Chapter Text
“Mark my words, Maddie! Nobody says no to Vlad Masters. You will rue the day that you spurned my affection!” Vlad roared from the doorway of his Colorado chalet. Danny’s mom stormed down the gravel driveway, her expression tight with a fury more controlled than Vlad’s.
Danny glanced back, and Vlad’s eyes narrowed on him. They were glowing a dangerous red that glinted off his creepily white teeth as he snarled at Danny, “and I will not get a cat.”
Wow, Danny’s offhanded comment really got that far under Vlad’s skin? Score. Danny rubbed it in with a glowing green smirk, then jogged to catch up with his mom.
Danny hadn’t even needed to go ghost to escape Vlad this time, and it was all because Danny and his mom were on the same team. They’d taken different lessons from that disaster of a college reunion: his mom had learned that Vlad was a total sleazebag, and Danny had learned that he wasn’t the only half-ghost. Neither revelation endeared them to Vlad.
The fact that Vlad had clearly expected to be able to bribe them into staying with him after he tricked them both onto a plane and then intentionally crashed it near his vacation home was a new level of audacity, even for him. Watching the blood rush to Vlad’s face when his mom flatly shut down his advances was the first bright spot of Danny’s weekend.
His mom might not have the full context about Vlad—heck, even Danny didn’t know all the details of what went down between Vlad and his parents back in the day—but Danny and his mom were on the same page that that roughing it in the Colorado Rockies was better than staying in comfort with that loser. Conveniently personalized gift baskets couldn’t smooth things over.
Speaking of, had Danny’s mom figured out that Vlad was the one behind the supposed “mother-son science symposium” in Florida, where they were supposed to be right now? She might not trust Vlad, but without knowing that he was a literal ghostly supervillain, she might not have realized just how deep his manipulations ran.
Danny tried to remember the exact sequence of events during their evacuation from the plane: the controls had been locked, they’d been losing altitude, and in a moment of panic, Danny had transformed and grabbed his mom to get them both out of there.
That was where Danny’s memories went a bit fuzzy, because he’d stupidly forgotten that his mom was wearing her brand new Specter Deflector. Trying to turn her intangible had given him a nasty shock that made his bones vibrate hard enough they felt like they were about to shatter, and he’d dropped his ghost form by sheer reflex. He’d been shaking so much that he’d almost fumbled the harness of his parachute. Danny could have sworn he saw the jet pilot, a ghost, hovering a dozen feet away and dropping their human guise before they fled.
The pilot had been one of Vlad’s ghost lackeys the whole time.
Danny followed his mom as she turned off the road and into the trees, and their pace slowed as branches of aspen and pine folded in around them, smothering the dim evening light. Danny fought off a shiver. It hadn’t felt this cold outside when they first landed, but that was before the sun had set beyond the high ridges to the west. They needed to put distance between themselves and Vlad, then start on a shelter—fast.
This would be so much easier if Danny could fly, or at least share intangibility so his mom didn’t have to take the lead and bushwhack. At some point she’d produced a foldable machete from her chunky lab boots that were an arsenal unto themselves.
Using his powers to help them had made sense when they were falling out of the sky. Now that their situation was less dire and Danny was thinking clearly, he was far less inclined to risk his identity for the sake of convenience. His mom still had that stupid Specter Deflector around her waist. Danny was never a fast learner, but he’d experienced enough Fenton tech firsthand by now that the message was clear: get too close to his mom, get hurt. It was like every opportunity Danny considered saying “hey, we don’t have to struggle, I have ghost powers!” the universe put a reminder in front of him of how bad an idea that would be.
Still—the mountains were cold, and it was only getting darker. With competent efficiency, his mom hacked down a small shrub and snapped off one of its longer branches. She flexed it appraisingly before passing it to Danny. “Carry that, I’m going to use it for our shelter tonight. It won’t be as ritzy as Vlad’s place, but we’ll make ourselves as comfortable as we can.” Her words were decisive and warm in a way that made some of the tension drop out of Danny’s shoulders.
She continued to collect fallen branches that fit her specifications, and Danny struggled to keep his footing as he carried the ever-growing pile of sticks in his arms. Maybe they didn’t need his ghost powers to get through this after all. His mom was pretty good at this sort of thing.
