Chapter 6: Sibling Rivalry
The silence in the Fenton household was a physical thing, thick and heavy like wet wool. Danny sat on the edge of his bed, head in his hands. He could still feel her, the phantom memory of her heat around his fingers, the shattered look on her face when she’d guessed. You coward. The words echoed, truer than any insult a ghost had ever hurled at him.
Two days. Forty-eight hours of radio silence. His phone was a dead brick. Sam had texted once—“You okay? Raven’s being weird.”—but he’d replied with a bland lie. He was waiting for the fallout, for the police, for Sam to kick down his door screaming. Nothing came.
The knock on his front door after school on the third day was quiet, precise. Three firm raps. It wasn’t Sam’s impatient pounding.
His stomach dropped through the floor. He floated downstairs, transforming just before he pulled the door open.
Raven stood on the porch. She wore dark jeans and a fitted jacket, her expression unreadable. She looked past him into the house. “Your parents home?”
“Lab,” he croaked, clearing his throat. “Full-spectrum ecto-filter test. They’ll be hours.”
“Good.” She stepped inside without waiting for an invitation, brushing past him. The scent of her—jasmine and something sharp, like ozone—hit him like a punch. She walked straight to the kitchen, familiar with the layout from years of visiting Sam.
Danny followed, his heart hammering against his ribs. The kitchen was warm, sunlight slanting across the worn wooden table. The hum of the refrigerator was suddenly deafening.
She turned to face him, leaning back against the refrigerator door. Her eyes were dark pools, evaluating him with a clinical intensity that was worse than anger.
“So,” she said. Her voice was calm, dangerously so. “You’re a ghost.”
He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. He just nodded.
“Or part ghost. Or some fucked-up Fenton experiment gone right. Which is it?”
“An accident,” he managed to say. “The portal. I was fourteen. I… fused with it.”
A flicker of something crossed her face—not horror, but a fierce, intellectual hunger. “Intra-dimensional energy merging with organic DNA. Theoretical biocontamination. My god.” She shook her head, as if dispelling a fascinating tangent. Then her gaze hardened again. “And you’ve been using it to spy on me.”
“No! Raven, I never meant—”
“The shed. The mall bathroom.” She pushed off from the refrigerator and took a step toward him. He instinctively retreated, his lower back hitting the edge of the kitchen counter. “My bedroom.” She enunciated each location like a prosecutor listing crimes. “You were invisible. You touched me.”
It wasn’t a question. He was trapped. “Yes.”
“Why?”
The million-dollar question. He could lie. He could say it was scientific curiosity, ghostly impulse, anything. He looked at her, at the furious hurt buried beneath the analytical veneer, and the truth spilled out. “Because I wanted to. Because I’ve wanted you for years. Because I’m fucked up and wrong for it and I couldn’t stop myself.”
She didn’t flinch. She moved closer, until only an inch separated them. He could feel the heat coming off her body. “You watched me with Todd. You watched me… after.”
“Yes.”
“And then you decided to help?” Her voice dropped to a venomous whisper. “Your invisible, ghostly fingers, fixing the mess you watched him make?”
“It wasn’t like that!” he hissed, shame burning through him. “I saw you hurting. I just… I wanted it to be good for you. I wanted to be the one who made it good.” The confession was pathetic, laying bare the twisted knot of his desire.
For a long moment, she just studied him. Her eyes traveled over his face, down his throat, to where his pulse hammered wildly. The analytical look was gone, replaced by something darker, more primal and reckless. A response to his own raw admission.
“Prove it,” she whispered.
“What?”
“You want to be the one who makes it good?” She closed the final gap, her body pressing against his, pinning him to the counter. Her hands came up and grabbed the front of his shirt. “Show me what your little ghost powers can do when you’re not hiding.”
Before he could process it, she turned around in his arms, her back to his chest. She reached back, grabbed his wrists, and wrapped his arms around her waist. Then she ground her ass back against him, a slow, deliberate roll of her hips.
A shocked groan tore from his throat. He was instantly, painfully hard, his erection straining against his jeans and the soft denim of hers. The friction was agonizing, exquisite.
“Raven…”
“Shut up,” she breathed, rocking against him again, harder this time. She kept his arms locked around her, controlling his movement. “This is what you wanted, right? Since you were a kid, staring at me with those big, guilty eyes?” She arched her back, pressing the full curve of her ass against his cock. “You got your wish. Now fuck me like you mean it, Phantom.”
