A/N: Hello everyone! I just wanted to tell you guys that I have been completely blown away with the response to Power Play. As of tonight the story's gotten 39 alerts, 19 reviews and 14 people marking it as a favorite, all records for me when it comes to a 'one-shot'. I cannot thank you guys enough. I've also gotten 11 new people who've requested author alerts since the publication of Power Play.

So in case any of you have stumbled in here by accident through a recent author alert, welcome to the Twilight Zone! This is the 8th chapter in the 8th story of my fantasy A/U "Four Winds" series. In deference to the people who have been looking forward to Guardian Monday since last week, I'm not going to waste any time explaining the base concept of this series here. Either go to the summary at the beginning of Chapter 1, or if you want to start from the *very* beginning, click on my Author page and look for the story "Four Winds". Then come back here when you're ready. :D

For the rest of you, I hope it was worth the wait!

"So you caught Dad and your old training partner *after* they had been swapping stories about you for half the night? That must have been awkward..."

"Yeah," replied Beckett, twirling spaghetti around her fork as she talked. "It was a little surreal, actually..."

"I'll bet," Alexis agreed with a smile and an amazed shake of her head. An question came quickly to her mind. "Hey, is he here now?"

Mike Royce answered from the couch, clearly bored out of his mind. "Yep. Not going anywhere anytime *soon*, that's for sure..."

Beckett had to resist the urge to roll her eyes, remembering that Alexis couldn't hear what Royce had just declared. "Oh," Beckett commented with a tactful smile, "he's definitely here, all right..."

Alexis seemed taken aback by the idea that there was a presence in the room that she could neither see nor hear. She asked Beckett in a conspiratorial whisper, "What should I say to him?"

"You don't have to say anything," Kate replied. "You can't see him, right?" Alexis shook her head.

"Oh great," Royce teased, rolling his eyes, "now you're teaching the kid to ignore me? Some stepmother *you* are..."

Now it was Castle's turn to roll *his* eyes. The wizard turned his attention to the women finishing up dinner at the kitchen counter even as he directed his question to all three of them. "*Ladies*, if dinner's as finished as I think it is, can we get started?"

The two women nodded; as they got up from the table, their dishes disappeared. Beckett grabbed the bagged spear and letter from the couch and put them on the table. "Okay," Beckett announced to the group, "These are the two key items to our investigation. What do we know about them?"

Castle picked up the letter. "This was the only letter that threatened a specific production as opposed to just threatening Vanderkellen personally. The only set of prints that could be identified were Vanderkellen's; there was one additional set not in the system and one that Forensics couldn't identify at all."

Beckett focused her attention on the spear. "This wasn't the spear used in the production; it was taken from a display case in the lobby."

"You said you could feel the remnants of the magic in the spear the first time you held it," Alexis added. "Can you still feel it?" Beckett nodded. "Can you see it like you did at the crime scene?"

Beckett focused on the aura surrounding the spear. "Yeah, it's still there..." A faint glow attracted her attention from the other side of the table. The detective grabbed the letter, which was the source of the curious glow.

"What do you see, Kate?" asked Alexis.

"The mystery set of prints on the letter...I can see them," replied Beckett. She lined up edges of the letter with the handle of the spear. "They look like regular fingerprints."

"At least from that perspective," Castle chimed in.

Beckett nodded in agreement. "Yeah, I can see why forensics had trouble with them."

"Do the prints match up?" asked Alexis.

"As far as I can tell," Beckett replied. She pinched the bridge of her nose to relieve the tension as she re-focused her eyesight on the physical world around her. "It's not like we can lift the prints and run them through the system anyway..."

A lightbulb went off in Castle's mind. "Maybe we can..." he mused. The wizard stretched his hand over the table, focusing his concentration on the spear and the letter.

Alexis grabbed her father's hand before he could get close to the evidence bags. "Dad, wait!" she exclaimed. "If you use magic to lift the 'prints', won't that contaminate whatever you get?"

Castle lifted his hand immediately, recognizing that his daughter was right. He ran his hands through his hair, forcing himself to stop his runaway train of thought. Alexis smiled as she watched her father's 'process', grateful that he had finally, somewhere, found some impulse control. "Don't worry, dad," she announced with a smile, "I have an idea."

Beckett and Castle watched as Alexis backed away from the table and turned toward the living room. Her eyes lost focus as she started looking for someone she knew she couldn't see or hear. "Mister...Mister Royce?"

Royce smiled as he watched Alexis 'searching' for him. "Beckett, tell the kid she can call me Mike."

Beckett crossed through the dining room and intercepted Alexis before she made it to her father's study. "He's over here by me, Alexis. And he says you can call him Mike."

Alexis smiled, grateful to have a physical form to focus her attention on. She returned to the dining room table, the two Guardians and their tag along ghost trailing along behind. "Okay, Mike. I have a question for you. How much energy would it take for a ghost to lift this spear?"

"Tons," Royce replied. "Poltergeists are the strongest of all ghosts."

