Beneath the Surface

1

Slender hands tipped in claw like nails snapped the lock on a suitcase, and opened it. Glass vials were stored inside, neatly nestled into the lined case. Dozens of them, each filled with different materials. This one with burnished red dragon scales, that one with a half dozen raven feathers. This one with strands of naiad hair, that one with hind blood. This one with a small golden glow that darted against the confines, a tiny desperate faerie.

That one with bright green blood from a halfa.

"This," the creature said with a decided smugness as she ran one finger over the green tinged vial, "Is going to be far too easy."

xXx

"You know, Danny," I never thought you'd make it through two days, much less two years," Jazz Fenton said to her brother as they weaved through traffic toward their parents' house.

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," he mumbled from the passenger seat.

Danny Fenton sat with his head tilted back, eyes closed and trying desperately not to break out in snores as he dozed next to his sister. It was the first day of summer break, and he had eleven weeks of blessed rest and freedom. Relatively, of course, because he could never just ignore the increasing ghost population in the human world. But compared to school, a job, his second job, and the stresses of keeping his various long distance relationships happy and healthy…

Well, he needed more sleep.

It would have been easier, he thought as Jazz turned down their street, if he'd gone to Sam or Tucker's colleges. Sam had gone to the University of New York to study political science and Tucker had gone to MIT to further his obsession with anything technology related. Danny had gone to U.C. Davis in northern California, a continent away from his best friends, and most of one from his family, and he could honestly say that he was glad to finally be coming home for more than a ghost on the fly.

He'd made it for Christmas both years running, had missed a thanksgiving, and managed to surprise his mom on her birthday (though he still hadn't told her he'd made the cross country trip courtesy of Air Phantom), but other than that he'd spent most of the last two years in California at school. He hadn't even seen Tucker since Christmas, or Sam since the summer before when she managed to steal a week in Sacramento without her parents.

But it was worth it. When he went back to school in the fall he'd be thirteen credits shy of graduation and acceptance into the graduate program. Which was something, considering that he'd decided to major in veterinary medicine. Two years of full course loads and summer semesters after high school and his first year had given him a the chance to start the graduate program after Christmas.

It was even more cool because he had a minor in paranormal sciences that was already done, diploma'd and in his carry on with his laptop.

"It's just surprising, Danny," she said as she pulled into the drive and turned the car off. "You'd even got a diploma before Sam and Tucker. It's weird." She slid out of the car, slamming the door closed and glancing up at the one echoed to her from across it. "It makes me want to say 'who are you and what have you done with my brother?'"

"That's me," Danny joked as he tugged his bags from the backseat, slinging two duffel's across his shoulders and hoisting two suitcases. "Danny Fenton, pod person."

The front door swung open before they got to it and Danny was tackled by two slender arms wrapping around his neck. "Oh my god, Danny, I can't believe you're actually here," Sam Manson was shrieking in his ear as he dropped his suitcases and wrapped one arm around her, the other grabbing for the railing to keep them from falling back down the stairs.

"You got small," he said as he held her tightly against him, his face buried in her hair. "And your hair got long," he laughed as he pulled back and she swung the thick tail back across her shoulders.

"Gimme," she said and snatched a suitcase up before he could grab both of them again. "Tucker! Come do something for a change."

"Danny, man, it's good to see you," Tucker Foley said as he appeared in the doorway and ducked past Sam and Jazz to grab the other suitcase and unhook two of the duffel's from around Danny's neck so that all he was carrying was the bag with his laptop and diploma. Among other things, though eh didn't want to have to think of the tricks he'd pulled to get the ectoguns through security.

"I'm alive and kicking, see?" he said as they all dragged the bags in and dumped them by the stairs. He'd take them up through the ceiling when someone distracted his parents. It was easier than trying to carry them all up at once. "When did you guys get in?"

