Archive of Our Own ^beta

"Mail call!" Janine's voice carried clearly enough up the stairs to rattle the shelving, followed by Peter's whining that she didn't have to yell so loudly when he was at his desk. Ray arrived in a matter of seconds, zipping down the flagpole and bounding over to her desk with a bright look of expectation. Winston made his entrance by way of the stairs, climbing down from the second floor, a screwdriver in his hand from the trap he was fixing. Egon had farther to go - he'd been on the third floor, in his lab, but on seeing the other four gathered at their secretary's desk, he hastened down the last half-flight to join them.

"So, what have we got today, Janine?" Ray asked, bouncing in anticipation. Normally, if all their postal worker brought them was business-related, their highly efficient secretary just sorted it into things she needed to take care of, things that required Dr. Venkman's attention, and things that either of them could handle, then dropped the third stack in her own in-box, the second stack in his, and went through the first on her own. If only one or two things required the other Ghostbusters' attention, she handed the mail to them as they came through her office area, or, if they didn't have a bust that day and never came downstairs (which was exceedingly rare - even on their slow days, they generally checked the containment unit at least once), she brought it up to them. Her doing a general mail call meant that there was enough personal mail that she didn't want to trek around the whole firehouse bringing it to each one. For Ray, that usually meant one of his comics or magazines had come in.

He wasn't disappointed; Janine handed him two large manilla envelopes, one from an independent comics publisher in Seattle and the other from the Canadian Society for Paranormal Research, along with an electronics parts catalog. "Here you go, Ray. Who do you know in Canada, anyway? Let's see, here's Winston's - " she handed him two thin envelopes with handwritten addresses, an auto parts catalog, and what looked like an advertising flyer - "Are those both from your sister? And these are yours, Dr. V. - " she handed over a stack of what looked like it was probably all business correspondence, plus a large white envelope from the Journal of Abnormal Psychology; that probably meant he'd gotten another article published - "and just this for you, Egon." Janine finished with a brilliant smile for the physicist, who took the single envelope from her and frowned at the return address. Ray snuck a peek; it looked like it was from one of Egon's physics colleagues out at Stanford.

The four were about to turn away from the desk when she held her hand up. "Wait, guys. There's one more thing, but it's addressed to both Ray and Egon." She reached under her desk and produced a package about the size of a child's shoebox. Even as small as it was, it required both hands for her to lift it off the floor. It was wrapped in a curiously coarse brown paper, and tied with old-fashioned jute twine; the mailing label looked like it had been run through a typewriter.

Ray picked it up; it was surprisingly heavy. He looked at the return address, and frowned. "I don't think I know a Dr. Corvisant at Oberlin; do you, Egon?"

"Not personally. His sister was one of my father's doctoral students when he taught at Case Western. He's an anthropologist, but he has a peculiar interest in exotic cultural artifacts with supernatural narratives attached."

Ray glanced at Peter and translated before he could complain. "You mean he likes rare trinkets with spooky stories."

"That is, in fact, what I just said. At any rate, I have corresponded with him by electronic mail on one or two of his artifacts. While most of them, the vast majority in fact, were merely legends, on one occasion he encountered a ritual mask that, true to its myth, contained a totemic spirit." Egon's face took on a peculiar expression, a mixture of curiosity and disgust that almost always meant he was about to have to admit that magic worked. "Fortunately, one of his graduate students was the daughter of a curandera, and recognized the spirit before things got too out of hand. It was not hostile, just confused, so she used her understanding of ritual to bind it back in the mask. I gave him strict instructions to send it to us if there were any sign of it reactivating, but I've not heard anything from him in months."

Ray grinned, and hid the smile behind his hand. He was the designated occultist of the group, and the others left things like spells and rituals up to him, for the most part. He had a certain aptitude for it, and dealing with arcane symbols gave him a thrill, although not as big a one as encountering the supernatural directly and helping people deal with it. Egon could have been just as good as he was, or better; he was descended from at least one wizard, and probably two, although one of them had lived among Puritans and hadn't been able to be open about it. Once in a while, Egon accepted that part of his heritage and adopted the magical solution to a problem, or at least didn't object to it being used. Ray suspected that on some level the physicist found it as fascinating as he did himself. But for the most part Egon didn't trust magic; unlike science, it was inherently unpredictable, and that sort of chaos offended Egon's sensibilities. It always galled him just a little bit when it worked.

Peter and Winston were a little less sanguine about magic. Peter's paranormal area was psionics, and Ray honestly didn't see much of a difference between the two. Venkman, on the other hand, reacted to all magic as if it were the sort that shows up in horror movies - even when the good guys used it, there was always a price to be paid, he felt. He had half-convinced himself that it was more or less safe for Ray to use it, on rare occasions, because Ray was so pure of heart that he couldn't be corrupted; Ray had tried to convince him that that was a load of crap, but Peter still acted as if he thought that way. Winston, on the other hand, had grown up conventionally religious in a way that none of the rest of them had, and thus had the usual baggage about all magic being inherently demonic. He'd grown out of it over time, and could even be enthusiastic about using rituals against demons, but he still instinctively flinched whenever Ray brought the subject up outside of the immediate context of a bust.

"So do you think he sent us the mask? Should we scan it with a PKE meter before we open it?" asked Ray, using Janine's letter opener to pick open the knot in the twine.

"No. This package is hardly large enough for it - he described it as being almost three feet tall." Egon frowned in thought. "Scanning it might well be an appropriate precaution. I'm surprised that he would go to the trouble of having something transported to us by post and not warn me that it was on its way." He started back up the stairs, then paused and headed to his locker instead. When he returned, he was holding his PKE meter, antennae out and already blinking, although it wasn't making noise.

"I'm surprised you didn't have your trusty meter in your pocket, Spengs." Peter looked at the PKE meter sideways. "I'm already not liking this. Someone sends us an unexpected package, and it's hot?"

Egon hovered the meter over the package. The antennae twitched gently, their lights flickering, and it chirped once, softly. "I wouldn't say hot. Warm, perhaps." He peered at the screen. "Very faint readings, negative valence. They're too weak for me to determine their class."

"That wouldn't be a possessed mask," objected Winston. "Negative valences almost always mean physical entities, don't they?"

"Or possibly an artifact created by one might have negative residuals from the contact," Ray offered.

Egon nodded. "That's the most probable explanation I can think of. If that is the case, I suspect that Dr. Corvisant sent it to us because he was concerned that he might not be able to handle the entity if it came looking for its property." He looked annoyed.

"Well, should we open it?" Ray had removed the last of the twine, and the hand with the letter opener was eagerly hovering over the tape holding the paper wrapping closed.

Egon glanced at the PKE meter, a slight frown still on his lips. "I suppose we should at least see what we have been sent. I will continue to monitor these readings, however." Ray nodded; while he and Peter were both fairly happy to take what life threw at them, both Egon and Winston preferred for their lives to be better planned. The physicist really didn't like surprises. There had been a time in college when Egon's day could have been predicted perfectly by a clock, although he'd started to break out of those strict habits even before he ran into a freshman psychology student named Peter Venkman and had them shattered permanently.

Ray slit open the tape and unwrapped the coarse brown paper from the package; he set it aside on Janine's desk, and she muttered something under her breath about it not being a wastepaper basket. He'd been expecting a cardboard box, but this was wooden, a simple rectangle of dark wood with a heavy grain. A sheet of cream-colored paper had been folded in thirds and tied to the box with a single loop of the same jute twine. Ray slipped off the circle of string and unfolded the note; Egon continued pointing the PKE meter at the box. Peter cleared his throat; Ray gave him an exasperated glance and began to read aloud:

"Dear Doctors Spengler and Stantz: Because you have been so helpful with my previous issues related to spirits and haunted artifacts, and since I cannot make any headway with this item on my own, I have elected to send this curious piece on to you. I confess that I am unsure as to what its effects are, or indeed if I am even correctly guessing that it is supernatural in nature. However, since my previous efforts in this area required outside assistance to correct, I felt it was safer to remand this artifact into the hands of experts. Please contact me when you can inform me whether my suspicions were correct. Yours most sincerely, Obidiah Corvisant."

Ray frowned. "He didn't even tell us where it was from. That's not very helpful."

"Does that mean he doesn't know?" Winston looked unhappy about the idea even as he made the suggestion.

"Possibly," responded Egon. "The residual readings on the item have not shifted. They are rather complex, for such weak residuals. Shall we go ahead and open the box?"

"Wait a minute. If there's any chance that a spook could jump out of that box and dive-bomb us, I want to be prepared," Peter broke in. Winston nodded, and the two of them crossed the garage and grabbed their proton packs and a trap from the back of Ecto-1. They unshipped their throwers, fingers on the power switch. Egon looked as if he thought all the fuss was about nothing, but he didn't discourage them. Ray just considered the box, looking for any sort of sign of its origin; it seemed completely unmarked, and it had neither a lock nor hinges, just a seam running just below the top of the box.

"Ready?" Ray asked his teammates. Peter and Winston nodded, and Egon aimed the PKE meter at the box. Janine put one hand on her desk, preparing to duck out of the way of the proton streams, if necessary.

Ray slid a fingernail into the seam and tugged; the top of the box came off like a lid, as one solid piece of wood. He lifted it away to reveal a lining of what looked like raw silk, in a sort of yellowish color. The bottom of the box was contoured, with a hollow in the center, and lying on its side in the hollow was a stone egg about the size of a fist. It was highly polished and lightly faceted, solidly opaque, and a light blue color with speckles in a darker greyish-blue. It caught the light from Janine's desk lamp and scattered faint little flashes of light across the room, and Janine made a soft "Oooo" as she caught sight of it.

Peter and Winston looked at the stone egg, then at each other, then stowed their throwers. "Doesn't look too dangerous," opined Peter.

Egon's eyes hadn't left his meter. "Still no change. I suspect that our previous theory was correct, that this has been handled at some time in the past by a physical supernatural entity of considerable power, possibly a Class Six or even Seven." He finally shifted his gaze to the stone. "There are a number of entities rumored to accumulate treasures of various sorts. This certainly looks like the sort of valuable item they might well covet."

"You mean Dr. Corvisant has been stealing Smaug's treasure?" Winston's voice was light, but there was an edge of worry to it still.

Ray put his hand to his chin. "It's unlikely, but not impossible. That's essentially what Peter's dad was trying to do in that Mayan pyramid. Maybe Dr. Corvisant or one of his graduate students stumbled over something similar?"

Egon shook his head, and set his meter on the table. "This doesn't seem to have any indications of particular cultural value. Mere grave-robbing isn't his normal modus operandi. Perhaps there are some markings that might further elucidate its provenance on the carving itself." Ray grinned at that, as Egon reached into the box; one of Egon's less obvious talents was an extreme facility with ancient languages from all over the globe - if there were any writing on the egg, he could probably translate it.

Egon's hand closed around the egg. Suddenly the air was split with two sounds simultaneously; the PKE meter on the desk shrieked, and Egon screamed in pain. The stone fell back into the box, knocked catty-corner from its hollow. Egon grabbed his right wrist with his left hand and doubled over, his features screwed up in agony. Ray snatched the meter from the desk as its shrill screeching faded to its normal breedling whine, and then back to a faint chirp.

Peter rushed forward to grab Egon's shoulders. "What the hell? Egon, what happened?" The taller man merely gasped, a shudder running through him. His eyes were tightly closed, a hint of tears at the corners. "Ray? You got anything?"

Ray's eyes jumped from the meter to Egon, then to Peter. "There was a PKE surge, a huge one, up to Class Seven, maybe even Eight, with some underlying Class Five frequencies, too. But it faded as soon as he let go, maybe even before that."

Janine sprang forward, across the desk. "Egon? Are you all right?" She grabbed his right wrist and tugged it out of his other hand, turning it towards her. Her eyes flared wide, and she gasped in shock.

Peter, Ray, and Winston all leaned in, expecting to see the reddened flesh and rising blisters of a burn. Instead, the tips of Egon's fingers and a spot on the mound of his palm were whitened and crystalline-looking. Janine reached forward, hesitantly, and tapped the patch on his palm with a fingernail. It made a clicking noise, as if she'd flicked her nail against a marble countertop.

Egon had managed to pry his eyes open. As soon as Janine had withdrawn her fingers, he snatched his hand back and dug his nails into the flesh of his palm, trying to pry the crystalline spots from his skin. He had clawed at them hard enough to draw blood before Winston managed to drag his left hand away. As they watched in horrified fascination, the welling drops hardened into ruby-red facets. The patches were spreading.

"What the hell," breathed Peter again.

"Whatever that . . . device is, it has triggered some sort of transformation," stated Egon in a bizarrely flat voice. "It is . . . intensely painful at the points of transition, and it appears to be spreading."

Peter whirled on the egg and snatched up his proton thrower. "Will it stop if we blast it?"

Ray turned the meter on Egon, then shook his head. "I don't think so. Egon's now displaying the same residuals that the stone was before it surged - very weak, kind of muddled, Class Five but negative valence. I think the effect, whatever it is, just needs the momentary contact to transfer. Don't, Peter!" he jumped between Peter's thrower and the stone egg as the psychologist advanced. "We need to study it to figure out what it's doing and reverse the effects! We can't do that if you blast it to smithereens. And what if each of the fragments still has the same effect?" Pater blanched and holstered his thrower.

Egon shuddered again and let out a cry between clenched teeth. The crystallized patch on his palm was now about the size of a nickel, and expanding just quickly enough to be visible. The tips of his fingers and the pad of his thumb all appeared frosted.

"What can we do to stop it?" demanded Janine, kicking back her chair and jumping to her feet.

Ray chewed at his lower lip in thought. "Let's get him up to the lab. We have equipment that can give us a better diagnostic of what's happening. Peter, help him up the stairs."

"You got it." Peter started to sling Egon's injured hand over his shoulder, but the taller man flinched back. "Don't, Peter. You don't know whether it's contagious," Egon protested.

"Yeah, we do," Janine contradicted him, holding out her own hand. "I touched you already, and nothing's happening to me."

"And there wasn't another PKE surge when she did. I think it can only be transmitted through direct contact with the egg," finished Ray, slamming the lid back on the box with more force than was strictly necessary.

"So come on, big guy, or I'll pick you up like a toddler and carry you up." Peter's threat was an empty one; he probably couldn't have hauled Egon very far alone. But the physicist leaned into the psychologist's shoulder and allowed himself to be supported as they mounted the stairs.

---

"This is very bad," said Egon softly, peering at his thumb beneath a microscope.

Winston and Peter exchanged a glance. Egon using only words of two syllables or less generally meant life-threatening trouble. Peter blinked first. "Okay, one more time, I'm a little fuzzy on what 'bad' means here. Can you be more specific?"

Egon's arm trembled, and Peter flinched at the reminder that the scientist was still in pain. "It appears to be an alchemical transformation. The matter that normally makes up my cellular structure - protoplasm, proteins, lipids, and so on - is transmuting into a crystalline structure. It would seem to be essentially similar to quartz, with impurities that give it opacity and color - possibly remnants of the mineral content of the original cells." He paused to close his eyes and breathe heavily. Egon was fairly good at mental pain management; they'd all had reason to work on it, and his powers of concentration were phenomenal. But what was happening to his hand was overwhelming his ability to work through it. "This implies that the effect is somehow able to convert one element into another - carbon into silicon, in this case. That should require immense amounts of energy, more than enough to disrupt my cellular structure. Whoever - or whatever - did this is expending incredible power on this attack, and I can't imagine why. It would have been much simpler just to have the egg explode and burn the firehouse down."

He looked through the eyepiece, then lowered the microscope's camera into place. He clicked the shutter several times and withdrew his hand from the microscope's stage. Winston stepped forward, murmured "Here, let me get that," and began unfastening the camera from its rig.

"Thank you," replied Egon, and looked at his hand. The crystalline patches had stretched down his fingers, freezing them in a slightly flexed position. His palm and thumb were already fused, and the rest of his hand was shortly to follow. "Peter, would you please check up on Ray and see if he's made any progress contacting Dr. Corvisant?"

Peter looked like he was about to object, but what came out of his mouth was "Sure, Egon. I'll be right back." He jogged out of the lab towards the staircase, his jaw set grimly.

Egon looked up at Winston as soon as Peter had left. "I'm concerned about what will occur when the effect reaches major blood vessels."

Winston grimaced and nodded. "When the arterial blood is forced up against the, uh, the crystallized part and has nowhere to go."

"Precisely. It could be fatal in its own right. I fear that we may have to amputate the hand." Egon took another deep, shuddering breath. "I apologize in advance for asking you to assist with that, if it becomes necessary. But I don't think Ray or Peter would be able to."

"And you think I can?" Winston's eyebrows shot up, and Egon winced. "I'm sorry, Winston, I just - " "No, my man, you're right. Neither of them could, and if they managed it they'd never be able to look you in the eye again. I think - I've had to do emergency surgery in the field before. I think I could, and I could face you." He glanced at the door. "Question is, could they face me afterwards?"

"Of course they could. Ray's nature is quite forgiving, and he'd understand that you were only doing what needed to be done." Egon plucked off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with his good hand, then replaced them. "Peter would have a harder time, but he would understand that it was necessary to save my life."

Winston's expression smoothed a little. "I'd still rather get you to a hospital and have a professional do it, if it comes to that."

"I don't know if we'd make it in time." Egon held up his right hand; his fingers were completely crystallized, and the effect was creeping down the back of his hand inexorably towards his wrist.

---

Peter paused in the hallway to catch his breath. Under his flippant exterior, his carefully-constructed barricade of defense mechanisms, Peter was fundamentally a fairly empathetic individual, and watching one of his best friends in that much pain was making him nauseous. His own hand was twinging in sympathy.

He pulled himself back together and darted down the spiral stairs, only to almost collide with Ray at the bottom.

"Gosh, Peter, you look awful," exclaimed Ray, catching him before he lost his footing.

"Yeah, well, dreadful ghostly artifact, friend possibly dying, it hasn't been one of my better days." Peter grabbed the railing and hauled himself upright; it was more of a effort than he'd expected. "I'm going to grab a few drinks to bring upstairs, and start a pot of coffee brewing. You want anything?"

Ray shook his head. "Not right now, but I'll take a cup of that coffee when it's done. I suspect this is going to be a long night."

"You get anything from that Corvisant guy?"

Ray's mouth pressed into a thin line. "Getting him on the phone wasn't hard; Janine talked to his department secretary and found out his office extension right away, and he was having office hours. He claimed not to know anything about it - says he never sent us anything, and he didn't seem to recognize the description of the egg." Ray's eyes dropped in that way that meant he was about to take the blame for something.

Peter set a hand on his arm. "Something else you want to tell me?"

Ray let out a breath through pursed lips. "Janine noticed something that she and I are both kicking ourselves for not having seen before. The postmark on the package isn't from Oberlin; it's from Cleveland. While it's not inconceivable that someone would have driven that far to mail a package, it's a little weird. I think he's telling the truth, and that someone else sent us the box."

Peter tried to remember where in Ohio Oberlin was. "They're not that far apart, are they?"

Ray shook his head. "No, not really. Like I said, if someone from Oberlin needed to go in to town for something else, they might mail a package from there. But it would be way out the way to go just to ship something. It's suspicious, at any rate."

"Who do we know in Cleveland?" Peter chewed on his lip in thought.

"Most of Egon's extended family lives in Ohio. I think his mom is in Columbus now, but he grew up in the Cleveland area, and that's where Spengler Labs is, out in the suburbs."

Peter frowned. "Yeah, but the only one of them pissed enough at us to send us a booby trap is his uncle Cyrus, and he doesn't really believe in what we do here. He wouldn't send us a spook's gotcha with a forged letter." Peter got along with Egon's mother's side of the extended Spengler clan pretty well, but his father's side was generally not impressed with the idea of ghostbusting as a profession, or paranormal research in general, and tended to treat Peter and Ray as if they'd corrupted their cousin and seduced him away from true science. Discussions about the matter with them invariably led to Egon coldly informing them that he'd chosen this path of research himself, thank you, and if they thought he was foolish enough to be conned by Peter, then they certainly didn't need him on their research team, now did they? Peter smiled faintly at the memory of the last iteration of that conversation, which had ended with Egon handing the phone to him and walking away. He'd listened to Egon's cousin rant about the scientific method for several minutes before offering to psychoanalyze the young man for free, which had rapidly ended the call.

