Maddie watched the flames flicker, tossing sparks up into the night. She'd sent Danny off to bed after the third time he'd yawned, promising to come in herself once the fire died down. To be honest, she was relieved to have a few minutes to herself.

Her son had been a regular mother hen ever since she'd woken up late this afternoon, insisting on helping her around everywhere despite the makeshift crutch she'd made that worked perfectly well, hovering as she ate and drank dutifully. But that wasn't her main reason for wanting to be alone. There was someone she had to see.

She waited for the light in the GAV to go out, then another ten minutes. Then she pulled a little device she'd cobbled together over the course of the day out of her belt pouch and switched it on. It purred to life with a barely-audible hum, glowing a familiar white-green. She tucked it out of sight under the blanket next to her log seat.

Barely five minutes later, a chill brushed the back of her neck. Maddie smiled. "You were supposed to go straight home," she said, not looking up.

"You're not going to atomize me if I go visible, are you?"

Maddie raised her empty hands in silent compliance. "Threats aren't particularly effective against you in any case," she noted wryly.

"Yeah, well… I was worried." He glanced around, eyes alert, a few wisps of bright green energy swirling around his fingertips. "There are still ghosts out here. I sensed—it wasn't a strong one, but..."

"You mean this?" Maddie reached under the blanket and held up her device, a baseball-sized cluster of wires and steel parts flickering green-white, weird against the firelight.

Phantom yelped and backpedaled right across the clearing. He ducked behind a thick tree branch.

Maddie snickered at his sudden retreat. So much for his usual bravado. "Scared?"

"The last doohickey you rigged together blew up a giant ghost, so, yeah. Petrified." He peeked over the branch, nothing but a pair of green eyes and a shock of white hair glowing odd and shadowless out of the dark. "What the heck is that?"

"Just an ectoelectric bio-emissions simulator." She toggled a switch on the back.

Phantom flinched and covered his head with his arms. Nothing happened.

Maddie flicked the switch again, watching the ghost with interest as the device lit up. She saw the ghost boy shudder. A blue mist escaped through the gap in his arms, curling up over the branch.

He looked cross-eyed at the vapor as it dissipated in front of his nose, then looked up at her. "Oh. Sneaky."

"I wanted to speak with you. Since you seem bound and determined to protect me lately, I figured a ghost presence would make you come running."

The ghost drifted through the tree and back into the clearing. He scratched the back of his neck. "Am I really that predictable?"

Maddie shrugged. "Less than you'd think." The last couple of days had been full of surprises, Phantom and his puzzling behaviour most of all. She poked a the fire with her makeshift crutch. A charred branch crumbled, exposing the glowing embers underneath. Maddie felt the heat press against her face. She turned and looked up at the ghost boy hovering just a few feet away, the smoke from the campfire curling around his toes. "You're not like other ghosts, are you, Phantom?"

"Totally not," Phantom rolled onto his back and grinned at her upside down. "I'm way better-looking."

She snorted and set aside the stick, patting the log next to her that Danny had recently vacated. "Come down here so we can talk."

He laughed again, but drifted back, out of the smoke and closer to the woods. "No offense, Maddie, but... we're back in familiar territory, remember?" He nodded at the GAV, just a dozen yards distant. "You, ghost hunter, me, ghost? I'm not sitting in easy zapping range."

Maddie felt oddly hurt by that. True, she had gone to the trouble of stashing an ectogun in her belt earlier, but... their little escapade had changed her perspective, permanently. She wasn't sure how to articulate it yet, but one thing Maddie knew for certain: Phantom was in no danger from her. Not tonight, and perhaps never again.

Phantom let out a loud sigh and drifted down to settle, feather-light, just above the ground on the far side of the campfire. "Happy?"

She nodded, acknowledging the compromise. "Thank you."

They both stared at the fire for a long moment, a silence filled with crickets and the swish of leaves in the wind. Maddie glanced at the place where he'd been injured, but the jumpsuit had closed over the wound, black and seamless. "How's the leg?"

Phantom rubbed his thigh. "Getting there. Yours?"

She followed his gaze to the ace bandage wrapped around her foot. "Same." She gave him a sidelong look. "Thanks to you."

