PART 3

Their numbers were trimmed on the way to the Herald office when John MacDee discovered mid-step that he couldn't proceed any further, like he'd run up against an invisible wall. "You're the guy that came up from the Gull?" Evi said, with a small, grim nod. "Must've hit your limit. Not bad going... Most of us are tied within a given distance of where we died."

The old barfly swore and stomped about behind his invisible line. "Well, shit. I guess I'll hover around here twiddling my thumbs while you all go do your thing." He looked disgruntled. You wouldn't have thought he'd not done a day of work in three years.

At the Herald, Nathan didn't expect his research team of waifs and strays to strike gold fast. The Teagues didn't have all their old files on the computers yet, and it was going to take more years than the two old pressmen had left in them to do that. It meant the computer search would be hit and miss. He got the others started at the desks searching the paper archives while he and Evi tackled the computer, which was apparently the tricky part for those of ghostly status.

Occasionally Evi would go across to one of the others when they waved a hand to signal, and blow or flick the paper they were working from over onto the next page.

Big, lumbering ogre!Vince crossed the room a few times to stare at the papers moving on their own, and Dave, little goblin Dave who it seemed could still talk, gibbered at his brother, "We've got goddamn poltergeists in here now, Vince, that's what this is! It's your fault! You're the one who was so hot to be dicking about with the Ouija Board last Christmas party. Everyone knows you play with a Ouija Board, you get poltergeists. Least if the infestation was rats we could eat 'em!"

Nathan kept trying to touch things, but except for the one time he'd done it accidentally in the grip of his fury, he couldn't make it work, much to his frustration. "It's probably gonna take time to build up your energy reserves again," Evi said, eying him dubiously. "If this is a temporary state, maybe that's time you won't have. He must have leeched a lot out of you. Them-" she waved her hand at the others. "They never had much to start with, but you, you were young - ish - and strong, healthy and happy, and gettin' some on a regular basis." Nathan scowled at her. "You should have the mojo to spare."

Damn Max, Nathan thought, fuming. Haven needed help, Audrey was out there somewhere needing his help, and thanks to Max Hansen's interference, he was stuck intangible and useless. He closed his eyes on the swell of rage and the other memories it stirred up and carried along with it. At least he understood, now, he reflected wryly, that flash image he'd had from Jackie, before he closed his eyes to hide from it. That fist coming toward him... He'd not understood at the time, all out of context, either what it was or why it had provoked such an intense fear reaction. It had seemed like a giant... But it had only been that he had been so very small, back when that fear had lodged in his brain. Back when Max and Max's temper had become his worst fear.

Who beat a child that young? It wasn't a question a police officer should ask. He'd seen these things... but he supposed, that was different from understanding it. From being on this side of it, absorbing the memories and revelation as an adult.

"Tell me how I should be able to do it," he said to Evi. "Tell me how you do it."

"Honey, it either happens or it doesn't." Somehow her eyebrow lift made that very clearly a virility pun. She lifted her hand, waggling her fingers. "Just focus real hard on the surface of your skin you want to touch with. Put your energy there. It's spread out, and you don't have so much of it, so you need to make sure it's concentrated." She strutted the few steps over to Vince and reached up on her tip-toes to flick him on the forehead.

Vince smacked himself in the face trying to catch whatever he thought he'd felt and made a noise like Homer Simpson. Nathan snorted, amused despite his frustration.

Evi walked back slower, her face more thoughtful, her eyes a little sad as she looked him up and down. "So I'm hoping you're not permanently dead when I ask this question, but... you keeping my boy happy? You and Blondie?"

"Me and Audrey," Nathan corrected. He twisted his facsimile of a mouth into what he hoped was a dry but reassuring smile. Duke was... complicated. So was happy, while the Troubles were around. Duke's own Trouble was a doozy, on that front. Nathan still remembered with bitter vividness the night he'd almost walked out, too afraid of what Duke was, of what that could mean for them. They still hadn't finished dealing with that. Nathan didn't know if they ever would. He wondered what Evi would think of Duke's kind of 'special', the truth of what the Reverend's hints and promises had turned out to be. But he answered, "He's doing all right. Took a while to get over you dying."

"...Yeah." She spread her hands. "Didn't we all?"

Something occurred to him. "Audrey shot the Rev. He isn't...?"

Her eyes gleamed a bit evilly, but she shook her head. "That old goat? Moved on... Maybe to Heaven, but if there's any justice, then the other place."

Nathan kept silent, since he didn't believe in either.

"I did hear about it, though," Evi added.

"On the... ghost vine?"

"Very funny. No-one ever thought of that before... It's no wonder Duke likes you. You're about as straight a straight man as he could ask for."

Nathan shook himself, and pointed to the computer. "We should... get back to work." He looked guiltily at the other half of the room. Five out of seven hands were raised and they had an audience again.

They found the news report pretty quickly, though, in the end. The reason they found it so quickly... was because they hadn't needed to go back to the old archives, after all.

"This happened last year," Nathan said. "Same time last October. I don't remember this."

"Yeah," snarked Evi, "but I've learned that memory in Haven is a funny thing."

"Hey, I know about the Troubles, okay?" Nathan retorted. "I know now and I knew back then. I maybe didn't want to know, or to accept that I had one - hell, it presented like a goddamn medical condition, you can't blame me for going to the doctors first - but I knew about them. Are you suggesting I blocked this out, too?" He looked down, spreading his insubstantial arms, wafting them through the desk top.

Evi shrugged. "I guess dumbass denial can blank through a lot. Maybe you figured you dreamed it. Maybe it wasn't this widespread last time. Hell, I don't know. You're the one who knows about this. I'm just dead."

"The article." Nathan swung back to it, annoyed. "'Groups of attendees at a High School movie special and others became far too invested in their costumes. Suspicions are high that a batch of contaminated wine on special offer in a local store holds the blame...' Is that better or worse than 'gas leak'?"

Evi kept scouring the page. "Other news this edition included three suspicious deaths. Homeless man, knife attack, and one who... 'may have been trampled by speeding cattle'? This is normal in Haven?"

"That's not normal even in Haven," Nathan growled. He clicked on the related articles. With the possible exception of the homeless man, they were obvious cover-ups, but he was willing to bet on the cause of all three. "Three in one day... People died from this, last time. And last time was smaller." He watched her roll her eyes at him, but ignored her and thought fast. "But last time, we didn't have Audrey. She's immune. This Trouble would have run its course unchecked. Maybe there's still a chance this ends without a body count." Except going by what he'd seen of this Trouble's choices here, that homeless man had probably been made a ghost, like all of them. Had he... not found his way back to his body, afterward?

If that was a danger, then it was important, he decided, to keep people's spirits up... no pun intended, but on the other hand: "If lots of people became... insubstantial like this, before, then they got back at the end of it." He looked around his little flock. "A few people died, but there's no mention of mass mysterious deaths. You're all going to be all right. Even if we can't find a way to fix this, if Audrey doesn't fix this, last year it seems like everything went back to normal without her anyway, eventually, and most everyone involved came through it unscathed."

"Whoo! Bravo pep talk!" Evi said. "Okay, we know this. We have the high school movie night. Put the ad side-by-side with this year's..." She held up the current Haven Herald. "It seems a pretty sure thing. But what the hell do you hope to do about it, Mr Intangible?"

