Only one person in their family had the brute force required to shake a house in its foundation when he slammed the front door.

"Morning, Honey," Maddie called without looking up from her newspaper. "How'd your hunting go?"

A man covered in filth and blood stumbled into the kitchen. "Is Danny here?" he demanded, clutching a piece of fabric that had probably once been white between his fingers.

Maddie folded up her newspaper, moving slowly as one might when confronted with a terrified animal. "The Sun's barely up, Jack. If he's anywhere, it'd be in bed."

With a shake of his head the man bounded up the stairs, hollering for their son.

Placing the paper on the table, Maddie closed her eyes and took a deep breath before reaching out with her ghost sense. The absence of another core was confirmed by Jack's increasingly frenzied cries of Danny's name – the young halfa wasn't at home, and if Maddie's ghost sense was anything to go by, he was no longer in Amity Park.

Jack thundered back down the stairs. "Mads," he shouted, "can you sense him?!"

The fabric in his hands was covered in red and green splotches.

Clenching her fingers, Maddie got to her feet and dampened a cloth under the tap. "Here, clean your face," she ordered, prising the ruined glove from his grasp and switching it for the towel.

The large man buckled at the knees, practically falling into a chair. "You knew, didn't you?" he demanded, obediently scrubbing the cloth across his face. "Even if he didn't tell you, your ghost sense would have. Why didn't you tell me?"

Jack looked so scared and broken, and it was suddenly difficult to breathe. Maddie's heart beat fast and loud against her ribs as she wondered what on earth could have taken place for Danny to reveal himself when bleeding as much as Jack's stained jumpsuit suggested.

A horrible, unthinkable situation stopped her scrambled suppositions – had Jack done this? The hunter had been a lot kinder to Phantom since their brief stay in the halfa's lair, but it was obvious to anybody who cared to look that there was still some tension to their relationship. Jack had been uncomfortable with having the kid in and out of their home without knowing Phantom's identity, and had been trying to press for the kid's personal details since their return to Amity Park.

Had Jack finally snapped, as he had been wont to do in the past, and forced their son to transform with some ghastly weapon? Did he injure Danny? There was a lot of blood, and judging by her smoke-blackened husband, a fire had also been involved. Maddie took a shaky breath to collect her thoughts. "What happened?"

Jack seemed to deflate, drooping like a plant whose watering had been neglected in summer heat. He quietly told her what had taken place after the ghost alarms went off, right up until getting back to the RV from buying food.

Maddie sat still and stared at the scarred tabletop.

In a way, it would have been better if Jack had done this; at least all they would have had to worry about were some fast-healing injuries and a damaged father-son relationship.

Vlad had their son. Vlad, with his fancy weapons of torture and even fancier plans. Vlad, with his burning drive for revenge and overwhelming possessiveness. The missing arm was suddenly as insignificant as a paper cut.

"I swear I thought he was safe! It should have been me, not Danny. I'm sorry!"

Maddie shook her head numbly. "It's not your fault," she murmured, twisting Danny's glove in her grasp.

"Yes, it-"

"Why didn't Vlad just kill you instead of kidnapping Danny?" she demanded, rising from the chair. Grasping Jack's shoulders, Maddie made him look at her – if Jack started to wallow in guilt now, then they would get nothing done, and Vlad would win. "It would have been easy to kill you in one hit with Danny in such a bad condition."

Jack's eyes grew wide. "Vlad wants you and Danny both," he responded.

"That's right," Maddie said, releasing her husband's shoulders and fetching the poor guy a glass of water. "Whether Danny turned to dust or not didn't matter to him, it was just a plan to get him out of the way for a few months. But since you saved Danny, Vlad decided to kidnap him. He's trying to force us to come to him, where he'll most likely kill you and make me his mate. Vlad wants us to come to him willingly, because that'll be the ultimate victory." The mental image of Vlad's holding her, of him running his hands down the huntress' curves, claiming her even as she kicked and screamed, sent shudders through Maddie's body.

"What makes him think we'll come?" Jack asked. "I mean, it's not like he can actually kill Danny, so why shouldn't we take as much time as we need to rescue him safely? Danny would want that as well, even if he's being hurt."

Maddie sighed, pressing the glass into her husband's hand. She would never hear the end of this one. "I didn't tell you because I didn't want to worry you," she confessed. "Danny found out about an invention of Vlad's last week. We were going to destroy it before giving you ghost powers, but it looks like Vlad decided to strike earlier than expected."

Jack went very still, hands curling around his glass of water.

Maddie couldn't blame him – this wasn't something that any of them could take lightly. Vlad's latest creation sent her mind blank in terror, and she had only had her powers for a few weeks. To have lived with a core for as long as Danny had, and to be captured by the maniac with such an awful weapon, must be the worst mixture of anticipation and sheer terror that anybody had ever experienced.

"What weapon?" Jack breathed.

"Tucker's always got tabs on Vlad's computers, and whenever any new data is added, we can hack in to see whatever project he's working on. Tucker told Danny about this about five days ago, but the files had photos with them, so it's already been built. It attacks your core," Maddie said as levelly as she could. "When you're zapped by this weapon, it slowly strips away your powers, one by one. How many powers are taken away depends on the length of time subjected to the weapon. Apparently it leaves your core there, which keeps you immortal with a ghost sense and healing powers, but all the parts of your core responsible for powers are left as nothing more than useless scar tissue."

The glass slipped through Jack's fingers and shattered on the floor. Neither of them paid it any heed.

"He's going to force Danny to stay with him, isn't he? Without his powers, Danny'll be stuck as an immortal human, and won't be able to escape Vlad." Jack's words hitched, and he took a deep breath in an attempt to avoid a descent into hysterics.

"Yes," Maddie responded, twisting the glove around and around her fingers. "Whether we go to save him or not, Vlad's going to destroy Danny's core."