"Me?" He picked up a twig and started snapping it into smaller and smaller pieces. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"There's no way my hundred-pounds-soaking-wet son managed to drag my sorry carcass through two miles of thick woodland all by himself, no matter what he seems to think."

"Oh, yeah," Phantom scratched the back of his head, grinning sheepishly. "You got me. I might've done some of the heavy lifting."

Immediately after she'd forbidden him following her, no less. Threats really were useless. "Why did you help us?"

The ghost boy shrugged, tossing bits of stick into the fire and watching them char and curl up into little black spirals. "Dunno." His clear green eyes came up to meet hers. "Why did you?"

Maddie expected the question. She'd spent most of yesterday asking herself the same thing, but she still didn't have a good answer. She shifted her foot and winced at the accompanying twinge. "I couldn't let someone bleed to death right in front of me. Even a ghost."

"Ghosts can't die, remember?" he reminded her, teasing.

Maddie nodded. "Most ghosts." She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees and letting her hands hang close to the fire, enjoying the warmth. "Are there more of you?"

For a moment she thought he'd play dumb, throw off the question, but Phantom just sighed and leaned back on his hands. "Me, Vlad, and one more that I know of. Though I bet we're not the first. Or even the last. As long as humans keep messing around with ghosts, it's gonna happen again."

"What'll happen?"

He glanced at her. "Accidents."

"Accidents?" she repeated, frowning, trying to puzzle out what he meant. Was Phantom an accident? Or did he have one? If it was repeatable, was it really an accident?

"Don't overthink it," he offered. "Ghosts don't make sense half the time anyway."

"You do realize you're talking to an ectobiologist."

"And you're talking to a teenager," he shot back with a grin. "Isn't there some kind of rule that we have to be as uncooperative as possible?"

"Lucky for me, you seem to be the exception." That was a good word for Phantom: exceptional. In physology, in demeanor, in ideals... He wasn't just different, he was special. She wasn't sure why yet, but her curiousity had been thoroughly aroused; she'd figure him out sooner or later.

His grin turned into a scowl. "You're overthinking it right now, aren't you?"

Maddie held up both hands in surrender. "Force of habit."

"Well," He hopped up and stretched, lacing his fingers together and extending his arms until his joints popped. He arched his back like a cat, then let his arms drop with a satisfied sigh. "If the ghosts are really gone, I guess my work here is done. I mean the woods are great and all— if you ignore the bugs, the dirt, the rocks, all the things trying to kill us— but hey, all good things have to end, right?"

"Will I see you again?"

"Well, duh," he raised his hands as if holding a shotgun and peered through an imaginary scope. "Just don't be offended if I'm, you know, running for my afterlife."

Maddie winced. The playful way he talked about being hunted only seemed to underscore the grim reality of it. They were enemies. They should be enemies. "Maybe we could talk."

He tensed; the edges of his form blurred out of focus, as if he were on the verge of going invisible. "About what?"

About you, she wanted to say, but Maddie suspected that would scare him off. "You said I didn't understand ghosts. If I've learned anything in the past day or so, it's that you have a point; I've barely scratched the surface. Maybe it doesn't all have to be guns and scalpels. Maybe that can change."

Phantom studied her, and his shoulders relaxed. "Maybe." He drifted a little higher, tipping his head back to gaze upward into the night framed by the surrounding woods. His aura looked a little like starlight, and for a minute she could imagine him as a regular teenager out for a walk. Danny catching a few more minutes of stargazing before bed. "The stars are nice tonight, huh?"

Maddie folded her arms on her knees and smiled. "They are. There was a comet a few hours ago. It was beautiful."

He grinned. "I saw it, yeah. Monsters, bugs, raging river of death… but you can't beat the view out here." She hummed in agreement, tracking the milky way with her eyes. When she looked back, Phantom had vanished.

The next morning, Danny and Maddie sat at the GAV's fold-out table— or rather, Maddie sat while Danny knelt on the floor, gingerly unwrapping her foot. She held tight to the edge of the table, doing her best not to groan as her foot twinged and throbbed at every movement. They really shouldn't be unwrapping it at all, but the pressure was so tight now that her toes had gone numb. As the last of the bandages fell away, Maddie could see why; her ankle had swollen right back up to grapefruit size, the stretched skin mottled a spectacular array of reds and purples.