Eventually, they reached a small, natural clearing with the gentle noise of a creek nearby. Danny traded the pile of sticks to his mom in exchange for flint and a pocket knife (that also emerged from the depths of her boots).
Starting a campfire was a familiar routine from dozens of family camping trips, and Danny was grateful to have a discrete task to focus on after the disastrous beginning to the weekend.
First, he cleared plant litter from a patch of dirt and made a ring of stones around its edges. Next, he pried up large chunks of dry wood from an old fallen pine tree and scrounged up tinder and kindling from the perimeter of the clearing. Danny arranged everything in his new fire pit until he was satisfied, and finally, he struck the flint with the blade of the pocket knife. The spark caught the dense clump of dry moss at the center, burning fast and bright, igniting the kindling around it.
By the time he had a decent flame going, his mom had constructed a simple lean-to shelter and was returning from the direction of the creek with two full pop-up water bottles, each with a fizzing water purification tablet at the bottom.
Danny wrinkled his nose at the offered bottle of water and gestured to his campfire. “No chance at boiling it instead? The purification tablets always make water taste nasty.”
His mom just laughed. “Do I look like I’m carrying cookware on me?”
Danny looked pointedly between the water-activated expandable sleeping bags, inflatable pillows, water bottles, fire-making tools, and machete that had all come from his mom’s mysteriously well-stocked combat boots. He was sure she was packing even more that he hadn’t seen yet. Her boots seemed to contain everything except a cell phone they could use to call for help.
Well, everything except a cell phone and a cooking pot, apparently. That was evidence against Danny’s idle theory that his mom had discovered how ghostly pocket dimensions worked and applied that knowledge to her boots.
Danny accepted the offered water bottle with a half-hearted grumble as his mom settled down next to him on the log. Even a couple feet away, the threat of the Specter Deflector radiated from her skin like static electricity. Danny tried for subtlety as he scooted away from her, disguising the move by prodding at his campfire unnecessarily with the stick he’d chosen as a fire poker.
The move must have looked natural, because his mom followed his gaze and smiled. “The fire looks great, good work.”
Danny rolled his eyes. “I’ve been building campfires for years, Mom.” He’d actually been pretty proud of how the fire had turned out, but the compliment left him with a weird mixture of happiness and embarrassment that he didn’t care for.
His mom just hummed, then said, “Now that we finally have a moment to relax, how are you doing, sweetie? The plane crash seems like it really rattled you.”
Danny had been rattled, not by the crash but by the shock he’d gotten from the Specter Deflector in the process. Getting away from Vlad’s gross chalet and setting up a campsite had given Danny a chance to shake it off and feel something close to normal again, but as long as that belt was locked around his mom’s waist he couldn’t afford to drop his guard.
“I’m fine, Mom, I promise.”
“No headache?”
“No.”
“No scrapes, no bruises?”
“No.” Her concern started to chafe.
“Maybe we can just go over a quick cognitive and physical exam to make sure—”
“I’m fine, Mom, really. You’re acting like we haven’t drilled aerial evacuations from the Emergency Ops Center jet a million times, I know how to parachute.” Her mouth was quirked in concern as she searched his expression. Danny hated that she noticed how off he felt—Danny childishly didn’t want his mom to see him as weak.
Feeling proud of his campfire suddenly felt stupid. She had no clue about all the things Danny had accomplished or was capable of, and starting a fire was pretty low on the list.
Danny really needed to figure out how much she did know about the circumstances behind this whole misadventure, so he hedged, “I’d rather talk about why you lied to Vlad back there.”
She pursed her lips. “Danny, I know he’s a family friend, but you should know that some of the things Vlad has done have been… out of line. Your father thinks highly of him, but he has been making some—inappropriate comments toward me, ones that are disrespectful to both myself and to your father.”
“Ew, gross, I know he’s been hitting on you. I’m not ten. I’m talking about how when you told him about the plane crash, you didn’t mention that the jet pilot was a ghost. Why?”
His mom sighed, and the crackling of firewood filled the silence as she seemed to carefully choose her words. “I wasn’t sure if you saw that in the chaos of everything, and I didn’t want to scare you on top of everything else, sweetie. I know it must be frightening for you—there are any number of reasons a ghost might try to target our family, and I’m sorry you got caught up in that. That ghost’s sophistication to disguise itself as a human was remarkable.”
