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“What. The hell. Did you. Do?”
Danny clenched his fists. When he exhaled, his breath was pure ice.
Even now, Vlad couldn’t help but drip his voice in sadistic egoism as he drooled out, “I assure you, my dear boy, I certainly don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Shut up!” Danny’s voice echoed down the hall. He rounded on that fucking asshole, ectoplasm sparking on his fingertips. “Don’t play stupid with me! Where the hell are we?”
Vlad merely flicked a stone as if he were inspecting it for dust and tutted. “In case it hasn’t pierced through your abnormally thick skull, I was transported here too, little badger.” His eyes glinted red.
Danny backed down, if only slightly, and stared down the dim, branching stone hall before them. Behind, a wall blocked them in, and above, the stone continued seemingly forever, fading into darkness.
They didn’t seem to be on Earth, or even the Ghost Zone. Another dimension, perhaps? He tried to remember how they got here, but it was like his memory was covered with childish scribbles. What happened? Why were they here?
And where was here?
The hall rumbled.
“Oh my.” Vlad stood in front of what was now a new hallway forking into three paths. “This wasn’t like this before.”
The forked hallway vanished, replaced once more by the wall, and all Danny could feel was the prickles of cold, cracked rock seeping through the hazmat to invade his skin.
But…he shouldn’t feel cold, not like this.
As if to mock him, flowers sprouted between the rock around him. The buds opened—black, brown, filled with holes. Dead, all of them.
He scrambled back. “Where are we?”
“Now that is certainly a question.”
Danny peered down the hallway, which now continued straight into nothingness. And behind him, the wall had been replaced by a large stone door.
He hardly brushed a finger to it before it opened as if pulled back by a puppeteer’s strings.
The room beyond was cavernous—pitch black, save for a ball of white light in the middle. Danny stepped through, his footsteps echoing like laughter, and the hall disappeared, forcing Vlad inside with him.
“What the—” Vlad hissed.
Something crawled in Danny’s stomach. “Vlad?” Whispers glistened in the air, too faint for him to understand. “Do you hear that?”
“Whoever brought us here wishes for us to follow the light like some sort of moth.” Vlad turned, his palms glowing pink. “Unlike you, I’m not an imbecile.”
Vlad brought his hands up, and the light behind him pulsed in warning.
“Wait—don’t!”
Too late.
Just as Vlad released his power at the wall, the light expanded outward like a dying supernova, swallowing everything.
And then, Danny stopped existing.
Or, did he?
He had no body, no soul, no mind. Nothing. Everything was blank. But…
No, there was the light! If he found his hand, he could reach out and just…barely…touch…
“What are you?” a child’s voice whispered in his ear.
His feet made impact with white and gray tiled floor. He looked up—he had eyes again—to see a hospital room before him. The bed was empty, though a vase of pink and purple flowers sat on the side table next to it.
Muffled laughter sounded next door. Perhaps a family visiting their loved one. But Danny didn’t have that. He was alone, so alone, and it crushed his heart, squeezed his lungs, filled his body with an ache that couldn’t be solved by a few fucking flowers and why? Why was he so alone?
An explosion. The wall was now a crater, and drywall fell like hail from the sky.
Danny gasped and buckled over, the dusty hospital air filling his lungs. Beside him, Vlad—had he been there the whole time?—panted just as loud.
“It was a trick,” Vlad said, his eyes blazing. He raised his glowing hand above his head. “Nothing but a trick.”
He shot the ceiling.
The room crumbled, the floor split, and everything vaporized to dust.
They were back in the dark room, though it was no longer pitch black. Stone surrounded them in a hexagon with ornate, carved doors on every wall. In the middle, the white light flickered. Danny could almost hear whispers ring out from it.
“Vlad?”
Vlad ducked away from him. “Are you really so immature to let your emotions consume you like that? In enemy territory, no less.”
Danny frowned. Vlad’s voice sounded…shaky?
“Do you know what that was about?”
“No,” Vlad responded sharply, his sneer back in place. “And I suggest you forget it.”
