Here's chapter three. Again, remember, I'm just stumbling through this. If it sucks, that's why. This chapter is one of those pesky 'explanation' chapters that everybody hates, but it's vital to the plot. Real chapter next time, I promise.

Corrections Corner: I forgot to put in better page breaks last time. Oops. Oh, and it turns out I've been spelling Amity Park wrong this whole time. Curse thee, wikipedia!

Warnings/Disclaimers: I STILL do not own Danny Phantom. Happy now, glowering copyright lawyer? And as always, none of the werewolf trivia is accurate. Check wikipedia if you doubt me. Possible sexual innuendo in this chapter… it's rated T for a reason, ya know.

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Ring, ring! Ring ring! Danny Fenton sat in his room, a cell phone to his ear, waiting feverishly for the person on the other end to pick up. He felt terrible. He felt sick. His head felt like it would explode if he had another thought again, ever.

If this was what having a hangover was like, he was fairly certain that he wouldn't be drinking in the future. Not that he'd even had water to drink in the last few hours. Anything he ingested invariably came back up again. His muscles itched under his skin, and fog drifted across his vision, blurring everything.

Ring, ring! Ring ring! The worst part, if he had to pick one, was definitely the tail. It didn't exist in the conventional manner of speaking, but it was there nonetheless. He could feel it. It was there, its nerves sending data to his brain as surely and impossibly as the amputated arm of a saw mill victim would to its former owner. He couldn't touch it, but it was there all the same, wrapped tightly around his legs. The tip was twitching. It made him dizzy just thinking about it.

And if he looked in a mirror, he would see fur and a pointed snout and ivory fangs. After the first time it had happened, earlier that day, he'd assumed it was an isolated episode and made it through the rest of the day relatively without incident. Unfortunately, the second he walked through his bedroom door it had happened again, worse this time. And it wasn't going away.

Despite the fact that he hardly knew her, it had been time to call Kai.

Ring, ring! Ring- "Hello?" Someone, sounding disgruntled and vaguely dog-like, had picked up at long last. "Kai Wolfstein speaking. If you're looking for the office of Antigoras, I can transfer you. Otherwise, what can I do for you?"

"Who's Antigoras?" Danny said, his mouth not moving properly, causing his speech to slur. "And why do you sound so funny?"

"Oh, hey Danny," Kai said cheerily. "No offense, but you sound like hell. I put you on speakerphone because I'm having some trouble with the cord. Have you ever tried holding a receiver with paws? It's not easy."

"What?"

"Nothing. What can I do you for? If it's something major, I'm going to have to ask you to come over here; I'm in the middle of a meeting."

Danny swore, something that he didn't normally do. "How important is this meeting?"

There was a loud crash in the background, like someone (or something) putting its foot through an expensive sounding television screen. "Oh, pretty important, I'd say," Kai said airily, and then, to the other person, "Oi! Stop that! Old Anti only gave me enough money to cover hotel fees, and that's without having to replace appliances!"

Danny gave in. Any argument with Kai was obviously futile; she'd just wave it off or ignore it. "When should I be over, then?"

"Soon, hopefully. If you're here, then I've got a good excuse for getting rid of my current guest."

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After hanging up the phone, Danny had snuck out and headed for the hotel. It was an icy night, with bitter fall winds that nipped at his ankles and howled worryingly around buildings. The moon was still full.

That was odd, wasn't it? The moon usually stayed full for a day, maybe two if you weren't good at noticing the difference between waxing and waning, and then it went back to a nice, friendly crescent. There was something sinister in the way it was the same. Perhaps it was all a trick of the light?

There was one car in the parking lot, an ancient Ford Mustang with a coat of glossy black paint and nothing much else going for it. Besides that, he was alone. The streets were deserted, and the windows filled with dark shades. Kai's hotel was in the center of the city, and yet it looked as foreboding as the Bates motel.

Still feeling sick, he wandered into the hotel and up the creaky stairs to room 205. He knocked, and waited. There were more muffled crashing noises, and then the door creaked open to reveal a panting Kai. "Hello, good sir," she said in an overly loud voice that suggested that if Danny knew what was good for him, he would shut up, stay out of the way, and not ask any questions. "Would you care to wait in the hall for a few seconds while I deal with my client?"

"I-"

"Fantastic! I'll be with you momentarily, yes?" The door slammed in his face, and a shouting match (or bits of it; the door was pretty solid) was audible. Something smashed against the closed door where Danny's head had been moments before, causing a visible splinter in the façade. Pretending he didn't notice anything, he surveyed the hall. It couldn't have been creepier if the owners had been trying. Brass brackets held candles that dribbled blobs of hot wax over the wood-paneled walls and floor. Strange red stains ran the length of the tattered, faded carpeting. The window at the end of the hall was cracked beyond hope, and a family of cat-sized rats had moved into a mouse hole big enough for a human to fit quite comfortably. Why did he get the feeling that this was where Kai would fit in best?

