Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Dani hated police stations. If there was anything she’d learned after setting off to travel the world by herself, it was that police stations well and truly sucked. For one, they were usually filled to the brim with people and cameras, meaning she couldn’t easily slip away using her ghost powers without causing mass hysteria about a clickbait-worthy new cryptid on the scene and needing to lie low for a few weeks. That’d kinda bite since she was actually starting to like Boston. 

There was also the fact that one too many adults acted concerned about an “unaccompanied minor” and wanted to put her in foster care, which no thanks. Besides, Dani couldn’t imagine many prospective parents—foster or otherwise—wanting a ghostly freak of nature like her. And another thing? “Unaccompanied minor?” C’mon! Dani made excellent company. 

Honestly, Dani had the best stories! There was the time she parkoured away from law enforcement in the Philippines (and hey, she paid for that pandesal fair and square from the wallet of that one teen who was picking on some kids). Ooh, and can’t forget the miniature potato war with that one farmer’s kids in Ireland that the police had to break up! Not to mention The Incident in Florida…where the cops also got involved…

Dani frowned as she swung her feet in the uncomfortable metal chair bolted to the ground in the back of the police station. She knew better than to blindly accept the protein bar and water bottle the police officer who brought her in had given her—she’d seen enough snippets of cop shows in storefronts and the back of Best Buy to know better. They could swab her trash for DNA and fingerprints which would cause a whole bunch of issues when the test results came back as “100% Daniel Fenton, Amity Park, Illinois” with some ectoplasmic specks the machine would probably interpret as radiation poisoning, knowing her luck. Then she’d get chucked into a hospital, which would also be bad…

“Can you please tell me your name, sweetie?” the cop lady asked Dani for about the millionth time. Patience was beginning to wear thin on both sides if her thinly veiled exasperated tone was anything to go by.

Instead of giving her the usual death stare, Dani’s mouth quirked up in a smile as she faintly heard two familiar voices coming from the front desk. “Nunya,” she rasped.

The cop leaned forward across the metal table, relieved as she poised her pen over her notepad. “Can you repeat that, hun?”

“Nunya Business!” Dani crowed, taking her chance to dart to the front of the police station with her protein bar and water bottle stashed in her front hoodie pocket. 

“Hey, get back—”

“...volunteers at the Chase Space for the summer program.” Dani heard Alex explain as she drew closer, something forceful yet light in Alex’s tone—it was almost magical how Alex got people to just kinda… fold.

“You’re volunteers at the Chase Space for the summer program here to pick up your charge,” the receptionist echoed, his voice dazed and slurred. “No paperwork is needed…”

“Pinky! Beantown!” Dani cried, straddling over the swinging gate to reach her friends/acquaintances (she was leaning more towards “friends,” but it had only been two weeks since she met them, and Dani had learned the hard way that trust is not so freely given in her line of life—“half-life” if she were to steal one of Danny’s jokes; she was very good at stealing after all). 

“Ugh, why am I still ‘Beantown?’” Magnus complained under his breath.

Alex grinned, leaning dramatically against him. “Aw, chin up, Maggie! You could still be the insane ‘Brain’ to my genius ‘Pinky,’ if you wanted.”

“I thought that was supposed to be the other way— oof! ” Dani barreled into Magnus’ side with a deathly bear hug that would make most people keel over. For whatever reason, Magnus, Alex, and a few of their friends who visited the Chase Space were strangely resilient. As it stood, Magnus awkwardly patted Dani’s head, messing with her ratty red beanie in the process. “H- ey there, squirt. Ready to go?”

Dani looked back at the mess of papers that had scattered in her wake and the muddy shoe prints all over the station from both her wild entrance and spectacular exit. “ Get me out of here, ” she hissed. 

Alex said something else to the officer at the front desk, but Dani didn’t pay it much mind, instead ungluing herself from Magnus’ side. A little part of her regretted it since despite his whole shell of sarcasm and dry humor, once you got to know him, Magnus was warm. He was sunshine incarnate, ready to help people in need (and curb stomp the ones who put them in such a situation, a reminder that warm sunshine could still burn ). 

Dani still had nightmares about the nice but lonely old woman who said to call her “Abuelita” and made Dani the best chocolate caliente with piloncillo and freshly grated chocolate and warm chiles and cinnamon. Abuelita’s electric stovetop had broken making said chocolate caliente and Dani didn’t know a repairman was scheduled to arrive when Dani had intangibly stuck her body halfway through the oven door to look at the wiring herself.

The screams of “Diablo! Diablo!” still haunted her, all these months later, especially when she remembered Abuelita’s betrayed expression in the hallway when Dani ran out the door. 

The officer’s voice raised a fraction too loud as Magnus guided Dani outside the police station, making her entire body shrink in on itself. It reminded her a little too much of Vlad, of his fury and disappointment when she or her now dead experiment-siblings didn’t decant as the perfect copy of their genetic template, Daniel “Danny” Fenton, never mind their failure when they couldn’t successfully capture him. 

Magnus extended his hand, a silent offer, one that Dani rarely took at first, but now often accepted. As much as Dani loathed and was terrified to admit it, she trusted these guys. They felt familiar in a way that she couldn’t quite put her finger on, kinda like Danny, but more…real. Maybe that was just because Magnus and Alex didn’t look like the golden child Vlad claimed Danny was, an image she could never replicate, much less live up to. 

And, you know, screw it. She gripped Magnus’ hand in a death grip, but he didn’t seem to mind or even notice. Dani was mentally around ten-to-twelve-ish even though she had decanted in Vlad’s lab less than a year ago and was forced to mature a million times as quickly. She could act like a little kid, at least for a tiny bit, as a treat. 

Alex finally pushed open the police station door, briefly glancing back at the now-dazed officer before facing Magnus and Dani with a wry smile. “I don’t know about you, but I think it’s high time we head back for lunch, guys.” 

Dani brightened. So that meant Alex and Magnus weren’t going to ask about—

“And also why you ended up getting caught by the cops, Dani,” Alex finished, hand on hip. 

Dani deflated a fraction as they all began walking in the direction of the Chase Space. The air was awkward and tense like Alex and Magnus were just waiting for her to say the wrong thing, enough to kick her to the curb, but that just could’ve been Dani’s imagination—their voices weren’t even angry. They were just…worried, if anything. That was almost worse. 

“Pronouns the same as yesterday afternoon? She/her?” Dani asked Alex as Alex flanked Dani’s right to cover the side Magnus hadn’t. Asking such a question had been new and strange at first since Dani had never met a genderfluid person before, but it was now just a part of routine. 

“It’s he/him right now,” Alex corrected, his expression momentarily tense at the reminder that Dani had been missing for that long. “Now, what happened to land you with the cops? We were looking all over—”

“Are you hurt?” Magnus quickly cut in, “Because I can look—”

“I’m fine. ”

Dani briefly considered telling him about her scraped-up knees and bruised side from being forced against a brick wall but ultimately decided against it. They were already upset with her, even if they hadn’t done anything to show it, yet. That’s just how the world worked, from Dani’s not-so-long-lived experience. 

Dani heard Magnus make a little wounded sound in the back of his throat, something she probably wasn’t supposed to hear. She kicked a rock on the sidewalk with her beat-up grey and blue Velcro Sketchers, hoping that the skitter would be enough distraction. It wasn’t. 

“What happened, Dani?” Magnus gently asked. Only then did Dani notice the dark circles under his and Alex’s eyes, the smoothed-over waver in his voice. Guilt choked her throat. 

Dani thought back to the night before, unsure how she could explain everything, or even make Alex and Magnus actually believe her. She’d found out the hard way that most other people didn’t believe beings like ghosts and monsters existed (the whole of Amity Park being a massive exception), much less hearing about them and how much they screwed her life over. 

Dani had been walking back to the Chase Space just before dark yesterday, just like she promised Alex and Magnus (even though she could use her ghost powers to beat anyone up, not that they knew that), but she happened to notice a few guys with breath so rancid she could smell it from the sidewalk all the way to the alley. They wore sweat-stained clothes and most had a telling drunken slur to their speech ganging up on a street dog. It had shaggy black fur, scared red-brown eyes, and massive paws that it should grow into one day. But at the moment, the dog was way too small to defend itself, whimpering as each boot made contact with its body. 

So, cursing her genetic donor’s inherited hero complex and lack of forethought, Dani jumped in not as a Phantom, but as the scrappy not-quite-a-street-kid Dani. She yelled at the guys to leave, but when that didn’t work, she squared her shoulders and raised her fists, thumbs wrapped around the outside in a way that would be frightening for most people to see how instinctual it was for her. Even though her punches may have a tinge of ectoplasmic strength, that didn’t stop her from getting shoved into the nearby wall before getting kicked to the ground like the baby black mastiff. 

The puppy struggled to stand and tried to bite the guy closest to Dani, but ended up getting kicked so hard, that it disappeared in the rotten trash in the nearby dumpster tipped on its side.

Then Dani had seen red. Or rather, green, because by the time she came to, she was leaning heavily against the alley’s brick wall, wiping a streak of ectoplasm-speckled blood from her nose, the glow of her ghost form fading back to regular ol’ human-ish Dani with bisecting rings around her middle. Ancients, she must be both out of practice and out of her mind for not jumping in as her Phantom persona sooner. 

When she had stumbled past the groaning prone bodies around her to check the dumpster where the dog had been flung, she found nothing there but shadows and a half-breath that could’ve been her Ghost Sense, or just the puff of warmth cooler night air, even though her exhale had been tinged blue. For ease of mind, she hoped it wasn’t the former, since that’d probably mean that the poor dog had died. 

She failed.

By the time she managed to pull herself out of the alleyway, the cops had arrived, and she refused to talk, sleep, or eat once they dragged her into custody.

Dani rubbed her eyes with her free hand, trying to bring herself back to the present, hoping to make it look like she was wiping away exhaustion rather than tears. 

“I—” she took a shaky stabilizing breath. “Some drunk guys were beating up a dog in an alley when I was heading back to the Chase Space before dark,” Dani surmised in a mumble, hanging her head. Each step Dani took sounded like a heartbeat slowing to a stop. “I tried to help, but I think I…I was too late. Then the cops arrived.” 

Dani couldn’t help but find kinship with that dog, beaten up and beaten down just for existing, all alone. She just hoped that if she was ever in trouble, the person coming to help her wouldn’t be too late like Dani was for the dog.

“Glad you’re not too hurt, kid,” Alex said neutrally, fidgeting with the ornate garotte he always had clipped to his belt. Dani knew he liked making pottery after he showed her the arts-and-crafts area of the Chase Space, but didn’t think Alex was nearly weird enough to always carry it on his person. Then again, this was Alex she was talking about. Even still, Dani had met weirder people, so she didn’t question it. Alex paused to find his next words. “But your knuckles are bruised. You remembered to punch with your thumb on the outside, right?”

“ Alex, ” Magnus groaned, making Dani giggle despite her plaguing exhaustion and guilt. She’d caught glimpses of him sparring against Alex with a variety of weapons in one of the spare rooms—something she probably wasn’t meant to see, given how they immediately stopped whenever they heard footsteps—and even though he got his butt handed to him more often than not, he was still fairly adept at fighting. Despite this fact, he tried to take the more pacifistic route whenever possible. “Please don’t encourage the child to commit violence.” 

“I’m…twelve!” Dani argued, tugging her hand out of Magnus’ protective hold. She hoped that hesitating on the number she gave wasn’t suspicious. “I’m not a child. I also personally like violence.” 

“See, Punzie? ” Alex crooned in a teasing tone.

“‘Punzie?’” 

Alex brushed aside, “Like Rapunzel. You’re blond and sweet, plus your whole… everything. ” Dani felt like she was missing something, but figured it was just an inside joke she didn’t understand.

Magnus groaned again, putting his head in his hands this time.

“Let the kid indulge in some good old-fashioned bloodlust, Maggie! And what if she needs to know how to defend herself?”

“She’s not like—”

Alex raised an eyebrow. “ Really? ”

Magnus’ face flickered through a dozen emotions before glancing down at Dani, who had initially enjoyed watching the confusing yet comfortable lovers’ banter like a weird tennis match over her head. But now…

“What am I ‘not like?’” Dani tried to play off casually, even though her slightly slower-than-average heart was beating like a jackrabbit. It wasn’t like she hadn’t been ostracized in an outgroup before—she knew that pattern of speech usually came before getting left behind—but she’d kinda hoped that the Chase Space (really, Magnus and Alex) wouldn’t be like that.

“A teenager,” Alex said smoothly, but Dani didn’t quite believe that’s what Magnus had been referring to. “You’re not a teenager like us since you’re twelve, kid. ” He punctuated that sentence by lightly poking Dani’s forehead, making her go cross-eyed as she tried swatting his hand away with little luck. “We have to deal with more nuisances than you do.”

Dani rolled her eyes. Yeah, sure they did. Like Alex and Magnus had to beat back temperamental ghosts and the more recent errant monster on the regular with unnatural powers. Dani just attracted “weird.” Come to think of it, it’d been a while since she’d called Danny—he’d probably like to know that solid-state monsters who were definitely not ghosts also existed. It was a good thing he’d had her memorize his encrypted phone number before she left once she got re-stabilized with the Ecto-Dejecto…

“Dani, you with us?” Magnus asked and Dani blinked up at him, nodding dully. “We’re back at the house. I need to double-check to make sure that lunch is all ready to go for everyone, but— Sam? ”

Dani jolted to alert at the name, a dozen questions running through her head. Sam? Like, Sam Manson? Why was one of Danny’s best friends here in Boston? Did Sam somehow mix up the address of her family mansion in Amity Park with the Chase Space one? How did Magnus know Sam? Like, he’s friendly, but only once you crack his shell, and Sam can be standoffish, but really—

Then Dani actually saw the girl poised to knock on the front door of the grand mansion that served as the home of the Chase Space. Notably, this girl was not dressed goth, instead covered in earth tones head to toe, from her green hijab to her sturdy wide-legged trousers that brushed the tops of her practical sneakers. Also, she had brown skin, not Sam Manson’s deathly white.  

“ Samirah! ” Alex exclaimed with a grin, rushing up to meet the stranger on the steps. “Sam! My dear, dear sister, how have you been? Here to join us for lunch and check out the recent renovations?” 

“Alex, it’s good to see you as well.” Sam tilted her head for a moment, studying Alex. “He/him?” 

Alex nodded as Magnus and Dani joined him on the steps.

“Ah, and who is this?” Sam asked with a warm smile, making eye contact with Dani, almost looking through her, making Dani shy away. Sam looked about Magnus and Alex’s age, around mid-to-late teens, and was apparently Alex’s sister, but that didn’t mean much of anything to Dani. Any new person could potentially be a threat, regardless of age, relationship, or whatever else. Until proven otherwise, she had to be wary. 

“She’s one of our more recent residents,” Magnus explained, putting a comforting hand on Dani’s shoulder, which she totally did not lean into, thank you very much. It was just extra support while her scraped knees were still recovering from yesterday, yeah! Totally. Mm-hm.

“I’m Dani,” Dani volunteered bluntly when Magnus lightly nudged her. There were only so many manners you could get a once lab experiment now kinda-sorta street rat to practice in a real-life setting.

“My name’s Samirah, but please, call me Sam,” she replied.

“Like Samantha to Sam? I know someone like that.” Dani thought aloud, immediately biting her tongue and cursing her big mouth once she realized her inside thoughts had become outside ones. She really needed to break that habit since the last time it happened, she was snooping invisibly and had accidentally spooked Magnus so badly, that he dropped a bunch of glassware he’d been carrying up from the basement. And that wasn’t even mentioning all the other times!

“Huh, so do I—my Samantha-to-Sam is one of my…coworkers. Although, our boss just tends to use our last names to avoid confusion if a ‘ Hey, you! ’ doesn’t suffice.”

Dani couldn’t hold back a snort at that—she blamed sharing DNA with a guy who punned and joked incessantly. As it stood, Sam’s lips tugged up in a half-smile at the small victory of getting Dani to laugh, but it took much more than jokes to earn Dani’s trust. Even the scummiest people like Vlad could make half-passable jokes sometimes, but admittedly mostly at others’ expense during evil monologues. 

Sam turned to face Alex and Magnus, most of the easiness fading from her expression. “Unfortunately, I’m not here on a social call, my friends. There has been a breach—” She looked down at Dani with a crease in her brow, remembering that a not-friend was in her vicinity. “I’m sorry, Dani, but this is a sensitive topic. Can you please leave us to talk privately for the time being?”

Dani’s childish instinct was to protest immediately but managed to stop herself by taking note of Magnus and Alex’s strangely serious demeanors, expressions that didn’t particularly match Dani’s usual perception of them. Whatever was happening was big. 

So, instead, Dani said, “I can go double-check all the lunch stuff for Magnus since I’ve done it before. Also, if whatever you have to say is so ‘sensitive,’ you probably shouldn’t discuss it out here, just saying. And as a hint, not many people go to the top floor since the rooms haven’t really been dusted or cleared out, yet.” And now to sell it… “They’re good for when you want to be alone—I know from experience. Though you probably don’t want to have your meeting under a dusty bed. Around one should be good, though!” Dani joked, successfully making Alex bark a startled laugh. 

Dani watched as Magnus, Sam, and Alex climbed the main stairway up and up to the uninhabited rooms in the mansion, splitting off toward the kitchen to cement her alibi before following after them. 

Like, c’mon. Seriously? Those guys were acting so suspicious and cagey, so who could really blame Dani for wanting to know what was up?  

Dani quickly pulled out all the standard pre-packed brown lunch bags and threw them on the counter like she’d seen Alex, Magnus, and some of their other friends pull out a million times before, ready for any kid to grab them. That was assuming if anyone actually swung by the Chase Space, of course. Recently, fewer and fewer kids and teens had been coming to the mansion, and when they did, they left almost immediately, eyes darting around nervously and shivering, more so than the usual distrusting kid, from the street or otherwise. Dani understood being wary of a mansion handing out free goodies that seemed too good to be true (but figured that most peoples’ apprehension came from other reasons besides their creator being a seriously crazed-up Fruit Loop decanting her in the basement lab of a mansion), but even these reactions were strange.

She sighed as she chucked the usual snacks basket on the steps leading out the kitchen door to the side of the house, accessible through an open gate at lunchtime for anyone who didn’t want to come into the actual building. At first, it was nice not having to worry so much about hiding her ghost powers from as many people, but Dani couldn’t help but feel that they were all leaving because of her, since she was the only non-Chase Space volunteer—like Alex and Magnus—who was left.  

Then, out of a fear-ingrained habit, she ducked into the large pantry to transform, shutting the door behind her as she was flash-banged by the newly installed motion-activated light inside. In an instant, a glowing ring of light appeared at her stomach, bisecting as she transformed into her ghostly alter ego. 

Ages ago, she’d swapped out that stupid crop top and low-rise pants that made her sick thinking about—she didn’t want anything to remind her of the horrible time she spent under Vlad’s thumb or nearly destabilized. Currently, her Phantom form sported a cozy black and white hoodie and a similarly colored pair of patched cargo pants tucked into black rain boots with nearly smudged-off flowers. They were once white boots with red flowers she’d found in a shoe store’s dumpster, but the colors had reversed to black and electric green upon transforming. Dani wasn’t afraid to fight anyone who said she didn’t look “hero” enough, because excuse her for not dying in a hazmat suit that could pass as some comic hero’s standard spandex costume. She did the best she could, alright?

Jumping into invisible and intangible flight, she floated up through the ceiling and began zooming to every room on the fifth floor, poking her head through walls and flooring alike until she located the muffled chatter. She puffed out a wisp of Ghost Sense, long since used to it since arriving at the Chase Space—Dani could only figure that the mansion was so old that it was haunted by some weak spirits that she could never find or simply avoided meeting her, which totally didn’t sting.

The chatter became significantly less muffled as she poked her head through the door to find Alex perching on the dusty bed while Magnus leaned against the wall and Sam stood across from them, jaw set.

“—strange shadows have been popping up around Boston,” Sam was in the middle of explaining as Dani entered the room and alighted on the desk part of what she assumed was a sheet-covered vanity. “It’s something clearly magical, but the power seems to be purposely muted…it’s odd.”

Dani’s eyebrows shot up and she leaned forward a fraction. These guys knew about magic and supernatural weirdness too? But were they chill (like Danny and his friends), or nutso hunters (sorry, Danny’s parents) about it?

“Does Odin know about these…shadows?” Magnus asked, crossing his arms. “I mean, he should since the guy’s kinda known as ‘all-seeing.’” 

That name…it sounded familiar. Maybe Magnus had said it in passing before. A bit nervous, Dani flipped up her sweatshirt’s hood, burrowing into the comforting fabric and fiddling with the pullstring.

“Of course he does,” Alex drawled, waving a hand, “otherwise he wouldn’t have had his most trusted Valkyrie come down to tell us. Though doesn’t he usually like pulling the whole ‘cryptic quest-giver’ thing in his office before spontaneously disappearing?”