“Yeah,” Danny said hollowly. “Remarkable.”
“I just wish I noticed sooner and we wouldn’t be in this mess. I’m a ghost hunter and your mom, it’s my job to protect you. I really let you down. I’m just… I’m sorry, Danny.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Danny said.
Her words hit too close to home. If anything, it was Danny’s fault. He was a ghost hunter too. Until the pilot dropped their human guise, they had somehow avoided tripping Danny’s ghost sense. Even with his powers, Danny had been pretty useless on the plane.
That sort of thing was exactly why this weekend was supposed to be about training with Sam and Tucker. But like usual, trouble had found Danny first.
His mom leaned forward to rest her elbows on her knees. “To answer your original question, there are a couple of reasons I didn’t tell Vlad. The first is that his attitude about ghosts seems to have shifted since our college days. Despite all those ectoscience books he has shelved in that chalet, he seems to have become quite the skeptic,” his mom said the word skeptic like it was an even more offensive word than ghost. “Between that and his unwanted advances, I don’t want to give him any more of an excuse to keep us with him. We are perfectly capable of reaching help without him involved.”
That was… wise, actually. His mom only knew the half of it, since Vlad was worse than a skeptic. But with the limited information she had, his mom was being cautious and pragmatic. It had gotten them this far.
“How are we going to reach help?”
“Old fashioned hiking. We can make our way back to the road in the morning and stop at the first place that has a phone.”
“There’s no way Vlad won’t drive by in a souped-up car to try and pick us up if we try that.”
“Then I’ll refuse him again. As distasteful as his behavior has been, I know Vlad. He wouldn’t go so far as to force us.”
Danny didn’t quite think either of those claims were true, but he had no better ideas. He took a sip of his bitter water and glowered into the campfire.
“Oh cheer up, Danny, it’s only for one night. We’ll be on a plane home by tomorrow evening at the latest. Maybe in the morning we can do some quadrat sampling before we make our way out of the forest—this is a great opportunity for you to learn more about biodiversity in this ecosystem. We could even submit it to Mr. Falluca as extra credit to boost your science grade.”
“I get it, my grades suck. You don’t have to rub it in,” Danny said.
Of course she would be excited about any chance to do science, even if it didn’t have the word ecto in front of it. And of course even in an emergency situation a thousand miles from home, Danny’s grades still made him a disappointment.
He poked the campfire a little too roughly, and one of the larger pieces of wood collapsed in a whirl of sparks, smothering some of the flames in the process. The entire campfire was smaller and sputtering now.
Danny ground his teeth.
“You’ll see, sweetie, it’ll be fun. Just think of this like our annual Fenton Survival Training we do at Beall Woods State Park, but with even better stargazing.”
Danny glanced over at his mom, but her head was tilted back now, face turned up toward the night sky. Danny followed her gaze.
Between the time they had chosen their campsite and now, darkness had fully fallen over the forest—and the stars had burst forth. Between the altitude and the lack of light pollution, the colors of the stars were clearer than Danny had ever seen: red, yellow, blue and white scintillated in the swathe of sky above the clearing. Otherworldly, like distant portals into another dimension.
The view had the immediate effect of drawing Danny out of his own head and back into the mountains. He let out a breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding.
With the comforting warmth of the fire in front of them, the night air felt crisp and clean instead of threatening. Danny almost felt himself looking forward to the deep sleep that always came to him while camping, cocooned in his sleeping bag and surrounded by the gentle rustle of pine needles and leaves. He would wake up to the pale dawn of a forest alive with birdsong. The nostalgia bubbling up from camping trips throughout his childhood softened their current situation a bit.
“I’m sorry we can’t see the Kennedy Space Center tomorrow,” his mom said. “But at least we have this. The weekend isn’t turning out like I planned, but we’re spending it together, and that just… it means the world to me, Danny.”
Danny realized too late that his mom had shifted closer to him to bump his shoulder with her own. It was a casual, friendly gesture, and the contact was brief, but it shot like lightning up Danny’s spine. He shoved himself away, wheezing out, “don’t touch me.”
“Okay,” she said with genuine surprise, leaning away from him. "Sorry, sweetie.”