Castle relayed the information to his daughter, adding, "but sweetheart, Mike doesn't have that kind of power. I had to flip through a file that he wanted to see last night because he couldn't lift a sheet of paper." When he caught the lifting of Beckett's curious eyebrow, Castle turned to his girlfriend and quickly whispered, "I'll tell you later."

Beckett studied Mike and Alexis carefully, pushing herself to try and figure out where Alexis was going with this. When she noticed how the soles of Mike's shoes were going through the area rug to rest on the floor *beneath* the rug, Beckett realized she had caught on to Alexis' idea. "Ectoplasm..."

Alexis nodded enthusiastically. "Exactly! Mike, I don't think you need to actually manipulate the letter and the spear, just to *try* to."

Beckett pulled a set of evidence gloves out of her purse and carefully removed the letter and the spear from their bags.

Royce stared at the items, clearly apprehensive about working off of Alexis' theory. "Wait a second, ectoplasm is *physical* matter. If these 'prints' are made up of energy, won't the slime just go through them...maybe even dissolve them completely?"

Castle relayed Royce's concerns to Alexis before Beckett could counter his argument. "But you keep saying it yourself, Mike," Beckett insisted, "you're not that powerful a ghost."

"Gee, thanks, kid," Mike teased.

Beckett let the comment roll off, continuing her argument without missing a beat. "Worst case scenario, your hand passes straight through the spear and the letter without leaving any evidence you even made the attempt."

Alexis picked up Beckett's train of thought, adding to it in an effort to convince the ghost of his power. "It's...it may be a little more complicated than that." Alexis asked Royce, "Can you see the prints on the letter and the spear?" Royce nodded; Castle relayed the message, and Alexis continued her explanation, "Mike, what I want you to do is attempt to...God, I hate to say it like this...I want you to try to drip your blood on the prints."

Royce's eyes widened for a split second before he broke into a smile. "Good idea, kid. *Really* good idea...That just might work..." As Beckett and Castle turned to *him* for an explanation, Royce told them, "Ghosts are made up of energy and ectoplasm. Because I'm a low-level spirit, I don't have much of either. The residual energy in those prints is *strong*; it has to be for me to still be able to see it so long after the wizard used it. Beckett, you were wrong about the worst case scenario being that nothing would happen; the *worst* case scenario would be that I stir up the energy from the prints and make it impossible for you to get anything useful from them. But going over the prints in drops...that just might work..." Royce approached the table cautiously, not wanting to go *through* the table. He took a pin out of the pocket of his jacket, piercing the tip of his finger just enough to draw blood. The drops disappeared as they fell the few inches from his hand to the table. Royce's expression grew into more and more of a grimace as he worked, clearly in pain by the time he got to the letter.

Beckett watched the ghost of her old partner with a growing feeling of concern. "Royce?" she asked, "Are you okay?"

Royce refused to answer until he finished with the letter. "I'm fine, that was just a little more...uncomfortable than I thought it was going to be. Did it work?"

Beckett focused on the prints on the letter, smiling as she saw the results. "Alexis?" she asked, "Did you bring that print lifting kit I asked for?" Alexis nodded, pulling the powder, brush and tape out of her bag.

Castle watched, fascinated, as his daughter pulled two perfect sets of prints off of the evidence on the table. "Great job, honey," he told her with a proud smile. Concern quickly overtook Castle's features, though, as he realized a problem with their working theory. "But are these prints going to be of any use to us?"

Alexis turned to her father in confusion. "Why wouldn't they?"

"They're not *fingerprints*, or forensics would have been able to pick them up conventionally. It's great that we can verify that the prints match between the letter and the spear. But if there's no way that the prints are in the system, what good will that do us?"

"I have an idea about that," replied Alexis. She ran to the study and pulled a promotional copy of 'Frozen Heat' from the bookshelf, setting it down in the free space between the items on the dining room table. "Dad," she suggested, "I want you to erase this book...but just hold your hand *over* the cover, don't touch it."

Castle nodded, acknowledging his daughter's directions. Staring at the book, he cleared his mind to concentrate on the task at hand. The wizard held his hand an inch over the book, keeping it as steady as he could. The book glowed on the table as Castle carefully whispered his way through the spell.

It was over in a matter of seconds. Alexis didn't bother to verify that the book was wiped clean of its text; she had more important information to gather. "Kate?" she asked, "can you tell me what you see when you look at the book?"

Beckett focused on the energy surrounding the book. Instantly she saw everything she needed to know. "I can see his prints," she told the group.

"Are they a match to my dad's fingerprints?" asked Alexis.

Beckett pulled out a page of fingerprints she had copied at the station. "These are the prints we took when your dad was booked for riding naked on that horse..." She compared the prints to what she saw when she looked at the book. "They're a match."

Castle's eyes widened in surprise at Beckett's evaluation. "Really?" Beckett nodded again. "So the prints we got off the spear and the letter are legitimate sets?"

"As far as I can tell," replied Beckett.

Don't forget to leave comments below! As always, I really want to hear what you think! :-)