The door blew open, and a rather flustered young man in a rumpled and torn suit jacket stalked out. His nose was crooked, hooked, and looked misplaced on his face. His hair was jet black with streaks of silver, and flopped over his forehead and across the brims of his gold-rimmed glasses. The glasses masked eyes like coals of fire that glowed red in the light, and went back to being brown when he stopped moving. He fidgeted a lot and always seemed to edge towards the nearest source of darkness or, if not that, then at least a considerable absence of light. His brows were fixed in a permanent scowl.

"We'll settle this later!" he snarled to Kai, before glancing at Danny on his way out. "And you, boy… watch your back. You never know what's hiding behind it." He did not walk away so much as vanish into thin air, though his footsteps rang down the hall as he stalked off.

"Who was that?" Danny asked, focusing on Kai. She was still wearing her usual ensemble, but it was ripped in several places and looked to have been thrown on at a moment's notice. "And what happened to you?" He looked past her into the room, which was largely in a state of disrepair. The bed sheets had been thrown off, and lay on the floor. Danny gave her an odd look, which earned him a smack over his throbbing head.

"Get your mind out of the gutter! He was being a bastard. I hit him. He hit back. Fighting ensued. End of discussion." She glared, making it very clear that any further talking on the subject would not be condoned. "His name's Drakkus Bacchus, though most people call him Drake Brock. Nasty piece of work, really. Not the sort of person you'd like to meet in a dark alley, or even in a brightly lit one with plenty of burly policemen around. Now, come on in. I made coffee."

Danny was ushered into the room and seated firmly in a wickerwork chair. Behind him, he heard Kai lock the door and bolt it. A hot mug of something that neither looked nor smelled much like coffee was thrust into his hands. "I don't drink-"

"Drink it. It'll help your nerves."

"This doesn't look like coffee." He took a small sip. "Doesn't taste like coffee either."

"It's coffee. Drink it." Again, her tone closed the discussion. But he didn't drink anymore of it. Kai pulled another chair up, and fixed herself a cup of the coffee that wasn't coffee. "Now, what do you need?" She grabbed the book for reference.

Danny took in the room. It was a bit on the small side, mostly because of the piles of papers and books that were strewn across what had once been called the 'floor'. Various liquids bubbled in tubes on a table along one side of the room, and a whiteboard with markers and what looked to be a hand-drawn map of the city dominated the wall farthest from the door. He hesitated. Honesty, here, was probably not the best policy. This girl was a fanatic. Those people could be hard to deal with. "I have… a friend with a problem," he began, having to consciously stop himself from gripping the mug too tight. If it met the same fate as his alarm clock had, there would be complications.

"Really?" Kai asked, looking interested. "I do love a good problem. What's up? Do I know the guy?"

Danny sighed. It was hard lying to someone this genuinely nice. The word 'clueless' sprung to mind, but that wasn't right… she had the air of knowing everything. She just didn't want you to know she knew.

Though he could not possibly know that, Kai was currently applying the same word to Danny.

"My friend… thinks he's been bitten by a werewolf. He's checked around and it all seems to add up, and… he's got some questions."

Kai glanced at him like a hungry lion biding her time until the moment to strike arrived. "Why isn't your friend here to ask me those questions himself?"

He didn't like lying. He really didn't but… this was one of those things that you didn't just go around telling people. She was Tucker's friend, true, but that didn't mean anything. Anybody could be anybody's friend; it didn't automatically make you trustworthy. "He lives in Wisconsin," Danny invented, his mind drawing up an image of the only other halfa in existence.

"And he's sure it was a werewolf? Wolves can get big in a place like Wisconsin, you know."

"Positive. It was a clue when the wound healed straight away."

Kai nodded pensively. "Yeah, that sounds right. Any external symptoms? Or internal ones? There are different kinds of werewolves. Some bites can be deadly."

Danny gulped. Deadly? That didn't sound promising. Maybe he had gotten one of the harmless ones. Oh, right. There were no harmless ones. "He sees fur on his face when he looks in mirrors, he's got a ghost tail, he's constantly sick to his stomach or throwing up, and he's got a killer headache. And… I don't know if this would make a difference, but he's got the same powers as me."

Kai, who suddenly looked impercievably more alert, squinted one eye and drummed her fingers or the chair's armrest. "Ghost powers, huh?" She asked, reaching for a small tablet and a pen. She scrawled several things down on the paper before continuing. "That would change things up a little. Look, this is a whole new ball game now. Just start your questions and I'll answer them as best I can."

