Chapter Text
The Specter Deflector slipped from his mom’s outstretched hands onto the dirt.
“Danny?” she said, more concern and uncertainty in her voice than when she’d faced Vlad’s menagerie of ghosts. “Danny, what is this?”
“I, uh, it’s not what it looks like.”
“What does it look like, young man?” Her words were as stern as her tone tried to be, undercut with worry.
“It’s just—a cool new ghost-hunting glove, Tucker, Sam and I made. It’s what we were working on in the lab this morning before we left for our trip! I put it on to fight those ghosts, but,” Danny let out a breathless, nervous laugh, “it looks like I didn’t need it after all. You saved the day.”
That might just be believable! Score. Enough of the truth was in there.
Danny still felt the pull of his transformation. It was harder to stop now, unstable, like the trail of gunpowder had been lit and Danny was waiting for the explosion. He closed his eyes and swallowed it back down, an electric and simmering nausea that burned like turpentine at the back of his throat.
When Danny opened his eyes, his mom’s were lingering on his hair, and Danny knew that he was cornered.
“Sweetie, I need the truth. Did those ghosts do something to you? Some—some sort of ghost venom, or—” her eyes narrowed and she cut herself off, then felt at her hip for where she sometimes clipped a Fenton Finder to her utility belt. She didn’t have it on her right now, but there was only one reason she would be reaching for it.
“I promise I’m not overshadowed, mom. I swear.”
Swearing something was serious business in the Fenton household, and Danny rarely invoked it. His mom knew that—she was the one to raise him that way. “Then explain yourself, Danny. I need the truth.”
Danny swallowed. He’d almost revealed himself as Phantom to her during the plane crash when he’d thought their lives depended on it. He’d considered it again as they hiked through the forest but had decided against it due to lack of necessity.
Given his lock of white hair, his glowing glove, and a ghost core that felt like it would boil over at any moment, Danny realized that if he didn’t come clean now he might not get another chance to do it on his own terms. But with the Plasmius Maximus locking his powers away, Danny didn’t bring anything useful to the table that could temper the weight of the truth. All he had to show for himself was the string of failures that had gotten him here.
The only thing that had gone right for him so far this weekend had been setting up the campsite: dividing up tasks, building the fire, stargazing—it had almost felt like the carefree family vacations they’d taken when he was little.
And now, when Danny was helpless, his mom had single-handedly fought off the ghosts that Danny couldn’t. Most importantly, her hug just now hadn’t hurt him.
Danny had been right earlier: they didn’t need his ghost powers to get through this. But Danny did need his mom.
He unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “Okay. The truth is that this isn’t a ghost hunting glove. I’m sorry, that was a lie.”
His mom nodded, and it was only her valiant attempt at a patient expression in the midst of all the chaos they’d been through that convinced Danny to keep going.
“The ghosts that took me didn’t do anything to me. No venom, no ghost magic, no overshadowing. I’m just—like this,” Danny said, looking down at his glove.
“Danny, baby, you’re not making sense.”
“I’m part ghost, Mom.”
Danny’s confession clearly threw off whatever rationalization his mom had been attempting. She looked suddenly faint, like all the confidence and ease she’d shown in battle had drained away. “What do you mean you’re ‘part ghost?’”
“Don’t worry, I’m still human! Well, half human. I have been ever since the portal opened. I’m…” Danny took one last deep breath, then met his mom’s eyes. “I’m the reason it opened.”
Her expression was dangerously brittle, and when she spoke it was strained, hesitant in a way his mom’s voice never was. “No, that’s—when the portal opened, there was an unexpected time delay before the system reached threshold voltage,” she said, reciting the explanation that she and his dad had arrived at in the weeks after the portal opened. They had checked and re-checked their numbers, and Danny had let them. “We didn’t know that the space between the two dimensions would behave like a capacitor, so we didn’t factor it into the calculations. We expected the portal to open instantly, and when it didn’t, we thought it had failed.”