Sam shifted her feet. “Yes on both counts, but Odin’s currently busy with…an anniversary party for one of his favorite thanes, I think? That’s why he’s trusting me to sort this all out. The party apparently involves a lot of hands-on stabbing, but I’m not sure about the subject of said stabbing…”

Dani grinned even though no one could see through her invisibility. A stabbing party would be fun, so long as she was the stabber as opposed to the stab-ee. 

“What event in Valhalla doesn’t involve stabbing?” Magnus muttered. Then, more clearly, “So you’re basically a scout looking for…magic shadows and a way to get rid of them, then?”

“Unfortunately,” Sam grimaced. “There’s also a worry that the shadows could be malicious and attempt to invade an entrance to Yggdrasil, which would be notably…disastrous. I was hoping you two could help me search. They’re concentrated in the Boston area and since you spend much of your free time here, I figured you might have seen something off or where to look.”

Magnus looked conflicted. “We’d need to close the Chase Space for a while, even though it hasn’t been as booming for the last bit of its trial run…”

Alex considered for a moment before snapping his fingers. “That’s it! Kids used to swing by the mansion on the regular, and even stay the night, especially when school first got out for the summer. But recently, not so much. Maggie and I were worried, so we started casually checking around the spots he used to use around the area, but they’re all pretty much accounted for.”

“And Dani even asked a kid recently why they didn’t want to stay for any of the activities we have after breakfast, but she said they just kind of shivered and left,” Magnus suddenly recalled. 

Dani vaguely remembered the interaction—the kid, maybe named Kai? Well, they’d been all shaky before abruptly announcing that they wanted to leave. Dani tried asking them more questions, but they’d left too quickly, leaving Dani confused and trying not to feel too hurt. It was hard enough getting along with kids her age, much less trying to relate to them. After all, they’d usually been in the school system constantly surrounded by other kids while she’d been cognizant for all of a few months with social interaction information downloaded into her mind, but no real way of knowing how to apply it correctly.

“But Dani’s still here?” Sam asked.

“What are you implying?” Magnus replied cautiously. “She’s just a regular kid.”

Dani bit her tongue. She couldn’t argue when she was supposed to be silently invisible (and also downstairs as a very normal human, not a spying ghost).

Sam raised her hands defensively. “I am simply stating the facts.”

“It could just be that she’s too stubborn to get spooked,” Alex shrugged, eyeing his sister. “She knows how to hold her own. I can tell the kid’s been through a lot, but she’s strong. She’s good.”

Dani brightened at those kind words, extracting herself from her spot on the vanity to get closer to Alex and his praise. It was…nice to hear stuff like that instead of the usual cusses at her expense she sometimes had to endure during her travels. 

And even though her heart squeezed as she did so, when Dani closed her eyes, she could almost imagine it was Danny saying Alex’s words instead. In an alternate world where she’d stayed with him, one where his parents weren’t so distrusting of ghosts, maybe she could’ve been a little sister again. There had been Bed Sheet, and Monster, and Tiny, all unstable Danny clones who preceded Dani. They could relate to one another by virtue of being decanted one after the other in an attempt to be the perfect child—the perfect Danny—for Vlad to call his own if he couldn’t have the original. Bed Sheet, Monster, and Tiny didn’t talk much, but they were company enough in the short few days Dani had before Vlad sent her off to trick Danny. 

There were three undeniable facts she often tried to forget: Dani had brothers once. Dani’s brothers had been dead and gooped longer than they’d been alive. Dani threw away the chance to have a brother again. 

Heck, Danny said that Jazz knew and helped him hide his ghostly secret, so Dani could’ve had a sister too! She’d never had one of those before. It might’ve been nice, but Dani would never know. 

Dani hiccupped a sob and rubbed her face with her hoodie sleeve. Ancients, she was going soft from just some nice words—

“Did anyone hear that?” Alex jolted in alarm, hurdling the bed and pulling out his garrotte which was now…glowing?

Dani stumbled back, mentally listing every swear she’d ever learned. Damn it, you should know better than to reveal yourself!

And even weirder and more concerning, Sam summoned a sizable war axe out of thin air and Magnus pulled the pendant off his necklace’s cord which sprung to life as a steel sword flashing with some kind of rainbow symbols. As if the situation couldn’t get any worse, the sword started singing an off-key acapella rendition of the Ghostbusters theme song.

How uncomfortingly fitting.

“You done, Jack?” Magnus hissed as he, Alex, and Sam stood back to back to back, scanning the room as Dani stood invisibly frozen in fear, mere paces away.

“You besmirch my art!” the sword, apparently named Jack, exclaimed, “It’s bad enough that you haven’t been practicing with me recently, but now you insult my singing? How rude! I swear I taught you better manners than that!”

Magnus gritted his teeth. “Now’s really not the time, Jack.”  

Jack made a sound that sounded like a cross between a huff and a half dozen weapons clashing together. “I assume we’re looking for paradoxes, then?”

“ What? Jack, explain.”

“Oh, so now you want me to talk, señor? I thought ‘now wasn’t the time because Jack isn’t appreciated even though he deserves the good kind of mink oil for his leather grip—’” 

“Hey! I never said any of that,” Magnus protested. 

Jack forced a dramatic sob. “You certainly implied it!” 

“Magnus, apologize to Jack!” Alex cursed, tightening his grip on his garrotte. 

Magnus scanned the room once more, his eyes completely missing Dani’s invisible form. He swallowed and angled Jack’s blade. “Look, buddy, I’m sorry. I’ll get you some mink oil or whatever the next time we’re in Valhalla. Now, what did you say about paradoxes?”

Jack glowed as Magnus, Alex, and Sam began circling, still covering each other’s backs. “In case you forgot, I am a weapon best wielded when let go, señor. I myself am a paradox. Duh. I somehow exist, though I really shouldn’t. So, not only can I enhance paradoxes, but also sense when they are near. Sort of. Let’s see…”

Like a dowsing rod, the tip of Jack’s blade guided Magnus’ left arm back and forth before settling to point directly at Dani. Magnus advanced and—

“It went through the floor!” Jack cried as Dani finally unfroze, intangibly slipping feet first through the many layers of the house, all the way down to the ground floor. 

“Follow it!” Sam’s muffled order echoed through Dani’s skull. 

Within one moment and the next, Dani’s descent marked by an uncomfortable chill, she was back in the walk-in kitchen cupboard. In a flash of light, she was back to being Dani, terrified-but-trying-to-hide-it street kid supreme, dressed in oversized red and blue clothes in desperate need of a wash. She tucked herself in a corner by the solid 10-pound bags of rice, glad to have the electric green, black, and white of Phantom gone, but her heart still beat wildly out of her half-dead chest. 

“I lost the paradox, señor!”

Alex’s faint voice swore lowly. “Guys, what about Dani? What if it got her? Where is—”

She needed to leave. Another sob hiccuped out of Dani as she shakily stood. She was a royal screw-up once again and had scared everyone off just because of who she was, something she couldn’t control. Dani didn’t choose to be half ghost and she should’ve remembered to half care about the people around her. 

Summoning her courage with a hitched sob, quickly followed by a bite to her tongue so hard it bled, Dani transformed into Dani Phantom once more. Cries of surprise followed from the room over with Jack calling out in triumph. Without thinking, Dani barrelled out of the cupboard, hood up and green eyes blazing with ectoplasm-tinted tears, coming face-to-face with Alex and Sam brandishing their weapons while Jack pulled Magnus’ left arm parallel to the ground so his point leveled with Dani’s nose.

“Who are you?” Sam asked cautiously as Dani levitated an inch or two off the ground. “We don’t want to fight you if it can be avoided.” Dani didn’t trust those words with how Sam still held her axe aloft. “But we must know, are you the one in control of the strange shadows across Boston?”

“Where’s Dani?” Magnus cut in before Dani could answer Sam’s question. “Little girl? Black hair, blue eyes? The kid who was in this kitchen before you. ” 

An accusation. 

Dani’s throat went tight and she was sure her next words sounded like she’d been gargling gravel for the past decade, never mind that she didn’t exist then. “ She’s gone. ” After a pause, she added, “ Safe. ”

“Dani’s an innocent mortal! Innocent!” Magnus protested, gripping his sword tighter. “It’s not fair to involve her with all this…this Norse bullshit!”

Something skittered behind Dani and she went to turn, but—

“Hey! Eyes on me, buddy!” Magnus announced. 

Dani whipped back to face him, hands now glowing with a flicker of ectoplasmic energy. She didn’t want to hurt anyone, truly, but wasn’t above violence if it was necessary—even a scare ought to do them some good. 

“ Let me lea— ”

“Alex, now! ”

In a blink, a weight landed on her back and Dani ended up with a face full of rat which quickly morphed into a massive raccoon, followed by an emerald green snake that tried to choke around her neck. She writhed in a momentary bout of panic before remembering that she could turn intangible, letting the snake drop to the tile with a painful-sounding thunk! Dani was relieved for a moment, only to realize in dawning horror that the snake soon melted into the confused and wincing form of one Alex Fierro. 

From out of nowhere, Sam boosted herself up on a counter and gracefully swung her axe down hard enough to crack the tile, aiming for Dani’s skull, only to miss when Dani went intangible once more at the last second, sidestepping and turning her foot solid in time for Sam to trip over it. Sam let out a startled shout as her axe, as Dani predicted, cracked the tile, lodging itself deep.

A ghostly hiss leaked into Dani’s voice as she rose into the air, the otherworldly glow of her ghost powers now on full display. “ Leave. Me. ALONE. ”

Not all that unlike the spacecraft she and Danny loved so much, she rocketed away from the mansion with an explosion of light, determined never to see the Chase Space or its inhabitants ever again. Once the mansion was out of sight (yet a long way off from being out of mind), she let out a guttural, heart-wrenching sob at the loss of so much, now hitting her so suddenly, that she nearly fell out of the air. As it stood (or rather, hovered), she stopped her flight so fast, it would’ve given a regular human whiplash.

Dazed, she drifted down to the nearest rooftop and just sat there, unblinking, at the afternoon Boston skyline, punctuated by the clamor of lunch break traffic. She knew she’d miss this view, but there were plenty of cities left in the world with Boston just one flicker in a sea of many. She’d get over her heartache eventually as she always did, filling the void with good food and stories and a million and one beautiful sights only afforded to someone who could fly and perch on top of the world like her. 

Every time she got too close and overstayed her welcome in whatever place she ended up in her travels, it ended badly. Her near scrapes with testy locals and even testier law enforcement usually happened because she got too comfortable, and let her guard down just a little, something in her carefully crafted persona slipped.  

From that point on, Dani refused to let that kind of hurt happen again. If she sensed trouble on the horizon, she’d leave first, and most times before even a hint of upset, drifting away like a ghost on the wind, leaving barely a hint of her existence or even her own name. 

Dani had been a fool to think Magnus and Alex and the Chase Space were any different. 

It was a bit lonely, sure, but being alone was a small price to pay for freedom, even if that “freedom” meant being free from people too.

Taking a deep breath, preparing to detransform back into regular old Dani, she pressed her hands to her chest, right above her ghostly core, focusing on the strong rattling hum.

And then, seemingly propelled by his own sword, Magnus Chase slammed into the chimney next to Dani, screaming all the way. 

Chapter Text

Now, Dani knew being a half-ghost clone of a teenage vigilante made by said vigilante’s arch-nemesis meant that her life would never be exactly like the picture-perfect images of tweenage girls she saw on the TVs in storefront windows. However, she never expected to come face-to-face with a teenager pinwheeling around her on a rooftop propelled by a disco light-up sword singing show tunes.

After Magnus peeled himself off from the first chimney next to Dani, Jack the disco sword dragged Magnus face-first into another chimney and across skidding rooftop tiles, punctuating each jerking movement with the extended “ di-di-di ” part of “I’m Blue.” Dani only knew that song because one of the street kids she once met in LA loved screaming the lyrics at the top of her lungs to echo around the streets in such a way that car alarms went off. But now, it unfortunately just sounded a little too much like “die-die-die!” which was a not-so-good omen for Dani.

“Jack, stop!” Magnus cried. As soon as he said that, Jack just stopped midair, leaving Magnus’ arm awkwardly raised in the air as the front of his body was diagonal with the rooftop. He carefully pulled himself upright and threw his free hand in the air in exasperation. “Was that really necessary, Jack?”

“Mink oil~” Jack trilled a reminder.

“Dude, I promised you—okay, we’ll deal with that later. Now”—Magnus leveled Jack’s sharpened edge at Dani, who stood with a slack jaw—“who are you and what have you done with Dani?”

Dani shook her head to clear the confusion from her mind and pulled her hoodie’s hood a little more securely. She floated to be just above eye level with Magnus and forced her voice to go more gravelly and ghostly, maybe sounding like someone at least twice her physical age. “ I’m…a phantom. Dani is safe. She wanted to leave. ” 

The shadows of the chimneys in the midday sun seemed to stretch as she steeled herself. She needed to be careful about what she said, especially considering that Magnus and his friends were apparently also part of the supernatural world, yet completely out of Dani’s wheelhouse. 

Magnus gripped his sword tightly, knuckles going white. “Okay…I’m just gonna call you Phantom, then. I’m also not going to accept a nothing-burger answer like that, buddy. I need some proof that Dani is alright, otherwise this’ll get ugly real— holy Frey, what is that?! ” 

Maybe it was a cheap trick to distract Dani, or maybe she just instinctively trusted Magnus, which was terrifying to consider the implications of since she’d only known him for two weeks. But after months of being attuned to the slightest potentially dangerous shifts in the environment to avoid certain full-death, Dani whipped her head around to see what Magnus was pointing at with his shaky free hand. 

From out of the stretching shadow of a crumbling chimney, a shaggy mound of… something undulated, its shoulders and pointed ears swiveling and rearranging in a manner just left of normal. Its bushy tail swept the ground yet made no sound as it pawed the rooftop, reminiscent of a dog ready to hunt. But this wasn’t a dangerous yet friendly semi-pet like Danny’s ghost dog companion, Cujo. It wasn’t a pet, it wasn’t a dog, and could maybe be argued to be a wolf, but that felt wholly inaccurate as well. And then when its piercing glowing red eyes met Dani’s gaze, she understood that this thing, this wolf-but-not thing, wasn’t just left of normal. Normal had completely left the building. 

The puff of blue mist that signaled the activation of her Ghost Sense lodged itself in Dani’s throat. Rather unheroically, she hacked up the Ghost Sense with watery eyes since she refused to break the stare with the wolf-but-not stalking ever closer. The blue mist left an acrid and tacky taste on her tongue, like secondhand smoke from the inhabitants of a rundown hostel she once visited in Wales mixed with the cheap glue on the flap of the letter she never found the courage to send to Abuelita as an explanation for the “Diablo Incident.”

“ I think it’s a ghost, ” Dani said evenly, her voice still crackling with a ghostly echo. “ But not quite... ” 

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Magnus demanded. “And wait, the wolf isn’t yours?” Dani noticed a half-controlled tremor in his words.  

Before Dani could answer Magnus, the wolf-but-not lunged at her face. Without a second thought, she summoned a blob of ecto energy to her palm and slapped the monster across the muzzle, sending it careening into the already crumbling chimney. It didn’t even have the decency to look surprised or even hurt at the display, despite the light sizzling of fur that quickly disappeared on the wind. In a swirl of shadow, the monster slithered upright, studying Magnus and Dani with a predatory glare. 

“Jack, I just wanna make sure I’m not seeing things.” Magnus hefted his glowing rune-covered sword in his left hand. “The weird Phantom person who kidnapped Dani just bitch-slapped a wolf made of shadows, right?”

The wolf-but-not warily eyed the dissipating glow of ectoplasm from Dani’s palm.

“With an un-Midgardly energy about them too, señor.” Dani somehow got the sense that if Jack-the-talking-sword had a head, he’d be nodding solemnly. 

At that moment, the wolf-but-not let out an almighty bark, sending Magnus stumbling back in surprise. While off balance, the monster melted into darkness and reappeared in Magnus’ shadow. With ungodly reflexes, he managed to twist away, avoiding the monster’s maw and thus newest chew toy by mere fractions of an inch. It still managed to rip a chunk out of Magnus’s shirt as he wildly swung his sword around with a yelp. 

While the wolf-but-not focused on Magnus, exchanging close quarters bites and parries, Dani took her chance to jump into the fray. Like a half-human torpedo, Dani body slammed the monster, accidentally wrenching Jack’s hilt from Magnus’ grip, sending Jack clattering to the ground. Dani struggled to secure a solid grip on the wolf-but-not, but it kept trying to dissolve and reform into other shadows as she kept pace with her own ghostly intangibility. 

As jagged teeth attempted to tear off her face, Dani had the fleeting thought that having a Fenton Thermos to capture the wolf-but-not would be really nice right about then. 

“ Move! ” Magnus’ sharp order interrupted her hopeful thought. 

Without a second to process, Dani instinctively released the wolf-but-not, pushing it toward Magnus’ voice while she intangibly barrel-rolled away. She struggled to stand, much less float upright. And the next thing Dani knew, through blurred vision, Dani was watching Magnus—surrounded by a blinding halo of golden light—plunge Jack into the monster’s side. The monster howled in agony, its pain reverberating throughout the whole of Boston. It then melted into the shadows it spawned from, and Magnus promptly collapsed. In a blink, Jack the sword transformed into a white pendant of some kind, magically darting up to reattach himself to a loose cord pooling around Magnus’ neck. 

Losing all spooky, mystical ghostly pretense, Dani screamed, “ Magnus! ” She half-flew, half-ran to his side, skidding to kneel by his side and check his pulse. He was paler than usual, almost corpse-like. Her hands trembled as she cradled Magnus’ calloused hand, pressing her index and middle finger to the inside of his wrist. She nearly cried when she felt the slow but steady (for now) ba-bump.  

A chorus of ghastly howls echoed on the horizon, more chilling than the one Dani had witnessed not even minutes prior. Please be my imagination, she pleaded, tugging her hood tighter. 

And as if things couldn’t get any worse, Sam and Alex picked that exact moment to appear on the rooftop. Or rather, two birds—what they were other than predatory, Dani couldn’t say—that morphed into Sam and Alex landed, brandishing a spear and garrote respectively. Dani felt like tearing her hair out and cursing at the sky. She was surrounded by the debris-littered aftermath of a fight, ecto burns and claw grooves scattered around like those stupid little inedible pretentious garnishes at fancy restaurants. What’s more was that Dani was leaning ominously over their friend.

“Get away from Magnus!” Alex barked, stalking forward with his garrote primed for battle in his hands. Somehow, his biting tone was worse than the monster’s literal barks and bites. 

Sam’s hijab flapped in the wind as she stood in a ready stance with her spear angled diagonally from her brother. If she threw it, it would no doubt solely hit Dani. “Do not make any sudden movements,” she warned. “Your path here was complex, but not untraceable. We will find you again should you attempt to escape, and our presence then won’t be so amicable.”

Stiffly, Dani stood upright and sidestepped into nervous floating as Alex shot her with a furious glare before stowing his garrote and checking Magnus’ pulse. Satisfied, Alex hoisted Magnus’ arm over his shoulders to support him. Magnus mumbled something, but the words were unintelligible, and Alex guided him back over to Sam. 

The air was tense, and yet, like before, the noise of Bostonian traffic below still carried on. Honks and shouts and whistles…pedestrians bustling. Dani almost could’ve laughed at the realization. Despite the craziness of ghosts and glowing swords and people who could turn into animals at the drop of a hat, the world still somehow carried on.  

“Who are you?” Alex finally pressed. “What did you do to Magnus? To Dani?”

“ I’m a phantom, ” Dani repeated the same thing she’d told Magnus, her voice taking on that old ghostly echo once more. “ And you won’t believe me, but I didn’t do anything to Magnus. We fought a wolf made of shadows, and he lost consciousness as soon as he dropped his sword. Dani is safe. She…wanted to leave.”

Alex started to protest, but Dani cut him off. 

“ Now, please, let me go. ” She tried not to let her voice crack, but that task was made significantly more difficult when she caught a glimpse of Magnus’ limp form. Could she really just leave him there? Leave Alex? They’d been nothing but kind and supportive of Dani since her arrival at the Chase Space. But truly, no one ever wanted a ghost overshadowing their lives full of, well, life . She wouldn’t subject anyone else to that. Dani was destined to travel forever. Wandering. Alone. 

“We need more concrete answers than that,” Sam argued, voice level, yet there was an undertone of fear, or maybe just wariness. Dani couldn’t really blame her. If she were in Sam’s shoes, Dani would have felt the same. Most people really weren’t too keen on keeping a ghost (half of one or otherwise) around. Some had even called Dani “eldritch” when her grin stretched too far and the rooms she had entered dropped way below freezing, even long after she’d left. “And you’re correct—we don’t believe you. We have several reasons not to. I appreciate your cooperation, but you’re not—”

Sam’s words twisted like her spear had already wedged itself in Dani’s rib cage through to her heart. Dani would always be an outsider, a screw-up kid who was never listened to. 