Ray jolted Peter out of his reminiscences. "I'm going to go tell Egon, and then see if I can find anything like the egg in the usual references. Bring me that coffee when it's ready?"

"Sure thing, Tex." Peter sauntered into the kitchen and rinsed out the coffeepot; he opened the cabinets, made sure that Slimer hadn't gotten into the can (he usually didn't, since he generally didn't like coffee very much, but some days he wasn't very picky), and began scooping grounds into the filter. Shortly, the homely aroma wafted through the kitchen, and Peter relaxed a bit. He plucked several canned sodas and one beer from the fridge, and headed back towards the stairs.

Someone was shouting. It sounded like Ray. Peter hesitated, then charged up the spiral staircase, flew off the last step, and burst into the lab.

" - You're not cutting your hand off, and that's final!" Ray had his arms crossed, and his face had taken on what Peter sometimes privately referred to as Ray's stubborn two-year-old look. Egon's expression was equally set. Winston looked torn.

"Who's not cutting what off of who?" Peter was already pretty bewildered; letting his features sink into total confusion wasn't hard.

Egon sighed, and set his hand on the table with a thunk. "Peter, it's spreading. It's going to start cutting off circulation and causing hemorrhaging any minute now. The pain is . . . unimaginable." The physicist swallowed. "I would rather lose the hand than suffer like this for much longer." His face, normally pale to match his platinum locks, was almost grey.

"We can go to a doctor, then, and see if they can give you pain medication. I don't think amputation of a magically transformed extremity is a good idea, but if it's going to happen, it needs to be in a sterile environment, and I hate to break it to you, but this lab isn't." Peter tried to make his voice soothing instead of shrill, and seemed to at least succeed in calming Winston down. Ray and Egon both glared at him.

Ray shook his head. "I'm with Peter on thinking that if this is a magical transmutation, cutting it away isn't going to stop it. If this was a curse or a spell, you might get a respite while it would have worked through that tissue, then it'll just start again at the stump when it would have gotten there anyway." His features were set in defiance. "And if that occurred during the surgery, it could cause much worse complications than the curse."

Egon looked at Ray open-mouthed, then at Peter, then at his hand. His wrist had frozen while they were talking, holding that hand at an awkward angle. "Why isn't the radial artery blocked yet?"

Ray's expression softened, and he moved across the room. He lightly held Egon's petrified hand between his, and closed his eyes. Winston backed off a step, and Peter's eyes narrowed, but neither man said anything.

Ray opened his eyes again. "Can you feel anything?" he asked, running a fingernail across Egon's palm.

Egon shook his head. "Nothing. The crystallized portions are quite dead."

It was Ray's turn to shake his. "I don't think it actually is dead. I mean, I believe you that you can't feel anything, but I think it's more like suspended animation. I'm pretty sure that if - when - we find a way to reverse the process, it'll go back to normal."

Egon breathed heavily, shakily, with his eyes turned towards the floor. When he finally looked up, they were red with unshed tears. He looked directly into Ray's eyes, and asked "Did you sense anything?"

Ray was taken aback. Egon rarely acknowledged Ray's occult practices so openly, and Ray hadn't even been sure Egon knew that he was 'feeling' for magical energies. "A little, I think. It feels like a curse, anyway. It's a magical process of some sort, and that's why your anatomy isn't reacting like it would to a purely physical transformation. I don't - I don't think science is going to be what solves this one." He stopped, and bit at his lip. "I'm sorry, Egon."

Egon leaned back in his chair. "You have nothing to apologize for, Ray. While for research, I much prefer the proper experimental method, in a crisis I am more than willing to use whatever works." He squeezed Ray's arm with his good hand. "And all things considered, I would prefer to keep the hand than lose it." The corners of his eyes were still crinkled with pain, but he was managing to maintain the facade of control.

Peter set a soda and the beer next to Egon. "Hey, Spengs. You're sweating like crazy. You need to drink something."

Egon looked at the offered beverages. "Water would be better for proper hydration."

"Yeah, well, I figured you could use a little muscle relaxant. And if you don't want it, I might prescribe some for myself."

Ray snorted. "Peter, you're not a psychiatrist; you can't prescribe anything."

"Okay, so it's OTC medication. I still think it might help."

Egon visibly decided that the argument wasn't worth having, and began fumbling with the tab on the can with his left hand. Peter winced at his own stupidity in not opening it himself, but decided not to try to do it for Egon now - that would only make his friend feel more helpless.

"And I put some coffee on downstairs. I promised Ray a cup; I'll go fetch that while he hits the books." Ray was ahead of him; he'd already pulled their copies of The Grey Grimoire and the Big Book of Spells from the lab shelf and was flipping through the former's yellowed leaves.

"I'll come with you; I could use a nice hot mug, and I don't want you carrying three up the stairs." Winston made it out to the hallway before Peter, caught the banister for the staircase, and paused, a dark look flickering in his eyes.

"Please tell me he didn't ask you to cut his hand off," muttered Peter.

"Okay, I won't tell you that." Winston looked like he wanted to forget it, or possibly lose his lunch. Then he cracked a weak smile. " 'Magically transformed extremity,' man?"

Peter flushed a bit, but shrugged. "You gotta talk to people in their own language."

Winston raised an eyebrow in imitation of Egon's usual gesture of skepticism. "Uh huh. Let's get that coffee and get back up here before Ray starts reciting spells and scares the spit out of Slimer or something."

"Those spellbooks of his scare the spit out of me." Peter followed Winston back to the kitchen, the comforting smell of the coffee offering a tantalizing illusion of normalcy.

---

As soon as Peter and Winston had left, Ray pushed the door almost closed and rushed back to the table where Egon had laid his petrified arm. "Okay, Egon, I'm going to try two things before they get back." He paused, then with down-turned eyes he continued, "I'm sorry about this."

Egon had managed to open the can and had swallowed most of its contents. He wasn't a frequent consumer of beer - he prided himself on his mental faculties, which made the prospect of drinking to intoxication distasteful to him, and when he chose to have alcohol as past of a meal, he generally preferred wine - but he seemed to have decided that Peter was right about needing something to relax himself. He set the can back on the table and looked up at Ray, his eyes more steady than before. "Raymond, please cease apologizing. You are in no way responsible for my current condition, and if your occult expertise can stop its effects, I welcome any exercise of it you deem necessary." He drew a slow breath. "In fact, I am beginning to think that you and I need to cross-train on this as well as our technical knowledge." His blue eyes flickered away. "It is mostly chance that I was affected, and not you. I could research counterspells and talismans nearly as easily as you, although I do not know the source material as well. But actually performing them would be . . . difficult for me, so much so that I do not know if I could do so competently in a crisis without your active assistance."

Ray blinked. "But, Egon, you always gripe about the unpredictability of magic. Why would you . . . " He faded off, not sure exactly why he was protesting.

"Peter won't do it because it frightens him, and Winston is always going to have his own doubts. I'm the logical one to be our backup occultist." Egon managed a smile, although it was obviously edged with pain. "I have certainly studied enough to already know most of the theory. I can read the languages. I just . . . have to get over the illogic of it all."

A hand came down on Egon's shoulder, tentatively at first, then with a steadier grip. Ray gave Egon a peculiar look, as if he were studying the physicist's features. His eyes seemed darker than normal, almost hooded, and a strange expression played at the corners of his mouth. After a long moment, he leaned over and whispered, as if he were afraid their comrades would overhear, "Is it partly that you're afraid you'll enjoy it?"

Egon's eyes flashed, and his jaw dropped open. After a stunned moment, he looked up and Ray and whispered in return, "Yes. In fact, I'm terrified I will." There was a long pause, and then he continued, as if he weren't sure he wanted to hear the answer, "Do you?"

Ray's hand squeezed his shoulder again. "Yeah. I do. There is something . . . a little bit addictive about it. The whole Secrets-Man-Was-Not-Meant-To-Know thing can be heady." He let go and picked up the nearly empty beer can. "But just because something gets a hook into us doesn't mean it's bad. Just dangerous. It's the excess you have to guard against." He set the can back down. "Me more than you, I think. I kind of have an addictive personality anyway. You're good at control, Egon. If this," and he touched the crystalline thing that had been Egon's right wrist, "had been happening to me, not only would you have to play team occultist, but I think I'd be rolling on the ground screaming."

"I'll admit, I find that course of action a bit tempting myself, too," Egon replied, managing a shadow of their usual bantering tone.

The occultist straightened back up. "Okay, I'm going to do two basic banishings on you, hopefully before Peter, Winston, or Slimer get back up here. If we're lucky, one or the other of them will work, and if neither one does, that'll tell me something about what we're dealing with." Ray reached into his jumpsuit and removed a knife with a black handle carved of deer antler from an inside pocket. It was covered by a leather sheath imprinted with Ray's name in futhark runes, which the occultist removed and set aside, wiping the flat of the blade against his leg. He held the ritual knife point down in front of him for a moment, stilling his features into a look of concentration, and began drawing symbols in the air above Egon's hand, muttering "By fire and water, earth and air, . . . "

Egon lost the thread of what Ray was saying as a pulse of shattering pain flooded through what was left of his arm. He clenched his teeth to keep from crying out. His usable hand flailed, grasping futilely at the table and knocking over the unopened soda can, which rolled off the table and underneath his chair with a thump.

As suddenly as it started, the pain eased. Egon opened his eyes - he hadn't realized he had closed them - and tasted blood in his mouth. He must have bitten his lip. His tongue found the raw place and poked at it. He shook his head and became aware that Ray had set the knife down and had his arms around him, was frantically whispering "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry . . . " into his shoulder.

"I'm all right, Ray. The pain is - lesser now than it was when you began." Egon thought that was true, although the sudden throb of pain might have simply dulled his nerves. "What happened?"

"Backlash," murmured Ray, lifting his head just enough to be clearly heard. "This isn't just one thing, and I didn't focus the counterspell correctly, so I got an energy rebound." He rubbed the hand that had held the athame, and Egon noticed that it was a bloodless shade of pale. He hadn't been the only one hurt by the backlash. Ray continued, "The one good thing is that I think I got a sense of what its components are. I think it's a combination of a curse, a binding spell, and something else. I need to check a couple of things. If that's what it is, I'll need to undo the binding, which shouldn't be hard, then lift the curse, which might be tricky, and then undo whatever the third thing is." He straightened up, and ran his fingers through his auburn hair. "The stuff we have up here isn't going to be enough. I'm going to have to go get my equipment from the downstairs workshop as soon as someone else gets up here to stay with you."

"Ray, I'm hardly going anywhere. I can handle a few minutes alone." The effect had just reached Egon's elbow, and he shifted position so that it at least wouldn't be at as awkward an angle as his wrist was. It still hurt a great deal, but it was no longer excruciating. "And I think you must have bled some of the energy off. The transformation is no longer quite as painful."

Ray favored him with a wry grin. "I may have just overloaded your nerve endings and numbed you out. And there are fewer nerve endings on your upper arm, anyway." The engineer's eyebrows went up as he realized something. "Egon, have we gotten any pain medication into you at all?"

Egon managed a weak smile and gestured at the beer can, lying on its side on the table. "Just that."

"Not good enough." Ray turned towards the door just as Peter and Winston returned, each holding two mugs of coffee. "Oh, hey, guys. I'm going to need some of my more specialized equipment for this. Can you hold down the fort up here while I run downstairs?"

"Sure," Winston replied; Peter nodded and added "Do you need any help bringing stuff up from the basement?"

"If I do, I think Janine can help," Ray answered, perhaps a little too fast. "Peter, while I'm gone, can you get Egon some ibuprofen? I don't think it'll make the pain go away completely, but it might help."

Peter smacked himself in the forehead. "No problem, Ray; I can't believe I didn't do that earlier. Sorry, big guy," he apologized to Egon in a softer voice.

"I didn't think of it either," said Egon, shrugging it off. Ray darted out the door in the direction of the stairs; from the sound of his footsteps, he took them at a run, two at a time.

"Yeah, but you were distracted by the prospect of becoming the next addition to the sculpture garden." Peter set down the two mugs he was holding on the table, and headed off in the direction of the bathroom.

Winston set one of his mugs down on the computer desk, then brought the last one over to Egon. "We weren't sure if you wanted any, but we figured if you didn't, either Ray or Peter would probably drink it."

Egon looked into the mug. From its medium-tan color, it had several spoonfuls of half-and-half in it. He raised it to his mouth with his left hand and sipped at it. Unsweetened. Just how he prepared it, and anathema to Peter, who took his black, or Ray, who liked his with half that amount of creamer and several spoons of sugar. He smiled in spite of the insistent ache and creeping numbness in his arm. "Thank you, Winston. Did you make this or did Peter?"

Winston laughed. "Peter wouldn't let me touch it. Said he'd made enough coffee for you guys in college, he could prep it for you in his sleep, and had, some mornings."

The smile grew broader as Egon remembered one semester, when all three of them had had an eight o'clock class. "He did, or close enough as made no odds." Peter had still technically had a room at the frat house, but he'd spent almost as many nights at the apartment that Egon and Ray were sharing. Most Tuesday and Thursday mornings had begun with the three of them piling out of the building at twenty-five minutes to eight and racing towards campus. For all their procrastinating, they were only late once, and that was because a traffic accident had blocked an intersection. "Peter was always a master of just-in-time delivery." Egon dredged himself out of his memories; he cherished their stories of those times together, but sharing them too often around Winston or Janine felt self-indulgent, even exclusionary.

If he realized where Egon's mind had gone, Winston didn't seem to mind; he just chuckled. "Yeah, the times when Peter's gone from sound asleep to dressed and ready to hit the road in five minutes flat have been pretty impressive."

"Just call me Mr. Insta-wake." Peter strolled back into the room with a small white bottle in his hand; he shook out two tablets and handed them to Egon. "Or maybe Nurse Venkman. Here, big guy, take two and call me in the morning."

Egon held out his good hand for the pills, and regarded Peter with half-lidded eyes. "Considering how you behave towards your nurses every time you're in the hospital, should I be batting my eyelashes and trying to pinch you?" The physicist seemed surprised to hear his own words; as soon as they were out, a flush spread across his cheeks.

Peter started at the comment, too, and nearly dropped the bottle of ibuprofen. He recovered almost instantaneously, and came back with "Heck, no, Spengs; are you trying to get Janine to throttle me?" But his voice held an odd quaver. Winston shot a glance across the room, clearly wondering what had gotten into both of them, but his features softened back into sympathy as Egon downed the tablets and washed them back with a swallow of coffee.

Peter settled into the chair closest to Egon and sipped at his own beverage. His eyes were on Egon's sleeve, but he said nothing. Egon met his eyes, and his left hand touched a spot about a third of the way up his right biceps. "It's gotten to here. Ray seems to be right about this being an entirely magical ailment; I have detected none of the issues with blocked arteries or severed nerves that I would have expected from a purely physical transformation."

Peter rubbed at his temples with one hand, the other still clutching his mug. "And that means a magical solution, too, right?"

"Yes." Egon's blue eyes caught Peter's green ones in a steady gaze. "And if you care for my well-being, you are going to stay out of his way." He inhaled unsteadily, but didn't drop his stare. "I realize that you don't like magic, Peter. It makes you uneasy -"

"With things like this happening, I think I have a fairly good excuse for not liking it much," burst out Peter, but Egon silenced him with a gesture.

" - Peter, it unnerves me too. Not for the same reason, I know. For me, it's the illogic of it, the fact that the rules are flexible and change unpredictably." Egon paused, as if to give Peter space to speak.

Peter took it. "Yeah, and that means that if you think it is predictable, like the ritual for Hob Anagarak, you jump in with both feet just like Ray does." He ran one hand through his forelock. "I don't - it's not - damn." He looked down, and leaned back in his chair. "It's not like Winston. I don't have moral objections to it, or think we're all damning our souls to Hell for using it."

"I don't really think that, either," added Winston from across the room. "I might have, when I first joined the team, and I'd still feel weird about, you know, summoning demons or controlling them. But it's mostly just habit, at this point. I know you guys aren't going to do anything I wouldn't approve of with magic, just like I know you wouldn't with your gadgets here. At least," he corrected himself, "nothing that I wouldn't approve of except blowing up the lab."

"And that's exactly what I'm afraid of," continued Peter. "We know - all of us, humans in general, not just us Ghostbusters - so little about what's safe magically and what isn't, that we don't know when we're about to do the equivalent of causing a major explosion. And you get so interested in the minutia of things, and Ray's so gung-ho about everything, I'm afraid that neither of you would see it coming."

"What, exactly, are you afraid we'll do? Ray's explained this before - humans aren't powerful enough to call up fireballs or summon lightning," Egon argued. The discussion seemed to be distracting him from the pain in his arm; it was too soon for the medication to have kicked in.

"Your great-great-great-grandfather didn't even know as much as we do about what he was doing, and he managed to summon a fire-breathing dragon," Peter pointed out.

"True," acknowledged Egon, "but remember, that was a spirit already present at the well. He just gave it a form. In the absence of such a spirit, his dabblings would have been utterly fruitless." That incident had been one of several that had softened the physicist's attitude towards magic; he had grown attached to the genius loci, although he would never have admitted it publicly.

Peter sighed. "It just seems too easy to screw up. I don't mind the two of you studying it, but actually doing something with it, casting spells and stuff . . . "

"Isn't that a little hypocritical, Peter?" Egon's voice was gentler than the words. "You certainly ran us through enough ESP experiments to count as 'doing something,' or at least making the attempt. Why should your specialty be privileged over Ray's?"

"Because psi comes from the human mind, Egon," Peter objected. "Magic is something external, from somewhere outside of us, and we don't know anything about where it comes from or why. Every time Ray tries something, I worry about him." He lowered his eyes to the floor. "I'm afraid it'll change him, in ways we can't even think of. I'm scared that what we'll get back at the end won't quite be Ray anymore." He exhaled heavily. "It'd be too hard to have to worry that way about both of you."

Egon opened his mouth to respond just as Ray staggered through the lab door, his arms just barely wrapped around a stack of cardboard boxes almost as tall as he was. Janine followed him, carrying another large box with a small stack of books balanced on top of it. "Hey, guys! I think I've got everything we'll need. Winston, can you give me a hand with these?"

As the others began unstacking, Egon gestured Peter closer, and said in an undertone, "Peter, you do realize that Ray's occult research started before we ever met him, don't you?"

"Well, yeah, I . . . " The green eyes narrowed. "Egon, he hasn't been actually doing magic all that time, has he?"

"How closely did you ever look at his room in our old apartment?" Peter's eyes grew wide. Egon nodded. "He tried not to let me know, since he knew it frustrated me, but yes, Peter, he has been practicing, not just studying, since well before you and I came into his life. That's how he knew which spells to use to stop the attacks from the books in the Macabre house, among other things. If it has changed him, Peter, it has given us the Ray we know, not taken it away."

Peter was, for once, speechless. For nearly a minute, his gaze turned inward, holding the look of a man searching through his memories. Finally, he seemed to reach a conclusion, and his eyes focused on the friend in front of him. He reached out and squeezed Egon's good hand, then took on a look of determination and joined the others in unpacking Ray's equipment.

---

Peter looked up from the musty tome he was flipping through. "Hey, Tex," he called across the room, "what's the Latin for 'binding' again?"

"For the meaning we want, it'll probably be 'copula,' although some of the more dramatic authors might use 'vinculum'. Most of them will reserve that for a spell that binds a spirit to a person, place, or object, though, not one that binds two other spells together," Ray replied over the top of a huge codex.

Peter chewed his lip. "What's 'limes,' then?"

"That's 'boundary,' Peter," came Egon's bass voice from the table. He was propped up awkwardly; his right shoulder was now frozen in place, and the stone that was replacing his flesh was heavier than muscle and bone. That, in its own way, had convinced Winston that hunting for a medical or scientific solution would be fruitless. A transformation that failed to obey the law of conservation of mass was not going to be solvable using the lab's usual equipment, even one stocked with devices as esoteric as those created and patented by Drs. Spengler and Stantz.

