He didn’t even bother with the banter this time – charging up an ectoblast, the boy allowed it to build in his hands before condensing it into a hard ball of green energy. The core of the blast burned with a greenish-black hue, crackling with the sheer power it contained.

With a wild cry, Danny launched it at Skulker; the blast was so powerful that it disintegrated the majority of the hunter’s suit. The ghost squawked in indignation, falling to the ground a few metres below as his jets were destroyed. “Calm down, Whelp! I did not come here to fight you.”

Danny shrieked in frustration, grasping his hair and taking several deep breaths. “Ghosts have been coming all day and telling me that!” he shouted. “Nearly every single one of my enemies had turned up with flowers or chocolates, and acted offended when I blasted them out of the sky! In addition, I have dinner with Sam in half an hour, and if more ghosts turn up, it’ll ruin my night with her!”

Skulker chuckled, wriggling out of the helmet so that he could move about freely. “Well, here you go, Whelp,” he said, pulling out of the helmet’s mouth a small box tied with a ribbon. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

Danny dropped his hands, staring incredulously at the hunter. “Not you, too,” he groaned, stooping over to claim the box. “This had better not have anything nasty in it.”

The box contained what looked like some very expensive chocolate. “Nicked it from Plasmius’ stash,” the tiny ghost announced proudly.

Danny stared at him. “Why the hell are all you guys giving me presents?”

Skulker cackled. “Of course, you wouldn’t know, would you?” Danny charged an ectoblast in warning, and the tiny ghost waved a hand dismissively. “Well, you flirt with all of us, so why shouldn’t we give you gifts? It’s Ghost Zone culture, after all.”

The power around his hands died down as Danny gaped at his hunter. “What? I do not flirt!”

Skulker shrugged. “In the Ghost Zone, fighting is flirting, kid.”

The halfa froze. “Fighting… I… I-I… What?!” He paced along the nature strip, pressing a hand to his mouth in realisation. “Is that why you guys keep on coming back when I chuck you in the Ghost Zone?” the teen demanded, rounding on Skulker. “Because you think that I’m leading you guys on or something?”

The ghost rolled his eyes. “Well, yeah. It’s perfectly acceptable to have more than one mate in ghost culture, so it’s fine for you to flirt with all of us.” Hoisting himself up to sit on top of his scorched helmet, Skulker stretched his hands above his head with a luxurious groan. “You’re excused this year because you didn’t know about the custom, but next year you’re expected to give gifts to all of your significant others in the Ghost Zone.”

“I’ll give you a Valentine’s gift!” Danny growled, sucking the ghost into the thermos with grim satisfaction.

And Danny shrieked right along with it. His foot, as though dipped in acid, was eaten again to the bone. He cradled it in his arms, hissing through ground teeth, and finally tore the glove off his right hand. Trembling fingers ran over exposed muscle and came back coated in liquid ectoplasm.

He moaned in pain and fear, clutching the sheared off limb and watching, eyes filled with bleak understanding, as the foot reformed.

Like a flash, he saw a slimmer, 12-year-old foot in his place, melting into the floor, her small, terrified scream echoing his own anxiety as, piece by piece, his body threatened to fall apart.

Danny left the ghost be, and took off running. No flying. No intangibility. His whole body was a rag doll, threatening to uncoil at every seam, dissolve away, until nothing but ectoplasmic waste remained.

He was unstable.

Danny limped along with terrified certainty. Through the front door, trailing red and green as he hobbled into the empty basement. His hands flew through drawers, ripping out shelves and toppling stacks of half-finished inventions. He sent crinkling papers to the floor and ignored the taste of burnt rubber that wrapped his tongue. He'd knocked an iron from the shelf, and couldn't care less when it ate straight through a pair of extra gloves.

A smoke detector blared overhead, panicking in a shrill, constant cry of urgency. The noise pierced Danny's skull, and he raised his gloved hands to his ears in vain.

