We traveled to the Revyvtech offices. At first, it seemed not unlike when we shadowed the young twins. There were places we could not go, then, too.
"Well," said Iris, as Danny translated, "Why didn't they investigate then?"
Do not think us incurious. There are many things that can turn aside such weak spirits. Not all of them are sinister, or even purposeful. Some of our number cannot be far from their kin. Some, their loves. Some may only walk the paths they walked in life–
"Are you saying that there aren't any ghosts here who used to work for Revyvtech?" asked Iris.
Gwensyvyr looked amused despite the horrific damage to her arm. There are, but in their own accounts, they were not highly ranked, and are quite sure their passwords will no longer work.
Danny wasn't so sure of that. He wasn't a computer genius, as indicated by his 'plan' to hack Revyvtech, but he'd spent enough time helping Tucker to be embarrassed he hadn't thought of asking. He looked up hopefully at the other ghosts.
"Sometimes people don't change things like that right away," he said. Jazz came back in as he spoke, and Danny set the phone on the floor while he took the jar and a pair of plastic gloves from her. "Maybe if we can find some people who only died recently, we could try out theirs?"
Some ghosts left the room. Others engaged in hearty bouts of mime. Others glared at him.
Gwensyvyr touched his arm with her uninjured hand, and gestured back at the phone. They glare because they are troubled by my injury. Danny was fascinated by the fact that Gwensyvyr seemed to have spontaneously reinvented texting lingo. Although, it was possible that her current batch of spelling decisions just happened to look like that. They should glare at me instead.
The ghosts looked more or less appropriately chastized.
"Right," said Danny. "Okay." He unscrewed the lid of the jar. "That doesn't explain how you got hurt." He frowned at the cream. "This works for me, but you're intangible… I don't know if I can even put this on you."
Gwensyvyr shrugged, then held out her arm.
"Yeah, I guess there's only one way to find out." He pulled on the gloves and scooped out a small amount of the cream. Then he reached out, and to his surprise, was able to smear it on Gwensyvyr's arm.
Although, maybe it shouldn't be such a surprise. Ever since that first day, she and the other ghosts had been growing stronger. Just now, she'd been able to touch him, and he'd been able to feel it, and she had at the Masque as well.
"Oh," said George. "That's– That's really weird to look at. Sorry, honored ancestor, but it is."
Danny didn't stop applying the cream. "Do you see her?"
"Not. Not really. More like, I can tell there's… something. Like heat over a sidewalk. Where you put the cream."
"Are you seeing the cream?"
"I don't think that's it," said Iris. She sounded fascinated. "It's like looking at glass in water."
Danny was honestly just relieved that it was working. He took some more cream from the jar and continued up, past Gwensyvyr's shoulder.
It felt as if Danny were on the verge of a revelation. As if he had the end of a string in his hand, and all he had to do was pull it to unravel the knot of this mystery. But he was missing something. Some puzzle piece, some scrap of information that would make this all make sense. Or maybe what he was missing was perspective.
Gwensyvyr had run into blood blossoms. Probably at Revyvtech. Blood blossoms hurt ghosts and half ghosts. Gwensyvyr was growing stronger. She was stronger than she'd been when Danny had first arrived.
He finished rubbing in the cream and started peeling off the gloves. "Can you tell us what happened now?"
Gwensyvyr reached over and tapped the phone, which had gone dark. It turned on.
"Huh," said Danny. "Okay." He unlocked it and brought up the keyboard. Gwensyvyr began to type.
The building was largely empty, and we became frustrated. I saw movement and light behind a door, and became convinced that secrets were being spoken of within. But the space beyond it was one that was barred to us. Once, before we grew so weak, I could defeat such barriers, push them aside. I pushed. The barrier defeated me, however. Gwensyvyr gave Danny a wry smile. Yet, in harming me, it revealed its nature. Although it seems that you already know the name of the scourge.
"Blood blossoms, yeah," said Danny.
I thought them eradicated, or nearly so, wrote Gwensyvyr. I must ask, how did you encounter them?
"One time was a fluke," said Danny, not wanting to get into the time travel thing, "leftovers from the sixteen hundreds. But then Mom and Dad found some old seeds and got them to grow. They put them all away when they realized I was allergic, but–"
"Wait," said Iris, "it's something you're allergic to? The ghost you're talking to was hurt by something you are allergic to in Revyvtech?"