Her wounded expression hurt almost as much as the shock from the Specter Deflector. The fragile sense of peace and comfort Danny had felt around her was entirely shattered.
“I’m… gonna go sleep over there,” Danny said, pushing himself up, grabbing his sleeping bag from the shelter, and dragging it a dozen feet away. He’d be exposed to the elements, but he had a lot to stew about, and he didn’t want to do it next to his mom where one wrong turn in his sleep would shock him again.
His mom was making her disappointed face, and he pointedly didn’t look at her. Hurt and guilt pooled like oil and water in his chest.
“Alright,” his mom said softly. “Goodnight dear. I love you.”
“Yeah. ‘Night,” Danny said, zipping himself into the sleeping bag and pulling the cord of the head cover tight.
The area he’d chosen had a large, crooked root right under his inflatable pillow. Danny stubbornly didn’t move despite the growing crick in his neck. Eventually, he heard his mom smother the campfire and retreat into the shelter, and with a dull sour feeling in his stomach Danny fell asleep.
When he startled awake, it wasn’t because of the Specter Deflector but because of his ghost sense. His eyes shot open to see a large, glowing, hairy foot right in front of his nose. A half-formed cry died in Danny’s throat as he was scooped intangibly from his sleeping bag by broad, wicked paws.
Danny struggled, panicked and confused, a part of him hoping this was a bad dream. He managed to get his hands braced against the bristled fur of one of the arms that restrained him, but Danny wasn’t the one controlling their intangibility and grappling was pointless. No matter how hard he strained, the ghost didn’t even react.
Dazed, Danny watched the forest pass by in a blur as his ghostly kidnapper tore quite literally through the trees. Danny hadn’t been wrong earlier when he’d thought about how much easier and faster it would have been to travel through the woods as a ghost. Eventually, and with a sinking resignation, Danny saw faint lights start to twinkle in the distance between the thinning trees. They resolved into a porch light and windows.
He was being dragged right back to Vlad’s stupid vacation home, and this ghost must be another one of Vlad’s goons. Figured.
In minutes they covered the distance that had taken Danny and his mom an hour. The ghost phased them inside, and Danny found himself unceremoniously dumped in the same tacky birch wood chair he’d sat in earlier, half awake and heart pounding with adrenaline, with Vlad’s stupid face sneering down at him. Around him loomed half a dozen ghosts, and it took Danny a moment to realize they were all animals.
The ghost that had taken Danny turned out to be a six-limbed bear. There was a wolverine with one eye. A rat, as tall as Danny was, with five. A cyclops mole whose star-shaped nose ended in tentacles, and an elk with antlers that split into fractal patterns. They all had too many limbs or teeth. His mom had mentioned the biodiversity in the Rockies, but he doubted the animals here were this unique.
Then Danny looked between the head of the bearskin rug under Vlad’s plush slippers and the face of the bear ghost that had kidnapped him from the campsite. They had the same face. The elk head above the fireplace matched the elk ghost, even though the ghost had the legs and sharp teeth of a mountain lion. Danny had a sinking feeling about the glossy pelt that was draped across the back of the sofa. The dead glass eyes of animal heads mounted on the walls joined the glowing eyes of the ghosts they had become, all of them fixed on Danny.
Vlad hadn’t just recruited these ghosts, he’d made them.
“Welcome back, Daniel. I trust whatever accommodations you found out there aren’t as homey as mine.”
“Homey? Please, this much taxidermy in such a small space makes it more like a petting zoo. Once you get that cat, it’ll be perfect.”
Vlad didn’t rise to the bait this time. His mouth was set in a calm, confident smile, but his eyes were as cold and hard as those of the taxidermy. “Your childish insults can’t help you, and your mother isn’t here to talk you out of this one, little badger. Which means we also don’t have to pretend that I wouldn’t grind you into the dirt if you so much as try to interfere with my plan again. It would be a shame if your mother learned that these woods are too dangerous to camp in with her son, alone. You’ll only have one place to turn.”
Vlad withdrew a device from his pocket that looked like a souped-up taser. He lifted Danny by one arm, pressed the device into Danny’s stomach—and then Danny’s vision went white. It left Danny feeling like his blood was carbonated and his skin was made of white-hot tin foil, worse even than the shock of the Specter Deflector. After several seconds of agony, Vlad withdrew the device and dropped Danny to the floor. Danny gasped and dug his fingers into the dense fur of the bearskin rug, head swimming. His ghost core felt like it had been flayed.