Danny picked up where she left off, quoting verbatim something he’d heard at the kitchen table for months now. “You calculated the permittivity constant after the fact based on the timestamp of the portal opening. But you said the number didn’t make sense, that you were still missing something.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head, her eyes locked on Danny’s glove. “This means we missed everything.”
Danny could see the dots connecting behind his mom’s eyes. Maybe it was cruel to make her be the one to say it, but she finished in a whisper: “You were in the portal during dielectric breakdown.”
Danny nodded. “It… changed me. It made me part ghost.”
His mom reached for him, offering her outstretched hands in an open offer for contact if Danny wanted it. He accepted and she squeezed his hands reassuringly: one clammy skin, the other luminescent and moon-white.
“‘Part ghost,’” his mom said as though testing out the phrase, a crinkle of something like doubt in the lines on her forehead.
“Yeah.”
She had to believe him. He couldn’t argue the numbers or the science with her, his grades were proof enough of that. Danny didn’t know what to do if she didn’t believe him.
Thankfully, his mom’s train of thought seemed to be taking her through evidence that Danny didn’t have the presence of mind to string together right now. She asked, “Is that why you backed away from the Specter Deflector?”
Danny nodded, and her eyes widened. “And earlier, too—on the plane, at the campsite. It hurts you. I hurt you.”
“Yeah,” Danny repeated, at a loss for anything else to say.
“That means all the times our trackers detected a ghost in the house, all those times we thought there was a bug in the system—”
“It was me.” Danny was unsure whether it was his mom’s hands that were trembling, or his own. She swept circles onto the back of his hands in a reassuring motion that could have been for either Danny or herself.
“When I hugged you after fighting off those ghosts, you didn’t flinch like you did earlier even though I was still wearing the Specter Deflector. How? And your appearance—” her throat made an awful, complicated noise. “Danny, what happened to you tonight?”
“My ghost half isn’t working right now. The bear ghost you fought off is the one that took me from the campsite earlier,” Danny cringed, still embarrassed he’d let himself get caught. “Mom, all of those ghosts are working for Vlad—you have to trust me, he’s the reason we crashed here in the first place. He’s not a skeptic like you think. He wanted this to happen to make us stay with him.”
Danny was walking so many fine lines in this conversation. He was throwing Vlad under the bus with the truth, but still only half of it. Danny didn’t want to reveal Vlad’s ghostly identity, Plasmius, to his mom when Vlad still had so much on Danny that he could use to make Danny’s life miserable.
Plus, if Danny kept Plasmius a secret, then he still had something to threaten Vlad with even after his mom knew about his own identity. His parents wouldn’t take kindly to knowing that the Wisconsin Ghost was their erstwhile friend.
“Vlad did this?” His mom’s thumbs stilled, and her eyes narrowed. She suddenly looked a little less lost, but no less concerned. “Baby, did Vlad lay a hand on you?”
Danny forced himself to swallow a laugh at that understatement, knowing how much more that would upset his mom. “He used a ghost hunting device on me that he said would short out my powers until midnight. I guess my ectosignature is too weak right now for the Specter Deflector to register it. That’s why I wasn’t able to fight those ghosts that he sent after me. When I tried, bits of my ghost half slipped, and that’s how this happened,” Danny gestured up at his hair, then considered his ghostly glove. “Now it’s spreading. But I’m useless like this. I haven’t been able to fly, shoot ectoblasts—”
“Or ‘appear human,’” his mom said, too gently.
Danny’s stomach swooped. “What?”
“You called yourself half ghost and half human. You said the device is preventing you from using your ghost powers—it’s also preventing you from looking like you’re alive. Shapeshifting is a ghost power.”
“No, you’re not getting it,” Danny said, disconcerted. She thought his human form was a ghost power? For some ghosts, sure: that jet pilot, or Spectra, or Johnny 13. But Danny… Danny was different. “It’s not like that for me, it’s not some disguise. I’m not just a ghost that can look human, I still am human. Half.”