"I-" Nathan looked at her. He still had not managed to assert his presence on the world in any meaningful way. He had a sinking feeling, but he tried: "You're the one who can touch things. Make yourself felt. Heard, too, I'll bet-" He didn't know the rules, but that expression looked like confirmation. "Duke is in danger from this, too."

"Play the cheap card," she sneered. "Hey! I am not some Troubles-fixing Scoobie-Doo Mystery Machine happy camper, and this shit killed me already. I don't help, except... oh wait, yeah, that's it - myself. Me, and mine. And guess what? Since I'm dead and he's sleeping with two other people, I'm not too sure that includes Duke."

"If you thought that, then why involve yourself in any of this?" Nathan asked impatiently. He would've carried on, but Max Hansen chose that moment to reassert himself upon the scene and then some.

He'd been, if Nathan thought about it, more solid and real than any of the rest of them before, even including Evi. It maybe contributed to the daunting impression of him, but then again, maybe that was his bearing and the sense of threat he seemed to emit... or maybe that was just Nathan.

He saw how the whole room's faces had frozen in shock as Max reappeared, marching through the wall straight into the midst of them. It wasn't just Nathan. But Max... something had happened to him. Max now was exuding energy like a light bulb; brighter, more solid, more real than ever. Vince Teagues gave a growl and lunged toward Max, intercepting - or for a moment at least seeming to intercept his ghostly charge. Max laughed as he strode through Vince. He whipped a hand through the air, causing a newspaper from the table to fly up and wrap itself around Vince's cross ogre face.

"Come back for mine," Max said, grinning like a cheerful skull: still terrifying, for all that the grin was genuine.

"No," said Nathan, drawing his gun. He fumbled it as the kaleidoscope of memory was dredged up, as before, at the sight of Max approaching fast and angry. Like some internal switch had been struck, Nathan's thoughts scattered. His hand shook even though he'd kept hold of the gun. Evi hurled herself at Max, hands pushing forward into his chest to shove and block, trying to give Nathan time to steady and aim, but Max just slammed her aside. She fell through a wall, disappearing from sight. Nathan mustered words- "Don't you want to be better than this?" They shivered on his tongue as though his tongue was still flesh.

They weren't bad words, in the circumstances. Maybe they'd have worked on someone. But not on Max. He slapped the gun out of Nathan's hand.

Nathan backed off, through a table, through Dave. "Nathan! What do we do?" Annalise cried out.

"He must have leeched from a whole lot of the new spooks for this much juice!" Evi was back, but keeping her distance.

"I thought he could only do it to family?" Nathan said.

"It takes a deep connection to some emotion for that sort of deep hold. He can still steal a little from a lot!"

"Tell us how to help, Wuornos!" Baylen called.

"Stay away from him," Evi responded. "You'll make him stronger."

Running away, it was occurring to Nathan, might be the best thing he could do to protect the rest of them. He backed off again, preparing to turn and run, reminding himself that the wall wasn't a barrier. But Max was faster than he was ready to counter. Max caught him and dragged him around. He thrust his hand into Nathan's chest.

Nathan froze, arms caught in the motion of flying out to defend himself. He looked down. It wasn't deep, but Max's palm and fingers definitely blurred and crossed the boundaries of his own substance, settled inside his chest. It didn't hurt, but it didn't exactly not-feel, the way that Nathan was accustomed to not-feeling, either.

This could not be good. Nathan tried to make himself move, to shove Max away.

"Block him!" yelled Evi. "Think of something he can't get past, that he has no hooks into! You've a whole damn life that had nothing to do with him! Think of Duke! He's strong enough to reduce you to threads, you have to block him now!"

Her words didn't exactly take the pressure off. Nathan had already known he needed to stop this, after all. He clutched for Max's arm, trying to drag it from him. Instead, his hands sank in, becoming absorbed, picking up the same strange glow that had started at the contact between Max's hand and his chest. All he'd done was further extend the link between them that was feeding Max.

In the absence of any other move, he frantically re-evaluated Evi's words. He thought of Duke, and Audrey, and his life now, which was full of Troubles... his own and everyone else's... but was still happier for the most part than he'd dreamed he could be while his own Trouble was still in force. Any connection Max had to his life was buried far in the past. Why should Max have any hold over him now?

The flare of light slowly dimmed in the contact between them as the seepage of his energy slowed and stopped. Max snarled, increasing his efforts and agitation, but whatever he was trying didn't achieve the effect he wanted, and the more he failed, the more hope Nathan stole back.

"Duke," he hissed, growing bolder, leaning forward. He remembered Max's reaction of revulsion, earlier. "Practically live together, these days. How do you feel about having that in your genes? Just think, on a regular basis, Duke Crocker fucks your flesh and blood." His teeth grit, he drew the poison out. Max had been in prison twenty-five years, and Nathan knew what such a thing meant there. Duke, much more a New Man, a man of the world, or whatever else he chose to glibly call himself, had laughed at Nathan's struggle to accept and adapt to being involved with someone of his own sex, even if that relationship also included a woman. It had been a learning curve for Nathan. But he'd learned it, and he'd take it, now, as a weapon against Max.

He didn't know what he was doing... He didn't expect to be doing it... but suddenly those points of connection between them flared bright again and the energy started to draw the other way. He could feel his own power returning to him, burgeoning and bolstering. Then, he felt the rest of what Max had stolen start to flow into him.

"You go, kid!" Evi yelled, her voice croaking, and edged with a hint of disbelief. "Drain him dry!"

But Nathan didn't want that.

Max's own individual energy had a distinct flavour. Somehow, Nathan could tell when they were down to that and it was no longer the stolen power he was taking back. He broke desperately free of the contact, gasping. The world looked... different, coming out the other side.

He couldn't really have reconciled himself to the thought of having seriously damaged Max, who was still his own kin - of doing it that way, so intimate and despicable, even if no such concern seemed to be carried by Max himself.

Besides, he didn't want anything that came from Max. Even his raw energy seemed to feel wrong.

"You goddamn-" Max was staggering too, reeling, far more transparent than he'd been when Nathan first encountered him, less real, now, than the other temporary ghosts. "You perverted pipsqueak of a-"

"Go away," Nathan rasped. "I left you enough. But I don't know what the hell I'm doing, and if you don't go away now, I will take more."

The moment held, face to face, glaring, their roles reversed. Then Max swung his arm hard through a chair - failing to connect with it - and blind fury crossed his face, twisting it into an ugly expression, before he turned his back and stalked away.

"You ain't got me beat!" Nathan heard his parting yell. "You solve this, go ahead, boy. Put your ass back at that Police Chief's desk! I'll still be there, lurking in the shadows. And you'll still be weak!"

Nathan took what seemed a hell of a lot like a shuddering breath and gathered himself up, trying to regain composure.

"I knew you could do it, Chief," Annalise said.

If she had, she'd been on her own. Evi's gaze held surprise and acrobatic eyebrows. Nathan looked around the rest of them.