“ Then what do you like me to tell you? ” Dani seethed. “ Do you want me to be the bad guy? The easy specter to blame? I’d rather die again than hurt Magnus. I told you the truth, and you say that I didn’t. ”

“‘Die again?’” Sam echoed, confused. Her spear tip momentarily dipped, and Dani realized that she had said too much. Sam readjusted her grip on the spear’s shaft, brows furrowed. “What are—?”

“Are you a rogue Einherji?” Alex spoke up from where he was tending to Magnus, cutting off his sister. “Sam and I can lead you back to Valhalla while Magnus heals there. We can figure this out, Phantom.”

Dani’s floating wavered. She had no idea what the hell an “Einherji” or a “Valhalla” was. With a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, she got the sense that she was really, truly, out of her depth. So, Dani did the one thing that had rarely failed her in the few months of her existence: she ran away. 

Soon, Alex and Sam’s surprised shouts faded into the distance, wind wicking away Dani’s tears as she shot off like a monochrome rocket. Her invisibility and intangibility, paired with Alex and Sam’s likely reluctance to leave Magnus alone and injured, unfortunately, served her escape well. As much as she’d like to stay to help her friend, or even just come clean about all her ghostiness, it was too late for that. Now that “Phantom” was here, “Dani” might as well be gone. 

Dani’s flight faltered, and her intangibility failed. With a painful thunk, she plastered face-first into a mostly-windows skyscraper, startling the professionally dressed top-floor inhabitants clustered around a large table with graphs and analytics projected on the far wall. The only sign of Dani’s presence was an unsightly splat of drool sluggishly dribbling down the windows as she dizzily floated in circles to the ground and into a secluded alley. Dazed, she transformed back into regular ol’ Dani, her black and white attire disappearing into ratty red and blue street clothes as glowing white rings bisected her midsection. 

Leaning heavily with a palm pressed against the musty wall, Dani caught her breath, purposefully ignoring her hitched, dry sobs as she clutched her stomach. It growled, because of course it did. Dani cursed herself—she’d gotten too used to three scheduled meals daily with several snacks and even dessert at the end of the day. 

She stumbled out of the alley and into the bright afternoon light, picking a direction. Anywhere would do, so long as it was in the exact opposite direction of the Chase Space. Maybe she’d get lucky and could hitch a ride on public transit far enough away before they kicked her off. She just needed to regain her strength before trying to fly off again. Ducking her head and weaving through Boston’s bustling foot traffic, Dani prayed that she could get over the sanctuary the Chase Space provided, the kindness of Alex and Magnus. She prayed for safer and less emotionally charged traveling, even. To whom she prayed, Dani couldn’t say. Really, anyone who would be willing to listen. But honestly, who’d listen to a screw-up like Dani anyways?

Up ahead, a classic greasy diner caught her eye, all shiny with spotty chrome, scuffed black and white checkerboard, and splashes of red and teal looping cursive around the worn vinyl records displayed in the window. The diner was squished between much taller buildings, as if it’d been plucked right out of the 1950s and refused to get with the times as everything else sprang up around it. It was perfect for Dani’s purposes, especially since few people were inside aside from the servers. At least one of them looked old enough to be a mom to a kid around Dani’s physical age, so she could hopefully tug on some heartstrings. 

She’d spin a story about getting split from her family on vacation, her phone stolen in the big-wide-unfamiliar city, the works. If Dani could force a few tears and wipe enough dirt away from her face, she could play the part of a lost little girl and maybe get a cup of water and maybe some fries. Dani had long since stopped worrying about the moral implications of such a grift because food was food. 

If she really couldn’t avoid it, she’d straight-up steal food from the kitchen after causing an invisible distraction in the dining area. Dani didn’t like blatant stealing—she cursed Danny’s hero complex that seemed to be embedded in the very DNA used to make her—but again, food was food. 

And so, Dani pulled her lost-kid-in-a-big-city grift for the billionth time, targeting the middle-aged woman. She even faked a call to her “parents” on the corded pay phone mounted to the wall behind the register when she was offered. Best of all, the lady set her up in a corner booth with not just a water cup and salty fries, but also an entire scoop of shelled peanuts! They were from the complimentary barrel up front, where regular paying customers could grab from while waiting for their orders. Dani stowed the peanuts in her various pockets—they were a good source of protein that could be more easily saved than a pile of greasy fries. 

“What’s New Pussycat?” rumbled from the crackly jukebox in tandem with Dani’s stomach. She licked the salt from her fingers to savor the taste of the fries, but it wasn’t enough to keep her hunger at bay, so she nursed her water cup while waiting for a good moment to slip away undetected. The last thing she needed was to have a well-meaning person call the cops on an unaccompanied minor again. 

Just as Dani was about to slide out of the diner booth, a man who was definitely not dressed for a Boston summer set a red plastic tray on the table, absolutely covered in a mountain of diner staples—everything from burgers to milkshakes, fries, and warm apple pie à la mode. The good kind of Coca-Cola with real cane sugar in glass bottles that Dani recognized from her less-than-stellar trip to Mexico, threatened to topple, but they magically remained upright, only rattling when the man leaned against the booth. His sunglasses were obnoxiously thick and boxy and impractical, as was his thick brown fur coat layered over a button-down shirt that sported swirling patterns that seemed to be constantly shifting. Dark skinny jeans and pointed shoes finished off the outfit, if Dani were being both loose and generous with that definition. 

At just that moment, “What’s New Pussycat?” transitioned into the next song, “It’s Not Unusual,” which totally didn’t weird Dani out. 

“Hello, darling! Mind if I join you?” the man trilled as he took the seat across from Dani. He drawled the word “darling” in such a way that it sounded more like “ dah-ling ” than anything else, all hoity-toity. It uncomfortably reminded Dani of Vlad’s forced upper-crust dialect, setting her senses on immediate Red Alert. “I’ve got plenty of provisions to share and my arms were getting tired from carrying that tray, never mind the travel I had before or even thinking about what deliveries I have planned for later—”

“Actually, I do mind if you join me,” Dani snapped, grabbing her water cup as she shimmied out of the booth. “I don’t talk to weirdo fruit loops or accept their ‘gifts,’ so I’m just gonna head out—”

“Ah, a shame. From one wayward traveler to another, I would have thought a message from back home would be irresistible.”

Dani paused in her tracks. “I don’t have a home, weirdo,” she whirled on the man, “so I don’t need some stupid message!”

The few customers in the diner ignored her outburst, as did the even fewer employees, including the nice lady Dani had tricked. Said lady even tried walking through Dani with glazed eyes, making Dani instinctively go intangible at the last second to avoid getting hit. Unfortunately, she forgot that she had an audience. 

“Your older brother mentioned you had some of his…quirks. Danny cashed in a rather large favor on Thanatos’ behalf to have me personally deliver a message to, quote ‘wherever in the world my little sister is.’ Squandering your brother’s kindness and sacrifice is rather rude, don’t you think?”

Dani’s eyes widened, and she tried tugging on the nice lady’s shirt sleeve to get her attention, but her eyes glazed over Dani. The nearby booth, packed with a family full of tourists, ignored her presence entirely, even when she screamed in their faces. 

“Who the hell are you?” Dani shouted as she stormed back to the man, “How do you know Danny? My Ghost Sense isn’t going off, but everyone’s acting like I don’t exist. That didn’t happen until you arrived,” she jabbed her finger at his chest, “so I’m blaming you. What the hell is your deal, buddy?”

He casually brushed Dani’s hand aside and smiled wide, too wide. Dani’s ears popped, and she suddenly got the sense that this sort of unease was what others often experienced around her. 

“I am the patron of travelers and thieves, orators and shepherds and tricksters, a true psychopomp in my own right.” He had the gall to wink at Dani. “Although you may know me as the one—and only!— HERMES! ”

Patron? What does he mean by “patron?” Does he just fund random groups of people and stuff because he’s a disgustingly rich fruit loop?

Dani got the distinct impression that whoever this Hermes guy was was expecting applause; in fact, she felt compelled to, so she pointedly crossed her arms and clenched the fabric of her shirt in a death grip. “Is that supposed to mean anything to me? I’ve been all over the world and met hundreds of people—not one of them was named ‘Hermes.’”

This “Hermes” character dramatically pressed a hand to his heart. “Why, I have never felt more offended! Except for that one time when Zeus didn’t think I was nearly cunning enough to make Epimetheus believe there were no more hard feelings between his brother, Prometheus, and Zeus himself after the whole ‘giving humans fire’ fiasco. But! Because I’m feeling kind and I have pledged to deliver a message to you safely in one piece, I will not smite you. Furthermore, you will take a seat.”

A shiver went down Dani’s spine as she caught a dangerous flicker in Hermes’ ever-shifting shining eyes. One moment they were crystal blue, then bronze, then gold, and back again. How she hadn’t noticed it before, she wasn’t sure, but now Dani understood that the man before her wasn’t strictly a man. He was ancient. Powerful. Eldritch, even. It was like when she took a traveling shortcut between naturally spawning Ghost Zone portals and skirted past a stronger ghost’s territory, like Warden Walker’s prison. 

Whoever this Hermes was, Dani knew that she had to be careful. Megawatt smiles could hide just about anything—Vladimir Masters being a prime example in her experience. 

Dani put on a brave face, which for her was mostly sarcasm and sass. “How generous of you… Lord Hermes,” Dani tried as she slid back into the booth. “Lord” was a decent enough attempt at enough respect to not get her killed, right? Hermes seemed uppity enough, with an ego to boot. 

“Bah, none of that falling-on-your-sword ‘Lord’ business, please! I like heroes who are unafraid to speak their minds—I am the patron of language and oration, after all. I’m curious to hear how the youth speak nowadays. That’s why I appear to you as I do now!”

Like a sweaty bug-eyed beaver taking a detour to Hawaii? Dani thought to herself. Fearing the aforementioned smiting, she instead asked, “And that would be…?”

“Well, there is this mortal on TikTok—a fantastically chaotic digital hellscape, in my own personal opinion—who has an absolutely divine fashion sense and sings with the grace of one of Apollo’s Blessed! He reminds me of my younger years, just after the Trojan War, assisting my great-grandson on his odyssey.”

“Right…” Dani didn’t mention the fact that such “divine fashion sense” didn’t necessarily mean “common sense” in dressing for the sticky Boston weather. She also didn’t mention that she had absolutely no idea what Hermes was referencing. As it stood, Dani barely knew what TikTok was, much less what Hermes’ great-grandson (which had to be a joke since there was no way Hermes was that old) had to do with some random war. 

“Ah, where are my manners, darling?” 

Dani pursed her lips. In the same place you left your fashion sense .

“Eat up, eat up! I am a traveler like you—I understand how famished one may become on one’s journey. It’s no traditional feast a mortal might share with a god, but—”

“A god?!”

Hermes had the nerve to laugh, something high-pitched and crescendoing before abruptly cutting off. “Oh, I knew I forgot something! Several millennia carrying and remembering divine messages, and yet I somehow manage to forget my own. Yes, darling, I am an Olympian god.”

“Olympian…?” Dani asked faintly. “Like…like the games with all the really good athletes?”

“I’m a Greek god,” Hermes explained with a chuckle. “Though I was there for some of the first games in Olympia, Greece. Now, now, as fun as it can be to confuse people in their introduction to the mythological world—” 

Hermes ignored Dani’s weak, puzzled protests. 

“—I do have somewhere to be after this. Besides, we’re Greek in Norse territory. The phrase ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ exists for a reason, and while I’m somewhat sure my father would grant messengers like Hermodr some grace in New York, I’d rather not test my luck. Once, I forgot to save the date for one of Tyche’s parties, and I was cursed to sort out mixed-up packages and order complaints for ages afterward. Getting on Lady Luck’s bad side is rather unpleasant, don’t you think?”

“You talk a lot,” Dani said without thinking. She immediately slapped her hands over her mouth. “I didn’t mean—”

Hermes threw back his head and laughed. Dani realized he did that a lot, almost too much. 

“You, darling, are a riot! I haven’t had this much fun in ages. I’m so glad I took a break on my usual route for this, truly. Now for that message from your dear brother…” 

Before Dani could process the word “brother” this time around, Hermes snapped his fingers. A scrawled letter appeared out of nothing with a pop, trailed by faint golden sparkles. He dramatically plucked the letter from midair and held it out for Dani to take. With a trembling hand, she reached to grab it, only for Hermes to jerk it away at the last second. 

Hermes’s smile flickered into a more serious expression. “Due to the message’s…sensitive content, shall we say, I must confirm: Are you Danielle ‘Dani’ Phantom, the er, in Danny’s words, ‘clonecousinster’ to Daniel ‘Danny’ Phantom?”

Dani gave a wry grin at the phrasing. She could tell that Danny had had fun writing that down. “Yeah…yeah, that’s me.”

“Do you swear on the River Styx?” Hermes intoned, any remaining dregs of humor gone from his face. 

A shiver rippled down Dani’s spine as she swore on the River Styx and was graciously handed her letter. As she studied Danny’s shaky scrawl, Hermes carefully pushed a well-duct-taped cardboard box the size of Dani’s head towards her, past the towering tray of diner food. It was weighty and lightly jangled as it moved, the hand-drawn “THIS SIDE UP” arrows wildly prominent. Dani could only assume that wherever Hermes had pulled the letter from, the package was from the same place. 

“Perhaps I’ll recount some of my favorite travel stories to you one day—you are truly one interesting mortal.”

Dani tore her eyes from Danny’s letter. “Hermes, I—”

But Hermes was gone, leaving behind only a faint trilling laugh on the wind. That, and more diner food than Dani knew what to deal with. 

Dani ate what she could, never one to waste an excess of food, since who knew when the next chance she might eat would be? Even still, she felt bad leaving so much behind. 

Dani tucked the letter in her pocket and the package under her arm and unstuck herself from the crinkly pleather seat. The lady she’d tricked earlier blinked back into awareness when Dani was halfway out the door, muttering to a coworker about how odd it was that someone ignored their entire order for pick up. She tried flagging down Dani, concerned that Dani would miss her parents coming to pick her up. 

“I’ll be fine!” Dani promised, “I…I always am.” 

Chapter Text

Pickpocketing the annoying businessman was hilariously easy. It was so easy, it was almost sad. Almost. Any sympathy Dani might’ve had for the guy immediately evaporated once she noticed that he was actively being a sidewalk hazard by waving around an expensive ring-covered hand while shouting into a cell phone and harshly colliding with pedestrians. The dude didn’t even stop to apologize!

With a well-placed shoulder bump and some ghostly sleight of hand, Dani soon found herself with a slight jostling clink-clink! to her step at a rundown bus stop. She now had enough change for a ride out of the city while she recovered from using her powers so much after so long without doing so. The change sat heavily and securely in the toe of her sock, the Velcro straps pulled taut over her Sketchers. The last thing she needed was the pickpocketer to become the pickpocket-ee.  

Very few people stopped by the bus stop, and those who did, Dani kept a passive eye on. She sat on the edge of the bench, ready to bolt if anyone tried messing with her, but all she saw were just…normal people living normal lives. A tired mom gently rocking a stroller with a whimpering baby sat on the other end of the bus stop’s creaky bench. A college-aged kid leaned against the overhang, bopping their head along to some metal song Dani managed to catch leaking through the person’s cheap headphones. A young man holding a half-wilted bouquet of flowers with a massive hand-shaped bruise on his face sat on the curb, breath shuddering. And then there was Dani, the half-ghost tween abomination. 

She huffed and dug out the letter, apparently from Danny. In a word, she felt… conflicted. Danny had had her memorize his encrypted phone number before she left after the whole Ecto-Dejecto thing, but she’d only called him a mere handful of times since then, always from pay phones. She could have gotten a burner phone so he could call her back, but she never did. Communication with Danny was always on her terms—a choice she got to make without someone else breathing down her neck like it had been under Vlad’s thumb. 

Over almost half a year, she remembered calling once to tell Danny about what the stars were like up in Alaska because they were so damn beautiful she cried and just had to tell someone, anyone, about them. The other time in recent memory was after the Diablo incident with Abuelita. She’d nearly spilled her guts to Danny because she needed someone to talk to, to remind her that she wasn’t a freak of nature, to tell her that she wasn’t evil like her creator, but she’d chickened out and rambled about how great the food in Mexico was instead. 

Any time she called, Danny listened—as much as a socially inept teenage boy could, anyway—but they didn’t really know each other. There were some things that could be guessed and gathered based on context clues, or shared quirks that Dani had thanks to being Danny’s clone. The ghost stuff was obvious, followed by the obsession with astronomy and space. Dani even looked back semi-fondly when she berated Danny for not telling her about their shared (mild) allergy to kiwi. (She never thought a fruit salad would leave her mouth so uncomfortably tingly, not unless it was covered in enough Tajín to make her next coughing breath look like a red palette swap of her Ghost Sense.)

But for Danny to reach out to her via a magical Greek god delivered letter? Dani’s life was already ten kinds of weird! Although joking aside, for Danny to go to such lengths, something had to be seriously wrong, enough for him to let her know. And yes, it would be for something “seriously wrong” and not “amazingly right” since the apparent “Fenton Luck,” as Danny called it, only seemed to go one way. 

Her foot tapped anxiously on the cracked sidewalk below her spot on the bench.

The envelope that housed the letter was already creased, and the ink slightly smudged with her sweaty palms. 

“ Ugh, screw it… ” Dani muttered to herself. 

She ripped open the letter. 

Dani,

If you’re reading this, then that means Hermes held up his end of the deal. If you’re reading this and you’re not Dani, I will personally track you down, throw your ass into the Ghost Zone, and make sure the last thing you ever see is an ectoblast to the face! :)

Anyway, assuming that you’re reading this next part and not a twitching heap on the ground, you are Dani. Hi! 

Cutting right to the chase, things are SO BAD in Amity Park. DO NOT GO THERE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Seriously. I know you like doing the opposite of what you’re told, but please listen to me for once. My parents know I’m Phantom and did NOT take it well. I’ll explain everything better to you in person when I find you. Also, Vlad has gotten worse. I know it goes without saying, but avoid him, too. More than you have been. Duh. 

If Hermes stuck around to yap at you, you probably also learned that the Greek gods exist. And I kinda am maybe sorta related to one? And so is Jazz? 

Btw, I’m safe right now. With Jazz. AWAY from Amity Park. Thought you should know, given all that nutso stuff I just listed. 

Also, try to avoid using technology as much as possible. Monsters that aren’t ghosts can somehow track me that way now, and I don’t want you to take any risks in case that’s another quirk of you having my DNA. 

In the box, you’ll find my spare Fenton Thermos. Use it for any rogue ghosts. Once again, this is a “duh.” You’ll also find some gold coins that can be used for essentially a magic FaceTime call. Make a rainbow and toss one of the coins in. (Don’t try to pawn it off. It confuses mortals. Don’t ask me how I know that.) My buddy, Percy, learned this trick to say: “Oh, Fleecy, do me a solid. Find Danny at Camp Half-Blood.” And I’ll be able to pick up your call faster. You tell me where you are, and I’ll find you and bring you back to CHB. I know that you’ll say that you’re fine on your own and stuff, but I’m worried about you, Dani. I don’t know if you’ve noticed on your travels, but there are more scary things out there than rogue ghosts. Monsters exist, like I said before. Something worse is coming, too. I just don’t know exactly what yet.  

I wish we could have reunited under better circumstances. At least we’ll get to see each other soon, right? I’ve missed you. 

Love you,

Danny

Danny’s little innocuous “Love you” sign-off burned into Dani’s retinas. 

Love you, 

Love you, 

Love you, 

What was Dani meant to do with that, much less all of the other insane stuff Danny rattled off in his letter? His parents hating him? Vlad being extra weird? (Although that really wasn’t much of a surprise.) Monsters and gods?

It felt like Dani was crawling out of that test tube in Vlad’s creepy basement lab for the first time all over again, blinking blearily and confused into a whole new world. When that happened, she at least had a bit of preprogrammed basic skills and knowledge shoved into her brain to connect the dots between static images in her mind and the real-life counterparts. Now, Dani had little of that so-called “luxury.”

All she had was a small Fenton Thermos that she ripped out of the box and clipped to her belt, followed by a handful of gold coins she stashed in her pockets. Somehow, the people around her paid no mind to the obviously shiny distraction, almost as if their eyes were forced to look past Dani. She shoved the cardboard box with more force than was strictly necessary in the nearby trash can that was already overflowing. 

Danny apparently missed her. They’d met twice in person: once when she was deceiving him while under Vlad’s thumb and the other while actively dying and falling to pieces (or rather, destabilizing into ectoplasmic goop on the ground). They called a number of times Dani could count on her hands, remembering to account for time zone differences about only half the time. And yet, Danny still wrote “ I’ve missed you. ” What was there about Dani to miss?