She just kept looking at him with the same awful, pitying understanding. “Of course you’re human. Entirely human. You’re a human ghost. You were in the portal when it opened—Danny, the startup procedure required enough energy to ionize the air inside. If you were inside,” her eyes went glassy and her voice sounded wet, “it’s not something that you could have survived, baby. No one could.”
Danny shook his head furiously. “I did survive, though! Mostly. The way I look now, all mixed up, it’s just Vlad’s stupid device. I can show you more once it wears off, but if I let myself go ghost now, I don’t think I’ll be able to look human again until it does.”
“Lots of ghosts can appear as though they’re still alive,” his mom said, echoing Danny’s earlier thoughts. Speaking like she was the one breaking news to him.
Danny’s breath caught in his throat, and rather than fight to keep his breathing even he just stopped entirely. Apparently, not needing to breathe wasn’t a ghost power. Danny kind of hated the implications of that.
What she was saying about the Plasmius Maximus—and the way holding on to his human form was getting harder, the way it was pulling at him to give in and go ghost, that meant his mom might be right.
His transformation was just shapeshifting, after all. Lots of ghosts did that. Danny really wasn’t any different, was he?
He was a ghost. Not just half. Entirely.
An inexplicable laugh built in Danny’s throat but came out as a dry gasp instead as his core slipped further. His vision went funny as green light filled his left eye, the world tilting in lopsided color like wearing the world’s most disorienting 3D movie glasses.
She wasn’t taking the reveal nearly as badly as Danny had often feared when he would imagine how this conversation would go—she hadn’t pulled a weapon, hadn’t called him a monster.
This was somehow worse.
She turned his gloved hand over and looked at it in something close to wonder. “So this is part of your appearance as a ghost,” she said.
“You already know what I look like as a ghost,” Danny said, throat raw. “I’m Phantom, Mom.”
Her eyes snapped to his face, and she searched it like she was remapping it, overlaying her memories of Phantom. Given his hair, glowing eye, and ghostly glove, it probably wasn’t difficult at this point. He braced himself for her disappointed face, or maybe for cold, impassive analysis, or anger, or fear.
Instead, her eyes held something Danny craved from her so badly that it hurt: pride. She raised a hand to the side of Danny’s head and smoothed back his hair with her thumb, the white lock of it streaming through her fingers. “Danny Phantom,” she said softly, as though testing out the name. “Danny Phantom, you have been so brave.”
Danny, despite himself, felt his eyes mist over.
After a moment, his mom nodded decisively. “I’m going to get us both out of here. We’re going back to Vlad’s and I’m going to show him what happens to someone who thinks he can manipulate the Fentons.”
“Okay,” Danny said. He would gladly follow her anywhere right now.
“I know it’s difficult, but do you think you can keep resisting the effects of the device Vlad used on you? If he thinks you can still look like you’re alive, he might think the weapon has worn off already. You can bluff.”
Oh—his mom had that backwards. Vlad didn’t realize that appearing human—or, like his mom said, alive—was a ghost power. Vlad and Danny had both thought that transforming into a ghost was the power. But at the same time, Vlad wouldn’t expect Danny to be able to look like Phantom while under the effect of the Plasmius Maximus, either. Danny would pick his timing to give into his transformation. The bluff could work, just not for the reasons his mom thought it would.
“Yeah. I’ll keep holding it off.”
“You’re doing amazing, sweetie,” his mom said. She scooped up the Specter Deflector from where it had fallen, folded it in half, and tucked it under her shoulder. “You should save your strength. Would you like a piggyback ride?”
“Yes please,” Danny said. Even if he wasn’t straining against the Plasmius Maximus, letting his mom be his mom after everything was a relief. He climbed onto her back, and she set out for the chalet with determination.