Gwensyvyr nodded.
"Yes?" said Danny.
"What happened to–" Iris swallowed. "What happened to everyone but Vivian and Grandma Rose looked like an allergic reaction."
Danny nodded. He'd already been solidly convinced that Revyvtech was up to no good (see: the Vlad look-alike), but he knew that the others might have needed more convincing.
They didn't anymore.
But– Wait. Wait. "I'm pretty sure my reaction to blood blossoms is more of a syvyr thing than a family thing," said Danny. "Jazz didn't react like I did, when we had them in the house. Neither did Mom. There's nothing to say that anyone else is going to be allergic."
"We didn't try to eat them, though," said Jazz, "and regular things like that - allergens - can be concentrated, can't they? Why not more supernatural allergens?"
"There's another factor, if we're taking all the, ah, magic to be true," said Lewis. "If this thing works on ghosts." He waved in the general direction of Gwensyvyr. "Maybe it's more myth than fact, or an artifact of someone screwing up a timeline, but Gwensyvyr was supposed to have had children with her dead husband. A ghost. Unless there's some kind of nasty scandal lurking unknown in the family tree–"
"There definitely is," said Eugene, "there are always scandals."
"-we're direct descendants of that union."
"Do you think any of your ghosts know, Danny?" asked Iris. "Any of them know Gwensyvyr when she was alive?"
"Um," said Danny, looking sideways at Gwensyvyr. "Yeah. I mean, there's probably someone. Around."
The door to the room opened up, which was a shock, because everyone was accounted for, except–
Oh. It was Joanna. She was still in her pajamas, but she had her phone in one hand.
"What have you kids been doing?" she asked.
Iris looked down at her phone, which she had, up until that moment, been using to interrogate Aunt Alicia's security detail. Everyone else looked at Lewis's crime phone, which still showed the last thing Gwensyvyr had typed out.
"Investigating?" suggested Jazz.
"Have you been up all night?" Joanna asked in faint horror. Danny realized belatedly that most of them were still wearing pieces of their Masque costumes… They were kind of surreal in the early morning light streaming through the windows.
"We couldn't sleep after hearing about Alicia," said Eugene.
"And why did none of you wake me when you heard about this?" Joanna waved her phone, sounding like she was on the verge of tears.
"You seemed really tired," said Eugene, lamely.
The more accurate answer, as far as Danny went, was that they were really tired, and then forgot.
Joanna looked back at her phone and rubbed her eyes with her free hand. "Why all these questions about Alicia's medication? I don't understand–"
"We're pretty sure that Revyvtech was involved in the poisoning," said Danny. "The first one."
"Probably they were involved in the second one, too, with those special release capsules," said Iris.
"I don't know that they were that special," said George.
"Pretty sure?" asked Joanna. "How sure is pretty sure?"
Danny turned to Gwensyvyr. "Would blood blossoms have affected them like that?"
Yes.
Which, of course, begged the questions of why– especially given that only some family members had been affected, and they'd apparently all been eating the same thing. Still, details like that could be worked out later.
"We know they at least have something that would act like the poison that killed everyone but Vivian," said Danny.
"The spirits…?" asked Joanna, not finishing the phrase.
"Yeah," said Danny.
Joanna took a deep breath. "Thank you, honored ancestors."
Gwensyvyr gave Joanna a thumbs up. Joanna jumped. "Oh! For a moment I thought–" She shook her head and started pressing buttons on her phone.
"What are you doing?" asked Eugene.
"I'm calling your uncle," she said.
"He wasn't picking up for us or for security."
"He wasn't being called on his personal phone."
The phone rang, tinny and distant to Danny's ears. And rang. And rang. Joanna sniffled and switched to a different number.
"Who are you calling now?" asked Eugene.
"Mr. Kynbaz - yes, on his personal phone."
Oh, so everyone just had two phones, now, huh? Good to know.
This time, the phone was picked up. Danny heard a tired "Joanna?" from the other side of the line.
"Kevin," said Joanna, "I need you to authorize an extraction for Alicia."