Begun in the innocent days of late summer, 2019. Finished for InvisoBang 2021! With gorgeous cover art by strawberry-requiem-art (Tumblr) and dynamic illustration by thickerthanectoplasm (Tumblr)!
Warnings for gore, violence, drug reference, cursing, dark themes, and a serial killer. Because All-New Ghost Rider. And because Maddie Fenton.
But first: theme song!
Yo! Robbie Reyes, he was just eighteen.
To provide for his brother, needed stacks of green,
So he stole a supercharged street machine.
He was set to win big, two car-lengths ahead
Till gunmen cornered Robbie and shot him dead.
But he didn't stay dead. This evil ghost
Brought Robbie back as his human host.
They hit the road hot, bone, fire, and steel!
They drove for revenge, got blood on their wheels!
When Robbie woke up, he didn't think it was real,
With one eye orange, and his body all healed—
Got a cold shock when the ghost made his reveal.
Though he was built to do evil he understood
It's what you do that defines you. He strives to do good:
A hero for his neighborhood!
Danny Phantom streaked through the night sky over the highway like a meteor on a mission. The snowy ground threw back the city sky-glow, the road below stood out like a black chasm. Sirens wailed behind him from a pack of squad cars losing ground on their targets. A helicopter whup-whupped in the distance, shining its spotlight on him and on the two vehicles below him fleeing the city at very close to Danny's top speed of one hundred and twelve miles per hour.
Scratch that. The burning muscle car in the rear shot forward and caught up to the van in the front. People in the van threw open the back doors and started shooting at the muscle car, and normally Danny would be pretty sure whose side the Hero ought to be on in this situation, but...that muscle car was literally on fire. And still doing over a hundred miles an hour down the county road. He watched as the driver, also on fire, phased out through the glass and manifested a sturdy-looking ectoplasmic chain to sling around the van and yank it off the road.
Danny choked and clasped his hands over his mouth as the van tumbled over and over across the frozen cornfield. Guns or not, he'd say the guys in the van had probably gotten what was coming to them.
The ghostly driver and his car power-slid to a stop next to the van, and the driver jumped on it, rolled in through the back hatch, dragged a guy out by his ankle, and then reached down to the ground and manifested a crowbar out of his own shadow, with which he started beating the other bad guy. Danny saw the gunman's arm break.
"Dude, not cool, can't you tell he's said Uncle already?" Danny yelled, swooping down out of the sky. "Obviously I'm all for a little crime-fighting, but geez."
The other ghost wasn't so much of a quipper. He tipped his head back and screamed at Danny, a metal skull and bright yellow flames, expressionless burning eyes. A less-beefy version of Skulker in his power-armor, but Skulker had never shown interest in hunting the living.
Danny phased his arm through his own torso and pulled out his Fenton Thermos. "Back to the Ghost Zone with you, Robocop." He took aim and activated the Thermos, braced himself in mid-air as the beam locked on to the other ghost and it started to tear and flicker at the edges.
The ghost's car backed right through its driver, sucked him inside, and took off, splattering Danny with melted snow and ripping out of range of the beam. Danny shut the Thermos off and growled.
The sirens drew closer and closer, two squad cars pulling off the road to surround the tipped-over van, a third keeping up the chase on the burning muscle car. Danny sped up, pushed himself to his limits, arms straight at his sides to cut air resistance, his legs streaking out behind him in a formless contrail, eyes locked on the roof of the muscle car. They left the squad car behind again, and below him, the driver phased out of the car and onto the roof. The car slowed as the driver snarled up at him. Danny took a breath, charged up his right fist with a crackling green ball of ectoplasmic energy, and let loose at one of the rear wheels.
The car swerved, dodged his shot. But the swerve cost speed, and now Danny could bring the Thermos to bear without losing ground to the car. He swooped in, closer this time, took aim at to the driver, switched on the beam.
He saw the driver kneel down on the roof of the car and brace himself. The car picked up speed again, the ground rushing away underneath them, and Danny gritted his teeth and pushed forward—he was not going to lose this asshole before the Thermos caught hold—until suddenly he realized he was being pulled; he couldn't actually fly this fast.
The other ghost was flickering, fire streaming off him and into the Thermos's mouth, but his hands and feet weren't moving from the car. The Thermos hauled them closer and closer, its suction building like an approaching gravity well, and Danny just had to hold on as the metal between his hands started to heat up from flames swirling in and ectoplasmic energy swirling out, let himself be tugged along until this whole ghost and all its fire got vacuumed up and then he'd be able to go home—
The ghost yanked one hand out of the car, swung a length of chain over its head, lashed out and hit Danny in the face with a hammer on the end. Danny dropped the Thermos, its beam shut off, and he slid a hundred feet over the asphalt. If he were human right now, he'd be double-dead. As it was, his whole body stung with roadrash and he had a vivid impression of what it felt like to have his nose shoved down his throat.
He watched the muscle car streak away into the distance, then a ghost-zone portal opened right in front of its nose with a vooom and the car and its driver vanished into it.
More tires screeched behind him, and a searchlight blinded him.
"Freeze! Place your hands on top of your head!"
Danny ignored the order, groped around for the abused Thermos, and sank through the asphalt and out of sight.
"And now: Ghost Watch! Ghost villain Inviso-Bill caused more trouble last night, defending a gang of heavily-armed bank robbers from what may be Amity Park's very own super-hero! This fiery vigilante, dubbed 'Night Rider,' can be seen in this video assisting police to apprehend the gang's ring-leader!"
Assisting police? The other ghost had been half-way to killing the guy. To be fair, the robbers had been firing machine guns at him, but he was a ghost! Get over it! Danny got shot at all the time with weapons that could actually hurt him—by his own parents!
"Phone," demanded Mr. Clark in his dry monotone, and Danny grudgingly surrendered his phone from where he'd been watching a closed-caption newscast behind his math text.
Danny was half-way asleep when his ghost sense woke him with a puff of super-cooled air from his lungs, and Tucker nudged his ankle with his sneaker. "Dude! Danny!" he hissed, pointing at the window.