Danny could barely manage to not go boneless against her shoulders. He tried to focus on maintaining his iron grip on his core, but his two-tone vision from having only one glowing eye was giving him a headache. He allowed his other eye to glow, too—it didn’t alleviate the pressure as much as he’d been hoping, but at least he wasn’t looking at the world through two different filters anymore.
Once they reached the hewn log steps of the chalet, Danny dropped back to the ground. As his mom strode up to the door, she clicked the Specter Deflector back around her waist—probably remembering that the ghosts she’d fought before answered to Vlad—and knocked. Danny lingered behind her.
Vlad swept open the door to reveal that he’d changed into an indulgent silk robe and pajama set and combed his hair back in a way that looked supremely stupid. “Maddie, you came back! I was so worried for you and Danny, all alone out there. The wildlife in the forest can be dangerous, you know.”
“Oh, Vlad, you have no idea. Thank you for opening your home back up to us.” The naked relief in her tone and expression almost made Danny believe that his mom was happy to be here, and Danny considered that maybe he got his ability to lie from her.
“Anything for you, my dear,” Vlad said unctuously. Blegh.
His mom crossed the threshold and Danny ducked inside after her. She stepped into the living room and waved a dismissive hand over her shoulder without looking back. “Danny, go somewhere else while the adults talk.”
Vlad closed the door and finally looked at Danny with a triumphant expression—but as he took in Danny’s strange combination of human and ghostly features, it morphed into something sharp and assessing. Danny played it up and fixed Vlad with the same illuminated smirk he’d given him when he and his mom first left the chalet.
Then Danny finally let go of his core. Rings appeared around his waist, and with a sigh of relief his ghost form washed over him.
Danny still couldn’t actually do anything. There were still ten minutes until midnight. But even though he was powerless, Danny finally had more room to think now that he wasn’t straining against his transformation.
Vlad’s expression flickered, just for a moment, with fear. He looked between Danny and the grandfather clock with tight confusion. Danny was glad to exceed expectations for once, bad grades in math and science aside.
As far as Danny knew, Vlad was also under the impression that they were both half-ghost, half-human. Danny wondered how Vlad would feel once he learned that their human appearances were just a ghost power.
Vlad, remembering himself, brushed past Danny and gestured his mom toward the couch with a cloying expression. “Please, do sit. You must be exhausted from your trek in the woods… and from carrying the weight of that mistake you made all those years ago.” Vlad briefly glanced at Danny when he said that, a way to emphasize that even though Danny could go ghost, Vlad still thought he had the upper hand and would rub it in Danny’s face while he could.
His mom settled onto the couch cushions next to Vlad. “We all make mistakes, Vlad. I might make one now.” Ugh, gross. Scratch inheriting his ability to lie from her—this performance had to be better than anything Danny had ever managed.
His mom leaned forward, hand hovering over Vlad’s shoulder—and then a spark jumped between her fingers and Vlad’s skin. Vlad stiffened.
“Oh, silly me,” she said, fluidly pushing herself back up suddenly. She unbuckled the Specter Deflector and dangled it from one finger, then draped it over the back of the couch. “Now that we’re somewhere safe I can finally take off this clunky thing.”
Vlad relaxed, but Danny hesitated. Had his mom noticed Vlad’s reaction to the Specter Deflector? There was no other reason for her to take it off. Was that all it had taken for her to suspect something about Vlad’s identity?
Danny distinctly realized he had no idea what, exactly, Vlad’s history was—much less what the history between Vlad and his parents looked like beyond being “college friends.” Maybe she had context that Danny lacked, and between learning about Danny and seeing that spark just now, she had the final piece of her puzzle.
Whatever his mom did or didn’t guess, though, there was no way she knew just how powerful Vlad was. Danny had felt so confident in his mom’s abilities after watching her drive back the chimera ghosts that he’d had forgotten that, against Vlad, she might actually meet her match. And she just took off her best defense against him.
