The slayers had begun to attack in ever increasing numbers. At first, Danny had fended them off half-heartedly, his mind still warring between what Silver had said and what he knew to be true. Then more and more of the creatures had appeared, and he had been forced to concentrate on fighting them or risk impalement.

Eight of them rushed him at once; he tried to blast and dodge at the same time, lost his footing, and went rolling down the hill. The world spun crazily around him, rendering conscious thought all but impossible until he landed face first in the dirt. Looking up unsteadily, he saw that he was centimeters away from having broken his neck against a tree. He used it lean against while he stood and started to look around.

What was it Haight had said? "You can't miss it but you may find you'd like to"?

The bridge was black with blood. Dismembered corpses littered the concrete surface, some human and some belonging to monsters. Slayers stood lined up along the edges, their dagger-like arms crossed before their faces. Then the vision dispersed, leaving only bloodstains and scattered bones. Not much better.

The clattering noise of his pursuers' limbs along the asphalt finally dragged the boy's attention from the carnage. The creatures had doubled in numbers; this was getting ridiculous. He took a breath to steady himself, then dashed across the bridge. On the other side, he slid to a halt with a choked shout as the Lady in White appeared directly in front of him.

"It was only a game," she said and vanished. Behind him, a sudden rumbling crash intermingled with the enraged screams of the slayers. Danny turned quickly to see the bridge crumble into the chasm, taking the supernatural hunters with it.

"Thank you!" he yelled, unsure if she could hear him. With a sigh of relief, he resumed trying to convince himself that he was still human where it mattered. The journey back to the prison was uneventful, to his discontent. Unable to fight, he was forced to think.

The problem was simple. Ghosts were evil. Danny was half ghost. That made him half evil. He tried to fight it, but it was too much fun to overshadow the school bully and make him act like an idiot. It was too easy to solve his problems with violence instead of his brain. The more time went on, the more ghost-like he became. What if he wasn't just half ghost anymore? What if he died completely? What if that accident had been slowly killing him this whole time?

Somehow, the knowledge that Vlad was still half ghost after twenty years wasn't helping. Vlad was evil. And what if he wasn't half ghost anymore? What if he was actually a full ghost who could just pass for a human? And more importantly, he was evil. He happily used his powers for his own gain, something Danny found he was slowly falling prey to.

"Hey, kid!" Danny shouted and whirled around to see Horace standing by the gate he had just passed through without even realizing it. He grinned apologetically. "Didn't mean to scare you."

Danny smiled slightly in return. "No, I'm just…I didn't mean to yell…"

"She's getting to you, ain't she?" At the boy's dejected nod, he shook his head and sighed. "Yeah, she does that. Listen, for what it's worth, I know better. I see you standing there, all depressed and stuff. If she was right about you, you wouldn't care. Trust me, kid. I've known Haight for a long time, now, and you ain't nothing like that uncaring bastard. No matter what they try to tell you."

Danny stared at his feet a little while longer. "Did you really kill your wife?"

"I did it to protect her," Horace confirmed. "I cut her so those whack jobs on the outside couldn't hurt her. They called it a crime of passion, and it was. This place…twists everything all out of whack. It got to me; don't let it get to you."

Without another word, he disappeared in a flash of blue electricity. Danny wished he would stay; he could have used the company. He followed the wall around instead of taking the road. There was a lot of brush, but he was able to get through, and it meant he didn't have to face the marksmen he could hear ahead.

At last, he came to a large gate that hung open. An old, rusted bus sat derelict between the two doors; as he watched, it filled up with a familiar green gas, and Haight formed to leer out at him.

"Go away," Danny said as he squeezed past the bus. Perversely, Haight escaped through the cracked and broken windows to begin following him.

"I want to know you," he breathed. "I want to know why you try so hard."

"Because," the boy answered with a bit more force than was probably necessary. "My family's lives are at stake, and I will save them."

"…That's what I want to know…You remind me of the inmates I killed…I used to listen to their final calls; they all said the same things, that it would all be okay…Like they knew something I didn't. What is that? What do you know…?"

Danny shook his head. It wasn't about knowing something. They cared about their families; that was all. They wanted to make what was happening as painless as possible. They just…but that was it, wasn't it? "I know how to care," he answered.

