Hello. Sorry for posting so late today. I've been a bit under the weather. You know how it goes. Enjoy, and see you on Tuesday!

.

.

.

Chapter 71: Do You Hear That

.

"Did you hear that?" asked Meg.

"Hear what?" asked Alex cupping her ear.

"That," said Meg. "The screamin.' You don't hear it? It sounds kinda like someone dyin.'"

"Yeah," said Tess, slowly, looking over her shoulder. "Jeez, it's been a while, since I've heard somethin' like that."

"Hey," said Adrestia. "Wasn't Phantom supposed to have something like that?"

"You don't think-"

"Yeah, I do think. Come on, kiddos, we've got a victim to find."

"Addy, I think that maybe you might need to, like, maybe think that sentence out a bit more, you know what I mean?"

"Why?"

.

.

.

It took some trial and error to get enough gliders started up, consuming time that Danny was loath to waste. He waited a minute, then, for the others, vibrating with worry. Then he couldn't take it anymore. He had to go, go now, or everyone would die and it would be his fault. He couldn't afford to wait. The worlds couldn't afford to wait.

He hopped on the nearest glider and twisted the throttle, pulling the handlebars up. Yes, he could try and fly on his own, but he was so weak now. The wisps had restored his energy, but they couldn't fix his injuries, couldn't undo the wear on his body. It was better to let the glider do the work.

.

.

.

"I can't believe he left without us," said Maddie, again, angrily zipping up the front of the bulky, and somewhat overlarge suit she had stolen from one of the GIW tents.

"We can," said Sam. "That's why we have a tracker on him."

"You what?"

"Have a tracker on him. The Boo-merang just wasn't cutting it, anymore," said Tucker, tapping away on his PDA. "I'll ride with Sam, Jazz can ride with you. Um. You, what's your name again?"

"Jeremy. I don't think I caught yours, either."

"Sam, Tucker, Jazz, Maddie," said Sam, introducing all of them. "Have you ever driven a motorcycle?"

"Yeah, I had a bike."

"Well, this is a bit more complicated, but I think you'll be able to figure it out."

"Okay," said Tucker, "I know where Danny is now."

"How often does this happen that you need to have a tracker on him?"

"It's actually more because he keeps getting kidnapped, or stranded, than because he runs off," said Jazz, pushing Maddie towards one of the gliders. "And going ahead is probably the right decision, from a saving-the-world perspective, if not from a keeping-Danny-alive perspective. I mean," she said, perching behind Maddie on the glider as the older woman tried to decipher the controls, "we really aren't going to make much of a difference, if they're as heavily armed as the other ones. The lair gave us a massive advantage. I just hope that the shadows get everyone out in time."

.

.

.

Ellie would have laughed if anyone described what she and Danny had as a psychic link, but, ultimately, that's what it was. Not a strong one, like you'd see in melodramatic teen romances (Ellie spent a lot of time in libraries), but a link nonetheless.

They couldn't do anything silly, like read each others' minds, but they did occasionally get impressions of what the other was feeling, or doing. Ellie was on the receiving end more often than not, in her opinion. Danny was way more emotional than she was. The poor kid was always stressed. He should take a vacation every now and again.

On the other hand, once he had called her on a phone whose number he definitely shouldn't have known to demand to know why he had just had a vivid dream about fighting a Yakuza gang. That was over half an hour after Ellie had tangled with said gang, but still.

Then, sometimes, being on the receiving end could be a benefit. Like, it had only taken her a week to pick up Spanish, because Danny was already fluent, and sometimes she'd have an instinctive reaction to something that she'd never experienced before, only to find that Danny had. It came in handy, especially during fights, although it wasn't as convenient as the actual memories she shared with him, and it was certainly more confusing.

In any case, Ellie often got flashes of fear, pain, anger, and confusion from Danny. These were usually followed up by a sense of victory, and that odd, bone-deep satisfaction, that satiation, that happiness, that came from fulfilling one's Obsessions. Ellie tried not to worry too much about it. Danny was strong. He had saved her. He saved everybody.

(Sometimes Ellie wanted to go back to Amity Park, to help him. That was one of her Obsessions, too, inherited from him, but she was afraid. Afraid that if she went back, she would become as tied down, as trapped as he was. If he had ever asked her to stay, to help, maybe she would have. But he asked different questions. Unselfish questions. Like, Are you happy? Are you safe? Do you have enough money? Do you want to stay? Do you want to meet our parents? Is there anything I can do for you? So she didn't.)