"Jazz was back last week," Sam said as she dropped down on the couch. "Tucker got back yesterday, I flew in last night." She made a face. "Midnight arrivals suck. And what did you bring home? Slabs of granite?"

Danny stuck his tongue out at her. "No, just a couple trees. You remember the redwoods?"

"That's not funny, those trees are endangered," Sam said and poked him in the side as Tucker collapsed next to her and then on top of her. "Off," she said as she tugged his signature red beret down over his face.

"I brought home stuff. Books, clothes, presents."

"Presents?" Jazz asked eagerly as she leaned over the back of the couch, her hair dangling in Danny's face. "Where's mine?"

Tucker snickered as he straightened his beret and sat up. "Did you bring someone some jewelry finally? You know, of the diamond ring persuasion?"

"Tucker," Danny said warningly, finding himself echoed by Sam as he flushed red. "Where's Mom and Dad? I wanted to give them theirs first."

"They are at the store getting last minute supplies," Sam said.

"Dad wanted cookies."

"Oh," Danny said, and smiled. Quickly he went into ghost mode and shot up off the couch. "I'm going to put my stuff in my room," he said as he grabbed his bags, turning them and himself intangible and flying through the ceiling and into his room. He dropped them at the foot of his bed, save for one of the duffel's, and let himself drift back down to relax across the couch, head on the arm and legs draped across Sam before he became human again.

"So," he said, hand on the bag, "Who wants goodies?"

"Goodies?" Danny's mom said from behind him and he spun around, accidentally kicking Sam in the arm as he went pale and saw her head peeking from around the kitchen door.

"M-Mom!" he stuttered. "How long have you been there?"

"Not long, sweetie," she said and smiled at him. He jumped over the couch and wrapped her in a hug. "I missed you, Danny. It's good to have you home."

"Alright, let me at him," his dad said, following his wife through into the living room. "C'mere," he said and he scooped both of them up in a hug. "Imagine, my Danny has a degree in ghosts!"

"Um, paranormal science, Dad," Danny said as he extracted himself and hopped back over the couch. "It's a lot more than just ghosts," he said with a grin at his friends.

He grabbed his computer bag as his parents settled on the couch across from him and dug through, coming up with a black (fake) leather case that he handed to his mother. "I figured it was the best thing I could bring home to you," he said as she opened it and smiled.

"It's wonderful, Danny," she said. "We'll have to frame it and put it up with Jazz's Masters Degree."

Danny grinned. "That's great. But it wasn't the only thing I brought. Just the best," and he grabbed the duffel from next to his feet and unzipped it, pulling out two boxes from the top. They were wrapped, and Sam cracked up at how bad a job he'd actually done on the. "Hey, wrapping is not my strong point. Why do you think I always get Jazz to do it?"

He tossed one box to his mom, the other to his dad, and watched as they opened them. His mother's was a small book that she obviously had recognized easily. "Danny, this is amazing! I've never seen one of these outside of a museum."

"It's the only one," he said with a smug smile as she leafed through a handwritten copy of Caspian's Annotated Paranormal Anthology, with a few additions straight from the ghost zone. "There're some pages I stuck in the back," he said as she flipped to them. "Some of the things I found out, I thought they might be useful to you."

His father, however, was staring at a mall glass jar filled with green goo.

"It's ectoplasm from the most powerful ghost in the Ghost Zone," Danny said, and winked at the dropped jaws Sam and Tucker gave him. He'd tell them later how he convinced Clockwork to part with a bit of ectoplasm. Until then, they could gape.

He dug another gift out, this time a simple envelope, and handed it to Jazz. The only response he got was a squeal as she opened the envelope and found tickets to the American Psychology Convention in Washington state that fall.

Two more gifts later, and the bag was empty, a massive flat box on Tucker's lap and a small cube in Sam's hand. They both gave him looks, asking whether or not it was safe, and Danny shrugged as they began to unwrap them. Tucker immediately started spluttering and covering his box with scraps of paper before popping up and heading for the stairs at speed.

