A/N: Um... hi?
OK, I feel bad for not updating for so long, and to tell you the truth I still didn't want to upload it, because I'm in the process of writing chapter 22. Or at least, I should be. Things are slowing down at the moment because I've been catching up on some sleep, and I've been writing another story (yes, DP, will be up when I've actually finished it).
So anyway, here it is, there might be changes to it when I discover I should have put something in here that I need in a later chapter, but I don't think so. No promises as to when the next chapter will be out.
LOST
Chapter 21: ...Into the fire.
Vlad didn't leave me out of his sight. We went to my house first to gather some clothes and my school stuff, and he graciously allowed me to say goodbye to my parents and Jazz. My father hugged me so tightly that I started choking, but I didn't say anything about it this time. Jazz was just shaking her head and my mother tried to make the best of it.
"Don't worry, sweetie," she said, "I'm sure, when all this is cleared up, you can come home again."
I didn't say anything. Vlad, however, couldn't resist.
"You can come visit him any time you want, my dear," he said gallantly, "In fact, if you want to be close to him all the time, there is plenty of room in my house. I have very nice guest bedrooms..."
"No," Maddie said coolly, shooting me an apologetic look, "Jack and Jazz need me too. I'll come visit, Danny, if that's alright?"
I grinned at her and nodded. "Don't worry, mom," I said, "I'll be fine." At least she wasn't fooled by him.
Jazz stepped in, her face carefully impassive, but her eyes mistrusting. She had made it clear she didn't like me living with Vlad, and was very suspicious of it. I thought I had managed to convince her that it was my fear of going to prison that let me to it – which in fact, it was, just not for the crime she thought it was – but I wasn't sure.
"He'll need help with his homework," she stated.
"Why, of course, Jasmine," Vlad said, "You can come over to my house tomorrow. I will send the limo. What time do you get home? Or do you prefer me to pick you up at college?"
"No thank you. I'll drive myself."
"Good, good. Don't worry, you won't have to do this for long. I'll get him a professional tutor, but it takes time to find a good one. Until then, your help will be most appreciated."
He grabbed my arm and started steering me to the door. I didn't resist, but did look back at her, trying to put some kind of warning in my eyes for her to leave it alone. She frowned at me, but stayed silent. Vlad pushed me all the way to his limo and made me enter ahead of him. He half turned, waved and then we were gone.
"What do you mean, you'll get me a tutor," I said as soon as the car door was closed, "This arrangement is temporary! I'm not gonna live with you forever! There's no need to get me a tutor, Jazz can help me!"
Vlad arched an eyebrow and smirked at me.
"My dear boy," he said, "I'm not going to let that feisty red head corrupt your impressionable mind. You're staying with me, whether you like it or not."
"You can't make me."
"Yes. I. Can."
With an angry thud, he closed the screen that separated us from the driver, so the man couldn't see us. Then, he transformed into Plasmius, and the sensation of the black rings touching my leg sent shivers up my spine. It felt different from my own transformation, like a darkness cutting through me, not the light, cold feeling, but somehow black and burning. I felt tainted.
As soon as the transformation was compete, he split up, and now I was faced with two Vlads. I moved backward in my seat and reached for my own ghost form. Too late.
Suddenly, one of the Vlads turned intangible and flew right at me, entering my body. I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came out. I felt his presence, struggling for control and tried to fight back, pushing at the ghost inside of me with all my might. Slowly, I felt myself losing control. My hands and feet were the first to go, and I felt myself sit up straight. My head bend forward and I raised my hands... only I didn't do that. I wanted to scream again, but my voice refused to respond.
Instead, I said, "Interesting. You can still hear me. Very good, Daniel, not many people are aware of the fact that they are being overshadowed."
My voice. Vlad talking. The panic grew. He had taken over my body, he could make me do anything. I/He turned my head and looked at the other Vlad sitting opposite me. He had transformed back into Vlad Masters and was looking at me with an amused expression on his face.
"You didn't know it was possible, did you," Vlad number one said to me, "How do you think I acquired most of my wealth, Daniel? I can make people do anything. Including you. Or the judge. Or, if necessary, a complete jury, although that would require some effort and would seriously weaken me."
My hand moved forward, opened a small hatch and took out a pocket knife. I opened it and brought it close to my face, so I could inspect it's sharp edge. Then, I brought the knife down to my arm and quickly made an shallow incision on my left wrist. I felt the pain, but I couldn't do anything about it. I just watched in terror.
"I'm stronger than you, even at half strength," Vlad number two said with my voice, "The troubled teen. Depressed. Couldn't take the pressure anymore. So many youngsters start cutting themselves nowadays. Nobody understands why. It's the parents' fault, they say, they give their children too much freedom. Children can't handle freedom. They start drinking too much, become abusive, criminal, and finally start to self-destruct. They won't let you go home, Daniel."