The bus’s wheels creaked to a stop on the curb, and a handful of passengers exited once the doors hissed open. Dani stashed the letter in her pocket and dug the money for the bus fare out of her shoe. She stood last in line to board the bus, and the driver grunted at her to get on when she paused before the first step. 

She could run away like she had always done, first from Vlad’s creepiness, then Danny’s awkward kindness, and now the stability of the Chase Space with Alex and Magnus. Hell, she was even running away from Danny again by ignoring his letter (for the time being, at least).

Dani shook her head and set her jaw. She gripped the bus railing and planted her foot on the questionably sticky stairs of the bus. Dani had never needed anyone before, not really. 

The bus driver huffed. “You on or off, kid? I ain’t got all day.”

“I—”

“ Dani! ” a familiar voice cried, sending a jolt through her half-dead heart. 

Dani whipped her head around to see none other than Alex Fierro barreling down the sidewalk in a blur of pink and green. Some people had the sense to jump out of Alex’s way, but others weren’t so lucky. In shock, Dani lost her balance on the bus steps and stumbled back to sit on solid ground, hard. She barely managed to avoid crushing the Fenton Thermos on her hip at the cost of what was sure to be an epic bruise on her butt in a few hours. 

The bus doors closed, and the driver pulled out from the curb and down the road, missing one passenger. When Alex finally reached her, Dani was still staring at where the bus once was, numb to any of Alex’s frantic questions and looking Dani over like an overprotective parent from the sitcoms Dani had caught clips of in shop windows. 

The moment Alex laid a hand on Dani’s shoulder, every sense kicked into overdrive, burning hot like fire. Dani scrambled away from Alex’s touch as if she were that skittish dog she had tried to protect last night, though that felt like a lifetime ago. 

“Don’t touch me,” Dani growled, uncaring whether or not some ghostly echo bled into her words. The road seemed to be strangely clear now, so she didn’t need to worry about subtlety or pulling the “lost little tourist kid” grift. 

“You’ve been missing for hours!” Alex exploded, “A weird ghosty guy said you were safe and wanted to leave, but that’s bullshit! You love Boston and blindly trusting ghosts is stupid! Excuse me for being worried!”

Trusting ghosts is stupid. Alex’s words rang in Dani’s ears. 

“Oh, yeah?” Dani challenged as she stood, rage pooling in her core. “And trusting you is better? You and Sam turned into birds! Sentient shadows exist! Magnus has a talking sword. Jack sings pop music and glows and drags people around for Ancients’ sake! How can I trust you guys if you don’t tell me about any of this magicky stuff that is clearly normal for you? Ghosts at least make sense. Oof-ouch, you’re dead, and bam! you’re a ghost who can walk through walls, disappear, and fly.”

“How does that make more sense than—” Alex paused. His voice became dangerously calm. “Dani, how do you know that I turned into a bird? Actually, wait, how do you know any of that stuff you just mentioned?”

Dread dropped like a stone in Dani’s stomach. “I—”

A low, resounding horn blared with no clear origin, the sound mixing with unholy wailing. The wind kicked up. The sky darkened with a swath of clouds. 

A puff of Dani’s Ghost Sense wrenched itself from Dani’s lungs alongside her breath. 

At first, Dani thought that Danny had miraculously stumbled into Boston while fighting a rogue ghost with his terrifying Ghostly Wail. However, Dani couldn’t be more wrong. 

Flickering from the stretching shadows of one building to the next, a cloaked figure on horseback dragged a massive cavalry sword that skittered dark sparks on the asphalt. The steed was truly a nightmare, with sharp teeth more fitting for a predator than a horse, spikes running down its armored harness, and the wisps of its shadowy mane blending into the warrior’s dark, misty form. 

Never had a horse’s clopping steps sounded more threatening. 

Dani shuddered. “What…what is that thing? It’s like a ghost, but not quite…”

“Get behind me,” Alex hissed to her, pulling Dani by the wrist and around to his back. He brandished his glimmering garrote while keeping a watchful eye on the horseman. “I’ll act as a distraction, and you run like hell. Head back to the Chase Space—it should hopefully have the right wards to fend off malevolent forces. Do you understand?”

Dani’s hand drifted to her Fenton Thermos, and some residual ectoplasmic energy buzzed at her fingertips. “Alex, I can help—”

“ Do you understand? ” Alex’s jaw was set, tone unyielding. He still didn’t look back at Dani. 

“Screw you,” Dani’s voice crackled in her throat. And yet, she still turned and ran.  

As Alex let out an almighty battle cry and charged the horseman, Dani dove into an alley once she thought she was out of his earshot and transformed into Phantom. Because truly, did Alex really think that Dani would let him fight by himself? Besides, Alex didn’t want Dani to fight. He never said anything about Phantom helping .  

She zipped back to Alex in a heartbeat. He was locked in a stalemate with the horseman, his garrote magically extending to impossible lengths to wrap around any open appendage, but everything seemed to slip right through the shadow’s form. The horseman swung their cavalry sword, and Alex promptly disappeared, replaced by a skittering lizard that jumped back into a human at the horse’s side. His swinging garrote failed to bisect the horseman once more, and while he was off balance, the horse stamped a suddenly solid hoof on the edge of Alex’s sweater vest. 

In a blur of phantasmic fury, Dani barreled into the horseman’s side, aiming to separate steed from rider and thus hoof from a stunned Alex. Dani ended up flying through the horseman’s ribcage, an unsettling sense of wrong-wrong-wrong ripping through her very being as she crashed on the asphalt. 

Dani tried the same stunt again, intangibly this time, but failed once more. 

“What gives, dude? This is so unfair!” Dani stamped her foot before settling into a fighting stance, fists ablaze with bright glowing ecto energy. “Either be intangible or no— whoa! ”

The horse whinnied and bucked, letting Alex roll out of the way and spring back up to standing. It then retreated back into a further shadow at the behest of its rider. 

“ Phantom? What the… ” For a brief moment, Alex looked dazed and confused, but then he snapped to attention, eyes flicking between Dani’s ectoplasm and the horseman. “They don’t like your green…stuff! Get them!”

Dani offered a mock salute, both hands still glowing green. She then shot off like a rocket and lobbed ecto blasts anywhere the horseman attempted to escape, the residual sparks from each blast marking the ground like landmines. Finally, Dani had the horseman cornered, surrounded by a blazing ring of green that took all of Dani’s energy to maintain. 

“You suck!” Dani panted as the horseman stared unblinkingly into her soul, even as she floated easily twelve feet above them. Another puff of her Ghost Sense wrenched itself from her lungs. “I’m so exhausted, dude. Just for that, eat Fenton Thermos!” She unclipped the gadget from her belt (thankful that it had stuck with her transformation from human to ghost), and uncapped it in the direction of the ghost only for it to do… nothing?! It whirred and flickered correctly and everything it was supposed to, but fizzled with a pathetic whir as if she’d aimed it at a human instead of a spirit. 

She clipped the Thermos back on her hip, frustrated. “Oh, that is sooooo not fair! Like, even more unfair than I thought earlier!”

A chorus of ghastly howls and wails and brassy horns echoed on the horizon. And with that, the horseman tilted their head at Dani, and although they had no discernible facial features, Dani got the sense that they were smiling. 

Something high-pitched rang in Dani’s ears, and she fell to the ground, convulsing as one thunderous message sank deep into her subconscious, through her skin, her mind, her very being. Each syllable was punctuated with a pounding war drum, so loud it felt like her brain would melt through her rattling ears. 

The Hunt is coming, The Hunt is coming, The Hunt is coming!

The horseman was swallowed up into the shadows, not even a whisper of their presence left behind. And then, all Dani knew was darkness.

Chapter Text

“I never really liked you anyways,” Danny shrugged, his form hazy and voice far away. “Vlad made you, and he’s evil, so you must be evil too, Dani.”

Dani began melting into ectoplasmic sludge, starting first at her throat—she couldn’t protest, couldn’t cry out. She just watched helplessly and rasped gurgling pleas as she sank lower and lower on the business end of a glowing Fenton Thermos. 

“Sorry, them’s the rules, kid. I need to soup bad kids like you and send you back to Vlad.” Danny’s explanation sounded hollow.

Dani thrashed, but her mostly sludge body didn’t respond. And then something shook her—fervent and loud and—

Wake up!

Dani’s vision swirled with the muddled splotches of pink and green; her vision doubled until it snapped back into focus. Alex Fierro’s face was two inches too close to Dani’s, staring at her in blatant concern. His lips moved at a mile a minute, relief etched across his expression as he looked over Dani, but she couldn’t hear him over the high-pitched ringing in her ears. 

The asphalt prickled uncomfortably under Dani’s back, and the road rash across her body stung like a million wasps buried beneath her skin. A scrape bled sluggishly at her temple. 

Just to double-check, Dani glanced at her outfit. She was wearing her red and blue civvies, which explained why Alex was fussing over her, just as Dani suspected. After all, Alex surely wouldn’t do such a thing for Phantom, given that he still believed Phantom kidnapped Dani. Not only that, his concern proved that he hadn’t seen her detransform; otherwise, Dani would’ve likely woken up fully dead instead of just halfway there. 

“—out of here. C’mon!”

“Wha…” Dani slurred intelligently as Alex slung one of Dani’s arms across his shoulders. Her empty Fenton Thermos clattered hollowly at her hip. 

The smell of burning rubber and ash filled Dani’s nose, the hint of the aftermath of battle equal parts comforting and stomach flipping. She wondered if she inherited that feeling from Danny or if some part of her, deep down, relished it because evil Vlad programmed it in her messed-up brain. 

With his free hand, Alex fished his phone from his pocket and began flicking through the apps. Dani briefly caught a text profile picture that might’ve been a blurred Sam in her green hijab, but Dani’s vision still swam in and out of focus. Despite herself, Dani closed her eyes and let her head rest against Alex’s shoulder. 

“Stay awake,” Alex ordered, not unkindly, but still firm. “I think you have a concussion. The taxi should be here soon. We’ll get you patched up at the Chase Space before dinner time.”

“I’m fine,” Dani slurred. Her eyes creaked open not of their own accord. “I’ve had worse. Lemme…lemme go…”

“I somehow seriously doubt that, kid.”

Dani’s brain struggled to make the right connections with her mouth, her usual filters strained at best. “I’ve been goo before…melty…melty like ice cream. Ouchie…big ouchie. M’ brother saved me…I wan’ ice cream, ’lex…”

Alex didn’t respond. Or, if he did, Dani’s brain was so stuffed full of cotton, she couldn’t hear a thing. 

Dani blinked, and suddenly there was a bright yellow taxi cab rolling up to the curb. The driver rolled down a window. 

“Uh, do ya want to call an ambulance instead…? a guy with a thick Boston accent asked.  

Alex snorted, and something in his tone shifted. It was more sardonic than usual, smooth like a snake. “Ha, in this economy? I promise we won’t get blood on the seat.”

The cabbie huffed, and his voice came out a little dazed. “Eh, fair enough. I wouldn’t be doin’ this gig if the economy wasn’t so dogwater. Hop in.”

Throughout the cab ride to the Chase Space, unease churned heavily in Dani’s gut—she hadn’t been in many cars before, and the ones she had been in mostly belonged to cops. Alex kept prodding Dani in the back seat, keeping her upright and awake despite her half-hearted protests. He whispered all sorts of random things to Dani, like how Magnus was now rested and well, or that Alex hoped Dani would help him lay new gravel and plant flowers in the Chase Space’s yard in a few weeks. Alex’s voice was even and calm, but his ever-tapping foot against the matted taxi carpet told another story. 

Sam greeted Alex and Dani at the Chase Space’s front door, like she’d been pacing just behind it for ages, waiting for her brother to return. She swung open the door with a little more force than was strictly necessary and ushered both Alex and Dani inside, scrutinizing the stretching shadows of the front porch behind them. 

Sam hissed something to Alex about Magnus and a mercy… something . She mentioned that weird word again— Valhalla —and pulling some strings for Magnus to “come back quicker” than usual, whatever that meant. 

Dani soon found herself propped up on a too-fancy couch with an old bedsheet underneath her, Alex and Sam trading harsh whispers that bordered on arguing. Looking a bit more gaunt than usual, Magnus laid a towel-wrapped ice pack on some of Dani’s more dramatic bruises on her knee. Her entire body felt much too sticky and oddly stretched due to the vast amounts of various adhesive bandages littering her skin. The antiseptic stung the gash along her forehead as Magnus gently cleaned the wound, followed by a ripple of sunshine-y warmth when his fingers brushed against Dani’s hairline. 

She almost fell face-first into the kind touch—a soft feeling bubbling up from her core. It reminded her all at once of that first morning waking up in the sun-speckled branches of a forest canopy she’d escaped to after being freed from Vlad’s clutches. 

Her fuzz-filled brain marginally cleared as well, her sluggish thoughts sparking to almost-clarity. 

“Mag…Magnus? Are you okay?”

He startled, and the sunny warmth from his fingertips faded as he seemed to register that Dani had spoken up.  

“I should be asking you the same thing, squirt.”

“Some…some creepy shadows bodied me when Alex told me to run,” Dani lied, “I, er, Phantom , checked on me and then helped Alex fight. I think. It’s still kind of fuzzy…” She put extra effort into sounding pathetic and weepy to sell the lie. 

“That’s about what Alex said.”

Dani internally sighed in relief. As she fisted the already grimy bedsheet below her, another thought came to mind, one that had been plaguing her for ages. “…so I’m not crazy? You guys can see the monsters, too? Every time I tried to tell someone, they’d just look past the weird stuff and call, like, sea monsters that tried to eat me ‘frenzied sharks’ or ‘spiky driftwood.’”

Magnus grimaced and fumbled through an explanation of something he called the “ Ginnungagap,” where the void’s primordial mist rose up and filtered through the Nine Worlds, sometimes hiding magic and Norse god and monster stuff from people who didn’t have the eye for it. Magnus also had a cousin who simply called it “the Mist,” which he thought was much faster and easier to say than “ Ginnungagap.” 

The kind of stuff Magnus was explaining sounded sorta like what Danny had rambled about in his letter—

“I need a rainbow!” Dani blurted out, sitting up ramrod straight and patting down her pockets for the golden coins from Danny. She nearly beaned Magnus’ nose with her sudden movement. 

“Whoa! Watch it! We have some Pride flags in storage we haven’t hung up yet?” Magnus floundered, completely confused. He then blinked and properly registered what Dani had said. “Wait, why do you need a rainbow?”

Dani launched herself from the couch to stand so quickly, she ran straight into the nearby coffee table. She let out a pained yelp as her shin began smarting painfully, and books and magazines went flying. Hobbling around the common room area for, well, she didn’t know exactly, other than a vague idea of a crystally something-or-other for rainbow making, she didn’t process Alex and Sam bursting in to find the cause of the commotion.

“What’s going on?” Sam asked as Dani continued tearing apart the room, now scrambling halfway up the unlit brick fireplace. 

“She needs a rainbow?” Magnus shrugged helplessly. Then, he finally registered where Dani was climbing and scrambled over the scattered books to pull her off the mantle. “Get down from there! ”

Dani ignored him and used a bit of her ghostly flight to help herself flip onto the too-high mantle and reached for a shiny speck of something on a display shelf diagonally up and to the left. Now, Magnus couldn’t pull her down without risk of Dani breaking her neck, not that he knew she could save herself with ghost powers in at least half a dozen different ways.

“‘A rainbow?’” Alex echoed with a short laugh, raising an eyebrow and putting his hand on his hip. “Are Magnus and I not good enough representation?”  

Dani snorted at Alex’s joke as she reached for the shiny something, which turned out to just be a shard of glass, likely from a broken picture frame that never got fully cleaned up. She quickly retracted her empty hand. With an almighty sigh, she sat down on the surprisingly sturdy mantle and began kicking her feet. 

“Can someone lend me a hand?” Dani asked innocently.

Magnus looked like he was about to have a heart attack, while Alex was holding back laughter, and Sam looked utterly unimpressed.  

Still on the verge of laughing his butt off, Alex strode over and helped Dani down. Dani was fully capable of helping herself, what with the ghost powers and everything, and barring that, her street smarts and parkour skills, but Dani prided herself on being a little turd as much as possible. She grinned when Alex ruffled her hair, knocking her red beanie askew.

“Now, kid,” Alex started, “why exactly did you need a rainbow?”

Dani pursed her lips, eyes flicking nervously to the three teens surrounding her. Somewhere in the background, a pretentious old grandfather clock ticked ominously. They already knew about magicky weird stuff, so there’d be no harm in telling them, right?

“I promised Danny I’d give him a call through a magic rainbow thingy. I have the coins for it.” Dani dug deep in her pocket and produced a few golden coins to show Magnus, Alex, and Sam.

“...but you’re Dani,” Magnus said slowly, as if Dani had misspoken. “Why would you call yourself?”

“I’m Dani, D-A-N- I. I need to call Danny, D-A-N- N-Y. He’s my…” Dani hesitated. She had confirmed her audience was cool with magicky weirdness, but that wasn’t to say they’d take too kindly to the concept of clones, much less ghostly ones initially created to replace their DNA donor. “Danny’s my brother,” she finally decided.  

“Doesn’t that get confusing when you’re together?” Sam asked.

“We don’t talk much, so not really.”

“As for it confusing your parents?” Alex and Magnus tensed when Sam’s second question pierced the air, hanging heavy in the air like a bullet buried in a ribcage. 

Dani stared deep into Sam’s eyes, her very soul. She echoed Magnus’ words from her first day in Boston, “‘Rule Number One of the Chase Space: Don’t ask about someone’s past unless they tell you first.’”

Sam shuddered. “My apologies.”

Dani nodded in acceptance. “Now, does anyone know where I can make a rainbow in this house? I’d like to call my brother at, um…I think it was called ‘Camp Half-Blood?’”

At the mention of that name, Magnus groaned. “Oh, gods, that’s what you mean by needing a rainbow. My cousin, Annabeth, talks about using Iris Messages, like a demigod FaceTime powered by the Greek goddess of rainbows. Dani’s Greek. I’m so not ready for another crossover…”

Chapter Text

With a triangular glass prism in hand and an old office all to herself, Dani hesitated to Iris Message Danny. Magnus said that he’d check on her in about an hour while he, Alex, and Sam perused that mansion’s library for anything about sentient shadow monsters and how to defeat them after his incident wolf on the rooftop and Alex’s account of the shadowy horseman. If Dani was done before then, she could put the prism right back where she’d found it in the office and help with the book search.

She was also now trying to reconcile with the weirdness that Alex, Magnus, and Sam had dumped on her after Magnus’ “crossover” comment. Apparently, they were all children of Norse deities, making them half-human, half-god, otherwise known as “demigods” or “half-bloods,” though some people didn’t like that term. Magnus was the son of Frey, god of light and fertility, and all that jazz. Alex and Sam were half-siblings through their parent, Loki. Dani had seen and heard enough about Marvel movies to know that Loki was generally regarded as a not-so-great dude even without Alex and Sam’s brief description. 

Despite getting the whole demigod rundown, Dani somehow got the sense that they weren’t telling her something important. They mentioned something called “Valhalla” often enough to be important, but shied away from discussing it in full around Dani. She hated being left out—it made her feel like more of a kid than she already was. 

What’s more is that they all thought that Dani was a demigod like them, the daughter of some Greek god instead of a Norse one, hence the whole "crossover" thing. By all accounts, multiple pantheons crossing paths and interacting with each other was likely the herald of bad news, if not the bad news itself. Even still, Dani could relate to the “only being part human” aspect of being a demigod, but she mostly just smiled and nodded placatingly at the demigod suggestion. She didn’t know if that was possible, even with being Danny’s clone. 

She sat down heavily with her back against the wall and glumly placed the prism on the ornate footstool in front of her. It caught the bright light of the nearby lamp just as Magnus had planned and helped set up, scattering rainbows across the maps and artifacts that felt like they’d be more at home in a museum, rather than an old man’s office. Then again, a rich old guy could probably buy whatever he wanted; Dani knew that from her experience with Vlad. Magnus had once mentioned his late Uncle Randolph had passed down the mansion that housed the Chase Space to the younger generation, but aside from that, Dani knew very little about the man. She assumed that Randolph had more family than Magnus and Magnus’ cousin Annabeth based on the weathered picture frames on the walls, but since Dani hadn’t crossed paths with an older woman and two girls that looked like a cross between the woman and Randolph, they too were long gone.

And then there was the thread of doubt that threatened to squeeze Dani's heart until it burst. She hadn’t called Danny via payphone in weeks, much less seen him in months. Maybe he thought she was as long gone as Randolph and his family. And yet, she’d likely see Danny in person if what he’d said in his letter was true—she couldn’t run or hide from her problems and fears anymore. Dani had read Danny’s message so many times in the past few hours, the words were impressed onto her eyelids: You tell me where you are, and I’ll find you and bring you back to CHB. I know that you’ll say that you’re fine on your own and stuff, but I’m worried about you, Dani.

