A shrill scream echoed through the empty streets of Amity Park. A creature best described as an old crone with hands like claws, ratty grey hair, and wrinkled yellowing skin was the source of the glass-shattering noise. The two humans that had arrived to stop this menace cried out in agony and clapped their hands over their ears, for all the good it did. The sound reverberated through their skulls and might have killed them if the ghost boy formerly known as Inviso-Bill hadn't slammed into it from behind and sent it crashing to the ground.

"You guys all right?" he called to the two humans.

Jack Fenton shook his head to clear it and yelled loudly, "What?"

His wife Maddie rolled her eyes and fired her Ghost Bazooka at the banshee as it started to recover. It screamed one last time as it was pulled into the small, temporary ghost portal, and Maddie smirked before turning her attention to her other ghostly enemy. "Now, what are you doing here?" she demanded, aiming the bazooka at his head.

Danny Phantom held up his hands, much as a criminal would when cornered by the police, and said quickly, "I had nothing do with it!" His panicked tone and expression practically screamed "guilty fourteen-year-old."

Jack looked around helplessly and yelled again, "What?"

Maddie rolled her eyes again and mimed her husband to be quiet. Danny took the opportunity awarded by her distraction to become invisible and fly away. Her angry shouts followed him for a while, until he got out of earshot. He sighed sadly; he loved his parents dearly, but there were times…

Then he remembered that, as his parents, they wouldn't keep trying to send him to the Ghost Zone if he would just tell them he was their son. So really, it was his own fault they were now driving way past the speed limit in pursuit. They still couldn't see him, but the Fenton Family Ghost Assault Vehicle was equipped with Fenton Ghost Radar. They didn't need to see him to track him.

"Attention, ghost!" Maddie yelled over a loudspeaker. "Give up now, and we won't use you for an experiment when we catch you!"

"Oh, now that's incentive," Danny muttered. He flew a little higher to scan the side streets for any place he could lose them. It occurred to him to just fly higher, but without knowing exactly how good their radar was, he couldn't know when he was high enough. Besides, they would just pick up his signal again when he came back down. He did have one advantage, at least. Above all the buildings, he could fly in a straight line while his parents had to concede to the turns of the road. Unfortunately, the Fenton RV was considerably faster than he was, and his dad was just shy of being a reckless driver.

He heard a noise and turned just in time to dive below a blast of some kind. Apparently, Jack and Maddie had fixed the auto-targeting at some point, which meant that they didn't need to see Danny to attack him. He dodged another blast and was forced to go intangible to avoid flying headlong into a building.

Suddenly, he stopped and slapped his face in annoyance. His parents couldn't exactly drive through a building, now could they? He glanced around to see that it was an office of some kind. The employees bustled about their business, completely oblivious to the invisible intruder in their midst. He floated over to a window and looked down to see the RV slide to a stop in front of, and very close to being inside, the building. He waited until Jack and Maddie came charging out of the elevator, waving their weapons and shouting about ghosts, before he flung himself through the window and back into the open air.

He gave a relieved sigh at having finally lost them. If it had come down to actually fighting them, he never would have won. They were his parents; he wasn't going to hurt them, no matter what they tried to do to him.

Ebony Angel lowered her binoculars and slid the visor of her helmet back down. She prided herself on her anonymity; beneath that all-concealing outfit, she could have been anyone. It was powerful feeling, and an addictive one.

She chuckled slightly and patted the seat of her bike. The rumbling of its motor made her think of a panther, impatient to begin the hunt. "Soon, Sweetheart," she crooned. "Half the joy of the hunt is in the stalking, after all. The chase will begin soon enough, and then we'll see if this Phantom is as worthy of our time as 'he' said."

Danny crept out of his bedroom and looked around. No sign of his sister; so far, so good. He quietly descending the stairs, straining his ears for the sound of pages turning; still nothing. He knew his parents weren't home yet, but where was Jazz? Not that he particularly wanted her freaking out over the gash on his upper arm, but the fight with the banshee had put him on edge. He shook off his undoubtedly baseless concern and went into the bathroom to find the first aid kit.

Any wounds he sustained in ghost mode usually healed, at least superficially, whenever he changed back into a human. This one, however, was bad enough that it stuck around. At least, it wasn't as bad as it had been when the banshee gave it to him. He had just finished cleaning it and was in the process of finding a Band-Aid large enough to cover it when the front door banged opened.

"I can't believe we lost him!" Jack yelled. Danny snickered quietly. He heard his mother reply but couldn't make out what she said through the closed bathroom door. "Danny! Jazz! Are you home?"

"Just a minute!" Danny yelled back. He gave up trying to find a Band-Aid and decided to simply cover it with gauze and medical tape and pray no one would notice.