It wouldn't stop, but neither could he; a drawer. a beaker. Everything that could be moved was banished from its position, dumped unceremoniously on the floor.

A tiny cry of relief came from his parted lips, drowned in the sirens, as he tore open a drawer housing a syringe of dark, moldy gloop.

He took it in his shaking hands and dug the tip 2 inches deep into his left arm, stopping only when it hit bone. His thumb slammed into the plunger, and he breathed as it sent the fetid remains of a 3 month old ecto-dejecto experiment into his veins.

Dripping feet reformed, flesh crawling back over the bones of his toes, and he fell, cold with shock, against the counter. The syringe fell limply from his hands, rolled a few inches, and stopped when it knocked against the shattered remnants of a glass beaker.

He phased calmly into his human self, hearing only the in and out of his breathing as suited men poured into the tiny confines of the lab, gas masks snapped around their heads, and dragged Danny from the smoke-filled, tar-covered floor.

...

"I found it. In the far left drawer, kinda near the portal." Lithe hands held a sealed beaker over Danny's bed. He took it, but let his hands linger on her dark blue nails.

"New nail polish," he remarked lightly. Danny clutched the beaker to his chest, ignoring the acrid stench that snuck beneath the thing's lid.

"Why...did you need me to get it?"

"I accidentally knocked an iron over and burned some gloves. My parents won't let me in the lab."

"No, why do you need it?"

Danny studied it silently.

"Is Danielle back?" Sam asked quietly.

Danny shook his head. "I don't know where she went."

"Then...what's it for? Or why didn't you phase yourself through to get it?"

He swallowed a strangled laugh. "Do you have the syringe?"

"What's it for?"

But she held it out all the same, and he grabbed it, studying the layer of mold, ectoplasm, and blood that coated its needle. He cringed, trying desperately to wipe it clean on his sheet.

She seized his arm. His hiss of pain sent her hand away, but she snuck it back, lifting the edge of his cotton sleeve.

"You've used it already." Her hand brushed over the injection site, following the contours of dark purple bruises and reddish blotches under his skin. "Danny, this looks infected!"

"Don't worry," his chalky voice responded.

Her hand didn't let go. Sam held him, eyes digging into his. "What happened?"

"I'm unstable, Sam."

"...You're what?"

"I think I pushed myself too far. I started...falling apart. My leg, actually. My leg just dissolved to the bone."

Scared purple eyes shook. Her hands crawled up his face, wrapping his cheeks with their soft palms. His skin was clammy to the touch.

"Then stop pushing; the ghosts can wait!" Her eyes flitted to his eyes, back to the injection. "Please. I don't think--this stuff doesn't look safe! We'll find help." Sam tripped over her own words, shot down by the tiny shake in Danny's head.

"I don't need help. I need these." He hoisted the syringe and ecto-dejecto in his hands. The contents in the beaker sloshed, its separated layers churning together.

The different tiers came back, the top solid and flaking easily. The second comprised of coagulated chunks of chemicals soaked in a sauce of oily fluid. The bottom was a dark, marshy green, blooming with fuzz.

The rotting contents refused to mix.

"Promise me you'll tell me if it happens again," Sam whispered, pushing the beaker down until she was eye to eye with him.

"I do. I promise."

She hugged him tightly, never seeing the crossed fingers behind his back.

...

Danny ran like the prey of some fierce animal, deftly rounding corners and throwing his shoulder against the boy's room door. He stumbled inside, unhooked the backpack from the crook of his arm, and shut himself in the first stall.

His melting fingers sprang a syringe from his pocket, his other hand tearing the belt from its loops and fumbling as it tugged the leather strap around his left arm. Hid hand plunged elbow-deep into his bag, surfacing with the beaker of decaying ecto-dejecto.

Eyes reserved, he yanked off the plug, sunk the needle in, sucked up the pungeant contents, and jammed the needle into his arm.