Dani vaguely knew what a FaceTime call entailed, and if an Iris Message was anything like a magical rainbow version of it, Dani didn’t know how she would react to seeing Danny’s face again. His face was the one hers was meant to match exactly, to replace, according to Vlad. 

When she got sick after spending too much time out in a frigid British downpour, her voice had gone so scratchy and rough, she sounded so much like Danny, it scared her. It was made worse when she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the window of an antique bookstore in the heart of London, and the floppy wet hair, scratchy voice, and just her overall appearance made her yelp in panic, thinking that she'd somehow turned into Danny himself. She’d been too nervous to speak or even look at her reflection for days after that, terrified that she was slowly morphing into someone she didn’t want to be. It wasn't that Danny wasn’t a good person, not at all! It’s just that Dani didn’t want to be Danny. She wanted to be herself , whoever that ended up being.   

The first step to becoming herself meant facing her fears and who she was meant to replace, but would never be if she had any say in the matter. 

Dani took a deep breath and whispered, “ Oh, Fleecy, do me a solid. Find Danny at Camp Half-Blood. ” She flipped a golden coin into the biggest of the scattered rainbows on the floor, about the size of her head. A few more coins followed, just for luck. They all disappeared into the rainbow like a bunch of quarters in the slot of a vending machine. 

For a heart-stopping moment, nothing happened. And then, the rainbow rippled, and there was the rainbow-tinted face of Danny, turned to the side and laughing with someone. In the background, Dani noticed a few bunk beds with rumpled blankets and miscellaneous articles of clothing hanging over the sides of a few bunks. Something rustled behind Danny, but Dani didn’t focus on that. All that she processed is that wherever and whatever this “Camp Half-Blood” place was, it made Danny happier than she’d heard in a long time. The background was lived in. Comfortable. He was laughing with someone Dani didn’t recognize. Danny had made a place for himself in such a way that it made Dani’s heart ache with want and jealousy. Even at the Chase Space, Dani flitted from room to room each night, taking her meager belongings with her each morning.

Dani felt like she was encroaching on something sacred, something else she could ruin.

And then the person laughing in the background muttered something, and Danny whipped his head around to face the technicolor Iris Message interface head-on. His eyes widened and pupils dilated, and then the biggest grin Dani had ever seen stretched across his face.

“Oh, my gods! Dani!” he cried, and his face zoomed in. The IM rippled in response, sending a thrill of worry down to Dani’s gut. When Danny drew back, he was smiling sheepishly and scratching the back of his head with the same nervous tic Dani knew she herself had. “Sorry, I got excited and forgot that you can’t hug people through Iris Messages.”

The same voice in the background snickered.

“Shut up, Nico!” Danny flushed. “Go bother your boyfriend, or something. I want to talk with my little sister!” 

Another boy popped into frame over Danny’s shoulder and waved at Dani, which she returned awkwardly. “Hi, Dani. Your brother’s been talking nonstop about you. Have a good chat.” Danny batted Nico away, and a few seconds later, a wooden door slammed shut behind him.  

“Who was that?” Dani asked, curiosity getting the better of her.

“That’s just Nico, the only other current resident of the Hades cabin besides me,” Danny brushed aside, rolling his eyes. He continued, “Oh, Ancients, I’m glad you’re okay. You are okay, right?” 

“I’m fine,” Dani promised, staring at a spot past Danny in the background. It was easier to focus on that than on him. “Hermes delivered the package and letter, and I’m safe in this office—”

“Wait. Are you in a mansion?” Danny asked. Dani looked up to see him now standing on his end of the IM, frantically studying her somewhat ornate background. “You’re not hiding out in Vlad’s mansion, are you? Did he kidnap you? So help me, if he hurt you—”

“Danny! Danny, I’m fine! I’m nowhere near Wisconsin! Or Vlad, ” she spat. Internally, she felt a little warm at seeing how protective Danny was of her. He cared. “I’m in this youth shelter place-thing that’s being converted from a family mansion or whatever. I’m in Boston, Massachusetts.”

Danny slumped back on the bunk behind him, relieved. “That’s…that’s good. I’m in Long Island right now, so I think I can fly there in about…” Danny’s face scrunched up as he did some quick mental math. Something rustled behind him again. “...an hour and a half, an hour if I push it, so—”

“Oh, my God. No shot… ” 

“Dani?”

“DO YOU HAVE WINGS?!” Dani exclaimed, leaning forward so far that her face nearly collided with the rainbow mist of the Iris Message.

“Wha—? Oh, yeah.” Danny shifted a wing a bit longer than his arm into frame, wincing at it. Dani could tell that the color of it was dark, but couldn’t parse it out through the rainbow sheen of the Iris Message. “It’s kind of a recent development, so I haven’t found the time to tell you—”

“You look so fluffy!” Dani squealed. She really couldn’t help it, gushing about how soft Danny’s wings looked. Truly, Dani thought the snippets of sitcoms she’d caught in store windows exaggerated the stereotype of tweenage girls gushing about fluffy things, like plushies and pets, but here she was, proven wrong. Granted, Dani had been known to gush about raccoons and almost orb-like pigeons, so it sorta made sense she’d like Danny’s wings so much. Because, well, pigeons. Birds were great!

“ Stop it… ” Danny complained, ducking his head under one of his wings, making Dani giggle even more. 

“Are they a new ghost power?” Dani managed to ask, finally stifling her giggles. 

Danny winced. “How about I tell you in person?” 

Dani pursed her lips, but eventually agreed. It rubbed her the wrong way to see Danny being so cagey. 

“Uh, so…do you have a better address than just ‘Boston, Massachusetts?’ Not that I don’t think I can’t use the process of elimination with my Ghost Sense, but I’d get to you sooner with an exact address.”

Dani rattled off the address for the Chase Space, along with the helpful (and funny) landmark of the Leif Erikson statue with the metal bra outside the mansion. She then frowned, an odd thought crossing her mind. 

“What’s wrong?” Danny asked with a creased brow, hefting a messenger bag with some travel essentials over his shoulder. “I know that face. It’s a ‘I don’t wanna say anything, but something’s up’ face.” The unspoken, I know that face because it’s mine, observation burned in Dani’s ears. 

Dani nervously drummed her fingers on her knees and let out a sigh. As much as she was loath to admit it, Danny knew more than her about fighting ghosts and otherwise weird spirit-y nonsense. “Right, so there are these shadow spirit things in Boston…”

By the end of her recounting about her two direct encounters with the shadows (and all the weirdness of Norse gods and demigods, apparently) in Boston, Danny’s jaw had wound so tight, Dani was afraid it might snap and pop off. 

“The shadows kind of sound like one of my rogues, Johnny 13,” Danny eventually said. “He has a sentient shadow with a mind of its own, but mostly follows whatever Johnny, or his girlfriend, Kitty, says.”

“Maybe? But the horseman guy didn’t get souped by my Thermos, remember?”

Danny rubbed his chin. “That is weird, I’ll admit. My buddy, Nico, also knows about some ghost stuff, so I’ll ask for advice before I head out. Maybe you gotta weaken them like Pokémon before you catch ’em all?”

“I have no idea what that is,” Dani deadpanned. 

“How do you not—?” 

Dani wanted to say, I’m learning, so cut me some slack! I was programmed to have your love for space and Dumpty Humpty and whatever else, but I’ve had to learn everything not deemed “necessary” by an evil fruit loop all by myself! Other people thought I was insane when I had to ask kids my physical age what Star Wars or My Little Pony was! Do you have any idea how that feels to be seen as dumb for something that you can’t control?

Instead, Dani offered her a pained half-smile. “I am literally less than a year old, dude. Vlad didn’t pre-program what I’m guessing is a pop culture reference into my baby clone brain.” 

A pang of guilt rippled over Dani when she saw Danny flinch at the reminder. 

“R-right. I’ll…” Danny fumbled to regain his composure. He failed. “I’ll be there soon, Dani. Just keep hanging in there.”

“Danny, I—”

“I care about you, Dani. A lot. I hope you know that.” And then Danny wiped a hand through the Iris Message on his end, and the concerned expression on his face vanished into the aether. 

“No! Don’t leave me!” Dani cursed and repeated the little Iris Message prayer, almost frantically, “ Oh, Fleecy, do me a solid. Find Danny at Camp Half-Blood.” She practically chucked a golden coin from her dwindling pile into the rainbow. 

A cheery voice with a hint of static rang out from the rainbow instead of showing her Danny. “I’m so sorry! The person you are trying to reach is unavailable right now! Would you like to leave a message? To leave a message, say ‘yes’ and wait for the chime! To hang up, say ‘no!’” The voice’s tones for “yes” and “no” sounded somewhat flat, like they’d been recorded in post. 

Dani let out a muffled scream of frustration. “ Ugh, no! This isn’t fair—”

“Thank you for selecting ‘no!’ Have a nice day!” The rainbow then promptly ejected the coin, beaning Dani square in the forehead. 

She recoiled and cursed and ranted to the thin air. Dani couldn’t exactly pinpoint why Danny had made her react in this way, other than it was because of Danny she felt like…like this, whatever “this” was. 

A knock on the thick wooden door snapped Dani out of her broiling emotional whirlwind. “Dani? You good in there? I heard yelling.” Magnus’ voice was muffled through the layers of wood. 

Dani quickly sobered, snatched up her few coins into her pockets, and lightly slapped her face with both hands to just get herself together. No one needed to see her like this. “Just a sec, Beantown!”

Magnus grumbled about being called “Beantown” again, but it bought Dani enough time to open the office door herself rather than Magnus barging in with his disco sword or something. 

“You done with your call?” Magnus asked. He was clearly going for a more casual vibe, but Dani couldn’t ignore how he not-so-subtly studied her clenched fists, her peeling Band-Aids on her hands from where she fidgeted them halfway off. 

“ Yes. And you’re not gonna ask me what I was yelling about?”

Magnus offered her a strained grin. “‘Rule Number One of the Chase Space: Don’t ask about someone’s past unless they tell you first.’ Besides, my friends and I are no strangers to beating up crazy family members.”

Dani muttered, “I seriously doubt that.” Given that Danny had a ridiculous track record of getting new ghost powers on a semi-regular basis, and often at just in the nick of time to stop whatever ghost of the week was after him, Dani wasn’t too sure that Magnus, son of a Norse god though he was, could beat Danny in a fight. 

“C’mon, kid, I have a good distraction for you,” Magnus said, steering Dani away from his Uncle Randolph’s office and down the stretching hallway. “There’s still a mountain of books to go through in the library.”

“Do I get to climb the shelves?”

“We’ll see.”

“Ooh! Or maybe one of those fancy rolly ladder thingies?” Dani beamed with pride when she noticed Magnus' amused-annoyed expression. 

Magnus ruffled Dani’s hair, and she playfully swatted him away. When he thought Dani wasn’t looking, he peeked outside a nearby window to see the red-orange sky marking the beginning of the sun’s descent. He winced. “We’ll see, Dani.”

Chapter Text

“Do you really think the shadows are gonna come back at sunset?” Dani asked Sam, picking up the next book in her pile. The book Dani held was an illustrated children’s guide to Norse mythology and Germanic folklore with a cracked spine and well-loved pages. In a cheery font, the inside cover read “This Book Belongs to” with the names “Emma” and “Aubrey” scrawled in multicolored crayon on the printed line. 

Sam stopped pacing and now stood eye level with Dani, who sat cross-legged on a sturdy antique wood table.

“I hope not, Dani, but the howls sound closer than before,” Sam said. “While the strange shadows have been cropping up for the past few days, based on my intel from Odin, two direct attacks on demigods in one day is a great cause for concern. It’s nearly 7 o’clock now, and the sun is meant to set in about an hour, thanks to the Boston summertime, so I’d rather be somewhat prepared than not. The night means more places for shadows to hide.”

Dani frowned. She still didn’t know exactly what to make of Sam quite yet, but she could respect Sam’s preparedness. Dani knew a thing or two about being ready for the worst—more often than not, anything good that happened to her often ended belly up. “When I was talking with Dan—” She paused and considered her phrasing. Danny vs. Dani was confusing, wasn’t it? That’s what Magnus had said earlier, anyway. “When I was talking with my… brother, he mentioned dealing with a ghost with a sentient shadow that followed the ghost around. He said he’ll be in Boston as soon as he can, so he might be able to help, but I dunno.”

“How did he stop them?”

In the background, Magnus and Alex were still flipping through books, speaking in hushed tones.

“With one of these.” Dani unclipped the Fenton Thermos from her hip and held it up to Sam for her inspection. She shied away when Sam extended a curious hand. “It’s basically a ghost trap. I tried using it against one of the shadow spirit things earlier, but it didn’t work. They might’ve been too powerful for it, or maybe the Thermos is only meant for a specific type of ghost…so yeah.”

“When did you fight the shadow?” Sam asked. There might have been a concerned lilt to her tone, but Dani panicked and took her question as an accusation. 

“As Phantom!” Dani blurted. “I…I mean, with Phantom! With Phantom, yes! She noticed me running away, and because I totally have no fighting skills whatsoever, she stepped in and helped me out!”

“Right…” Sam said, unconvinced. “And Phantom…she didn’t hurt you?”

“Of course not!” Dani balked. “ I’m Pha…fantastically good friends with her!” She only barely caught the near slip-up.

“Phantom nearly knocked me off a roof,” Magnus deadpanned from across the room. “I’m a little skeptical—”

“She probably had a good reason for it,” Alex interjected. “Phantom was probably scared.”

Dani relaxed, thankful for Alex’s save. 

“Of what?” Magnus asked. “Phantom had all these weird glowy powers and could fly and stuff—” 

Alex flicked his boyfriend on the forehead. “You chased her with a sword.”

“I thought Phantom kidnapped Dani!” 

“Phantom didn’t kidnap me,” Dani mumbled. Three pairs of eyes suddenly focused right on her. Her shoulders hunched, and she busied herself with flipping through her picture book, trying desperately not to be perceived. It did not work very well. 

“It sure looked like kidnapping,” Magnus said. 

“Wait. Phantom seemed to share some ghostly traits with the shadows, too…maybe they’re connected?” Sam added. 

“I didn’t get kidnapped, and Phantom isn’t working with the shadows!” Dani snapped. In her anger, she nearly ripped the illustrated page of a king getting invited to a fancy party or wedding or something. There was a horse, and a dog, and a long journey. She didn’t really pay attention to the specifics. “What about the whole ‘Rule Number One of the Chase Space?’ I don’t have to talk.”

Magnus looked stumped. “Yeah, but we can still be worried—”

Alex suggested levelly, “Maybe if Phantom could swing by later, explain it herself—” 

“STOP TALKING!” Dani exploded, throwing her book to the side. It landed pages side down a few feet away on the ground. She clamped her hands over her ears and curled into a ball. Her eyes often glowed toxic green when she was upset, and she refused to let anyone see. Dani had already dug herself a deep enough hole. She couldn’t handle being called a diablo again.   

The table below Dani shook, and it took her a second to realize that she was actually the one shuddering. Hot tears trailed down her cheeks. Her heart clenched, and everything felt too slow and staticky, but somehow too fast at the same time. 

“…ni. Dani. Take a deep breath, chiquita, c’mon…” 

That nickname brought on a whole new wave of tears. Abuelita had called her that before, praising her for being a sweet little girl who helped carry her heavy groceries and saved her aching back and tired old bones. 

“Deep breath,” Alex said again, impossibly soft. 

Dani’s entire body rattled as she inhaled. She half-choked on a sob. 

“Good,” Alex said. “Can you look at me, chiquita? ”

Dani slowly raised her head, eyes watering. Her hands dropped like stones from her ears, settling heavily. Alex filled her vision, blocking out the library, the stacks of discarded books, Magnus, and Sam. Toxic green light reflected from Dani’s eyes to Alex’s. 

“There we go...it’s alright…” Alex then slowly extended a hand, waiting for Dani to pull away. When she didn’t, he gently wiped away Dani’s tears with his thumb. She leaned into his hand. “It’s hard keeping everything in, huh?”

Dani nodded weakly, face still cradled in Alex’s palm. Alex didn’t scream in fear at Dani’s otherworldliness. 

“Ph-Phantom isn’t bad. I—She’s good. She’s good.”

“She is,” Alex agreed, squeezing one of Dani’s hands with his free one. “I probably wouldn’t be standing here without her.”

Dani nodded again, albeit more stiffly than before. 

“You back with me, kid?”

“Mm-hm…”

Alex stepped aside and let Dani scoot off the table and stand on her own two feet. She was prepared to apologize for her outburst at Magnus and Sam to get it over and done with so they all could continue the much-needed research, but they were nowhere in sight. 

“Where are Magnus and Sam?” Dani asked as she trudged over to recover her thrown book as if to make up for her outburst. Her voice sounded wrecked. 

“I told them to leave. You needed space, and they weren’t helping.”

“I would’ve been fine…”

Alex sighed. “You’re what, twelve years old? We’re about to face a storm of terrifying, shadowy ghosts. You’re allowed to be ‘not fine.’”

Outside, the wind howled and shook the old mansion. The windows rattled like bones in a disturbed tomb. Dani hugged the picture book close to her chest and turned to face Alex, forcing herself not to cower at the sudden noises beyond the mansion’s walls. 

“We all need to do stuff we’re not ready for,” Dani said, focusing more on her picture book than Alex. The way Alex phrased the ghosts as being a “storm” seemed familiar, but she couldn’t quite figure it out. That phrasing, combined with that mantra she heard before passing out after the horseman’s attack…it meant something.

“Dani—”

Dani swore, cutting Alex off. And then she cackled in delight. 

“You good?” Alex asked, concerned. 

“Never been better! I think I found it. ” Dani flipped her picture book around to show Alex an obnoxiously cute illustration of a frowning king carrying a small dog in his arms atop a horse. Around him stood dozens of armored men, also atop horses, flanked by wolfish hunting hounds bounding around. The procession marched through a foggy night filled with cartoon stars and a smiling moon. “Alex, I introduce to you: The Wild Hunt. ”

Chapter Text

As Sam thumbed through Dani’s picture book, comparing it with the website link Alex sent to Sam’s phone, Dani huffed. “In Danny’s letter, he said demigods can’t use technology. Is that true, Alex? Or are we playing with fire and hoping we don’t get burnt by a fire monster?”

With crossed arms, Alex leaned against a wall covered by an extremely out-of-date neon yellow and navy blue floral wallpaper. He kicked a leg back, likely to balance himself, but to Dani it looked like he was trying to stamp out the too-cheery flowers. “Maybe that anti-technology thing’s just for Greek demigods. We’re Norse—maybe we’re just built different. But seriously, I’ve never had an issue.”

“Same here, but it’s admittedly tonal whiplash to see, I dunno, a fantastical monster of legend and then Alex is showing me a meme from Tumblr,” Magnus said, trying to read over Sam’s shoulder. 

“I vaguely remember learning that Odin led the Wild Hunt,” Sam finally said, making Magnus stumble back when she stood. “Ah, sorry, Magnus.”

“No worries.”

“But this says it’s led by someone named—”

“King Herla,” Dani confirmed for Sam, jaw set. 

Dani had forced Alex to take her to wherever Magnus and Sam had ended up, which turned out to be one of the spare bedrooms that’d been converted into an impromptu armory. They had a lot of Valhalla friends—there was that name again!—who sometimes stopped by in case of weapon emergencies. Dani couldn’t even begin to dissect what that meant. At least none of the kids who visited the Chase Space had ventured to the far corner of the top floor, more concerned with grabbing food or a place to crash on the first floor that was easier to escape from. Being homeless or having a rough home life ingrained those sorts of instincts early on that were tough to break. 

Magnus frowned. “Okay, so I could’ve sworn we already faced most of the stuff in the main Norse mythological canon, like from the Prose Edda to the Poetic Edda. I’ve never heard someone named ‘King Herla.’” 

Dani didn’t know what those Edda things were, but they sounded important. And for all of Magnus’ sarcasm, he was wicked smart and just sort of remembered things most people didn’t. So, Magnus not knowing at least something about King Herla was strange to Dani. Magnus once joked to her that if he hadn’t become homeless halfway through high school, he might’ve gone to some place like Harvard or Yale, but Dani sensed there was more than a kernel of truth in that joke. 

“Not everything that exists has been written down, Magnus,” Sam said. “And everything that has been written may not be complete or wholly true. Nothing is without bias.”

“You can say that again,” Alex snorted. “I looked up an English translation of the story on my phone—the one I sent to you, Sam—and in this version, Herla got the short end of the stick for pretty much no reason.”

