#exclusion zone

“Aren’t you supposed to be in bed still? Jazz and me were going to do breakfast in bed for you.”

“It’s ‘Jazz and I’,” Jazz said by unsuppressible instinct.

Maddie waved Danny off. “Oh I don’t want breakfast in bed. I want to finish the Fenton Disintegrator.” Her eyes went sly. “And if you two want to make me breakfast while I focus on this, I wouldn’t say no.”

Maddie placed the flower vase on the table. Jazz moved it to a different table that did not have an active welding flame.

“Okay. Well I’m making the eggs. Jazz is making the pancakes. Oh also--” Danny spread his arms out at half width. “I was uh, gonna give you a hug along with Happy Mother’s Day but… I don’t know if you’re maybe covered in chemicals or like, embers that will light me on fire?”

Maddie surveyed her hazmat suit. She brushed some unidentified debris off to the floor, which Jazz earmarked to sweep up later before it could eat a hole through the hardwood. For now, she was pulled into the same hug as Danny, and then quickly released.

“Now go make breakfast,” Maddie said, as she snapped her hazmat facemask back on. 

Danny nodded, and he slipped under his mother’s arm before she sat back down. “I’m putting a whole stick of butter in the eggs so speak now if you have any issues with that.”

“Maybe it doesn’t need to be a whole stick,” Jazz said, following Danny into the kitchen. But her brother was already in front of the fridge. He threw the doors open with bravado and emerged with the egg carton in one hand and a stick of butter in the other.

Jazz’s protest was lost in the moment. Her attention was sopped up by the burgeoning, building, rumbling roar that was blooming explosively closer. Jazz whipped her head to the front door as, with all the grace and subtlety of a fighter jet landing, the Fenton RV tore around the corner and parked atop its oil stain. Audibly, the engine died, and the door popped open, and heavy feet slammed across the driveway before bursting through a front door which was luckily already unlocked.

“HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY MADS!” Jack announced. There was a certain sticky mania in his eyes, Jazz noticed, which he developed whenever he drove for longer than Jazz thought was advisable. And, glancing at the 10:33 on her watch, Jack had been driving for at least 7 hours. 

That was the first thought to cross Jazz’s mind. The second thought was that some sort of faux paus had occurred, as her eyes were pulled to the thing tucked in Jack’s arms, which he now thrust out with full enthusiasm. It was another bouquet of flowers—and not even one that blended well with the colors of hers and Danny’s—and not even one Maddie would like, as Jazz knew her mom had never been particularly fond of roses.

The third thought to cross Jazz’s mind came as a snap of confusion, a conviction she was staring at something visually impossible. It was as if the light from the window or the stance Jack took were distorting the roses. The petals were red—like roses often were—but they were red like animal flesh that had stopped bleeding moments ago. The leaves in deep black shadow were not in shadow at all. They basked in the light. Or perhaps they swallowed it, for how boastfully, wholly, impenetrably black they gleamed. 

Maddie seemed to be making the same silent assessment. And she shattered Jazz from her thoughts by the genuine, visceral, gasp that snapped Jazz’s attention fully to her mother.

Maddie stood from her table seat. Almost robotically, she peeled the face of her hazmat suit back once again, and what sat underneath was an expression of slack-jawed shock, utter intrigue. Her irises flitted about, stark against the wide whites of her eyes, drinking in the whole of Jack’s bouquet. Her expression begged some question which Jack seemed to smugly understand.

“Yep, they’re genuine,” Jack said, straightening his back, barely hiding the self-satisfied smile spreading over his lips. “Let me tell you Mads, it’s a damn task to track down a botanist who won’t laugh in your face when you ask about the blossoms, let alone have some cultivated. You don’t want to know how far I drove or how many speeding laws I broke to get these.”

Maddie’s instruments lay forgotten on the table. She walked like a puppet toward Jack, arms hovering in half extended reach. Her eyes were wonder, and they drank in the flowers in the same way that the flower’s black leaves drank the light. She yanked the glove off her right hand and gently caressed a petal, letting out a noise that Jazz assumed was delight.

“Of course, the lady warned me these’ll last maybe one week, max—ficklest plant in the world about growing conditions, like they wanna get themselves extinct—but I figure in the meantime you and me can make the most of that one week.”

“’You and I’…” Jazz muttered. “Dad what, um, what are those?”

Jazz jumped when a hand tapped her from behind. She’d been so consumed in the strange display, she’d forgotten the pancakes, and the eggs, and Danny in the kitchen behind her.

There was an accusation in her throat as she whipped around—something like “Don’t startle me like that.”—but the protest strangled itself silent at the sight of Danny’s face.

“Hey uh Jazz, d’you think you can finish breakfast…? I think I need to lie down in my room.”

Jazz had no immediate answer, because the question was about breakfast, and breakfast was nowhere near the forefront of her mind as she scoured Danny’s face: alarmingly pale, slick like Danny had been running in the heat, lips indistinguishable from the surrounding skin. The only color showed in the rashy redness of his cheeks. He was breathing as if every breath took an unspoken effort.

“Are you okay?” Jazz asked, alarmed.

Danny clapped her on the shoulder and rounded past her. He hugged the walls as he moved, carving a path to the stairs which seemed to give him the widest distance from the huddle that Jack and Maddie made by the front door.

“I’ll tell you later I just really need to lie down,” he said in one breath, and Jazz caught the hint like fear in his voice which set her teeth on edge. “Make Mom’s breakfast okay thanks.”

“Danny…” Her attention jumped between Danny and her parents. “Hey, Mom, Dad, I think Danny’s maybe—” Jazz caught herself.

A new thought held her tongue.

“Dad…” she stepped closer to her parents, who seemed to finally remember her presence in the house. From the corner of her eye, Jazz watched Danny slip upstairs. “Those are… really interesting-looking flowers. Can you explain what they are?”

“Blood Blossoms!” Jack declared with enthusiasm nearly strong enough to rattle drywall. “EXTREMELY rare—they all but went extinct after the 1800s. Hell, some spectral enthusiasts think they’re just a myth, but me and Mads always knew—” Jazz didn’t correct him. “—and so I made it my mission for Mother’s Day to track these babies down.”

“And what do they do, Dad?” Jazz asked, hearing in her own head what a stupid question that was to ask about a bouquet of flowers, but sinkingly sure she was going to receive an answer.

“They decimate ghosts,” Jack answered, and he drew his tongue out along every word of the answer. “And they do it in incredible ways. Unlike anything we can create.”

…

Pancake lingered like ash on Jazz’s tongue, tasteless beneath the worry she beat down under her feet as she made good on her promise to Danny. She prepared breakfast with only a few stray pancakes burned. She scrambled the eggs in the absence of her brother and his whole stick of butter.

The pancakes were passable by taste test, so Jazz dished out four plates. She served two under the elbows of her cooing parents, so wholly consumed with the flowers at the table. They noticed nothing amiss on Jazz’s face. Their bug-eyed goggles were too rapturously invested in the petals of one flower, cut to strips by scalpel and oozing across the table.

Jazz ate her plate quickly, leaving half, and grabbed the one untouched plate. “I’m gonna bring this plate to Danny while he’s… studying,” she said, a little angry at the verbal hitch in her lie. But Jazz knew no one was really listening. She knew what it meant when her parents got like this. She could say she was taking this plate to Danny Phantom, and it wouldn’t be enough to make her parents blink.

“Oh, go ahead,” Maddie said with a wave. “Don’t stick around on my behalf. Jack, look at this, against the window light.” She held up a strip of dissected leaf. “The stratification would suggest no cell walls. And there’s visibly no chlorophyll.”

“I’ll get the microscope,” Jack answered, giddy, like a school child.

Jack bounded to the lab. Maddie rambled under her breath, hunched over the gift she had made into her specimen. And Jazz slipped out of sight.

Jazz hugged the banister up the stairs, rounded the upper hall, knocked twice on Danny’s door. She worried for just a moment she was not actually invited to Danny’s room, but a faint come in, met her. She opened the door by just a crack at first. She caught the way Danny winced as she did it, sitting at the sill of his thrown-open window.

“You can come all the way in. Just, can you close the door behind you?” Danny asked, and Jazz did. She pressed it shut with her shoulder, thumbs digging into the plate in her hands.

“I brought you your breakfast,” Jazz said, eyes scouring Danny’s face.

“Thanks, you can put it wherever,” and he seemed to lean farther into the open air of the window.

“I think that’s dangerous,” Jazz remarked. “Leaning like that.”

“You’re right. You should warn your brother who can’t fly.”

“…Right,” Jazz answered. There was something stressed to his humor, just a bit too biting and sharp. Jazz maybe did not want to play jokes right now.

She set the plate on Danny’s desk. Sweet spring air caught her loose hair, which she tucked behind her ear as she turned to inspect Danny. He took the full brunt of the breeze, but it did not cure the slick clamminess on his face. His skin was icy, face tight.

“Are you okay?” Jazz asked again.

“Fine. Completely.”

“Those plants are a problem, aren’t they.” It wasn’t a question.

“…One week, Dad said, right?” Danny asked with a pale white smile. “Then they’ll die off.”

“Danny, what are they?”

“Blood Blossoms,” Danny answered, a bit reluctantly.

“And what are they doing to you?”

Danny’s wry smile came back, weak. “S’you know how Dad’s allergic to daisies?”

“I don’t think this is the same as Dad sneezing so loud he sets off car alarms.”

Danny’s smile folded. “Maybe not… Or maybe I will start sneezing that loud. We don’t know.”

“Danny, please, another time, maybe, for the jokes? You’re scaring me a bit.” Jazz stepped closer, and reluctance closed out the last of the weak jest on Danny’s face. “What are those things doing to you?”

“I don’t… actually know, is the thing. The one time I ran into them they were—like—bad? I don’t know what they did other than they hurt. I don’t recommend direct contact.”

“But it’s not just direct contact, is it? It did something to you the second Dad walked in the door.”

“That’s not fair. I think it took a good three seconds at least.”

“Danny.”

Danny rolled his eyes, but the pale slickness on his face took away from any annoyance his pedantry could inflict on Jazz—and pedantry was her game, anyway. “…Yeah. I could tell what they were the moment I felt it.”

“And what is ‘it’?”

“Like…” Danny’s fingers flexed nervously, “really sick? Really clammy, and hot, and like I was breathing a bunch of really sharp microscopic glass.” Agitation won over Danny’s body language, flexed fingers now tensing, shoulders tightening. His eyes skipped away from Jazz. “And actually, this feels weird and embarrassing to explain. You’re not my doctor yet.”