Danny couldn’t intervene directly without wasting the window his mom was giving him to slip away. He didn’t intend on just waiting out the ten minutes until midnight. A plan was forming in his mind. It was Danny’s turn to back her up.
The animal ghosts Vlad that had under his thumb hadn’t shown themselves yet, but Danny knew they had to be nearby. There was an easy way to grab one’s attention—he just had to find a piece of taxidermy that wasn’t displayed in the living room.
With Vlad distracted, Danny ducked into the hallway. Bingo: atop a narrow table sat a glass display case containing a taxidermied mole posing on a bed of dried moss. Danny approached it.
“Hey,” he said softly. “C’mon, I need to talk to you and your friends.” When nothing happened after several seconds, he slowly reached out for the glass—then a wide, diaphanous paw with long claws slapped his hand away, the ghost manifesting between Danny and the taxidermy, its unnaturally long nose tentacles wriggling in a threat display.
Danny backed away with his hands raised only to bump into the broad chest of a too-tall mountain goat whose horns and eyes both twisted into dizzying infinite spirals. All the animal ghosts started to seep from the air and walls to surround Danny. The bear was back too, looming over him with a low growl.
Danny cringed and held a finger to his mouth in a quiet down gesture. His own voice was hushed. “Sorry about that! Sorry. I don’t want any trouble, I just need to talk with you. I’m not the one who turned your pelts into wall art, okay?”
The ghosts paused, seemingly not inclined to attack without provocation. Whether that was because they remembered fighting his mom and thought better of it, or because Vlad wasn’t actively siccing them on Danny, he was grateful for the chance to plead his case.
Danny gestured with a thumb at the wall between them and the living room. “I just wanted to say, y’know, you don’t have to work for that guy. This is your territory, after all, and there are way more of you than there are him.”
Their glassy gazes shifted to look amongst each other, and the mole tilted its head in interest. Danny continued, “I can help you. If one of you knows where that weapon Vlad used on me is, the Plasmius Maximus, can you bring it to me without tipping him off?”
After a heavy pause, an eight-legged deer bobbed its head, then skittered away. It returned, offering the taser-like device to Danny in its mouth. “Thank you,” Danny said, and the deer dropped it into his hand. Stringy ectoplasmic spit clung to the Plasmius Maximus, a strand stretching between it and the deer’s many-rowed teeth until it finally snapped. Danny, out of politeness, ignored it and didn’t wipe it away. “I’ll make sure my mom doesn’t target you all, okay? Our problem is with him, not you.”
One by one, the ghosts turned and disappeared back into the bones of the house. Danny wished he could go invisible for this next bit, but that was still out of the question. With the Plasmius Maximus tucked into his utility belt, he carefully crept to the entrance of the hallway and peeked back out into the living room.
Vlad and his mom were on the couch, one of Vlad’s arms now draped over his mom’s shoulders. From the angle they sat at, Danny could see his mom’s face. “I’m so glad you’ve finally seen reason, Maddie,” Vlad was saying. “I just wish you hadn’t had to go through so much before realizing everything I have to offer you.”
“We have all the time in the world to make up for it,” his mom said, voice still like satin, but Danny could see cracks in her mask now. Her expression was strained and posture stiff as though Vlad’s hand on her was something rotten. Her eyes minutely flickered to Danny—Phantom, now—then to the grandfather clock. It was almost midnight. She didn’t visibly react, turning instead to look into Vlad’s eyes.
Danny did not envy her position. He’d take gross ghost saliva over that any day.
She leaned forward. “This means I can do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time now,” she said, lifting her arms as though to embrace Vlad. As she did, she subtly swiped the Specter Deflector from where she’d draped it over the edge of the couch.
Vlad leaned into the expected embrace as his mom positioned the belt across his back. Then in one swift motion, she pulled away, clipped it around his front, and turned the lock. Vlad sprang to his feet and shouted in surprise, then in pain and anger as sparks laced over him like fireworks.
