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“Oh now that does make things a touch more convenient. You see I already have a reservation for two set up at a nice little spot near the campaign office tomorrow,” Vlad lied. “It was going to be a quick little affair with one of my donors, but, I am sure they can reschedule.”

“Thank you. Thank you. Just tell me the place and time, I’ll be there.”

“Oh don’t even fret. I’ll send a driver to pick you up. Expect him around 11:30. Anything I should know before our… consultation?”

Maddie fell silent.

“…No. No, I don’t think so. I don’t want to give you anything that might… make you jump to any conclusions. I think I need to explain it all at once.”

“I understand completely, my dear. Wear something red, won’t you? It’s a stunning color on you.”

“Sure. I’ll—11:30? I’ll keep an eye out. Here. For the driver.”

“Yes, 11:30. Until then~”

Vlad hung up, and he ruminated on what he’d agreed to—or perhaps instigated.

This was a matter of clinical curiosity. After all, he was tabling his pursual of Maddie for the time being. A project on hold—cooled, but not soured, he assured himself, as he did not care enough about what happened to feel truly sour.

Vlad suppressed a small laugh. It was funny almost, powerfully ironic, how ideal this situation would have been to him 2 weeks earlier. But it was tainted by the knowledge of what Maddie wanted to discuss.

Vlad knew, and the swaths of blood stains on the carpet knew, which neither bleach nor vinegar had been able to fully lift from its fibers.

…

Sunlight fell like waterfalls through the second-story bay windows of Le Petit Capot. The tables were well-spaced, private despite the vastly open floors. Each was decorated with a satin white table cloth, napkins folded into roses, candles brand new and unlit. A string quartet played near the fountain, a dash of ambient background noise and mindfully polite chatter from the tables already seated. Vlad sat, confident and eager, perusing the wine menu and wondered whether Maddie might be jealous of everything she’d missed out on when Vlad ordered the most expensive bottle on the list.

“Sir.”

Vlad raised his eyes. The host approached, pulling out the second chair from Vlad’s table and gesturing to it. He watched Maddie enter from behind, clad in a stunning red dress whose creases suggested it had lived in her closet for the better part of many years. Vlad took another small victory in how so very out of place Maddie was here. Stunning, beautiful, yes. But she could not carry herself well. She shifted visibly in her dress. They were different creatures, clearly, she and Vlad.

“Thank you,” Maddie took her seat, and the host bowed and exited.

“Wine menu, my dear,” Vlad handed over the menu as though offering a business contract. “I am already intending to order this cabernet,” Vlad said, tapping the priciest item on the list. “We can order a second bottle of course, if anything else catches your eye.”

The wine list did not catch her eye. They were too tired and dull and lifeless for much at all to catch their attention.

“No thank you.”

“Appetizers, then? I know escargot can be a bit cliché in this kind of establishment, but if you’ve never had truly superb—”

“I think I should just. Get started.” Maddie’s hands had vanished beneath the tablecloth, but Vlad could tell she was wringing them out of sight from the uncomfortable shift and shuffle of her arms. Her eyes darted about. Her voice dropped. “Since you’re… busy. I don’t want to waste time.”

“Just the cabernet then. And the escargot, for the table.” Vlad flagged the waiter over. Maddie avoided looking at either of them as Vlad ordered.

“Now then—” Vlad leaned forward, one arm out and palm up, inviting conversation. “You seem quite bothered. What is it you’d like to tell me?”

“Danny’s dead.”

Maddie’s eyes refused to find his as she spoke. Vlad arched an eyebrow, less surprised by the statement as much as he was by its bluntness, by its phrasing. Not “a ghost.” Not “Phantom.” Dead.

“My… my goodness,” Vlad said, constructing whatever kind of faux reaction an uninvolved, non-half-ghost billionaire may have. One who did not already know every detail of what Maddie intended to divulge today. “Oh my sweet dear. I’m devastated. I saw him just a few days ago it feels like.” Vlad reached a hand out, and he pulled Maddie’s right arm up above the table, cradling her hand in his. “When did this happen?”

“Last week. Sometime. I don’t know precisely.”