But what had happened a few days ago was anything but normal. The only thing that she had ever experienced that even came close to what she was feeling from Danny, was when she was destabilizing. When she was melting. When she was dying.

Needless to say, she booked it back to the States.

Once there, she stopped for a moment in a diner (even with natural portals doing much of the work, crossing the Atlantic was hard), only to discover (the diner had a TV tuned to a national station) that Danny's entire class had been kidnapped by a ghost, and that Amity Park was now crawling with GIW agents.

That meant that Ellie had a lead.

She had started going through a list of all the ghosts that had enough of a grudge against Danny to want to do something like this, and was strong enough, or tricky enough, to carry it out. The list was surprisingly short. Physical fights generally had a different connotation among ghosts than humans. It was more of a rivalry thing, than an enmity thing. The fights weren't quite 'all in good fun,' but few of the intelligent ghosts that regularly came to Amity Park actually wanted to hurt Danny.

Sure, Skulker talked about it all the time (and he had chased Ellie a few times before Danny had made it clear that Ellie was Off Limits) but whenever he had the chance to 'end the hunt,' so to speak, he didn't take it. Yes, Ember did try the mind-control thing nearly every time she thought she could get away with it, but she didn't do anything except make people go to her concerts. Okay, Johnny and Kitty caused chaos everywhere they went, but that wasn't entirely their fault. That list went on. Danny had even managed to broker tentative truces with some of them. After all, he had nothing against their Obsessions, just the methods they used to follow them.

But, the other list. It was short.

There was Aragon. The Dragon Prince of Maddingly blamed Danny, Sam, and Tucker for a number of things, including stealing his kingdom, turning his sister against him, and ruining his wedding. But Ellie would have expected to hear something on the news about a giant angry dragon tearing up the school.

There was Walker. Maybe. The Warden of the Wastes didn't like to leave his prison, and, last they spoke, Danny had been working on some kind of cease-fire with the rules-obsessed ghost. So maybe she should cross him off the list.

It could be Spectra. Ellie counted herself lucky that she had never met the woman. Danny's stories about her, when he could be convinced to talk about her at all, and her description in his ghost files were disturbing in the extreme. But she was more subtle than this. If she was going to go after Danny and his classmates, she would have used shapeshifting, or overshadowing, not a straight-up kidnapping.

Undergrowth was another possibility, in terms of power and motive, as was Vortex, and possibly Nocturne. But this didn't seem to fit their styles.

Ellie briefly considered Sobek, but he preferred a straight-up fight. Then the Mountain King, Baba Yaga, the Man With Golden Hands, Greenbeard, Long Wang... None of them felt quite right.

The news had said something about technology acting up right before and after the kidnapping. That might indicate Technus, but Technus was one of those ghosts who almost seemed to like Danny.

There was always Vlad... But he would never bring so much GIW scrutiny down on himself. He was smarter than that. More cautious than that. And he liked Danny too much to bring that kind of GIW scrutiny down on him.

It took Ellie until she found a natural portal to wonder if, maybe, Danny hadn't been kidnapped by a ghost at all, and that the story was a ruse on the GIW's part. She paused then. That made sense but... At the same time, it didn't. Why would they take an entire class of random humans, if that was the case? In Ellie's opinion, the GIW were evil, but that didn't mean that they had no morals at all. They hated ghosts, but surely they wouldn't go after Danny's class just to provide a cover story.

No. Danny was in the Ghost Zone somewhere, and Ellie was going to find him and help him get out of whatever mess he had gotten into.

She flitted through the portal just before it closed.

Then she realized that she had no idea where in the Ghost Zone Danny could be, and the Ghost Zone was a very large place, even if one was only considering the space that roughly corresponded to Earth. She sighed.

The only thing that she could really do, other than just fly around blindly, was ask around, try to see if anyone had heard anything.

It turned out that no one had seen Danny recently. However, a large number of people had been asking for him. Including Vlad Plasmius and the Gracious Ones. Whoever they were. Ellie was having trouble getting much of a description out of people except that there were either three or four of them, they had wings, and they were scary. That wasn't much of a description. Even Vlad's vultures fit it, more or less.