From Casper High's driveway, a powerful engine rumbled closer and closer. Danny looked around the classroom for any spiritual intrusions, then chanced a look over Tucker's shoulder out the window.
An extremely cool car pulled up and parked in front of the ramp, and the throaty rumbling noise fell silent.
Danny's chest still felt cold.
Out in the snowy driveway, a sleek black muscle car parked in the winter sun. It was broad and graceful and high off the ground, vintage curves and a big shiny blower sticking out of the hood like in Mad Max. The chrome sparkled, the paint was glossy and immaculate except where slush had splashed up from the wheels. It looked very much like the car 'Night Rider' drove, only not on fire.
"O-kay," Danny drawled.
Behind him, Sam snorted. "Wow, a gas-guzzling dinosaur. Now with extra guzzle."
"Shut up, I love her," Tucker hissed, staring spellbound out the window.
The driver got out. Instead of a possessed robot, or maybe some rich old guy in a polo shirt, he was a young human dude: could be a student, maybe a Senior, in faded black jeans and sneakers and a black leather jacket. He looked tough. He had a short beard and big black ear-piercings to make himself look tougher.
He looked around the school sharply, his thick dark eyebrows drawn into a heavy scowl. Then he opened the trunk, hauled out a huge motorized wheelchair, lifted a skinny kid out of the passenger seat and set him on it. The skinny kid grinned up at him, then pointed up at the school, across the road at a tree, and down at the snow on the ground. The Senior bent down, clumsily packed together a snowball, and handed it to the kid, then escorted him toward the wheelchair ramp and out of sight, the scowl gone.
The car's passenger door had shut itself, Danny noticed.
"Man, that's a cool car," said Mr. Clark over by the window. "Okay, show's over. Back to cosines!"
Danny was completely alert, all his skin in goosebumps. But he had a hard time concentrating on math at the same time as he listened for screams.
The last bell rang and there were no screams. They still had detention with Mr. Lancer, all three Musketeers.
"Truancy, trespassing, destruction of school property," Mr. Lancer sneered from inside when Sam knocked on the door to his office. "Catch-22, it's as if you want to keep me here after hours every week. Wait in the hall."
"It was a ghost," Danny protested weakly. It was always a ghost. This latest detention was from Monday.
"And you just had to cut class," Lancer replied. He shut the door on them.
Sam, Danny, and Tucker stood around in the hall staring at each-other. They heard murmuring voices from inside, and then, "Fine, Mr. Reyes, fine. Until you recover a legible copy of your brother's IEP, we will provide these...accommodations."
"I get to go to school!" exclaimed a new voice, the words a little clumsy, the enthusiasm incongruous.
"Yeah, buddy. This is your new school, and your teachers are going to do everything in their power to keep you safe and help you learn everything you can."
"You've made your point, Mr. Reyes."
The door opened, and the scary Senior in the leather jacket left Lancer's office, followed by the skinny kid in the wheelchair. Danny coughed up icy air and stared at them.
"Gabe, why don't you go down the hall. I'll meet you at the elevator," Scary Guy said, and the skinny kid whirred away past the classrooms. Scary Guy just stood there, glaring at them and clutching a blackened manila envelope stuffed with half-charred paperwork. "You're in trouble a lot, huh."
Danny shrugged.
"The American education system is a soul-crushing relic of the Industrial Age," Sam deadpanned.
"We're free spirits," Tucker punned. Danny elbowed him. Every breath he blew out was colder than the air he took in. If that big muscle car wasn't a coincidence, and Scary Guy was the one setting off his ghost sense...
Looking at him more closely, Danny decided that he was definitely setting off his ghost sense. Scary had freaky-bright eyes, one orange, one green. He may have non-glowing, non-dead-looking light brown skin, and he may have close ties to humanity what with taking care of his brother, but he was either overshadowed by Night Rider, or a really good shapeshifter, on par with Spectra and her buddy Bernard. Fantastic. Danny narrowed his eyes. "There a reason you're squaring up against three freshmen?"
Scary Guy closed in on Danny, eyes narrowed. "If you mess with my brother, you'll wake up eviscerated at the bottom of a ravine," he murmured. Then he backed away, eyes wide, an expression of 'did I just say what I think I said' clear on his face.
Chalk one up to 'overshadowed.' Danny held up one hand, ready to transform and punch the intruder right out of him.
Abruptly, Scary Guy shook his head. "I meant, you mess with my brother, you spend the rest of the semester in traction," he clarified. "Stay away from Gabe." And he hurried down the hall to, apparently, meet his brother at the elevator.
Danny shivered. "Well that's just great. Guys, meet Night Rider, my latest nemesis. The one who's, like, literally too heavy to fit in the Fenton Thermos."
Sam raised an eyebrow. "How's that possible? I've seen that thing suck up—"
"I dunno, maybe it's cause he's haunting a real car?"
"An amazing car," Tucker added.
Lancer's door opened again. "Mr. Fenton! Vaping on school grounds? Place your backpack on my desk to be searched!"
Tucker gave him a sympathetic pat as Danny coughed out the last of the cold air from his lungs.
Detention lasted almost until six and felt like three days in an FBI interrogation room. Neither Mr. Lancer nor Principal Ishiyama could tell a compact ectoblaster from a vape pen, and Mom and Dad weren't answering the phone. Mr. Lancer finally called Jazz, who dragged Dad up from the basement so he could identify Danny's borrowed Fenton Tech for the principal over FaceTime, and then drove to school to pick Danny up while Mom and Dad kept working downstairs. Danny wolfed down dinner and ran up to his room to transform and go patrol the city, a much less stressful prospect than finishing the massive pile of homework waiting for him.
