Gunfire ricocheted off the metal dumpster or embedded itself in the brick. After a few moments, it stopped, and Danny carefully leaned out to return fire. He was all-too aware of the white haired ghost hovering above him, but Silver seemed content to simply watch as he finally destroyed her pets.

"Well done, amante," she quietly praised.

He would almost rather she spoke telepathically. At least then, he didn't have to listen to someone else controlling his voice. "Why are you doing this?" he sighed. He continued to not actually look at her as he retrieved his mini searchlight and made sure it was still undamaged.

"I want to play with you," she gave her canned response. "I'm so lonely."

"You've said that before. Maybe if you didn't kill everyone you met, you wouldn't be."

I kill them so that I won't be. Her voice came accompanied by an image of her astral form surrounded by the souls that made up the Malice. But I know now, I've been looking for you. They don't matter anymore; you're my soul mate. We'll be together forever.

Danny shuddered involuntarily at the thought.

"Am I really so bad?" Silver asked curiously. "There's a voice in my head that calls me a monster. It sounds like you, but you can't project. I know that. The voice says I hurt you. Isn't that the point?"

"You're not human," the boy dared to reply. "You wouldn't understand."

"I used to be human."

"You were never human!" he exclaimed, rounding on her angrily. "You kill people for no reason! You torture them for fun! You're worse than the ghosts!"

Silver flinched and disappeared. There are worse things than me, you know.

After a few minutes, Danny started to shake from a delayed fear reaction. He couldn't imagine what had possessed him, but for a few minutes, he almost felt like his old self again. He decided it must have been his proximity to his other half. The same thing had happened last time he split himself in half, when his two selves had finally stopped bickering and worked together to beat Technus.

Something moved in the rising fog. He shined the light on it and was rewarded by a slayer's cry of pain before it burst into flames.

So that's what happened when the light was too bright for them. He smiled slightly and shined it on the other two that appeared, achieving the same reaction. Suddenly, he felt a little better about this adventure. So, naturally, a streetlamp exploded to his left and made him jump.

Kat liked to explode streetlamps. One day, she went around town just blowing up streetlamps and scaring everyone. It wasn't quite as bad as some of his enemies' rampages since she was making an effort not to hurt anyone, but he had still been forced to catch her in the Fenton Thermos. He finally let her out an hour later and demanded to know what that was all about. Her excuse? Boredom.

She may not have been a ghost in the most technical sense of the word, but she was in every other way. He wondered how Silver was keeping her…

Kat was an astral projection. She was more ghost-like than Silver, but she was still weak against a good jolt. He didn't know if that if that would apply to his current dilemma, but it was worth thinking about.

Something moved in the corner of his vision. He shined the light there, but there was nothing to see. After a moment, he decided it was his imagination and moved on.

He just couldn't help but wonder if Kat was stronger than Silver. The psychic could be visible, but Kat had learned to be audible as well. But then, why couldn't she break free and get rid of Silver? Maybe they just had different abilities…

The thing moved again on his other side. Once again, he shined the light; and once again, there was nothing to see. He was starting to become very scared, not that he wasn't already. It was simply getting more difficult to keep that fear at bay again. It had to be the Malice. The malefactors were considerably more straightforward.

He clutched his searchlight in a tighter grip and turned to make sure there was nothing behind him. It wasn't until he turned back around that he found it.

"Don't you get it, Mer? She's dead."

"Mother isn't dead. She's right here."

He sighed in exasperation and put a hand to his forehead. Ever since Adrianna died, their daughter had been acting…strangely. To put it mildly. As though she had something to hide. True, she had been the one to find the body, but…

She had been holding her pillow. There had been flecks of blood on it, just like around her mother's mouth. But he couldn't believe she had killed her own mother. It just wasn't…

"Why do you come out here, anyway?" he asked, trying to steer away from that line of thought. "I thought you didn't like to be alone."

"I'm never alone, father," she answered, standing. "All my friends are with me."