Vlad’s eyes went incandescent as red suns as he roared. His mom inhaled sharply and leaned back—she had obviously expected the Specter Deflector to work, but whether she was taken aback by Vlad’s rage or his obvious display of ghostliness, Danny wasn’t sure. “You—you vile treacherous brat—just like your son,” he hissed through gritted teeth, even as his spine and fingers curled under the current from the Specter Deflector.
Danny approached Vlad from behind and pressed the Plasmius Maximus to his back, then activated it. Vlad spasmed, then stilled, the sudden drop in his spectral energy rendering the Specter Deflector inert along with Vlad’s ghost powers. His muscles still rippled underneath his skin, misfiring in little aftershocks.
Danny knew what both of those devices felt like firsthand. He grimaced in sympathy, but not in guilt. That was his mom Vlad was flirting with.
Vlad heaved and gaped between them both in shocked betrayal, then down at his waist where the Specter Deflector was locked.
A pair of shimmering black rings formed around Vlad. “What—No. No,” he said, but his transformation overtook him and left Vlad Plasmius, the Wisconsin Ghost, standing defenseless in front of Danny and his mom.
“You—” Vlad rounded on Danny, arcing his hands as though to summon ectofire. The attempt left Vlad staggering. “What is this? What did you do to me?”
“The same thing you did to me,” Danny said, holding up the Plasmius Maximus. “You don’t have access to your powers now.”
“It was never meant to trigger our transformation!”
Danny crossed his arms. “It works exactly the way you designed it to, Plasmius. Your living form is a ghost power.” Danny looked at his mom as he added, “It always has been.”
“No. You’re lying. You didn’t transform instantly,” Plasmius spat.
“Yeah, because I fought it. I guess I was better at that than you.”
“Impossible,” Vlad said, staring down at himself. Then his expression frayed dangerously at the edges. “By revealing me, you broke our deal, little badger. I’ll get you for this.”
“I never told her who you were,” Danny countered. “And you used the Plasmius Maximus on me, too. That means you revealed me to her first.”
“I figured you out on my own, Vlad.” Danny’s mom confirmed.
“But Maddie,” Plasmius said, wild anger giving way to a kicked-puppy expression. The about-face was jarring. “You… you came back to me.”
“Only to get my son home,” his mom said icily. “Once Danny explained what happened to him—how he became a ghost—everything started to fit together. I had a lot of time to think about you on our hike back here. Once I saw your reaction to the Specter Deflector, I knew, Vlad.”
“Then you know that your son is a monster too,” Vlad hissed.
Vlad’s face slammed to the side under his mom’s fist. Vlad doubled over, holding a hand to his cheek and staring up at her in shock. Danny watched his mom with wide eyes. “Never speak that way about my son in my presence. Never again,” she heaved, shaking out her fist, knuckles reddened from the impact.
“But you know now,” Vlad pleaded. “You know that Danny is the very thing you hate, just like me.”
“I could never hate Danny.” She looked toward Phantom. “I will always love him. All of him.” She wore the same expression that Danny had seen when she called him Danny Phantom for the first time.
Vlad fell to his knees and clasped his hands, petitioning. “Then what about me? Why was I never enough for you?”
Danny’s mom looked down at Vlad with her hands on her hips. “The Vlad I used to know was my friend. You were Jack’s friend once. Now you insult him, insult me, and attack my son. I already despised you before I knew you were a ghost. This changes nothing.”
Vlad’s gaze lowered to the ground, speechless. Danny had never seen Vlad without a retort or an insult ready.
“Tell me where your car keys are. I am taking my son and leaving.”
That seemed to rouse Vlad, and a hint of his previous condescension quirked his lips. “You forget that your precious son and I are not the only ghosts here. Come to me, my pets! Your prey has returned. And this time you need not hold yourselves back.”