Danny thought for a minute, searching for a logical jumping off point. "He's noticed that… that his powers don't work anymore. It's kind of scaring him. Is there some sort of hidden reason behind that?"

The specialist got up abruptly and marched towards the white board. "Look over here," she grunted, uncapping several markers. She spent a moment erasing the previous drawing, and then penciled in a stick figure using the black marker. "Let's say this is your friend," she said, still illustrating. A green wavy border, supposedly of ectoplasm, went up around the stick figure art. "And this," she gestured at the border, "is the unimaginable corner inside him that houses his spirit. You know the definition of ghost, right? It's basically just a spirit without a body to inhabit. That's important to keep in mind." She was still drawing, and two more stick people went up in the border, one on either side of the original. They were smaller than the first by a large bit. She pointed with a marker at the one on the left, a replica of the first. "This is his normal spirit, see? Mostly, normal people have one of these most of the time, and that's it. Finite. Curtain call. End of the show, Mac. But people who are part ghost spend most of their time with two souls in one body.

"They say that it's like two sides of the same coin: you're essentially the same person, but one of you is ghost, and one is human. This is incorrect. The other you is a separate entity, see? Not the same at all. The only reason you stay you when you 'go ghost' is that the human psyche is stronger than that of the other spirit." During this part of the lecture she alternated between drawing and pointing vaguely at the other figure on the right. It was in gray pen and had two green glowing eyes. "Now, the body was built to hold one spirit at a time, and that's it. But, as you must know from experiences with overshadowing, it can contain one more if it has to. This is commonly called 'being possessed', but in this case it's different. When you yourself are overshadowed, it means that the ghost is most likely simply hovering around you, controlling the actions of your ghost half.

"Unfortunately, it draws the line at three, which brings us to a little conundrum." She stopped, and Danny realized that a third smaller figure had materialized, this time in the space between the top of the board and the top of the first figure's head. It was brown, and had claws on the ends of its stick arms as well as pointy ears. "See, when a werewolf bites you, it has the same effect as whatever turned you into a halfa; it splits your spirit apart. Sort of like cells dividing, but not. Now, as long as there are three souls in one body, the two break-away ones will battle constantly until a clear victor emerges. The loser is evicted into the world around. Not a real ghost, by the way, because it can't become corporeal. It just exists. This is the underlying source of any disappearance of powers.

"It's deeper than that, though. The wolf spirit is sort of like and ethereal tick; it clings on to the dominant soul in the host body, drawing energy from it. It is the inevitable victor in any such battle. And until it comes out on top, it causes symptoms such as your friend described. The tail means it's not far from its goal."

Danny was still confused, despite the fact that he'd been taking notes on Kai's tablet. "So, what you're saying is that my friend will never be a ghost again?"

"That's not it at all! There's no reason why your friend couldn't get his ghost back. We just have to get some antidote in him."

"So there's a cure?" Danny said excitedly. Soon, the whole ordeal would be over.

"Nope. But I'm working on it. At the rate I'm going, we should have one by the end of the century. Or never. We'll see how that plays out." She waved at the bubbling stuff.

Danny's hope took a nose dive. "But my friend will be dead by then!"

Kai sighed, rubbing her temples. "No, he won't. Werewolves don't age, Danny. He'll be whatever age he is now until the end of time or the day we find a cure. Whichever comes first."

Moving on, Danny asked his next question. "My friend says that the moon over Wisconsin has been full for almost a week. Why?"

"Werewolves. The moon where they are is always full. It's part of the curse, see? Doomed to change every night of their lives. Quite painful it is, too. There's no end to it. Of course, if your friend gets used to it, it's not so bad, really. Or so I hear."

"Can you tell me a bit about the transformation?"

"Not really. It's different for everybody. But after you're first bitten, it takes a few days of bodily preparation before you can transform. Hurts like hell the first time, and takes longer too. On average, it lasts about a minute, but if you get really good you can drag that down to thirty seconds. At first it's around three." Kai seemed to have a knack for answering the questions you hadn't asked.

"My friend has to turn into a werewolf every night of his life? What'll he do for a living?"

"Best kept secret of werewolves. Lucky thing I happen to know it. All werewolves work for the Fates."

"Fates? But-"

"That'll be all for today," Kai said, hauling him off his chair and pushing him in the general direction of the door. "Kai's emporium of supernatural info is now closed. Have a nice stay in the hall."

"But-"

"Bye now!" She said heartily, about to close the door in his face. "See you in school." The door halted halfway across its trajectory, and a mischievous voice from behind it said, "And Danny? You should get Vlad Masters a present for being such a useful scapegoat in this talk. Might I suggest a nice… cat?"