Sam shot Danny a questioning glance and said, "Do I want to know?"

"Probably not," he said honestly, and got up and gave his parents another hug, a kiss on his mom's cheek and then followed Tucker up the stairs and into his room, absently kicking at a suitcase so that he could collapse on the bed. "Tired," he said pitifully as Sam dropped to the foot of the bed in a more lady like fashion.

"I'm going to kill you, Danny," Tucker said as Sam snatched the box from his lap and started laughing at it. On the front was a rather… graphic, Danny thought was the best word, depiction of a blow up doll. His ode to Tucker and his forever dating ways.

"I'm already half dead, so it's not going to happen. Why don't you actually open the box instead of being pissed about what you think it is?" Danny suggested as he cracked one eye open to make sure his best friend actually did that instead of being too shy.

"If it's really a blow up doll, I'm going to have to wash my eyes with bleach," Sam said as she sat forward, watching avidly, her own gift forgotten in her hands as she tried to see what Tucker was doing.

Tape was snapped, cardboard ripped a little, and the lid came off to reveal wads of white tissue paper that Tucker shuffled through hurriedly. "What is it, Danny? Where is it?" he begged as he finally swooshed the last layer of paper to the floor to reveal a book. "A book?"

Danny rolled his eyes. "No, not a book. A grimoire, from England. Somebody said that it was Merlin's," he added with a snicker.

"And we all know how real he was," Sam muttered as she plucked the book from Tucker's hands. "I'm willing to bet you, though," she said as she opened the thick book and traced a finger along a page, "that this is real. I can feel the power."

Danny shrugged. "It's covered in the stuff, just like the two of you are."

Sam shot Danny a grin at that. "Well, we had to do something so we weren't just sidekicks."

Danny laughed as Sam and Tucker paged through the thick handwritten book, arguing over translations and sometimes insulting the original owner's handwriting. In the five years since Danny had gained his ghost powers, Sam and Tucker had invested themselves as his sidekicks, and then ghost fighting equals by studying, of all things, magic.

Sam had reasoned that if ghosts existed, and magical objects (like the Reality Gauntlet) existed, then there was a pretty good chance that magic existed. So after enough research to keep the three of them plowed under by school work and ghost fighting combined, they managed to find out that there were two types of magic users. Those with the innate ability, and those who learned it through study and practice.

They'd both fallen under the second, until Sam had found a highly dangerous spell at the end of the junior year that required a human sacrifice to trigger latent innate ability. And they'd performed it, with Danny as the sacrifice, in a completely, insanely roundabout way. Sam and Tucker convinced him that if they drew blood from him in his human form, and then he went ghost, that the spells requirements of blood from a living creature that became a ghost would be satisfied.

It had been, and they'd spent a great deal of time and effort in the intervening time becoming fairly decent mages. Sam insisted on that, she wasn't going to let herself be called a witch. Not when she'd spent most of high school calling Paulina one. And Tucker had agreed that it was acceptable, since when he thought of wizards he pictured fruity old men with long gray beards and tall, pointy hats.

"I take it you like?" Danny asked as Tucker nodded enthusiastically.

"Dude, do I even want to know how you got your hands on this?"

"Probably not," Danny muttered as he winced in remembered agony. He'd had to donate a pound of flesh for the cause, and even in ghost form the pieces taken made him ache to remember it. "But it was worth it if half the things I was told are true."

"Probably more than you'd think," Sam said as she handed Tucker the grimoire back.

Sitting up, Danny picked up the small box Sam had forgotten on the bed. "So, are you going to open yours?" he asked as he handed it to her, steeling himself against the familiar jolt of desire as she took it from him, her fingers brushing his and making an all too familiar heat rush across his face.

"Yeah," she said quickly, too quickly. She fiddled with the paper before working a finger beneath the tape and popping it loose. "I don't suppose you'll tell me what it is?" she asked as she tugged the paper off and crumpled it into a ball that she aimed at Tucker's head.