"Right. As in 'limit.' Should've known that one." Peter sighed. His Latin was rusty; it was only his determination to blow the SATs out of the water in high school that had led him to take it in the first place (although he'd pretended to his fellow athletes that his mother had made him sign up for it out of some misbegotten hope that he'd be more interested in attending Mass). He'd switched to French his senior year, having secured quite respectable test scores that summer, and continued it in college, mostly because it impressed girls. It also allowed him to read a few professional journals from Europe, although honestly, German would have been more useful in his field.

He'd taken the one French grimoire from the stack that Ray had brought up, but quickly found that nothing in it was useful to their current situation - it seemed to be mostly concerned with various methods of predicting the future or seeing faraway places. Peter had set it aside to reread later, since some of what it described verged on his own specialty. He'd done more research into telepathy than clairvoyance or precognition, but he'd been interested in all of them, back in his grad student days and his brief time as a lecturer.

Now, he was picking his way through one of the many spellbooks written in medieval Latin. Ray was working through another, much faster than Peter was managing. Egon had taken the one written in Chaldean, since he was the only one who could read that with any fluency, followed by one of the two in ancient Greek; Ray could manage in that, but Egon's comprehension was better. Winston had been given one of several in Elizabethan English. Janine, sprawled on the floor, was running her fingernail from right to left along the pages of the one she'd picked up, to everyone's surprise except Egon's. Peter had been annoyed with himself after thinking about it for a minute. Of course Janine Melnitz could read Hebrew. She'd had to borrow one of Ray's Qabalah books in English to define some of the unfamiliar terms, but she was plowing through the spellbook steadily.

Several pages later, Peter's head rocketed up. Something in the room had shifted, but he'd only noticed subliminally. Whipping his head around, he looked at Ray, still buried in the Liber Umbrae, then at Egon. Egon still had the Greek codex - really, it was more of a folded scroll than a book - in front of him, but his left hand was on his chest, and his breathing patterns had changed - he was almost panting.

"Yo, big guy, what's wrong? You hurting again?" Peter was on his feet and at Egon's side in no time, and the others joined him a scant second later.

"I'm having trouble breathing," admitted Egon. His eyes were wide and held a faint hint of panic.

Ray's hands fell to the placket of Egon's salmon-pink shirt. "Egon, I'm going to unbutton you so we can see where the transition point is." Egon made a brief noise of assent, and Ray's fingers began picking at the buttons. Peter forced himself to look away, towards the book, until Ray's gasp made his head swivel back involuntarily.

The icy line of the transmutation was creeping across Egon's chest, spreading in a widening circle from the shoulder like a slow-motion ripple in a pond. "I think it's starting to affect the lungs," murmured Ray, unnecessarily - Peter was pretty sure all of them had figured that out.

Egon nodded to confirm Ray's statement. "I can't - it feels like I can't expand the lung on that side. I'm not getting enough air." He puffed, as if he'd been exerting himself, then continued "Ray, which component of the composite spell is preventing the physiological effects I'd feared earlier from - from killing me outright?"

Ray's eyes widened in shock. "I don't actually know," he admitted, embarrassment flaming his face. "Not the binding itself, but it could be either the curse or the third component."

"What is the third component, anyway?" asked Janine, putting a hand on Egon's shoulder, where the transition line was creeping towards his throat.

Ray shook his head. "A transformation spell of some kind, either turning one substance into another or substituting one type of matter for another. I don't know which of those it is, or exactly what type it would be. It's too mixed up with the curse that makes it spread slowly like this for me to be able to pick it out. That's why I want to unbind them first, so I can get a reading of the energies of both spells. But," he continued, staring at the slowly moving boundary on Egon's skin, "Egon's right - if I unbind them before I know what each component does, I might remove the part of the spell that's keeping him alive through the transition." He swallowed, and bit his lower lip.

Peter dropped a hand on Ray's shoulder. "I think you're going to have to untangle that for me, Ray. Does that mean you can't undo this?"

"No, no, I'm pretty sure once we find the right spells I can remove them in the right order," Ray hastened to reassure him. "But - Peter - Egon, I'm sorry, I think even if we find all the spells in time - "

Egon's breathing had become shallow; he inhaled sharply to interrupt Ray. "You're not going to be able to remove them until the transition is complete. If you cancel the spells in the correct order once I am fully petrified, I will revert to my normal state all at once, but doing so with me in the halfway state might cause irreparable damage."

Ray nodded, mutely. Peter reared back, and started shouting, "Wait a minute, are you telling me we have to let this creeping crud turn our buddy totally into a statue before we can do something about it?" Ray flinched away from him, as if he were expecting Peter to lash out, and Peter caught himself and lowered his voice. "Is that right?" he asked, forcing himself back to something more resembling calm.

Again, Ray nodded, his eyes full of self-recrimination. Egon frowned. "Peter, it's not - "

Peter put his hand back on Ray's arm. "It's not Ray's fault, Egon, I know that. I'm sorry I shouted, Ray; I wasn't yelling at you. I'm just mad at the bastard who did this." He closed his eyes and forced his anger down. "Speaking of which, do we have any leads at all on who might have sent us our rotten egg?"

Janine glanced at Ray, then said, "I rang up some of Ray's buddies in the occult scene. They made some phone calls and got back to me. There's a couple of people in the Cleveland occult community who are apparently into the nasty crap - calling up demons and stuff. We're hoping that the good guys can come up with some handwriting samples for us to compare against the letter in the package." She gave Peter a look of particular defiance on the phrase 'good guys,' and Peter suddenly realized why Ray was still on the defensive.

Gently, he slipped one arm around Ray's shoulders. "Hey, you think I'm blaming you for this, little fella?"

Ray sighed and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. "Not consciously, no, but the package was addressed to both Egon and me, and if someone in the occult community is targeting us, then -"

"Then they're a serious jerk, and we'll take 'em out once we get all this settled." Peter turned Ray so they were standing face to face, with Peter's hands on the shorter man's shoulders. "Ray, magic rattles me a bit, but I'll do whatever it takes to get Egon back into a more flexible consistency, and right now I'm extremely grateful to have someone on the team who can hack this. And who wasn't the one who got stoned, because I'm not sure Egon and I could handle the research if you were the one turning into one of the Elgin marbles here."

Ray bit his lip, then pulled Peter into a brief hug. "Thanks, Peter. It means a lot to me that you're trying to help instead of just leaving the weird stuff up to me. You too, Winston," and the youngest of their number pulled the oldest into a sideways hug, as well.

"No problem, my man." Winston returned the favor, putting one arm around Ray's shoulders. "I may not like this stuff, but I'll do whatever it takes to get Egon back to his fighting trim, and you're the expert here."

Ray, Winston, and Janine settled back to their ancient tomes, but Peter scooted his chair closer to Egon and watched him. Egon's eyes were heavy with the continuing pain of his transformation and his worry for both his teammates and himself. He made himself meet Peter's gaze, and half-whispered "I'm not going to be able to speak, soon."

Peter blinked, then, in an instinctive motion, one hand flashed out and brushed the line of advancing facets just short of Egon's adam's apple. "Yeah, it's almost at your larynx." He blinked; he'd taken Human Anatomy in college, on the grounds that a good psychologist ought to at least be familiar with physiology, too, but again, his knowledge was old and rusty. "Don't try to talk until it's, um, gone through there already. I bet you'll still be able to whisper."

The physicist grimaced elaborately. "Until it reaches my jaw, which won't be too much longer."

Peter forced his lips into a mock-frown. "Hey, don't make faces. Didn't your mother ever tell you it'd freeze like that?" His attempt at humor got only an exasperated half-grin from Egon, but across the room Ray let out a snicker. Peter shrugged. "I had to say it, you know I did."

Egon's eyes fluttered closed, and his breathing became slow and labored for a minute. Peter recognized the expression as one his friend habitually took when he was trying to force himself to relax. After a long pause, he opened his eyes again, and in a strange, breathy whisper he responded "I would expect no less from you, Peter."

Peter's gaze dropped to Egon's pale throat. Was the line advancing more quickly, or did it just look that way because his neck was so narrow? "Hang in there, big guy," murmured Peter, and patted Egon's unfrozen shoulder awkwardly before going back to his own book.

A few minutes later, Peter straightened up " . . . Ligare venefica plures in unum . . . 'A working to tie many magics in one,' hey, Ray, could this be it?"

Ray practically levitated out of his chair and bounded over Janine to hover over Peter's shoulder. He translated, much more freely than Peter had, " 'A ritual to bind many spells into one, that they may be concealed in a single talisman and loosed at the will of the binder,' oh, yes, Peter, I think this is it!" Ray snatched the spellbook from Peter and bounced away with it, then looked back in apology. "Uh, sorry, I need to read this one and figure out what we'll need for the unbinding; would you mind switching with me?"

"No problem," Peter smiled. "And if the binding came out of that ratty old thing, there's a pretty good chance that the rest of it is in there, too, right? I'm barely a fourth of the way through it."

Ray thought about that more than Peter had intended. "That depends on how big a library our bad guy has. If he's - or she's, it doesn't have to be a guy - only got a few books, then yeah, but if their collection is anything like mine, or if they have access to the special collections at a library - "

Egon wheezed, in that same breathy whisper, "From personal experience, I can attest to the Cleveland Public Library's special collections being significantly less interesting, from a paranormal perspective, than the New York Public Library's."

Ray relaxed a bit. "True, although they could be from somewhere else and have sent it through an intermediary in Cleveland. Anyway, we know that this part is from this book, or at least a spell with the same effects, which means that undoing this spell should work as a countermeasure."

Janine pulled herself off the floor. "Ray, can I do something before you start chanting or drawing chalk lines on the floor, or whatever it is you're going to do?"

"Sure, Janine," agreed Ray. "What is it?"

"Show me where that section starts and where it stops?" Ray pointed to the passage Peter had lighted on, and then another spot halfway down the next leaf. Janine gently took the book from him, and left the lab in the direction of the stairwell. "I'm going to make some copies just in case something blows up, or goopers attack us and slime the book, or something."

Ray started to object, then caught himself and thought about it. "Good plan, Janine," he called after her as the click of her heels hit the staircase.

"Man, can I hire 'em, or what?" Peter would never say something like that in front of Janine; they had their little rules. But he was genuinely fond of their secretary, despite his teasing, and while her manner with their more pushy customers on the phone could use a little work, he couldn't imagine trying to run the business without her.

"Indeed," came the breathy whisper from Egon, and Peter's smile flickered for a second. Then Egon inhaled sharply, a strange, slightly whistling noise, and there was a second sound of something hard bumping against wood. Peter pivoted on one foot, and saw Egon with his functional hand pressed to his chest again, as the crystalline boundary approached the mid-line. A look of panic was rising in Egon's face, and he leaned forward as if he were about to try to struggle to his feet.

Peter was at his side instantaneously; he couldn't remember taking the few steps across the floor. "Hold on, there, Spengs. What's the deal-io?"

Egon's free hand clutched at Peter's sleeve. "Peter, my heart, it's about to stop my heart!"

A wave of icy panic rushed through Peter, too, but he forced it back down. Egon needed him right now; he could panic later. "Hey, Ray, how big a problem is magically induced cardiac arrest by petrification gonna be?"

"Picking up on our big words today, Peter?" Ray was deliberately remaining jocular; Peter mentally cursed at himself - that was his job, and he didn't need to foist it off on the younger man when Ray needed to focus his peculiar skills on the task at hand. "Given that interruption of bloodflow hasn't knocked him out or caused any serious problems yet, and if it's got his heart from that direction it's already got the venae cavae, too - I'm pretty sure the spell that's keeping him alive will keep doing its job." He placed his fingers at the pulse points on Egon's throat, both of them already scaled over with stone. "Your mighty brain is already cut off from blood flow, Egon," Ray pointed out, his voice straining not to melt into sympathy and finally failing. "I know this has got to be horrible, but you'll survive it. I promise."

Egon didn't look reassured. "I feel like I have a trapped bird in my ribcage," he whispered. "At least, the part that hasn't already turned to a rock prison." His pupils were near-pinpoints, and he was beginning to shake. Oh, god, Egon, Peter thought, don't go into shock on us now.

Peter looked at Ray, then at Egon, then at the couch, where Winston was still flipping through his spellbook. "I'm gonna move Egon over there, so he can be a little more comfortable, okay? That all right with you, big guy?" Egon started to nod, and stopped short; his chin was already beginning to fuse. Peter slid one arm under the stony shoulder, with Egon's head cradled on his collarbone, as Ray curled an arm around the physicist's waist from the other side. They shuffled across the room as Winston vacated the sofa, re-plumping the throw pillows as he scooted out of the way. Peter settled the stone arm - god, it was hard to think of that as part of Egon; it was much more natural to Peter to see it as something foreign, invasive, even though it was clearly attached to him - on the arm of the sofa, grabbed a throw pillow for the small of the taller man's back, and eased him down, as Ray caught Egon's feet and removed his shoes and socks.

"Making sure my feet get cold early, Ray?" Egon's whispering was even further muffled; his jaw was now molded in place, but his tongue was still free.

Ray jogged off into the bunkroom, and came back clutching Egon's slippers and a slightly ratty bath mat, which he tossed on the floor like a thin rug. "Your lower extremities are going to be the last part of you to petrify," the occultist said, his lower lip twisting as he slid the slippers onto the physicist's long, narrow feet. "I'm going to need to know when it's safe to start the ritual for the unbinding."

"Of course, Ray. Aaaagh!" Fresh pain blanketed Egon's features, and his body, or what of it could still move, started trembling again. Peter slid sideways onto the couch and grabbed Egon again, drew him up against his torso, and wrapped his arms around him. Winston handed him a worn-looking afghan, which Peter took gratefully and draped around Egon's shoulders.

"Hang on there, Spengs. It's not going to kill you. You're gonna be fine." The platitudes fell from Peter's lips like rainwater from a gutter, automatically, fluidly, meaningless.

"It hurts, Peter," Egon hissed, unable to turn his head towards his friend's shoulder or even to grasp him with more than one hand. His one good arm curled around Peter in a death-grip, clinging to the younger man as if he feared being torn away. "Oh, god, Peter, please . . . " Peter shifted, pulling the older man half into his lap, like a child, pressed against him, the stony side of his chest already cooling. The psychologist wrapped his arms around his friend, and whispered "I'm not letting go, Egon. I'm here. I've got you. You're okay."

Peter held Egon against him, against his chest, as he felt his friend's heart flutter, spasm, stop, and finally grow cold.

When he worked up the courage to look up, Egon's lips were frozen in a grimace of pain, although his eyes were bright with both tears and gratitude. Janine had arrived when Peter's attention was focused on Egon, and she was standing in front of them, one hand on the back of Egon's head and the other on Peter's upper arm. She was crying silently, tears slipping down past the sides of her nose onto her yellow tank top when they got past her glasses.

Peter realized he'd been holding his breath, and he didn't know how long. Long enough for him to feel lightheaded, at least; he released it in a sigh. "You okay in there, big guy? Blink once for yes and twice for no."

Egon blinked once, and then moved his left hand in a wiggling gesture across his lap. Janine's head shot up, and she let go of both of them to jog across the room. She grabbed one of the stenographer's notepads that Egon and Ray used to record their experimental measurements, and began hunting for a pen. Winston fished one out of his pocket, handing it to her with a "Here you go." She raced back and set the notebook on Egon's thigh, clicking the top of the cheap ballpoint and pressing it into his left hand.

His handwriting was shaky and hard to read, although considering that he was writing with his off hand, it was reasonably legible.

Thank you, Peter.
I think my ability to assist with the research is also ending.
Very shortly, my eyes are not going to be able to track.

"Do you want us to leave your glasses on, Spengs?" asked Peter, very softly.

I have a spare pair in the top drawer of my nightstand.
Put the ones I am wearing somewhere safe, and let me wear those.

Egon plucked off his glasses and handed them to Peter, being careful not to scrape them against the pen he was still holding. Peter took them and folded them gently, then jogged into the bunkroom.

As he was sitting on Egon's bunk looking through the nightstand, a sob bubbled up from somewhere near his solar plexus. His hand closed on the spare pair of spectacles, round like the ones he'd just set down but a darker shade of red, and his throat felt like it was closing, too, as he struggled not to burst into tears. He leaned forwards, his head hung almost between his knees, trying to force his breathing back to a normal pattern, but his mind kept playing back those last fluttering heartbeats. And if Ray's mumbo-jumbo doesn't work, he thought, then that really was the end. I'll never feel his pulse again.

"Easy, there, Pete." Winston's voice was warm, as was the hand that closed around Peter's. "Let me take these in to him. You take a minute for yourself, okay? You're not going to be any good to him or Ray if you can't let yourself feel what you're going through."

Peter couldn't speak; his throat was too tight. He nodded, handed over the spare glasses, and gripped Winston's wrist tightly before letting go. As the oldest Ghostbuster's footsteps moved back to the lab, Peter let his head fall into his hands, and tiny sobs wracked him as he struggled to get back under control.

---

Peter stepped out of the bathroom, his face scrubbed pink to remove all traces of tears. Not that the whole team hadn't probably heard him, or that any of them would judge him for it, but he was the morale officer, and he felt like he was falling down on the job, letting his own fear and hurt get in the way of keeping their spirits up. Ray and Janine weren't fragile, he knew that, but they both tended to wear their emotions on their sleeves. That wasn't going to solve the problem at hand, and neither was his own little breakdown. Thank god Winston was there. A hint of a smile played at the corner of Peter's mouth. Ray's hiring instincts weren't half-bad, either.

Ray looked up from the grimoire he'd taken from Peter, his face full of excitement and the book full of makeshift bookmarks - glass stirring rods, strips of paper torn from another steno notebook, a few wooden splints from something, a latex glove, and what looked like a flattened coil of copper wire. "Peter, I think you were right! I've identified two hexes in here that are good candidates for the curse component of the compound spell." He managed to frown without losing the thrill that was still clearly written across his eyes. "But this isn't an alchemical spellbook, and so far I haven't seen anything that makes sense as the last part, the one that's actually causing the transmutation." He set the book flat on the table. "And I've read the whole thing." A stack of photocopies sat next to him; apparently Janine had been busy.

Their secretary was curled up on the sofa half-leaning against Egon, the evidence of dried tears still clear on her cheekbones and glasses. The physicist's face was now a fine carving of translucent crystal, all the way to his upswept hairstyle, although the hand that Janine was clinging to was still skin and bone. She looked utterly heartbroken. Ray saw Peter's gaze turn on her, and said in a much lower voice, "She sat with him through his eyes going, like you did for his heart. I thought she was going to scream for a minute, but she never made a sound." Ray swiped the back of a hand across his forehead. "God, Peter, I know he's alive in there, I know it better than any of the rest of you, and it's hard not to feel like we're losing him. I can't imagine how you and Janine feel."

Peter gave Ray a sidelong glance at that statement, but Ray turned back to the book and jotted something on a scrap of paper. Peter leaned heavily on the table. "So, should Winston and I start going through your alchemy texts, or do we need to start gathering ingredients for you, or what?"

The younger man raked one hand through his hair, leaving it in a series of untidy spikes. "Right now, I'm making a list of what I need to undo the binding. That'll split this into the curse and the alchemical component. Then I need to take readings, maybe do a divination, and figure out which one needs to be lifted next. I won't know what I'll need for that until I can see those two components clearly." Ray ran his finger down the page, and added 'sea salt' to his list.

"See them, Ray?" Peter let his curiosity overcome his worry. "You mean there'll be a light show or something?"

Ray waved his hands. "No, not like that. But this isn't like reciting the words of a spell out of the book like we've done a few times before, with the Hob and at the Macabre house. I'm going to have to be in, well, it's sort of like self-hypnosis, a light trance state to cast the unbinding spell. I'm not just triggering something someone else set up; I'm going to be actively interfering with the energies." Ray took a deep breath, and then amber eyes met emerald with a look of firm determination. "And if I'm doing it right, when I'm in that state, I should be able to see, or at least feel, the other spell energies that are affecting Egon."

Peter frowned, and then began thinking out loud. "Well, if it's like self-hypnosis - that's not too bad. I've done that before, when we did that project on whether hypnosis improved performance on the Zener test. But you'll be in control of it, right, Ray?"