Danny saw Night Rider again that night, streaking North on the freeway toward Chicago leaving burning tracks of spectral fire, weaving through traffic and phasing through cars and scaring the crap out of people. But it was past midnight, Danny didn't know anyone in Chicago, and that was a very long way to fly, so he let it pass. But if he showed his face—um, helmet?—in Amity Park again, Danny resolved he wouldn't get off so easy. He'd suck him into the Fenton Thermos and dump him in the Ghost Zone...somehow.
Night Rider's little brother, he saw in English class the next day. He sat in his electric wheelchair with a padded desk on his lap, just in front of the front row, and a man a bit too young to be a teacher sat next to him on a stool, quietly talking to him and pointing things out on an IPad. Danny was a couple rows too far away to eavesdrop. He watched them a bit, until his eyes went blurry, then he rested his head on his desk and shut his eyes for a moment that ended when the bell rang and it was time for chemistry.
"You just let him go?" Sam demanded at lunch. They had their usual table in the cafeteria, in the shame corner farthest from the counter.
Danny hunched defensively over his mashed potatoes. "It was midnight and it's a really long way and I don't know anything about Chicago, okay? What if I got caught 'abetting crimes' again."
"Yeah, lighten up," Tucker interjected, sawing through his rubbery pork chop. "Chicago's a big city. They probably got their own superheroes. Danny's got enough going on."
"Danny, you can't let the media get you down," Sam said, turning a different tack. "You know right and wrong. You know everyone deserves a right to a jury trial, and not to get mauled by some power-tripping vigilante. You did good."
Danny blushed. "I. I guess."
A whirring sound interrupted them. Night Rider's little brother was approaching their table in his electric wheelchair, a tray loaded Sunny-D and two servings of macaroni-and-cheese balanced on his lap. "Hi! I'm Gabe Reyes. I'm supposed to sit with you guys because you're cool."
Danny barely caught what he was saying because he was distracted by how subtly off his voice was, the way his head was cocked like he had a crick in his neck, the strange curl in his wrists as he lifted the tray up onto the end of their table. He realized he was staring, and then felt a stab of self-disgust because you weren't supposed to stare at disabled people, his mom had taught him better than that. Then he felt a twist of panic, because what if this kid wanted to eat lunch with them every day? They usually got to talk about whatever they wanted at lunch, the din of the cafeteria acting as a sound barrier, and they were such social pariahs that no one ever, ever sat at their table. Would the kid even understand if they talked about ghost stuff? Would he understand what they were talking about but not understand the need for secrecy? Danny scrambled for a way to gently direct Gabe Reyes to another table without hurting his feelings, but then Tucker asked, "Man, who told you we were cool?"
Gabe pointed at the A-List table. Dash Baxter and Paulina Sanchez high-fived each-other.
Danny scowled at them, even though he'd been thinking of doing the same thing. He was such a horrible person. What was wrong with him, seriously.
"Okay, uh, Gabe," Sam said with a careful smile, enunciating very slowly and clearly. "Of course you can sit with us."
"They told you right, we're way more awesome than those losers," Tucker said around a mouth-full of pork. Cafeteria pork-chops took about two minutes of chewing per bite, so there was no sense delaying a question until after he'd swallowed. "So what brings you to Amity Park?"
"Robbie, he's my big brother, he got scared because people died all the time back home in LA, and our uncle left us lots of money so we moved here because it's across state lines and the crime rate is really low," Gabe said. Sam raised her eyebrows at Danny— now, we don't have time to unpack all that...
"Oh, you're from California," chewed Tucker. "Enjoying the snow?"
"It's really pretty," Gabe said. "Robbie doesn't like it because he says it hurts our car's undercarriage and it's hard to drive on. And it's hard to drive my chair on. But it's pretty. When the sun sets it gets really bright, it shines up at your eyes."
"That is one heck of a car."
"It's so cool! It goes super fast. Robbie can make it go so fast the front wheels jump, he can do a, do a—"
"A wheelie!"
"A wheelie!"
"What model is it?"
"It's a, a 1969 Dodge Charger with a 426 Hemi V-8 and a supercharger—"
"Hang on, lemme Duck-Duck that," Tucker said, pulling out his phone. He poked around through the search results.
"It can make twelve pounds of boost! That's the air, you squeeze a lot of air into the intake manifold, it makes the explosions bigger, that's how engines work, lotsa-lots of explosions."
"Wow, that is a badass car," Tucker said, scrolling through an article. "Wow. Gabe. I have to see that car. I must. I need to see her. You gotta help me, dude, you gotta ask your brother to show me his car."
Danny cleared his throat loudly.
"Oh, relax, I'll do it in the daytime," Tucker said, rolling his eyes.
"Uh, Gabe," Danny cut in, "What does your brother do? His job?"
"He's a mechanic. He helps people with their cars."
"Did he ever get hurt really bad? Like, the doctors were scared he wouldn't make it?"
Gabe's eyes got wide and Sam slapped the table. " Danny. "
"No," Gabe said softly. "Would that happen?"
Sam scowled at Danny. "Never mind. It doesn't matter because clearly, your brother is—" Night Rider— "fine."
"So tell me about this car," Tucker interrupted. "How fast does it go? Did he restore it? Does he take it to car shows? Has anybody ever used it in a movie?"
Gabe and Tucker talked about cars the rest of the lunch period, and Danny pictured how furious Night Rider would be to know that the "class delinquents" were hanging out with his little brother. He decided to steal the Fenton Fisher from his parents' lab in the basement. Maybe if he hooked Knight Rider with it, he could yank him off his car and suck him into the Thermos without getting hit with a crowbar again.
"Aw, shiiiii—" Danny groaned as he turned the last corner to Fentonworks.
There was, if he remembered it right, a '69 Dodge Charger with a supercharged 420 Henny V8 parked at the curb, just under his dad's giant blinking marquee sign. His breath chilled, the fog of it even more intense than it should have been in the cold afternoon; as he stared at the car, he felt like the car was staring back.
It was an improbably cool car. Huge and sleek and glossy, one of those old "land-boats" with the broad shiny chrome bumpers and coke-bottle curves, and that blower sticking up out of the hood. Danny wasn't sure how it all worked, but it looked intense. There wasn't a dot of rust or a dent anywhere on the mirror-smooth black paint. He reached out to touch the hood near one of the little round glass headlights, and yanked his hand back. Felt like he'd just touched a hot stove.