He missed the vein. He felt like he did. If not a vein, then a channel, and tube. A spot in his left arm where the ectoplasm flowed.

The needle came out, shaking, as a trail of deep green slunk behind it.

Again, he plunged the syringe. He squeezed the contents into his flesh.

Searing, burning, acid pain ate up his arm, and Danny bit his lip, fighting the torrent. He felt white-hot snakes slither down to his hand, and his skin erupted in red, allergic welts.

His whole left shoulder had swollen twice its size, dripping a whitish mixture of pus and plasma from the opened syringe holes. Red oozed down with them, coating the gangrenous patch of green, stinking flesh with a stream of crimson.

Danny collapsed against the stall and whimpered through the tears running down his face. It had been his 8th injection, and the beaker had gotten dangerously low.

His human side rejected the toxic cocktail more and more with each injection. It fought desperately, his immune system prepared to destroy the limb of its own volition.

But his ghost side?

His ghost side craved it.

It threatened to fall apart without it.

...

Saturday night came with a rainstorm and six attacks.

Danny collapsed in a cold mess on the sheets of his bed, his face buried in his hands. Freezing, clammy sweat mixed with the rain in his hair, his heart slamming into his ears with each beat. The whole room spun, and his very head threatened to cleave in two.

He wasn't dissolving.

He wasn't even dissolving.

Danny sat bolt upright, swaying as his balance sent him veering to the right. Clumsy hands tore open his bedside drawer, removing the needle and empty beaker from within. Terror clawed in his throat as he shook the empty glass jar, his eyes turning to the fetid green still in the syringe.

He didn't need it.

Eyes trailed to his left arm, to the decaying black that ran down to his wrist. Fingernails rotted from the constant poison. Blooms of red--itchy, hot, and painful--opened into wide sores on his shoulder. One ate to the bone.

Another injection would be unbearable.

"Please no," Danny whimpered into the dark of his room. His body felt like it was falling apart, his heart 10 beats away from quitting.

The syringe trembled in his hand.

"I don't want to."

A sob wrenched past his lips. The room spun.

"It hurts," his childlike voice muttered.

Slowly, with numb fingers, he wrested the belt from its loops, wrapping it around his arm with experience.

And the needle sunk in. Twice. Three times. His nerves sent it shaking, too imprecise to strike the "vein."

Four times. The injection rode through its weathered route, hemorrhaging just beneath his elbow. The searing goop sprung like a leak through his skin, destroying the last of the arm's rotting barrier between air and flesh.

"No..." Danny whispered, watching the last of the ecto-dejecto escape through the tear in his arm. "NO!"

He needed it!

Danny ran down the stairs, left arm clutched in right, and didn't even notice the stream of green ectoplasm that trailed on the soles of his shoes.

He found the same back drawer, flung it open, and watched testtubes roll on their side, propelled by their momentum. He dug deeper into the drawer, finding nothing.

"No..."

Danny spun, slipping on his own ectoplasmic fluid, and hobbled to the next cabinet. Dread filled his stomach when he tore the doors open.

Empty.

He walked on bone.

Empty.

Collapsed on rotting knees.

Empty.

"SAM!" he shrieked.

Empty.

Danny dragged himself, until his fingers snapped off at the knuckles.

Finally, he stopped. Withdrawal sent chills through whatever remained of his body. His head pounded, vision blurred, tears poured.

Danny could only watch, fascinated, as his left arm dissolved, layer by layer, into gorey, tar-colored tissues, leaking like gasoline, onto the floor.

The "vein." A tunnel, more like, rotting at the edges. The constant injections had just eaten a path through his arm. He lapsed into a fit of coughing as the smell invaded his nose.

He didn't even think to scream until it was too late. His voice fluttered through the holes in his chest, and he quieted, distance consuming his mind.

Frantic feet beat down the lab steps, halting just shy of his half-dissolved corpse.

"Danny!"