Jazz nodded. She painted over the worry on her face. For however little she understood, she understood one thing absolutely—which was that she was Danny’s older sister. “Okay. Right then. I’m going to go downstairs and tell Mom and Dad they need to get rid of the flowers.”

“Jazz, no—” Danny snapped to face Jazz again.

“Danny, this is really really bad for you. It’s doing something bad to you.”

“But Mom was so happy—you saw her face—” The rashy redness spread patchier on Danny’s white cheeks, embarrassment creeping like a stain across his skin as he broke eye contact and looked aggressively at the floor. “Besides!” he said, throwing his arms out. “What would you tell them? ‘Hey the flowers that specifically make ghosts sick are making Danny sick. Do not ask any follow up questions about what this infers.’”

“Implies,” Jazz said, quietly, before she had the chance to filter it. She shook her head. “Never mind. If you give me five minutes, I will come up with an excuse.”

“Jazz, don’t—”

“I’m not letting those flowers stay in the house with you.”

“I can figure out—”

“—figure out how to hurt yourself unnecessarily over some flowers? Mom will understand.”

“Dad worked really hard to get those.”

“Which is not a good reason to let them hurt you.”

“I’m Danny Phantom! I can take some punches--”

“—Biohazards aren’t punches--”

“—I could fight a car, like I said—”

“—Biohazards aren’t cars.”

“—I can figure this out, Jazz—”

“—and so can I! By getting rid of the flowers.” Jazz paused, reading the genuine distress on Danny’s face. Her shoulders fell a bit. Her tone softened. “I… know you’re Danny Phantom, the selfless town hero who can take a few punches. And I am Danny Phantom’s sister, who is here to advocate for him when he tries to heroically, selflessly, get himself hurt over something he should be allowed to object to.”

Danny fell quiet. Some unreadable expression crossed his face before he looked back up at her. “…Compromise, okay…? We could give it a week,” Danny said, and his uncomfortable smile was back. “Dad said those things die after one week. I definitely, 100%, heard him say that. Maybe I’ll—if I say I have a big project, with Sam and Tucker—stay at their house a couple nights—I’ll be at school most of the day anyway. If they’re dead in one week, I don’t have to ruin Mom’s present she likes. And Mom and Dad won’t have to …imply anything about me from knowing the ghost-hurting flower hurts me.”

A dozen arguments built up behind Jazz’s tongue, obstinate denial, absolute refusal. It wasn’t just a ridiculous thing for Danny to request—it was out of the question.

“Day-by-day,” Danny added, negotiating against Jazz’s unspoken objection. “We can—I’ll play it by ear. I’ll tell you how I’m feeling every day. That’s the compromise, okay? And if I can’t make it a week, I’ll tell you, and we can… do something.”

There was a misdirected frustration building to pressure inside Jazz. But the longer she looked at her brother’s pale face, the better she understood it was not Danny frustrating her.

A delighted laugh hit the bedroom door, muffled, floating up from the kitchen. A babble of words too murmurous to make out. A thunk, a shivering whirr of a saw blade, a new hoot of triumph all followed. Jack and Maddie were children free on summer break. Their wild joy would be infectious, if it didn’t curdle Jazz’s blood.

“Please?” Danny added.

Jazz let out a long-held breath. She let the frustration turn inward.

“It… is infer, in that direction,” Jazz said. “You meant to say, ‘Mom and Dad won’t have to infer anything about me.”

“Well that doesn’t make sense.”

“And fine,” Jazz said, sharper now, and wholly focused on her brother who stiffened at the change in tone. “…Fine. I’ll lie to Mom and Dad with you. I’ll tell them any lie you want me to about you working on a project with Sam and Tucker. But this is a day-by-day thing, okay? If I think you’re in serious danger, or that this is too much, I’m getting rid of the flowers.”

…

At noon on Mother’s Day, Jazz pulled together a duffel bag of Danny’s belongings. She sifted his shirts from the laundry pile, grabbed pants and socks and underwear, rolled them and stuffed them in with toothpaste and toothbrush and deodorant until the duffel zipper would not quite close. She fetched Danny’s school bag and shoes and homework from the places he directed her. It bothered Danny, clearly, to be so helpless in it all. He’d tried to get a few of his things for himself, only to learn that the air right outside his bedroom was like glass down his throat.

This eliminated the option of leaving by the front door. So with his duffel bag packed, Jazz sent Danny out the window

“It’s a real shame you can’t stick around for the dinner I’m making Mom for Mother’s Day,” Jazz announced loudly, alone, to herself, as she creaked down the stairs. “But I completely understand. This biology project is THE most important project of sophomore year. You and Tucker and Sam are completely right to meet up tonight and spend the whole night working on it. You may want to consider spending all week on it, I think. In fact I hope you call me every day along the way, so I can help.”

“Jazz is right, Danny!” Jack answered, though he did not look up—perhaps could not look up—from the kitchen table which had become a second lab. His face was consumed entirely into the task of skimming petal slivers with the sharp edge of his scalpel. He deposited wafers of flesh thinner than paper on the bed of a microscope slide. “Sophomore grades are the most important grades you’re going to get. Do well now and you’ll be like Jazz one day.”

“Right you are, Dad. I’m going to drive Danny over to Tucker’s house now so no need to get up.”

And Jazz moved to the front door—quietly at first—and then with a quick snap-shut of the front door as she looked over her shoulder and, for just a moment, thought her mother was looking up at her. The door frame rattled, and Jazz’s heart pounded with the lie. Did her mom notice Danny missing? Could her mom notice anything that wasn’t Blood Blossoms right now?

Jazz buried the thought. She’d deal with it, if she needed to.  

Her attention was to her car now—squeezed up against the Fenton RV nearly close enough to trade paint. Her passenger-side doors were entirely inaccessible. Danny sat in the car already, eyeing her, duffel bag curled in his arms. His body leaned almost limp in the way he trusted his weight to the passenger’s seat.

Jazz tugged the driver side door, surprised to find it locked. She made eye contact with Danny.

“I phased in,” he said, which she’d already figured out. Danny made motions to the Fenton RV. “Tell Dad to park better.”

“I think he’ll take that as a challenge to park closer,” Jazz answered, and she heartened a bit at the chuckle this got from Danny.

Jazz unlocked her door, took the driver’s seat, and turned the keys in the ignition. She tried to act focused on the task—tried to act so entirely consumed in the job of not scratching the RV as she backed out—but in truth her attention was entirely on Danny even when her eyes weren’t. Her mind lingered too long on the deep breaths he took beside her—like he was breathing properly for the first time in hours.

…

By evening, Jazz was scrubbing pans in the sink. She’d secured a small win, breaking from her self-imposed cooking duty to try out a “You know, Mom and Dad, maybe you should take all that down to the lab? I want to use the table to serve Mom her Mother’s Day meal.”

Meals at the table weren’t a strict Fenton tradition. She half-expected her mother’s insistence they eat around the Blossoms, like breakfast, but her request was enough to sway her parents. Perhaps the extra weight Jazz leaned into “Mother’s Day” had tipped them over the edge.

And when dinner was over, Jack and Maddie disappeared to the basement again, scattered like cockroaches. Jazz cleared the plates. She loaded the dishwasher. She scrubbed the sink. She scrubbed the counter. She moved, as if by osmosis, as the sponge in her hand sought new targets. The table stole her attention. She scrubbed. She scrubbed. First her focus was consumed in wiping pollen, dissolving the sap which dried too deep a crimson for Jazz’s comfort. She scrubbed, and dried, and scrubbed again. And still her fingers itched.

Her cleaning assault spread to the floor. A sponge, at first, became a broom, became a mop. It became the heavy-scented floor cleaner. In the time it took the floor to dry, Jazz moved her assault to the living room. Because pollen spreads, and she felt a fearful certainty it was already in her every breath. She imagined how it might feel if it were glass she was breathing, if it were glass in her lungs, if she were Danny. She threw all the windows wide open. She scrubbed the walls.

If Jack or Maddie emerged from the basement, Jazz held the excuse ready on her tongue that she was just doing Mother’s Day cleaning.

Jack and Maddie did not emerge. The sun dripped out of the sky. Jazz vacuumed. She shed her clothes and placed them in the washing machine and started the load. She mopped again. Underneath the citrus-pine, Jazz still smelled something sickly-sweet.

…

On Monday morning, Jazz navigated the freshmen halls to find Danny before the start of first period. He’d claimed that morning over text that he was fine, that his night had been uneventful, that Sam had stashed him in her parents’ 37th extra bedroom—which Jazz had accused of exaggeration, and which Danny had doubled-down on by raising the number to 47.

It wasn’t until Jazz caught sight of him leaning against his own locker that she was willing to let go of the tightness in her chest. He raised his head at the sight of her, and Jazz noted the human amount of color that had come back into Danny’s skin. She pulled him into a hug despite his wriggling protests.

“Don’t—” Danny yanked his face free and squirmed out of her grip. “No—no hugging at school. Not where Dash could see me.” The bruising under his eyes did not escape her notice.

“Why? Is he gonna get jealous?” Jazz asked, to the immediate flustered reddening of Danny’s face.

Jazz didn’t know a ton about Dash, but she knew two things about him. One, he picked on Danny, so Jazz already hated him. Two, he could not focus on a tutoring session with her to save his life—either because he was stupid or because he had a thing for her. Or both. He’d tried asking her out after a session once. Jazz had shot him down immediately, due to hating him.

“Ew. No,” Danny brushed his shirt down, one of his clean ones, then froze a moment in fear.

“My clothes are totally clean,” Jazz said, reading the worry in Danny’s eyes. “I’m doing laundry every day. So I don’t wear anything with Blood Blossom pollen on it.”

“Thanks.”

“I also got Mom and Dad to move their set up down into the lab.”

Danny nodded along to this, visibly heartened. “Oh good. Awesome. That’s a little less ‘scrubbing the hell out of every surface’ I’ll have to do when I’m back.”

“I’m doing that too. Already. Scrubbing the house,” Jazz added, and Danny missed a beat.

“Oh…” Danny said. “Thanks. Actually. That’s really nice.”

“It is. I’m very nice. So accept my hug.”

A huddle of five teenagers squeezed past Jazz, a quiet Sorry excuse me from the freshman on the edge of the group. Jazz watched them go past, and then she dropped her voice.