“What—what did you do to me?”
“This, my boy, is the Plasmius Maximus. It will short circuit your ghost powers for three hours—that is, until midnight. I tell you this because I’ve seen your grades and I know you’re bad at math.”
Danny pushed himself up onto his elbows and glared up at Vlad. “You hacked into my school’s network? Creepy. And why is everyone on me today about my grades?”
Vlad ignored Danny’s words as he loomed over him with the rest of the ghosts. “I will be perfectly clear about my expectations: you will run back to your mother, and then you will both be chased back here by my pets. Without your ghost powers you won’t have any thoughts about fighting your way through them. Like it or not, you will be staying here with me.”
Danny’s core fluttered, and with a shock he felt his grip on his human form slip. Rings flickered in and out around his waist, and he forced the rising, urgent pull of his transformation back down, but his control felt weak and slippery.
“Ah-ah-ah,” Vlad tutted. “I won’t waste your energy trying to transform. It’s futile, as well as foolish, especially when you still have such a long night ahead of you.”
Wasn’t this thing supposed to short out his ghost powers? Vlad certainly seemed to think that the transformation rings had been a deliberate attempt by Danny rather than a near-loss of control. Danny wanted the relief of giving into it and going ghost. His muscles were trembling just like they had after the portal accident, and he was dizzy.
Was Vlad mistaken about the effects of that thing? Whatever was happening, Danny resolved himself to resist it, no matter what Vlad said. Any device of Vlad’s meant bad news.
“The clock’s ticking, Daniel,” Vlad said smoothly, and then whispered, “Run.” The chimera ghosts parted, revealing a clear path to the door.
Danny grit his teeth, pushed himself to his feet—and he ran. He tried to follow the same path his mom had bushwhacked for them, but in the darkness everything looked the same and he lost his sense of direction fast.
Soon he heard the chimera ghosts rushing after him. The elk with the mountain lion’s legs was gaining, and as it tore through the underbrush Danny realized that he couldn’t feel them with his ghost sense. It had woken him up when that bear ghost had come for him, but thanks to the Plasmius Maximus it must be offline.
All Danny could do was test the limits of whatever Vlad had hit him with and hope for the best. Desperately, Danny tried to scrounge up enough energy for an ectoblast. He raised his hand and tried to pull ectoenergy into his palm, ready to shoot in the vague direction of his pursuers, but a sharp pain in his temple made him cry out and abandon the attempt. He couldn’t even manage a single shot, and his core felt even more agitated than before. Danny wouldn’t be trying that again.
Strangely, the ghosts weren’t pushing their obvious advantage of flight or intangibility. Even in his disorientation, Danny somehow stayed a few steps ahead of their claws and teeth. That could only mean that they were playing with him, herding him back to the campsite—and in turn, Danny was leading them straight to his mom.
Danny pushed sweaty hair off his forehead, then pulled up short as some of it drifted back in front of his eyes. That lock of hair was white, and faintly glowing in the dark night.
Danny pulled the white hair taught and struggled to focus on it, wasting a valuable second in disbelief. The rest of his hair, as far as he could see, was still black. He looked down at himself—still human—then back to the inexplicably ghostly lock of hair. When he finally let go of it, the white strands flowed in the air, undeterred by gravity.
What did the Plasmius Maximus do to Danny to knock his powers so out of whack? The last thing he needed was to not have access to any of his ghost powers, but to still look like a ghost. That was the worst of both worlds.
A growl and snap behind Danny kicked him back into gear, and he stumbled forward, prey driven by predators. His heart pounded in his chest hard enough to remind him of the mile he ran in PE once right after coming back from lunch at the Nasty Burger. He’d puked up a Double Chocolate Graham Cracker Nasty Shake on the side of the track.
Danny just had to hold out until midnight. He had to find his mom, and pretend to play into Vlad’s plan, and after the Plasmius Maximus wore off Danny could kick Vlad’s ass and his mom could hotwire one of his luxury cars or something. Roll credits.