"The kid-" They stared blankly. "The High School kid. The one that organises the movies. His details weren't in the papers, but the Teagues must have spoken to him recently, for the poster to be there on the back page. We need to search their desks, their diaries-"

The way they stared at him now was weird. Nathan knew he was, well, exuding. Overflowing. Far too much energy packed inside him, and unlike Max, he didn't know how to keep a tight hold on it. He could feel it leaking away by the second. Max had been scary with it. He didn't want to know what he was like with it. But he hoped the energies that peeled away went back to those Max had stolen them from, somehow. He couldn't hope to control and direct them. He turned around and made for the nearest desk - Dave's.

Dave was behind him. His little goblin form stared and skittered back as Nathan rounded on him. "I-is that you, Nathan? What the hell you doing dead? Garland would have our heads!"

Vince had removed the newspaper from his face and was staring too.

Nathan was visible? He leaned in to Dave, not really able to resist, and intoned a deadpan, "Boo."

Dave shook his head and blinked rapidly, but maybe because he was a monster, didn't really react in a truly spectacular fashion.

Nathan had to get Duke before he was back to normal.

Right now... He walked around Dave and, focusing on his fingers as Evi had told him, shoved the back of the chair at Dave's desk away to clear his path.

It screeched on its castors right the way across the room and slammed into the wall with an almighty bang.

Everyone jumped. "Careful, Hero Type," Evi said. "I hear office furniture can be dangerous when riled."

After that, post-it notes, diaries, scrap paper and the backs of flyer leaflets were easy. Nathan found what he needed on a post-it - "'Marcus Johnson. High school movies. Lousy selection, but topical. 5 The Av. Pick up posters. ?Interview ?feel-good piece.'"

Nathan straightened. he had what he needed. Now, he could go act upon it while he still had the extra power to spare. The longer this Trouble was active, the more very real danger there was of people being hurt by it. He looked back at Evi, and over the group of ghosts behind her. "Keep them safe for me just a while longer."

She opened her mouth, eyes flashing, sarcastic tongue ready... and at the last, for whatever reason, decided against it. "Well, fine. You owe me, Wuornos."

Which raised an unfortunate question, for she had helped him, even putting herself between him and Max, and how could he ever pay her back for that? He realised, abruptly, that when this Trouble was over, unlike the rest of them, Evi would not be returning miraculously to life.

She seemed to pick up his thoughts as he hesitated. Her eyebrows sketched out shapes of irony. "There's a hollow under the tree out on Main Street... Quality rum works best, to appease the Ghost of Evi Crocker. And... you don't tell Duke about this. Ever."

"Why...?" Nathan started to blurt the question before he realised how much, of course, it would wound Duke to discover Evi hadn't moved on. "Still looking after that guy?" he asked, instead.

"Just go," she said, and turned aside. "Save the day."

"Thank you," said Nathan, with as much emphasis as he could, unable to think of anything more profound. He cast his eyes over the rest of them. "You'll be back in your bodies soon."

He stepped out through the wall. The Avenue wasn't close. He started to run.

Horror wasn't something Audrey entirely felt she grasped, though you'd think she was an aficionado going by Nathan's bitching on the subject. Oh, you could give her some teenage vampire angst, a few homoerotic werewolves, some hot guys fighting monsters, some spooky chills and thrills. But zombies were kind of depressing, the appeal of slasher movies eluded her (inevitably the psychology of it all failed to add up, and the whole thing fell down under a general unscary feeling of fakeness) and she wasn't afraid of ghosts. Really, she had never understood the impulse that compelled kids in particular to watch horror movies so avidly. To fixate on a genre that was about disturbing the hell out of the viewer. She bantered with Duke about it on the way to the kid's address, hoping to distract him from the increasing twitchiness she was reading as hunger.

"It's the dare element," Duke said, "and teenagers are assholes. But I still dig Romero. Did you really read all of Anne Rice?"

They crept inside the home, armed with tasers, and the conversation silenced. The bite wounds in Audrey's wrist ached dully. She had begun to watch behind her for Duke again, not quite able to trust where he was or what he'd do next, however much she wanted to.

Duke at her back was usually a welcome presence, never a cause for concern. But aside from the vampire issue, he did tend to reveal how much he wasn't a cop. After a minute, he carried on the conversation, hissing under his breath, "Some teenagers think the most dumb-assed, creepy shit is cool. No sense of reality. I swear there's an age somewhere between 13 and 17 where everyone's a psycho."

Audrey, who was pretty sure she'd heard profilers offer the same argument, hand signalled to shush him. She watched him start to open his mouth again, and then swallow his disappointment. How much was this need to talk an indicator of the struggle against his need for her blood becoming critical?

The house they were in was very ordinary, although Duke's mimes about the tidy doilies tucked under most of the ornaments in the downstairs rooms seemed to indicate that he considered them as much objects of terror as all the monsters.

A male zombie was moving slowly about the living room, no longer watching a TV left on in one corner, and a female one was in the kitchen. The zombies were relatively easy to dodge and then contain, shutting and wedging the doors of those rooms to keep them in.

"Must be the kid's parents," Duke said, hushed. "I guess we know what he thinks of them." He cleared his throat and said, with a careful amount of neutrality, "If this kid is still human, can I bite him? I figure that would, you know, give him a pretty good incentive to want to turn everyone back."

"You just keep a hold on things, Duke," Audrey said. "I know you can." She cast her eye at the stairs. There was music pounding faintly now from one of the upper rooms. She did not think it had been there when they entered the house. With a little luck, their Troubled person was the source of the noise, and they would resolve this quickly. She stopped and frowned at Duke, though. There was something important to do first. "Let me see what that wound looks like now."

He lifted his shirt. The star shape on his abdomen was pink and less angry than earlier, but the thought of him returning to human with it like that still made her uneasy. The memory of the gaping hole it had been before she'd given him her blood kept returning to her.

"Wait here," she said, and nipped back into the small kitchen. She evaded the mom-zombie in there - maybe Duke had a point: the apron was almost as terrifying as the doilies - and grabbed a knife from a rack and a clean cup from the drainer, and also another pack of candy bars that she spied on the counter top. She supposed it was too much to hope that the blood loss would counter the extra intake of calories. "Excuse me, Mrs. Johnson." She ducked under the zombie's arms and made it out of the door, then wedged the chair back to seal it in.

"...Audrey?" Duke checked her, concern straining his voice, as she held up the knife. She rested the cup on the top of a bookcase, hovering her wrist over it. "What are you doing? Audrey, no. You're pale as hell. You can't do this again, right when we have to face this Troubled kid and things could get dangerous. You need that!"

He moved to stop her, but she'd already drawn another nick with the tip of the knife. The one from earlier was clotted and unwilling to be reopened - the healing powers of vampire-spit. Some of the literature she'd read had made a point of mentioning that. The ones whose authors had bothered to think about the consequences of teeth-sized punctures in major arteries.

"Keep back," she warned Duke. She didn't fill the cup - he was right, she needed it as well. But it had a good few inches in the bottom before she stopped. "Um... lick?" She offered out the palm of her other hand awkwardly. "No biting and you get the cup after."

Duke was visibly salivating and had drool to spare. She clapped her wet hand over the new cut, holding it down hard, and stood back so that Duke could take the cup.

The slurping was pretty gross, but maybe that was an unavoidable consequence of the protruding fangs. It was kind of disturbing that when he finished the cup, he wiped his fingers around the inside of it where his tongue couldn't reach and licked those off, too. But the more the better, she reminded herself, in terms of healing that injury, and clearly he was desperate - and what kind of resistance had he been putting in all this time to leave her alone, if she was witnessing the want he'd been fighting down, exposed and naked, now?