“Tough ghost night?” she asked, gesturing to Danny.

“What makes you say that?” Danny asked, and it wasn’t sarcasm.

“You look like you haven’t slept.”

Danny let out a little guffaw. He folded his arms. “Yeah because Sam’s parents’ 57th guest bedroom has the world’s stiffest bed in it. Same for the other 56 guest bedrooms. I tried them all. I’m something of a modern-day Goldilocks on beds that suck ass.”

“There are not 57 guest rooms.”

“Sam walked me to my room and she said, ‘I forgot we had this room.’ How do you forget a bedroom in your house, Jazz?”

“I’m hearing a stunning lack of gratitude from this corner over here, Goldilocks.” Sam’s voice startled Jazz. She looked around her brother’s shoulder to see Sam leaning against the neighboring locker.

“That’s Mr. Goldilocks to you,” Danny answered.

“You don’t set the name-calling rules while you’re my house guest.”

“Sam, how many guest bedrooms are in your house?” Danny asked, possessed suddenly with purpose as he peeled entirely away from Jazz. “57?”

“It’s not 57,” Jazz answered.

“I don’t know. I’ve never counted,” Sam answered. “Could be 57.”

“How would there be 57 bedrooms?” Jazz rallied back. “The square-footage alone—”

“I’ll count them all tonight,” Danny said.

“Do not do that. You’re not allowed to wander around my parents’ house while you’re my stow-away,” Sam said. “If they find you, you’re toast.”

“A house that big? I think your parents should be more concerned if there’s not a ghost haunting the halls.”

“Still vetoed. If Maria sees you in ghost-form you will put her in cardiac arrest. She is very Catholic—”

“—Maria?” Jazz asked.

“Sam’s maid—”

“—My parents’ maid—”

“—and she likes Sam more than she likes Sam’s parents. So Maria is keeping me secret from the Mansons. Her and Ida—”

“—My grandma?”

“She’s chill.”

“My grandma knows you were there last night?”

“Yeah we chatted.”

“Why were you talking to my grandma?”

“She talked to me.”

“How did she findyou?”

“Well that might have been my fault.”

“What did you do.”

“Maybe I accidentally went into her room.”

“Why?”

“My bed is NOT comfortable, okay! I was checking out the other rooms, which I already admitted to—”

“—Well stop doing that. You will get caught.”

“Ida is chill though.”

Sam folded her arms. “…Grandma is chill.” She jabbed a finger into Danny’s chest. “No more wandering. Go fight a ghost or something if you’re bored.”

Danny gestured widely. “Like I was just saying to Jazz! No ghosts last night!”

“Huh,” Sam answered.

“First time in like… at least a week. This should be my opportunity to get a proper night’s sleep, but instead I’m stuck sleeping in the Goldilocks mansion.”

“Jokes get less funny the more you repeat them,” Sam said.

“Am I out of mileage on the Goldilocks bit?”

“Afraid so.”

“You’re in the Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel of rock-hard beds,” Jazz offered.

“I don’t know what that is,” Danny answered.

“It’s a paradox from German mathematician David Hilbert.”

“No, do not make me learn before the school bell has rung. I’m not doing work off the clock.”

As if in direct response to Danny’s taunt, the first-period bell clambered loud and frenetic from the hallway speakers. Danny shut his mouth into a tight thin line.

“So Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel—” Jazz continued, a light smile on her lips that Danny met with a withering glare.

“Oh noooo, I have to get to history where I’m learning about not-that. Sorry. Another time.” Danny clapped Jazz on the shoulder as he side-stepped her. Jazz grabbed his hand before he could fully pass.

“Meet back here after school?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“I wanna check in with you before you go back to Sam’s.”

“Yeah yeah I know.”

“One day down,” Jazz said. Danny looked up at her, and she gave him a little smile.

His mask of annoyance melted just enough to smile back. “Yeah. Just six to go.”

She yanked him a little closer. “Hug before you go.”

“NO HUG,” and he phased his wrist intangible before she could trap him in her devious clutches. Sam followed him, laughing. Jazz lingered, watching his back disappear.

She felt better. He was normal. He was her little brother like always. And maybe six days was all it would take to bring him home.

…

On Monday afternoon, Jazz came home alone. The smell of lemon cleaner lingered bright in the air. Very little had been disturbed in the house from the night before when Jazz had cleaned it spotless. Empty, as if only she lived there.

She set her bag down. She rounded into the kitchen, fingers trailing on the threshold frame that separated kitchen from the rest of the house. Two coffee mugs, brown stained rings going dry at the bottoms, sat in the basin of the sink.

Jazz pulled on the rubber dishwasher gloves from beside the sink—each too large for her hands—and she got to work scrubbing the coffee mugs spotless. She let the water run extra long, until it felt like everything was clean once more.

A bang rattled underfoot. A clang, clang, ttshock rumbled in sequence. And suddenly Jazz’s mind was filled with images of the lab. Suddenly, everything felt less clean.

Jazz picked her head up. Shoulders back, she strode to the basement door, which was firmly shut, which she had no intention of disturbing, lest it mingle its poisoned air with the rest of the house where Danny needed to live.

“Mom, Dad, I’m ordering us pizza!” Jazz announced with a heavy-knuckled rap against the basement door. She paused, ear straining. Silence met her for a few moments, before it was suffocated beneath the cacophony of metal grinding.

Jazz backed away from the door. She knew her parents when they got like this. She likely wouldn’t see them the rest of the night.

Jazz wondered if there was a way to pass slices of pizza into the lab without the taint of the blood blossoms infecting her own skin.

The thought sat hollow in Jazz’s heart. Maybe she wouldn’t try to hug Danny tomorrow.

She grabbed the mop again.

…

On Tuesday, Jazz grabbed both of Danny’s shoulders with an idea.

“Daisies,” she said simply.

“…The flower,” Danny answered in a way that indicated he very much did not understand what his answer was meant to be.

“I’ll buy a bunch of daisies. Then when Mom and Dad aren’t around, I put the daisy pollen all over the Blood Blossoms,” Jazz elaborated. “Dad will think he’s allergic to the Blood Blossoms, so he and Mom will get rid of them.”

Danny considered this, pausing his answer until the people passing behind them in the hall were out of earshot. He adjusted his back away from the locker dial digging between his shoulder blades, which broke Jazz’s grip slightly.

“Okay but. Do you think Mom and Dad will actually get rid of them? Or do you think they’re going to keep doing whatever they’re doing, but now with Dad sneezing loud enough to move the house a few inches every time?” Danny made a little hopping motion with his hand. “That could be bad. He might walk the house into the street doing that.”

“Maybe someone will call in a noise complaint,” Jazz added, in jest, but the hope inside her was deflating.

“I mean. They’ve exploded plenty of things in the lab before. And the RV sounds like an airplane. But yeah Dad’s sneezing might be the thing that gets them shut down for good.” Danny seemed to pause in thought, then waved the idea away with his hand. “Wait, no no, bad idea. We can’t do this plan. If you accidentally cross-pollinate the Blood Blossoms and the daisies, I think you might invent a flower capable of killing me and Dad on the spot. I’m not sure. I think I have to draw a Punnett Square for that.”

Jazz let go of Danny’s shoulders. “I will table the daisy idea for now.” She pointed squarely at his chest. “But I’m not ruling it out.”

She let her brother go. And some part of Jazz dwelled longingly on Danny’s They’ve exploded plenty of things in the lab before. Jazz wondered if it was too much to wish they’d do it again soon, and take the flowers out with everything.

…

On Thursday, a little before 7am, Jazz was pulled from her laser-focused vacuuming by the heavy grip of a gloved hand on her right shoulder. Jazz jumped so high she nearly unbalanced Jack, who stared back just as startled by his daughter’s reaction.

They held eyes for a long time, Jack’s looking stickier and redder than when he’d first appeared with the blossoms, now squinting at her in confusion. Hastily, Jazz shut off the roar of the vacuum.

“You uh… you’ve been vacuuming?” Jack asked.

A rattle came from the kitchen, stealing Jazz’s attention for the moment. Maddie had placed two coffee mugs down on the counter, and her head popped around the frame. She watched Jazz and Jack while the coffee pot gurgled behind her.

“Yeah um. Just vacuuming,” Jazz answered, recalibrating, and cursing herself a little for missing the fact that both her parents had resurfaced.

“Oh okay. I didn’t think it was your chore week. For that,” Jack answered. His words came choppy and unpracticed. Jazz wondered how long he’d been awake, or how long it had been since he exchanged a non-scientific word with someone.

Maddie was watching. Jazz grabbed the vacuum handle defensively.

“Well as I see it, I’m basically an adult, and I’m living here without paying any rent. Which means I’m falling behind on proper maturity. I need to start demonstrating adult responsibility now, Dad, or I’ll never fully succeed at college and life after.”

Jack scratched his chin. “We coulda been charging you rent?”

Maddie bonked him on the head with the butt of a coffee mug. “No, Jack. Here’s your coffee.”

Jack spun on spot, scooping his equally sticky-eyed wife up in a hug, which she protested only lightly as he spun her.

Jazz fought to bury the distress on her face. It felt stronger than just imagination, the way she pictured the pollen sloughing off her parents onto the newly vacuumed rug.

Jack set Maddie down and claimed his mug from her. Maddie looked around. “Where’s Danny?”

“School already,” Jazz answered hastily. “You know—that—working on that project. The science class project.”

Maddie set a hand under her elbow, coffee clasped tight in the other hand. “Right. He said something about that.”

“It’s a super important project. He’s been working on it non-stop.”

“When is it due?” Maddie asked.

“N-next Monday,” Jazz faltered.

“Hmm. Well tell him to make time Saturday for Alicia.”

“For what?”

“Aunt Alicia is visiting Saturday. For dinner,” Maddie clarified with a sip of her wafting coffee. Maddie frowned. She tilted her chin down and sniffed once at her armpit. “Oh I’m one to talk, I suppose. How many hours have we been down there, Jack?”

“Consecutively or cumulatively?”

“Either way. Jack, we need to start actually going to bed. And I have to prepare the house for Alicia on Saturday. Don’t start anything downstairs that’ll take more than 48 hours.”

“And what should I do Saturday?” Jack asked.

“Help, also.”

“Jazz has the vacuuming covered,” Jack added, seemingly happy to put the connection together.

“But does Danny really need to be here?” Jazz cut in, sharp, clearly breaking Maddie from some train of thought.