Ray nodded vigorously. "And if it becomes necessary to bring me out of it, all you should have to do is shake me. But I can't imagine that you'll need to do that unless we're attacked by a ghost in the middle of the spell, and the circle I'll cast should be a reasonably good ghost repellant."

Peter's eyes narrowed. "How vulnerable will you be while you're doing it?"

"Magically, I won't be vulnerable at all; I'll be better prepared than I am normally. Physically, I'll be kind of out of it, but it won't be like I can't react to things - I just might be a little slow." Ray studied Peter's expression. "You mean spiritually? I'm not calling up spirits, Peter. Unless something arrives from outside, there's no risk of possession, and the circle should offer me pretty good protection from that, although it's not perfect."

"Just to be safe, I'd like to have a couple of packs and a trap up here." Peter felt bad saying it; it felt like he was telling Ray he didn't trust him, and that wasn't true. Well, it wasn't Ray he didn't trust, anyway. Mostly, it was just a way of pushing back against his own helplessness. And it was one of the few ways he could think of to show that he was protecting Ray and Egon.

Ray didn't look hurt, although that might have been because of a deliberate effort on his part. He thought a moment, then nodded. "Okay, you can have them up here just in case, but you can't power them up during the spell unless it's an emergency. The proton streams would seriously disrupt any energy manipulation I'll be able to do."

"Okay." Peter relaxed just a fraction. "What else can we do?"

"Move the sofa a little bit away from the wall, so I can draw the circle around myself and Egon. Actually, it should be as close to the center of the room as we can get it. I'll need a bowl of water; if that cobalt glass bowl we use for salsa is clean, we can fill that with the bottled spring water from the fridge. Don't use tap water; it'll be harder for me to charge. I think everything else we need is in my box over there. Um, there's a chant that I'll be using; it'll be more powerful if everyone does it, so I'll have to teach it to you. And - Peter - "

The taller man leaned down. "Whatever you need me to do, Ray."

Ray paused, biting his lip. His amber eyes were liquid, and touched with a hint of fear. "Believe in me, Peter?"

Peter drew back in shock, then leaned down and swept Ray into a hug. "Always, Ray. Always."

Their moment was interrupted by a moan from Janine. "Oh, god, Egon!"

Peter and Ray almost knocked each other over in their scramble to get to Egon's side again; the crystallization was creeping down his left hand towards his fingertips. Peter was sure, now, that it was moving faster than it had in the beginning. Egon still gripped the pen, so hard his fingertips were white with the effort, and despite his wrist having frozen, he desperately scribbled at the notebook in front of him, balanced on a leg that might as well have been carved of granite. All four of them watched as each knuckle froze in place, and each stroke of the pen became an effort. The writing grew cramped, then stopped.

The flimsy plastic pen tumbled from his fingertips as they stiffened and glazed over.

After a horrified pause, Winston carefully slid the pad from Egon's lap, and turned it so that Peter and Ray could read the shaky handwriting.

Janine, your presence here has been a great comfort to me. Please understand that I care deeply about you and for you, and I always will, no matter what happens.

Ray, you know that I have every confidence that you will succeed. In the highly unlikely event that you do not, however, please understand that I know you will have done your best and I could never ask more from you.

Winston, it is unfair of me to ask this of you but please look after Ray and Peter. I am concerned that in their rush to free me they will fail to consider their own needs.

Peter I love you

The mark where the pen had fallen served as the only punctuation for the last sentence.

Winston very carefully set the pad down on one of the lab tables. Janine was flushed and her eyes were red, but her mouth was taking on an expression of grim determination. Ray's eyes were too bright, but they were also full of ideas, and he turned to one of the boxes and began unloading a brass brazier. Peter just looked like he'd been punched in the gut.

Janine ducked down, and removed the slippers from Egon's feet. "His left one's completely frozen, too. And his right one will be in just a minute. Cripes, his legs are so long, how did it get down here so quickly?" She grasped his toes and rolled them against the palm of her hand; they flexed weakly in response.

Winston gently moved Peter over under the guise of looking past Janine's shoulder. "It think it's moving faster. It seemed like it sped up after it got his vitals."

Peter swallowed and came back to life. "Yeah, it was practically racing down his hand, there." They watched in silence as the last bits of warm skin on Egon's toes became encased in crystal. Janine slowly let go.

Peter's voice hardened and cracked. "Ray, how long before we can get started with the hoodoo?"

"Give him five minutes to make sure that all of the internal tissues have, uh, petrified. And I still need a bowl of water. Then I'll change and get started."

Peter sprinted from the room and hit the stairs at top speed. Winston looked back at Ray as he and Janine began tugging the sofa out into the open space of the room. "Change?"

Ray looked a bit embarrassed. "Uh, yeah. I need to be in ritual garb. I mean, it's not absolutely necessary, but it'll make me feel like I'm in the right sort of headspace to do this, and it's traditional."

Janine flashed him a wicked grin. "Oh, darn. I was hoping you were going to do it skyclad."

Ray sputtered and almost dropped the candle he was holding. "Janine, who taught you what 'skyclad' meant?"

She pouted. "You think I've worked for you guys for seven years and I've never read anything about the occult?" Winston finished nudging the sofa into place, and decided it was safer not to ask.

---

Ray had insisted to Janine that it wasn't necessary to turn the lights out in the lab, but she had pointed out that it would both add to the atmosphere and make it easier for all of them to remember that this was temporarily a sanctum and not just the lab. He had to admit that she was right on that front. The sun had just set, and the light filtering in from outside was the warm pink and cool blue of early twilight. Two proton packs and an empty trap leaned against the wall by the door, where they could be reached easily if a ghostly attack fell on them. An oil lamp flickered in each corner of the room, and several candles, black and white, marked the cardinal and cross-quarter points of the three concentric circles chalked on the wooden floor.

The outermost circle was the largest one Ray could draw within the rectangle of the room; just inside its borders, he had marked the symbols for signs of the zodiac, and called each one to protect the circle. Slimer hovered miserably outside it; he had drifted in from his tour of his favorite neighborhood haunts - mostly dumpsters behind restaurants, but there were a few people in the neighborhood who put out food for him, like they might for a stray cat or dog - just as Ray had finished changing into his robe. Winston and Janine had explained what had happened to Egon, and Slimer had freaked out, predictably. Then Ray had had to explain to the little green ghost that he needed to stay outside the circle while Ray was working. Initially, Slimer had protested; then he'd watched Ray start chalking the circles, and he'd screeched and run off. Every ten or fifteen minutes since then, he'd come back, stopped just outside the circle, and stared at them, lip quivering, but he'd stayed quiet and he hadn't tried to push his way in.

The next circle was about twelve feet in diameter, large enough to easily encompass the sofa. Ray had chalked the alchemical symbols for earth, air, fire, and water at the compass points, asked the elements to support and protect the rite, and lit a candle for each element. He'd stationed Peter, Winston, and Janine roughly equally spaced around the outside of this circle; they were passing a stick of sandalwood incense around counter-clockwise, slowly rotating positions on each pass. He'd already sprinkled the whole room with salt water and waved around a bit of smoldering sage, which had made Peter sneeze.

The innermost circle was about three feet in diameter, immediately under Egon and the couch. It was filled with a pentagram - specifically, the banishing pentagram of the element of earth - which had made Winston a little nervous until Ray had carefully explained that it was a banishing pentagram, not a summoning one. In its center, Ray had put the blue bowl, now full of salt water, and the brazier, holding a small incense charcoal and a spoonful of frankincense. A steady trail of fumes curled up around the edges of the sofa; the combination of the smoke from the brazier, the smoke from the incense stick, and the remaining haze from the sage made the air in the lab seem heavy and alive.

Good. Ray inhaled the mixed scents, grounded and centered himself, and let himself sink into a receptive state. Ritual consciousness required him to let the chattering part of his mind drift. Other people had to turn off their inner skeptic, but Ray didn't really have much of one. With Peter and Egon around to be his external skeptics, he hadn't needed one in a long time.

Egon . . . . He's trusting me to be able to do this. Ray roused himself from his thoughts and raised both his arms, the athame clasped in his right hand. The voluminous sleeves of his robe fell back, and he called out "We begin."

Immediately, the three helpers in the middle circle stopped. Janine was holding the incense; she folded her hands in front of her with the still-smoldering stick poking out off to one side. Peter clasped his behind him, and stood with his feet about a foot apart, knees locked. Winston straightened up, hands at his sides in choirboy at-rest position. They all looked at Ray expectantly.

"Anathi ghabanahi, naulan michthalas." Ray chanted the opening words of the ritual carefully, precisely, his voice rising and falling in a pattern that was not quite a tune. "Nahali habraxas intheo." These were the words of power, and they weren't in any known language. At least, not any known human language. His hands made a series of gestures, tracing sigils in the air in front of him with the knife. The air in the room seemed to thicken, and the flames of the candles guttered and spat. Winston's eyes widened, and Peter visibly stopped himself from cringing; Janine licked he lips expectantly and looked hopeful.

Well, that felt like it worked. Ray had decided to translate the rest of the ritual into English, so he wouldn't stumble over pronunciation and so that the others could follow what he was doing. He'd deliberately kept the wording a little archaic for flavor, but he'd balked when Peter had suggested using thee's and thou's. "Brothers and sisters, we stand here between the sacred and the profane to undo what was ill done, for the betterment of our brother. Speak, that this is so."

"So be it," chorused Peter, Winston, and Janine together. Ray heard Winston mutter "amen," under his breath, and Janine echo "amein," under hers.

"Lift up your voices, that you may lend assistance in this task for which we have gathered." Ray closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, and heard the others draw breath with him. He concentrated, and then began the translated chant on a single note: "What was made will be unmade, What was undone will be done again. What was bound will be unbound, What was tied will be loosed again." He inhaled, and repeated the chant again, and again, and again, the voices of his friends wobbling to stay on the note around him, to keep the same rhythm, to breathe in the same places as he was. On the third time around, he heard a pair of hands clapping slowly, keeping a beat to keep them all together. That must be Winston; that didn't sound like Janine's hands, and Peter couldn't keep a beat with a metronome to spot him. A smaller pair of hands joined him - that must be Janine - and by the end of the line Peter's foot had stated tapping. Ray opened his eyes, still singing, and stepped forward, athame in hand.

He realized with a start that the room was full of snaking and pooling currents of energy, clearly visible to him now; the shock of seeing them almost jerked him out of his trance. He forced himself to sink back into the chant as he moved to the edge of the central pentacle. Janine's alto had jumped up a fourth and was singing in a warbly harmony with his and Peter's tenors and Winston's baritone. What was bound will be unbound. Ray looked at Egon through the smoke trickling from the brazier.

A web of tangled grey, like dead vines, snarled around his fallen comrade, held in place by a net of glowing red. A thin tendril of both energies wound around and around, back to the wooden box on the lab table. Ray looked at it, and it pulsed, a sickening throb of that dead greyness. Fortunately, the table was within the outermost circle. He began to move, his feet touching the floor in rhythm with the chant. Ray carefully stepped over the middle circle between Janine and Peter, and crept barefoot across the floor, around and around, as if he were stalking the box.

What was made will be unmade. The chant had a melody now, steady, up, down, and back to the central note. The thing holding Egon in its grip, trying to hold back the brilliant blue glow of his aura, was still coming from the box, from the egg. How could that be happening? But before he worried about that, he had to stop it, to break the bond. Ray pivoted, half-prowling, half-dancing across the floor, the chant pulsing through him. His left hand flashed out and caught the foul umbilicus connecting the egg to Egon; his right hand brought the athame down as the twined tendrils writhed in his grip, and slashed through them.

What was tied will be loosed again. Five voices, alto to bass, resonated around the circle, harmonizing, holding him up in a current of energy. The twisted energies in his hands wriggled like a snake and tried to loop around him, to lasso him and stop him from freeing Egon. He slid the athame into its sheath on the rope tied around his waist, and snagged the red vine in his right hand. He began wrapping the red cord around one hand and the gray cord around the other, untangling them, yanking them apart. A crackling blue energy sparked between the two sinews, and Janine gasped in her cocoon of golden light, but she kept chanting.

With a yank, Ray ripped the two separated fibers away from Egon. They snapped in his hands, writhed like worms yanked from the ground, and then went limp and dissolved.

Ray pulled the athame back out from its sheath and spread his arms straight out. The room was full of energy - leftovers from various experiments, the crackling yellow traces left by the proton packs, the shimmering white sparkles that were the residue of the traps, the green and purple that was the echo of Peter's latent psi, the gold and purple that was the same for Janine, the pulsing indigo and red of Winston's natural spirituality, the shining blue and yellow that was Egon's intuitive connection with realms beyond this one, the flashing blue and orange that was his own native power, and over it all, the bright green overlay of Slimer's PKE residuals. He drew all of it into himself, every erg of it that was enclosed within the larger circle, and directed it through the athame as he traced the banishing pentagram again above Egon, directly over the one chalked on the floor. Janine, on cue, tossed the incense stick she was still holding at the brazier, where it bumped the incense charcoal and began going up all at once.

Ray waited until the chant reached its end, and then shouted "Ia!" as loud as he could and still control it. All the power he'd drawn in rushed out of him, through the banishing pentagram he'd drawn in the air, down through Egon's stone form into the one below him. It sounded like a thunderclap to Ray as it went, and nearly knocked him over.

He regained his footing, made sure he hadn't dropped the knife, and looked at Egon. The red tracery was completely gone, and there was no connection between the grey that still bound him and the box, which still pulsed. The room was silent, and the energy that had filled the room was now confined to the chalk lines in the floor, which glowed brighter than flame to Ray's eyes. He noted, somewhere at the back of his mind, that he could still see the free-floating energy out beyond the outer circle, and that he probably ought to do something about that on a regular basis from now on - it probably attracted spirits.

Ray dropped to one knee, and brought the athame down hard, so that the point stuck in the floor just in front of the couch. The banishing pentacle flashed, and then faded. "Nahali habraxas evaunt. The rite is accomplished. So be it."

"So be it," echoed his friends' voices from around him, and the air vibrated once and went still. Ray turned towards the nearest person - Peter, as it happened - and murmured "That was great." Then he pitched over sideways, barely missing hitting his head as his friends' strong arms caught him.

---

When Ray came to, he was sitting on the couch between the stone figure of Egon and the rather limp figure of Janine, who, while not out cold, was obviously woozy. Peter was similarly slumped in one of the wooden lab chairs. Winston was circling around the room - clockwise, Ray noted with a smile - putting out all the candles; he'd turned the lights back on.

"Well, that was some powerful medicine you laid down there, Tex," drawled Peter, raising his head. "How much did you yank out of us there at the end?"

"More than I actually intended to," admitted Ray. He looked around, and confirmed that he was back to normal consciousness; he couldn't see Slimer's overlay, or his friends' auras, anymore. He remembered his last thought before grounding the ritual through the athame, and sat up. "When this is all over, I need to do a full cleansing ritual for the whole firehouse. We leave energy residue all over the place. I'm almost surprised it doesn't show up on the PKE meters."

"It probably would if you two geniuses didn't automatically filter out Slimer's residuals. How much of that is really him, and how much is stuff you assume is him that's actually from your nefarious experiments?" Peter indicated the room with a wave.

"Good point. Although some of it is from us, directly." Ray pulled himself up from the sofa, trying not to jostle either Janine or Egon, padded across to the smaller table, and rummaged in one of his boxes. He came up with a small, old-fashioned broom made of straw bound to a willow rod with rawhide thongs, and began sweeping away the chalk of the outer circle, thanking each zodiac sign as he reached it.

"What happened at the end there that took you out, and almost took Pete and Janine with you?" asked Winston, as he started gathering up the candles that had been out long enough to not drip wax.

"I channeled all the energy in the room through me into the banishing pentagram. I think I didn't know my own strength, and pulled too hard from you guys, and then when I pushed it back out again, I sent too much of my own power with it." Ray paused at Libra, and leaned against the table. "I've never done this with a small group before. I've been to a few semi-public rituals with a huge crowd of people, in the hundreds, and I've been to a few that were gatherings of several covens, maybe thirty to fifty people. And of course I've worked on my own a lot. But it's . . . different, when it's only five."

"Five? There were only four of us in the circle. Was Slimer helping from outside?" Janine's voice was wobbly.

"No, there were five people in the circle; I could feel four other auras, plus my own . . . " Confusion clouded Ray's features for an instant, until Peter sat upright like someone had shocked him and shouted "Ray's right, I could hear Egon singing with us!"

"I couldn't," stated Winston, warily.

"I - oh, now I'm not sure, but when Ray had that weird look on his face and was dancing around the outside of the circle with that knife out like a weapon, I think I heard him, too." Janine's eyes were shining with hope, and she twisted around on the sofa to look into Egon's frozen eyes. There was no flicker of awareness in them, reflecting the light like sapphires, but she addressed him anyway: "We know you're still in there, Egon, trying to help us, and we're doing everything we can to help you. Just trust us; we'll do it."

"Gosh, I hope I didn't pull too much from him, too," worried Ray.

Peter's brow creased with concern, but he brushed off Ray's worry easily. "Well, if you did, it's nothing that a few minutes of rest haven't cured for the rest of us, and he's not going to be running anywhere in the next few minutes." He clambered to his feet to illustrate his point, and retrieved the bowl and brazier from under the couch. Janine tucked up her feet to get out of his way, and then followed him off the sofa as he carried the bowl over to the lab sink and dumped it out. She snagged the brazier by the handle and carried it gingerly to the window, opening it with one hand and then carefully shaking out the ash.

They cleaned in silence for a few minutes. Ray sorted through the incredibly vivid images in his memory, distorted as they were by his entranced state, interpreting them through the filter of his academic knowledge. Finally, he looked up and said, "I could really use something to eat. Anyone with me on that?"

General noises of assent rang from around the room, followed by Slimer's "Oboy! Food!" from the bunkroom.

"Takeout?" asked Peter, heading for the phone.

Janine shook her head. "If we've got eggs, I'll make omelets. Not," she reminded them in a sharper voice, "that I'm gonna make a habit of cooking for you guys, but it'll be faster than waiting for something to be delivered, and I, for one, need to build my energy back up." She disappeared down the stairs, and Slimer followed her, babbling about pizza.

Winston and Ray finished cleaning up as Peter dried out the glass bowl. "Should we leave this up here, or take it back down with us?" he asked as they set down their brooms and towels.

"Let's leave it for now. We're gonna have to do this at least once more," replied Ray, as they filed out of the lab and headed down the spiral stairway.

"Once? Don't we have two more spells to dispel?" asked Winston, the smell of toast already wafting from the kitchen.

"Actually, when I unbound the two effects and dispelled the binding, the curse went right with it. It didn't have enough substance on its own to exist without being bound to the other effect. Well, that and I seriously blasted it when I yanked everyone's energy," Ray finished sheepishly as they gathered around the dining room table.

"Don't you guys debrief without me," called Janine from the kitchen, accompanied by the smell of melting butter. "I wanna hear everything Ray has to say about what happened."

Peter wandered into the kitchen and stuck his head in the refrigerator. "What kind of soda does everyone want?" He brought four cans back to the table, then went back to get glasses and ice. By the time he'd dredged up four clean glasses, Janine had set two omelets wrapped around melted cheese in front of Ray and Winston, and was most of the way through a third. Ray realized again, as soon as the plates hit the table, that he was starving, and tucked in immediately. He was chasing the last few bites around the plate when Janine came out and set down omelets for herself and Peter. Slimer floated out of the kitchen holding a plastic plate of scrambled eggs and making "yum, yum" noises to himself.

Ray sucked down about half of his soda and faced the rest of the table. "Okay, guys. The good news is that the binding is gone, and I managed to remove the curse at the same time."

"Yay! So we're two-thirds of the way to getting Egon back?" cheered Janine around a mouthful of toast.

"I'd say halfway," replied Ray carefully. "The unidentified third component wasn't what I thought it was. In fact, I don't think it's a spell at all."

"So what is it, Tex?" prompted Peter as Ray finished his drink.