Figures. He scowled back at the car, which he was now positive was staring at him as he sucked on his finger. He tipped his head up at the Ops Center that perched on the roof of the building like a flying saucer, and contemplated transforming, floating invisibly into the house, and just holing up in his bedroom until Night Rider went away.
That was stupid. "Don't be such a wimp," he told himself, and let himself in the front door.
"Danny, wipe your shoes," his mom yelled from the basement.
Danny stopped, rolled his eyes, and stuck one shoe, then the other into the open maw of the Fenton Footwear DeGrimer parked just inside the door. Faintly luminescent microfiber tendrils licked at the snow and road-salt. It managed to suck his left shoe off, and he gritted his teeth and stuck his hand in to rescue it. Felt like he'd lost a layer of skin. "Got it, Mom," he yelled back.
There was no one in the kitchen or living room. He didn't hear anything from upstairs. He crept down into the expansive concrete basement where most of the Fentonworks work went on, the Ghost Portal and the ectoplasm distillery and the lathes and fabrication shop and radiation bunker and containment chambers and dissection tables and stasis rays and the Specter Speeder and the summer sports equipment. Steep concrete stairs with no guardrail led down into the lab space. An air compressor turned on, an echoing roar that drowned out sound. He spotted his mom soldering a circuit-board at one work bench, surrounded by cannibalized chunks of leaf-blower, carpet-steamer, agricultural-sprayer, and hoverboard. A bazooka-like shape was taking form in front of her. Danny wished he didn't have to know what it did.
The air compressor shut off abruptly and Danny's ears rang. He heard his dad bellowing from behind the Fenton Speeder. "—converts surplus ecto-energy into AC current, to run the navigation and recording instruments, and climate control!"
"So it's the alternator," said a new voice. Night Rider.
"The Fenternator!" Dad corrected. Danny heard a smack, and winced in sympathy; one of Dad's full-force friendly back-pats. "Got to be careful with these wires, they'll knock you right on your behind. Maddie, remind me to measure this kid for a Fenton Jumpsuit! Insulated against electrical shocks up to one thousand volts! I'd lend you Danny's, but I haven't seen it for months, wonder where he put it..."
Clearly, the Ghost Portal put out more than a thousand volts.
"I have coveralls," said Night Rider. "I know how to be safe around high voltage."
"It's a stop-gap, but I have a solution," his dad said, and Danny rounded the Speeder just in time to see his dad slap a Fentonworks logo—a big sticker of his own face—over the breast of Night Rider's baggy gray coverall. Jack Fenton was built like a refrigerator. Night Rider rocked with the hit and rubbed his chest, looked down at the logo and winced, then gave a very fake smile. He spotted Danny, and his ghost-bright eyes narrowed. "Ah—hey."
Dad looked around. "What? Oh! Danno! Get over here!"
"Who's, uh, who's this?" Danny asked, as though Night Rider hadn't just given him murder-eyes at school a couple days before. Night Rider actually bared his teeth at him, and Danny side-stepped to put more of his dad's bulk between them. Dad didn't notice.
"Danny, meet Roddie!"
"Robbie."
"Roddie here's our new apprentice! Jazz refuses to learn the family business and you really need to concentrate on your grades, so to grow Fentonworks and give your mother and me some more time to work on our passions, we hired Roddie to do the upkeep. He's got zero ectology background, but we'll train him up. Sweeping, mopping, harvesting ectoplasmic entities to fuel the ectogenerator, welding, oiling the garage door hinges, figuring out why the Fenton Family Ghost Assault Vehicle makes that grinding noise every time I turn left at eighty miles an hour, fabrication, machining, and taking out the trash. Maybe one of these days we'll even show him how to hunt ghosts!"
"Yeah," said Danny, staring Robbie right in the eyes, "I bet he'd have a fun time."
Robbie stared back, raised one jagged black eyebrow.
"Hunting ghosts, " he said. "Hanging out all day with ghost hunters."
Nothing.
"I can't think of a better way to learn what really counts in life," his dad boomed. "We'll make a man out of you, Roddie."
"When's my first paycheck?" Robbie asked.
Dad's mouth turned down at the corners. "Mm. Roddie. About that...how would you feel about working for cash? Payroll taxes, you know..."
"Cash is fine. I'll be counting."
"Oh! Right. Smart man!" Dad slapped Robbie on the shoulder again. "Welcome to Fentonworks!"
"Yeah, welcome to Fentonworks," Danny said from behind his dad, and slipped backward toward the stairs. The basement had no cell reception and he needed Sam and Tucker's opinions on this guy. Was Night Rider a total skeptic about ghost hunting (hilarious) or was he a really good actor slipping in to spy on Fentonworks for the other ghosts (horrifying)?
"If you're ready to start, how about you fix this up this old thing," his dad said to Robbie. "I call it the Ghost Gabber! Translates the nonsensical murmurings of ghosts into words you and I use every day! Something's wrong with the sensitivity, though, it always acts up around Danny—here, this rheostat controls the receiver threshold—"
Danny hurried up the stairs before his dad could call him over to demonstrate how the Ghost Gabber acted up around him.
"So I just turn this on," he heard Robbie say, and then the Ghost Gabber made a squawk and said, in its automated feminine voice, "Fornicating believe this guy, keeps giant stickers of his own face—holy feces that thing works. Feces. Fornicate. Fear me."
Danny spun around at the top of the stairs, lost his balance, almost fell ten feet, and hovered back to safety.
Night Rider was staring down at the Ghost Gabber in his hands like it was the Holy Grail. His eyes were huge. "Madre de dios. It can hear him!"
"Mother of god. It can hear him. Don't you dare you little illegitimate-child, you've really stepped in the feces now. I am a ghost."