“Yeah,” Dani piped up, “Herla was a human king who made a promise to an unnamed dwarf king to attend each other’s weddings a year apart. Alex found another version where it was a faerie king instead of a dwarf one, but the point still stands: no-magic king vs. magic king. The human wedding went great, King Herla married his queen, yada-yada. And a year later, Herla and his dudes went down to the dwarf kingdom, had a three-day wedding party, fun times had by all. The dwarf king then gave Herla a bunch of gifts and, um…”

“I’ll just paraphrase the next parts from my phone,” Alex offered. Dani nodded, and Alex brought his phone closer to his face and squinted to skim the text, “and the dwarf king gave Herla ‘presents of horses, dogs, hawks, and all things befitting venery’—that’s hunting by the way—‘and falconry.’ And the most important gift: the dwarf king gave Herla ‘a small bloodhound, to be carried in arms, strictly forbidding any one of Herla’s whole company to dismount until the dog should leap forward from his bearer.’ And then Herla learned from some guy on the road that he hadn’t been gone for three days, but actually 200 years.”

“Yikes,” Magnus offered. 

“And even though the dog didn’t hop off, some of Herla’s guys tried getting off their horses and turned to dust!” Dani exclaimed, of course remembering one of the most horrifying parts of the story. She could sympathize since she’d almost turned into destabilized ghost goop, which was pretty similar to getting dusted, in her opinion. 

Magnus winced, “Double yikes.”

“And so Herla and his wedding-party-turned-hunting-party still ride on as what we now call the Wild Hunt, forever.”

This time, Sam was the one who cut in with, “Triple yikes. Is there any way the story said the Wild Hunt could be stopped? All I know is that Odin used to lead some of his favorite einherjar and Valkyries on nighttime hunts during winter in Midgard, but not so much anymore, thanks to all the air traffic from human technology. Odin’s Wild Hunt seems a lot less vengeful than Herla’s version, so I can only guess that there’s more than just one Wild Hunt.”

“I dunno,” Dani shrugged, trying to appear less shaken than she actually was. The idea of more than one storm of ghosts unsettled her. “I guess we could pull them off their horses to turn them to dust like in the story, but that seems cruel.”

Magnus crossed his arms. “Maybe, but they were pretty dead-set on killing us first, Dani. But even if the dusting thing works, we’d need to be able to touch them. Jack went right through the shadow wolf thing half the time—they seem a lot less solid than their folklore counterparts.” 

“Aren’t a lot of them human, though?” Dani asked. “I thought you guys only dealt with monsters…”

“Dani,” Alex said gently, yet his voice was unerringly firm, “Herla’s Wild Hunt has been riding for centuries. Even if they were human once, I don’t think they are anymore.”

Dani opened her mouth to respond, but a sudden, fervent howling outside made the words in her throat shrivel up to dust. It was muted, but the wordless pain and anguish in the resounding battle cries and war drums echoed in Dani’s ears, more terrifying than when she’d faced the lone shadowy horseman. The mansion shook, and Dani’s teeth rattled in her skull. 

Magnus rushed to the nearby window. “I thought the Wild Hunt was going to come at night!” Midair, a shadowy wolf-but-not slammed into the glass, startling Magnus, who yelped and scrambled back. Around the mansion, something shimmered faintly, like the kind of sparkly gauzy fabric Dani saw on the prom dresses in snippets of teen sitcoms she’d caught glimpses of on her travels. The window, despite being glass, held strong against the creature’s strong blows and refused to shatter. 

Magnus fumbled at his neck, and in a second, a flashing steel sword appeared in his left hand. He brandished the blade at the window, now half standing. The wolf-but-not snarled and retreated, howling at its shadowy brethren who blotted out the red-orange Boston skyline with black. 

Sam leapt into action, flicking on the bedside lamps and vaulting over the dust-covered bed to flip the switch on the bedroom’s overhead light. “They don’t like light,” Sam surmised when everyone looked at her in confusion. She then gestured at the way Magnus’ sword pulsed with rainbow disco runes. 

“How rude!” Jack the Sword exclaimed in Magnus’ hand. “Everybody loves me! I light up the world with my mere existence!”

Sam rolled her eyes. “As for why they attacked now, at sunset and sundown, shadows stretch.”

“The Wild Hunt’s shadows then had the chance to get bigger and badder, right,” Magnus said. “Good for a sneak attack, not so good for us.”

“Then we shall surprise them right back with the power of strobe lights!” Jack announced. If he had a chest to puff out, Dani bet Jack would have done just that. He then rambled rapid-fire, “Please consult your nearest doctor, physician, or battlefield medic for any concerns regarding photosensitivity. Flashing lights or patterns may trigger seizures in some individuals. Viewer discretion is advised.”

Magnus blinked. “Jack, what?” 

“Oh, and I can sense the paradox better, now that I’ve become more attuned to its presence—”

Dani tensed, suddenly remembering how the sword had somehow tracked her ghost form earlier that day. 

“Okay…you’re not making much sense, Jack. Back to pendant form for you…”

“But señor—”

Jack’s voice immediately cut off as soon as Magnus touched Jack’s pommel to his necklace, morphing into a little stone pendant that to Dani seemed to be carved with a weird “F” symbol.  

“Do…do you think that the Hunt can get in?” Dani asked, chewing on her lip nervously and watching as the shadowy storm brewed. 

“We’ll do everything we can to keep you safe,” Alex promised, pressing Dani to his side protectively. “So long as the protection runes outside hold and we still have light, we should be fine.”

As if the universe wanted to prove Alex wrong, the lights around the room flickered and electricity hummed dangerously through the air. 

“That’s not good,” Dani said faintly. 

Outside, a flurry of voices compounded and chanted over and over, The Hunt is here, The Hunt is here, The Hunt is here!

“We can’t wait until morning for them to leave,” Sam said. “Who knows how much stronger they’ll become with another night and day to grow? They were just wandering shades the past few days. And now they’re suddenly…this.” Her voice slightly shook despite the hardened, resolute look in her eyes. 

The lights flickered again. Then, with a sharp pop, the room plunged into darkness. 

The Hunt is here, The Hunt is here, The Hunt is here!

Everyone cried out in surprise. Dani yelped as  Alex’s comforting hand on her shoulder turned into a vice. “Sam, Magnus! You two good? I’ve got Dani.”

At that moment, Magnus’ entire body lit up with a faint golden-yellow glow, reminding Dani of warm summery fields and sunflowers. She could now see the dimly illuminated outlines of Sam and Alex, tense with weapons drawn. Despite the chaos and danger outside, a sense of peace washed over her, emanating from…

“Magnus?” Dani whispered. For some odd reason, his now-glowing outline and shining eyes paired with the Wild Hunt’s encroaching chill made her think he was a ghost, or like a reanimated corpse back from the dead. His teeth nearly shone through his skull like little pearled nightlights. Now, Dani was half ghost herself, and she was all too familiar with death thanks to her destabilized clone siblings, so it wasn’t the thought of Magnus looking like a ghost that terrified her. Rather, it was the idea of him being dead. 

“Don’t freak out! It’s okay, Dani. It’s just a power I inherited from my dad, Frey. He’s all light and sunshine and stuff, remember?” 

“‘Flower gleam and glow,’ eh, Punzie? You’re the light of my life~” Alex teased. 

Magnus glowed about five times brighter at Alex’s words, hiding his furious blushing behind his hands. Sam laughed despite herself. 

“‘Punzie?’” Dani echoed. “You called him that earlier, but I still don’t get it.”

Alex grinned, but it was a bit strained. “Remind me to show you the masterpiece that is Disney’s Tangled when we finish dealing with this Wild Hunt mess, Dani. The Mouse really cooked on that movie.”

“The…‘The Mouse?’” 

“Later,” Alex promised. For now, Dani took solace in Alex’s words. They would all make it out of this nightmare alive. Dani would learn what “Tangled” and “The Mouse” were. 

“Okay,” Dani said. “Also, does anyone have a plan? I don’t think that this’ll be as simple as doing a bunch of stabby-stabby.”

Sam stepped forward. “I believe I do, but I don’t think ‘Punzie’ here is going to like it very much…”

Sam, Alex, and Dani turned to look at Magnus expectantly. 

Magnus groaned. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me!”

Chapter Text

Sam’s plan had been fairly simple: send out a rather glowy Magnus who would be wielding Jack the Disco Sword as a shadow repellent, and cover Magnus in glow stick bracelets leftover from a Chase Space event earlier that summer. From there, Magnus could try finding King Herla to figure out what his whole deal was. If not that, then wrestle him off his horse to dust him like the men in the story to sow chaos in the Hunt’s ranks. That was all assuming that King Herla could be reasoned with or dusted. Or that the Wild Hunt's leader was, in fact, Herla.   

This was a great theoretical plan, “theoretical” being the operative word. As it stood, the second Magnus stepped outside the rattling front door, Magnus and his light were swallowed up by the darkness. He didn’t scream, and the shadows didn’t pounce, but he was there one second, and then he was just…gone.

“Magnus!” Dani cried, trying to pull out of Alex’s gentle but firm hold. From a nearby window, Dani could see how the Wild Hunt’s storm had kicked up its fervor. 

“We said we’d wait for five minutes,” Alex managed, voice hoarse. With the dull headlamp he sported in the dark of the mansion, Dani couldn’t help but be reminded of the abandoned lighthouse she’d seen once in Portugal. The windows at the top were cracked and barely holding on for a miracle, for the impossible. Something in Alex’s eyes looked similarly cracked as he stared straight ahead at a window, unblinking. He was trying to keep it together, likely for Dani’s sake, but Magnus was still out there in a ghost storm. Alex’s boyfriend was in danger, and there was nothing he could do about it besides waiting. 

“He tied the paracord to his belt for a reason,” Sam added, fiddling with one of the dozen surrounding electric lanterns. The headlamp, lanterns, and paracord had been part of a wilderness survival activity that the Chase Space had hosted before Dani ever arrived in Boston. The offending neon orange paracord sat triple-knotted on the door handle inside the Chase Space. “He’ll tug on it if he needs help.”

Dani bounced on her feet and rocked back and forth, too antsy to stay still. Her hand drifted to her belt, where a new bone steel dagger rested at her hip. Sam had insisted that Dani have a way to defend herself, just in case, which immediately shot her up a few spots in Dani’s good graces. Magnus had looked like he wanted to protest, but let Sam help Dani figure out what weapon would best suit her (admittedly) short stature. When Dani had chimed in that she had experience stabbing people with pocket knives—don’t ask, Minnesota was wild—Magnus had sighed long-sufferingly. 

Even though his protectiveness was nice on most days, Dani was more capable than others realized, even without the ghost powers. She didn’t need help. She never had. 

The door handle jostled outside, the paracord jerking wildly. 

“Magnus!” Alex gasped and rushed to open the door. But before he could unlatch the last deadbolt, the paracord snapped and whipped away into the dark fog like a fiery orange whip. 

And there Alex stood at the threshold, chest heaving. The frayed bit of paracord dangled uselessly from the inside door handle, flapping in the ghostly wind. He screamed and drew his garrote, but Sam pulled him inside and shut the door so her brother couldn’t run headfirst into danger. 

“What are you doing? Sam! Sam, let go! We can still find him—”

Sam held her brother’s arms to his sides. “We need to regroup and focus. Running in like Halfborn during battle practice isn’t going to help.”

“How are you so calm?” Alex exploded, trying to wrench himself away. Alex held firm. “Your friend, my boyfriend, is probably getting torn to shreds out there!”

“I know!” Sam snapped. “I’m trying my best, but we are severely overwhelmed and—”

Sam’s words faded into static as Dani inched away, ghosting into the background without actually turning invisible or intangible. She was used to using her forgettable nature to slip away, after all. At least it would serve her well to sneak out and transform into Phantom to save Magnus. 

Every breath expelled a little cloud of her blue Ghost Sense, rattling her lungs with cold as if she’d been dropped into a frigid East Coast December instead of a Boston summer. Dani could rely on Magnus’ natural sunshine-y Frey-given warmth to thaw her enough, but now that he was out in the thick of the ghostly Wild Hunt, Dani shivered with a chill like she’d never be warm again. 

“Dani! Where are you going? It’s not safe to split up right now.” Sam’s words were laden with concern, but all that did was spark Dani’s temper. 

Maybe, if Dani wasn’t so blinded by rage at her chaotic existence and fear for Magnus’ safety and a million-and-one other things, she would have explained exactly that. Something like, I’m gonna take out my tweenage angst on anything that moves outside! I have glowing ghost powers, so I should be safe! I’ll save Magnus, no biggie!

Spouting any number of excuses would’ve been an intelligent move. However, Dani wasn’t feeling so smart or tactful, so she flipped Sam and Alex a rude gesture with both hands and darted into the nearest room with a lockable door: a bathroom. She locked herself inside, just barely managed to summon the strength to form the bright white rings that turned her into Phantom. Without the extra time the locked door bought her, Dani would've been ghost-toast. She cracked her knuckles and readied herself to intangibly slip through the tiled floor, guestimating where the front door of the mansion was in relation to the bathroom. If she could get the angle just right, she could fly through the dirt and pop up where Magnus—

At the bathroom door, Sam and Alex’s voices overlapped with their furious banging knocks. One asked what in the Nine Worlds Dani was doing—she couldn’t tell who—and the doorknob rattled dangerously. 

Dani didn’t wait to be discovered and dove straight through the floor and into the dirt. Her secret identity as Phantom was practically in shambles, and she’d need to skip town after the whole Wild Hunt mess was over, but a girl could hope that Sam and Alex had a momentary burst of Amity Park-style stupidity and obliviousness. She liked the security the Chase Space had provided, but Dani, on record, wasn’t allowed to have nice things. However, that didn’t mean that others couldn’t. Future kids that Dani would never meet would need a place like the Chase Space and understanding people like Alex and Magnus. 

Dani found herself in the middle of the maelstrom. 

The world had become so pitch black, when Dani kicked off into hovering with ghostly flight, she very well could have just as easily been ten stories or ten inches off the ground. 

Living darkness whipped the hood off her head and stung her body with the hundreds of minuscule rocks and sticks kicked up in its fury. Cold squeezed at her lungs, puff after puff of her Ghost Sense escaping her throat like dozens of little canary birds trying to escape the coal mine. Streak after streak of pale blue Ghost Sense frosted Dani’s lips and were torn away by swirling shadows. 

As her frantic Ghost Sense settled to a few occasional shivery puffs, Dani willed her natural ghostly glowing aura to shine bright, to burn. The nightmarish steeds of the Wild Hunt screeched, and the huntsmen grunted, but the storm only marginally lessened around her little silhouette of security. 

Out of nowhere, a sword swung at her shoulder, followed by at least a dozen arrows after she dodged the blade. Each arrow met its explosive end via Dani's wild, glowing green ecto blasts. 

“MAGNUS!” Dani cried, going intangible at the last second to avoid being cleaved in half by a battle axe that appeared out of the aether. “WHERE ARE YOU?”

Dani willed herself to glow brighter, but she felt herself flagging even as the shades of the Wild Hunt reared back. She lobbed blast after blast of ecto energy into the densest parts of the shadowy storm, only for the darkness to swallow them up seconds later. 

She called Magnus’ name over and over again, growing more and more frantic as she zipped through the darkness and twisted around the blades of the Wild Hunt. 

Then…she saw it! A flash of flickering gold that felt like sunshine incarnate. “Magnus!” Dani half-sobbed, relieved beyond belief. She dove to meet the hazy figure that solidified into Magnus, but then—

A burning pain ripped through Dani’s shoulder. 

She crashed hard, jostling the spectral arrow stuck through her shoulder like the world’s worst shish kebab. Dani tried phasing it out with her intangibility, but the point stayed stubbornly lodged, scraping against the asphalt that Dani now found herself pressed flat to. Another arrow whizzed past her ear, and she flung a weak ecto shield to deflect the spear that threatened to pin her body to the ground like a moth on an insect collector’s corkboard display. 

Green and red swirled blood oozed horribly from her shoulder, but she still managed to remain conscious and fighting, scrambling away on foot since her flight had turned too lopsided. Not looking where she was going, she ran headfirst into something warm and alive and—

“Phantom?” Magnus grunted. His usually stern grey eyes flickered with molten gold. He parried an incoming strike to Dani’s left, pulsing with golden light. “Gods, please tell me you’re on my side.”

“I am, I swear I am!” Dani’s voice cracked. Her eyes widened. “Duck!”

Startled, Magnus did as told, and Dani knocked back a charging horseman with an eye-searing green ectoblast behind Magnus, sending them stumbling into the darkness. The nightmare steed bucked, and the rider screamed. She tried to block out the too-human cries like all the others she’d heard since stepping into the maelstrom. 

“Thanks,” Magnus said breathlessly. He swore and threw up a shimmering golden dome around them as another rain of arrows came crashing down. “Oh…huh. That’s a new power, I guess.”

“Señor, the paradox!” Magnus’ sword exclaimed. “It’s right—”

“That’s not important right now, Jack!” Magnus grunted, sinking to one knee as he still supported the golden dome with an outstretched hand. “Ugh, I don’t know how much longer I can do this...”

“Me…me neither.” Another wave of pain ripped through Dani’s shoulder. She grimaced and tried tugging at the arrow, but the shaft didn’t give. “And any minute, Alex and Sam said they were gonna charge out here and—“ 

“How do you know my friends?” Magnus’ tone turned steely, even as he focused all his strength into fortifying the cracking dome of golden light around them. 

A million thoughts rushed through Dani’s head, lies, half-truths, excuses…and yet, she didn’t voice a single one. She took a deep breath and said, “I’m D—”

All sound was suddenly swallowed, each ragged breath of Dani and Magnus subsumed in an instant almighty hush.

The clatter of incoming weapons ceased. A hunting horn’s blaring cry echoed across shadowy oblivion. The dark mist parted, and the largest horse Dani had ever seen indented the asphalt with each thunderous step. Atop the horse sat a gaunt man cast in shadow, draped in an ornate cloak and riding garb, a tarnished crown nestled in a mess of tangled curls. In his arms lay a small bloodhound with sad eyes and a lolling tongue. The horse stopped moving. Its rider tilted his head and said something in a language unfamiliar to Dani’s ears, rasping. When Dani didn’t respond, he threw his head back to laugh, a rough booming thing, like the hull of a ship scraping against a rocky sandbar. He snapped out of his reverie to make direct eye contact with Dani and spoke in cold, lilting English. 

“Do you know who I am?”

Dani forced herself to act braver than she was and stepped in front of Magnus, who was now straining to uphold his shield. Blood stuck tackily to her black and white hoodie, and she tried not to sway from the burning pain in her shoulder. She chanced a guess as she looked up. “You’re King Herla. The leader of this Wild Hunt.”

The man huffed, “‘Herla’ is what they call me now, eh? In an older tongue, they once called me ‘Herela Cyning.’ Oh, how time marches on. Oh, how we march on.”

“What do you want?” Magnus grunted out. To Dani, it sounded like he wanted to say more, but his words devolved into heavy breathing. When she chanced a look back, his forehead was slick with heavy sweat despite the all-encompassing cold of the surrounding shadows of the Wild Hunt.

“I do not speak with Woden’s rabble. He has done enough already.” 

“‘Woden?’” Magnus coughed. Herla ignored Magnus’ weak question. 

Dani tried asking Magnus’ question for him, and Herla replied, “The new tongue may call him ‘Odin,’ but I am of the old. Now, tell me, little spirit, how long have you wandered alone?”

“Let’s just say I have a lot of ‘Frequent Flyer’ miles,” Dani said distractedly, cataloging her surroundings. The shadows were pressed against Magnus’ shield now, their tendrils attempting to wriggle under the line where the dome met the ground. She needed to get Magnus and herself out of here…

“Your words are new, but I can parse the meaning. You are a wayward little spirit with no home to call her own. Come, child. Join our number, and never shall you be without companion.”

“I dunno what you mean, dude. I have plenty of friends!” Dani really…didn’t. But whatever! Scary ghost guy didn’t need to know that. “By the way, kinda rude to call my buddy Magnus here ‘Woden’s rattle’ or whatever you said.”

Magnus seemed to wheeze in agreement. 

Herla’s horse shifted nervously, and he tugged roughly on the reins with his free hand to steady it. “Rabble. The one-eyed god’s einherjar, his war hounds, his so-called ‘honored dead.’ They  merely fell with a weapon in hand and deemed worthy for glorious purpose at Ragnarok, while the Wild Hunt’s blades and bows were forgotten by both Woden and the dwarf king who tricked us.”

Dani’s eyes widened. Magnus was…dead? No…no! She could still hear his rattling breathing behind her. That admittedly sounded bad, but he was usually so full of light and life! And with his glowy sunshine powers, literally bursting at the seams with life! Dani could’ve sworn she’d seen him discreetly pushing past erratic daisies and dandelions that cropped up in the sidewalk cracks behind him as he walked.

Magnus Chase could not be dead.  

She ignored the phantom curl of her Ghost Sense in her throat. Her voice cracked as she said, “I’m sorry you weren’t treated right when you were alive, King Herla. It wasn’t fair to you or the people you traveled with. But it’s also not fair to take out your anger on people who weren’t even born yet when all that bad stuff happened to you.”     

“The roots of Yggdrasil are deeply entwined with this kingdom on the water, your Boston! The only way to right the wrongs of centuries’ past is to find an entrance and scale the World Tree to Woden’s court in Valhalla! Only then will he see, half-blind as he is. It is our destiny.”