It was a cruel Trouble that transformed someone you loved into a tasty meal.

Audrey grimaced, watched him clack the cup back down on the bookcase and avert his face from her, shoulders slumping, ashamed of his need. "How is it?" she asked, pointing at the loose ends of his shirt. Her head was spinning slowly and she knew she couldn't do this again.

"Better," Duke said, indistinct. his face was still lowered as he turned enough to pull up his shirt again.

Maybe the pink was a little bit paler, but honestly it didn't look much different to Audrey. Maybe that hadn't been enough for any real effect. At least it seemed to have abated Duke's hunger.

"If this guy is human," Audrey said, deciding, picking up the knife and cup again, sliding the knife into her pocket and hooking the cup handle around a zip tie on her jacket, "then he's donating. I am not solving this Trouble just to see you collapse dead."

Duke stared at her for a long moment, then down at the wound, fingers brushing over the pink edges of it. "Okay," he said slowly. "I am not going to argue with that."

Duke was still a pragmatist at heart.

"Okay," Audrey echoed back. At this point, she was hoping the kid was human. She did not want to take the chance. Although she winced at the thought of what Duke might think about drinking blood once he was... no longer under the influence. "Let's do this."

She found her hand wanting to reach for her gun as they crept up the stairs, so she gave in to the temptation. She had been trying not to shoot the creatures, but they didn't know what they were up against with the kid.

Along the staircase past two clashing types of horrible wallpaper was a darkened, windowless upstairs corridor at the centre of the house. The music emerged, louder now, from an ajar door along the hallway. It had been coming in stops and starts, and as they drew within a few feet of the door, it abruptly stopped again.

Audrey internally cursed, but there was no point in hiding. Her footfall had landed audibly just outside the music's cut, made louder by the shock of the silence. She kept going and pushed open the door.

A kid waiting in a computer chair on castors swivelled around to face her - and it was a kid, about three layers of teenage acne fighting for dominance over the lower half of his face. He looked human. It was very disconcerting. Audrey remembered, nastily, the last time she had taunted a high school student into blowing himself up.

"Whoa!" the kid said, "Even down to the plucky girl hero, this time. It's even better than I thought." And he picked up a video camera and pointed it at her, then at Duke, who was entering the room behind her, looking nonplussed.

The kid also reached behind himself and slapped his finger on a key to start the music blaring out again.

"I hate the ones who do it on purpose," Duke said loudly. "Hate them, hate them. Point that camera away, unless the next thing you want to film is me killing you." Duke's eyes flickered down to the camera. "You want to tell me about the great reason you'd better have for doing this, kid?"

Because sitting playing with computer equipment and what looked like his own amateur damn studio while the world went to hell around him didn't seem like recalcitrant or sorry behaviour.

"Art, man! the kid retorted, flinging up his arms. "I've been out all day collecting footage. I had to come back to upload before I could get more. How else do you make a monster movie with no budget? Move to this freaky town, dude, and make your own monster!" As his movements grew animated and his eyes shone with fervour, Audrey became pretty sure no-one had had to 'make' this kid into a monster.

On his multiple monitor screens buried in the set up of computer, DVD and camera equipment, Audrey could see flickering images play out. A group of one type of vampires fought another: the traditional type were trouncing the Twilight clones. She watched, in the footage, as one woman ripped half a man's throat out, and Audrey's heart sank as she let go of the idea that this could be resolved before anyone died for real.

The kid crowed at the image.

Elsewhere, a man transformed into a wolf and pounded away up the street, howling at the fakey, overlarge full moon in the Troubled sky. A witch stripped nude in the moonlight, giving the camera a lengthy pause. The monitor where the vampires fought flickered with static. Sounds on the recording made it through the music: cursing and a quick retreat.

In the new image that replaced it, Max Hansen strode down the centre of the street with both fists clenched at the end of his swinging arms. Audrey recognised him even with his form colourless and bathed oddly in light, and gasped.

"There are ghosts from this Trouble?" Duke asked, an edge to his voice. It was a particularly odd note, even though he didn't seem to have any recognition in his face for Max.

Johnson gave a derisive snort. "Oh, sure, but most of them are a complete waste of time. You can't even see them, or if you can they're like wisps. They barely show up on camera. Useless! I can't film that. But this guy, this guy is great... He walked through a few walls and I lost him, though." Mawkish teenage disappointment filled his voice. "After my memory's clear I'll go out and try to find him again."

"That's Max Hansen," Audrey said flatly, and watched recognition flare in Duke. "Marcus, that man's already dead. I was at his autopsy. He's not someone from the town transformed by your Trouble."

"That's a real ghost?!" the kid whooped. "Provable? On camera? Score!"

"Max Hansen..." Duke spoke with a dull, apprehensive note. Audrey wasn't sure what connections he was making that she wasn't, but he clearly had something. "Audrey, that guy was supposed to be Nathan's father, and he's out there, and - well, it sure as hell looks like something about this Trouble has got him stirred up. Audrey, Nathan died."

It took her a moment to put it together, her thoughts full of Marcus Johnson and his screens. To an extent there was no sense speculating about Nathan out there, potentially at the mercy of Max - who'd disappeared off the screen and been replaced by more werewolf antics - should the two of them cross paths. Max wouldn't want to hurt Nathan, would he? They were family, after all. Max had been looking for him out of some kind of sense of connection. Still, that was a meeting that would surely screw with Nathan's head.

The rest worried her more. She turned on Johnson. "Tell me that the ghosts turn back."

The kid shrugged, too wrapped in his ego to notice her urgency or gathering ire. "Most of 'em, but what's the point? They're all useless people anyway, might as well be dead already. That's the only reason they change that way." He was laughing as he said the last.

"Shut the fuck up," Duke snarled, taking a step forward. Audrey moved to hold him back, but noticed his eyes had turned red and stopped before she physically touched him, hissing warningly instead. "You don't know anything."

"The losers and the lifeless," Johnson sneered. "Even worse that the parasitic users, leeches and junkies that get to be vampires, but at least I can film those."

A tremble ran through Duke's form. Audrey remembered that was an old wound, one that Nathan saved up and only used when he was really mad.

"It's not you," she said quickly. "It latched onto your Trouble. We figured that out." To Johnson she asked sharply, "And what about your parents? Did you film them, too? Anything to say about what they turned into? Or does what they turned into say more about you?"

For the first time, the kid's face looked conflicted. Then he shook himself out of it. "They'll be just fine when it wears off. I locked the doors."

Audrey had picked the lock on the front door to let herself in, but since they'd sealed the parent-zombies in separate rooms, she supposed that still stood. "Considerate of you," she sneered, pushing for an emotional reaction out of the kid. Anger, defensiveness, preferably regret. If this Trouble was fuelled by his passion to make his monster movies, maybe he was more blinkered than truly evil.

"Well, yeah," the kid retorted, though. "It's dangerous out there. I can see how even your tame vampire considers you a tasty snack." He nodded at the crusted wounds on Audrey's wrist and snickered.

"He-" Duke's hands were twitching.