After a few seconds, Haight started to laugh. "You know how to care?" he repeated. "That's it? …All this time I thought it was something…some secret and…it's nothing but emotion?"

His laughter faded away; Danny didn't have to look to know that he had gone. Sadly, his celebration was short-lived as a rumbling noise heralded the arrival of some burrowers. He ran forward and jumped onto a rusted chain link fence attached to some kind of building. At the top, he swung onto the roof, then walked to the other side to get his first real look at the prison yard.

It was divided into sections with a great deal of barbed wire-topped chain link. Concrete watch towers stood imposingly over the yard in certain key points. Stunted brush and foliage had overgrown the yard, but it was still traversable. The boy lowered himself to the ground and struck off across the empty yard.

Most of the fences were broken down. Although the myriad slayers made for a slow and treacherous crossing, he didn't have any real trouble until he reached the other side, where the sound of his sister's voice crying his name drew him into the pitch black interior of Abbott State Penitentiary.

"Jazz?" he called, creeping forward.

The sudden, unexpected sound of children's laughter drew his startled attention to the left, where a very young version of the Lady in White and the boy he had seen in Fort Maleson dashed through a gated threshold, across the darkened lobby, and through a door on the other side. The Lady stepped out as they vanished and stared sightlessly in Danny's direction. Without a word, she turned and walked back through the door. He wasn't sure anymore if he had actually heard Jazz's voice, but the Lady seemed to be trying to lead him somewhere.

As he walked down the hall, a slayer burst out of a door in front of him. He started to simply destroy it, but it didn't even look at him. It turned and ran, as though whatever was beyond the door was frightening even to it. He peeked through the door, but it was just a control room of some sort.

A smashed, rotted wooden table lay on the floor next to a pair of broken monitors. A large window dominated the far wall; the glass had been smashed. Next to it sat a huge generator of some kind. Danny strode across to the window to see a huge, dark room, empty save for a chair at its center and another generator beyond that.

"Is this where you died, Horace?" he whispered, recognizing the electric chair from TV and movies.

He and many others… Silver whispered. She showed him an image of his father strapped in that chair, so vivid that he jumped through the window before he realized it was only in his head. So I can still get a rise out of you, she gloated.

"Leave…me…alone!" Danny yelled. The futility struck him then, and he started to laugh bitterly. In that instance, human or not, he would gladly have reduced Silver to a red smear on the ground like he had done to that mainliner. It was a rage he felt with such intensity that it terrified him. He slid down the wall and sat staring blankly at the chair for a long time, his thoughts and emotions in complete turmoil.

He had never felt that angry before. Even when Vlad was threatening his family, he had never gotten that angry. He looked down at his hands to see that even his ghostly glow was brighter than normal, affected by his rage. But was it rage? Was it just extreme anger? Or was this hatred?

He thought he hated Vlad, but clearly he didn't because Vlad never evoked this kind of response. He had never felt hate before, but that had to be what he was feeling. There was no other word to describe it. He hated Silver for doing this to his family, to him.

Eventually, the feeling subsided to leave him feeling numb and empty. He stood and turned to go through the glass wall that had once separated the E chamber from the viewing room, where witnesses would have gathered to ensure that the condemned actually died. But what good had they done Horace? According to Haight, he had still been alive.

Outside the viewing room, laughter to his right led him down a set of stairs into some kind of basement area. His ghostly glow provided enough light to just barely be able to follow another hall around. Eventually, concrete was replaced by steel grating. He nearly walked off into empty space because he wasn't paying attention, but he roused himself and found the stairs into the sub-basement where he followed some flooded halls around until he reached a dead end.

The wooden ceiling above him had crumbled to the ground at some point, and he could see the upper basement, but it was too high to jump. Some thick cables enabled him to climb up, and he walked through a few hallways into some kind of machine shop.

The two children appeared slightly more grown up here as they sat across the room in quiet conspiracy. The Lady in White stood behind them, watching almost lovingly. She looked up and smiled. "We were so happy back then. He asked me to marry him that day, and I told him I would. We were only ten years old, but we kept our word for eight years. He taught me to love."

Danny took a few steps forward, and the two children vanished to be replaced by a pair of marksmen that stood to either side of the Lady. "And then he taught me to hate."