“...‘our?’”

The bloodhound wrapped in Herla’s free arm whimpered and squirmed, trying to wrench out of Herla’s choking hold. Its big, wet eyes looked at Dani forlornly. Although maybe it had just smelled the blood leaking out of the arrow wound at her shoulder.

“Those who have been forgotten, dismissed for so long. The Wild Hunt is not alone in this, and together the trodden upon are made strong.” The shadows whipped and howled around him, wailing bloody murder. “Those who have the power and might impose themselves on the weak, even in death. There were boys on the cusp of manhood who never grew older as a result of the dwarf king’s curse, reduced to a half-life. Scion of Death, join our ranks, and we can take revenge on those who have done us wrong!” His words echoed, all-consuming.

Dani’s thoughts immediately drifted to Vlad Masters. With an entire ghost army behind her, she could easily pummel the more experienced halfa into the ground—he’d learn what it was like to be destabilized, melting into goop. Vlad would wish that he’d never made Dani, and he’d pray that he’d never been born. 

But Dani was better than Vlad, better than Herla. She wasn’t stuck with her past, not that she had much of one to begin with. Dani looked forward, because that’s what she chose to do. Besides, the whole “evil clone” schtick hadn’t worked out well for her when she invaded Danny’s school and stood dutifully at Vlad’s side like a trained dog. Vlad had kicked her to the curb when she was no longer useful, and she realized that involving herself in Vlad’s pain had made hers grow worse.

Vlad had called her a mistake, that she was too young and too feminine to be Danny’s replacement, too free-spirited and chaotic to heel at Vlad’s beck and call. But being human, being alive meant making mistakes and learning from them. She wasn’t a mistake. She was learning, using Vlad as an example of what not to be. 

Not only that, ever the contrarian, Dani wanted to prove Abuelita wrong. She was no diablo, but she sure as hell would fight like one if it meant stopping Herla.

At that moment, something inside Dani seemed to shift. “I know your story, Herla.” Dani’s voice came out strained and hoarse. She didn’t know how much longer she could retain consciousness, much less her ghost form, thanks to her wound. “You had a wife you loved. You led your people as best you could. You were a man of your word when faced with an impossible deal with a magical being. Where’s your honor, now? You said it wasn’t fair that young men suffered because of your deal with the dwarf king, but now you force them to fight again?”

Magnus added roughly, “I don’t know how many gods you’ve fought, but the ones I’ve faced weren’t easy to take down, if at all. I challenged Loki himself to a flyting, and my friends and I barely survived. Do you really think you can take on all of Asgard at once, plus every einherjar in Valhalla? You’d be letting your people down again.” 

The ghostly storm around them seemed to slow at Magnus’ words, their pained howls slowly shifting to rushing whispers like a river cascading into the rocks at the end of a waterfall. 

For once, Herla acknowledged Magnus. Herla pounded his chest, unintentionally jerking his horse’s head since his fist held its reins. “I am a king! I will be respected as such! It is our destiny to avenge the lives we were robbed of. My wife and people died thinking I had forsaken them. My legacy was tarnished for the whims of a magical being! I have been reduced to a cautionary tale throughout the ages, recounted in less than two breaths. It is not fair.”

The bloodhound in Herla’s arms keened, whimpering lowly. He roughly petted a well-worn path down the fur on its back. It didn’t settle.

“Tell me the name of one of your men,” Dani suddenly said.

“What?” Herla seemed taken aback.

“Or one of the boys,” she amended. “Any of them who follow you. Who are they?”

Herla stayed resolutely silent. His breath didn’t hitch—he hadn’t needed such a mortal action in a long time. He turned his head away, maybe in shame.

“Or your wife’s name,” Dani pressed, now seeing double. She steadied herself against Magnus, who seemed remarkably underwhelmed by her presence as Phantom, taking the weirdness in stride. He at least didn’t take the chance to stab her in the gut. “Who was she? How did you two meet? What was her laugh like? What color were her eyes? What—”

“I DO NOT REMEMBER!” he roared. Then softer, more broken, “I…I do not remember. What sort of king am I?”

The shadowy whirlwind finally drifted to a standstill, creating a more defined border between them and the outside world. The dark fog parted enough for individual horsemen, wolf-like hunting hounds, and previously unseen hunting birds to be made clear, standing at attention all around Herla. And now Dani could see the stars for the first time that night, no shining moon hanging amongst them. It was a new moon, Dani realized, its illuminated side faced away from the Earth, nearly invisible. The lunar cycle would soon begin anew.

“You’re a person who got dealt a rough hand,” Dani said, taking a few brave steps toward Herla, and out of Magnus’ protective golden bubble. She gradually elevated with shaky ghostly flight until she was just a few paces away, eye-to-eye. “So are the people you now lead in this Wild Hunt. You travel on and on and on without stopping, like you’re running away from the past, like it’ll change your fate. But what happened can’t be changed, Herla. I think it might be time for you to move on.” 

“The other forsaken ones had promised me—”

“Do you really want to keep doing all this for eternity?” Dani interrupted. “That’s a really long time.”

The bloodhound squirmed in Herla’s hold once more, its too-big puppy paw slapping the top of Herla’s bracers. 

From behind Dani, Magnus quoted, “You were given ‘a small bloodhound, to be carried in arms, strictly forbidding any one of Herla’s whole company to dismount until the dog should leap forward from his bearer.’ That’s how the story went, right?” He had finally dispelled his shield, his eyes glassy with exhaustion. Jack was still held loosely in his hand, blessedly silent for once.

Dani shivered. She always forgot how scary accurate Magnus’ memory could be. If she hadn’t believed him before about his “Harvard or Yale” comment, she had no shadow of a doubt now.  

“I am not ready to let go,” Herla said. “I suspect few of us will ever be.”

“Then what’s your plan?” Dani asked, tense. This was where things could go from tentatively looking up for once to horribly awful.

Herla looked to his men, the outlines of their faces still hazy with few distinct features. “As you said, little spirit, we shall ‘move on.’ This Wild Hunt once stepped into the Wye River to avoid conflict for a few centuries. I realize now I do not wish to fight for the sake of more powerful beings than I. We do not want to be the pawns of forsaken gods. We shall leave the conflict once more.” The men around him rumbled agreement, their horses’ hooves stamping the ground in lieu of applause. “Your Charles River shall serve as substitute for the Wye.” 

Dani just nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

Herla inclined his head as the shadows began to slowly disperse around them. “You may join us, little spirit, wise orator that you are. You are strong in more manners than one.” He gestured at the arrow still lodged in her shoulder.

“Um…no thank you, King Herla.”

He laughed hollowly. “I realize now that I have not been a king for a long time, little spirit.” Without warning, he reached forward with his free hand, and Dani braced for a strike, only for Herla to swiftly remove the arrow in one swift gesture. It faded into nothing as soon as his hand made contact and his now-empty fist returned to his horse’s reins. “However, I do have the power to begin amending for the hurt I have caused. Although it will leave a scar, you will have the mark of a true warrior, little spirit.”

Dani’s shoulder still throbbed, and she knew she’d need some bandages, but Dani no longer felt like she was going to fully die. And yes, she got the sense that it’d leave a gnarly scar, but it would at least be something so uniquely, horribly Dani’s. It would be a mark from a life she decided the path for, no matter the cost. 

Herla guided his horse to the front of the Wild Hunt and silently led them down the darkened street and off to the distant banks of the Charles River. Dani caught one last glimpse of the bloodhound in Herla’s arms, its drooping head nestled in the crook of his elbow. For now, it did not leap forward. Dani didn’t know if it ever would, or if Herla and his men would let it.

Between one blink and the next, the Wild Hunt was gone, not even a war cry or thunderous hoofstep left in their wake. Dani liked to imagine she could hear the far-off splashing of several bodies entering the Charles River. She hoped that the modern-day pollution wouldn’t bother them too much. At least the dead couldn’t get more dead than they already were, right? 

Then, all at once, light and sound returned to the world. The last of the shadowy fog cleared, and once-dead streetlights and homes flickered to life. Facing the complete opposite direction from Dani and Magnus, Sam and Alex stood back to back, wearing an assortment of glowstick jewelry and camping headlamps. They whipped their heads around, startled at the sudden lack of shadowy fog. Alex wound his garrote tighter in his hands while Sam’s spear dipped in her grip. 

“Hi, guys,” Magnus coughed. He smiled and waved weakly. "Lovely night, isn't it?"

Chapter Text

“MAGNUS!” Sam and Alex shouted, running over. 

Magnus attempted to meet them halfway, but his knees buckled on the third step. Dani zipped over to support him, reminding him to take it easy; surprisingly, he listened. Hovering a few inches off the ground to match his height worked well enough until his arm brushed her bad shoulder, making her wince.

Alex stowed his garrote mid-run and collided with Magnus first. Dani slipped intangibly out from underneath Magnus’ arm and watched as Alex looked over Magnus’ exhausted form. Between cussing out his boyfriend and thanking a bunch of people Dani couldn’t remember, Alex figured that Magnus could do with a few Band-Aids and his clothes could do with fewer rips, but otherwise, he looked alright. Sam sighed in relief and kept a watchful eye over their reunion and Dani, but didn’t point her spear at her ghostly form, so she counted that as a win.

When Alex pulled away from planting a kiss on a dazed (but happy) Magnus’ lips, Sam finally said, “Magnus, I’m glad you’re alive—”

“Thanks—?”

“—but we have more pressing matters to attend to. Dani ran off somewhere just after your paracord snapped, and we don’t know where she went! She has little fighting experience, so—”

Dani suddenly found the scuffed pavement very interesting.

“Shit,” Magnus hissed, trying to pull himself out of Alex’s hold, who was more focused on making sure Magnus didn’t collapse more than anything. “We need to find—”

“—and what happened with the Wild Hunt? It disappeared!” Sam now held her spear in a death grip, using it to gesture in a very-not-safe-for-Dani sort of way.

Thus, Dani took that as her cue to quickly and quietly start getting the hell outta dodge while everyone else was distracted by Magnus catching them up on the Herla situation.

“And just where do you think you’re going?” Alex asked, startling Dani just as she flickered out of the visible spectrum. In surprise, she became solid and visible once more and floated back down a few feet, not used to getting caught. 

Dani swallowed roughly, tucking her face further into her hoodie’s hood. “I, uh…you guys don’t like me and think I’m evil? So I’m leaving before bad things get worse?”

“I think you’re pretty good, considering I’d be dead-dead from Herla if you hadn’t shown up to save my hide,” Magnus volunteered, stowing Jack back into his pendant form despite vehement protests. “Phantom, I think you might be able to help us find Dani if you use your walking-through-walls power—it seems really helpful.” 

Dani didn’t have a moment to reflect on how genuine Magnus sounded or why he said “dead-dead” like that before Sam pointed out, “Wait, why does your voice sound different, Phantom? I thought you were more…echoey.”

Dani cursed to herself. She’d been too tired from dealing with the Wild Hunt to remember to slip her voice into a more ghostly and mysterious tone. Dani made a flippant gesture with her hand and said, more spooky this time, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I have always sounded like this.”

“You just changed your voice,” Sam deadpanned. 

“Did not!”

“There it is again!”

Dani cleared her throat and began shakily floating off into the night sky. “Absolutely not. Goodbye, everyone, see ya never-ever-again!” She forced herself not to look back. Tears would be free game once Dani got high enough up in the cloud layer, though.

“Phantom,” Alex said sternly, “get back down here. Please.”

Dani immediately broke her self-imposed rule and glanced back. Alex’s dull headlamp made it look like Alex had a third eye that stared straight into Dani’s soul. He had a hand outstretched and just this…this look in his eyes like he was trying to say a million and one things. Mixed in with hope and pleading was this sort of desperation that didn’t often cross Alex’s face. Normally, so unbothered around new people encroaching on his space, seeing Alex like this toward Phantom felt completely foreign to Dani. 

Did…did Alex know? Somehow, Dani felt more raw, more exposed than when the Red Huntress—Valerie—had caught her mid-transformation during Dani’s return to Amity Park. Maybe it’s because she actually knew Alex and hadn’t made a temporary truce with a ghost hunter to find Danny Phantom to get his help with stabilizing her once-goopy form. 

“C’mon, I…I just wanna talk, alright?” Alex worried his lip, like he didn’t know how to say what he wanted to say next. “Like…like I said earlier, it’s okay to not be okay. You just faced a storm of terrifying, shadowy ghosts. You’re allowed to be ‘not fine,’ chiquita.”

And then the dam broke, and so did Dani. She began heaving these ugly, ugly sobs, tracking little lines through the grime on her grubby face. Snot dribbled down her chin, then smeared across her hoodie sleeve as she drifted back down to Earth like a balloon that had lost all its helium. 

Her feet pressed flat to the ground, and tears still rolling down her cheeks, she looked at everyone in turn. First, Sam with her soft knitted brows and tucked-away spear, then still supported by Alex, Magnus with his misty eyes, and finally Alex. He searched Dani’s face for something, and Dani could only pray he knew what he was looking for.

Worst came to worst, she could always run after Herla and dive into the Charles River with the rest of the Wild Hunt.

Dani took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and let a bright ring of light form at her torso, which wasn’t too hard, considering how exhausted she was. The ring split in two, one traveling down to her feet and sputtering out once it brushed the pavement, the other stuttering around her face before making that deciding final push.

She still didn’t open her eyes, squeezing them even tighter and clenching her hands into fists at her sides. “My name is Dani Phantom. I’m half-human and half-ghost. I…I’m good, I prom-promise.” Her breath hitched a sob. 

Dani waited for the fallout, the exclamations of disgust, the cries of “Diablo! Diablo!” but no one said a word. For a moment, Dani thought that a ghost or god or something else with a cosmic wrench to throw her way had grown impossibly big and pressed a fat finger on Earth’s axis to stop it spinning, halting time in the process. Then she was wrapped in a crushing embrace. Dani finally cracked her eyes open to see that the world hadn’t ended. Instead, Alex and Magnus’ arms wrapped around her so tightly, so securely, like they were afraid she was going to fly off again. They whispered assurances and acceptance, but for the half-life of Dani, she couldn’t parse a single word. Out of the corner of her eye, Dani could see Sam smiling softly, hand pressed to her heart. It was fair enough she didn’t join the mushy-gushy feelings corner—they hadn’t known each other for even a full day. 

“You don’t hate me?” Dani’s wet voice was muffled against Alex’s sweater vest. “Even though I’m a freak of nature that shouldn’t exist?”

“We could never hate you,” Alex promised.

Dani squeezed Magnus and Alex once and tried carefully extracting herself from where she was pressed between them, only to be pulled back in by Magnus, who seemed to have gained something of a second wind. “Ah-ah-ah! You are not leaving this group hug until you acknowledge that we care about you, Dani. All are welcome at the Chase Space, and that includes you—half-ghost, half-human, half-whatever.”

Dani’s tears soaked into Magnus’ shirt as she angled her hug towards him. His natural warmth kept the night’s chill at bay. “Thank you,” she said, “thank you for letting me be me.”

The hug dispersed, but Magnus kept a steadying hand on Dani’s shoulder. “You’re not going to run away again, are you? At least not until we get everyone patched up and get some sleep?”

Dani harshly rubbed the tears from her eyes. “Okay, Mag—”

“Señores y señorita, I have located the paradox!” Jack said as he appeared out of nowhere. He announced this with a grin, despite not having a face to make such an expression. His blade was inches from Dani's face, and she had a feeling that if he could grin, he would. “A being who is not quite dead and not quite alive!

“Someone’s late to the party…” Dani muttered sourly. 

Jack didn’t seem to hear Dani and continued, surprisingly serious, “But I applaud you for acting as a paradox in another way.” Dani ignored the fact that Jack very much did not have hands to applaud with. “You defeated a foe without fighting. The best weapon is one that is never wielded in the first place. We are kindred spirits—I am a sword best used when let go. You are a weapon that wasn’t designed to be one.”

Dani gulped, mouth going dry at Jack’s words. Did he know? Did he know that someone—that Vlad—designed her? If so, what did Jack mean?

Everyone stared at Jack. 

“Hm. Cryptic words of encouragement are not well-received. Duly noted. I…am going to sleep now.” With that, Jack flickered into a white stone pendant and latched himself to Magnus’ necklace, hanging lifelessly. 

In the distance, an owl cooed. A sickly warm summer wind rustled the leaves of nearby trees gently. Decades-old brownstone buildings like the Chase Space mansion groaned under the starry night sky. 

“We should head inside,” Sam suggested, stifling an impressive yawn with her fist. “Then we can deal with everything in the morning. Jid and Bibi think I’m having an AP Literature summer homework-study-sleepover at a school friend’s house. I think I said I was hanging out with Marianne Shaw, again? I'm honestly not sure at this point...”

Alex snorted, “Nerd. You have summer homework?”

“Well, Jid and Bibi think I do, at least. What they don’t know won’t hurt them. Besides, I did study literature with my friends—learning about the story of King Herla hands-on must count for something, I think.”

Another little wave of anxiety lifted from Dani’s shoulders. If someone so seemingly put-together like Sam was also keeping supernatural secrets away from people she was close to, then maybe Dani herself wasn’t so bad. 

Compared to the Wild Hunt chaos of the past day, the Chase Space’s too-quiet winding halls and gently creaking floorboards felt like a blessing. All injuries were addressed and dressed in the buzzing incandescent glow of the old lighting in the kitchen. Dani, Alex, Magnus, and Sam’s little circle of four blearily passed around a bottle of painkillers like it was a liquor bottle at a more stereotypical teenage nighttime get-together she'd seen on passing TV screens. Dani snorted at the image, but really, the most stereotypical and normal teenager-y thing that happened that late evening was everyone staying up ridiculously late and fighting against drooping eyelids and sleep. Ultimately, after the nightmare that was the Wild Hunt, no one was too keen on finding out what actual nightmares they’d have that night.

That’s how Dani found herself staring up at the popcorn ceiling from the bed of a slightly dusty but still cozy guest room in the Chase Space. 

Dani had jumped at the chance for a warm shower with shampoo and hair conditioner—a rare luxury for her. Her hair hadn’t been harshly pulled back in a rough but practical ponytail stuffed halfway into a worn beanie. Instead, Dani's loose, dampish hair clung to her forehead and clumped around the plush pillow she clung to as her thoughts drifted.  

Dani and the older teens each had their own rooms, all in the same hall for the night, not that it stopped Magnus from trying and failing to silently tiptoe to Alex’s room. Dani couldn’t help but overhear him hoarsely mutter something about wolves and today reminding him of “that night, about three years ago.” Alex had muttered something back, and two sets of footsteps padded behind Alex’s squeaky door. Whatever that conversation was about, Dani wouldn’t pry. 

To Dani, it admittedly felt weird to have a real bedroom to sleep in. And no, unreserved motel rooms accessed via ghostly intangibility and invisibility didn’t count. (Those rooms tended to smell like mold and creepy-crawlies.) And even for the past two weeks in Boston, she drifted in and out of the Chase Space like a, well, ghost. She never dared to take a proper bed because if she did, she was entertaining the idea that people actually liked having her around. 

For a while, Abuelita had given Dani her son’s old bedroom and draped a hand-sewn quilt over the top of the tiny, lumpy bed. Abuelita liked Dani well enough, pinching her cheeks como una manzana and making mountains of home-cooked meals. Despite little kindnesses like these, Dani’s experience in Mexico hadn’t been the best. And yet, Dani had noticed and had tried to ignore Abuelita’s pained glances at faded photos of a very young man in some kind of military uniform slinging an arm around an Abuelita with fewer smile lines yet a larger grin than Dani had ever seen. Dani wasn’t quite a replacement, but rather a balm to a pain Abuelita herself couldn’t fully articulate, much less Dani. 

Dani’s new-old pajama set from the Chase Space’s donation box was one of the most comfortable things she’d ever worn, too. She didn’t quite know what to do when faced with yet another sign of permanence. The loose-ish pajamas were frustratingly perfect for Dani with their eye-bleeding pink-teal-purple galaxy print flannel pants. The matching soft tee was the cherry on top of the cozy sundae with the phrase “I need space!” printed under a pink-scale cartoony Saturn with sunglasses and a happy grin. 

Not only grabbing that, when Magnus, Sam, and Alex were turned around, Dani had also snuck over to the donation box full of toys meant for the younger kids at the Chase Space. She noticed and pocketed an unlabeled plastic baggie with a few black and white Star Wars figurines that’d been tucked on the top, purely because she could now possibly entertain the idea of owning more than just the bare essentials. What were some small toys when compared to an entire set of pajamas? 