"It can hear him!" Night Rider hugged the Ghost Gabber to his chest. Dad grabbed for a weapon, came up with an unfinished gauntlet. Mom circled around the Fenton Speeder and levelled an ectorifle at Night Rider's head.
"It can hear him. Oh fornication. Robbie, no, no, get the fornication away from these people, I know what you're thinking and it won't work! Fear me!"
"Get out of our apprentice, ectoplasmic scum," Mom snarled, as Dad bellowed, "Try me, spook," and Danny didn't know whether to swoop in and haul Night Rider out of there, hand his dad a weapon that was actually finished, or make popcorn. He settled for standing at the top of the stairs, gaping at them. And keeping very quiet, because the Ghost Gabber was on.
"You're real ghost hunters?" Night Rider demanded. "This stuff actually works?"
"—actually works? Get out get out get out of here you ungrateful psychopath! I brought you back! You owe me! I am an undead scourge."
"We are the world's pre-eminent ectologists and paraphysical engineers," said Mom primly. "And yes, ghost. It does work."
"We're one and the same! We have an eternal spiritual bond! You'll never be free of me, they'll destroy us both—"
Night Rider shut the Ghost Gabber off, slowly set it on the floor, and knelt with his hands on top of his head. "Doctor Fenton, please." His face twisted in desperation. "Get him. Out of me."
Mom approached him sideways, cuffed him with a length of Fenton Cord. "We'll do whatever it takes, Mr. Reyes. You have my word."
"Thank-you," said Night Rider raggedly. "Thank-you, thank-you— shut the fuck up, Eli, just shut up!"
Fentonworks had never had a case of overshadowing come in willingly for exorcism before, so de-ghosting Night Rider was a bit of a production. Mom got out a camera and microphone and sat Night Rider down in front of a whiteboard with the day's date and "Victim of Overshadowing" written on it, then disappeared to change some wiring and fuel cartridges around on some other machines, running back and forth with hand trucks and crouching over a magnifier with the soldering iron. "Jazzypants!" Dad yelled up the stairs. "Get down here! We're gonna rip out a ghost that's been possessing this poor kid!"
Danny heard running footsteps from above, and Jazz bolted down the stairs, red hair streaming behind her. "Danny!" she screamed. "Danny! Where—!"
"Um, hey?" Danny said, giving her a little wave from where he sat on a green-stained lab bench.
"You're okay," she gasped.
"Yeah?"
"Jazzie! Meet Roddie!"
"Robbie," Night Rider corrected, shoulders slumping.
"Roddie's our new apprentice—who just so happens to have first-hand experience with the horror of ghostly possession! Roddie here's been overshadowed for—how long, son?"
"Nineteen months," Night Rider muttered.
"Speak up," Dad ordered, flicking the microphone.
"Nineteen months," Night Rider said, leaning forward.
"And what heinous atrocities has the being committed in your body?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
Jazz was staring at Night Rider from the top of the stairs, and her fair skin was blushing beet red. Danny stood up in alarm and ran up the stairs, trying to block Night Rider from her view. He did not need a repeat of the Johnny 13 situation. "Come on, Jazz, this is gonna be super boring. Let's watch, uuuh, Bachelorette? "
"Why would I want to watch some borderline-abusive reality TV show that cheapens and commodifies romantic bonds?" Jazz demanded, resisting his pull. "Dad! Did this young man consent to be your guinea pig?"
Night Rider lowered his face into his hands as he burst into hysterical laughter.
"Of course he did, he's a natural-born ghost hunter!" Dad announced.
"Nineteen months," gasped Night Rider. "Nineteen—" He straightened suddenly and shook his head. "Can we hurry this up, my sitter's only booked until eight and I promised Gabe I'd take him to the arcade."
"You can't rush science!" Dad scolded him. "You rush a scientist, you get rotten—Mads! How's it going back there?"
"I transferred the ecto-cartridges from two of the Mark III blasters to the Turbinator and I'm re-aligning the spectral diodes around the rim," Mom yelled from across the lab. "Sweetie, some of these diodes were installed in reverse, please, PLEASE remember to double-check the diagrams!"
"Right," said Dad. "So, Roddie. Do you recall the incident when this malicious spirit first entered your body?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
This went on for another hour. Danny messaged Sam and Tucker and they arrived twenty minutes later, and then they all camped out at the top of the stairs. No popcorn, but Tucker brought a bag of pork rinds that he and Danny shared. Sam took notes on Mom's periodic progress updates. Jazz kept trying to yell her own interview questions down at Night Rider.
"How do you think the responsibility of raising your younger brother while you yourself were also a child has impacted your identity and emotional equilibrium?"
Night Rider scowled up at her, his orange eye actually glowing. "I'm fine."
Mom yelled, "Honey, where did you put the 8000-Watt supercapacitor?"
"Can't you just use the jumpstarter?"
"I need it to stabilize the voltages from the ectothermactorreactor so the superfluid ectoplasm doesn't detonate!"
"It's adding weight to the Ghost Deadfall!"
"Thank-you, darling!"
Danny sighed as he watched his parents argue over whether or not to cannibalize the Ghost Deadfall to finish their newest gadget. He leaned over to peek at Sam's phone, where she'd spelled 'ectothermactorreactor' three different ways. "You can relax. I don't think you'll ever need to know this stuff."
"Hey, Tucker and I are involved, too," Sam murmured. "Now be quiet. We might need to save your ass from one of these things."
"I think I can handle that," Danny said, with confidence he did not feel. "I mean, I live with them. If they decide to go after Phantom, they'll tell me their whole plan ahead of time, trying to invite me along on their ghost hunt."
Tucker snorted. "Box Ghost splatted you with a crate of bananas the other day. He was holding it over his head! Right in front of you!"
"Okay," Danny grumped, watching Jazz. She was still staring down at Dad and Night Rider.
"You had like ten minutes to go intangible. Or duck! You can duck, too!"
"Okay!" Danny snapped, shoving Tucker. Carefully, so as not to push him off the stairs.
