder dampen down so that they could see the image echoed clearly.

And he wasn't surprised when he heard the startled gasp from Danny as he realized that, if the spell was true cast, the coffin was empty.

"She's not in there," Danny murmured, and before Tucker could say anything the halfa was gone in a flash of brilliant light, already sinking beneath the ground, hope shining on his face as his head sank past the surface of the earth.

"Well fuck me," Tucker muttered. "This could be bad."

Moments later the coffin started rising up from the ground and Tucker's stomach twisted at the sight of it. It wasn't much changed than when it had gone down, just reflecting the dark night, and Danny appeared next to him, agitated and showing it. Gloved hands moved over the surface of the coffin and Tucker sighed as he reached a hand out and grabbed Danny's shoulder, squeezing, reassuringly at first and then harder, waiting for the ghost to turn and look at him.

"You don't have to be here when I do this," he offered, and Danny shook his head. Tucker nodded, understanding, and murmured a spell of opening, almost wincing as he heard the various locks on the coffin lid unsnap with clicks that were far too loud in the silence of the cemetery.

"You know way too much," Danny said quietly as they both reached out to lift the upper half of the lid. "On three?"

Tucker nodded and let Danny count it out, raising up on three and feeling tears flood his eyes, trickle down his cheeks as he looked in. he looked away, closed his eyes, and looked back again to make sure he wasn't seeing things, that his eyes weren't playing tricks on him, and he let go of the lid to tug his glasses off and wipe his eyes roughly. Next to him Danny was on his knees, hands buried in his face, back in his human form, hot tears stinging skin.

Finally Tucker found his voice and dropped down next to Danny, pulling him into a tight hug that Danny returned fervently. "It's empty."

xXx

"Is she alive?" were Danny's first words when they reached the safety of Tucker's room, nearly shouted as Tucker made a slashing motion for him to shut up. Danny winced as he realized how loud he had been, and how late—early—it was. "Sorry, I'm sorry, but is she?"

"I don't know," Tucker said as he dropped onto his bed and lay back, tugging his glasses off to rub his eyes. "I really don't know, Danny, but I think she might be."

"Tucker," Danny started and stopped. Tucker cracked and eye as he slid his glasses back on and watched as his best friend rubbed the back of his neck and then scrubbed both hands across his face as he sighed.

"Danny, this is me here. You can tell me anything," he said quietly as he watched whatever battle Danny was fighting wage war within him.

"I know. It's just… Something really weird has been going on lately, and I don't know what." Tucker tensed at this, knowing that this could be the proverbial nail in the coffin if he was dead on in his suspicions though, and Tucker knew full well, it was getting beyond deniable that Danny was being manipulated. Except that it looked like Danny was trying to break free of whatever was influencing him.

Danny rubbed his face again, trying to suppress the ache that was building unbearably behind his eyes. "Do you have anything for a headache?" he asked as an especially sharp throb nearly brought tears to his eyes. "I can't think through this."

"Your head hurts?" Tucker asked surprised.

Danny nodded, feeling queasy with even that slight movement. "It's getting worse. A lot worse."

Tucker narrowed his eyes as he got up and headed for his desk, shoving the chair at Danny who collapsed into it gratefully as Tucker opened a drawer and dug out a bottle of aspirin. "Here," he said, opening the bottle and handing it to Danny. Tucker grimaced as Danny chucked four into his mouth and dry swallowed them, grimacing himself at the taste, and Tucker took the opening while he had it.

Danny had always had fairly strong mental walls, things he had developed against the pressure of life while he was splitting himself between two worlds, but Tucker had known how to get past those for years. This time he had waited for the chance to get past whatever enchantments Danny was acting under, enchantments that Danny was apparently actively trying to fight off if the way he had suddenly turned ill when he had tried to talk to Tucker about the weird things. Weird things that Tucker now knew without a doubt related to whatever mess Danny was in, up to his neck, and Tucker just knew that his succubus assumption was right.

It was strong, the glamour on Danny, and Tucker felt beads of sweat break on his brow as he forced magic into Danny's distracted mind to try and break it. It was weakening as Danny continued trying to fight, because Danny truly did want to talk to his best friend about whatever problem was in his mind, but not enough, and Tucker arrowed a sharp spear of power at it, searching for the weak spot. Even then it wasn't enough, not nearly enough, but the glamour was chipped, cracked, and with the pressure Danny was placing on it the cracks were becoming seams, ready to burst the more he tried to talk.

"So what's the problem?" Tucker asked Danny, eyes still closed and focused on the spell that wreathed his friend. There, he thought to himself as he heard Danny struggling to find words, fighting as hard as he could against the pain, against the spell, and Tucker hammered it watching as the seams suddenly split apart and the shell of the spell flew back, dissipating into nothing the moment they were separated from Danny.

Between watching it and the effort of breaking it, Tucker could only blink in confusion as Danny finally said what he had been trying to say.

"I almost slept with Charlie."

"You…what?" Tucker asked, having fully expected Danny to say that he had slept with Charlie because, if Tucker was right, and he had been so far, Charlie was the demon in question. Which meant that Charlie was much weaker than Tucker had initially thought, and that made no sense, or Danny was much stronger than Tucker had thought, which still made no sense.

He blinked. Or maybe it meant that Charlie was working around something that was a natural repellant to succubi if the texts he had studied were true: love. Normally, Tucker would have been ecstatic by the well timed realization, but there was no way he could be until it was resolved and Charlie sent back wherever she had come from. And Danny was helped, because he needed help, Tucker realized as he turned his attention back to his friend.

"I know. I know," Danny said miserably as he buried his face in his hands, looking much smaller and weaker than Tucker knew him to be. "I didn't want to, I didn't even mean to. But it's like one second she was talking to me and the next she was…" Danny broke off shaking his head and turning helpless blue eyes on Tucker. "Something is wrong, Tucker. I can feel it. But I can't find it to fix it."

"Dude, it's alright. I'll help you." Tucker reached a hand out to Danny. "Tell me what's going on and we'll find a way out of it."

Danny nodded and closed his eyes as he started telling Tucker everything. Everything and anything, he amended as he spoke. The memory lapses, the way that some times when Charlie would kiss him, he would think that he was kissing Sam again. How sometimes even just thinking of Sam was impossible, between the headaches and the way he could hardly remember her name sometimes.

The way Charlie had tried to seduce him the night before, and how he had just… gone along with it. Willingly, even, until something snapped in his head and he thought his world was ending again. And Sam. Seeing Sam. Touching her, talking to her.

"She said she needed help, that I have to find her and help her." Danny closed his eyes against Tucker's prying green gaze. "She sounded really desperate, Tuck."

He cracked an eye to see Tucker nodding. "Alright, she needs help, we give her help."

"So how do we find her?" Danny asked.

"Leave that to me," Tucker answered grimly, knowing that he had a way, he just had to find it. "We'll find her, we'll save her."

Danny nodded. "I think she's alive," and was relieved by Tucker's nod of agreement. "But Tuck, we have to hurry. Wherever she is, I don't think she's got a lot of time left."