Then, after emerging from a rather noisy restaurant called Second Chance, she ran into the will-o-the-wisp. Ellie didn't know a lot about wisps. She tended to avoid them, for health reasons, but rarely encountered them in the first place. They lived in other ghosts' territories, and Ellie didn't have one, and wasn't interested in stepping on other peoples' toes. Generally speaking, they left her alone, too. They were shy little things, most of the time.

But this one trilled excitedly, urgently, at her, and tugged lightly at her sleeve. Ellie didn't know the wisps language, not really, but Danny did, so she got the general impression of what it was saying, which was mostly hurry hurry hurry, and, danger, disaster, with one or two cries of help thrown in.

Ellie couldn't ignore a cry for help any more than Danny could. Besides, knowing Danny, and the way that coincidence worked in the Ghost Zone (i.e., there were no coincidences), there was something like a seventy-five percent chance that he was involved.

Okay, so she was just making up the percentage. But still.

She followed the little ghost for some time, hoping that it wasn't leading her into an ambush. Wisps did have tendencies in that direction, after all. But it didn't. At least, it didn't lead her into an ambush meant for her.

The wisp had brought her to what was probably normally a very cozy little floating island. It had purple grass, a few furry trees, white tents, the remnants of explosions, a fair fair amount of blood, a large number of unconscious and possibly dead GIW agents, and a door.

Well.

A bit of cautious checking revealed that most of the agents weren't dead, and that a lot of them were tied up, one way or another. Ellie really didn't know how to feel about that. She'd never wished anyone dead, but the GIW were monsters. The things she'd seen them do... She shivered.

It looked like they had been mounting, or about to mount, an assault on the door. Bad idea. Doors like that lead to lairs, and while it wasn't impossible to defeat a ghost in their own lair, it was the next best thing. You'd need a weak ghost, with a poor connection, and possibly an externalized lair... Which didn't seem to describe whoever had done this at all. Ellie knew that if she had a lair, and these people were camped outside it, she wouldn't have come out until they left. Which this ghost had done, before beating the living daylights, and in some cases the living, out of the agents.

Ellie touched down lightly in front of the door, tilting her head as she examined it. It felt oddly welcoming, for something surrounded by so much carnage. She touched it, very lightly. It felt a lot like Danny. Was he behind the door? Or... Was this his door? Was it hers? Their ectosignatures were similar enough that it would be hard to tell-

"Excuse us!" called a voice, jolting Ellie out of her reverie. "Do you know what happened here?"

She jumped, whirling, green fire in her hands. Four women, one with four arms, the other three with wings, were hovering several meters above the island.

"Ohmigosh," said one of the winged women, the one with a single braid, her hands flying to her mouth. "So cute." This one began to sink towards the ground, but kept a respectful distance from the spooked (ha) Ellie.

"Did you do this?" asked the four-armed woman, sounding vaguely impressed.

"Uh," said Ellie, lowering her hands, deciding that the women weren't going to attack her. "No. I don't know. I just followed this guy here."

The women exchanged glances, and one of them, the one in the red dress, whistled at the wisps, created a ball of light, and made an inviting gesture. The wisp came away, and started singing at her.

"You're Danielle, right?" asked the four-armed woman. "I am Adrestia. These are my crew, Tess, in the red, Meg's the one having a conniption over how cute you are, Alex is the corpse poker."

"Hey, like only fifteen percent of these are corpses," protested Alex.

"How do you know my name?" asked Ellie.

"We have a description of your cousin, which you match, except that you're pretty obviously a girl," said Adrestia. "Do you know where we can find him, by the way?"

"Why are you looking for him?"

"We think that he might have been involved in a crime. Not as in, you know, he committed a crime, but that he might be a victim of a crime.

"Yeah," said Alex. "'Cause your cuz seems like a pretty chill dude, from what we've heard."

"And, like, a solid rep is tough to get here in the Realms," said Meg. "Gosh, your hair's, like, so pretty. What d'you do to it?"

"Uh, wash it?"

"Meg, you want to tone it down a bit? You're freaking her out." Adrestia examined the door behind Ellie. "Do you know whose door that is?"

"No," said Ellie.

"Hey, Addie?" called Tess. "We've gotta problem. Like an ultra big problem."