“Hmm? Yes of course. It’s a family dinner.”

“I just really think this science project is important.”

“I’m sure he can take a break for dinner on Saturday.”

“It might break his flow.”

Maddie stepped closer. She ruffled one hand in Jazz’s hair, and Jazz fought down the shuddering wince in her shoulders.

“We’re Fentons. Not machines. We all need to come up a little bit from our work. And that includes you.” Maddie took the vacuum handle from Jazz’s grip. Her kind and sticky eyes found Jazz once again. “That’s part of adulthood too, Jazz. Knowing when it’s okay to step back and just relax with your family.”

Jazz touched lightly at her hair. She stared at the rug she’d not finished vacuuming.

It felt futile. The whole house was tainted.

…

On Thursday morning, Danny straddled the bench of a picnic table in the Casper High recess area. He leaned in conspiratorially, hands moving as he spoke.

“Did you know Ida had a motorcycle when she was our age? Like, an entire motorcycle.”

“As opposed to half a motorcycle?” Tucker asked. He sat backwards on the bench, same side as Danny, back pressed to the picnic table. His fingers twiddled in the pad of his palm pilot.

“As opposed to like, a moped. Or a scooter,” Danny clarified. “Illegally, too. She didn’t have a license. She had to speed away from the cops on it.”

“So are you just spending every night talking to my grandma?” Sam asked. She sipped on a juice box and released it from her mouth to spin the straw between her fingers.

“She’s cool!” Danny threw his hands up. “And I’m bored! And if you won’t visit me then I’m gonna visit Ida.”

“I’m not visiting you because you’re a hideaway in my house. And I’m not about to tip my parents off that you’re here.”

“Ida isn’t a snitch.”

“She told you to say that, didn’t she?”

“I think her exact phrasing was ‘Snitches get stitches.’”

“Do not shank my grandmother.” And Sam returned to sipping her juice box.

“Her words! Not mine. I’m shanking nothing these days.”

“There have to be at least a few ghosts you should be shanking,” Tucker responded. He tilted his head over his shoulder and continued typing without watching his hands.

“None! I think the Box Ghost broke up with me. Haven’t seen him in ages.”

“Ew,” Sam answered. She plucked the juice straw from her mouth, then her face sobered. “I mean, we do know what’s happening. It’s not like it’s not obvious.”

Danny quirked an eyebrow at her.

“Your parents are running a Blood Blossom laboratory right at the portal’s entrance. It’s not exactly surprising that ghosts are suddenly giving Amity a wide clearance.”

Danny crossed his arms. “I mean. I considered it. I just didn’t love the idea.” He straightened a bit. “They’ll probably start trickling back in as the Blood Blossoms die, anyway. Jazz, have you seen them lately? Are they like, half-dead now?”

Jazz startled to attention, pulled from thoughts about vacuums and pollen and Saturday dinner plans. “The—have I seen them?”

“Yeah the Blossoms. Are they half-dead now?”

“I haven’t seen them. I’ve been avoiding the lab. I didn’t want to risk getting pollen on myself.”

Danny nodded along. “Okay well. It’s Thursday, so they’re more than half-dead already. Dad said they’d be dead by Sunday. So they’re probably, like,” Danny tapped his fingers quickly, “4/7th dead, according to math. Good. I really miss my bed. I miss getting good sleep. How was I sleeping better with Box Ghost attacks than I am in the world’s stiffest mansion. Sorry Sam.”

“You can insult the mansion. I hate it.”

“I’m gonna miss Ida though. That’s gonna be a hard goodbye.”

“You can still visit her. She’s not going anywhere.”

“Alicia’s visiting,” Jazz cut in, words tumbling from her mouth. “Saturday night. Aunt Alicia. Danny, Mom and Dad want you home for dinner.”

Danny’s wide eyes found her. Tucker and Sam watched her too, eyebrows raised.

“Is that this Saturday?” Danny asked, a little breathless.

“Yes. Sorry. I tried talking them out of it, but it didn’t work.”

“Fuck,” Danny muttered. Stiffness worked its way back into his body language, trepidation, anxiety. Jazz read it off him like it was bleeding from his body.

“If—” Jazz started, “—if the Blossoms are half dead, already. And in the basement. Maybe by Saturday, it’ll be like they’re not even there. Maybe it’ll be fine. I’ll check the Blossoms tonight and let you know.”

Danny’s shoulders seemed to ease a bit. “Okay. Yeah that’s a good plan. They’re probably—that should be fine.”

“But if it’s not fine, Danny—”

“—I know, I know—”

“—Then we really need to—”

“—I just don’t want to make a scene in front of Aunt Alicia. Or—have to say something that makes Mom and Dad realize I’m a ghost so then Aunt Alicia also knows I’m a ghost? Wow, I don’t want that.”

“What if you try going home tomorrow night?” Sam proffered. She leaned in, juice box firmly planted on the picnic table. “Friday. Practice run.”

“That’ll be worse,” Danny answered. “The Blossoms will be more alive on Friday than Saturday.”

“But you can also bail easy. Text me, and I’ll call you with some emergency about our extremely real science project. You can feel out if you could handle Saturday.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” Jazz jumped in. “Like Sam said, you can bail. And I promise, if you need to bail, I will talk Mom and Dad into getting rid of the Blood Blossoms.”

Danny’s mouth pressed into a thin line. He kneaded his hands together under the picnic table. Jazz could almost read the way he was talking himself out of his own anxiety.

“I’ll… it might be fine, though, right?” Jazz repeated. “The Blossoms should be mostly dead. Maybe they’re dead already. Maybe we’ve been drawing this out for no reason.”

Jazz heard the lie in her voice. If the Blossoms were dead by now, surely her parents would have broken from their trance. They’d have surfaced by now. Something was still alive down there, and Jazz simply hoped it was dying fast.

Reluctantly, Danny nodded. He swallowed. “Okay. Okay, sure. That’s the plan then, I guess. I’ll try Friday—and it—maybe it’ll be fine. Maybe I’ll get to sleep in my bed Friday. That would be nice.” The nerves didn’t leave Danny’s voice. “Maybe they’re dead. They’ve gotta be. Dad’s like, famously bad at keeping plants alive.”

“He is.”

“Killed a bunch of herb plants.”

“And that tomato plant Aunt Alicia gave him.”

“Think she might bring him another?”

“I think she learned her lesson.”

“And there was that big plant in the front hall last year—”

“—I think that was fern—”

“—Not really a fern anymore now that it’s dead.”

“True.”

“And the Blood Blossoms, too, will stop being Blood Blossoms once Dad kills them. They’ll start being super dead instead.” Danny paused. And Jazz knew that Danny had not succeeded at calming himself down. Agitation bled from his every bit of body language, back hunched, fingers intertwined under the table. “…You’ll… check them tonight, right? Like you said? And tomorrow you can let me know how super-dead Dad’s made them.”

“I’ll report in on their super-deadness,” Jazz answered.

She did not bother voicing her new resolve out loud. Danny did not need to know. But the sight of him—his worrying fingers, his tense shoulders—set the decision firmly in Jazz’s chest.

She’d check on the Blossoms, sure. But, as Jazz saw it, if they were not already dead at the moment she descended those basement stairs, they would be dead by the time she left.

…

Jazz met the sunset alone. She finished her vacuuming by 9, and grabbed her backpack like a gawping fish, mouth open to the guts of books and papers and notebooks within. Jazz upturned the backpack and dumped its contents on the table. She cracked the spines on her textbooks, laying two out, leafing her notes between them, opening a notebook at the center which she set her pencil over in a convincing facsimile of doing homework she’d finished at the start of the week.

And she sat there, ears tuned to the basement, hoping for each creak to crescendo to the whining of basement steps, ascending closer to the door.

It did not come. The noises remained far beneath her.

9pm became 10pm. And then 11pm crept nervously closer. Jazz stood. She paced. She eyed the door. She hovered near it, on more than one occasion, tempted to knock and remind her parents of their oath to go to bed tonight.

It felt too risky, somehow. Like Jack or Maddie might ask, “And why do you want us to go to bed right now?” and Jazz would not be a strong enough liar to hide her intentions.

At 10:47, Jazz’s heart fluttered higher at the bouncing pattern of sound she’d been straining to hear all night—Jack’s heavy footsteps creaking up higher, bounce on bounce on bounce, until the clack-latch-click of the door hit and threw itself open.

“—definitive composition, but I think we’re still missing something on the reaction pathway, so I think—” Jack glanced up, “Oh, Jazzy-pants, you’re still awake.”

“I’m going to bed really soon,” Jazz answered amicably. “Just finishing this up.”

“What’s that—homework?”

“It is.”

“Man, you and Danny both.” Jack gestured. “With—with the homework.”

“The amount of homework I’ll have in college will far exceed the amount I have right now so I—” Jazz cut herself off as Jack let out a huge yawn, fist partially stifling his mouth. He wasn’t looking for an excuse from her.

Maddie squeezed past Jack, and Jazz’s heart went tight at the sickly-sweet smell that poured from the open door.

“Did Danny go to bed already?” Maddie asked.

Jazz’s grip on her pencil tightened. “Yeah. He went to bed like an hour ago. Be a little quiet going up the stairs.”

Maddie nodded to this, stripping her gloves off one by one. She yanked back her face mask and shook her hair out. “Jack, you can take the shower first. Jazz, don’t stay up too much longer.”

“I won’t,” Jazz answered, and she kept her tone even as her mother approached her. Maddie planted a kiss on Jazz’s head, wafting sweetness.

“Love you. See you tomorrow.”

“Love you too,” Jazz answered. “Oh, and uh, Dad? You have a flower allergy, right?”

Jack paused, half-turned. “Daisies, yup.”

“Are you worried at all about the Blood Blossoms? You know. Being allergic to them.”

“Nope.” Jack thumped his chest. “No risk of allergy here. Blood Blossoms are hypoallergenic to humans. They only bother ghosts.”

“Oh… that’s cool,” Jazz whispered, feeling one more possibility perhaps slip away. “Well, don’t let me keep you up.”

“Night Jazzy-pants.”

Footsteps bounced away from her. Jazz’s ears tuned to the careful way her father took the stairs to the second floor, mindful to not wake his son who hadn’t been home in four days.

She heard her parents’ bedroom door close. And Jazz exhaled. And she stood, and she rounded the threshold to the kitchen where she pulled the bottle of white vinegar from the pantry. She stashed it under her arms and moved to the laundry room, swiping up the bottle of bleach. She grabbed a spray bottle. She clutched them tight.