The Fenton Turbinator gradually took shape between the Specter Speeder and the fume hood. It looked disturbingly like an electric chair, with lengths of Fenton Fishing Line tied to the arms, legs, and back for restraint. A broad, wire-wrapped hose snaked from the dome-shaped stainless-steel headpiece to a coffin-sized transparent double-walled case studded with sensors. Night Rider jerked his head at the assembly. "How's this going to work?"
Mom shut down her welding torch with a satisfied nod and wiped sweat off her forehead with a synthetic chamois. "The diodes around the rim of the Turbinator emit an ectoplasmic superfluid, forming a clockwise vortex capable of penetrating biological tissue," she explained. "The subject is positioned so the brain's pineal gland is located at the center of the vortex. Contact with the superfluid induces sublimation of any adherent ectoplasmic energy and mobilizes it from the tissue. Once sublimation is observed, the operator throws the switch to the Fenton Inductive Pipe. Electromagnetic induction draws the superfluid ectoplasm and the sublimated ectoplasmic entity into the containment chamber for study."
"Does it hurt?" asked Night Rider with a strange, mirthless smile.
"Superfluid ectoplasm is harmless to biological tissue," Mom said. "So long as it remains in the superfluid state."
"No. I mean, does it hurt the ghost."
Dad scoffed. "Ghosts don't feel pain."
"The Fenton Turbinator is designed to extract the ectoplasmic entity in an intact state for future study," Mom explained. "Then we can test its resilience in the face of extreme temperatures and radiation, use it as a target for weapons testing, dissect it to document its internal structure, and when the entity has completely lost cohesion, we'll use its remains as raw material for the ectoreactors that power the Ghost Assault Vehicle and the Specter Speeder, and ecto-cartridges for our weapons. We pride ourselves on using every part of the ghost."
Night Rider's smile got wider and wider as her description went on until it was positively wicked. "Good."
On the stairs, Danny hunched over his stomach and handed the bag of pork rinds back to Tucker. Sam rubbed his shoulder. Jazz covered her mouth with her hands, and Danny wondered what had her so upset. Maybe Mom talking about weapons.
As Mom and Dad's inventions went, this one wasn't so terribly bad, Danny told himself. It wasn't a gun; they'd have to catch him first to stick his head in the Turbinator. 'Intact state' was encouraging. He knew it was possible to separate his human and ghost halves thanks to another invention, and it turned out both halves of him were capable of independent thought. So all he'd have to do, if they ripped his ghost out, was sneak down to the lab before they got into any of the really nasty experiments and let his other half out of the box.
No, what had him feeling sick was the absolute venom in Night Rider's voice whenever he spoke of the spirit overshadowing him. Was overshadowing really that bad? It was so handy, and when Danny did it, people almost never seemed to remember anything happening...but Robbie had been overshadowed in some way for over a year, and he'd clearly noticed his hitchhiker. Danny couldn't imagine borrowing another person's body for that long, couldn't imagine wanting to—it was claustrophobic. What was this other ghost doing?
"How's it coming, Mads?" Dad called.
"Testing connections, dear!" Mom buzzed around the Turbinator with a voltmeter, probing the wires. At last she handed Dad a remote. "You can do the honors."
"Fantastic!" Dad bellowed, and punched the button.
The Turbinator howled like a jet engine and spat swirling jets of glowing green ectoplasm out from under its rim. They rapidly condensed into a flat green disk like a spiral galaxy. Mom waved her hand through it, inside the headpiece. "A stable vortex. As designed."
"Another brilliant Fenton ghost-fighting invention!" Dad bellowed. He circled around the interview table to untie Night Rider from the chair.
Night Rider jumped up and tried to bite his arm, tripped, and fell to the floor face down on his bound hands. "Sorry, Mr. Fenton," he said. "He's scared."
"As well he should be," Dad agreed, and helped him up, holding him easily at arm's length in case of more biting. Or kicking. Night Rider kicked at his knee. Dad picked him up by the waist and tucked him under one arm. "Ready, Mads?"
"Ready, Jack!"
They manhandled Night Rider into the chair. Dad pinned him down while Mom tied the restraints and Robbie bared his teeth in some internal struggle. When he was secure, Mom and Dad stood back. "What are you waiting for?" Night Rider demanded, limbs jerking against the strands of Fishing Line. "Get this creep out of me!"
Dad stooped down to look him in the eye. "You understand that this device, while theoretically sound, is completely untested and will be applying an extremely high voltage very close to your brain?"
"I trust Dr. Fenton," Night Rider said. "Light me up."
Mom and Dad high-fived. Then Dad lowered the dome of the Turbinator with its glowing green vortex down over Night Rider's head, leaving only his mouth and beard exposed. Night Rider's struggles stopped abruptly, and his arms and legs went slack.
A long pause. Mom bent down to peer under the Turbinator, and then consulted a row of gauges on the back of the headpiece. "The vortex is still stable. Pure superfluid. Jack, we did it!"
"How's that feel, son?" Dad asked.
Danny stared down from the stairway, his knee bouncing, listening.
Night Rider licked his lips, almost in slow motion. "Weird," he said, his voice soft and drawn-out. "My. I'm." The Turbinator hummed as they all waited for him to elaborate. "Hmm."
"Has your possessing spirit's hold on your nervous system loosened?" Dad asked.
Night Rider's hands slowly uncurled from the chair's armrests, fingers stretching out as far as they could go until they trembled, tendons straining at full extension. He said nothing.
"Jack, when the entity sublimates, there will be a visible flash from the energy liberated in the phase-change," Mom announced. Her goggles were down.
"Oh, yeah!" Dad exclaimed, pulling down his own goggles. "Hide your eyes, kids!"
"Oh my god," Jazz groaned, resting her head in her hands.
Danny turned around to Sam and Tucker. "Oh! Right. UV radiation, it's super bad for your eyes."
"And your everything," Sam shot back.
"Maybe you should go."
Tucker pulled his hat down over his face. "I'm good!"