Vlad turned to a door, his cape flipping behind him, and thrust it open. Danny followed, but as he glanced back, he saw the hospital room flicker in the air.
They stepped into another hall filled with shadows crawling and whispering unintelligible words. Rather than damp stone, the place smelled of…bleach?
What?
A gun whined from the shadows in a tone that raised the hairs on the back of Danny’s neck. Only certain guns sounded so delicate, so high-pitched.
His heart thudded. His eyes must have been playing tricks on him. There wasn’t any stone in sight. It was tile. Glossy, unadulterated white tile. And it devoured every inch of him.
Down the hall, whispers transformed into recognizable deep voices.
He was walking toward them.
But…no. His hands were cuffed behind his back and no, no, no!
Something slammed his torso. The shadows swallowed him whole.
“His death was peculiar, wasn’t it?” one of the Operatives asked.
“It was. But don’t worry, we’ll find out his secrets soon enough.”
No!
Red eyes rounded on him, cutting through the black air. Danny recognized them, but they didn’t make sense. Why was Plasmius in this cell with him? Plasmius couldn’t have gotten captured by the Guys in White too. If he did, then they were screwed, but no, he wouldn’t have. He wasn’t—he didn’t—
A scream tore through Danny’s throat, and now it was his turn to rip his hands from their cuffs and throw himself at the door with glowing fists. The door broke from its hinges, slamming into the wall behind it with a bang so violent, the tile fractured.
Danny hit the wall—the stone wall—but when he turned around, the cell was gone and only the hallway remained.
“Okay.” Danny tasted acrid words on his tongue. “I…don’t…I think someone’s messing with us.”
Vlad peered at him with an expression Danny couldn’t discern. “It would appear that way.”
“I think—no, I know that second room was for me. That was my memory. So, was the first one yours?”
Vlad tensed. Then, with PR-practiced control, he said, “I agree that someone is digging through our pasts. So now the question is, why?”
As if in response, the floor disappeared.
They landed in a large, circular lab with metal walls and purple-tinted flooring. Fuzzy music filled the room, jumping and repeating as if from a broken record. The air stung, and the source seemed to be a large glass tube with thick, green ectoplasm coating the bottom.
“Why are we in your lab?”
“It’s a memory, Daniel. Clearly.”
Vlad pointed, and then Danny saw him. A second Vlad, frozen in time, hunched over a computer displaying a green-coated DNA structure.
Danny crept forward, trying to read the text on the screen, but it was too fuzzy.
“What were you researching?”
“Your DNA structures, of course.”
Danny whipped around. “Huh?”
Vlad grinned, his teeth seeming sharper than usual. “Well, if you weren’t going to be my son, then I was going to have to make one of my own.”
“Wait.” The realization hit Danny. “You were trying to clone me?”
“You caught me!” Vlad held his hands up in surrender, but his smug expression belied any sincerity.
“You sick fuck.”
“Oh, now, don’t be like that! Rest assured, the clones didn’t last a full minute before melting.”
The flame of Danny’s ongoing fury toward Vlad reignited in his core. “When we get out of here, I’m going to end you.”
“Feel free to try!”
Danny wanted to snark back, but something splashed his nose. He looked up, and the room had turned into a melting oil painting. The walls wept, and the music faded into static. The floor wasted away, revealing another set of tiles underneath. And when Danny peered up, another lab stood in its wake.
This lab was smaller, darker—minus the portal. The brilliant, glowing portal that beckoned him forth.
Who was Danny to resist that siren call?
“Don’t you wanna know what’s waiting on the other side?” Sam’s voice echoed, and Danny did want to know what was there. Yes, he wanted to know so badly!
Sam wasn’t here now. But that was okay. The only thing he needed was the portal.
He stepped forward.
The portal hummed in agreement.
Someone grabbed at him, but he turned intangible and stepped forward again.
“Come to me,” the portal said. “Tell me your secrets.”
“Okay,” Danny whispered. “I’ll tell you my secrets.”
