Night Wind
By: Wilona Riva
Disclaimer: Butch Hartman does; I don't.
The Night Queen's Phantoms
It had been a week since the boy tumbled out of the portal and collapsed. Her daughter and two friends had been downstairs taking pictures of the portal when it activated without warning.
Maddie was worried. She laid the boy to rest in the guest bedroom, which was mysteriously decorated and messy like any other teenage male's room. She straightened the picture on the nightstand: the one the family had taken together with Sam and Tucker at the newspaper conference a month ago. Danny had been so shy then.
Danny. Her son, Daniel James Fenton. She had brought him home from the hospital fourteen years ago. She ruffled his long white hair. He must've gotten a horrible fright when the portal shocked him.
"Boyo, you are getting a haircut before school starts," she told him. "What ever possessed you to grow it out so long?"
Clockwork heaved a great sigh as the mortal huntress accepted the story he'd fabricated of the boy's presence in her household. He'd gone so far as to create photographs, school records and scrambling the boy's mental pathways so his powers were difficult to control. The nameless phantom was very rare amongst his brethren; he was able to walk among the humans as one of them. So Clockwork tapped into this ability and persuaded the boy that he'd always been thus.
It was the girl, Sam, that he conferred the guilt for the accident upon and placed it within her mind that the boy had become half-ghost as a result of ectoplasm bonding with his DNA in the explosion. If everything played out right, the boy would never know what he truly was and if his people should seek him out, then he would appear as normal as a human would ever be.
Clockwork worked hard into the night, tweaking the timestream here and there so that Daniel James Fenton would have a place within human history.
The Night Queen was furious when she learned of the portal's opening, the vortex sucking her little phantom into what ever world lay beyond. She closed her eyes and sent out a call for him to come to her.
Danny Fenton's blue eyes opened, then shut. He blinked, sensing the nearby presence of one of the two that he'd sought, then felt someone calling him. It sounded like his mother. He groaned at the aches and saw the heavy bandages on his left arm. He'd been lucky that there hadn't been more than that one nasty burn when he'd been caught in the portal; its vortex had caught him and sucked him in.
Okay, that wasn't what happened. He'd gone in on a dare from Sam, who had taken his picture, when he'd put on the jumpsuit, only he hadn't been wearing it when he'd been thrown out. He couldn't remember what happened, but Sam had been profusely apologizing, afraid she'd killed him. It was Tucker who had calmed them both down, after Danny had rushed to the mirror and saw what had happened to himself, and he'd passed out. Sam tried to catch him, but he had slipped right through her fingers. She had jokingly suggested he was half-ghost. Tucker had backed her up and run upstairs to get his mother.
His mother. She was calling him. He need to find something, no someone.
"Argh!" he groaned, clutching his head. "Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!"
"Danny, what is it? Are you alright?" Maddie came rushing into the room. "Oh, poor baby, why did you do it? You could have died and become one of the evil ghosts that your father and I have to hunt down and destroy."
"Very comforting," he told her dryly. "I feel weird, that's all. Like a voice is calling to me from beyond this world."
Maddie smiled in understanding. "You just had a traumatic accident, Danny. That is normal in some near death experiences."
His blue eyes got a far away look just then. "She's near, but he is not. I have to find them."
"Who are you talking about, Danny?"
"I don't know," he whispered, face crumpling as the tears came again. "Mom, I hurt so much."
"I know, Danny," she whispered, rocking him gently as she used to do when he was a baby. "Mommy's here and no evil ghosts will hurt you. You'll be a fine hunter someday yourself."
Clockwork smiled. "All is as it should be," he whispered to himself.
"He's not coming back," Dusk was told by Moon, when she came back from the Bubble Forest.
"We'll find him," she said. "Just maybe it's going to take a while."
"No, Dusk," Moon interjected. "He ignored the Night Queen's call. He's never done that before. Ignored our customs and sassed the queen on occasion, yes, but this, never. He should have answered by now."
"Maybe something above prevented him from coming," she suggested.
"It's possible," Moon agreed. "Now, what story shall I read you tonight?"
"The one about the world above," she said, picking up the book Phantom had been reading from earlier. "Please."
"Once upon a time..."