"Hey!" he yelped indignantly as it bounced off his forehead and he looked up to glare at her. Then his mouth hung open and he stared at the box is Sam's hand. "I know I asked if you brought her jewelry, but I was joking. I think."

Sam turned bright red as she stared down at the simple black velvet box in her hand. "It's not, is it?" she asked.

Danny shifted uncomfortably on the bed and shook his head. "No. It's not," he said with a pained smile at her tone. That was the reason why it wasn't, because she'd never given him even the slightest indication that she might be interested… "I'm not proposing, so you don't have to worry. Besides, the box is just ridiculously big for a ring."

"Yeah," Tucker said as he closed his book. "Cause if you're proposing I want to know when you two had the time to date."

Sam shook her head and tried to slow the beating of her heart as she opened the box and gasped. Inside the box was a smooth sphere of clear amber, perhaps an inch, maybe more in diameter. She lifted it out carefully and held it up to the let the sunlight filter through it, smiling even wider when she realized that it was, unlike most amber when cut larger than a carat, completely flawless.

"It's amazing, Danny. How'd you find it?" she asked as she cradled in her palm, shooting him a radiant smile.

He grinned back, his blue eyes bright in the face of her pleasure. "Let's just say I know someone. Test it out?" he asked with a cocked eyebrow. "I've been gone a while. You can both show me a few tricks."

Sam laughed and tossed the amber globe into the air and raised her hand so that it was caught in a net of energy she wrapped around it. The stone drifted higher and suddenly began to glow, and then Tucker laughed and said something quietly, and the stone burst apart into thousands of incandescent particles, drifting down over them all and disappearing when they fell on Danny's skin.

And when he looked back at Sam, she was holding the stone up in her fingers like nothing had ever happened, smiling smugly with Tucker as he nodded, impressed. "Alright, I'll admit it. That was wicked cool."

"Mostly illusion," Tucker said as he leaned back in the chair, twisting around and booting Danny's desktop up.

"You guys can do more than illusions, right?" Danny asked.

Sam laughed. "Well, duh. But most of our magic is, um, aggressive?" She laughed again, this time lacing it with a distinctly evil edge. "Of course, I can show you a glamour, if you want."

"Um, I don't think—" Danny started before scrabbling back across the bed from the vapid Paulina that was sitting at the foot of his bed and staring at him like he was the only popsicle around on a very hot day. "Get away from me!" he yelped.

Tucker laughed as he swiveled back around. "Sam, that's not very nice."

The glamour dissolved and Sam collapsed across the bed laughing. "I know it's not, but you have to admit, it was funny."

"I hate you both," Danny muttered as the shot grins his way.

xXx

"So when does your roommate get in?" Tucker asked as the three friends strolled through the park.

The sun had set more than an hour ago and Danny had already taken up his role as ghostly defender of Amity Park. From the Box Ghost, which had been a pitifully simple task, and had finally cemented in him the fact that he was home. He was currently heading through the park with Sam and Tucker on their way back from the Nasty Burger.

"Hmm?" Danny asked, distracted. He was still trying to get over the fact that Dash Baxter, golden boy of Casper High's athletics program, was flipping burgers for a living. "Oh, Charlie gets in tomorrow morning. I have to be at the airport before eight."

"Jazz is actually letting you borrow her car?" Sam asked as she trialed behind the two boys, her attention on the amber sphere still.

"It was either that or take the RV. Jazz bit the bullet and I get to pick Charlie up like a normal person."

"Oh, yeah. And your appearance of normal is going to dissolve the second you get home," Tucker said as he glanced back behind him at Sam. "Will you quit that?"

"What?" she asked defensively, and the amber was dropped quickly into a pocket before Tucker could reply. "Sorry," she muttered. "It's just cool."

"And I'm missing something," Danny said as he watched, bemused.