These were her offense. Whatever was half-dead in that basement would be fully dead when this was over. Jazz would see to it.

Jack hadn’t shut the lab door behind him, so Jazz did not need to free her hands as she approached it. Its maw gaped at her, consumptively black, emanating a chill which Jazz knew to expect, but it still set her skin to prickle. She set a foot to the first step and eased down. And the next. The dark ate her, and she let it.

In the depths of the lab, Jazz lost her vision. There was a light switch near the entrance, but she hadn’t reached for it, too consumed in the bottles in her arms. So instead she had only the faint glow of the portal to light her path. Its placid green swam, beams of acid light pooling out across the floor. It reminded Jazz of the water in the flower vase, the way its refracted light swam across Danny’s face.

Jazz hit solid floor. Her breath curled in a chill around her—the lab, encased in deep rock on all sides, was always just a shade above freezing. The dark sat equally cold against her eyes, blind except for the faint portal glow, and the stretching, yawning shadows that reached out to her, cut by the odd table surface or utensil stamped in the portal’s glimmer.

She breathed in sweetness.

She’d cleaned everything she could upstairs. But the bottles of bleach and vinegar in her arms felt like the first real power she possessed.

Jazz could make out the cutting shape of a table to her right. She stepped cautiously toward it, unburdened her arms of their weapons. And with her hands free, she held them out in front of her. She walked until her fingers pressed into the wall. She moved along it, fingers skimming, feeling for the light switch.

Her fingers found its beveled texture, and Jazz threw the light switch.

The lights poured. Her breath drowned.

More.

And everywhere.

Deep black twisting vines spilled down the lab tables. Flesh-red petals, curled into tight blossoms, crept, and crawled, and spread. Every table. Every lab bench. Jazz looked closer, through the vines that spilled over like pots of boiling water, and beneath she counted 5—6—7—8 individual flowerpots. Each was host to the hearty, turgid, faintly bio-luminous thorned vines of a separate Blood Blossom plant, each adorned by the fanned-wide fleshy decorations of healthy flowers, which reached their open petals in the direction of the shimmering portal, as if to drink its light.

Jazz stood frozen. She scarcely breathed, aware at each fluttering breath of the thing that invaded her lungs. And she was aware—too heart-sinkingly aware—that the sprawl of flora before her was not half-dead. It was not the shriveled and desiccated remnants of a bouquet so picked-apart by experimentation.

This was thriving.

And why?

Why did it sprawl? Why did they pulse? Why were there more…?

Jazz’s eyes roved. She counted the pots again. And this time around, she noticed only one was a true flowerpot—reddish clay with hairline fissures spiderwebbing its surface. The other seven pots were beakers. Transparent glass betrayed the tight fibers of black roots in the soil, so dense as to almost appear solid.

Jazz let the fear hold her for just a moment more. Just long enough for a single despairing note to leave her lips, unheard by the greenhouse sealed underground.

And then Jazz moved.

She did not start with the vinegar. She reached right for the bleach, unscrewed its cap which flaked away with alkaline salts on its rim. Its heady ammonia smell cut the air, and Jazz welcomed it.

She moved, purposeful. To the first pot, she drowned its roots in a slosh of bleach. It glugged out, and greedily the pot drank. The noxious outpour of fumes stole Jazz’s balance. She put the bleach down, tilted her face away, and breathed deep. Sweet.

She repeated the action pot by pot. Her eyes took in each lab table as she passed them. Specimens littered every surface not occupied by pots. Thin slices of flower and vine boasted themselves from microscope slide to microscope slide. Careful cuttings sat as neighbors to the slides, alchemic mashings, test tubes each too fleshy red to be mistaken for normal ecto-experiments.

On the third table, Jazz found a specimen where ecto-green mixed with the goreish red. It sat in a cup, whose contents shimmered green, pulsed, oozed, as if clawing at the edges of its cup prison. The clawing was an illusion. Whatever was inside couldn’t be alive—or maybe simply Jazz didn’t want it to be. A single stem sprouted through its center, one tight bud at its tip.

Jazz plucked the stem, cautious of its thorns, and she ripped it to fleshy shreds.

She increased the bleach she poured in the next pots.

And when she finished her assault, she doubled back. The spray bottle came uncapped beneath her fingers, which had gone only a little sensitive under the slimy sloughing of bleach particulate on her skin. Jazz poured the vinegar inside the spray bottle, and she sprayed down every leaf, every stem, every petal.

At the last leaf sprayed, her eyes lingered on the dripping Blossom flesh with its petals open wide to the swirling portal. Her eyes skimmed across the whole lab, consumingly focused on the way each and every coiled flower tilted itself toward the open portal. She was reminded of the little herb garden they’d had as children. The way the seedlings tilted their fresh green leaves into the window that gave them sun.

Jazz wanted to suffocate these things. She now itched with the urge to shut the portal. She wanted to kill their sun. But she was frustratingly aware no such thing could be done. The portal doors were, in all practical ways, decorative. Nothing truly kept the portal closed. Nothing sewed the rift shut. Nothing kept the ghosts at bay.

Nothing, except the Blossoms, it seemed.

Jazz rounded the portal’s control panel. She pressed her thumb against the id lock, popped open the glass box over the controls, and flicked down the rightmost switch. The portal’s heavy clunking metal doors shivered shut.

She knew they would be open again the next time she visited the lab. But it felt like something.

This, entirely, felt like what she could do.

When her parents found their garden dead tomorrow, there would be no reason to suspect her.

The flowers were at the limit of their lifespan. She could remind them. These were strange and weird ghost plants, which no one understands, which survive only a week.

Unsteady on her feet, Jazz gathered up her weapons once more, and cautiously she ascended the stairs. Higher and higher she stepped, until she felt like she could breathe again.

At the top, her fingers hovered over the light switch.

Jazz killed the lights. And she shut the door.

(art from @ghostfiish)

…

Jazz woke before the sun. She had perhaps not truly slept. Her whole night had been pulled fitfully in and out of half-waking dreams of Blossoms and Danny and her, at the center, interloper, lobbing excuses for why one or the other was missing—why one or the other could not enter—why one or the other was dead.

By 5am, Jazz stepped out of her room, bare toes on cold hardwood, and doubled back for a pair of shoes to wear into the lab, which was too dangerous for bare feet.

She crept carefully. Her caution was needless—Jack’s snoring covered all sounds of her footfalls—but this was too important for mistakes. She navigated without lights, hands feeling for railing, eyes pulling shapes out of shadows.

It wasn’t until she reached the basement, and opened its heavy door, that she reached for a light switch.

The basement lights caught with a shunk.

And at the bottom, eight pots of vibrantly black-vined Blood Blossoms stretched their yawning flowers toward the placid swell of green light from the open portal.

Jazz swallowed. Everything inside her chest felt heavy.

She creaked down the steps, unarmed, this time. She touched her fingers to the Blossom vines one by one. As dense, as pulsing, as bio-luminous as they’d been last night—perhaps, more so, now. The petals were as deep a flesh-red as before, muddied only by the bathing green portal light. Jazz stared deep into the portal, which had reopened, just as she knew it would. All the flowers stretched toward its welcoming light.

Jazz inhaled deeply.

Not a hint of bleach lingered in the air.

She smelled only sick rotting sweetness.

…

“They’re alive. There’s more of them now. They’re feeding on the portal.” Jazz texted Danny once she imagined he was awake.

“You’re kidding,” Danny answered.

At school, Jazz found Tucker, Sam, and Danny pulled away and huddled tighter than usual in the hallway corner. Her approach stifled all conversation, as three faces turned to her looking for answers she wasn’t sure she had.

“How many?”

“Eight pots. But they’re each way bigger than the bouquet. They’re eight whole plants now.”

“Maybe they—”

“Bleach and vinegar don’t kill them.”

Danny faltered. “…Well that wasn’t what I was going to ask.”

“And it’s the portal keeping them alive?” Sam asked.

“All their flowers are pointed at it. I think it’s like the sun to them.”

“And there’s no just closing the portal?” Tucker asked, but he answered himself before Jazz could. “Okay obviously not—we could have gotten rid of the Box Ghost way before this if it was possible.”

“What is happening to the ghosts?” Sam asked, seemingly half to herself. “The Blossoms are just… keeping them away, right?”

“I don’t know,” Jazz answered. “We’ll probably find out once we make Mom and Dad get rid of the flowers today.”

Jazz watched Danny wince from the corner of her eye.

“Or tomorrow,” Danny said.

“Danny, come on—” Jazz cut in.

“Look, look! I think you’re right, okay? Probably.” Danny held his arms close to himself, fingernails digging into his elbows. “I just know Mom and Dad, and they’re going to run like a hundred experiments on me to learn why I’m allergic to the Blood Blossoms, and they’re going to figure out I’m a ghost. And like, do I tell them I’m Phantom, specifically? Do I tell them about the portal? And also them learning I’m a ghost might NOT go well and maybe they’ll think I’m evil or… dead…?” Danny swallowed. “Like I do actually have like, literally three different tests next week, and other stuff going on, and I don’t… I didn’t want to tell them yet, okay?”

No one answered Danny immediately. His nails dug in tighter.

“I just want to try everything else first, okay? When I come home for dinner tonight—”

“—Danny you can’t,” Jazz answered hastily. “Danny they’re a jungle.”

“I just want to try! In case!” Danny threw his arms out. “If they’re feeding on the portal, maybe there’s a chance that’s keeping them happy. Maybe the lab is containing them and the portal is feeding them so—it’s like maybe—like when a lion already ate so a deer can just like, hang out around the lion.”

“It’s a plant, though. Not a lion.”

“I don’t totally know what it is. None of us do.” Danny fell quiet a moment. No one filled his silence. “…I’m just going to try tonight, okay? And if it doesn’t work, then we’ll do whatever you want, Jazz. Mom and Dad can find out I’m Phantom. And if that doesn’t go well, maybe Alicia will adopt me.”

Jazz hesitated, reading Danny’s response as she reached closer for him. This time, he did not resist her pulling him into a hug.

…

With the sun dipping in the sky, Jazz picked Danny up five blocks from the Mansons’ mansion. Jazz tried for conversation. She tried asking about Ida, about Danny’s tests next week, but each attempt got only a shallow response from Danny’s pale lips. His attention was elsewhere.

