Supernatural Retaliation

Chapter Fourteen

Everyone froze, but Danny, who was very used to the unexpected, almost immediately snapped out of the moment of shock and decided to use everyone's surprise as an advantage. He took several slow, lateral steps towards Sam. Looking at the demon on his left, he breathed a sigh of relief. She hadn't noticed him move—she was too busy staring at Dean. Looking up at Sam, the incredible betrayer, he frowned angrily. Sam hadn't noticed him either, and so Danny slowly reached towards his betrayer's belt loop, where his phone hung from a sliding case.

"Dean!" Sam yelled, horrified. "I thought I told you to stay away!"

Danny looked up at Sam, unnerved by the suddenness of his voice, but didn't let it slow him down. He gently slid the phone out of its protective case as carefully as he could with the ghost shackles, and backed away from the whole group, Sam, Ruby, and the unnamed demon who looked a lot like Paulina. Looking down at the red Motorola in his hands, he realized that, as much as he really didn't want to do it, there was only one thing he could do.

"You are not getting me out of that deal by trading someone else!" he heard Dean scream. As his yells rose in volume, Danny assumed he was coming closer. "Do you hear me?"

Danny flipped the cell phone open and carefully dialed the number before pressing the send button.

"Why can't you let me do this?" Sam bellowed in reply. "It's for your own damned good! It's for my good! Don't you get it? I am not going to live alone!"

The boy heaved a heavy, nervous sigh as he waited for it to begin ringing.

"Well, well, well," the demon purred. "Look what the cat dragged in. Nice wheels, by the way."

"Shut up!" Dean growled before turning back to Sam.

No one noticed as Ruby slyly peek out of the corner of her eye before turning around to find Danny, who had turned his back on them all.

Danny bit his lip, trying desperately to drown out the yelling with his own thoughts.

"Hello?" Jazz finally answered tiredly.

Danny closed his eyes and breathed to calm himself. "Jazz?"

"Danny?" she said before a quiet yawn. "Don't you know what time it is?"

"Yeah, sorry," Danny said as calmly as he could. He didn't want to worry his sister any more than he already had. "But, um... I really need to speak with Vlad."

"Vlad?" She said, a little startled. "Vlad's not...here. He said he was going to work this morning and never came back. Why do you need him? Is something wrong?"

"No," Danny drawled, trying to steady his shaking voice. "Of course not. I just wanted to… ask him something. I'm gonna go. Loveyoubye."

He quickly ended the call before Jazz had the chance to say anything in reply. He could barely hear the yelling anymore, so he quickly dialed Vlad's cell. As he waited for the older man to pick up, he went over what he was going to say.

"I'm going to die!" sounded a little urgent, which was good, because it was an urgent matter, but it might be too much for the older half ghost. He decided against "They're going to kill me!" because of the same problem. But as soon as he decided on "Vlad, I really need help," the phone crumpled in his hands. He looked at it in surprised terror as he realized what it meant. He looked up from the twisted plastic to see the smiling face of the Paulina-demon. She laughed in his face, and suddenly, he felt her fling him in the air with that invisible demonic force. He was thrown and held against a crumbling brick wall, sandwiched between Sam and Dean. Ruby was leaning against the edge of the wall with crossed arms and a blank expression.

"You bitch," Dean growled. "You tricked us all. You lied to our faces."

There was a pause before Ruby turned to face them. "Demons are known to do that from time to time," she said, like he should have known all along. Like she was disappointed that he hadn't known.

"Thank you, Ruby," the Paulina-demon purred, "for bringing them all together."

Ruby frowned. "Wait a minute," she said," You said you could only take one of them."

"Well," the demon rolled the word about her mouth as she put on a thoughtful face. "I lied. I'm taking them all. Lilith will be so please with me, won't she? Sorry, I stole all your credit."

"I don't care about the credit," Ruby said evenly. "Take the ghost—I've always hated ghosts. But I want the Winchesters alive."

Danny stiffened at the mention of ghosts. Sam turned his head to find that Dean was avoiding him.

"Don't you see?" Ruby continued. "Lilith isn't going to stay forever. She's powerful, yes, but if everyone acts together, she can be taken down. No more monarchy enforced by the strongest and inflicted upon the weakest."

But her efforts of persuasion didn't affect the other demon in the way she had intended them to. The other demon took two quick steps forward and backhanded Ruby across the face. Ruby fell backwards onto the ground underneath the water tank and her eyes became narrow black slits as she growled furiously. She picked herself up off the ground and moved forward to take a swing at the demon laughing at her. Only, as soon as she took two steps forward, she ran into an invisible wall.

The crossroads demon laughed even harder as Ruby looked up at the underside of the water tank, where some hunter must have painted a pentacle along the circular rim.

As Ruby returned her incredulous gaze back to the crossroads demon, the crossroads demon said, "Hunters aren't the only ones who know how to use those. And, by the way, I happen to like Lilith."

Ruby pounded her fists fruitlessly against the wall and the crossroads demon turned her attention back to the three people still pressed against the wall.

"Not only are you all corrupted," Dean observed, "but you're corrupted against each other."

"That's just the way we roll, I guess," she replied.

"Why?" Sam whispered. They all turned to him to find that he was shaking against the bonds that held him still.