And Vlad faltered. He was not usually one to falter, but he’d come to this meeting knowing everything, and the everything he knew would not have included an answer like that. “A year ago,” she should have said. “When Jack and I built the portal,” she should have said.

So she was lying to him then, maybe, Vlad thought, a bit colder. An odd choice for a woman who’d come absolutely begging to him for help.

He let none of this show on his face.

“My god. Did he go missing? My Dear you should have told me sooner. I could have had the whole town’s forces out searching for him. I’d have dropped my re-election responsibilities in a second if—”

“Can I… explain please? Can I just explain?” Maddie whispered. Vlad nodded, and rubbed his thumb in circles along her hand, still grasped in his.

“Last week—a week ago today—Jack and I captured Phantom. We brought him back to the lab and dissected him. To study him.”

The rhythm of Vlad’s thumb faltered. He kept it off his face, but it soured something in him, deeper and worse, to hear how few words it took her to say it. How clinical it was, the way she said it.

Vlad remembered it differently.

The desperate slamming pounding on his front door from a boy too weak to phase through. Arms hugged deathly tight around midsection as the only pressure holding organs inside. The whole front of his suit torn away, skin peeled and the whites of his clothing dyed black with rusted crimson and crusted ectoplasm. And the noise—the attempt at speaking—the look in his eyes which was so far gone—the elements which Vlad could not remember without the memories clamping like a fist around his entrails.

Vlad swallowed it all down. His heart rate was rising, and that was silly, as he had nothing to be worked up about.

“Phantom escaped. Jack and I were taking a break, and a cuff was loose—Jack had meant to fix it before, but must have forgot—and it. When we came back down into the lab, Phantom was gone.”

Vlad nodded, staring with an expression he was making sure looked rapt. He was studying her face. He was finding she hadn’t aged quite as well as he’d always thought. That rapturous beauty that had held him throughout college had gone somewhere.

“That—by itself, missing a subject. It wasn’t a problem. Ghosts have escaped before. It happens. Jack and I didn’t think too deeply about it.” Maddie glanced to the right. The waiter hovered against the other wall, wine bottle in hand. He’d read the atmosphere of the table and tried to tuck himself away until a good moment. Maddie sighed. She pulled her hand from Vlad’s. She stared down as she spoke, quieter. “I never… thought Phantom was a vengeful spirit. …I was wrong. God. I was wrong. If I could have just destroyed him on the table. …If Jack and I had never captured him.”

Vlad was glad, in the moment, that Maddie would not meet his eyes. There was emotion bleeding through on his own face which he could not wipe away.

(“I have to tell them, right…? That it’s me…?” Danny, stitched back together to the best of Vlad’s ability, kept alive with the entanglement of machines Vlad had once used to incubate Danny’s clones. He could only speak when the machine breathed for him. A rasp instead of a voice. Eyes too dry to cry, dehydrated and spent from all the screaming and sobbing Vlad had not been around to witness, and could only imagine. “I can’t hide this. They’re gonna know…”)

“Maddie… my dear… I’m—perhaps not quite following—it sounds like you mean—”

“Phantom killed Danny,” Maddie said, and she said it with no emotion in her voice, because the alternative was to fall completely apart.

“That’s—”

“It’s worse,” Maddie said, her voice wavering. “He took Danny’s body. And he told Jazz—told all of us—that Jack and I did this to him. To Danny. He’s still walking around. In Danny’s body. Pretending to be Danny. Jack and I know the truth of course but he has Jazz convinced. Jazz believes it. She thinks Phantom was Danny, that it’s been him all along, and she doesn’t know that Danny—and she thinks that we—Jack and I—thinks that we—”

Maddie’s breath hitched. She was pale now, so starkly pale against the sequin red of her dress and breathing all too quickly. The waiter with the wine retreated. Despite the open air, Vlad felt a pressure closing in around his chest.

(“It’s…………….. going okay.” Danny flinched as Vlad threaded another stitch. It took too much effort on Vlad’s part to align the needle with how badly Danny’s body trembled. It wasn’t because of the stitches. Danny’s body trembled on its own, perpetually, for the last four days. As if it had forgotten how not to, as if those untold hours on the dissection table had broken him into this state. “It was scary when I—thought I couldn’t actually convince Mom and Dad but… Jazz convinced them. They get it, I think. That it’s me. …They haven’t attacked me, you know, haha? …..It’s awkward. I think they’re sorry. It’s weird. ….I think it’s okay.”)