"That's the bad news. I don't know," sighed Ray. "I had assumed that the stone egg was just a carving, and that the effects were a compound spell that had been cast on it. The curse let it transfer from the object to whoever picked it up." He flicked a speck of cheese off his ritual robe, and realized he probably should have changed before eating. "But that's not what I saw. It looked like the petrifying effect is an inherent property of the egg. The curse was like a spring trigger; normally, the effect would take a lot longer to affect someone - it wouldn't just petrify someone completely from one touch. And the binding was there so that the curse would keep affecting someone once they were no longer touching the egg; they couldn't just put it down and walk away." Ray rubbed at his forehead with the back of his hand. "We're going to have to figure out what kind of artifact the egg actually is to be able to find out how to counter it."

"Which means we hit the books again," groaned Winston.

"I'll put on another pot of coffee," offered Janine.

"Just don't let Ray brew it," called back Peter. Ray cuffed him halfheartedly.

Properly fortified, they piled back into the lab. It did feel different in there, Peter realized. Less noisy, somehow, although the usual sounds of traffic and pedestrians still floated up to the windows. Ray gathered the books that were pure grimoires into a stack on the table by the door, and handed out new ones - equally old and musty, Peter noticed with dismay.

"These are more general occult references, along with some alchemical ones," explained Ray. "The good thing is that most of them are in English, and the rest are either French or Latin - we won't be stuck without someone who can read Sumerian." Peter flinched, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Janine do the same, but Ray had buried himself in a new tome and didn't seem to notice. Then again, he'd felt Egon's energy in the circle much more than they had, which probably meant that he was much more confident that they could get their friend back than they were.

They sank back into the lab chairs, books spread on tables, the floor, the tops of shelves, every available surface, and went back to their frantic research. The whispering noise of turning pages, Slimer's garbled voice as he talked to himself in the bunkroom, and occasional wordless noises of excitement or disappointment from Ray as he found possible leads and then dismissed them again, were the only sounds that disturbed them.

Maybe they could have used a little more noise. Several hours later, despite the coffee, they were all nodding off. "The energy drain's still getting to us," complained Ray, rousing himself out of a treatise written in what could just as easily have been labeled medieval Italian as late medieval Latin.

Peter pushed himself up from the codex he had been examining with his eyes shut. "Is Egon in danger from staying petrified too long?"

"I don't think so, at least not yet, although I'm 'theorizing from incomplete information,' as Egon might say," responded Ray, yawning. "I mean, that's got to be boring as anything, but Egon's got the strongest mind I know - he can entertain himself for a while, working out topological connectivity formulas or something." He looked more serious. "I'd only really worry if he's trapped in there long enough to start suffering from sensory deprivation. That's your area, Peter; how long would that take?"

"Depends on the person." The psychologist's face was grim. "Some people start breaking down after only a few hours. But you're right, Ray, Egon's stronger than that." His gaze withdrew inward for a moment; this was guesswork more than calculation, but it still required careful thought. "Just at a guess, I'd say he'll probably be good for a day before he starts hallucinating, and if he can keep his mind away from traumatic memories, a few hours of deprivation hallucinations probably won't hurt him. If he can sleep, subtract that from the deprivation time."

"And I don't think it's complete sensory deprivation," added Janine, her voice thick with fatigue.

"Oh?" Peter looked the question at her.

"One, he kept writing after his eyes were, y'know, crystallized, which I think means he could at least see a little bit. And two, all of us except Winston could hear him singing along with us when we were chanting, which oughtta mean he could hear us." She crossed her arms, daring Peter to tell her she was wrong.

"He could have 'heard' us the same way we were 'hearing' him," pointed out Ray. "That might have been an energy thing, rather than actual auditory perception."

"And I suspect our Egon could write with his off-hand in the dark underwater," finished Peter, "although the fact that anyone other than him could read it is a bit of evidence in your favor. I think we just don't have enough information to guess." His voice softened. "But I sure hope you're right, Melnitz. I really hate to think of him trapped in there all alone."

Winston stood up from a relatively modern-looking book of known mystical artifacts, rubbed at his eyes with a knuckle, and put a hand on Peter's back. "Egon told me to take care of you mad scientists, too, and I think making sure you get enough sleep that you can think straight is part of that. Let's get you boys to bed, and you, too, Janine. You can have the couch in the rec room; I'll get you a blanket. We can start fresh in the morning."

---

Peter woke up and looked at the clock. 4:35 am, about three and a half hours after Winston had insisted they all get some shut-eye. He was still exhausted, but his eyes lit on the empty bed where Egon should have been, and his ears found the space in the normal nighttime noises of the firehall where Egon's resonant bass snoring was missing, and he couldn't make his mind relax. His gaze flickered across to Ray, who seemed to be sleeping soundly, without a trace of the strange, driving force that had animated him earlier. Peter slipped out of bed with the near-silence of long practice and padded across the hall to the lab.

The frozen statue of his best friend stared sightlessly at the dark windows. Since Egon hadn't frozen all at once, there was a strange, off-balance feel to the crystalized body, as if different parts were moving in different directions. It was an oddly un-composed look for Egon, who normally prided himself on his togetherness. It didn't help that the captured facial expression was clearly that of a man in pain, although it had seemed that the worst of it was over after his heart had been petrified.

Peter carefully lifted the lab chair he'd been sitting in earlier and set it down directly in front of Egon, on the bathmat that had been kicked out of the way during Ray's spellcasting. It did a reasonably good job of muffling the sound. The brunet pushed the lab door closed and lowered himself into the chair, equally carefully. For several minutes, he stared into Egon's forced-open and unblinking eyes, glittering blue topazes against the streetlights and moonlight filtering in from outside.

"I don't know if you're still in there, Egon," Peter began, his voice low so as not to disturb his teammates in the next room. "Ray says he knows you are. I'm not so sure, but I think you are. I sure hope so. I don't want to think that this - thing," he continued, waving his hand in the direction of the box, "has somehow just shut you down. And even if you are in there, for all I know you're sleeping like any sane person would be at this hour. Maybe you're awake, but you can't hear me. I don't know how much is getting through this." He traced his fingers gently across the glassy surface just under Egon's ear.

"But I just - I just needed to talk to you. God, you had to give me your last words, and you had to tell me - " He faltered, his voice catching. "Dammit, Egon, I love you too. And I can't ask you what you mean by that, telling me that now, like this. This isn't fair." Peter's right hand curled into a fist in his lap. "You know I love you, Egon. You've known as long as I've known you. And I can't ever say it, because I'm a jerk, and because we're both afraid of opening that whole can of worms again."

He sighed, his green eyes welling with unspent tears. He hadn't realized he had any left, but apparently they were regenerating. "I keep wondering how badly we screwed up, Egon. We had - that whole first year, we had so many opportunities. We could have said anything, we could have done anything, and we were both too chickenshit to try. I was afraid for my reputation. I cared what people thought about me because I thought that was my only open road to power over my own life, manipulating people and making them think they liked me. You were the first person other than my mom to really like me, you know that, Egon? I don't think anyone ever saw the real me before you did. No one cared enough to look past the surface, and I wasn't exactly going to encourage it, either."

"And you," Peter continued, his voice picking up an edge of accusation, "were afraid of what your parents would think. You didn't have any friends to impress, and I don't think it ever occurred to you to worry about what your lab partners thought of you, but you sure worried about impressing your professors, and your parents still ran your life. A junior in college, and you were still calling them every night! You hadn't told them about any of your parapsych or mythology classes, because you knew your dad wouldn't approve. We were buddies for a whole semester before you even told them about me, because you knew your father wouldn't approve of your having friends outside the science department, and half the time I think you only got up the guts to mention me because you knew your mom would be relieved to know that you at least had made friends with somebody."

Peter had slumped in the chair, his tailbone balanced on the edge of the seat. He unclenched his fists and ran his hands through the tangled thatch of his hair. "And yeah, I worried about what my folks would say, too. I already knew Mom's health wasn't good. I didn't want to, I don't know, shock her by telling her that her little all-American boy, straight-A student, football player, frat pledge and BMOC-to-be was a faggot, or at least half a fag. And I was sort of afraid Dad would try and thrash it out of me, if he found out, but at that point I was more than ready to just try and snow him on that front. He'd already lied to me about who he was sleeping with."

"Between the two of us, we had so many good reasons not to try it. The Seventies were pretty free if you just wanted to do your thing, but they weren't ready for - long-term alternatives, I guess. If we both slept with a long string of guys, no one would have been that scandalized. But just each other? Or, really, two guys falling in love, not just fucking? I don't know if even New York was liberal enough for that, then." Peter almost slid off the chair; he pushed himself back up with his arms and leaned forward, with his elbows on his knees. "Yeah, actually, it probably was if you knew the right crowd. But we didn't. We wouldn't have even known who to ask about it."

"So we didn't. We chickened out. Do you remember that conversation, Egon? I had to get halfway drunk to even get up the courage to bring it up to you. We sat at either end of your couch like the space in between was no-man's-land, and we stumbled through everything, and god, we were so stupid. And we went over every reason we shouldn't fall in love. Every reason we shouldn't, and none of the reasons we should have. We agreed that we wouldn't, and that we'd never talk about it again. And then you kissed me, Egon, remember?" A single tear trickled down Peter's cheek, unbidden. "That one kiss, that we packed everything we weren't ever going to do or say into. I never wanted to let go of you, Egon; I wanted to sit there on that ratty couch with my hands in your hair and your mouth on mine and just freeze time there forever. And then I got up and I walked out that door like an idiot, and I went to some stupid sorority party and banged some poor Barnard girl I'd never seen before and never saw again, and when I'd used her like a cheap tissue she asked why I was crying and she tried to comfort me. I didn't deserve her in the state I was in. I certainly didn't deserve you."

Peter held back sobs, but his voice was tight and raspy, and both his eyes were leaking. "All that time, Egon, there's never been a day I don't remember that kiss, don't remember burning for you like a Roman candle. I've thrown myself at a hundred different women, maybe more, and managed to fall in love with one or two, but not one of them has replaced you for me. I keep coming home to you; where you are is home, for me. I need you, Egon. I need you like I need air. And it's killing me that I can't ever talk to you about it."

"I think we screwed up. I think we should have tried it. Maybe it wouldn't have worked out; we're pretty different, and I don't even know if we're sexually compatible. Maybe I would have gotten tired and screwed around on you. I don't think so, but it could have happened." Peter had slid forward in the chair again. "Hell, maybe you would eventually have cheated on me. Maybe we would have fallen in love with Dana and Janine and not fallen out of love with each other and worked something out. I don't know if you're even really in love with Janine, you know that? But the point is, we don't know what could have happened. It could have been magic, Egon, something a hundred times more powerful than what Ray did in here tonight and more. We'll never know. And I wanna know, Egon, I want to know what we're like together." He slipped out of the chair entirely, onto the floor at Egon's frozen feet.

For a moment, there was only the sound of Peter's sobs as he laid his head on Egon's petrified knees and cried, fighting for control of his voice if not the rest of him. Then he murmured "I love you, too, Egon. More than I've ever loved anyone. And it scares me. I get along okay when I don't have to think about it, but it scares me. Love's stronger than I am. I hate it when something takes me over like this. And this hasn't ever gone away."

Peter scrambled up onto the couch, curling his arms around the stone statue of his best friend in the world, the man at the center of his life. "Why did you have to tell me that? Why couldn't you write those words any other day, Egon? I love you, too. I always will."

Sobs became ragged breathing. Ragged breaths evened into calmer ones. Peter's breathing finally settled into wet half-snores as grief gave way to exhaustion and then fitful sleep.

If two pairs of eyes, amber and aqua, shared a look of knowing sympathy in the hallway, there were no other open eyes to see it. If one pair of feet crept back into the bunkroom, and another slipped quietly down the stairs, Peter didn't hear either of them.

---

The sound of rattling pots and pans, accompanied by the smell of a truly wretched pot of coffee, didn't quite wake Peter up; that was Slimer, who insisted he was checking up on Egon - but still managed to sideswipe Peter and get ectoplasm down the left side of his face.

It was just as well, Peter realized. He had slept with his head in the statue's lap, and his neck had a terrible crick in it; worse, while he knew that Ray and Winston would have noticed his absence from the bunkroom when they got up, and must have either figured out where he was or come in to check on him, he really didn't relish the idea of them coming in and finding him like that. At best, one of them would have made the obvious innuendo, and he wasn't sure he could handle that in the state he was in.

On the other hand, he reflected, Ray had met them only a year after Peter had met Egon. Ray had always been pretty perceptive. If he hadn't picked up on the tension between them, then he was a much greater innocent than Peter knew he was, even then. It was entirely possible that Ray would understand that joking about that was . . . unwise.

But Winston wouldn't, and he would be looking for ways to break the tension, since - Peter winced, and not just because of his neck - their team psychologist was lying down on the job. He dragged himself to his feet and staggered into the bathroom.

By the time he'd hauled himself back out, dressed, and stumbled downstairs, the scent of breakfast was thick in the air. Peter meandered into the kitchen and over to the coffeepot. Janine was also already up, and dressed in the same skirt she'd worn the previous day along with one of Ray's t-shirts from a science fiction convention. A rather silly-looking alien twined its arms across her chest as she stirred a pot full of something thick, bubbly, and redolent of brown sugar and cinnamon.

"Mmph," Peter mumbled by way of greeting, poking in the cabinets for a clean mug and finally fishing one out of the drying rack. Someone had put the dirty ones from the previous day in the sink, but no one had washed dishes last night. He couldn't even remember whose turn it had been. Peter poured himself a cup of coffee, blew on it, and took a sip.

It was too weak, and over-brewed to compensate, with a definite burnt overtone.

Peter took another few swallows and then protested to no one in particular, "Who let Ray make the coffee?"

"Sorry, Dr. V.," replied Janine, taking the pot off the stove and hunting in the drawer for a ladle, "he beat me here, and I figured it's not in my job description, anyway."

"Neither is oatmeal. Not that I'm complaining; redheads with great legs can make me breakfast anytime." Peter tried flashing a patented Venkman smile at her. It faded a bit at her response; rather than coming back with a snappy put-down, like she normally did, or just taking the compliment, she looked distinctly uncomfortable. For a second, Peter wondered if the 'great legs' line struck her as sexual harassment without Egon around to distract her. "Uh-oh. Did I just step over the line?"

Suddenly, her regular smirk was back, if not in full force. "Not a chance, Dr. V. 'Sides, you wouldn't know where the line was if I drew it on the floor in chalk. You want raisins in your oatmeal or what?"

Peter winced a bit inwardly at the reminder of the diagrams from last night's occult happenings, and shot a glance at Ray, who was setting the table with a thoughtful look in his eyes. The youngest Ghostbuster seemed a little less energetic than usual, but that might just be because Egon wasn't back among their ranks yet. "No, thanks, Janine, I prefer my grapes like my women: young and unwrinkled." Janine found a serving spoon and seemed to decide that was good enough; she headed out into the dining room with the still-steaming pot.

Peter poured himself a glass of orange juice to wash the taste of the coffee out of his mouth and joined the table. Ray had already filled a bowl and was adding butter and even more brown sugar to his oatmeal; Winston had sprinkled a bit of cinnamon sugar over his. Janine added a splash of maple syrup, which Peter hadn't even realized they had in the cupboard; he wondered briefly how Slimer had overlooked it. Speaking of Slimer, here he was, right on cue. Peter dished out a bowl of steaming porridge and tasted it before adding anything. It seemed reasonably flavorful; Janine had already sweetened it a bit and added some spice. He decided to eat it as-is; if nothing else, maybe she'd take it as a compliment to her cooking. Ray scooped out a bowl for Slimer, who promptly poured it down his gullet and wandered into the kitchen to look for leftover pizza.

"Decided to stand guard over Egon last night?" Winston's question was gentler than Peter expected, and the younger man relaxed a bit. "Yeah," he admitted, rubbing the back of his neck, "I woke up in the middle of the night and felt kinda bad leaving him in there by himself."

Ray nodded. "If I hadn't wanted to leave him over the pentagram to make sure it finished grounding out the energy from the ritual, I'd have suggested we move him to the bunkroom overnight, too."

Peter hadn't remembered that Ray had left the pentagram up. He shivered a little at the idea that he'd spent the last half of the night over it - then he caught himself. It wasn't a summoning pentagram that some half-cocked would-be magus was using for summoning demons; this was part of his friend Ray's attempts to free Egon from his crystalline prison, and Peter knew perfectly well from his own experience of last night's ritual that it represented some sort of progress. At the very least, Ray had unlinked Egon from the stone egg and gotten some idea of what they needed to do next.

Peter decided to change the subject. "So what's next on the agenda, Ray?" Before the younger man could swallow his mouthful of oatmeal, Slimer drifted out of the kitchen again. At least he was remembering to use the doorways instead of oozing through the walls. Peter tried to catch the spud's attention by waving a banana at him, which seemed to work. "Yo, spud. You said this morning that you were checking up on Egon. What did you mean?"

Slimer's eyes grew sad. "Egon stuck. Swimer make suwre Egon still thewre, Egon not gone, not mowre stuck."

Ray's eyebrows went up at that. "We can see him right there, Slimer. We know he's not gone. What do you mean by 'more stuck'?"

Slimer looked around. He always got nervous when the guys tried to ask him questions his English wasn't good enough to answer; the little green ghost obviously didn't think in words. "Bad fhing make Egon stuck, but not aww way stuck. If Egon stuck too wong, Egon go 'way?"

Janine's mouth puckered. "Ray, can ghosts sense life energy?"

"Some of them can," answered Ray. "Sometimes Slimer can tell where we are and track us that way, although he's not great at it. I think he's saying that he can tell Egon's still alive in there, even though he's frozen. Maybe the part about not being all the way stuck means that Egon's energy is still active, even if his body isn't?"

"Uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah!" Slimer nodded enthusiastically, sending blobs of ectoplasm flying. Peter managed to cover his coffee cup just in time.

"Well, we pretty much knew that from the ritual, but thanks for the confirmation, Slimer," said Janine with a grin. Slimer did a quick salute, or at least what passed for one for him, and zipped off out the window. Peter shook his head. "That spud has no attention span, I swear."

Ray stood up and began clearing the dishes off the table. "We'll need to pick up where we left off. We're looking for any artifact that might cause the petrification effect - it doesn't need to look like an egg, I don't think. Uh, and we should probably follow up on those calls from yesterday -"

"I'll take care of that," interrupted Janine. "I'll need to reschedule your bust for today, so I'll be on the phone anyway."

"- Okay, great. You go ahead and handle that, and then meet us back in the lab. We'll run right up and get started." Ray scuttled off into the kitchen with the dirty dishes, and started the water running in the sink.

Peter and Winston headed for the stairs again. As they headed into the lab, Winston asked "You holding up okay? I don't mind saying, I was a little freaked out when you weren't with us this morning. Ray figured out where we'd find you, but . . . "

Peter shook his head. "I'm antsy. Egon's still down, although after last night I trust Ray to find a way to beat it even if he has to do that shamanic trance thing he was doing and pull the spell apart thread by thread with his teeth." He swallowed. "And I'm a little bit freaked out about how easy that was for Ray last night, and the look on his face when he was stalking the binding spell."

"Yeah, that was weird. I've seen Ray look like that on busts before, when he's about to hunt down a ghost that's hurt one of us, but it's not a fun look, and the chanting while he was doing it just made it stranger." Winston pressed his lips together in concern.

"And on top of all this, someone sent us that package. Which means someone has it out for us." Peter frowned; he didn't like accumulating enemies. He had enough already. "And it's likely that they'll know that booby trap only got one of us. They probably won't expect us to get Egon back, but they might try and make a move on the three of us left. Or four; we can't even assume they won't think Janine's a threat." They'd reached the lab again, and the statue of Egon was staring helplessly towards the door. Peter picked up the book he'd dozed off on the previous night and took it over to the sofa to resume his vigil, awake this time. Winston found his and spread it out on the lab table, and they started their research again.

---

"We're not getting anywhere!" Ray slammed the book in his lap shut and tossed it at the wall. It bounced off with a thump and landed on the floor, pages falling open to a diagram of a complicated piece of alchemical equipment. Peter clambered off the sofa to pick it up, and was suddenly struck by the image of someone who looked exactly like Egon without his glasses in Renaissance-looking garb, using equipment like that in a dimly-lit lab. He shook his head to clear it.

"Taking it out on the books won't help, Tex." Peter closed the book and returned it to the pile on the computer desk. "Besides, you need to work on your pitching arm before you try a throw like that."