"Seriously, guys—"
Night Rider groaned from inside the Turbinator, his splayed hands finally relaxing. "...Y-yeah," he replied to Dad, slurring, thirty seconds late.
Dad leaned down again. "You good, son?"
"Mm-hm."
"Do you feel the possession losing its hold?"
"Yeah—" His mouth dropped open and the flash of light Mom had warned them about erupted from his body, brilliant blue settling to a ghostly-green glow that rippled up over his skin and coveralls toward the Turbinator in branching patterns like pulsing veins.
Danny stared. He could see the ectoplasm being sucked out of Robbie's body, whatever spirit had possessed him dissolved into nerveless fluid, and what was that like, to lose cohesion like that? To go from a solid to a fluid? Even when Danny was intangible, he still had a form. His ghost body was stretchier than bone and flesh, but it always carried the suggestion of physicality, always ready to spring back into its original shape. What if Mom and Dad were wrong about this machine removing ghosts intact? If they put him in the Turbinator and half his mind just dissolved into a puddle, what could he do? Could he absorb himself back into his skin? Drink himself? What would that feel like, to be so helpless?
The green glow began to recede from Night Rider's feet and hands, flowing up toward his head. His fingers twitched again and went still.
"We have sublimation!" Mom announced. "I'm energizing the induction system!"
A squeal of discharging capacitors and a crackle of stray voltage. Lights on the containment chamber flashed on, and the green glow under the Turbinator headpiece was sucked violently up and away and out through the pipe. A green blob ghost the size of a grapefruit shot out and bounced around inside the containment chamber. Danny raised his eyebrow, surprised that such a small, nonthreatening ghost had managed to possess a human for so long and cause Robbie so much distress—but then again, Skulker was a blob ghost, and Skulker caused Danny plenty of distress, thanks to his power armor.
A second later, the pipe spat out another ghost. A bigger ghost. A burning skeleton with monstrous fangs and talons that struck one wall of the chamber so hard it rattled where it was bolted to the floor. It shook its head, spun around in the cramped space, and then lunged at the blob ghost, jaws agape. The little blob zipped out of its reach, using the larger ghost's lack of maneuverability to its advantage.
"Two for one!" Dad exclaimed, watching the two ghosts hurtling round and round the containment chamber. "Did you know about this, Roddie?"
"Jack," Mom said quietly.
"I mean, just one otherworldly parasite is bad enough, but two?"
"Jack."
Dad peered at the readings from an EMF imager attached to the containment chamber. "A Level Two and a, Mads! The big one's a Level Four! We've never gotten this close to a Level Four!"
"Jack!" Mom lifted the Turbinator off Night Rider's head, and Dad finally turned around.
"Oh-fuck," Dad said.
Jazz wheezed. "Oh my god."
Night Rider, Robbie, was dead. Danny could see from thirty feet away that Robbie was dead, because what skin wasn't covered by his clothing was blackened and charred and shrunken against his bones, his eye sockets were empty, and half his jaw was missing. No tongue, yellowed teeth, fragments of bone and rust-colored flesh. He could smell the body, he realized: gasoline, barbecue, and something that faintly reminded him of fancy cheese. The body was beyond rot; it was cured and dried like a smoked sausage. Half-way mummified.
Below Danny, on the stairs, Jazz repeated "Oh my god, oh my god," fingernails wrinkling her jeans.
"Roddie," Dad gasped. "What did we do."
Mom put a firm hand on his shoulder. "There was no Roddie," she said.
Jazz made a strange choked noise.
"Roddie was an ectoplasmic entity masquerading as a human," Mom continued. "It had no consciousness, that's why it allowed us to destroy it. It had no self-awareness and no desire for self-preservation. In its imitation of human behavior, it reacted as a human would when it became parasitized by another entity. Think, Jack. You know superfluid ectoplasm is harmless to live tissue. Nothing we used could have done this to a human being. And look." She scraped the body's remaining cheek with a screwdriver. "It's desiccated. Whoever Roddie was, he's been dead for—probably nineteen months."
The ghost containment chamber shook when the big burning ghost struck one wall after a particularly fast charge. The little blob flitted frantically around the space like a ping-pong ball.
"He fooled me," Dad said, wiping his eye on the arm of his suit.
"It fooled us both," Mom agreed. She looked up abruptly at their audience on the stairs. Danny flinched. "You all understand what you've just seen, correct?" she demanded. "We captured two ghosts that were using a human corpse to walk among the living. They infiltrated Fentonworks, probably for intelligence—"
"No!" Jazz exploded, standing abruptly. "That's reductivist—first it's a mindless ghost now it's after intelligence— you're just making up whatever justifies your insane, bloodthirsty—"
"Jasmine Fenton!" Mom barked.
Jazz burst into tears, turned around, grabbed Danny around the torso and yanked him into a hug. Her chin struck his forehead painfully. Then she ran up the stairs and slammed the basement door.
Danny rubbed his forehead, staring at the two ghosts and the dead body, trying to calm himself. He knew for a fact that he wasn't like Night Rider. If Mom and Dad caught him and stuck him in that machine, he'd be a live Danny and a ghost Danny. Not a months-old electrocuted corpse and a confused ghost rattling helplessly around in a plexiglass box. That wouldn't be him.
"Tucker, Sam," Mom continued, her voice level, teacherly. "I understand that what you just saw must have been extremely disturbing. I apologize, from the bottom of my heart, for letting you two watch. If I had known the outcome of this exorcism...this must be very hard, to confront death at such a young age."
Tucker gripped Danny by the shoulder, bruising. "Your mom is creeping me out," he whispered, his lips unmoving.
"As you can see," Mom said, knocking the handle of her screwdriver against Night Rider's ribcage, a dry hollow sound, "this body has been dead for a long time. Any forensic pathologist will agree that we didn't kill him. If you go telling tales about what you've just seen, not only would you jeopardize Jack's and my important work, you'd be falsely accusing us of murder. We would be cleared. " Another echoing whack with the handle. "The courts would do their best to protect your privacy as juvenile witnesses, but that protection is imperfect. Schools and employers would take a very dim view of young people who go around accusing others of murders that clearly did not happen. You understand?"