"Well," Danny said, staring at it, unraveled bandages dangling from his fingers. "Crap."

Maddie grimaced, a little queasy at the sight of the lump of flesh attached to her own ankle. If it didn't throb with every movement she'd be convinced it was an alien growth and not actually a part of her body. She'd taken the strongest painkillers they had onboard, but putting her weight on the (probably fractured) ankle was out of the question. Even lowering it for more than a few minutes had proved excruciatingly painful. "There's no driving on that."

"You think?" Danny ran his hands through his hair, then paced off to the end of the GAV. "That's totally broken! Forget driving, you ought to be at a hospital." He turned around. "What about the satellite phone? Once it's fixed, we could radio for help."

"Fixed?" Maddie echoed, poking through the charred scraps of hardware that used to be the satellite dish that sat sadly on the table. "I'd have to build one from scratch. Those ghosts really did a number on it."

Danny groaned and sat, dropping his head on the table. "Kind of wishing those ghosts hadn't completely destroyed our only way home."

"It's not our only way home, Danny," Maddie said, trying not to smile at her son's dramatics. "The GAV is fine, we just need a driver." Though he did have a point; driving was out of the question. For her, anyway… She paused as a thought struck her, then eyed Danny thoughtfully. "How's your leg?"

He rolled his eyes and stood up. "I told you, I just pulled a muscle. It's fine—in fact—" Danny noticed her speculative look and stopped short. He took a step back, raising his hands in surrender. "Woah, wait. Me? Not happening. Nuh-uh, no way."

Maddie's smile turned into a grin. "You have to learn someday, Danny."

He paled. "Ghosts I can handle. Getting stranded with my mom lost in the woods? Also handled. But driving manual?"

In half an hour their gear was packed up and Maddie sat comfortably in the passenger seat with her foot raised on the dash, watching her son fidget in the oversized driver's seat.

She smiled serenely at him. "Ready?"

Danny adjusted the rear view mirror for the eight time. "Oh sure, what could go wrong? I mean we're only on like the worst unpaved road ever in an eight-ton armored vehicle with an unlicensed, unqualified driver at the wheel."

Maddie popped open a soda. "If you can fight off ghosts for two days and single-handedly rescue your mother from the middle of the wilderness, you can handle a little rough terrain."

"It's not the terrain I'm worried about! I can barely see over the dash!" He craned his neck, peering out the windshield. "Everything's so… so Dad-sized!"

Maddie laughed. "You're taller than me, Danny. If I can handle it, you can."

"See if you're still laughing when I drive us right into that ravine," Danny muttered, hunching his shoulders, but he turned the key anyway. The GAV roared to life.

Maddie leaned back in her seat, and something hard poked into her shoulder. She reached up and tugged until it fell into her lap: The Specter Deflector. The heavy steel links were charred and useless, wires and broken circuitry jabbing out at odd angles. It was still locked, as if it had been phased right off her waist. She smiled and coiled it up, tucking it away into the glove compartment. "Somehow, I think we'll be okay."

- end -

A/N:

Gracious, this took me forever to get posted. Part of the delay was that it's not a necessary chapter; the previous one does a good enough job resolving all the conflicts and tensions. Still, I had the scenes and it wraps things up nicely, so it's worth posting. And I can finally move RI to my complete folder! Ha! Take that, procrastination!

I know a lot of you were hoping for a reveal fic, but that's not really what I set out to do with this story. I'm more interested in Maddie's relationship with Phantom, honestly, and how it can develop into mutual respect and friendship without that automatic boost of realizing he's her son. Though now that Maddie's paying attention I doubt it'll stay secret for long... I give it a week tops once they get back home. XD

And no, I have no intention of writing a sequel. You're welcome to give it a shot if you like, though!

Many thanks to Cordria for her patience and persistence in beta reading this fic! This chapter would never have made it online without your support!

Thank you to everyone who read and reviewed! I really loved writing this fic, and I'm happy that all of you have enjoyed it as well.

-Hj