Then, something blocked his path. A man, a ghost. One with teal skin and red eyes. Danny tried to push the ghost aside, but it gripped his arm.
“Let me go.”
“No.” It grabbed his other arm and pinned him to the floor.
“Let me GO!”
“Snap out of it!”
“I have to go to the portal!” He thrashed. His knee made contact with the ghost who grunted, but otherwise didn’t budge. “I NEED TO GO!”
Slap!
His cheek stung. He breathed hard, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes.
“Something is tricking us, little badger! There is no portal!”
No, the ghost—Vlad was wrong. He needed to go into the portal. Why didn’t Vlad understand? He had to, and Vlad was trying to stop him.
“Focus! There's no portal! We’re in a labyrinth, Daniel!”
No, no, no…
They…
There was no…
There was no portal?
The air cracked above him.
No…portal…
Another snap. Then another.
They weren’t in his lab. They were in a labyrinth. Someone was messing with them, picking through their memories.
Crack.
“Who are you?” Danny called into the fractured ceiling; the pressure in his ears increased. “Who keeps whispering?”
A pebble fell from the ceiling, and then, like a spiderweb, thousands of cracks appeared in the air. When Danny exhaled next, the room shattered, pieces cascading like diamonds and falling into the dark depths of nothing.
With the room gone, all that remained were swirls of green ectoplasm and purple doors.
“Why have you brought us to the Ghost Zone?” Danny called out.
The whispers snickered in response.
“I think I may know why,” Vlad said, releasing Danny. “You really shouldn’t have been so obvious, Vecna.”
The laughter faded around them, and tatters of robes twinkled from the corners of his eyes.
“Vecna?”
“A death god.” Vlad’s eyes narrowed on the same dark, snaking robes that seemed to be growing more opaque with each second. “And a pathetic one at that.”
The laugh sounded again, this time from behind him. But when Danny whipped his head around, it followed. He turned again, the whispering laugh remained echoing behind his head.
It was maddening.
“What do you want from us?” Vlad demanded.
Danny blinked, and they were back in the GIW. The scene shifted in a timelapse of frozen white suits and glittering white tiles. An invisible hand pushed him through a door and Danny wanted to puke because he’d been in this room before, but the timelapse continued on. People moved in and out, green hitting the floor one moment and cleaned the next.
Danny refused to turn around.
“You don’t need to,” the whisper assured him. “Look at the computer screens.”
He couldn’t. He’d forgotten how to breathe.
For one horrible moment, Danny wanted to call out to Vlad for help. But then Vlad was beside him, squinting up at the screens that Danny was too cowardly to see.
“They’re studying it.”
“A ghost core’s energy,” Vlad muttered. And then, as if he could sense Danny’s cold terror—or perhaps he could see the way ice crystals were spreading from Danny’s feet—he added in a low whisper, “It’s no one we know.”
It’s not you, Danny translated, and he steeled himself to turn around, to see the unnamed green ghost splayed on the table with its vibrant core fully on display.
“They want to know your secrets.”
Danny shut his eyes.
Vlad scoffed. “They’re too simpleminded to figure it out.”
“But I’m not.”
The voice—Vecna’s voice—hit him like a metal pipe, and Danny snapped into awareness to see a desert of ash sand under a blood orange sky. Before him, a figure sat upon a throne made of bones.
Vecna’s black and red tattered robes hardly covered his gray skin, bones visible underneath. His black spiked collar surrounded a head of flesh and skull, too sharp teeth, and black pits with glowing red pupils for eyes.
Danny sucked in a breath. He’d met many strange ghosts, but nothing quite like this.
“Don’t be foolish.” Vecna’s voice ground into Danny’s skull like rocks. “You have secrets, secrets of how you cheated death, and me. Tell me, and I’ll bring you home. Refuse, and I’ll send you back to the labyrinth.”
“Quite the set of options,” Vlad responded in his signature smirk.
“Quite.”