"Not you," Audrey assured him, and turned back to Johnson, trying to quash her anger. "He was hurt. I gave him this myself, freely. Look at your footage, Marcus. Really look at it. Your Trouble is killing people. Some of them aren't going to be able to get up again after this, with just a few confused, nightmarish memories to take away."

Johnson shrugged. "They say stuff about art and suffering."

"That's supposed to be the artist's suffering, you little shit," Duke said. "Not everyone around him."

Audrey was about at the end of her tether. The kid could have killed Nathan. Might have killed Duke. He could have killed an untold number of others; one for certain. He didn't care. He only turned back to click a button on his computers, switching between footage that had gone fuzzy and grey on one monitor, rearranging wires and starting up another stream of images. "We need you to stop this," Audrey said, hardening her voice. "Marcus, you need to stop this now."

"No!" He flung his hands up, swinging around on his chair. "Are you crazy? I only get one chance each year! Last year I didn't get enough to work with. I need to go out and get more film!"

"You-" Duke was incredulous. "This is not okay, kid!"

Audrey said, "This isn't detention from your teacher, or a slap on the wrist from your parents. This is murder, Marcus, if you know people are dying and allow it to continue. This is jail. And I will make sure that jail happens."

"Bitch, how?" the kid returned hotly. "You're gonna come out and say, 'You changed the whole town into monsters' and use that to prosecute a sixteen year old, lock him up and throw away the key? I don't think so! I'll just finish making my movie, and everything will be just fine. Hardly anyone died last time, and I did check after - those people were a waste of space anyway."

"Marcus!" Audrey snapped. He was turning away from her, absorbed in screens and moving pictures, no attention for anything else. Her patience expired. She drew her gun again and put four bullets into his recording equipment without a pause. The kid gave a great wailing cry of rage and loss. "People's lives are at stake! This is important!" But breaking his focus on the gear and rendering his movies impossible didn't snap Marcus Johnson out of his obsession.

It just made him incoherent with rage.

His face was red with anger and eyes tear-splotched as he turned around. He rose from his chair... but kept rising, impossibly, until his head pressed the ceiling, and the colour of his face had distorted to an unreal shade of dark red. His clothes burst and muscles and body rippled. His hands grew claws. Horns pierced the ceiling, scattering plaster down as he shook his head.

Of course he wasn't human. Of course. Duke would have been all over him since the moment they'd walked in if he hadn't subconsciously smelled of something else.

Now, Duke looked alarmed and their Troubled person was some kind of... of movie demon or devil, and how were they supposed to fight that?

Audrey cursed herself for wasting so many bullets on his equipment - all in all, it really hadn't been the best of her ideas - as she raised the gun again and expended the rest of the clip. The demon reached for her. Bullets glanced off its hide. Equipment sparked again as a rebound struck electrics, and Audrey felt something sting her cheek. "Damn it! - Duke, no!"

He'd expended the ammo in his shotgun seconds after her, and as she frantically tried to reload, not letting her concerns affect the instinctual, trained-in motions, she watched with horror as he put himself between her and the demon. He got his hands up and managed to catch most of the oncoming hand without getting scored by its claws, though his feet scraped on the floor as its greater strength pushed him back.

Eyes, Audrey thought, desperately rethinking and setting her aim anew. If I can't shoot through the skin, then the eyes... It was a small target and she wished she'd reloaded Duke's abandoned shotgun, instead. It was easy to forget that this was a teenage boy she was firing on as she pulled the trigger again and again.

Duke grunted in pain as the claws moved, sinking into his defensively raised arms. The unexpected bonus of the demon transformation was that Johnson's form simply didn't have the space to manoeuvre, but it was still horrifying to witness how proportionally larger the demon figure was than Duke. It make Duke look tiny, poised and braced in her defence.

The demon raised its other hand to fend off her bullets, but she'd about given up any confidence of finding a soft target, between height and angle, constant movement and armour.

She had to do something. This was barely holding Johnson - the creature Johnson had become - and stalling wasn't enough, they had to stop him. What could she- electricity, she thought suddenly. The wreckage of the kid's equipment was still sparking, connected to the mains. But how to get it into the monster? Maybe Duke could be a conduit? His body was technically dead right now, his heart not beating anyway, but that wasn't to say the damage wouldn't return with him when he changed back to human. Audrey tried to remember what damage was done to the body by electric shock - by a lightning strike? - but couldn't. Could she lose Duke when she might have already lost Nathan? Could she ask it of him?

There were more lives at stake than theirs. Johnson would inflict worse and non-survivable damage on Duke, in any case, if he continued unchecked.

"Du-" She opened her mouth to gasp out his name, to outline the plan, and Nathan burst through the wall. "...Nathan?"

He skidded to a halt, apparently just as startled to see them - and extremely startled to find himself faced with a ten foot tall, four foot wide demon, squeezed into the small room. He'd emerged behind the demon's back, and was too close to stop himself before half his transparent body overlapped its hard, red, bullet-proof flesh. He gave a startled yelp and stumbled back. Audrey, just as startled by what she'd just witnessed, voiced a second, more incredulously questioning, "Nathan?!"

"Nate?" Duke echoed her, and gurgled as he struggled with the hand trying to crush him.

Nathan gaped at the monster, arms swinging helplessly by his sides. He looked like Max had in the recorded footage, bright energies alive in his form - a form he'd already demonstrated was clearly insubstantial. "I - I came looking for a kid," he stuttered, craning his head back, staring upwards as he took another step away from Marcus Johnson.

He'd diverted at least some of its attention from Duke already. The demon's head scraped around, stripping more plaster from the ceiling, and the kid's voice emitted from its lips, sullen and childish and deeply strange in its new context: "Aw, damn it! Another ghost, and you wrecked my camera!"

"It's the kid!" Duke yelled. "It's the kid, Nathan! Do something - ugh, I don't know, something ghosty!" He gave a strangled cry as Johnson finally realised he could just lift his arm and steal all of Duke's leverage in one fell swoop, leaving him dangling, both feet kicking frantically off the ground.

"I-" Nathan raised his hand, staring at it, then extended it toward the demon again, uncertainly. He pushed his fingers through the tough, red skin of the demon's back.

Johnson looked like he was about to rip Duke's head off. "Nathan, now!" Audrey yelled. It was possible he couldn't see all of Duke's predicament from where he was. She wasn't sure what he was thinking, and she certainly wasn't sure how his current state of being worked, but he could get beyond that armoured hide, and there was no time for hesitation.

Determination took over Nathan's face and he stepped closer, reaching up to the limit of his height, pushing his hand deep inside the monster's chest cavity. Audrey saw the muscles in his arm tense up as he squeezed his hand closed.

"Ungh." Johnson made a weird, discomforted noise. "Urk."

Duke dropped from the demon's grasp and landed on his knees, gasping and bloody. He made a gurgling shout of alarm as he realised what was about to happen, and Audrey saw it too, diving in to grasp the back of his jacket and try to haul him out of the way before the giant demon collapsed on top of him. Audrey had the horrible feeling that they weren't going to get clear in time and she yelled in advance, bracing herself... But it was a much smaller impact that she heard behind her, and she turned to see it was the teenage body of Marcus Johnson that had face-planted the floor.

Nathan was standing behind Johnson, hand still outstretched. He lifted his eyes from the kid's unmoving body. They fixed on Duke, staring. His eyes narrowed in a perplexed squint. He opened his mouth-

And vanished.