"Say yes," Danny whispered, all the hairs on the back of his neck raised and his heart hammering.
"Yes, Mrs. Fenton," Tucker said politely, and Sam, so sharply you could hear her teeth snapping, said, "Got it."
Dad wagged his finger at Tucker. "That's Doctor Fenton, bucko."
"Yes, Doctor Fenton."
Danny practically shoved Tucker and Sam out of the house while Mom and Dad rolled Knight Rider's corpse into a tarp. It was dark, the slush on the roads was freezing. "Go home. Hang out with your parents. Sam, maybe let them stuff you in one of those designer dresses you hate. Be clingy."
Sam frowned at him. "Danny, what do you think your parents are going to do?"
"To me? Nothing. I'm a Fenton. I'm supposed to roll with the weirdness. To you? I have no idea and I don't want to find out. It's not forever; once they get started on a new project, they'll probably forget all about it. Just go home. Please."
"You want me to call the cops?" Sam offered.
Danny shook his head hard. Cops? He didn't want cops poking around Fentonworks, didn't want Mom and Dad to get put on trial, paraded in front of cameras where they'd coldly discuss the exorcism on TV as though it wasn't insane or horrifying at all. "No! No. I mean, Mom was right. It's too bad about Night Rider, but he practically—he begged them to do it, and he really was a ghost. They know what they're doing. That would never have happened if he was really alive."
Sam didn't look any happier. "Hypocritical, coming from you."
"I'm different."
Tucker cut in. "Ghost or no ghost. Robbie's all the family his brother's got. They'll put him in an orphanage or something."
"What do you want me to do?" Danny asked, his hands spread. "Let the little blob ghost go? No way he's got enough power to make a dead body look that lifelike. Not on his own. It's over. Go home."
"I'm going," Tucker said, zipping up his down coat. "But only because your mom scares the bejeezus out of me." He turned around and picked his way down the icy steps. "Oh, no. Oh man oh man—this, too?"
"What?" Sam and Danny followed him down, Danny going intangible to keep the cold from sinking through his skin.
Tucker waved at Night Rider's car. Once buzzing with ecto-energy and showroom pristine except for the slush in the wheel-wells, now it was a burnt inanimate hulk. The sheet metal was warped and rusted, the windows were gone. They circled it, peering inside: the upholstery was charred away, still oozing a faint smell of gasoline. Bullet-holes ventilated all the panels on its left side, probably from the same bullets that had riddled Robbie's corpse.
Even Sam went pale under her white makeup.
Danny heard the underground garage for the Fenton Family Ghost Assault Vehicle rumbling open from around the corner of the complex. "Go on, I think Dad's gonna tow this thing somewhere."
Tucker tossed his phone into the rear footwell. "I'm coming back for that."
"What are you doing?" Danny demanded.
"Danny, your parents just killed a guy," Tucker said. "Even though he was a ghost, he was going along, living his life. But, since he was already a ghost all along, and you're a ghost who lives with world-renowned ghost experts and has access to all their equipment, you can fix this. And I'm helping. Got it?"
Danny stared down at the burned, rusted car. "How?"
"We'll figure it out. Right, Sam?"
Sam stroked the ruined car with her gloved hand. "I mean. He was kind of a bad guy. But he wanted to get the other ghost out of him. He probably didn't want to break people's arms at all, he wanted to stop, his only mistake was that he thought he was still alive. And he never directly went after Danny. Right?"
Danny shrugged, nodded.
"So, yeah. Tucker's right."
They agreed with each-other. This almost never happened. Danny resigned himself to figuring out some way to put Humpty-Dumpty together again, and then years in the future of getting hit in the face with red-hot crowbars trying to catch Night Rider. "Alright. You're right. We'll figure something out. Now get out of here, before Dad sees you."
Sam and Tucker trudged over the half-plowed sidewalks and turned the corner by the time Dad came around the block in the FFGAV. He pulled it around in front of Night Rider's car, let down the winch, and got out, carrying a long narrow bundle wrapped in a tarp, over one shoulder. He was biting his lip and frowning. Danny kept his distance as Dad unlocked the car's trunk with an unfamiliar set of keys, dropped the bundle in, and shut it. Then he reached through the shattered driver's side window and did something to one of the levers. "Hah," he said at last. He stared down at the car, much like Tucker had. "Real shame. This was one heck of an automobile. Collectible. Well, that's ghosts for you." He hooked the winch under the front of Night Rider's car, rose, and spotted Danny. "Danno! Catch."
Danny, intangible, fumbled the keys when they flew right through his hands and then through his face. He went solid hastily and immediately shivered, scooped the keys out of the snow. The keyfob was a little multitool, with pliers and screwdrivers, the paint on the edges worn through from rubbing and jostling in Night Rider's pockets. His gut twisted.
"Throw that down the Ghost Portal when you go back inside, alright, son? And there's another box of things down there too. Just toss 'em all in. Your mother and I will be back in an hour or so. Have some of that left-over spaghetti!"
Behind him, Mom jogged down the stairs, sure-footed on the ice. "There's left-over spaghetti in the fridge, sweetie." She paused to grab him by the shoulder and kiss his forehead. "Do your homework! Lights out at ten! And one thing, there's this box down in the lab—"
"Throw it in the Ghost Portal, I got it," Danny groaned, shrugging out of her embrace.
"Make sure you do."
"Okay." He watched as his parents disappeared into the FFGAV and took off with a rattle of treads and the tortured wail of the ectogenerator, towing a burned-out car with a body in the trunk. He heard Dad's favorite New Wave station pounding through the speakers.
It was freezing. He shivered and hurried inside.
Gonna kick some ass, 'cause he's Robbie Reyes!
Doesn't need this shit, 'cause he's Robbie Reyes!
Deserves a fucking break, 'cause he's (Robbie Reyes)