A few months back, Dani had snuck into the back storage room of a dollar store to pick through the merchandise that couldn’t be sold to grab some non-perishable food and water bottles. While there, she stumbled upon a box of unsold cheap plastic toys, all with misprinted wall-eyed expressions and chipped paint. She picked up a figurine of an off-brand Stormtrooper from Star Wars, its hollow black t-shaped visor halfway smudged up the unusual crest on top of its helmet. Dani had just learned what Star Wars was from another street kid at a nearby park, her face burning when they teased her for not knowing what “Use the Force, Luke!” was from when they had narrowly avoided getting caught by the cops and needed a bit of luck to get away. The Stormtrooper, identical to all the other ones in the bin, didn’t look like the ones the street kid had pointed to on their faded Star Wars: A New Hope t-shirt. 

Way back when, Dani didn’t have the space for toys and food, so she had opted for the more practical option. Now, however, she could hold on tight to the better-quality trooper figurines than what she had seen at the dollar store. There were three troopers in total: one with blue markings and an oversized pauldron plus an armored skirt, one with orange patterns and a distinct visor, and one that was completely monochromatic with no unique markings of their own. Maybe she could paint her own designs on that shiny-clean figurine one day, with nail polish or Sharpie, or something. But still, Dani loved them all, and they now stood guard on the nearby nightstand.

And then, even though Dani’s fingernails were bitten to nubs, unlike all the sparkly and pretty and polished nails Dani had seen in teen magazines tossed carelessly into alley dumpsters, they were free from most of the usual dirt that semi-permanently caked them.

Aside from the flashes of memory of the worst of the Wild Hunt, that choking darkness, Dani felt like any other tweenage girl for once in her short existence. 

Dani was clean. She was not running. Dani just…was.  

She sighed into the dusty air, particles of fluff dancing in the soft glow of the ancient bedside lamp that she would let shine until morning, just because she could. Next to the lamp and trooper figurines, the Fenton Thermos Danny had sent her pulsed with green light that was muted by her worn beanie draped over the top. Her most prized possessions were still within arm's reach if she needed them. 

To settle herself into sleep, Dani took a slow, deep breath in, but when she exhaled, a puff of blue mist curled into the air, dancing with the dust. 

Ghost Sense. 

Dani rolled off the bed with a yelp and was on her feet in seconds, readying an electric green ectoblast in her palm without transforming into Phantom. 

A dark white-and-black blur then smashed through her window, scattering glass across Dani’s room. Based on the resounding cries, down the hall, Alex, Magnus, and Sam had been alerted. In a panic, Dani lobbed her weak ectoblast at the steadily rising mass on the floor. 

Faster than Dani could process, the suddenly upright figure shrieked and shot out a palm to summon a sleek green ecto-shield, absorbing her energy in an instant. Then, the figure doubled over, wheezing. 

At just that moment, Alex, Magnus, and Sam came barreling into Dani’s room, still decked in pajamas and wielding their various weapons. 

“Godsdamnit!” Alex swore, yanking Dani towards him by the scruff of her t-shirt. “Dani, get back!”

Stunned, Dani fell back, stumbling over her feet while staring at the doubled-over figure. A mass of striking white and black feathered wings exploded from their back, mantling in surprise and obscuring their face in shadow. It took her a moment to process in the poor lighting and chaos, but when Dani studied the familiar lines of a too-sharp face she knew from reflections in puddles and storefront windows, the burning neon green eyes that served equally as a poisonous warning I-am-dangerous-stay-back and a siren’s call like-knows-like, I-you-we-are-here, she froze. 

“Danny?”

His wings relaxed when his name was called. He took a shaky step forward, but hesitated at the first footfall, his silvery-white boots crunching against the scattered glass. Green and red bloody scratches littered his weary face, and his bloodshot, watery eyes darted off to the side before he summoned the courage to face Dani head-on. 

He suddenly tipped forward, and Alex, Magnus, and Sam’s weapons raised all around Dani in tandem, enveloping her in a protective semicircle, quickly closing in. Then he righted himself on trembling legs, leaning on the nearby bed frame for support. 

“Hi, Dani,” Danny Fenton-Phantom said lightly, voice faint. “I…I like your shirt.”

And then he passed out. 

Chapter Text

Because Danny was apparently needlessly dramatic (and no, Dani could not relate, shut up), he came to about ten minutes after he fainted. However, those ten minutes while he was conked out were certainly not peaceful, filled with confused shouting and arguing and explanations from Dani about hers and Danny’s Iris Message conversation a few hours prior. 

It was a blur to Dani, but the conversation went a little something like this:

Alex, Magnus, and Sam: Hello??? Who is this???

Dani: My brother. Danny. Different spelling. I talked to him via Iris Message. He’s also a ghost.

Alex, Magnus, and Sam: ???

And etc., blah-blah-blah, more shouty-shouty. Dani was hardly fazed at this point. Facing down someone as intimidating as Herla and his Wild Hunt without peeing one’s pants would do that to a person. 

Navigating the scattered glass over to Danny was another beast entirely. Sam had been sensible and enough of a quick-thinker to shove on her sneakers as soon as she heard the window shatter, even if the tongue tabs on the top were mostly crumpled and wound through her laces. She stayed with Dani, who transformed into Phantom to take advantage of the built-in boots, while Alex and Magnus quickly ducked out to grab their own shoes, cleaning supplies, and various medical stuff. 

“So…this is your brother, then? He looks exhausted,” Sam said as she and Dani heaved Danny onto the bed and onto his side so his wings wouldn’t be in the way. Sam was blessedly calm throughout the whole ordeal, which made Dani’s head spin. Most people would still be screaming their heads off while waiting for their 911 call to connect, which Sam also hadn’t dialed. Dani figured that she’d looked at Danny’s sprawling wings and his general supernaturalness and thought, Yeah, that’s probably not a good idea… 

“Sure,” Dani deflected. “But more importantly, he flew all the way from New York, the overprotective idiot.” She lightly floated in the air next to Danny and hesitantly pressed the back of her palm against Danny’s forehead. When her gloved hand made contact, his tense expression, even in sleep, relaxed. White rings of light bisected his midsection, sputtered into existence, splitting once before reforming and disappearing. “I’m safe, Danny. You are, too. I promise.”

Slowly, eventually, Danny transformed, his black and white Phantom jumpsuit giving way to sneakers, blue jeans, and an obnoxiously orange t-shirt that read “Camp Half-Blood” circling a picture of a winged horse. 

Once Magnus and Alex came back, all four of them made short work of the glass on the floor and Danny’s injuries.

“What’s with the wings?” Magnus asked Dani as he worked on removing the last of the glass shards from Danny’s arm with tweezers. He hovered a glowing hand over Danny’s body, and the smaller cuts littering it lit up in tandem, slowly sealing shut. “I’ve only read basic human, elf, and dwarf anatomy books, so I don’t know how I can help if there’s a problem—”  

Danny shot bolt upright with a sharp gasp, sending everyone a foot in the air. He shoved Magnus back, and Danny watched in shock as his cuts healed before his very eyes.

Magnus swore. “I know you’re a ghost, but maybe try not to spook us, dude!”

Danny rubbed at his eyes, his brows knitting when he noticed the bandages wrapped around his hand. “Will?” he asked groggily before his tone turned sharp. “What are you—? Oh. You’re not Will.”

“I’m Magnus, the guy who healed you.”

A puff of Danny’s Ghost Sense curled out of his mouth, and Danny gripped the bed’s comforter in a vice. “You’re also dead,” he accused.

“Herla was right, then?” Dani blurted, stepping forward. “You’re…you’re dead?”

“Magnus and I are einherjar,” Alex interjected, enunciating the word. His eyes softened when they briefly met Dani’s, like an unspoken apology. “We are the honored dead and sorta-revived warriors of the Norse war god, Odin, in his eternal army. Sam is the Valkyrie who saw our bravery in death and brought us to Valhalla. It’s…not easy to take it all in, I know.” His words painted a powerful, awe-inspiring image, but the effect was somewhat ruined by his silky pink pajamas with pearly green buttons and piping along the pressed collar. 

Danny’s head shot up at the mention of Sam’s name, but he relaxed when he caught sight of who Alex was talking about. The disappointment in his expression was obvious to Dani—he was thinking about his Sam, his friend, from Amity Park. 

“And you’re not gonna attack me or Dani?” His eyes flashed dangerously.

“Not unless you attack first,” Sam answered honestly, readjusting the long sleeves of her sleep shirt. Dani suspected that she might have stowed a small knife or two under them. “I would hope that you would extend us the same courtesy?” 

“I like you guys already,” Danny decided with a wry grin and stifled yawn. He turned to Dani and said, “You picked some good friends, Dani.”

Dani blushed at his fond tone and ducked her head. 

Danny’s eyes suddenly went wide, and he tried to sit up in the bed, but ended up dazed. He swore when Dani instinctively wrestled him back down. He needed to chill!

“Stop it! Let me up! I just remembered the shadow spirit things you mentioned—where are they? Am I too late?”

“Dani talked down their leader,” Magnus told Danny, pride coloring his words as he crossed over to Dani and pulled her floating form away from Danny with a careful hand on her shoulder. Danny stopped struggling and trying to bat her away with his unwieldy wings. “The entire Wild Hunt retreated with no sign of wanting to come back. They were tired of fighting. I was right next to Dani the whole time.”

Danny opened and closed his mouth a few times, unsure how to respond. He finally settled on a weary exhale. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you needed me, Dani.”

“I had it handled,” Dani huffed, her glowing ghostly aura flashing. She shrugged off Magnus’ hand in the process. “Besides, you literally left New York as soon as I called. You flew all the way here in the dark for hours, dummy. It’s fine.”

“But—”

“I. Am. Tired. We all are,” Dani said pointedly, gesturing around the room. “We’ll talk in the morning, okay?”

“Agreed,” Sam added before Danny or anyone else could protest or add any other horrifying mythology-related revelations. “I don’t think that now is the best time to have such discussions. We’ll speak over breakfast.” 

Dani continued, emboldened by Sam’s blatant support, “And take my bed, Danny. I’ll get you some PJs and find somewhere else to sleep.”

“Dani—”

“I am not afraid to Soup you with a Fenton Thermos, dude!” Dani totally was, but she hid her fear with her rising volume. She didn’t even know if she could Soup Danny, so she gritted her teeth and clenched her fists.

Danny’s wings puffed up like a startled pigeon, but he didn’t argue back. Dani soon shooed Magnus, Sam, and Alex out into the hall and phased through the floors of the mansion to grab the first pajama-adjacent items she could find that she thought might fit Danny. She wasn’t cruel enough to leave him to sleep in the jeans he’d arrived in. She knew firsthand how much that sucked. As a slight afterthought, Dani grabbed a pair of kitchen scissors from the knife block to make room for Danny’s wings in the shirt. Again, she wasn’t that cruel. 

When she arrived back at the room that was hers for all of maybe an hour, Dani caught the tail end of an Iris Message call, the hazy rainbow disappearing as soon as Danny stowed away a small crystal prism and pen-sized flashlight into his pocket. “…I promise I’m fine. Bye, Nico…”

“Boo,” Dani announced her presence, floating over to the bed and chucking the ball of clothes at Danny, who grunted upon impact. More carefully, she handed the kitchen scissors directly to Danny, who looked up at her in curiosity. “You’re half-chicken, buddy,” Dani explained. “Even I can see you need to make some, uh, modifications to your clothes. See ya in the morning, man. Byeeee~”    

When Dani was literally halfway through the door, Danny’s mouth finally caught up with his brain. “Dani, wait—”

She intangibly poked her neck and head through the wooden panels of the door, smack in the middle. “What.”

“Can you stay for a bit?”

“We can talk in the morning, like Sam said. I need to find a new room. I wanna sleep, man.”

“Please, Dani?”

“Why?” Dani could sense her resolve failing. She was beginning to understand why other people seemed to soften when she wanted something. Danny’s and her eyes went all round and sad, like a kicked puppy’s, and the sheepish grin was the crowning jewel. Wait. Why was Dani comparing herself to a puppy? She wasn’t that cute or pitiful, thanks. 

“I, uh, need some help with cutting up the shirt and stuff. I’m still kinda new at the whole ‘wing thing.’” Danny laughed awkwardly and scratched the back of his neck. Dani frowned—she recognized it as a nervous tic because she often did it too.

“You can sleep in your orange shirt. Or without one. You’re a guy, so it’s whatever. You just wanna talk to me without the others here!” Dani accused.

“Yeah, kinda,” Danny admitted. 

Dani was so surprised by the genuine response, she fully entered the room. “Fine. Then talk.”

“It’s nice not yapping at a floating head,” Danny joked. Dani immediately spun on her heel to leave, but Danny quickly apologized, almost frantically. “Sorry, sorry. Humor…humor is how I cope, y’know?”

Dani huffed and sat cross-legged midair. Sweat dripped down her forehead from maintaining her ghost form for so long while still so drained from her encounter with the Wild Hunt, but it was worth it to loom over Danny. 

“I like your new outfit,” he offered. “Are the boots good for stomping?”

Dani smiled despite herself. “Thanks, and yeah. They are good for stomping. It’s at least better than what Vlad gave me.”

“Anything would be. That Fruit Loop royally sucks.”

“Yeah, and the sky is blue and the grass is green. Way to point out the obvious.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Danny laughed at himself. “And you’re still…stable?”

Dani froze. Her memories trickled back to before the Ecto Dejecto, when he was seconds away from dissolving into nothing more than a puddle of green goop. Her face had half-melted into an amorphous mass, making her truly look like the monster she sometimes felt she was. And yet…

“I haven’t melted into sludge since the last time we saw each other, if that’s what you’re asking. And even if I was destabilizing, healthcare in America is bad enough as it is. I don’t know how well they’d take a ghost girl floating into the neighborhood pharmacy and going, ‘Ah, yes, get me the right kind of goop that won’t make me into goop and more dead than I already am.’”

Danny fully snorted at that, caught off guard. “It’s good that you’re not goop.”

“I would hope you’d think that, dude.”

“But shouldn’t you maybe detransform and take a rest, Dani? You look—”

“Like I’m dead on my feet? A dead girl walking? Like I need to ‘sleep’ with some fishies—“

“Tired.” Danny’s simple, no-nonsense answer felt like a gut punch. And then there was the kicker: “I’m worried about you.”

Dani’s shoulders shook with silent laughter, the idea so ridiculous, her body couldn’t even force an aborted giggle. “Man, and here I thought I was the funny one! Guess the original will always one-up the copy, huh?”

“Wait-wait-wait. Hold on. Is that really what you think?” Danny’s voice bordered on sick horror with a pained note. “That you’re…you’re just a ‘copy?’”

“Yes! Your copy.” Dani whispered brokenly, each word crashing into the next like the bubbles in a shaken-up soda pop bottle strained against the cap, “I’m weird! I’m a freak! How do you explain suddenly having two Dannys in one place? You don’t! Without you, I would not exist! Do you have any idea what that’s like? My entire existence is based on you—I was meant to be you, but better. But I’m not! And I never will be!”

The Original tried to speak up, but Dani steamrolled right past. 

“Why do you think I hardly ever called you?”

“I don’t know!” he finally bit back, a similar fire burning in his eyes as in Dani’s. It was similar, but not the same. “I’m not you, Dani! I have no idea what goes on in your dumb head!”

Dani recoiled, as if slapped.

The Original never raised his voice without reason, Dani had learned once upon a time in a mansion’s basement, buried deep in central Wisconsin. “My dear Daniel cares deeply for his loved ones,” Vladimir Masters had once said, “He would never raise his voice at them, not unless they were in danger—truly admirable, I must say. His loyalty and respect for them burn through his very core, running deep in every beat of his heart, just as you are loyal to me. Now, repeat…” Dani had tripped through the words alongside her clone brethren, their tongues still slick with ectoplasmic decanting fluid.

The point was, Danny cared about her. It was just as he’d said in their Iris Message, stated overtly in that little “Love you” sign-off from his letter delivered by Hermes. But you had to give something up in order to be respected, even more to be loved, right? Jokes with Magnus and Alex, or helping Abuelita with her chores, or a million other little things. She hadn’t done anything for Danny, and was even a time and resource sink with no payoff for him, so she still didn’t know why—

“Do I need to have a reason to care about you, Dani?”

Dani’s stupid-stupid dumb brain couldn’t process the question.

“I love you, Dani,” he eventually said, like it was an unshakable, fundamental truth of the universe. “Unconditionally, as your friend, or ‘cousin,’ or brother, or whatever you want me to be. You don’t even have to like me, and I’ll still care about you.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t have to.”

Dani ran her gloved hands through her white hair, pulling and tugging at the strands as if the pain would ground her better than gravity itself. Dragging her hands from her hair to her face, she then let out a pathetic little whine mixed with a groan muffled into her palms, but Danny just continued to calmly sit on the bed with his feathered wings shifting serenely around him. 

“How are you like…like this?” Dani complained, gesturing frantically. “You’re so good at being…being good!”

He tilted his head to the side, confused. “I’m…I’m really not, though?” 

That little hesitation, that little admission, is what did it for Dani. In an instant, gone was a tired and floating Phantom, replaced by an even more exhausted Dani, barreling into Danny for a torpedo-like hug. He was surprised at first, arms flinging wide, before both them and his wings circled around Dani, stupidly comfortable.

“Stupid Perfect McPerfect, knowing the right stuff to say,” Dani yawned as she clung tighter to Danny’s torso like a needy koala. He hugged her back just as tight.

“Dude, you have no idea how many mistakes I make on a daily basis. You just haven’t seen me make them since you’ve only seen me in person for maybe four hours total in your entire life, if that.”

“Vlad preprogramed me n’ the others with recordings of your fighting style and how you act n’ stuff…”

Danny involuntarily shivered, and for a moment, Dani thought she had ruined the peace between them so soon. Instead, he asked, “Others?”

“The other clones Vlad made—Bed Sheet, Monster, and Tiny. They destabilized faster than I did when you fought them.”

His breath hitched, and Dani felt the harsh swallow against her cheek from where his chin rested atop her head. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help them.”

“Me too.”

They lulled into a reflective silence, paying their respects to the dead.

Dani sighed. “I don’t know why I’m still around and they aren’t. It feels cruel.” If she meant to her clone brothers or to herself, she wasn’t sure. 

“The best thing you can do now is live, I guess,” Danny said with a shrug. 

Dani stared up at Danny, emboldened. “And kick Vlad’s ass?”

“And kick Vlad’s ass,” Danny agreed, chest rumbling with laughter. 

“I call dibs on punching in his stupid vampire face!”

“If you can reach that far, go for it, dude.”

Dani weakly swatted Danny in the arm. “I can fly, too, idiot.” Then she yawned, her eyelids weighing a ton. “Hey, Danny?”

“Yeah?” he asked, voice warm.

“C’n ya wake me up n’ five minutes? I just needa close m’ eyes for a sec n’ then I’ll go find another room…”

Dani didn’t hear his affirmative response, falling asleep faster than either thought possible.

Unfortunately, in all the chaos, Danny forgot to inform Dani of one crucial detail about his new demigod life outside of Amity Park: Danny was the son of Thanatos, the Greek god of Death. 

It is important to note the fact that with Danny being Thanatos’ only child ever, there came the untread territory of what might happen if Thanatos learned that said child had been violated. In this specific instance, if a “whacked-up Fruit Loop” of a man cloned said child. What might then happen to the man who cloned the child? To the aforementioned clone?

There are few Greek myths to make an inference and draw a conclusion about how a god may react in the instance of a slight against their child, much less Thanatos, most of whose stories are lost to Time’s cruel hand. The story of Sisyphus may provide an iota of insight into Thanatos’ violent inclinations toward mortals, but Sisyphus committed a slight against Thanatos himself, as opposed to a Child of Death. Thus, one may consider other examples of gods and their terrifying love or lack thereof for their brood.

Poseidon cursed Odysseus with tumultuous waves and storms after he struck Polyphemus, Poseidon’s cyclops son, in the eye without dealing a merciful final killing blow. Polyphemus called for revenge against Odysseus, and Poseidon responded. It was only when Odysseus planted an oar into the earth and sacrificed a ram, a bull, and a breeding boar to Poseidon, did Poseidon halt his wrath. In contrast, when another of Poseidon’s sons, Theseus, was pushed from a cliff overlooking the sea by King Lycomedes for his transgressions against the crown, the waves of Poseidon’s wine-dark domain did not reach up to cradle his demigod son. Instead, Theseus was doomed to fall, and drowned. To reiterate: Theseus was not dashed against the rocks, but specifically drowned. A child of the sea did not survive his father’s domain. 

Poseidon was and is a slighted god. One son was harmed, and the punisher did not escape without retribution. And yet another was not saved when he could have been, disgraced for actions deemed unheroic as he aged, and his assailant went unpunished. 

Thanatos, due to his elusive presence in story, is an undefined variable in the mythological equation centering the process of modern-day recalculation of godly judgment. 

And so, the god of death crossed from his domain to balance on the metaphorical scythe’s edge to his brother Hypnos’ realm of sleep. Thus, young Dani unfortunately became an unwilling part of Thanatos’ design the instant her eyes shut in Danny’s hold. Let us see how the Phantoms fare…

~An observation by C. Work