"Nathan! No!" Audrey yelled, struggling to her feet, lunging uselessly into the space that he'd occupied. Off balance, she stumbled into the wall.

"It's okay!" Duke said, spitting and sounding grossed out, his voice constricted. "He's gone back... his body's in the car, Audrey. Bleeergh. Oh, damn. Damn, that tastes foul... Sorry, no offence. And this..." He held his bleeding arms out. "This hurts... so much more... when I'm not a freakin' vampire." He scrabbled at the front of his shirt. Pulled it up to reveal a faded pink star shaped scar in his flesh. "Oh, thank God."

Audrey closed her eyes a moment and breathed a long sigh. Then she blinked them back open. "Nathan," she said. She took a step for the door and tripped over Johnson's body.

It took a moment to get past the haze of urgency chanting Nathan's name inside her head, standing there wondering why she'd suddenly hesitated... until she realised anew that they had just killed a teenage boy to stop this Trouble. A kid, whose parents were only downstairs and probably waking up from their altered states, now. "Oh my God. Duke, phone 911!" She fell down to Johnson's side and rolled him over onto his back.

"They're gonna be busy," Duke said, but was getting up, taking his phone out anyway. Audrey checked the kid's pulse, his breathing... nothing.

Damn! What she didn't need from the end of this day was another round of CPR. Especially not to save the same remorseless little shit who had caused all of this chaos in the first place.

But Duke was talking on the phone, and she dutifully started chest compressions, dully wishing she could just go home and not do this all over again.

Nathan opened his eyes and stared up at the roof of Duke's truck. His senses reeled as he tried to figure out the sequence of events that had got him there, but it seemed his body had, once again, been hauled around on adventures that he didn't remember. He hadn't been in it at the time.

He sat up, his head feeling slow even if he couldn't feel the exact status of his body right now, which as he turned his hands over and pulled at his clothes in the usual checks, at least looked fine. Temporary death had made him sluggish last time, too.

He was clumsily getting out of the car when a blur flickered across his vision. He squinted and shielded his eyes from the late afternoon sunlight, and focused on the spot where that slight blur seemed to be concentrated. It was faint enough to make him doubt for a second, almost like nothing was really there at all, like his vision was playing tricks.

"Evi?" he asked aloud, thinking resolutely that he could see something.

"So you made it back." Her voice reached his mind somehow, though he almost wasn't sure that it passed through his ears to get there. But still, he had the ghostly impression of her voice. Focusing hard, he could catch the bitterness that shaded it.

"The others?" Nathan asked groggily, concern flaring as more pieces of what he had been doing, and all the uncertainties still left open, descended on him. "Are they-?"

Her faint form shrugged. As he focused upon her form and her voice, it seemed both were becoming clearer, and it was possible to make out movements and even facial expression if he squinted. "They disappeared. I'm guessing they're back - at least, no-one stuck around to keep me company, except for Vince and Dave. Who look normal, now, by the way - back to themselves, anyway. When I left, they were working up to a fight about the state of their office, each claiming the other must have done it."

Nathan grunted, not surprised.

"So here we are." Evi spread her hands "And you know, and I know, and - Max is still around, somewhere, and he's going to be more pissed off now than ever. Good thing you seem to have acquired an eye for spotting ghosts. You'll have to keep a lookout for-" The end of that got lost in the din of emergency service vehicles pulling up, but Nathan got the gist.

He nodded. "You be careful, too." Something inside him seemed to become lighter as he looked beyond Evi and saw Duke emerge from the house. He was coming out to meet the EMTs, and Nathan watched him point them where to go, noting that he'd lost the pallor and that little pair of what-the-hell?-FANGS that Nathan had seen on him when he was in the house. Mysteriously, his shirt and pants were beige and blue again, no longer black, but that made the bloodstain in the centre of his shirt stand out starkly, where Nathan had failed to notice it before. Still, Duke wasn't moving like he was badly wounded. An older woman clung to his arm, but one of the EMTs took her from him and the other went into the house.

Duke paused outside the doorway and a weary but incandescent grin spread across his face as he laid eyes on Nathan, sitting on the edge of the back seat with the car door open wide.

Nathan raised a hand in a rather static wave.

Evi's ghost, he saw, was staring at Duke with all the things Nathan imagined having just been on his own face, plus naked longing and an awful sadness.

"Can you..." Nathan stopped and swallowed. He owed her. He'd have been in big Trouble if she hadn't been around to make sense of what was happening with Max. If she hadn't intervened. She hadn't had to. This might not be wise, but... "If I were to let you. Use my body. To talk to Duke again. Say goodbye. Do... Whatever you need. Could you do that? Would you want to do that?"

She looked at him speculatively, her mouth falling open a little way.

Nathan wondered if his face flushed as he added, "Of course, you wouldn't be able to feel anything." Maybe his offer wasn't worth much.

Her words refuted him. "That's some offer, if you're truly willing." There was mocking doubt in her voice, but still, along with it, so much need. "If you aren't willing, it won't work anyway."

Nathan stood up and put his arms down at his sides, spread slightly open, attempting to put his will behind the offer, bracing for... whatever. Duke was coming toward them. From the way he moved, he probably thought Nathan was opening his arms ready for an embrace. It was a bit public for them, and Duke should know better. Then again, it had been a long day.

"Well..." said Evi. "Here goes nothing." Her tone still had scepticism enough to tell him she did not expect it to work. That she didn't have energy enough, or Nathan wasn't willing enough... He probably shouldn't be. This was a bad idea. But after the day he'd had, after Max, after the way Evi had polarised herself against Max, the only thought that his sludge-for-brain could produce was why not? Max had taken who-knew how much from him unwillingly for who-knew how long. This, he could damn well choose to do.

It felt strange, as she moved to overlap him. No, he still hadn't miraculously regained the power to feel... this was more like the 'sensations' he'd experienced as a ghost. He felt her presence touch him, her 'weight' settling into him. He was intensely aware of her within him, brushing against parts of him that stirred with the excitation... there his anger, there his fears... his love for Audrey and Duke... A cascade of emotions with each flare. He sensed something of her in return, but it was faint like her transparent form: her reasons for hating Max so instinctually, making him flinch. Her opinion of him, while not wholly negative, was a fresh perspective he could have lived without.

"Oh," she said, as she settled deep enough in him to move his body, stepping forward slowly, awkwardly, and he could sense her getting to grips with his numbness. "I didn't realise it was like this."

Nathan was never quite sure what other people thought it was like. He couldn't respond, almost reduced to dozing in his own body, pushed down someplace hovering at the boundary of the conscious level. It was... a very peculiar feeling, to be taking a back seat in his own brain.

"Okay," said Evi, and marched to Duke with determination. She fell into those open arms, carrying Nathan's body into the public embrace. She lifted her hand - his hand - to stroke Duke's face, and said, "Hey, babe," in his voice, in a fashion that managed to make Nathan wince even in his buried state. Then she said, "Duke," putting so much emotion into his voice that Nathan didn't think it sounded like his voice any more at all. Then she kissed Duke, thoroughly, not letting numbness get in her way.

Nathan felt the moment Evi dispersed from within him. Somehow, he knew she didn't just leave... didn't vanish or run out of energy. Something told him for certain that it was final: she was gone.