A nimble hand with the texture of tree bark reached out from the dark branches of a pine tree and wrapped like a vice around Danny’s forearm. When had a ghost gotten in front of him? Or was he that turned around? He yelped as he was yanked upwards, and he flailed before he saw—
“Mom‽”
His mom was perched in a pine tree, covered head to toe in camouflage. He hadn’t even known her jumpsuit had a camouflage setting. The Specter Deflector was still locked around her waist, but it somehow wasn’t hurting him, even as she pulled him to the safety of her tree hideout.
The sheer relief of seeing his mom and not being shocked made Danny’s tenuous grip on his core slip, and his heart skipped a beat as a glowing white glove enveloped the same forearm his mom had just grabbed to rescue him. His ghost half was spreading.
His mom’s gaze was, thankfully, not on Danny’s supernaturally glowing glove or hair, but on the hoard of ghosts that had been at his heels.
“Stay here, sweetie, you’ll be safe,” she said, then lightly flipped from the tree branch to the ground. She landed in a sparring stance, facing the ghosts as they streamed through the trees.
She looked confident, in her element, and giddy.
“C’mon,” she said, her voice clear and dripping with challenge. “Dazzle me.”
The chimeras descended on their new target. The bear ghost struck first, rearing on its hind legs while swiping at her with all four of its arms.
His mom deflected two of its blows with her leg and adroitly ducked under two jabs, landing a strike against the soft part of its broad neck. The bear let out a startled yelp Danny would have expected from a puppy, not a bear or a ghost, much less a fearsome ghost bear.
The mole reached out to strangle his mom with its nose-tentacles only for the Specter Deflector to force it to lose its grip, and his mom followed up with a pot shot from her wrist ray that left the mole retreating.
More chimeras filled in the ranks and surrounded her. Danny’s mom pressed a button at her hip, and suddenly the camouflage covering her suit stiffened, turning from flexible fabric to hard as stone. Then she twisted in an explosion of movement, and the camouflage shattered outward, scattering in all directions like grapeshot, driving the ghosts back. It bought her time to withdraw a dual-beam Fenton Saber from her boot—really, how did she not have a cell phone somewhere in there—and she whirled it over her head.
Maybe, just maybe, Danny could admit that his mom being overprepared for ghosts was helpful after all. Usually, it was embarrassing to him as a human and actively dangerous to him as a ghost, but right now he just let himself be grateful.
The ghosts that were still in the clearing were on the defensive now, and the many-eyed mountain goat with fearsome horns skittered back from her saber in fear.
“Boo,” she said.
That was the only excuse the remaining ghosts needed. Every one of them turned tail and fled.
Woah.
“Mom! You are awesome!”
“Aw, thank you, sweetie!” His mom beamed, raising her night-vision goggles and dusting off her hands as Danny carefully climbed down from the tree. He tried to keep his white-gloved arm out of her line of sight, and he could only hope that she didn’t notice the lock of white hair. It was only a few strands, right?
As soon as his feet hit the ground, Danny found himself wrapped into his mom’s embrace. Like when she pulled him to safety, her touch still didn’t hurt. Danny hugged her back with as much strength as he could manage. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” she said. “I was worried sick when I woke up and you weren’t at camp.”
“I’m glad you’re okay, too.”
She pulled back. Danny let go and, with as much subtlety as he could manage, shifted his gloved hand behind his back.
He just had to wait three hours until midnight—closer to two, now, hopefully. His mom smiled at him apologetically. “I’m so sorry, sweetie, I know what we talked about earlier, but I don’t think we have any choice but to turn back to Vlad’s chalet. If I had any idea that there were this many ghosts in these woods I never would have risked it. He may be a creep, but he’s a creep with a phone and transportation, and I need to get my baby home safe.”
Danny would usually blush at being called baby by his mom, but he decided to make an exception, just this once. He could admit that he had thoroughly lost control of this situation and felt almost dizzy with relief at the chance to follow her lead.
“First, mister, you need this more than I do,” she said, unfastening the Specter Deflector from around her waist. She moved to fasten it around Danny, and while it didn’t seem to hurt him now, Danny did not want to be stuck with that thing locked around him once the Plasmius Maximus wore off.
“No, Mom, wait—" Danny started, shaking his hands in front of him and backing away. His mom froze, and that was when Danny realized where she was looking.
One of the hands Danny held in front of him was enveloped by a white glove, glowing bright and ethereal in the alpine night.