"Why?" the demon echoed. "That's pretty simple. I mean, most of us are sent to hell for a reason, so—"

"No," Sam said, cutting her off, "I meant that you never answered my question. You have us both now, so why do you want the kid?" The demons smile grew wider the more he pressed on. "I mean, I was going to give you the kid in return for Dean's soul, but now that you have us both, why don't you just let him go?"

"That's a very good question," the demon said before turning to the boy in question. "Danny, would you like to answer that?"

Danny shook his head. "Don't—"

The demon laughed. "I thought so." She opened her balled hand in front of Sam's face to reveal his crumpled cell phone. "Here's your phone, Sammy. Danny tried to steal it, but I saved it for you." Sam didn't do anything. He wasn't about to be sidetracked by the demon's antics. "Who were you trying to call, Danny?"

"Nobody."

"I said," the demon growled, "who were you trying to call?" She waited several moments for Danny's answer before reaching behind her and pulling out from literally nowhere a shiny, new Fenton Thermos. "Was it the old man?"

Danny gasped and began to struggle in his bonds. "Let me go!"

Sam and Dean kept their mouths shut as they wondered what, exactly, was in the thermos and why it mattered.

"Were you begging for help?" the demon continued, aggravating the boy even more. "Oh, this is too good. I have to agree with Ruby, I really do hate ghosts."

Danny stopped struggling. "I don't see any ghosts here," he said, nervously innocent, but knowing full well what was coming. As the demon came closer, he began to blurt whatever came to mind in hopes that maybe, just maybe, it would stall her. "But I'm sure if there was a ghost here, he'd be really friendly, and I know that you would have no reason to hate him. And he wouldn't go blurting secrets to people he doesn't—"

The demon shushed him and pressed a slim finger to his lips. Small stinging sparks flew between his mouth and the demon's finger, but otherwise, for a moment, nothing happened. Danny thought for a second that maybe the demon was going to let him get away, but just as he did, he felt something at his waist. The demon took a step back and Danny looked down. Around his waist, two familiar blue rings flickered to life before obeying his will and dying out.

"No," he whispered. "Please don't—"

"Do you want to know why everyone wants this kid so badly?" The demon addressed the two brothers. "Do you want to know what's in this metal deathtrap?" she said, shaking the thermos before dropping it on the ground at her feet. "I'm sure you do. After all, you can't really lose a war if you don't know how you lost."

The force holding Danny released its grip and he fell forward onto the rocky ground, barely able to catch himself with his chained hands. "You lost because," the demon said, "of what he is." Suddenly, the two rings were hugging his waist again, and this time, he couldn't control them. He squirmed as he tried to force them back down, already aware of the shock he would receive from the Fenton Ghost Shackles if he allowed himself to go completely ghost. "Because you two—" The demon continued to force the rings apart just as Danny noticed the thermos at her feet. The thermos, he realized, that contained Vlad.

"Were so oblivious," she went on, and Danny looked around wildly until he saw a fist sized rock next to his chest, "you couldn't even figure out that you were practically living with—"

He reached out for it in desperation.

"—a ghost."

His fingers brushed against the smooth surface of the rock just as he lost all control. The rings shot all the way and he received the second shock of his life. The current from the chains came in pulses and Danny screamed in agony as they made their way through his body. He could barely sense or feel anything around him as the shocks ripped through him, but as he twitched involuntarily, his hands somehow fell on something hard. The rock.

For several moments, Sam and Dean could do nothing but stare in shock. All this time they had been living with who they had previously assumed was the murderer of Amity Park. Danny Phantom.

Dean was so surprised, he couldn't keep it in his head. After a string of swear words, the only thing he could say was, "It can't be. It can't be.…"

But after a while, it dawned on him that the young boy he had befriended was in pain. He pulled against his invisible bonds as hard as he could before he began yelling. "Let him go! Let him go!"

Sam fought a quick mental (more logical than moral) battle before he began to join. "Stop! Stop it!" After all, even foregoing the ethics of hurting a teenager, they couldn't let the demons have him. He was a tremendous advantage to whatever side of the war held him captive.

The demon laughed again, more sadistically than ever, before she released the hold she had on the boy. The rings instantly appeared at his head and feet and soon, he was back to every day, ordinary Danny Fenton. His wrists had darkened from the burns and he was panting heavily, but he was still alive.

"Had enough?" the demon asked him.

Out of all the reactions she knew she could expect, she hadn't readied herself for a reaction quite like the one she got. The boy rolled over on his stomach and, with both hands, slammed the rock down on the middle of the thermos.

The thermos dented heavily under the rock and the cap flew off. The demon gasped and stepped back before a swirling pink mist poured out of the container.

A/N: Kinda short again, I know, but I was hoping that upon the introduction of Vlad, we'd all be happy customers. It was just so hard to force myself to write some more, so I'm sort of surprised, this turned out to be a halfway decent chapter. And OMG I got fifteen reviews last chapter! The suggstions were amazing, since I write this story one chapter at a time and have no clue what's going to happen. Thank you guys sososo much. This is like, my first story with one hundred reviews and I wish I could give you guys cookies or something. But I'm broke. And hungry, so I'd probably eat the cookies if I had any.