He stumbled as she left him, as there was a moment when neither of them were fully in control of his body. Duke caught him around the waist. "Hey, now. Watch it, 'Babe'," Duke said, worried behind the jibe. "Don't knock yourself out with the force of your passion. Are... you all right, Nate?" Incredulity coated the question.

A wave of sadness struck Nathan. Evi was gone, and it... maybe it was his fault. He'd offered... but then, surely, as he thought about it, surely moving on was a positive thing? Certainly there had been nothing positive in hanging around Haven for eternity, insubstantial and incomplete, the way Max was.

He caught a hiss of pain from Duke as he shifted to better catch his balance. "What?" Nathan asked with instant suspicion. He transferred his hands to Duke's hips, where at least his clothes were undamaged. "What did you do to yourself?"

Silly question. He had seen that demon creature's claws digging into Duke's arms. There were cuts beneath his shredded jacket. The only reason there was so little blood visible was because he was wearing so many layers.

"The EMTs-" Nathan began.

"They've enough on their minds. Besides, I don't think there's anything here that needs a hospital," Duke said. The statement held the sort of tension Nathan knew well, of not wanting to go wait around endlessly in that environment when all he really wanted in the world was to go home and crash. Besides, right now the hospital was about to get very busy. So unless Duke's injuries were serious, he probably was much better off having them dealt with at home.

Nathan grunted affirmation. He was no-one to take a stand, and he wasn't going to make Duke go. Audrey still might.

"Are you okay?" Duke asked him, again.

"I've had a strange day," Nathan said.

And there was Audrey, walking out of the front door of the Johnson house, behind a stretcher carried between two EMTs, looking exhausted with her hair bedraggled. Nathan's breath caught as the meaning of the stretcher struck him - that the Johnson kid had a breathing mask on and was being carried out as a living patient. He had not killed him. Another tension inside him relaxed, and he looked back to Audrey, where his gaze would much rather go.

Audrey's face was animated by new energy as she laid eyes on Nathan. She actually ran from the steps to them both and hurled herself at him. Nathan felt her arms wrap around him, curling up under his shirt and sliding into his waistband to touch skin to skin, felt her soft hair under his chin... Warmth seeped into him. It made him feel alive again.

No secret why this Trouble had chosen to strike him in the way it had. But that was its opinion, and Nathan didn't rate it. He reached out and caught Duke's hand, drawing him closer, feeling nothing... at least with the skin of his numb fingers.

"Nathan, goddamn it," Audrey gasped, and pulled back enough to glare at him in mock severity and real anguish. "I saw you die. Again. You are both making this far too much a habit." She stepped back and reached an arm out to pull Duke in, as well, then squashed them together in her embrace.

Nathan could have said something about the need for discretion and avoiding three-way public embraces, but... opted not to. Just this once.

Finally, Audrey pulled back from them both. Duke scuffed a hand fondly through her hair. Nathan realised there was also blood on Audrey's shoulder, as well as her wrist, when he found smears on the palm of his hand and looked for the source. "We need to get you both back home and see to this," he said. He sighed and looked down. "Or... you need to go home and see to each other." He would have to go to the police station and organise arrangements to deal with the aftermath. He didn't know when he was going to get away from it all to join them. But he was uninjured, and there was no excuse for crying off the role he'd accepted, for all that he inwardly cursed it again. "I'll join you when I can."

"Nathan," Audrey said, rubbing her hand up into the gap at the collar of his shirt. He breathed in and closed his eyes, luxuriating in the feel of his skin, his heartbeat, stirring to life beneath her hand. "We'll be all right. What... back there, what did you do? How did you do it?" Her eyes searched his. "What the hell happened to you today?"

"I- spent a lot of time running around town gathering up other ghosts," Nathan said, truthfully. "We searched the Herald, and found out about the monster movie night. Vince had Marcus Johnson's address." He frowned, embarrassed about what had happened once he'd got on the scene, here. "I - I thought I could draw out Johnson's energy, the way I did, um, Max's. But it wasn't working. Then I realised I could just... make that hand a little more solid and squeeze my fingers to stop his heart. The kid, he's going to live?"

"He's breathing and they got his heartbeat back," Audrey said. "But I'm honestly hoping for future health complications. He's killed at least one person and didn't care. Probably a lot more than that."

"Three last time, too," Nathan added soberly.

"Little shit," Duke offered, wrapping his arms, carefully, once more around the two of them. He reluctantly untangled from Nathan, as Nathan gave him a grim little nod behind Audrey's back. She was fading, her face starting to take on the sleepy slackness of adrenaline crash. "Come on..." Duke's arms wrapped her shoulders, and the sensation lighting Nathan's skin disappeared as she let him go. "Nathan can handle it from here. Let's go home."

Duke had to resist the urge to keep feeling in his mouth for fangs. Couldn't get used to the thought of having had them, couldn't get used to the thought of being without them. He felt like he was going to be tasting Audrey's blood for weeks... and remembering, unwelcomely, how good it had tasted.

He'd returned Audrey and himself to Nathan's house. Their things were spread among all three of their abodes, by now, but at Nathan's the most sparsely. But it was for that reason Nathan's ordinary house felt a bit like a sanctuary, sometimes. It was a place they didn't go, that hadn't been marred by the strain of Troubles, only nosy neighbours. Even if it was very, very dull. Most of Nathan's personality was tidily tucked away rather than adorning the decor, but that was kind of Nathan all over.

Duke and Audrey showered and tiredly helped each other clean up. She was inhaling a coffee even while she was under the hot spray of the water, and started to brighten up at least enough for coherent conversation. She'd been subdued and quiet in the car.

Blood loss, Duke thought. I took too much. He couldn't help but conclude that most of her lassitude was down to him.

She turned her damp head to look up at him, and she must have caught the guilt on his face, because she said fiercely, "I wanted you to do it. Hell, the second time I did it myself and shoved the cup into your hand. I couldn't have lived with the idea that I could have saved you, and didn't. Besides, half of this isn't the blood, it's two lousy stints of CPR in one day." She rubbed her hands down his naked chest, cleaning off a last blood smear, ending with both palms spread over the mark where the metal pole had gone in, her fingers copying the upper points of the star. "Besides, you almost got killed defending me."

It still ached dully there, deep inside Duke's abdomen. He wondered if he was going to have to get some scans done.

He didn't say that.

"It looks like an old scar, now," Audrey said, with palpable relief.

Duke said, "You seem to have spent the day keeping everyone else alive. Let's get dried and get you patched up."

"I haven't washed my hair yet," she complained, "and your arms are worse than my shoulder."

"Have you seen your shoulder?" Duke asked. "Presumably you're immune to anything else Troubled werewolves might carry as well as their wolfy curse, or I'd be pushing you to the Emergency Department with all the rest. The hair will wait for the morning."

"All right," she groaned.

They just about managed to patch each other up without falling asleep on each other. Duke made use of Nathan's kitchen while Audrey flicked through the news channels and sipped at a series of heavily sugared caffeine based offerings. Maybe he couldn't make up for feeding on Audrey by feeding Audrey, but he was going to give it his best try. Nathan was going to go insane when he found out, though. Duke's stomach twitched uneasily, nothing to do with the tight feeling there from the healed wound.