He allowed me to stare at the blood trickling out of the wound onto my jeans. He kept a firm grip on me all the way to his house, and then had me pick up my bag and carry it into the house, up the grand staircase all the way to what was to be my room. He showed me around, the four poster bed, the desk with the computer and the bathroom. Once there, he released his grip on me, and the duplicate Vlad rejoined the original standing next to me. I staggered backwards against the wall and slid to the floor, holding my injured wrist.
"You'd better put something on that," Vlad said, throwing a roll of bandages at me.
With shaking fingers, I tried to pry it loose, groaning and cursing the entire time. Vlad left. I finally managed to get it loose and wrapped some of it around my still bleeding wrist. The cut wasn't deep, but it hurt. I got up with some difficulty and steadied myself against the wash basin. The mirror showed a terrified, pale face I hardly recognized as my own. I let out a scream and punched the mirror, shattering it. Then I proceeded to throw everything that was on the shelf under the mirror – soap, a toothbrush, a beaker – on the floor. That was basically all I could to in the bathroom.
I stalked back into my bedroom and kicked the computer off the desk. The books on the shelves were next, I blasted them and they started smoking. Then the lamps, and they exploded in a satisfying fountain of sparks. I looked at the bed. For some reason, I opened my mouth and screamed at it, a short, powerful burst. The bed shattered. Stunned, I stepped backwards, looking at what I had just accomplished. I had destroyed the bed by screaming at it. Way cool.
The door bust open. I swirled and tried to put up a shield for the pink ecto ray that was directed at me, but I have trouble with that in human form, so it wasn't very strong. The ecto ray penetrated it easily and I flew across the room against the wall. Dazed, but not quite unconscious yet I ducked and evaded Plasmius' fist. Now, I thought, would be a good time to transform.
I rolled away from him and reached for my ghost form, trying to transform as quickly as possible. The two rings appeared in a bright flash and washed over me as I kept rolling. I put up another shield, stronger this time, and managed to hold off two more blasts from the enraged billionaire. Then I let out a blast of my own, and to my great satisfaction managed to hit him square in the chest.
"Daniel!" he shouted at me, "Stop that this instant!"
"No!" I yelled, trying to control the anger and the hatred that always seem stronger when I'm in ghost form, "I hate you, you controlling, egocentric, maniacal fruit loop!"
He blasted me again and this time he hit. Then, he suddenly disappeared. I hovered for a moment in surprise, and then went after him. I was no longer thinking straight. Thoughts tumbled around in my mind, and I couldn't concentrate on anything for longer than a few seconds. Most of my thoughts, however, involved a painful death for a certain billionaire fruit loop, so I set out to find him.
Unfortunately, he found me first.
Out of the blue he appeared, and before I could react, he held something against my body and pressed a button. A sharp pain shot through me, and before I knew it I felt my ghost form literally drain away from me. The white rings appeared and I landed on the floor on my hands and knees at the top of the stairs, gasping. Vlad landed next to me and also transformed back to his human form, although in his case, human is but a manner of speech.
"This is called the Plasmius Maximus. It deprives you of your ghost powers for three hours. You're helpless now." He was panting, his face contorted in rage. "You'll get another shot of this before it wears off. You'll wish you were back in prison before the end."
I was already wishing that. I'd take Shade and his shady friends any time over Vlad. With some effort, I pulled myself up on the banister and turned around to look at my nemesis. He was holding something that looked like a tazer. That must be the device. I studied it. He saw me looking and clutched it tighter.
"This won't leave my side," he said.
He straightened. "Go to your room. You destroyed it. Fine. Now live with it." He leaned forward, his cold blue eyes unforgiving. "Remember what I can do to you."
I stared down at my wrist. Desperation settled over me. I was trapped. I tried to reach for my ghost form, but it wasn't there. As terrifying as it had been before, now that it was gone, I felt empty, incomplete. My ghost form was part of me. Take that away, and all you have left is a scared, helpless boy. I stared down the stairs, the opulent hallway with all the Packers memorabilia, the many doors leading to his library, the dining room, the living room and what have you, and of course the front door. My stomach grumbled. I hadn't eaten anything since seven that morning.
"Daniel," Vlad said, sounding a little bit more composed, "Go to the kitchen and have the cook fix you a sandwich. Then go to your room and start doing the assignments Mr Lancer was kind enough to send me for you. I expect you to be done at dinner time. After dinner, we'll continue your training."
I heard his words, but they hardly registered. I kept staring at the front door. For some reason, it seemed to move further away from me, the bright light that came from the two fake stained glass windows beside it growing darker. There was no escaping this. I noticed I was gripping the banister tightly, my knuckles going white. In fact, my whole body was tense and it took some effort to get moving.