“This is Phantom’s revenge for what we did to him. He killed our son. And no one knows but Jack and me… and you, now. Danny’s dead and I can’t even bury my son… It’s Phantom, now. Reminding us every single moment of what we did to him. And we have to pretend like—because Jazz is there. He turned Jazz against us. She believes Jack and I did this to Danny. We tried to explain but she just thinks we’re trying to avoid the blame. Like it’s denial.” Maddie dropped her forehead to her palm, elbow on the table, holding herself up. “I can’t tell Jazz that her baby brother’s dead. She won’t believe me anyway. I can’t have a funeral for my baby boy. I have to look at his corpse every single day and pretend it’s him, and not the monster that killed him.”

Maddie’s body trembled, and the sight of it was all too familiar to Vlad.

“Jack and I don’t sleep. We don’t eat. That thing lives in our house and our baby boy is dead. And I’m begging you, Vlad, to please tell me what to do.”

Maddie looked up, and the disquiet on Vlad’s face was hopefully not out of place with whatever she expected of him.

“Surely,” Vlad said, mouth dry, “there are ways to prove if it is or isn’t Danny. There must be… a million things Danny would know, which Phantom would not.”

“He’s in Danny’s body, Vlad. He has access to all of Danny’s memories right there. He can read any memory he needs right from Danny’s own brain…” Maddie’s voice caught. “And he can overwrite other people’s memories with possession. Physically, he has Danny’s body. Mentally, he has Danny’s mind. And there is absolutely nothing Jack and I can do to prove he’s not Danny.” Maddie fell quiet a moment, eyes dropping. “And if we go after him the only way we can—as a ghost—Jazz will think we killed our little boy. His friends, too. Do we do that…? Do we just do that, and destroy him, and lose Jazz right after we lost Danny…? Or do we live with the monster. Forever.”

(“It’s… I can’t really tell what they think. It’s maybe more awkward now but, it’s getting better in some ways, maybe, I think. I don’t really spend any time alone with them… or talk about the—haha—the uh—” Danny let out a stressed laugh, blinking away tears as he ran a hand through his hair. “I can’t really talk about the—not yet. Maybe eventually. Maybe we’re—I think we’re healing. Slowly, I think. It’s okay. I’m gonna figure out how to forgive them and it’ll be okay.”)

Vlad wasn’t speaking.

Vlad needed to speak.

“Maddie, I… My dear I hear what you’re saying. But what if—well—if he is so physically and mentally indistinguishable from Danny, what if he simply is Danny? It’s—what would this be—a half-human half-ghost hybrid of sorts? From my research I feel that could be distinctly possible—”

Vlad met Maddie’s eyes, and the pain in them silenced him immediately.

“…Not you too,” Maddie breathed. “Did he get to you already? Overshadow you already?”

“Maddie my love I am not overshadowed.”

“But he’s gotten to you first somehow, hasn’t he…?”

Vlad did not speak. He did not speak, and he thought of the blood lingering in his mansion carpet and the gore he’d seen inside his laboratory walls and the dead dead dead eyes of the boy coming back, day after day, clinging to the same exhausted hopefuls of “It’s getting better...” “It’s getting better...” “It’s getting better...”

The waiter set down the wine bottle, hurrying through a speech about its origin before Vlad raised a hand to dismiss him, and with clear shining relief the waiter bowed out. Vlad had not so much as looked at him. He was staring at Maddie. And she was staring back.

Maddie pushed her seat back, and she set her napkin on the table.

“Sorry to bother you about this, Vlad. You’re much too busy. Forget you ever heard any of this.”

She went quietly. Vlad watched her back disappear without so much as a word.

There was proof, surely, for the existence of half ghosts. There was proof directly within his reach, inside him, which could be shown at a moment’s notice.

But the crimes of Vlad Plasmius ran numerous and deep. It was not a decision to make lightly. It was not a decision to make at all for the broken shards of a family Vlad was no longer interested in pursuing—for a broken woman who’d lost her charm and a son too fractured for Vlad to ever proudly call his own.