He found his parents in the kitchen already watching the news even though any reports that might be aired about the ghost attack wouldn't be on until later. He sat down across from his dad at the table while his mother started work on dinner. It really was amazing to him sometimes that this family could possibly be so normal. If someone didn't know what Jack and Maddie did for a living and decided to ignore the brightly colored hazmat suits, they might have mistaken the Fentons for a standard nuclear family.

"Have you seen Jazz, son?" Jack asked, perhaps a little too casually. Perhaps the banshee had instilled pointless worry in him, as well.

Danny shrugged and managed to cover a wince as the movement reawakened the pain in his arm. "I've been out with Sam and Tucker," he lied. "She was gone when I got back." Although, maybe it technically wasn't a lie. He had been hanging out with his two best friends earlier. They had simply already parted ways for the day when the banshee had attacked.

To be honest, Danny was very glad his parents had arrived when they did. He was relatively certain he could have handled it alone, but not while trying to protect all the morons who were standing around watching. That was how he had gotten injured. Then the Fentons had arrived and managed to clear the streets while Danny distracted the ghost. Now, if they would just accept that he was only trying to help, his life would be so much easier.

"Sweetie, what happened to your arm?" Maddie's voice interrupted his inner monologue.

"Huh?" He blinked as he returned to the present to realize that he had been absentmindedly rubbing his arm above the injury. He quickly tugged his sleeve back down over the makeshift bandage. "Oh…um…I was…I just…walked into something…" he stammered. "You know, at the mall. Heh, clumsy me." He grinned nervously, but his mother seemed to accept the excuse. He sat through a lecture on being more careful and just barely managed to convince her that he was fine and she really didn't need to look at it because it was just a scrape really. The ectoplasm intermingled with his blood was considerably less noticeable when he was human, but it would still be hard to miss if someone got that close.

Jazz walked through the front door then, and Danny was able to slip away while she tried to explain that she had been at the library. He closed his bedroom door on a lecture about letting someone know where she was at all times and flopped onto his bed to stare at the ceiling.

And what a fascinating ceiling it was, at that. It was white. There were all those little…bits speckled all over. They had a name, but he could never remember it. Whatever they were, they were pretty pointless except as entertainment to a very bored fourteen-year-old. It was like looking for patterns in cloud formations. There was a certain area close to the wall that he swore looked like Clinton.

Wow, he was bored.

He thought about calling Sam, but her parents had initiated a new rule of no phone calls after six o'clock. It would only last until her grandmother managed to convince them that they were being stupid, but that didn't help tonight. The next logical choice was Tucker, but Danny wasn't in the mood to gripe about the delay on the new version of Doomed.

He checked to make sure he wasn't bleeding through the bandage, then went back downstairs. The conversation in progress was, predictably enough, about ghosts. Specifically, one ghost in particular.

"I'm just saying," Jazz was saying. "Maybe you guys should think about what motivates him. Why is he so interested in driving all the other ghosts out of Amity Park?"

"He's a ghost," Jack pointed out. "Who knows why they do what they do?"

"Well, he must have a reason."

"Ghosts are very territorial," Maddie said. "He probably just considers this to be his territory."

Danny dropped his head onto his right fist, flinched, and switched to his left. He shook his head in answer to Jazz's curious look and let his eyes flash green. She nodded understanding and went back to trying to apply logic to the enigma that was Danny Phantom.

"Well, that can't be all there is," she argued. "I mean, he was concerned for your welfare, right?"

"It was probably a trick," Jack announced.

"But that implies that he's not as simple as you guys already tried to say he was. Either he's complicated, or he's not. You can't have it both ways."

Jack grumbled for a few moments, then asked, "What do you think, Danny?"

Danny tensed and got that panicked look that he got whenever he was addressed on the subject of his alter ego. "Uh…I don't know…?"

The conversation was interrupted then by an electronic voice that said, "I don't know. Fear me."

"Oh, for heaven's sake!" Jazz exclaimed. She snatched the Ghost Gabber from where Jack had set it after a few futile attempts to "repair" it, and shut it off. "Honestly, I don't know why you keep trying to fix this thing. It serves no purpose whatsoever."

Danny looked up slightly from where he had buried his head in his arm, but Jazz seemed to have successfully diffused the potential disaster. He gave her a look of pure gratitude; she returned with one half amused and half chiding. He knew she was trying to say that he should just tell his parents and get it over with, and he would.

One day.

A/N: Yeah, I know I usually write these specifically from Danny's point of view, but I realized this one wouldn't work as well if I did that. So in order to keep the action from sounding contrived and random, you'll be getting the story from whoever's point of view will best tell the story.