I went to the kitchen and the cook, a thin man called Gascoigne with dark hair and a mustache, speaking with a fake French accent fixed me a sandwich. I ate it listlessly. I'm sure it must have been delicious, Vlad would only hire the best after all, but to me it tasted like cardboard. Then I went up to my room, viewed the mess for a while and then put the desk upright. The computer monitor was broken, the computer itself didn't look too good either. I opened a window to let out the smoke from the burnt books. I sat down at the desk, and spent the few hours that I had until dinner staring at the note with the assignments from Mr Lancer. I didn't touch a single book.
Dinner was an uncomfortable affair. We sat together at the end of the huge table that could have easily sat twenty, Vlad at the head of the table and me to his right. The room had wood paneling along the walls and heavy drapes at the windows, currently open so we could look out on the meticulously kept lawn. The huge marble fireplace in the middle of the room was supposed to give it a Victorian outlook, but I knew for a fact that this neighborhood and thus also this house was built a mere five years ago. I had watched more of those old videos my mom had stored in the box, and on one of them Tucker and I had been sneaking around in the construction site for this neighborhood. There had been several shots of me and Tucker standing on the first floor of a half-built house. I suspected it had been Sam who was holding the camera, but she never appeared nor did she say anything.
Thinking about Tucker brought a lump in my throat, and I put down my fork after only having taken a few bites from what seemed to be a steak on my plate. I hadn't tasted it. Like the sandwich, it tasted like cardboard. Vlad frowned at me.
"Eat that, Daniel, you're not accomplishing anything by starving yourself."
"I'm not hungry."
He leaned forward, his eyes flashing red. "I'll make you..."
Fear is an ugly thing. I felt myself go weak. With a shaking hand, I picked up my fork again and reluctantly started to eat. I glanced at the clock. Three hours, Vlad had said. In half an hour, my powers would be back. He saw me looking and smirked at me.
"I suggest you behave," he said, momentarily allowing me a glimpse on the small device that had taken away my ghost powers.
I looked down at my plate and said nothing. The lump in my throat just wouldn't go away, and I had trouble swallowing. I did manage to eat it all though, and even had some desert, vanilla ice cream with warm chocolate sauce that normally would have been my favorite, but which tasted just the same as everything else: cardboard.
After dinner, I followed Vlad down to his lab in the basement. With a glance on the clock on the wall he instructed me to sit down on one of the tables, and I couldn't help but notice they were spotlessly clean, without any clutter on it like in my parents' basement. The whole place was clean, almost obsessively so, and I realized something: Vlad was an obsessive man in everything he did. Be it his business ventures, his lab, my mother, me, whatever he wanted, he would stop at nothing to get it. I shuddered.
Vlad approached me and told me to hold out my arm and sit still. I complied. He stuck a needle in my arm and drew blood in the syringe. He transferred the blood in a vial and placed it in a centrifuge. After only a moment of rotating it at high speed, he took it out again and showed it to me. There were now four colors in the vial, first the dark red blood cells, a thin line of white, platelets, the yellow from the plasma and a thin layer of glowing green.
"Whatever happens," Vlad said, "Never let them examine your blood. It'll give you away."
"But what if I'm in an accident or something," I said, "I can hardly stop them then..."
Vlad gave me a hard look. "Better you die than that you end up a guinea pig for the GIW."
"What's that?"
"Guys In White. Government agency, hunts and studies ghosts. A half ghost would be the ultimate prize for them. And if you're captured, you'll give me away too."
"As you would," I said coolly.
I thought about the GIW. How bad would it be? Visions of me, strapped to a table and doctors and nurses all around me holding clamps and surgical knives, about to dissect me alive entered my mind. Or maybe I had seen too many science fiction movies.
"They won't capture me. I practically own them. I'm a huge supporter of their research facility."
He placed the vial with my blood in another machine and pressed a button. On a computer screen next to it, numbers appeared, and a graph. Vlad stared at it for a moment and then looked at the clock again.
I felt it. A sudden surge of power going through me, a burning coldness. My vision darkened for a moment, and when I could see properly again, everything seemed brighter, the colors sharper, my hearing enhanced. I heard all the little sounds in the lab, the whirring of the numerous computers, the buzz coming off the ghost portal, my own breathing and heartbeat... With a flash, I transformed into Danny Phantom.
"Ah," Vlad said, "Right on time."
He too transformed and gave me a threatening look. Attacking him was probably not a good idea. I wanted to though. I settled for a glare. He smiled viscously at me.
"I have a special assignment for you," he said, "We're going to introduce you to something new."
Anyone wanting to kill Vlad, stand in line :)