Jazz gripped the steering wheel tighter. Her fingertips ached by this point, gone red-raw from the repeated cleaning, the prolonged exposure to chemicals with a bite. She used gloves mostly, but gloves could not reach everything.

She’d cleaned the house again that afternoon, from the moment she got home from school to the moment she went to pick Danny up. If her parents interrupted her, she’d plan to claim it was in preparation for Alicia. Her parents had not appeared.

Jazz made the final right turn, rounding the curb with a tight cut and then swinging wider as needed to fit her car in alongside the colossus that was the Fenton RV. She left enough room for Danny to open the passenger door. He didn’t seem to be paying attention though, as he phased through the door anyway.

The clap of Jazz’s driver side door shutting went unmatched.

“I can still bring you back to Sam’s.”

Danny overtook Jazz, getting to the front door first. He fished the keys from his pocket and stared at them, thumbing the ring and the charm and the teeth of the house key.

“You know I lost these for a week once?” Danny asked, unprompted. “I just phased in and out of the house that whole week. Kept just hoping no one noticed, haha. Maybe once Mom and Dad know I’m a ghost, I’ll just stop carrying these around. That would be convenient right.”

Jazz did not answer. She was watching his hand that held the house keys. It shook.

Jazz put her hand over Danny’s.

“Let me go in first,” she said, giving him a squeeze, and stepping past him.

Jazz pulled her own keys from her purse. She felt the click of the lock mechanism, heard the weather strip whisper as she pushed the door open.

“That you, Jazz?” Maddie’s voice called from the kitchen. Jazz paused, smelling a heavy tomato sauce on the air.

“Yeah.”

“Is Danny with you? I’ve been calling him for dinner, but I don’t think he’s home.”

Jazz froze. “Um, no h—”

“Yeah, I am. Hi Mom,” Danny answered from behind Jazz, and it made Jazz’s neck hair stand on end.

“Oh good. Sauce needs probably five more minutes, but the pasta’s about done. Then we can eat.”

Jazz stepped into the entryway. She inhaled deep, her nerves trigger-hair sensitive to the slightest whiff of sickly sweetness on the air. She smelled tomato sauce, and cooking pasta, and maybe something underneath it. Maybe sweetness. Maybe not. She wasn’t sure what to trust. Her brain had started inventing that sickly sweetness wherever she went.

She turned immediately. She watched every part of Danny as he stepped inside. One foot. The next. There was a poorly disguised terror on his face, and Jazz wanted desperately to know if it was fear for what he might feel, or for what was already happening.

“Oh, shoot,” Maddie intoned from the kitchen. “Jazz, can you come here and help me?”

Jazz whipped around, eyes to the kitchen, then back to Danny.

“Uh with what?”

“I forgot to put the colander in the sink, and I’m already holding the pasta pot. It’s very hot. Can you just put the colander in the sink?”

“Oh um—”

Danny watched her with eyes much too wide, far too unblinking, his chest too unbreathing. He seemed far too wrong. It set Jazz’s heart pounding in her chest.

“Danny can you?” Maddie asked now. “It’s very hot, please.”

“Can you put it back on the stove?” Jazz asked, unable to beat the panic out of her voice. She couldn’t leave Danny’s side like this. She couldn’t afford to split her attention.

“I’d rather not. The colander is right here. If one of you two could just do it.”

Jazz watched Danny’s ashen lips part, like he was intending to say something. Jazz mouthed to him areyouokay? while her blood pounded in her ears.

Danny raised a hand, and like he’d changed his mind mid-gesture, the hand snapped in toward his chest. Jazz watched his fist curl white-knuckled tight in his shirt, and whatever word was on his tongue died as Danny hit the floor.

It took every ounce of self-control to stifle the scream that filled Jazz’s throat.

“What was that?” Maddie asked.

“Sorry Mom I think I left the car on,” Jazz answered, and panic cracked clean through her voice, deranged to her own ears. She was on the floor with Danny in a moment’s time, her arms under his shoulders, hoisting him, and a small bit of Danny’s own strength helped her effort.

She dragged him, aware for the first time that her brother was heavier than her, aware that she wasn’t trained in martial arts, or in dragging corpses. She was aware of all the insignificant things like how she scuffed Danny’s shoes and scraped his pant legs on the stone steps down to the front walkway, like how the grass was wet and would get his shirt wet where she laid him down and whisper-screamed his name on repeat.

His eyes cracked open, and he was not dead, which peeled off just enough weight for Jazz to breathe.

“Sorry. I thought I had more time than that,” he wheezed.

“What happened?”

“I don’t really know. …You ever feel like your soul got slurped out through your feet?”

“Danny, those are going to kill you,” Jazz said, and the panic still ate her voice.

“Yeah, probably,” Danny said, and he said it with resignation in the little bit of his voice that had returned. It took over his face, his eyes—the unhappy acceptance of the thing he’d given up fighting.

“Danny—”

“Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning, okay…? I give up. You’re right. I’ll tell them. I just want some time to think about what I’m going to say to them.” Danny pushed his back and shoulders out of the grass, elbows propping him like kickstands, so he was half-sitting, sweat-soaked and shivering. But alert. With her. Alive. “Man, this sucks. Man… this sucks…” His eyes swung around, lingering on the thrown-open front door. “And by ‘this’… I mean my biology project, which seems to have caught fire promptly after I left, and now Sam is desperately texting me to come back and fix it.”

“I’ll drive you back to Sam’s right now.”

“Don’t you maybe wanna help Mom with the pasta first? Her arms are getting tired.”

Danny gave her a little smile. Jazz couldn’t return it.

She didn’t want to do anymore jokes.

…

Dinner passed with the feeling of something chiseling inside Jazz’s ribcage. She bumbled through an apologetic lie about leaving the car running, and in a moment of panic remembering the oil stain beneath the RV and convincing herself the combination might erupt in flames. “Like with a gas stove,” Jazz said, which got something like a nod from her father.

And something had gone wrong with Danny’s science project. Some data they’d measured wrong, and would need to measure again from scratch, so Danny had to go back to Sam’s. But he’d be here tomorrow, for Alicia. He’d promised.

Jazz did not remember anything else of the conversation that night. She ate pasta that tasted like poison. Every single part of the house smelled sickly sweet.

She cleaned while Jack and Maddie toiled in the lab. Every bump from the basement, every noise, stabbed like a physical pain through Jazz’s ribcage. It made her almost insane. The poison the poison the poison the poison the poison the poison in their house. That her parents incubated. That she was breathing. That almost killed Danny in front of her.

The knowledge that it would be gone tomorrow should have been enough to calm her, but it wasn’t. Because it was here now. It might not scrub away tomorrow. It might sponge into her cells and make her poison too.

She cleaned through the frustrated tears dripping from her chin. She cleaned, and cleaned, and curled her fingernails into her skin at every fresh bump from the basement. It made it feel everywhere. It was everywhere. The image of Danny dropping like dead weight to the floor appeared every time she blinked. Her heart rate would not come down.

Hours after the sun set, Jack and Maddie came up the basement stairs. Jazz ignored them, scrubbing clean the sink for the fourth time. Maddie made some remark about not staying up too late, and Jazz answered with only a noise, afraid her voice might shake if she tried responding with a sentence.

Maddie seemed to linger just out of eyesight at this. Jazz scrubbed harder. She heard “Goodnight,” and the sound of her parents’ footsteps receding up the stairs.

Jazz put the scrub-brush down.

The obsession dominating her mind demanded she see them, understand them again. Like seeking out a spider lost from sight. So she could wrap her mind around them and prove to herself they were not More than before.  

Jazz clamped her hand around the laboratory door. She opened it, and she immediately reviled the sickly-sweetness wafting up from downstairs. And so she shut the door quickly behind her to stifle it. Her foot creaked down one blind step, another. She reached her hand to the light switch and threw it.

It caught with a shunk. It bathed the basement in light.

One-hundred unfurled flowers stared up at her.

Jazz stifled the shout in her throat, barely caught her footing, but the emotion impaled her straight through the stomach. Like being caught by 1,000 eyes in a dark room. Like being pinned on the highway under headlights. Primal panic stole her breath, turned her heart into a hammering in her ears, until she noticed the flowers pointed themselves just not quite at her…

Hands braced to the railing, she followed their invisible line—toward the basement door mostly, but just a bit off-caliber. Just a bit too past, and a bit far too the left, directed to a particular portion of the basement ceiling. Jazz knew how the basement sat beneath the house. Jazz could picture the exact spot in the foyer where Danny had dropped like stone.

The Blood Blossoms, their open petals and uncoiled flowers, collectively angled their invisible line of sight to take the foyer in their crosshairs.

…

Danny sat with his cheek pressed against the passenger window of Jazz’s car. He’d become pretty used to navigating life in a state of perpetual exhaustion, but there was something new to this chemical mix that weighed his shoulders to the floor. Dread—and though it was harder to admit—fear.

Jazz sat so stiff in the driver’s seat that Danny worried her arms might fall off. He knew he could ask her for assurance, but it all felt too stupid itching on his tongue. The “I’m scared” and the “I don’t want to explain myself” and the “Even if they accept me now, what if they don’t really mean it, and every day forever is different.”

“How are you feeling?”

Oh, that was directed to him. Jazz’s eyes were set to his in the mirror.

“Tired,” he said. And there should have been a funny quip in there somewhere. He just couldn’t find one in the mud of his brain. That fearful prickle like ant legs on his brain was back—the certainty that his energy drop from the previous day was far too intense to be explained by yet another bad night’s sleep.

What had been that nauseous pang yesterday, like hands reaching up and wrapping his organs and pulling down, until something far too important was ripped clean out of his flesh and out his feet?

Danny shivered.

At the next turn of the car, Fentonworks curved into view. Jazz parked on the street, a few houses away from Fentonworks. She popped her door open, and before Danny could properly unbuckle his own seatbelt, she was at his side of the car, opening his door, extending a hand for him to take.

“I’m fine,” he said, needing to believe it. Danny slipped past her.

He did not step much further. He idled on the sidewalk instead, watching the house, inspecting the Fenton RV still parked in the driveway. He had not even considered the RV. It was perhaps a poison greenhouse too, with whatever pollen had spilled from the Blossoms while Jack was transporting it.

“Mom? Yeah out front. Almost at the house—”

Danny hadn’t noticed Jazz pull her phone out. He wasn’t noticing the things he wasn’t noticing.

