Thirty-seven
Observants' High Council Chamber
The Ghost Zone
She came at him hard. In the years that Valerie had considered him the source of all her woes, Danny had been the brunt of her fury—and near-lethal attacks—more times than he cared to remember. But nothing like this. It was like she was coming at him from all sides, and if he dared to try and move to a different vantage point, she would go after Vlad's unconscious form, and he'd be forced to go back in and put up a shield to keep her from wasting him.
"Valerie, stop! I'm not the enemy here!"
"But you're protecting the one who is!"
"Because I'm not going to let you kill him!" He dodged another blast from her sled-mounted ray, and got an ecto-shield up in front of Vlad before she could pound him with her arm-mounted bazooka. While he was distracted, she nailed him with one of those floating box things that she could make hover around her. He hit the wall of the dome, which was still covered with ice from their fight with Vlad, and the impact knocked the wind out of him.
"Now you pay for killing my father!" she cried, taking aim at Vlad once more. Danny forced himself up off the floor even before he properly got his breath back, and flew at her as fast as he could. He managed to knock her off her sled before she could fire, and her shot went wild again, melting through the ice on the domed ceiling, but bouncing off the shield beyond it with a crackle of green and pink energy. The two of them crash-landed, skidding across the main floor of the arena, stopping just short of a broken bench in the seating section around it.
Growling in feral rage, she shoved at him. "Get off of me, Phantom!"
She managed to knock him off her, but he was back before she could get up, and he pinned her shoulders to the floor. "No! Not until you get under control! I'm not going to let you destroy yourself, Valerie!"
"I'm not looking to destroy myself! I'm looking to destroy the man who killed my father! And your father! And your sister and Tucker and Sam! How can you defend him?"
"I'm not defending him! I'm keeping you from doing something you'll regret for the rest of your life!"
"Letting that son of a bitch live is the only thing I'll regret for the rest of my life." With a twist of her body, she got an arm free and blasted Danny with something that knocked him back a hundred feet across the room. It took a second for him to realize it was a ghost net. Fortunately, it was only resistant to ecto-energy, not ice energy, and with a massive blast of cold, the net exploded off of him and he was free. He got an ecto-shield up around Vlad just before she nailed him with pink, flying razor disks.
Roaring in frustration, she wheeled on Danny again. "I swear to God, Phantom, I will blast you out of your afterlife if you don't stop defending him right now!"
"Would you listen to yourself, Valerie? I'm not 'Phantom,' I'm Danny. Your friend. You would honestly kill your friend just to get revenge on that piece of sewage?"
"If you were really my friend, you'd help me!"
"I am helping you!" She flew at him, and he went intangible, letting her soar through him. This time, instead of taking the opportunity to attack Vlad again, she wheeled around for another go at him, but he flew under her and grabbed onto her sled, making it intangible as well. With the sled gone under her feet, she plummeted to the ground, a good thirty feet below them. Danny let go of the sled and dove after her, grabbing her before she hit the floor.
"Let go of me!" She pummeled him with her fists.
"No! I want you to listen to me for five seconds!" He landed, shoving her back against the wall, then blasted her with an ice ray to freeze her to it. "Now are you ready to listen?"
She struggled to break herself out of the ice. "I'm gonna kill you!"
"And then what? Kill me, kill Vlad… what will that get you? Your father, my father, our friends… they'll all still be dead. And you'll be left with nothing but your own anger and bitterness. What has that ever gotten you, Valerie? Two years of holding a grudge against me, and what did it get you?"
"That was different! I was wrong about you! I'm not wrong about Vlad! He's evil!"
"Yeah, he is. He is a sick, twisted, pathetic son of a bitch. Which is why he isn't worth you losing yourself over. It wasn't what your grudge against Danny Phantom did to me that was the problem, Val. It was what it did to you. You think killing Vlad will solve everything, but your grudge won't die with him. It'll only get worse, until it eats you alive and you become what you hate. And I'm not gonna let you do this to yourself, Valerie."
"What makes you think you can tell me who I am?"
"I can't, but I can tell you who I am. Or who I became—or would have become—when I let grief and bitterness control me and rob me of my humanity. That thing in the park… not Vlad, but the other thing. The alternate future me. Do you know how I became him?"
"I don't really give a damn! I just want Vlad to pay for what he's done!"