That was another thing. The people had started to talk. He couldn't believe it was more than a horrible coincidence, but all her friends had died, and gruesomely at that. He couldn't believe it, but…

"Meryll, what have you done?"

She stood and turned at last to display her work. She was holding a chisel in one hand and one of her grandfather's silver plated colts in the other. On the barrel, she had inscribed a winding serpent. "Do you like it? His name is Cobra. I'm going to draw a weasel on the other one…or maybe a mongoose. You know, after Riki Tiki Tavi?"

He grabbed her shoulders, alarmed by sudden change of subject. "Meryll, answer me! What have you done?"

"I don't want to be alone. So I make sure I'm not."

He never even heard the gunshot.

Danny stumbled back as the thing released him in favor of shielding itself from the light. It made a whistling sort of squeal, the only noise it was capable of with the gaping hole in its throat. The boy couldn't bring himself to think of it with any kind of proper noun; it was more…more something than the others. Violent, maybe? Or maybe just less human? Whatever it was, it was stronger; the light seemed more like an annoyance than harmful. It didn't try to get closer, but it didn't back away, either.

He edged around it, taking care to keep light on it at all times, then tried to back away with tripping over anything or crashing into malefactors. Fortunately, the Malice's presence seemed to have forced them away or something.

He noticed the light was shaking most alarmingly, then realized that it was because he was shaking. His legs felt like they were about to give about, just like when the drowned girl had attacked. There was another one right behind him. He could feel it. He was afraid to turn, afraid to find out for sure.

Something thudded to the ground and startled him into turning. Silver's father took the opportunity to rush forward; something yellow hit the ground just behind it. The next few seconds passed in blind fear and confusion and ended with Darwin standing in front of two glowing gorger captains.

Danny was under no illusions as to why the spirit of insatiable hunger had rescued him. He turned to run, and two gorgers of the normal variety jumped from out of nowhere into his path.

"No!" yelled his own voice from somewhere above. An ectoplasmic energy blast hit one of the creatures while the other was lifted into the air and thrown into a wall. "El niño es el mio!"

"What?" Darwin demanded. "What gibberish isss thisss?"

Danny didn't wait around to see the rest of that battle, but he couldn't help but overhear the mental rejoinder, No one betrays Silver!

He eventually stopped to catch his breath and look around. The clock was in sight now, at last. All he had to do was make it that far. He thought he heard a crack, or maybe a boom. Whatever it was, it was quickly driven out of mind by the whistling noise that sped past his ear to be followed by sound of something very small striking concrete at a very high speed.

He didn't actually remember throwing himself behind the car, but he must have done so. He peeked careful around its fender and was rewarded by another bullet that grazed the tip of his nose. He jerked back, astounded by how much that actually hurt.

And the Malice was back. This day just got better and better. He could sit where he was and get…Maliced again, or he could run and get shot. Relive someone's death, or experience his own…decisions. In the end, it was the simple fact that Silver's father was actually about to touch him again that decided him. Again, he didn't actually remember making a conscious decision to run; he simply found himself dodging gunfire on the way to a small alley.

Thank goodness for self-preservation instincts.

He looked back and could have kicked himself for doing so, but the Malice seemed to have become distracted by the gunfire. He sighed in relief and slowed down. Although he needed to get farther away, his legs had turned to jelly. He sat down on an overturned crate and dropped his head into his hands.

This wasn't going well. He couldn't beat Silver; what was he thinking? He should give up and let the Malice take him. It would be easier. He leaned back. "What am I doing?" he muttered.

His attention was arrested by a cable above his head. It came out of a window and traveled towards the roof, so it must have belonged to a cable television, or maybe a telephone. That didn't matter, really. He wouldn't even have noticed it if it hadn't started to spark. Suitably unnerved, he decided that he had rested long enough and went to find a way to the clock tower that wouldn't get him shot.

A/N: /headdesk/ This was done yesterday. I thought I posted it. Oops. You get two now.