The electric smell of a challenge permeated the air, and Danny tried to jump up, to fight, but he couldn’t. He was held in place by the same snake-like robes that made up Vecna’s gown.
But how? When?
Vecna’s eyes narrowed to slits as they rested on Danny. “Consider this a warning.”
“Let me go!”
“Tell me how you cheated death.”
“Why don’t you read through my memories and figure it out yourself!”
“He doesn’t mean it like that,” Vlad said, his eyes glinting. “Really, I don’t know what you expected bringing this boy here.”
Vecna’s piercing gaze shifted to Vlad.
“His teenage brain is simply too underdeveloped for the situation, you see.”
It really was amazing how Danny could go from almost wanting Vlad’s comfort to refraining from punching him into next year.
“Then you tell me.”
Vlad hummed, mockingly tapping his chin. “No.”
“I won’t ask again.”
“Yes, you will, because you’re desperate. So, so desperate. I can see it in your eyes.”
Vecna didn’t rise to the bait. “If you’re so perceptive, then you’ll do good to explain how you cheated me.”
“What do the legends say?” Vlad called out to the orange sky. “Oh, that’s right! Vecna, the god of the underworld, can only control those whose secrets he understands? But you don’t understand ours. How, when our hallway forked into life and death, we chose to walk down both paths. So you can’t control us, correct?”
The wind picked up around them. Still restrained, all Danny could do was listen to Vlad’s voice increase in both confidence and derision as he taunted the god.
“Poor Vecna! Such a powerful god, and yet two humans managed to beat you. How pathetic!”
Vecna rose, stepping a bony foot off his throne. “I see all. All your fears, your memories. And with all that power, how you two managed to cheat still eludes me.”
The pressure increased in Danny’s head. For a paralyzed moment, he realized that Vecna was trying to pry him open for answers that he didn’t even have.
“Stop!” Danny yelled. “Get out of my—”
“SILENCE!”
The air cracked like a whip, and Danny was left with robes squeezing his limbs, and his chest heaving for air.
“There are other creatures who can walk the line between death and the living, but their existence is planned. For two humans with no fae bloodline to trick the laws of life and death itself?” He raised his chin, continuing his slow steps forward. “It’s abominable. And it must end.”
“Oh?” Vlad’s chuckle was full of thorns. “And how do you think you’ll force me to reveal my secret?”
The wind whipped, and then Vecna was on top of Vlad with Danny pinned beside him. The pressure was agonizing, and to Danny’s disgust, he could feel skeleton hands emerging from the ground to claw at his body. A scream inched up his throat, only to be stopped by robes gagging him into silence.
“You will tell me how you managed to evade my call. You will—”
There was a flash. Then, the pressure and his restraints vanished into thin air. He tracked Vlad’s vicious eyes to Vecna, whose robes had been burned through.
There was a hole in his ribcage.
Where Vlad’s still-smoking palm had just shot him.
The illusion shattered, letting them fall through time and space itself until Danny and Vlad were standing in an alley somewhere in downtown Amity Park. Night surrounded them, and the ground was damp with faded rain.
Vlad was the first to turn back to human form, brushing the shoulders of his dry-cleaned suit. “What a waste of a perfectly good Friday evening.”
“What was that?” Danny asked.
Vlad rolled his eyes. “Little badger, weren’t you paying attention? Anyway, I’m going home. Hopefully your parents haven’t been looking for you. Although, your oaf of a father could hardly notice a nuclear explosion detonating if one slapped him in the face.”
“But won’t Vecna come back? I—you—he was trying to kill us, and you blasted a hole in his ribs! How the hell did you even do that?”
“It’s simple, really. Do I have to spell everything out for you? He is a god of death, and our existence takes the concept of death and spits right in its face. He cannot hurt us, Daniel, we’re too…confusing for him. And now he truly understands it.” Vlad chortled and began walking down the alley.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Go home, Daniel. Or, better yet, bring me with you. I’d love to visit your darling mother.”
And there was that disgust right where Danny had left it last. “Fuck off, Vlad.”