The use of his ghost name, here in his sunlit kitchen, unleashed something feral. The guilt and fear combusted into pure, desperate need. One of his hands broke free of her grip and slid down, over the fly of her jeans, pressing the heel of his palm against her. Even through the layers, he could feel the heat. She moaned, her head falling back against his shoulder.
His other hand came up, fumbling with the button of her jeans, then the zipper. He shoved the fabric down over her hips, just enough. His own fly was a frantic struggle. Then he was free, his cock springing out, thick and aching. He rubbed the head through the wet silk of her panties, feeling her drench the fabric.
“Oh, fuck,” she whimpered, her cool composure shattering.
He hooked his fingers into the waistband of her panties and yanked them aside. He positioned himself, not asking, not hesitating. With one rough thrust, he buried himself inside her to the hilt.
She cried out, a raw, unfiltered sound that echoed off the kitchen cabinets. She was tight, impossibly so, and soaking wet. Her inner muscles clenched around him in a violent, welcoming spasm.
“Harder,” she gasped, pushing back against him. “Don’t you dare be gentle.”
He obeyed. He gripped her hips, his fingers digging into her flesh, and began to pound into her. Each thrust slammed her against the refrigerator door with a metallic bang. The rhythm was brutal, punctuated by their ragged breaths and the slick, filthy sound of their joining. He fucked her with all the pent-up obsession of years, with the terror of his secret being known, with the insane, intoxicating fact that she knew and was letting him do this anyway.
Her hands scrabbled against the smooth fridge door for purchase. “Yes, right there, god, Danny, right fucking there!” she screamed, abandoning all pretense.
He felt her orgasm approaching, a coiling tension in her body, a change in the pitch of her cries. He drove into her, over and over, hitting a spot that made her see stars. She came with a shattered scream, her body convulsing around his cock, milking him, pulling him deeper.
The sight, the feel, the sound of her undoing shattered his own control. With a final, broken grunt, he spilled himself inside her, hot and deep, his hips stuttering against hers as he emptied every drop.
They slumped together, a tangled, sweating mess, breathing in ragged unison. The only sounds were the hum of the fridge and their slowing gasps. The reality of what they’d just done—where they’d done it—began to seep in, cold and sobering.
The creak of the front door opening shattered the silence.
“Danny? You here?” Sam’s voice called from the hallway.
Panic, instant and ice-cold, locked Danny’s muscles. Raven went rigid in his arms.
Footsteps approached the kitchen doorway.
Raven’s head was still resting back on his shoulder. As Sam’s shadow fell across the threshold, Raven’s eyes met Danny’s. A wicked, defiant gleam lit them through the haze of pleasure. She deliberately rocked her hips back, grinding his still-sensitive cock inside her, drawing a sharp, helpless gasp from his lips.
Sam stepped into the kitchen. She took in the scene: her older sister, pants around her thighs, pinned against the fridge by her best friend, whose own state of undress was blatantly obvious.
Sam’s face cycled through shock, disbelief, and finally, utter, volcanic fury. Her mouth fell open.
“Oh my GOD, Raven!” Sam screamed, the sound shrill with betrayal.
Raven didn’t stop moving. She bit her lip, her gaze locked on Danny’s horrified face, and rocked against him once more, harder, a final, possessive claim. “Hey, little sister,” she panted, not looking away from Danny. “We were just… discussing biocontamination.”
Sam made a sound of pure outrage, spun on her heel, and stormed out, the front door slamming shut with enough force to rattle the windows.
The sudden quiet was more violent than the noise.
Slowly, Raven pushed herself off him. She pulled her panties and jeans up with calm, deliberate motions, wincing slightly. She turned to face him, her expression once again unreadable, wiped clean.
Danny hastily tucked himself away, his mind a white-noise void of panic.
Raven smoothed her jacket. She walked to the kitchen table, picked up a pen from a clutter of mail, and wrote something on a napkin. She walked back to him and tucked it into the chest pocket of his shirt, her fingers lingering for a moment over his pounding heart.
“That’s my number,” she said, her voice low and steady. “The one I don’t give to guys like Todd.” She looked up at him, and for the first time, he saw the full, terrifying depth of her curiosity—and her rage. “You’re going to show me everything. The portal. What you are. All of it. Or I tell Sam exactly what her ‘best friend’ has been doing in the shadows. And then,” she added, leaning in so her lips almost brushed his ear, “I tell the world.”
She walked out of the kitchen, her footsteps echoing down the hall. The front door opened and closed, softly this time.
Danny slid down the cabinet onto the cold linoleum floor, the napkin in his pocket burning a hole through to his skin. The warmth of her was still on him, inside him. The price of it now stretched out before him, a terrifying abyss he had no choice but to step into.