But he was noticing enough to recognize the blue and orange hazmat figures emerge from the Fentonworks front door. And he noticed Jazz going stiffer, inserting herself ahead of them.  

Maddie flipped her phone closed, stepping careless across the grass, squinted brow focused on her children.

“Jazz says there’s something you want to talk to us about?” Maddie threw her gaze over her shoulders—partially to Jack, partially to the open front door. “We could sit on the couch.”

“No, uh, out here—” Danny swallowed. “Out here is good.”

Jack approached, boots squeaking in the grass dew. Danny flitted his attention between them.

“What’s going on?” Jack asked. “Did something happen?”

“No. No—not really. It’s—the thing is—Mom, Dad, I’m actually…” Danny spoke before his nerves could fail him. Like jumping in a pool too cold. “I’m actually allergic to the Blood Blossoms.”

Danny’s nails were tight in the skin of his palm. He held the possibilities in his head like a hand of cards. Responses he’d prepared for. “That just isn’t scientifically possible.” “As a human, you can’t be. Are you sure it’s the blossoms?” “But Danny, they only affect ghosts. Why would they affect you?”

His mother’s brow scrunched. Danny’s heart beat in his throat, slamming in his ears. He swallowed compulsively, moved by the pressure to elaborate. “I—”

“Oh Honey,” his mother answered. “Is that why you haven’t been around the house?”

“I—” Danny tripped, voice dying like he missed a stair. “Yeah.”

“Have you been coming home at all?” Maddie asked.

“No. I’ve been sleeping at Sam’s.” Danny faltered. “I tried—yesterday—coming home, but I can’t… breathe… inside, I think.”

“Honey…”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Jack asked, and the absolute lack of anger, lack of doubt, lack of interrogation in his father’s voice robbed Danny of his thoughts completely. Danny simply stared, lips loosely parted, at the sad scrunch of Jack’s brow.

“I—you—Mom’s present. It was Mom’s present,” Danny answered, small. “And I didn’t want to ruin your fun.”

“Well your father and I have had our fun,” Maddie answered. Danny’s attention snapped to her, reading her desperately for any sign of disappointment or disbelief. None showed. “Now I’d rather have my son home.”

“Absolutely,” Jack echoed.

Maddie reached an arm out, and Danny had just enough of his sense left to recoil. Maddie paused, investigating her suit, before declaring, “Oh I must be covered in pollen. Oh everything must be covered in pollen. Oh Honey…”

Danny heard a noise—an exhale—from Jazz beside him. The rigor mortis stiffness of her shoulders seemed to bleed out of her body. Maddie seemed to notice her too.

“Jazz, is this why you’ve been cleaning everything?”

Quietly, Jazz nodded.

Maddie sat on this information, thinking. Then she looked back up at Danny. “That was very very sweet of you to not want to ruin a gift for me. But Danny, any time something like this happens, tell me. Jack and I will always care about you over a science experiment. Every single time. Okay? We love you.”

There was a new feeling rattling apart in Danny’s chest. It felt wet. It felt like relief.

“Okay,” he said. “I love you too.”

“Jack,” Maddie pointed a finger at her husband. “Go inside and get rid of the Blossoms.”

“Righteo.”

“Jazz, sorry to ask you do more cleaning, but will you come help me clean the basement?”

“I’ve been wanting to do that all week,” Jazz answered, and her eyes shifted back to Danny a moment, as if to ask him whether he was okay with her leaving.

“Danny, would you be okay waiting in Jazz’s car? Or maybe I can call Mrs. Manson and see if she can pick you up.”

“No. Car’s fine,” Danny answered. His voice was not totally there. “I’m totally fine with the car.”

Maddie nodded. “We’ll come get you when the house is scrubbed clean. I’m so sorry, Danny.”

“It’s fine,” Danny said. “I think I wanted to nap anyway.”

A hand gripped Danny’s, squeezing once tightly. It was Jazz, and when her hand left his, her keys were pressed into his palm.

“Here. Don’t lock yourself in the car. And don’t lose the keys,” Jazz said. And she was saying more with her eyes. Danny wondered if he was returning her meaning as he stared back, and nodded.

Jazz turned, as did Maddie and Jack, and suddenly Danny was alone.

He traced his steps backwards to the sidewalk, to Jazz’s car parked at the curb. He hadn’t asked Jazz how to unlock the car with her keys, so he just phased into the backseat. He laid himself across the seat, curled onto his side, thinking how even with the jagged pressure of the seat belt buckles, this was more comfortable than the Mansons’ guest bed.

Danny curled the keys tight in his palm. He stared forward at the back of the driver’s seat.

“They love me,” he said out loud, to the car, to himself. And he laughed wetly, and wiped at his eyes, and felt a softness in his chest almost stronger than his exhaustion. “Oh. They love me.”

…

Hours passed in an instant. Suddenly Jazz was knocking at her own car window, and the spring sun was high overhead, and Danny was being dragged from the best sleep he’d had all week.

Danny sat up, blinking blearily at his sister on the other side of the glass. She knocked again, and motioned to the car door handle.

Danny stepped clean through the door, and successfully startled Jazz at least a little bit this time.

“Did you even use my keys?” she asked.

“No. Didn’t lose them either,” he said, fishing them from his pocket and handing them to her. She smelled like lemon. “You smell like lemon.”

“The whole house smells like lemon. Thank god. You can finally smell something that isn’t the Blossoms.”

“What if I hate the lemon more than the Blossoms?”

“Then we’re giving you to another family,” Jazz hesitated a moment, worried perhaps the joke was too mean as she scoured Danny’s face. But he cracked a smile at her, and cracked his back, and stretched, feeling just slightly more alive. “Come on. Mom wants you to see if the house is better now,” and she could not totally hide the worry threading through her words.

Danny followed her, beating down the same worry beneath his feet. He approached the house hyper-aware of his own senses—the prickle of his legs, the pull of his breath, the rate of his heart—ready or perhaps too ready for any one of them to spiral to agony as he stepped nearer and nearer the house. He noticed the RV was gone.

Jazz clicked the door open. It creaked. She stepped and she stared behind her, eyes almost unblinkingly on Danny as he stepped inside too.

He waited for the glassy shards to rake his throat. He waited for that nauseous tightening of his organs. He waited for his breath to feel devoid of oxygen, or for his blood to turn to sludge, or for the simmering exhaustion headache to burst back into jackhammering.

Danny breathed. Jazz watched him. His arm itched, maybe. His leg was stiff, maybe. His head swam just a bit light-headed, maybe, but from the tightness of his breath and the sting of lemon cleanser.

He breathed. He breathed. Nothing tore his body to pieces.

“I think I’m fine,” Danny answered, and he watched relief pour through his sister’s body language. Jazz grabbed his wrist, and snapped him into a hug, and he let her do it this time. “Thanks,” he said.

“Welcome home,” she answered, unraveling from Danny.

…

There was an unshakeable effervescence to Danny’s mood. He stepped through his room, touching his belongings, flicking through his hanging clothes. He flopped on his bed and let out a little noise of joy, rolling a bit like a dog. He laid on top of the sheets, clothes on, stole his opportunity for a 20 minute nap until his mom came to get him.

She asked him questions—but not the invasive ones. Was he feeling okay? Did he need anything? Was he alright for Aunt Alicia’s visit tonight, or would he rather sleep.

And he was fine, and he didn’t need anything, and he was excited for Aunt Alicia’s visit tonight, actually, he told his mom, and was there anything he could help with?

Danny put plates on the table. He stirred gravy. He moved through the kitchen and the living room and the foyer with a new love for his home. A new understanding he was loved. He loved breathing. He loved helping. He hugged his mom from behind while she turned the oven on, and she twisted around to kiss him on his head.

Jack returned with the RV around 4pm. Aunt Alicia came at 5pm. Danny answered the door for her. He took her coat, and took her bags to the guest room, and asked her how her trip was. Danny never knew much about his aunt, but he wanted to now, because he loved his family.

He helped Jazz carry the dinner conversation. There was a certain reserved way Alicia spoke—in need of the right sort of encouragement and prompting to elaborate on her points. That was the sort of thing Jazz was always good at, and Danny tried to match her energy. He watched as Alicia spoke more, as she lost the tight furrow of her brow, and explained far too much about crop cultivation than Danny could internalize. It was only fair, for the equal amount of conversation Jack attempted to dominate with whatever Fenton contraption had already stolen his attention in the hours since he banished the Blood Blossoms. Danny watched his father’s face carefully. He waited for, or maybe expected, any expression of disappointment over their lost Blossom cultivation. None came. Jack was firmly enchanted by his new idea for the Fenton Spectrographer now.

Danny cleaned the kitchen after dinner. He hugged his sister goodnight. He was elated, almost, to be chillingly woken at 2am by a cardboard-castle’s worth of flattened boxes flapping against the side of the house.

“Beware as I, THE BOX GHOST, bury this rectangular dwelling beneath a tomb of deconstructed cardboard, and seal its evil garden for good!”

Danny had transformed before the sheets were thrown off his body. He let out a little hoot and took a running leap through his window, sweet spring air catching his white hair. He hovered high, arms crossed, until his moonlit shadow eclipsed the hunched back of the Box Ghost.

“Hey friend. Been a while,” Danny remarked, and the Box Ghost spun in a flurried panic.

“YOU cannot defeat me!”

“Oh I can’t?” Danny asked, a swirling bath of ectogreen congealing tightly, humming, in his palm. He snapped it out like a whip, snagging the Box Ghost’s leg, who howled and threw out a litany of Bewares as Danny hauled him in like a lassoed pig.

“But, before we do this for real—” Danny cracked his knuckles. And before the Box Ghost could react, Danny threw his arms wide, and grabbed the Box Ghost in a hug.

“NO! BEWARE! YOU MAY NOT HUG THE BOX GHOST IN YOUR CIRCULAR ARM FORMATION.”

“I missed you too. More than you know.” Danny released the Box Ghost, unclipped the Fenton Thermos from his belt, and tossed it—charging—into his other open hand. “Now back to business.”

…

Danny showed up to school Monday with his mind clear. He caught a few lingering stares from Lancer, seemingly curious at Danny’s mood despite the 65 he’d just handed Danny back on his test. Dash’s heckling didn’t dig any more than surface deep. Danny read the relief spilling across Tucker and Sam’s faces as he explained at lunch, in detail, what exactly had happened over the weekend.