"They're just old memories, kid," Horace said without bothering to show himself. "You head into the right places, you can still see memories from the three of us. Don't let it get to you."

"Why were the marksmen there?" Danny asked the ceiling.

"That, I can't tell you. I don't know myself."

The boy started to ask who she was, but a scream that sounded like Jazz interrupted him. He ran from the machine shop into a large room lined with six other, smaller rooms. The scream sounded again, louder this time, from the one nearest to him; he dashed through the door, which promptly slammed behind him.

"My soul…left me alone in here…" whispered a hopeless voice. Danny whirled around to bang on the door, but something from outside beat him to it. He backed against the far wall that wasn't nearly far enough as something slammed into the door repeatedly. The whispering voices grew louder and more frantic; he put his hands over his ears to block out the sound, but it didn't help. The thing outside screamed like a slayer and began rattling the door. He thought he screamed, but he couldn't hear himself over the other noise. Then, suddenly, everything stopped and the door flew open.

Danny found himself lying on the floor across some small steps with no clear memory of how he had gotten there. His heart racing and his breathing in ragged gasps, he stood and turned. There was the room; he must have run out and tripped on the steps.

"Good morning…" The boy yelled and tried to twist around, but only managed to lose his balance and fall hard on his rear. Haight laughed slightly and shook his head. "No…It's just not the same as the screams of the dying…"

"What do you want?" Danny demanded as he tried to get his heart rate back under control.

Haight shrugged. "What? I can't check up on you once in a while?"

Well, it hasn't happened yet, has it?

The boy froze, hardly daring to breathe as the feeling of hatred threatened to overtake him at that mental voice. It wasn't as bad as it had been, fortunately, but he still didn't trust himself to speak. Instead, he simply turned and walked away. This meant, of course, that he was walking closer to the solitary confinement chambers, but a repeat of that would have been far preferable to dealing with both Silver and Haight.

The center chamber opened onto an office of some sort. It appeared to have been hidden behind a fake wall for some reason. When he entered, time froze to show him a young soldier being reprimanded by the colonel who, thankfully, was not missing a head. Danny fled anyway; the sight of him…like that…had not faded in the slightest. It was the sort of thing he would have nightmares about for months to come. Eventually, he came to a ladder that took him back up to the first floor and yet another hall.

He walked down it to find a way back into the yard and ran gratefully into the open air. The sky was considerably lighter; dawn was approaching. Even the squeal of a mainliner as it oozed out of a puddle behind him was a welcome change from the slayers inside the darkened death house. He followed the fence around until he came to a hole that led down a slope into a wooded area. Green fog was staring to pool around his boots, but he ignored Haight and concentrated on his surroundings. Anything could be hiding behind those trees, although he would probably hear it if it was.

He groaned as a long gasp preceded Haight's voice. "…I feel I should congratulate you…" he wheezed. When Danny failed to show interest, he continued anyway. "You're the second person to make it this far. The guy you beat is over there." A tendril of gas pointed off to the left, and the boy looked in spite of himself.

The body was still in the process of decomposing, but it no longer had anything resembling discernible features. He guessed it must have been an older man because of the ratty and torn business suit it wore. He stared at it, completely numb, for a few minutes, then calmly continued on his way.

Doubtless, he would react to it later.

Haight continued to follow him through the woods. Although he didn't speak again, the sound of his slow breathless gasping was painfully obvious in the silence. Danny ground his teeth, but didn't say anything. He was afraid of encouraging the undead executioner. However, as he crossed to the other side of the fence again, he was forced to say something.

"Didn't I come from the eastern side of the island?"

"…yes…"

"And I walked all the way to the western side of the yard." Haight agreed again. "Right, so…why does the sign above that door say 'East Cellblock'?"

"Because you followed the death house all the back…" he answered smugly. "You should have kept going instead of coming inside here…Too bad you can't get back that way…"

Danny scoffed and started the other way. "Watch me."

"Silver knocked down the ladder." The boy stopped. "…But hey…if you really want to know if you can survive that fall, be my guest…It'll be interesting to watch…"

On the one hand, Haight could have been lying. More importantly, why had the Lady in White led him that way? And why didn't Horace warn him he was going the wrong way? He had too many questions, and no one he trusted to give him the answers. With a disgruntled huff, he about-faced and stalked into the cellblock.