.

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Crossing

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Danny stopped, tilted his head, and shut his eyes. He hummed thoughtfully, and nodded. "Yeah. I think this is one." He nodded again, and opened his eyes. "We can cross here." He smiled back at Sam and Tucker. It was the first time he'd smiled in a while.

"Are you sure?" asked Sam. Her voice was rough, but not from anger. She'd gotten sick a couple of days ago, and she hadn't completely recovered.

Danny ran his hand over the door of the abandoned building, as if he could feel the fabric of reality through it. "Pretty sure. It'll take me a couple minutes to figure out how we get through, but this is definitely a passage, not just a thin spot."

"Cool," said Tucker, mounting the two stairs that raised the door up off of the sidewalk, he glanced backwards. "But we should get off the street. Are there any people in there?"

Danny nodded in agreement, he didn't sense anyone inside the walls, then stopped. "I mean, no. No one's in there." He tapped a sign on the wall. "Foreclosed."

"We can't exactly read in this light," Sam said.

"Yeah, sorry." Danny checked the street one more time, and stuck his hand into the door, easily disengaging the lock. The door swung in. It was a mess on the inside, but then, Danny had learned over the past couple of months that foreclosed homes often were. He stepped inside. "I don't think this should be too hard to figure out," he said. The path, the crossing, felt strong and straight. Someone had probably died here, and haunted the building long enough for the path to form.

It was actually a little odd that no one was currently in residence.

"See if you can find some mirrors," said Danny, "or a door that feels w-"

"Freeze, ecto-scum!"

Huge bright spotlights flooded the room, blinding Danny and causing the other two to gasp in pain. Danny's core flared, and he got a shield up just in time to catch a series of ectoblasts.

GIW! How had he missed them? How had the GIW known to set up a trap here? Danny hissed, and swept his hand from left from right, knocking out the lights. He immediately realized why he had been unable to sense them from outside. They were wearing thick, white, full-body hazmat. They almost looked like spacesuits.

Before his shield failed, Danny grabbed both Sam and Tucker and sunk through the floor. He did not take his ghost form. Considering how that had turned out last time... No. Best not.

The basement was barren. The GIW had become more brutal, but they had yet to reach true competence. If it had been him, he would have made it so he couldn't go through the floor. Or the ceiling. Or the walls. Heck, he would have thrown up a ghost shield along with the lights.

The basement, like many in this part of the country, where winters were cold and long, was finished. It had a bathroom. Danny made a beeline for it, ignoring, for the moment, the sounds of government-issued boots on the stairs above. Sam and Tucker barricaded the door behind them as best they could, considering that the bathroom was largely stripped, and bathrooms didn't have a huge amount of movable furniture in the first place.

Luckily, the mirror, cracked and spotty, had been left behind.

"Hope this is it," muttered Danny. He brushed dust off the mirror, hesitated, then deliberately cut his hand on one of the cracks. He laid his bleeding hand flat on the glass.

Sam and Tucker were struggling to set up a human/ghost shield projector (donated by Vlad) in another stop-gap effort to keep the GIW out. The shield wouldn't last for long. The batteries had never been very good.

"Any time now."

"I'm trying, I'm trying," said Danny. There was a thump on the door, and it almost buckled inward.

Back home in Amity Park, Danny could figure out the key to a pathway in seconds, if he didn't just know it. But they were a long way from Danny's haunt, and this was the first good crossing they'd been able to find since they'd left. Danny just had to hope that it didn't want them to pay some weird toll, or leave from the attic, or anything like that.

The shield projector activated, and Danny heard some startled, if muffled, yelps from the other side of the door.

"Get the bazooka!"

"Shoot," said Danny. "How long do we have?"

"Couple minutes, maybe, once they start shooting," said Tucker. "I don't know what their bazooka is like."

Danny nodded, and returned his attention to the mirror. He was so close he could almost feel it.

There was an explosion from the door. The shield flickered.

"Come on," said Danny. He dumped spectral energy into the mirror, hoping it was like Poindexter's, hoping it would be enough, that they could cross over by brute force. "Please."

There was another explosion, and the shield vanished. The GIW burst into the room, their wickedest guns and devices at the ready, fully prepared to do battle with the abomination they had been hunting and the traitors who had chosen it over their own species.

... But the only thing that indicated that anyone else might have been present in the room was the bloody handprint on the mirror.