He left Nathan's share of the food in the pan, and Audrey scrambled around on the sofa as he brought out the plates. They sprawled out to eat with their backs rested at opposite end, legs mingled. A vampire show came on after the news and Audrey chewed slowly, watching it, but neither of them cared much. They were practically asleep by the time it was over and they finally heard the sound of the front door as Nathan arrived home.

Duke stood to plate some food for him, and consequently ended up caught in the crossfire of Nathan's entry and wearily enveloping embrace at the door, which he figured would almost certainly have landed on Audrey first had he not been right there, because it virtually always did. Nathan kissed him almost as thoroughly as he had outside the Johnsons' house. It was getting harder to tell he couldn't feel at all. Practice made perfect, Duke supposed, dazedly, as Nathan finally let go.

"Haven's infrastructure's not exactly falling apart at the seams, but it's a close thing," he said, disgruntlement dripping from his voice. "Four dead, so far. Two of them are Max's work, indirectly, I think..." He rubbed his forehead, fingers digging in hard enough to distort the skin and turn it white, anguish setting deep lines in his face.

"I noticed you come in and go straight to sweep Duke off his feet," Audrey commented. Good girl, Duke thought, way to distract him from the guilt track.

Nathan blinked, off-guard. "Well. I guess Duke kind of saved my ass today, in absentia."

"I saw you die," Audrey said, with a certain hint that the mock petulance was not entirely in jest. "Three times is inconsiderate, Nathan."

Nathan went to her and made up for the omission. Duke raised a hand to hide his smile under cover of a soft cough. He waited until Nathan had made amends with Audrey before asking, "Do we get to hear that story?"

Nathan's face twitched and he shook his head. "Doesn't matter now. Let's just forget about today." The way he looked at them both spoke volumes about his preferred method of forgetting. Duke went and got the plate to put in his hand before Nathan could start urging them to get frisky and miss out on dinner again.

"But you saw Max," Audrey said, sitting up and leaning forward as she watched Nathan eat, a few minutes later. "You mentioned as much earlier. That's... not nothing, Nathan."

Max's name did something to Duke's insides quite apart from his metal-signpost-stirred gut. He had the feeling, sometimes, that he remembered more about Max than Nathan did, and more about Nathan at the time when Max had been his only father. But he wiped it carefully from his expression. There was nothing from that time he wanted to bring back up, if Nathan had forgotten it.

"What did he do?" Audrey persisted. "How did he turn into that... that superghost? How did you?"

Nathan sighed. "He was siphoning energy somehow off all the new ghosts. I... stopped him." He looked at their expressions and his forehead crinkled in irritation. Duke got enough of a look at the pity and understanding on Audrey's face to hope he hadn't been wearing anything similar. "He's not my father." He scowled and checked himself, looking reluctant. "In a way, he helped me help both of you, today, but he'd sure as hell never have chosen to do it."

Duke had no idea what more there was that he might have said, had he not... been Nathan. Instead, he shoved the unfinished half of his lunch away and crossed to Duke again.

He found the scar as he was pulling Duke's T-shirt over his head and froze. "What is this?" His fingers traced the star shape.

"It happened while he was a... vampire," Audrey said carefully. "But I fixed it."

"Fixed..."

Audrey held up her wrist. "We were really close to losing him, Nathan."

Duke had been all kinds of waiting for the penny to drop with Nathan since the moment he'd walked through the door. He felt his mouth twist, now, and he turned away, breaking loose from Nate, who he was pretty damned sure wouldn't want to be touching him in a moment anyway. Unless, quite possibly, that touch was the impact of Nathan's fist with his jaw. The end of his T-shirt was still in Nathan's hand, catching him out as he moved. Nathan stepped back, not letting go, forgotten fabric twisting in his fingers, and scrubbed his free hand through his hair. "God," he said, eyes still down, pinned on the wound.

Then he surprised Duke out of the ballpark by grabbing and kissing him again.

"You're okay with-?" Duke gulped, unable to help himself. He had to know. "With me- me-" Words failed him.

"Drinking Audrey?" Nathan rasped. "No. But I'm not okay with you dying, either. And the last thing I want to worry about, tonight, is the three of us. You both look like you almost died today. I don't want to even think about what caused that wound." He eyed Audrey, the white bandage on her wrist. "In either case."

"You did die today," Duke pointed out.

"Yeah," Nathan agreed. "Let's go to bed."

"Sleep," Audrey said, a bit thickly, sounding already half there. "To sleep, Nathan. Ohhh, God, sleep..." She groaned and rubbed the back of her neck, blinking hard.

Nate opened his mouth, then shut it again, looking disappointed.

"...Don't tell us," Duke caught up wryly. "You've been lying down all day."

Audrey collapsed into snoring almost while Nathan was still crouched with his head buried in her thighs, much to Nathan's nonplussed offence, moving Duke to helpless laughter. But Nathan had to accept, grudgingly, that neither of his lovers were in the condition for doing anything energetically life-affirming tonight. Duke was also practically asleep by the time they'd tucked Audrey under the covers. "You can still fuck me if you want," he grunted, burying his face in the comforter. "Just don't expect participation."

Nathan sighed and rolled his eyes. "I think I can wait until the morning, Duke."

Duke might've already been asleep by the time he finished speaking.

Nathan lay awake with his thoughts.

Should he tell Duke that Evi helped him and then moved on, when it had taken Duke so long to move on from Evi and that had almost destroyed them? When Evi had asked him not to tell? It seemed to Nathan that the geography of that choice had changed when Evi left.

He couldn't decide. He might have to tell Duke anyway, because Baylen had been there, and even if he didn't know who she was, they'd made enough reference to Evi and Duke's relationship for him to put two and two together.

Nathan reached out and watched the shadows of his fingers touch Duke's sleeping face in the dark. The way Evi had helped him and then gone, it left him feeling a little like he'd taken on the obligation to love Duke for both of them.

Tired and dosed up on painkillers, Duke didn't stir, even though Nathan was unable to really judge the pressure of his fingertips to ensure the lightness of his touch.

He could feel Audrey, warm and soft against his other side in the dark. Duke was a blank, but Nathan knew the warmth was there, it was only invisible.

A shiver ran through him suddenly, and he half sat up in the bed. It seemed to him that a shadow moved in the darkness across the room - or not quite a shadow; an ephemeral, transparent shape that carried its own faint glow, but so faint it was almost not there at all. Nathan still had the undeniable feeling that it was watching him... with disapproval.

He reached under the pillow for his gun and stopped when he realised that wouldn't work now.

"Go away," he said, hearing his voice resound strongly. Max couldn't touch him. Nathan wasn't going to let him.

The shadow and the sense of unwelcome company slowly faded, though the sound of his own breath seemed betrayingly loud.

Nathan couldn't do anything about the police station, but perhaps there was a subconscious reason they all so seldom came back to his place. In future, he'd steer Duke and Audrey toward exclusively using their homes, on the coastal side of town. Perhaps he would finally sell Garland's old house.

His lovers hadn't stirred, too exhausted by their wounds and the strain of the day.

The darkness around him seemed somehow fuller, thicker than before: Nathan crouched half-up in the bed and turned his head in a watchful circuit of the room, staring into its depths for several minutes more before he lay down and tried to sleep.

END