Danny missed only 20 minutes of math class in order to take down a ghost dressed as a wrestler—who had voluntarily gone into the thermos after Danny managed to pin it down in the mud for two seconds. He managed to finish his science homework on time that night. He got an 85 on his history pop quiz. He heard a small and excited boy shout “It’s Phantom! It’s Phantom!” when he flew by the elementary school.

One week turned into the next. Danny’s elation mellowed into simple, simmering contentment. His life came back to him. And he was so glad for it back. To not be rotting away as a forgotten secret in a bedroom no one knew about.

But he did miss Ida.

So the next night, Danny snuck in through her window.

…

On a Thursday in early-June, Danny sat at his desk, brow furled in concentration over the English test beneath his pencil. The Casper High window A/Cs cranked in protest of the early heatwave claiming Amity Park. But it did not protest enough to keep the sweat from trickling down Danny’s neck. He was thirsty, and he’d been nursing a faint headache since the school day started.

Danny rummaged in his jean pockets for the ibuprofen he was not technically allowed to carry at school, and he dry swallowed them.

At lunch, Tucker and Sam carried the conversation in a heated debate over some game strategy Danny had not been listening closely enough to follow. He nursed his water, nibbled at his sandwich, and squinted against the over-brightness of the lights in his eyes. His headache had not lessened.

“Danny, what do you think?” Tucker asked, looking back up.

“Huh?” Danny responded.

“He’s not listening, Tuck.”

“Well tune in! This is important.”

“Sorry,” Danny offered a weak smile. “My head kinda hurts.”

“Want some ibuprofen?” Sam offered.

“I took some already,” Danny answered.

He fell silent again. He hid his hands under the table and rubbed them together, self-soothing.

The headache itself did not even bother him all that much. What bothered him was that other feeling—which he was sure, with time, he’d outgrow—which every single ache and soreness in his throat and pain in his head activated. That (well-earned, in his opinion) paranoia that this was the same signature pain of the Blood Blossoms. That somehow the pollen had clung to the walls at home, snuck back into his laundry, followed him to school.

Danny drank more water, and he ate the sandwich he had no real appetite for.

…

Gym class brought the whole lot of students in Danny’s period outside, toiling in the heat. Tetslaff flapped her attendance binder at her face in a facsimile of a fan. At least half the students had given up and found a shady tree to lie under, despite Tetslaff’s booming insistence they kick a ball around.

Danny, Sam, and Tucker were among the students who’d given up on the heat—Sam moreso out of solidarity with the other two than any actual exhaustion. Tucker whined loudly about what the heat was doing to the battery of his palm pilot. Danny sat with his body tense. The ache in his head had transformed into an almost blinding pain. And despite it all, Danny took this as a good sign. He’d changed into his gym clothes. He was outside. This was not Blood Blossom pollen stuck to his clothes. This was a normal, regular, fuckass awful migraine.

“Think you should maybe go to the nurse?” Sam asked, standing over Danny to increase the shade covering him.

“Why?” Danny asked.

“You look like you’re about to pass out.”

Before Danny could answer, a whisper of frozen breath escaped his lips. He groaned, head lolling back, disdainful eyes staring up into the tree leaves. “Well fuck.”

“I wish ghosts would just melt,” Tucker remarked, equally bemused.

“Maybe not all ghosts,” Danny countered, standing up. “Hey Sam, let’s head to the nurse’s office.”

“On it,” Sam answered, as she and Tucker formed a convoy beside Danny, ushering him off the field with excuses at the ready if Tetslaff noticed them slipping away. The teacher had seemingly lost interest, now also sitting in the shade, so Tucker and Sam needed to only direct Danny around the nearest edge of the brick school building so Danny could transform behind their cover.

Danny took off like a shot, intent on defeating this ghost as quickly as possible so he could resume languishing in his sickness. His eyes shot around, and he followed the pull of his core.

He wrapped around the edge of Casper High, the fast breeze of flying a light reprieve against the hot assault of the sun. He stopped at the grassy edge of the parking lot, in part because his core told him the something was directly ahead, but also because the ache behind his eyes transformed instantly into a piercing blade through his skull.

Danny dropped, holding his head as his breath hissed through his teeth. His stomach turned. His skin prickled. Fear found his heart fresh. And somewhere in the back of his pounding head, Danny was aware he was maybe a sitting duck for attack.

A moaning to match his own reached his ears.

Danny went quiet. He held his burning breath. He looked, eyes roving over the grass edge of the lot where the noise percolated from. He drifted closer. And closer. He stopped just as he felt the touch of hands wrapping themselves around his organs.

But Danny saw it now. There in the grass, visible between two parked cars.

The top of a skull, fractured at the jaw bone, two pleading ecto-green eyes like melting wax pouring down from the sockets. The base of the skull melded into a churning, gelatinous puddle of bright green. Finger bones sloughed of skin reached up, begging, pleading. The moaning rang out in wet terror. The thing that once was this ghost was poised like a man drowning, submerged in all but skullcap and fingers beneath the slurry of what it was once made of.

Danny understood with a recoil of horror what he was seeing. That if he reached for that hand—if he pulled that ghost up from its drowning—nothing remaining of the ghost would surface.

Those sad eyes seemed to understand the same thing as Danny. It only watched Danny, blinkless without eyelids, moaning its agony aloud with whatever remained of its mouth. Until the bubbling dissolved its hand, and its upper jaw, and ate its eyes from beneath, irises dripping down, staring—if they could still see—at the cloudless sky above.

Danny had stopped breathing, because he could no longer breathe. The heat pressed in around him. There was glass in his throat. The hands were grabbing lovingly at his organs, pulling, and pulling, and pulling just a bit tighter.

He dropped.

“Danny!” Sam, or Tucker, called from behind him. But Danny wasn’t hearing.

He was watching, though, and understanding what he saw. His eyes were pinned now to the growth of twig, and thorned black stem, and leaf, and curling blood-red blossom, that sprouted beautifully from the puddle of gore it made.

…

Jazz had moved like she was possessed when Sam called her. They got Danny into her car, and she drove, blind to traffic laws and speed limits, only half-hearing the constant talking Sam and Tucker coached Danny through to make sure he was awake, he was with them, he was okay.

Jazz parked behind the RV. Her hands were slick when she unlocked the front door, the word “Dad!” already escaping her throat before she got the door open.

He was there, seated, on the couch, tightening a screw in a metal wing of some new contraption. A football game rolled across the television screen.

“Jazzy-pants?”

“Dad, when you got rid of the Blood Blossoms, what did you do with them?”

“I took them to the dump,” Jack answered simply. “They’ll die there without the portal.”

He turned to face her fully, face waxing confused at the sight of Jazz’s expression. “Why?” he asked.

His eyes shifted behind Jazz, drinking in the sight of Sam and Tucker each supporting one arm of Danny’s as they walked in. The fear infected him too, showing stronger on his scrunched brow, his whitening lips. He looked between his children.

Kinetic magic allowed a practitioner to charge a held object before throwing it, making it curve slightly toward its 'target' when thrown, and to do more damage when it hit. This made 'flingers', as practitioners were called, a fairly uncomplicated inclusion in armies, especially because the magic was fairly easy to learn the very basics of, and outfitting a small unit of barely-trained flingers with slings often proved instrumental in overcoming even quite well-equipped foes. While the magic was taught at the Athenaeum of Might and Motion, the ease of learning it and general simplicity of its effects meant that it was hard to gatekeep, and remained a minor, if important, magic with military and occasional practical applications. The rise of firearms during the First Empire, however, rendered kinetic magic somewhat redundant – the deadliness and range of simple firearms was comparable to, and often exceeded, the “simply-trained squad of peasant flingers” that had previously been so instrumental. In fact, the only advantage that kinetic magic had over kinetic weaponry was that a flinger would just need a bag of rocks or darts, instead of the investment in materiel a squad of musketeers would require. Experiments were made, and the invention of explosive devices small enough to easily throw, such as grenades, levelled the playing field a little, but didn’t fully arrest the technique's decline across the period of the First Empire.

In 230 FE, in the small town of Rael, an enterprising kinetic mage, Siebs, explored the limits of the magic in a manner that, were it not for the Second Empire’s obvious interest in the military applications, someone in authority should probably have put a stop to. One of the primary limits to kinetic magic was the charging limit – a single flinger could charge a sling bullet for over five seconds before it stopped taking energy, the efficacy of which was dependent on the skill and training of the flinger, and if removed from skin contact, unthrown, it would immediately start losing energy, giving the flinger enough time to load it into a sling, but do precious little else. Trying to crack the ‘energy storage’ problem, Siebs discovered something new – if a stone was immediately passed to another flinger, it wouldn’t lose energy. Exciting enough, but the secondary effect was that this second flinger could charge the bullet too; on release, the effects of both flingers would apply. Extensive testing revealed something that, in hindsight, should have provoked more caution than glee – while this was a linear combination of the power of the flingers, it only needed three or four flingers before the sling bullet could be propelled faster than a bullet from a firearm, hardened by the magic to the point that it could penetrate thick armour or even stone walls. A demonstration with ten novice flingers managed to throw a pebble with more force and impact than a cannon. Interested in the possibilities and encouraged by their handlers from the Second Empire, Siebs inducted three hundred basic flingers, and set up a line, where each flinger would take a stone, charge it, and pass it to the next person in line. When the three hundredth member of this “peasant chain” released the stone, kinetic magic was excluded to a roughly spherical region surrounding the field the test took place in, centred just outside Rael, and the town was utterly destroyed by what, to all accounts, was an enormous explosion. When the crater was visited by concerned authorities, all that was found was a smoking crater across the entire exclusion zone, and a vast amount of heat and light being emitted by a ball of fire that was bouncing around the inviolable interior of the zone. Several weeks later, the fireball finally slowed down enough to simply disperse, and once the site had cooled down enough, expeditions revealed that the effect was still partially ongoing. Thrown objects in the zone accelerate faster and faster, until they hit another object or the zone’s boundary, and usually explode. Without extremely careful, slow movement, this can happen to basically anything, making exploring the zone incredibly hazardous to the unprepared. Several attempts have been made, over the years, to exploit this seemingly-unlimited kinetic energy generated by objects in the zone, although this process is complicated by the fact that very few materials exist that are strong enough to resist the kinds of forces generated in the PREZ, and that kinetically-charged material cannot leave the zone. Proposals about the use of rune magic to attempt to transfer energy out have been made, but are caught up in bureaucratic red tape, for the time being.