Ray buried his head in his hands and exhaled sharply. "I know, Peter, but we've been at this for three hours and we haven't made any progress. I thought we were so close last night." He raised his eyes and glared balefully across the room at the closed box. "Maybe I need to go back to the scientific approach for a while, take some readings or something."

"Hey, anything that gives us more information has gotta be a good thing, even if it only tells us what this thing isn't." Winston had churned through three texts to Peter's two in that time, but he looked like he was ready for a break. Janine was still downstairs on the phone; she'd come up once to let them know that she was playing phone tag with someone in Cincinnati who might have a lead for them.

Ray shoved the pile of books next to him away with a bit more force than was strictly necessary, and began rummaging in one of the drawers for the thick rubber gloves they had worn on their pre-Gozer busts to protect them from potential proton emissions from the packs. He tugged a pair on, and began switching on several of the devices he and Egon had painstakingly assembled from whatever was handy at the time. A familiar hum and crackle filled the lab. Ray fumbled with the lid of the box; the clumsy fingers of the gloves weren't small enough for him to pry the lid off. Winston handed him a file and stood back as Ray opened the wooden casket to reveal the object that had caused them so much trouble.

Ray frowned. "Did that happen when Egon dropped it? I wouldn't have thought that landing back in the box would do that."

Winston and Peter both leaned forward to see what Ray was pointing at. It took Peter a couple of seconds to find it. There was a tiny crack in the egg near the more pointed end, barely a couple of millimeters long. Winston shrugged. "I dunno, man; I didn't get that good a look at it the first time." Peter just shook his head; he couldn't remember, either.

Ray picked up the metal colander that served as the sensory array for their psychokinetic visual imager and placed it over the egg in its box. A fuzzy image began to fill the screen. The egg itself was clearly visible in solid yellow; the screen beyond its boundaries was filled with blue-grey static.

Peter squinted. Were there shades of color inside the stone itself? What did that mean?

Ray poked his tongue out of the corner of his mouth and adjusted two sliders on the control panel. The screen went darker and the static broke up into a pattern of rapidly moving pixels. The engineer shook his head. "Well, that's information, but I don't know what it means, either. I've never seen that before, and I don't know whether that's an energy field or if that thing's giving off ectoplasmic sub-molecular particles. Dammit, I need Egon for this." He rubbed one hand through his hair, leaving static-charged spikes in the wake of the heavy glove.

Janine slid through the half-open doorway. "Back to your toys? Did the books not have anything, or were you guys just getting cross-eyed reading?"

"A little of both." Winston waved her over. "What's new?"

"Well, we've got a couple of leads." Janine's lips were curled in a faintly predatory look. "One, there's an assistant professor at Ohio State who was denied tenure at Case Western. He blames several members of the Spengler family, most notably Egon's uncle Cyrus - remember him? - for rejecting his theories. His name's Warren Tillio. He started out in physical chemistry, but he's been dabbling in alchemy, something called 'sigil magic', and weirder stuff since then. Losing tenure sort of drove him around the bend, although he was able to get another professor gig before he got really weird. It's possible that he decided to try and get his revenge on the whole family. The Cleveland coven is trying to find a writing sample to fax us from this guy to compare handwriting."

"Okay, I don't know if that sounds like someone powerful enough to pull this off, but maybe we need more of the story." Ray looked up and to the left, as if he was trying to remember something. "What's the other one?"

Janine crossed her arms and leaned against the back of the sofa. "That's a longer story, and the one that we were waiting on someone to call us back from Cincinnati for. The occult community in Ohio is really spread out, Ray. Is that what it's like everywhere?"

Ray made a sort of sideways nod. "The magical community is really concentrated here in New York, and there are big groups in LA and San Francisco. But yeah, in most other places there's a few groups of people who know what they're doing, and a few more people working alone, and then maybe ten times that many dabblers who haven't got a clue but like the trappings and the feeling of power. Then you've got all the New Age people who aren't really occultists, just spiritual seekers, but they go to the same shops."

"Easy marks, you mean," muttered Peter under his breath. His father, the con man, had taken to running small scams on New Agers whenever he needed some quick cash.

"Well, it makes things really difficult when you're trying to spread the word about something." Janine looked like she'd expected there to be a Witches' Yellow Pages. "Anyway, there's a guy who's been in pretty much every coven, mages' circle, Thelemite temple, and druids' grove in Ohio. He keeps claiming that he has to move because of his job, but he won't say what his job is because he's afraid of being revealed as an occultist. He also won't give his name; he goes by the nickname 'Venator.' "

"That's 'hunter' in Latin," translated Ray. "And working under pseudonyms and craft names is pretty common for occultists."

"He'll study with a group until he gets bored, and then skip on to the next one," Janine continued. "And he doesn't discriminate; some of the groups he's worked with are pretty much Christian magicians, some of them are Pagans, and some of them are out-and-out Satanists. He always asks about the same sorts of things - how to summon powerful entities like angels, demons, or elementals. Most groups in Ohio and the surrounding states know about this joker, and they've agreed not to teach him anything big - eventually he'll decide they don't know how to do any of the stuff he's interested in, and leave again."

"So far he just sounds like a dabbler," Winston pointed out.

"Yeah, but here's where it gets weird: he had some sort of fight with Dr. Corvisant at a lecture he gave at the University of Cincinnati about six months ago. Dr. Corvisant was saying that the spiritual and magical traditions of indigenous cultures should be preserved as they are, not mixed with those of more technological cultures like ours."

Ray snorted. Peter grinned and added, "Because we all know he's so good about not plundering the traditions and treasures of other cultures for his own personal use."

"Well, yeah, but people don't always do what they know they shoulda done, right, Dr. V?" Janine gave him a piercing stare. Peter wasn't sure what specific transgression he was being blamed for, but he held up his hands and managed to look abashed. She took that as a surrender and went on. "Anyway, this Venator clown stands up at the end of the lecture and starts shouting about how academics and their rules keep real researchers from discovering the 'secrets of the ancients' and so on. He wouldn't sit down or shut up, and he started making weird threats, that Dr. Corvisant was 'risking his reputation' by messing with him. The university security people had to escort him out. About a week later, he sent a letter to the editor to every college newspaper in Ohio, and most of the weekly rag papers, too, about how magic was real and being covered up by the government. There was a little bit of the rant about academics suppressing the secrets of the ancients, blah blah blah, they faxed me a copy if you wanna read it. The important part, though, is that he named a list of 'enemies of free magic,' people that he blamed for his not being able to learn how to call up demons and stuff, and you guys - specifically Egon and Ray, although you appeared lower down in the list, too, Peter - were enemies number one and number two. Dr. Corvisant was number eight. At the very end, he said that as soon as he made contact with someone he called 'Gregatim,' his enemies would start to fall and magic would be free knowledge again."

"That's 'the herd,' or possibly 'herder,' since it seems to refer to a specific person," Ray translated again. Winston frowned, and reached for their paper copy of Tobin's Spirit Guide.

"Then 'Venator' disappeared," said Janine, unfolding her arms to spread her hands. "Not that anyone was really looking for him, but no one can remember seeing him from the end of January until about two weeks ago, when he turned up at an occult supply shop in Cleveland again. He bought a whole bunch of random gear, and when the owner asked what he was going to do with it, he told her to stuff it. She put out some feelers to the local groups to see who he'd contacted this time, and didn't get any hits. He hasn't made contact with any of his old groups there, or the one new coven that's formed since he was last there. The last people who remember seeing him are a Qabalah group back in Cincinnati, and that was before he had his little hissy fit at Dr. Corvisant."

Janine paused, and chewed at her gum for a moment. "The shop owner was one of the people I talked to this morning. She said she got a warning from her spirit guide that she shouldn't have sold him the stuff, which, y'know, I coulda told her that and I'm two states away. Anyway, she had a bad feeling about him, so she's doing some legwork trying to find out where he's holed up and whether he's working with 'Gregatim' or not. She's gonna give me a call later this afternoon; she also thinks she can come up with a sample of Venator's handwriting from some of the groups he worked with before. So hopefully, by mid-afternoon we'll be able to compare his and Tillio's handwriting to the letter we got and see if either of them could be our bad guy."

Ray shook his head. "Either of those could be plausible. Venator, or whatever his real name is, has a motive, but it doesn't sound like he was interested in the sort of magic we're dealing with here. The Tillio guy, if he has a background in alchemy, that could account for the flesh-to-stone spell, except we don't think that's a spell, exactly, anymore. And he doesn't have as obvious a reason to hurt us - he'd be more likely to focus on Spengler Labs."

"It all sounds so dumb when you say it out loud," groaned Janine. "Flesh-to-stone sounds like one of the spells from your D&D game, Ray."

"It is," Ray admitted with a halfhearted grin. "And it's also a spell-like effect from several of the creatures in the game, like the medusa and the basilisk. Of course, that's just in the game; in real life, a basilisk doesn't turn people to stone, it just kills them. And the . . . " Ray's eyes grew wide, then wider. He trailed off, staring into space.

"Ray? What's wrong?" Janine glared at him, and her eyes tracked past him to the screen of the psychokinetic visual imager. "What's that? Did you guys build an ultrasound to look inside of ghosts now?"

Peter stared at her in alarm. "No, that's the PK imager with the contrast turned way up and the brightness turned down. Why?"

Janine gestured at the part of the screen that represented the egg, and the variations of shade inside it. "This looks a lot like my sister Marsha's ultrasound did. I went with her a couple of times. I mean, it doesn't look human, exactly, but that sort of shape."

"Guys?" Ray's voice was shaky with both fear and hope. "I think I screwed up."

"Ray, can the guilt trip and tell us what massive leap of intuition you just made," ordered Peter.

Ray swallowed. "We've been assuming - no, I've been assuming - that since it wasn't a spell, the stone egg must be a magical artifact of some sort. But what if it's not? Those names - 'hunter' and 'herder' - both have to do with animals. Maybe - maybe that really is an egg. Maybe the effect that got Egon really is a 'spell-like ability,' a magical ability that a fantastic creature can just use instead of having to cast a spell. The curse let it happen just by touch, even though the creature hasn't hatched yet."

"What kind of creature could to that? Do medusas lay eggs?" Winston started edging in the direction of the proton packs, still propped up against the wall of the lab from the previous night.

"No, they have bodies like human females. And a basilisk egg would have just been a death spell. But there's another fantastic creature that can petrify with its gaze, and that does hatch out of eggs - the cockatrice!" Ray lunged for a medieval bestiary at the bottom of one of the stacks of books. Janine caught the top of the stack as it started to tip, and managed to steady it as Ray began flipping though the pages, oblivious.

Peter decided that Winston had the right idea, and scooped up the second pack. "So what do we need to know about cockatrices?"

"Don't look directly at one. If you meet its gaze, it'll petrify you instantly," Ray called back, half reciting from memory and half reading from the tome he held. "They're not very intelligent, but they have sharp beaks and claws, and they can do some damage physically even if they don't petrify you. Looking at one in a mirror won't petrify you." His eyes scanned down the page. "They're physical creatures; this bestiary doesn't use our classification system, but I'd say they'd be about Class Five with a negative valence."

Janine looked around the lab, clearly didn't see what she was looking for, and headed out into the hallway.

"So how do we fight it if we can't look at it?" demanded Peter, fastening the pack's belt around his waist.

"Do you two mad scientists keep any mirrors in here?" Winston asked, looking around the room.

"Um, let me see . . . " Ray began digging through a drawer, pulling out glass slides and lenses. A sharp cracking noise brought his head up. The three of them stared in horror as the PK imager's screen showed the yellow shape shaking and then abruptly unfolding, accompanied by a sound like a flowerpot dropped off a third floor balcony. The colander jumped.

"Why didn't we just blast the egg when we had a chance?" snarled Peter, more angry at himself for not thinking of it than at his friends.

"I think we were more worried about it's momma showing up." Winston powered up his thrower.

"Wait, guys! You're not gonna be able to trap it; it's too solid!" Janine came pounding back into the room, wobbling on her high heels. She'd strapped on the molecular destabilizer unit, the device they used on demons with physical forms and other physical entities to make them insubstantial enough to trap; in her other hand, she was clutching the mirror from her makeup compact.

"Can you really see in that thing?" Peter wasn't startled by her bravery, but he wasn't happy, either - that thing had backfired once and destabilized Egon. They knew how to fix it now, but the idea of their loyal secretary losing her molecular cohesion didn't much appeal to him.

"Do you have a better idea, Dr. V.?" She turned her back on the room and held up the mirror, just as a hair-raising screech, like slate being dragged across granite, rang across the room and a winged shape threw the colander off.

A birdlike shape perched on the edge of the box; tiny shards of the speckled stone shell lay scattered around it. Its head was beaked, with huge eyes; its legs were long and skinny. It had pebbly, scaly skin in a mottled shade of greyish green; a few feathers in a soft blue graced it here and there, in irregular patches. A pair of wings stretched out, spanning nearly a foot and a half.

"There's no way that thing could have fit in the egg," protested Winston, turning his head to the side to avoid meeting its gaze.

"It's been feeding off of Egon's energy, or at least it was until we broke the link," Ray called back, still digging through the drawer of optical equipment. "I think it used that energy to accelerate its growth process."

"Just don't look directly at it!" Janine wailed, and fired the destabilizer beam over her shoulder, trying to aim it using the mirror. The first shot was wild, and took out a window. The cockatrice screeched again and leaped off the table, beating its wings and scrambling towards them.

Peter tried to fire by watching out of the corner of his eye, but his shot went wild, too. Janine's second shot was a miss, but she was much closer than she was the first time and just scorched a patch of floor. Her next few shots missed by mere inches, and the cockatrice scrambled towards her position; Peter had to look away as the scaly beast swung its head around, trying to catch each of them in its stony gaze.

"Yaaaaaaaaah!" Slimer gushed through the floorboards and charged into the room with a battle cry. The cockatrice wheeled around to face its new foe, and looked Slimer directly in the eye. Ray gasped in horror, and Peter yelled "Slimer, no!"

Slimer froze for a second, and there was a crackling noise. Then he bobbed upwards and shook himself. What looked like curved shards of green glass fell away from him and landed on the floor, shattering.

"It can't stone him because he's not made of flesh, he's made of ectoplasm!" crowed Peter. "It can't affect him! Go, spud!"

"Nasty biwrdy huwrt Egon," growled Slimer, taking a swing at the cockatrice with a fist. He didn't seem to do it any damage, but it was knocked off its feet and slimed, and it certainly turned its attention to him instead of the humans in the room. It shook itself and opened its mouth, making a sound like a metal rooster crowing. "Not huwrt guys, too." Slimer took another swing; the cockatrice ducked, sending the little green ghost into a spin.

"I can't get a clear shot!" Janine cried. "I'm afraid I'll hit Slimer!"

"Same here," Winston agreed. The cockatrice almost had its back to him, now, and he snuck a peek in its direction. Peter was still too close to its head to risk looking directly at it.

Slimer missed his next swing, too, as the cockatrice ducked the blow. He looked around wildly, and the cockatrice dove sideways and came up directly in his face again, eyes flaring. Once more, Slimer froze for a second, and then shook off shards of fossilized ectoplasm. He made a frightened burbling noise, and dove into the floor again.

Janine and Winston both took advantage of his absence to try to get off another shot. Winston struck a glancing blow, but the cockatrice squawked and spun around, forcing him to look away, and Janine missed it by a foot and swore. Peter began trying to edge around to the other side of the room, calling "Winston, maybe we can pin it between us. Spread out, so it can't look at both of us at once."

"Got it!" shouted Ray, pulling a round concave mirror the size of a dinner plate from the optics drawer and then nearly dropping it. It was almost two inches deep, and clearly very heavy.

Slimer erupted from the floor near Winston's feet and grabbed one of the Latin grimoires in both hands. With a growl, he shot across the floor with the book held in front of him, and slammed into the cockatrice at full speed. It screeched and went down, wings flailing. Slimer did a loop-the-loop and whacked it with the tome again, and it flopped to the floor, stunned.

"Get out of there, Slimer!" Janine yelled. Slimer dropped the book and flew through the side wall of the room, outside the firehouse. Janine opened fire, and pinned the cockatrice in the destabilizer beam. It hissed in protest, and struggled to its feet, but she held the beam on it, and it began to lose its solidity, becoming slightly transparent.

Ray, his face turned away from the deadly bird, hoisted the mirror to his chest - but at totally the wrong angle for Peter to look into the mirror and zap the birdlike entity. "Peter, Winston, you've gotta hold it!"

Winston fired, looking sidelong at the cockatrice and hoping it wouldn't manage to turn around. Peter realized with a shock what Ray wanted him to do, why he was holding the mirror at that odd angle, and shook his head. "Ray, if I miss, I might neutronize you!" Winston's stream and Janine's beam converged on the cockatrice, but it still managed to struggle towards her, slowed though it was.

"You won't miss, Peter," Ray called back. "I trust you."

Peter looked at the reflection of the cockatrice in the telescope mirror, took the most careful aim he'd ever taken in his life, and fired. The beam bounced off the mirror perfectly and hit the cockatrice dead in the head; Ray jerked backwards from the force of the beam, but maintained his grip on the mirror and steadied his footing.

Slimer flung himself back through another wall - he must have made a circle around the building, Peter realized - and grabbed the extra trap by the door. "Twap out!" he called, dropping the trigger at Winston's foot and tossing the body of the trap underneath the writhing figure of the cockatrice. He stuck out his massive tongue, gave it a slime-splattering Bronx cheer, and dove through the floorboards once again. As soon as he was out of range, Winston stomped the trigger, and the entity, still screeching, slid into the ectoplasmic repository.

As soon as the trap snapped shut, Winston holstered his thrower and ran out to grab it. Janine lowered her aching arms and slid into the closest chair. Peter raced across the room to Ray, who lowered the mirror onto the table with a thump. "I think we'll have to get this one re-silvered," he said sadly, looking at the scorch marks the thrower had left on its surface.

"Never mind the mirror, Ray - are you all right?" Peter looked his partner over for any signs of neutronization.

Ray shook out his hands. "My fingers are a little tingly and the mirror got hot enough to sting, but I'm fine. You didn't hit me with the beam, not even a little bit."

"Whoever sent that must have expected it to take out the rest of us once it hatched," Winston pointed out, checking the lights on the trap to make sure the cockatrice was properly confined.

"Assuming that we didn't blast it before then," objected Peter.

"Which we probably should have done as soon as we broke the binding spell," admitted Ray, shadows creeping into his eyes.

"You didn't know it was alive yet, Ray," objected Janine as she unstrapped the destabilizer.

"No, but I should have guessed before now. I put us all at risk," Ray said mournfully, not quite looking at the rest of the team.

"Ray, that's crap and you know it," scolded Winston. "It didn't look like a real egg; it looked like a rock. And cockatrice eggs don't normally work like that, so you can't say you should have recognized it. You felt that there was a spell on it, which there was, and you worked from that premise. You even figured it out before it hatched, so we had enough warning that none of us got stoned. I think you've done as good a job as anyone could ask, so far. You've done a hell of a lot more than I have." He scooped up the trap by its handle. "I'm gonna go put this troublemaker into containment; you talk some sense into him, Pete. Man, I hope there aren't any more surprises like this coming our way."

Peter maneuvered around the sofa and Janine's chair, and set a hand on the back of Ray's arm. "He's right. Yeah, maybe you might have figured it out quicker, but you were worried about Egon. No one's going to fault you for that, ever. And if you hadn't broken the binding spell, I bet it would have hatched earlier, since it still would have been feeding off of Egon's life energy."

At the mention of their petrified comrade, Ray straightened up. "Okay, okay, Peter. I'll at least wait until I have Egon's judgement to go by before I start beating myself up." He rubbed his hand across his face. "At least now we know what's going on. I don't think I have anything in our library that explains how to rescue someone from a cockatrice's gaze, but Zane Cartwright over at the Mystic Web occult shop has a bunch of stuff on fantastic beasts. If anyone in the area will have it, he will. I'll give him a call, and if he's over there I'll take Ecto and see if he's got anything that'll help." The youngest Ghostbuster rose shakily to his feet and headed in the direction of the phone.

Peter followed him, a hand on his back for support; as he passed Janine, he stage-whispered "Keep an eye on the big guy until we get back."