"You need to give a damn, because you're doing the same thing I did that made me him. I… I lost everyone in that alternate timeline, and I couldn't deal with my grief, so I went to Vlad. Vlad. Who I can't stand. For the longest time after I found out about that, I couldn't figure out why I would go to him of all people. But now I know. I went to him, not to get rid of the pain, but to hang onto it. Because I'd seen him do it. For twenty years, he hung onto his anger at my dad and his obsession with my mom. I told him I wanted him to rip out my human side so I wouldn't feel the pain anymore, but I—this me in this time—know now it was a lie. Losing my humanity could never ease the pain. It could only burn it into me forever. And the opposite is true, too. Hanging onto the pain, and the anger, and the need for revenge, you can't have that and keep your humanity. I did it in the reverse order, but the result is the same. Anger alive and well, humanity gone. And I'm not gonna let you do that to yourself, Valerie. I'm not gonna let you become something you hate just to give you a few seconds of pain relief. I don't give a damn about Vlad. I hope he rots in hell for what he's done. But I will not lose you!"
"Why do you care?"
He gaped at her. "Because you're all I have left! You and my mom, you're all…" It hit him then. Harder than she'd hit him with any of her weapons. They were gone. His father. Jazz. Tucker. Sam. Gone. He sunk to his knees, overwhelmed by the pain as tears began to flow. "Oh, God, they're gone. I couldn't protect them, and now they're gone."
"At least you have your mom," she said, her voice as wracked with pain as his own. "I have nothing, Danny. Nothing. My dad was all I had, and that bastard took him from me!"
He looked up, wiping his eyes with the back of his arm. "You're wrong, Valerie. You have me."
She collapsed, boneless, into heaving sobs, the ice the only thing holding her up. Danny shot a ray of plasma, cracking the ice and releasing her, and scooped her into his arms. They fell against each other, both overcome by their mutual loss.
A staccato clapping sound echoed across the chamber from behind, and they both wheeled around to find Vlad, conscious and free of the ice Danny had used to bind him, walking towards them, clapping. "Bravo! Bravo! What a performance! Why, it nearly moved me to tears."
Danny was up off the ground in an instant, and he threw himself into Vlad as hard and fast as he could. They both flew across the room, crashing against the huge double doors on the opposite side, then landed in a heap on the floor. Danny kept Vlad's shoulders pinned the wall, his face just inches away from the man he loathed with every cell in his body. "Just because I won't let her kill you in cold blood, Plasmius, doesn't mean I'll let you get away with what you did. You're coming back to Amity Park, and you're gonna pay for everything you've done. My dad, Sam, Jazz, Tucker, Valerie's dad, Mr. Manson. And not just them. The whole world's gonna be out for blood after what you tried to do with the asteroid. You're gonna rot in jail or fry in the electric chair. I don't care, and it's not my decision to make. But you're not gonna get away with everything you've done."
He laughed, a brittle, mirthless sound. "You don't honestly think you can beat me, do you, Daniel?"
"I already have."
"We already have."
Danny looked over his shoulder, and Valerie was there, aiming her bazooka.
"Val…"
"It's okay, Danny. I'm not gonna kill him. Unless he gives me a reason to, like fighting back or trying to escape." She still looked deadly, but the wild, uncontrolled rage was gone, replaced by something a little more human.
Danny nodded, then turned back to Vlad. "I want to know where my mother is. You're gonna take us to her now, and then we're all going back to the Human World and to the police."
He laughed again. "Oh, Daniel, you're hilarious! You really believe you can win so easily? When will you ever learn? The only way you can ever beat me easily is if I let you. So you might want to ask yourself, why would I let you win?"
"This isn't twenty questions, Plasmius. Tell me where my mother is!" He banged Vlad back against the wall for emphasis.
"I'll answer your question only after you answer mine. Why do you think I would let you win?"
"I don't know. Because you're a sick bastard who likes messing with me."
"And?"
"And…" Danny's eyes widened. "You wanted to see what I'd do when I had you down. If I would kill you while you were defenseless."
"Very good! A little slow, perhaps, but at least you're not entirely your idiot father's son."
The reminder of his father brought a fresh stab of grief, and Danny knocked Vlad against the wall again. "I passed your little test, so you can forget about turning me into you. Now tell me where my mother is!"
"I'd start talking if I were you, Vlad. You may have noticed that I'm not as reluctant as Danny is to take you out if I have to."
"Please. You're even less capable than he is of actually defeating me. And you didn't pass my test, Daniel. You failed. Not only are you weak, you've exposed your weakness, and I will not hesitate to use it against you."