"I was using the amber as a focus for the ley lines in the park," Sam said as she shrugged. "Tucker's a bit sensitive to them since the incident last year."

"Incident?" Danny asked.

Tucker shook his head. "Nothing really. Just got snapped by one, is all. Makes me jumpy when people play with them around me."

Danny started to ask for Tucker to explain it to him in English when blue mist escaped his lips. "Right, ghost," he said, and Sam tugged the amber back out.

"Let me," she said with confidence. "I want to try this out for real."

Danny shrugged. "You know where I am. Just scream if you need me," he said as he watched her run back behind them and disappear behind some bushes. "Well, she seems to know what she's doing."

"We both do, Danny," Tucker said as he snagged a seat on a bench to wait for Sam to come back. "Sorry about the ring thing. You know, with the box."

Danny sighed and sank down next to him. "Don't worry about it. It's no big deal."

"It is. I don't know why you're still dancing around it after all these years."

"Dancing around what?" Danny asked. "We're friends."

"Which is why Sam willingly went to a debutante ball after she snuck off to visit you last summer. Because you're just friends," Tucker said, annoyed. "You're crazy about her. I know you are, so don't deny it."

"Alright. I won't," Danny said, amused that he could at least wipe the annoyance from Tucker's face with the unexpected admission. "I'm crazy about her. Doesn't mean she feels the same way."

"Oh my god. I can't believe I'm saying this. It's painful enough to agree with her without echoing her, but you are such a male," Tucker said. "Do you really think that Sam doesn't feel the same way?"

"She made it pretty clear earlier," Danny said, and Tucker winced a little at that. He could certainly understand how Danny would take Sam's reaction to Tucker's jabs about diamond rings and then the black jewelry box as not being interested.

But Tucker knew it wasn't true, otherwise he wouldn't be fielding calls all year long from Sam asking if Tucker had heard from him recently, or what do you think he'd like for Christmas, or even the loudly squealed oh my god he's coming home for the summer call. That one still made his ears hurt.

Danny grunted. "You talk like you're not a guy yourself," Danny muttered.

"I talk like a guy who's been talking to two women nonstop for three straight semesters," Tucker corrected.

"Well, I know Sam's one. Who's the other?"

"Miranda," Tucker said with a grin.

"Miranda?" Danny asked.

"My almost significant other. But you're trying to change the subject, so don't," Tucker answered with a verbal parry.

"What's the subject?" Sam asked as she popped up behind them, making both of them jump to their feet startled. She raised an eyebrow as she looked back and forth at them, her blue eyed halfa holding a fistful of ectoenergy and Tucker reflecting a similar green glow out of his eyes as his own hands blazed in shades of red.

"You two are way too jumpy," she said. "Ghost is gone. I like the stone," she shot at Danny as she headed around the bench and between them, heading down the path and towards the park's exit. "Are you two coming?"

Danny glanced at Tucker with a surprised stare as he took in the quick reactions and impressive display, and let his own hands dim and release the ectoenergy he'd been ready to send pulsing at Sam before they realized it was her. "She might have a point," he said as he rubbed the back of his neck and turned to follow her.

"Sam always has a point," Tucker said as they caught up to her.

"That I do," she said as she looped her arms through theirs. "So, what time are we leaving tomorrow?"

"Leaving?" Danny asked.

"You have a roommate to pick up, right? Tuck and I are going with, of course. You know, full Amity Park welcome and all that. Huh. Maybe a full Team Phantom welcome would be more appropriate."

"Jazz isn't going," Danny said automatically. "You guys want to go with me?"

"Wouldn't have asked if we didn't," Sam grinned.

Tucker sighed. "Actually, I never asked. That was all you, Sam."

"And where I go, you go."

Danny laughed. "Be at my house at seven."

"Seven?" Sam asked, dismayed. "But that's so early."

"Hey," Tucker interjected. "You wanted to go. So seven it is."