"You got it, Dr. V. I'll guard him like a bulldog." Janine straightened up in her chair. "And then I need to call about that window. You gonna take it out of my pay, since I busted it?" She sounded like she was joking, but she genuinely looked a little worried.

"I think we can claim it as a general business expense. You were trying to save all our butts, after all, and you did a darn good job at that. And I'm pretty sure firing the destabilizer backwards in a mirror is even further away from your job description than making coffee is." Peter winked at her and followed Ray to the bunkroom phone.

---

Peter walked back into the lab with a folder full of papers in one hand and a plate full of sandwiches in the other. "Hey, Melnitz. We got some faxes for you to look at, and that was Winston on the phone - Ray thinks they've got something, and they're going to pick up some potion ingredients and then head back here. They've already had lunch - that Cartwright character apparently fed 'em - so I figured we'd go ahead and have a bite. Slimer's been in the mayo again, so we've got turkey on white with mustard, and good ol' PB&J."

Janine had been flipping through one of Ray's tomes; she shut it carefully and looked at the proffered plate carefully. "Lemme stick with the basics," she said, picking up one of the triangles trickling grape jelly. She carefully angled the corner into her mouth so as not to drop crumbs on her shirt, and munched thoughtfully. "Did you bring anything to drink? Oh, sorry - thanks for bringing these up, Dr. V."

"No problem. I'll go get a couple of sodas." Peter jogged back down to the kitchen, snagged two cans from the fridge, and checked the cabinet for chips. Looked like Slimer got 'em all. For once, Peter didn't feel like getting on the spud's case about it; he wasn't sure whether Slimer had known that the cockatrice couldn't affect it, and if he hadn't, he'd been incredibly brave, but even if he had, he'd been awfully helpful in disposing of the beast.

By the time he got back to the lab, Janine had finished her half-sandwich, and was peering at the papers from the folder. One was the cream-colored letter from the package; the others were from the fax machine. She was scowling deeply.

"Here's your ice-cold soda, courtesy of Dr. Venkman. What's the story?" Peter looked over her shoulder at the samples she had spread out on the sofa.

"None of the handwriting samples is a match at all. This one is Dr. Corvisant, and you can see the signature's not even close. This is that Tillio guy, and it's a little closer, but his L's and O's are completely different. And this is the Venator character." She pointed. "Much blockier. We may be at a dead end, here."

Peter dropped into a chair and grabbed one of the turkey sandwiches. Not his favorite, but no one had gone grocery shopping since the last time Slimer raided the cold cuts, and it wasn't bad. "Hmm." Detective work came closer to his specialty than all the groveling through musty tomes did. He set the remaining soda on the table, and almost bumped into the PKE meter that had been left there the previous day. That gave him an idea. "It won't work off of faxes, but maybe we could take biorhythm readings of these three characters and compare them to any residual biorhythms on the letter? I mean, we'd have to go out to Ohio to do it -" Peter gave an elaborate shudder; he was a city boy to the core, and specifically this city - "but I think Egon's family could put us up, so it wouldn't be too expensive, and we're gonna have to track our culprit down. Even if there weren't the personal issue here," and he grimaced a bit at that but plowed on, "if someone's out there calling up and capturing things as dangerous as cockatrices, we need to do something about it."

"Really?" Janine favored him with an amused grin. "You're not gonna wait until someone offers to pay you for it?"

Peter put on a smug expression. "Normally I would, but revenge for picking on me and my buddies is almost as good as cash, don't you think?"

"I'd fly to Minsk on my own dime to give the person who hurt Egon a kick in the balls." Peter winced theatrically; Janine had a mean streak to her. She changed gears abruptly. "Can you get any biorhythm residuals off of the letter at this point? I thought they'd have worn off by now."

"I don't know if I can. Egon probably could, and maybe Ray." Peter tugged the antennae of the PKE meter out to activate it, and clicked the dial on the side to the frequency Egon used for electrometabolic biorhythmic frequencies. He ran the meter over the off-white paper and peered at the screen. "Nope, it reads that you've touched it, and maybe there's a really faint trace of Ray - at least, I think that's Ray's pattern. But that's it." Janine made a faint noise of disappointment.

Peter clicked the dial back to ectoplasmic frequencies. The antennae stirred.

Janine's eyes narrowed. "Was that just because it was next to the egg?"

"I don't know. I don't usually have to read this thing." Peter was bluffing, a little; Egon and Ray had made sure he could read a PKE meter as well as they could, back before Winston had joined the business. But since adding a fourth member, they'd allowed their roles to become more specialized, and Peter hadn't learned all the tricks Ray and Egon had come up with since then. He pointed the meter at the box the egg had come in, then some of the egg fragments on the floor, then at the letter again. "These are just residuals, and they're really faint." He glanced at the statue next to Janine. Egon, if you're here, and if I've got any gifts at all, I need you to help me out. "But they look different. The eggshells show Class Five residuals, pretty strong, with a negative valence. The box shows a really weak mix of Class Five and something else, but the Class Five readings are swamping over whatever the other thing was. The letter shows less of the Class Five, probably because the cockatrice didn't touch it, and -" Peter ran a hand through his hair and tried to make sense of the numbers and waveforms on the screen. "Oh, shit."

"What now?" Janine grasped his wrist and turned it so she could see the screen, too.

"Class Seven, also negative valence? I think? It's really faint." Peter pointed at the screen. Janine shook her head. "If you can't read it, Peter, I sure can't."

Downstairs, the doors of the garage bay opened noisily. "Oh, good, Ray's back. We'll let him figure all this out." Peter flicked a switch and turned another knob to set the PKE meter to record its last readings, and followed Janine downstairs, still clutching the device.

"Any luck?" the secretary called out from the stairs, as Ray and Winston piled out of Ecto. Ray was clutching a small black journal-style notebook in one hand, and had a paper grocery bag in the other. He looked like a small child studying for a test, his eyes dark and his nose wrinkled. Winston, on the other hand, looked fairly relaxed. He waved. "We got some good info from Cartwright. Ray's a little worried about some of the ingredients, but it didn't sound like there was too big a problem."

"I'm not worried, Winston, I'm just - it's a little weird, is all. Not quite sex magic weird, but -" Ray realized what he'd said, and his face flushed nearly crimson. Janine put a hand to her mouth and giggled.

Peter took the paper bag from Ray - it smelled like Chinese spices and cut grass, which would have been rather pleasant if it also hadn't made him want to sneeze - and handed him the PKE meter. "What do you make of that, Ray?"

One of Ray's greatest gifts was his ability to switch gears instantaneously. "Class Five negative valence residual readings from the cockatrice, and - what the heck is that other thing?" Ray stabbed at a slider under the screen with one finger and twiddled a knob. The Class Five readings faded out, leading a much fainter reading on the meter. Ray sucked in a breath. "Class Seven, also negative valence, and pretty powerful if it's separable from the Class Fives after this length of time. Is this from the box, Peter?"

Janine shook her head and answered for him. "From the letter."

Peter nodded. "Which doesn't match any of our three potential suspects' handwriting. Can you get that, Janine?" The secretary looked at him blankly, then smirked and reached for the phone just as it rang. Ray and Winston exchanged a knowing look.

"So the letter might have been written by a demon?" asked Winston, turning back towards Peter.

"Or some other equally powerful physical entity. The Bogeyman was a Class Seven physical entity, but he wasn't a demon," explained Ray.

"With those hooves and teeth, you could've fooled me." Winston had taken the Bogeyman almost as personally as Egon had; specters that menaced children were on his Top Ten list of Things That Need Busting.

"Gregatim?" asked Peter, giving Ray a probing look.

"Possibly, although I don't recognize the name." Ray poked his tongue into his cheek, thinking.

"I thought of that, and I checked Tobin's. He's not in there, at least by that name," Winston chipped in.

"Guys!" Janine's shout pulled them from their pondering. "I think you need to hear this. I'm gonna put it on speakerphone." The clustered around her desk as she pushed the buttons on her phone's desk unit. "Okay, Ms. Featherheart, go ahead." Peter rolled his eyes at Ray, who shrugged.

An older female voice, low and warm, rolled out of the speakerphone. "Thank you, Miss Melnitz. Am I speaking to the Ghostbusters?"

"Dr. Venkman, Dr. Stantz, and Mr. Zeddemore here," replied Peter. "Dr. Spengler is still . . . indisposed."

"I'm very sorry to hear that." There was a brief interruption, someone shouting incoherently far away from the phone followed by a thump. The female voice commanded "Stop that! You've done quite enough damage for one day," to someone on her end of the line, and then returned to the receiver. "I'm Morgana Featherheart. I know, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm the owner of the Bell, Book, and Candle in Cleveland, Ohio, and I and your secretary have been communicating regarding your most troublesome package."

"Yeah, she's briefed us," responded Winston.

"I had expected she would. When I last spoke to her this morning, I had assured her that we would attempt to locate Venator, but less than an hour afterwards a member of my coven, a student at Case, called me and said that she had received a frantic phone call from the head of the student occult research club at Oberlin. We charged over here as soon as we could; it's about an hour's drive. Venator had shown up on campus, and was holding Dr. Corvisant hostage. The campus police were trying to coax him out, and he was shooting fire from his hands."

"Wow, that's really powerful stuff," breathed Ray, his eyes wide with a combination of fascination and horror.

"Indeed. He was raving about 'human fools' and 'imprisoning his children.' We deduced quite quickly that he was possessed."

The Ghostbusters exchanged a look. They'd all experienced full spirit possession at one point or another; Ray and Peter had both been through it multiple times. Rescuing each other from a possession was difficult, and it left ugly footprints on one's psyche for weeks afterward. "What did you do?"

"We circled the building and attempted an exorcism." Ms. Featherheart paused. "Initially, it appeared to enrage and immobilize him, but we were not successful in removing the entity that was within him. However, he did let go of Dr. Corvisant, who put on a fetish mask he was keeping in his office."

"He promised Egon he'd put that into storage," protested Ray.

"Normally, I would agree with you that such artifacts should not be on public display, but in this case I think we'll have to make an exception. The spirit contained in the mask possessed Dr. Corvisant, and he overpowered Venator, at which point the spirits vacated them both. I've never seen anything like it before. The thing inhabiting Venator somewhat resembled the descriptions of cherubim in the Old Testament - head and mane of a lion, torso and arms of a human, legs and hooves of a bull, and the wings of an eagle. The other spirit looked like a three-headed snake. It drove the first spirit off. The one that had been possessing Venator shouted that it would take care of those who had imprisoned its child, and then return, and it flew away. We don't have a containment unit of our own, and none of us are strong enough to contain it in a crystal, even working together." Peter remembered the crystal ball that Egon's ancestor had once used to imprison a demoness, and shot a glance at Ray, who nodded.

"The other spirit returned to the mask. Venator is in the process of being arrested, but he's highly disoriented. He could be faking, but he appears to not even remember his actual name, and he has no form of legal identification on him." She paused. "I do psychic healing - I know some of you are likely to be skeptical of that, and many of those who practice it are frauds, but I hope you believe me when I tell you that Venator is highly damaged. I think he has been possessed, or at least controlled, for a very long time."

Ray answered, "I think we're willing to believe that it could happen. And yeah, we've all had a taste of what possession will do to you."

"At any rate, I suspected that anyone who had imprisoned a spirit's child had a pretty strong chance of being you, especially since you were already potentially involved with Venator's scheme. So I wanted to warn you that there is a large, angry spirit potentially winging your way." The woman on the other end of the line suddenly sounded very tired.

"We'll keep an eye out. Thanks for the warning, and for all your other help," answered Peter.

"You're quite welcome, Dr. Venkman. If, when this is all over, you have a chance, I would welcome the opportunity to compare methodologies with all of you, and I suspect Dr. Corvisant would like for you to inspect the fetish mask as well."

"We'll try and make time to check it out. Janine has your number, right?" The secretary nodded.

"She has my shop number; I'm there from ten until seven on weekdays, or you can leave a message. I hope to be able to speak with you face-to-face soon. Good luck!" Ms. Featherheart hung up the phone, and Janine turned the speaker off with a snap.

"Man, I don't believe this," groaned Winston. "There's a demon flying in from Cleveland to break the bird-brain out of containment? Is that what I heard?"

"Pretty much," agreed Peter. "I dunno about you guys, but I'd rather not face a pissed-off Class Seven one man short, even if his arms are gonna be tired."

"He has wings, Peter," Ray pointed out. "But - yeah. Whoops, I left the mortar and pestle in the back of Ecto. Can you take the bag up to the lab for me, Peter? I gotta grab a couple more things from the basement, and then I'll meet you up there."

"You guys need to install an elevator. I'm starting to get tired of these stairs," grumbled Janine as she, Peter, and Winston trudged back up to the third floor.

---

Janine had insisted on explaining the current situation to Egon's statue while Peter and Winston suited up and strapped on the packs in the lab. She was just finishing up the short version when Ray arrived with several bags of stuff and his own proton pack. Almost immediately, he ducked out again to change, not into his flight suit but into his black robe from the previous night. "It's not a spell, exactly," he explained, "but it works a lot like one. It'll help to be in the right frame of mind."

So far, the process had consisted of adding various herbs, resins, and other substances to the huge marble mortar and pestle Ray had brought up and counting the number of strokes it took to crush them together. Peter had gotten bored and suggested to Winston that they look through the usual references for a spirit matching the description Ms. Featherheart had given them; Winston had found one in the computerized Tobin's database almost immediately.

"Pankateinon," read Winston. "A minor demon who watches over the creatures of the Netherworld, and delights in unleashing them upon humanity. He is opposed by the spirits of the natural world, in particular the genii loci." He sighed. "Not much of an entry. I get the idea that he doesn't show up here often, just his critters."

"Too bad we can't call Egon's dragon down to help us," mused Peter. "He's a genius loci, right? I bet he'd kick this Pankateinon's ass."

" 'Pan-' is Greek for 'all,' and 'ktenos' is 'beast,' " Ray added. "So the name is pretty old, although someone somewhere down the line stuck a couple of extra vowels in there." He sighed. "Okay, now we're at the weird part of the recipe."

Peter took the bait. "So how weird is it?"

Ray wrinkled his nose in distaste. "It starts calling for bodily fluids."

"What?" Peter edged around to look at the page of the journal where Ray had written the recipe down. In Ray's loopy handwriting, the last four ingredients were:

An eyeful of tears from one who would live for him
A handful of blood from one who would die for him
A mouthful of spit from one who would be lost without him
Mixed by three strokes of the pestle from one who respects him

If these four cannot be found, there is no hope for him.

Ray read the page aloud. There was a long pause, finally broken by Janine remarking "Well, if it's gonna call for bodily fluids, at least those aren't hard ones to get."

"True." Ray nibbled at the edge of his lower lip. "And we have the right number. So which of us is which?"

"Didn't think there was any question about that," Janine murmured, picking up a test tube from the drying rack.

"Whoa, Melnitz," Peter put out a hand. "Which one are you going for?"

"Whaddya think?" Suddenly her voice was loud and full of sharp edges. "I don't get to go out there with you guys when you face death every goddamn day. I gotta count myself lucky when you trust me to keep the home fires burning. I come here every morning and I don't know if you'll be here, or out on a bust, or somewhere in the Netherworld, and I go home every evening not knowing if the roof's gonna blow off this place in the night because the containment unit goes."

She whirled to face Egon's crystalline statue. "I came here 'cause the agency sent me over, and the first thing that happens is one of his monitor-thingies spits blue sparks at me. Remember that, Dr. V.? And Egon didn't even notice I was there, he was so caught up in that thing. I didn't even get up the nerve to talk to him until three days later, when he was hooking up the alarm system and crawled under my desk. I figured if he was gonna get an up-skirt shot, at least he owed me a conversation. But he never even looked, you know? I didn't know if he was clueless or a gentleman. Hadn't been hoping for both, but there he was."

"I love him like the shoreline loves the sea, and half the time he doesn't even see me." Tears were pouring down her cheeks now, but her voice was clear and sharp as broken glass. "I'm not on his radar, you know? And he puts his life on the line every damn day he goes out. You're all self-sacrificing heroic sons of bitches, even those of you who pretend you're not; someday either you're going to come home short one, or none of you will come home at all. I know that. It's written on my heart with an icepick. And I'm pretty sure, if it's just one of you that you come home without, it'll be him. There's not a damn thing I can do about it. I'm gonna lose him, and I won't even be able to be mad about it, because he'll have died saving the world and it'll probably even work. There won't be a single thing I can do to stop him, and I shouldn't. And he's not even mine. Even if that doesn't happen, I don't ever get to have him, because he's married to - " her voice faltered - "to this job. And so all I can to is just be here, and do my job, and keep you guys in line and as alive as I can; just keep showing up, and being a part of what you guys have here, and know that if one day you don't come home, someone's gotta watch the containment unit and train up someone else to keep saving the world." She leaned in and kissed the statue on the cheek, leaving a wet smudge. "You guys have the luxury of dying for each other; all I can do is live for you."

She heaved a tremendous sigh, and then wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She turned back to Ray and handed him the test tube, a gram or so of salt water at the bottom of it. Her voice was much softer as she asked "Think that's enough?"

"I'm sure it's plenty." Ray's voice was heavy with unspoken gratitude. Peter hesitated, then pulled Janine into a wordless hug. She clung to him like a sail in a storm, and sobbed. Finally she let go, and slid into the chair next to Ray.

"Me next." Peter looked around.

Ray straightened his shoulders, and suddenly there was steel in his eyes. "Are you sure, Peter? Because I think either one of us could do this."

Peter met Ray's gaze. "Yeah, Ray. Yeah, either one of us could do this. I know you'd die for him, or for me, without a second thought. But that's why I'm gonna do it, Ray. Because I'd die for you, but I'd complain about it." The unspoken admission burned in his throat.

Ray stared back for another second, then closed his eyes and nodded. "But for Egon, you'd throw yourself into any danger and not even think about it once, much less twice. I know." He sighed. "Sometimes I envy you two that closeness, even though . . . even though I've been part of it for almost as long." The occultist fumbled at his waist for the athame, and handed it to the older man.

Peter laid the blade against his left palm, closed his eyes, and drew it across, wincing as the steel bit into his skin. A line of red wetness blossomed parallel to his heart line. He opened one eye to peek at it, blanched a bit, and turned his hand to let the scarlet fluid drip into the mortar.

He looked away from it, at the still figure of his closest friend on the couch. "And I know you'd do the same for me, Egon," he said, his voice low and unsteady. He turned to their secretary. "Janine, I know this doesn't make it any better, but you have my word that if it ever comes down to a choice between Ecto coming back without Egon or Ecto coming back without me, I'll do my damnedest to make sure it comes back with him."

Janine looked back at him with red-rimmed eyes. "Peter, you know I'd cry just as hard and as long for you, don't you?"

He hadn't, actually, and the words made his stomach twist in a completely different way from the sight of his own blood. "Well, yeah, Janine, I'm just awesome that way. But - "

"And I don't want to think about what it would do to Egon to lose you, any more than I want to think about what it would do to you or me to lose Egon." She closed her eyes, as if to shut out the images that were crowding her mind. Peter's jaw opened to say something, but no sound came out.

"Okay, Pete. The bleeding's slowed; let's get this bandaged up." Winston gently took his hand and began swabbing at the cut with an antiseptic wipe; at some point he'd gotten the first-aid kit from the bathroom. Peter let him clean the cut and wrap his hand in gauze. "Thanks."

"No problem, my man." Winston looked away. "Either you or Ray could have done that. I'm not sure I could have. I mean, I care for you guys like brothers. But dying for someone else . . . I've frozen up before." Memories of a long ago time and a far away place flickered in his dark eyes.

Peter shook his head. "Anyone could freeze under stress, Winston. That's just human nature. I trust you in the line of duty just as much as I do these other two clowns." He clapped Winston on the shoulder with the hand that wasn't bandaged.

Ray looked at the ceiling and worked his jaw, then spat a gob of saliva into the mortar. "I'm an engineer. Whatever you can come up with, I can build. And sometimes I get ideas of my own. But Egon, you're the genius who understands the principles and makes them clear to me. Without your ideas, I could never have built any of this. And to think of a future without that, without you and me putting together the next big thing . . . yeah. I'd be pretty lost, all right."