"Doing what's right even when it isn't what you want isn't a weakness, Vlad. Hanging onto your anger and hate for over twenty years, that's a weakness. My mom was right. You're pathetic. And I'm not gonna be anything like you. Ever."
"What I am is the most powerful being in this world or in ours. The Ghost Zone is very nearly mine, and the Human World will be, too. If you are choosing to not be like me, then you are choosing defeat and failure. I had hoped you would chose to be the powerful ghost hybrid I know you can be, but time and time again, you choose weakness and failure. You think you defeated me? You've defeated but a small portion of me. The next time we battle, it will be with all of me. And I will not hesitate to do what you could not. I will not hesitate to remove you as a threat. Permanently."
Before Danny could even summon a response, Vlad evaporated beneath his grasp in a burst of green vapor, and was gone.
Observants' Control Tower
The Ghost Zone
Tucker had never seen anything that was so simultaneously amazing and completely creepy in his life. The place where they had traced the power source for the shield was the top of a huge tower-like observatory that sat atop the highest peak of the mountain. Inside was some sort of control room, but unlike any Tucker had ever seen before. There were rows and rows of those gruesome eyeballs rising up from the floor on those optic-nerve-like stands. They were packed together so tightly that it almost gave the impression of a gigantic fly with its hundreds of eyes all watching him, only these eyes were all showing different images from around the Human World. Tucker whistled. "It's like Ghost Mission Control."
"It's pretty impressive," Mr. Gray agreed. "In a really disturbing way. But we're not here to check out the tech. We're here to take out the shield."
"Right." Tucker consulted his handheld. "It's somewhere in the middle of all this."
They started walking through the maze of eyeball screens, finally coming to an open area in the very center of the room. It was a sunken section, with three steps leading down into it, and from within, they could see a large number of the monitors. "This must be where the operators control everything."
"And that looks like the shield generator." Mr. Gray pointed out a boxy-looking contraption that looked like something straight out of Fenton Works.
But something else caught Tucker's eye. "Hold up. Is that what I think it is?"
"What?"
Tucker walked over to a monitor in the middle of the sunken area, but unlike the others, it wasn't a giant, bloodshot eyeball. Instead, it looked like a humongous gear.
From a clock.
"Dude! This doesn't belong to the Observants. This is Clockwork's!"
"Who?"
"Clockwork! He's the Master of Time. Vlad took him out a few days ago. But this place is full of monitors that can watch anything in the world. Why would he want Clockwork's viewscreen here?" He knelt down to examine the base, where wires snaked out from it. "It looks like he's hooked it into the system. Why would he do that? Unless—"
"We got more important things to worry about right now, Tucker. Let's take down this shield and go find Valerie and everyone else."
"Okay." Tucker got up off the floor. "But I wanna check something out before we go searching for the others. If this thing does what I think it does, then I know how Vlad faked their deaths on that video."
Observants' High Council Chamber
The Ghost Zone
Danny rammed his fist into the ice-covered doors where he'd had Vlad pinned only moments before. "Dammit! He was playing us the whole time!"
"I don't get it. If he was faking being weak enough for us to win, why not stay and finish us off?"
"He wasn't faking. He just wasn't all here."
Valerie put her hands on her hips. "That guy hasn't been all there from the getgo."
"No. I mean… You know how I can duplicate myself? I learned that from Vlad. Only he's got, like, twenty years more experience than me. He can make a whole bunch of copies of himself, and they don't have to be close together like mine do. Remember that thing with my cousin, Dani? How Vlad Masters was locked in the closet while Vlad Plasmius was fighting us? That was just him duplicating himself."
"So what we just fought was a duplicate?"
"Right. And duplicates aren't full strength. If they get defeated, it only takes out some of the strength of the whole, rather than destroying the whole thing. He was never in any danger at all. If you would've killed him, you would've thought you were committing murder, but it would've been more like… knocking the wind out of the whole Vlad."
Valerie shook her head. "So it was just a test. To see what we'd do when we thought we had the upper hand. Bastard."
"Yeah."
"So, what do we do now?"
"We gotta find a way out of here and find my mom and stop whatever it is he's planning to do."
"Okay, but we've already tried getting out of here and haven't had much success."
"Perhaps I can help with that," a deep and somewhat sanctimonious voice interrupted.
Danny whirled around, his heart leaping at the familiar voice. "Clockwork!"