The animal ghosts materialized from the shadows and corners of the room, clicking, growling, hissing, and advancing. His mom drew the Fenton Saber from her boot, her thumb hovering over the activation switch.
For a terrifying moment, Danny thought that his petition to the ghosts hadn’t worked. He startled when the mole appeared as though condensing from mist right in front of him—but facing Vlad. The ghost had placed itself between Danny and Vlad.
Danny looked over and saw the bear angling itself in front of his mom as if to protect her, too. She maintained her sparring stance until Danny caught her eyes and lowered his hands to signal that it was safe for her to stand down. She looked bewildered as the same ghosts that she had so thoroughly thrashed in the forest turned their backs to her, but in a poignant display of trust in Danny, she slid the Fenton Saber back into her boot.
And so Vlad found himself powerless, surrounded by the ghosts of the animals he had killed. “Butter biscuits,” he swore.
Maddie withdrew the key to the Specter Deflector from her pocket and brushed past the bear ghost to drop it on the floor in front of Vlad. “You can choose when to remove that,” she said, gesturing at the Specter Deflector around his waist. “It looks like you’ll get what’s coming to you either way. In exchange, you will tell me where your car keys are.”
“You think that after you insult me, degrade me, and turn my allies against me, I would help you leave? Surely not,” Vlad said, awfully haughty for someone kneeling while held at antlerpoint, but he still reached forward to grab the key and tucked it into the silk pocket of his robe. The mole ghost gave a guttural growl at the motion. Vlad sniffed dismissively, but remained still after that.
Danny’s mom let out an annoyed exhale through her nose, then turned her back on Vlad and went over to the entry table, throwing every drawer open and rooting around.
Danny stepped up to Vlad and offered him a sarcastic smile. “When you take off the Specter Deflector, you might want to run,” he suggested helpfully. “They’re pretty fast.”
The grandfather clock in the corner chimed midnight, and Danny’s breath fogged in front of him—his ghost sense. The Plasmius Maximus had finally worn off. His powers were back online.
For the first time that night, Danny truly relaxed in his own body. He reached for his core and tapped his transformation, and glowing rings split around him, returning him to his living appearance. It was no longer something he had to strain against: it was just as comfortable and natural as any other ghost power like intangibility, invisibility—or flight.
Danny was hit by the realization that they weren’t limited to the transportation options Vlad had to offer anymore. Now that his mom knew his identity, he could actually use his ghost powers to help them like he’d wanted to all along.
Vlad looked at Danny in resignation. “So it’s true. All this time, our human forms are nothing more than a mirage?”
“Yeah,” Danny confirmed, not bothering with explaining the distinction his mom had drawn between human and living. Danny was still reeling from that realization himself—he had a lot to think about and process.
Vlad did, too, but he would have to do it alone.
Danny turned away and found his mom rooting through a cabinet containing multi-player board games that were still wrapped in their original cellophane. “Mom, you can stop,” Danny said.
“It’s okay, sweetie, I’ll find his keys. Just hang tight,” she said distractedly.
“No, mom, we don’t need car keys. Look at me,” Danny said, and she finally glanced his way. Danny released his hold on gravity and gently pushed off the floor with his feet, hovering. He held out a hand to his mom.
“I can fly us both home. I can fly faster than we could drive, anyway—now that my powers are back, we don’t need Vlad’s help or his fancy car.”
His mom stared at him in something close to wonder, and Danny felt a brief flicker of apprehension. He looked like he was alive, but he was brazenly displaying his ghostliness. Seeing him with the full range of his powers available, was she reminded of the countless ghosts she’d only ever seen as enemies?
But then his mom gave him her steady, reassuring smile and accepted his outstretched hand. “Alright, baby. Take us home.”
It was like something that had been missing from their relationship for a long time finally slotted into place.
Danny let intangibility envelop them both like the cool alpine air. He took off, phasing them through the roof, rising up like the mountains around them.
They were a long way from home and had a long journey ahead—but it was one they would make together.