"So all I gotta do is respect him, and mix this mess up in three strokes?" Winston and Ray exchanged places. "Man, I get the easy job. I can't imagine how anyone could meet Egon and not respect the man." He ground the pestle around the mortar in a spiral from the center out, and then from the outside in, and then from the middle to the rim again. "Huh."

"What happened?" Ray peeked over the older man's shoulder.

"I thought it was going to blend into paste, and that was what it looked like it was doing, but on that last stroke, it all sort of broke up into powder. Little grains, like sand." Winston eyed it suspiciously.

"That's what it's supposed to do. Here goes." Ray gathered up a handful of the crumbly powder from the mortar and began sprinkling it over the crystalline statue of Egon. The others all held their breath. For a long moment, nothing appeared to happen, and Peter's heart felt like it was stuck in his throat.

"Look," whispered Janine, pointing with one long fingernail. "His hair's moving in the draft."

It was. A few seconds later, color flooded back into Egon's face. He blinked, and his eyes darted around the room; then his chest heaved, and he took a long, shuddering breath. His hands flexed, his knees shifted, and his feet found the floor.

His head fell forward, into his hands, and he gasped, forcing air into his lungs and back out again. In between great gulps of air, his bass voice sounded, shaken but strong: "Oh, thank god."

His head swung back up, and wet, sparkling blue eyes took in Peter and Winston in their jumpsuits, Peter's bandaged hand, Ray in his black robe still holding the mortar, and Janine with tear-tracks still clear on her face. "No. I should say, thank you."

Then he was off the sofa, launched towards Peter like a rocket, catching the brown-haired man in his arms and crushing him to his chest like he would never let go. Peter wrapped his arms around the taller man and buried his face in his shoulder. He felt Janine's arms sliding around Egon from the back, and one of Egon's hands slid down to touch her arm without losing contact with Peter. Ray joined in the embrace from Peter's left, and finally Winston's broad arms completed the circle on the right. Slimer came squealing in from somewhere, and tried to join in the group hug too, getting ectoplasm in Egon's hair and across Ray's shoulders.

Egon was back. Peter was aware that he was leaking tears again, but he didn't care. He had Egon back again, and he had the whole team together and safe. That was what mattered.

Suddenly, Egon straightened up, his face all business. "I couldn't hear everything after my ears petrified, but I think I comprehend the gist of what's going on. I understand that the demon that sent us the booby trap is on his way here from my hometown?"

"That's the short and sweet of it," replied Peter, not ready to let go yet but suddenly aware of the weight of the proton pack on his back.

"Then we have preparations to make. I think I can rewire the projective ectoplasmic energy sampler to act as a long-range detection system if we have a sample of the demon's PKE readings, but Ray, I'll need your help. Janine, we'll need all the firepower we can muster for this, so I'd appreciate it if you'd go suit up and get your pack. Winston, we may need the proton cannon on Ecto-1; can you make sure it's fully charged? And Peter . . . "

"Yeah, Egon?" Peter was the least technologically adept of the four of them; he wasn't sure what he could do to help. The gaze behind the spare pair of glasses regarded him oddly, as if Egon were seeing him for the first time.

"I need you to devise a strategy for distracting and annoying it. Think you can handle that?"

"Egon, ol' buddy, I can distract and annoy anything, and I don't need a strategy to do it." Peter grinned from ear to ear.

Egon's answering smile was almost equally wide. "Certainly you have been doing so to me for these many years. Nevertheless, it would be a good idea if we knew what you were going to do to annoy this particular being, so we can plan our tactics around it."

"You got it, Egon. Now, you've been hogging the couch for most of a day, so it's my turn to kick back here." Peter flopped down on the sofa and put his feet up on the armrest, hands behind his head.

"Just be careful of any aftereffects of Ray's pentagram. We wouldn't want you to banish yourself, now would we?" Egon laid a gentle hand on Peter's shoulder, then laughed as Peter twisted around, trying to see whether the pentacle was still on the floor without falling off of the sofa.

---

"This is great!" Ray's grin was just short of maniacal. He was now wearing his magus's robe over his usual jumpsuit. He had a very large wrench in one hand and a very small screwdriver in the other, and he was bolting a contraption with a great deal of exposed wiring to the roof of the firehouse. The excitement of an upcoming bust was making him vibrate; every time he stood up, he bounced on his toes.

"Easy there, Tex. You keep that up, you'll bounce right off the roof." Peter watched his second oldest friend finish bolting the triple-range molecular destabilizer beam to the roof. Egon jogged back up the stairs from the lab, holding a heavy-duty extension cord, the fourth such he'd brought up since they started. "Peter, plug the rectifier array into this," the physicist said, thrusting the business end of the cord at him and moving over to a small aluminum dish attached to a computer monitor that was making soft 'ping' noises.

"Anything on the demonic radar detector?" Peter scanned the skies once with a pair of binoculars, then again with the ecto-scopes on. He didn't see anything suspicious either time, although someone had lost a whole bunch of balloons off to the north of them.

"Not yet." Egon adjusted a dial and the 'ping' noise went up in pitch slightly. Peter found the jury-rigged plug that he thought he was supposed to attach to the extension cord; he slid them together, and a cardboard square festooned with what looked like Christmas lights blinked into activity.

The radio at his belt sounded. "We're in position down here." They'd decided to have Janine on top of Ecto-1 with the proton cannon, as well as her own thrower strapped to her back in case the cannon's batteries ran out. Winston had the mobile molecular destabilizer instead of his own pack; he was standing next to Ecto, but the garage doors were open in case they needed to beat a quick retreat.

Peter, Ray, and Egon all had their own throwers, in addition to the destabilizer cannon. They were also all three equipped with ecto-scopes and a pair of what Peter had dubbed periscope goggles - they contained two reflectors, so that when you were looking through them you saw pretty much exactly what you'd see if you were three inches taller. They'd protect them from the petrifying gaze of a cockatrice, although there had been some question as to what would happen if Pankateinon arrived with a basilisk in tow.

The 'ping' sound abruptly changed to a 'pong'. Peter and Ray both swiveled in the direction of Egon's detector. Egon tapped the monitor with a finger. "Bogey at twelve degrees south of west. Appears to be a single entity."

Peter turned in that direction and couldn't see anything; there was a building in the way. "No visual contact yet. Keep us posted."

The detector began making little chirping noises, as if it had given birth to a litter of PKE meters, in addition to the pongs. "Changing angle of approach. Now due west of us and approaching fast. Battle stations, everyone!" Egon scrambled to a sheltered position behind the roof access. Ray grabbed the handles on the destabilizer cannon; Peter hoped that they'd avoided the design flaw that had ended with the original destabilizer backfiring and almost turning Egon into a ghost. Peter walked over to the corner of the roof and slid his ecto-scopes into position.

Yup, there it was. Ms. Featherheart's description was remarkably accurate. It had huge golden wings with broad pinion feathers, a lion's head with a tawny mane that ruffled in the wind, and a very impressive humanoid chest. It was headed straight at them, so Peter couldn't see if it had hooves as advertised. Unlike a lot of demons, it didn't have horns; in fact, it was rather handsome in appearance, not obviously demonic at all.

It pulled up short, hovering in the air with powerful strokes of its wings, several stories above the neighboring buildings, still across the street and almost a full block away. Not in range for either the regular proton cannon or the destabilizer ray, Peter realized. So here was his big moment.

"Yo, catbreath! You can't park there!" His voice carried across the rooftops.

The entity curled its maw in a snarl, beat its massive wings once, and edged closer. It opened its leonine maw, and its voice sounded like a bear's growling. "You have been forewarned of my approach. This is bad. Why have you harmed my child?"

"Because it turned one of us into a stone statue, and tried to attack the rest of us when it hatched. That vicious little thing was your child, Whiskers?" The entity was moving forwards towards them, slowly. Peter got a good look at its lower limbs. Hoo, boy. They were the hindquarters of a bull, all right, and a pretty impressive one. The demon was definitely and blatantly male.

"My name is not 'Whiskers,' mortal." He sounded more amused than angry.

"Gregatim, then?" Ray had decided to join the conversation. Peter frowned - he didn't want the entity's attention drawn to the heavy weaponry before they were ready to use it.

"I have been called that these past few years. It is a title that does not displease me." The demon landed on the western edge of the roof of the building across the street from them, still just a bit out of range, and at an angle where it almost certainly couldn't see - or be seen by - Winston and Janine. So far, it had only gotten a good look at Peter and Ray.

Egon's voice crackled through the radio, very quietly. "Everyone stay in position. Janine, Winston, it is approaching from the side of the firehouse. Try to be inconspicuous until the entity is in range."

"Pankateinon?" Ray was grinning again. He edged out around the side of the destabilizer, the cord around his waist swinging.

That got a reaction from the demon, a bestial growl. "That name should be forgotten unto mortal kind. But I see by your garb that you are among the remnant who remember some fragment of the old ways." The demon's body language suddenly changed. It stood up straighter and unfolded its wings; suddenly Peter realized why the Cleveland witch had compared it to a cherub. When it wasn't menacing, it looked - not friendly, exactly, but noble. It extended one hand. "You are curious about the old powers. I can smell it on you. You have a gift. Does this other one respect it? Or the one crouching behind the little shed like a coward?"

Ray looked at Peter, suspicion in his eyes. Egon mumbled "oh, nuts."

"I can teach you, you know, Raymond Stantz. Yes, I know your name; I know all your names. I could show you. I have worked with mortals before." Pankateinon's voice was smooth, almost musical now. "These other two men - your partners - tell me, are they proud of your powers, little mortal? Do they encourage you? Or do they shrink away in fear, small-minded?"

Ray tore his eyes away from Peter. Egon clambered out from his hiding place, thrower in hand. Ray gestured at them each in turn. "They're afraid. Egon's just afraid of magic. Peter's afraid of me."

"Ray, no!" Peter was rapidly losing control of this conversation.

Ray turned back towards him. "You are, Peter. All Egon had to do was mention the pentagram and you flipped out. You . . . after the ritual, you looked at me like you wanted to bust me." Ray's voice was thick with hurt, and his lower lip was quivering. Very slowly, he winked the eye that the demon couldn't see.

Peter lifted his head in a fraction of a nod. "I - well, it's spooky stuff, Ray, you have to admit. You should've seen the look you had - it was wild, Ray." Egon looked back and forth between the two of them, eyes alight with several possibilities. Peter glanced back at him, eyes calm. It's okay, Spengs. The physicist's mouth was a thin line, but he held his position.

"You see? Already, all the world save this one city believes that you are madmen and frauds, simply because you capture spirits." Pankateinon stretched his wings and took to the air again, flying closer. "And these two, who work with you, who know there are spirits and powers beyond this one world, even they fear and loathe you for your link to those powers. Leave them, Raymond. Join with me. Become my apprentice, and I will show you things beyond mortal imagination."

Peter wondered, fleetingly, if Venator had watched the Star Wars trilogy while the demon was possessing him. Some of this dialogue sounded familiar.

Ray looked at the demon, eyes brimming with hope. Then his face became guarded, a strange look on Ray's usually open features. "What's your price? That offer is never free."

The demon smiled, showing its huge leonine teeth. "Clever, my child, so clever. You already know so many of the rules. This is my price: first, you give me back the child you stole from me, the cockatrice that I had - that I brought over to this world. Second, that you bring out the statue of your fourth member - Zeddemore, was it? - for it is my rightful property as well."

"But the statue's still alive!" Ray's shout was almost frantic. Easy, Tex, Peter thought, don't overdo it.

"It is, my child. Do not worry. I shall not harm him. In a way, he is lucky; he will neither age nor sicken. In a limited manner, he can live forever."

Egon shuddered involuntarily. Peter knew that his friend would have hated such an eternal semi-life, even if he'd managed to avoid going mad.

"What if I say no?" Ray called back to the demon, who was almost to the edge of the building. Any minute now he would be able to see Janine on top of Ecto; Peter couldn't see whether Winston was still in the open or had found cover. The demon obviously didn't think they would have been able to free their trapped member, and hadn't known which one of them it was, so he assumed it was the one he couldn't see.

"Then I shall have to take my property by force. Either way, I will have what is mine; it will be better if I may take it and teach you."

"What about them?" Ray gestured at Peter and Egon.

"That is up to you. I would not mind making a meal of them, if you would like your revenge on them for fearing you. But I know you humans grow attached to each other. If you wish, you may send them away and I shall not harm them."

"You're lying," growled Peter under his breath. "Even if Ray did take your offer, you'd still need to kill us and you know it."

"You'll just let them leave? I don't want to hurt them, even if they are afraid of me." Ray stretched one hand toward the demon.

"I will." Pankateinon hovered just shy of the edge of the building across the street. Egon's detector stopped going 'pong' and dropped to a bell-like chime.

"Now!" shouted Egon into his radio.

Ray instantly opened fire with the destabilizer beam, striking the demon in the middle of its chest. "Why do I get the feeling that's the same bargain you offered Venator? No thanks, furball. I'd rather be both feared and loved than neither one." The proton stream from Ecto's cannon and Winston's destabilizer beam caught the demon in its right shoulder and right wing, and it roared, a horrible noise that shook windows up and down the block.

Peter fired, catching the demon's left wing. Egon's proton stream crackled past, hitting it low on the torso. The demon roared again and struggled, but the destabilizers had already rendered it mostly transparent. Janine twisted a trigger dial to shorten her stream, and the entity was pulled away from the roof, towards Ecto.

"No, you fools! You cannot hold me! Think of the knowledge that will be lost!" It was still directing its appeal at Ray.

Ray adjusted his aim. "Count us, Gregatim."

The demon looked confused, then visibly totaled the number of his attackers. "Five? But - there were only four of you, and I felt the egg take one!"

"We got him back." Ray grinned. Egon sketched a slight bow, still holding his thrower on the demon. "All of us, using magic. They may be afraid of me, but they trust me anyway. You'll never know how that feels."

The demon roared incoherently, reaching clawed arms out of the streams towards the three Ghostbusters on the roof, but Janine was reeling him in like a pro and he never got close. Winston shut off the smaller destabilizer and reached around to the side of the pack. "Trap out!" he called, tossing it directly in front of Ecto. "Think of it this way, Greggie. At least you'll get to join your cockatrice friend in the containment unit."

The demon changed its aim and swiped at Winston instead, leaving gouges on the hood of Ecto but missing his target. Winston's foot landed squarely on the trigger, and the inverted cone of searing light sprang up under Pankateinon.

"No, I won't, you can't!" The demon beat his wings frantically; even ectoplasmic, they stirred up dust and trash into clouds on either side. Janine dropped her ecto-scopes into place to protect her eyes and sang out "This is for Egon. Bye-bye, baddie." She swung the proton cannon and tossed the demon, still caught in its stream, into the trap, which made its customary reversed-hiss noise and snapped shut.

A cheer went up from all five Ghostbusters, as well as some spectators hanging out the windows of the surrounding buildings. "We did it! That was easy!" crowed Ray, jumping up and down at the controls of the destabilizer cannon.

Peter pounded him on the back. "Way to go, Ray! That was some fine acting. But I thought I was going to be the bait today?"

Ray shrugged. "He'd targeted an occultist before, when he nabbed Venator. Once he saw me and reacted to the robe, I thought I'd run with it." His eyes flickered away from Peter. "Part of it wasn't exactly acting."

"Ray, I cannot believe for a minute that you were seriously tempted by his offer," Egon disagreed.

"Well, no, I wasn't," Ray admitted. "We know demons never play fair, and I already knew his track record as far as partnerships with mortals went. But that's not the point. When I was telling it you were afraid of me . . . "

"You were telling it the truth," Peter said flatly. "When you do your mumbo-jumbo, I don't understand it, and things happen. That freaks me out. Just like when I wake up from a nightmare and tell you guys about it, and part of it comes true later on, that freaks you out, Ray. Or when Egon comes up with a new device that does things we don't even have names for and might blow up the lab again, we all get a little nervous."

He reached out a hand and rumpled Ray's hair. "We're all a little afraid of each others' gifts, because we don't understand them. And after this entire wacky episode, I think we need to work on that, because if the egg of doom had managed to get both you and Egon, then Winston, Janine, and I would have been all but helpless here." Peter inhaled deeply, and looked at Egon. "I think I need to get you guys more up to date on psi, and test everyone again. I'm not the only one who's ever had precog dreams around here. Janine and Winston, too; Janine's had some damn good hunches over the years. And Ray, I think you need to teach Egon and me the basic stuff for magic. We can't just assume stuff like this won't happen again, and happen right when the one of us who's an expert is laid up in the hospital with a concussion or something equally stupid."

" 'Specialization is for insects,' " Egon quoted.

Ray looked at the faces of the two taller men, each in turn, then smiled and said "I'd be glad to." He pulled them each into a sideways hug, and added "I think we all need to start getting over the reasons we're afraid of each other."

Egon looked at Peter over Ray's head and started to say something when the door from the third floor stairs swung open and Winston and Janine piled out, Janine swinging a smoking trap by its cable. "We got him, guys! Let's get this monster into containment!" The general backslapping and cheering that ensued distracted everyone from more serious conversation; then Slimer arrived and insisted that they have dinner right away, because he was hungry.

---

The lab was a mess. The fragments of the cockatrice egg still littered the floor by the psychokinetic visual imager, its colander tipped on its side. The makeshift destabilizer cannon had been hauled back downstairs, although Ray had left the frame it was mounted on, in case they ever needed to use it up there again; the body of the massive thrower took up most of the table by the window. Ray's books and spell equipment had been packed back into their boxes, but the boxes were stacked loosely between the couch and the door, since no one had had the time to haul them back downstairs. The passage of many feet in many directions, along with the couch being shoved back into its original place, had finally scuffed Ray's central pentagram into an unrecognizable smear of chalk dust. Where the chalk hadn't been tracked, scorch marks from Janine's near-misses with the destabilizer and smears of ectoplasm from Slimer's evasive maneuvers stained the floor.

Egon stood in the middle of it all with a broom and a dustpan. He had no idea where to even begin.

There was a movement behind him. The physicist turned just in time to catch a brown jumpsuit edging away from the door. "Trying to sneak off before I recruit you for clean-up duty, Peter?" Egon called out.

"Nah." Peter waved a hand at Ray's boxes as he stepped back in. "I was looking for Ray. I hadn't realized until yesterday how personally he was taking the whole magic thing. Egon, it's been bugging him for over a decade, and I just now got it. I feel like a real heel." Peter threw himself into a chair and ran a hand through his hair. "I'm supposed to be the morale officer around here. I feel like I've been falling down on the job, especially since it's my reaction to magic that's really gotten to him. Janine doesn't mind at all; in fact, she thinks it's kind of neat. And Ray seems to feel Winston can't help it because of his upbringing. But . . . I'm supposed to be one of his best friends, and I've been keeping him down all this time."

"You are not the only one who has reacted badly to his occult studies, Peter, nor the only close friend of his who has expressed disapproval." Egon's mouth tightened into a line. "I have done so less than you, perhaps, simply because my upbringing was even less conventional than yours. I find occult studies fascinating from the perspective of an observer, and I always have. I vaguely remember deliberately seeking out such stories even before the Bogeyman first opened my closet door and sealed my fate." He gestured in a way that encompassed the room, the firehouse, their entire lives. "But I always shied away from actual practice, possibly because of the attitude my family displayed towards Zedekiah. Now that I am thinking about it more clearly, there was no such reluctance on the part of my family to discuss Eli and his escapades, perhaps because he was further in the past and perhaps because they thought of him as opposing superstition. But the methods he used were occult ones just as surely as Zedekiah's were." Egon re-adjusted his glasses, which had slipped down his nose again. "And in numerous small ways, I have made Ray pay an emotional and vocational price for my reluctance to face what I thought of as my family embarrassment."

"Yeah, I think we both owe him a major apology. Especially since his juju saved our butts big-time, here." Peter sighed. "How much of the ritual did you get to hear?"

"I heard the whole thing," Egon explained, setting down the broom and dustpan and settling back on the sofa. "I couldn't see very much, especially after the lights were turned out. It was rather like I imagine having heavy cataracts on both eyes might be - I could see motion, if it was large enough, and tell the difference between light and dark, but that was about it. My tactile and olfactory senses were completely inactive. But my hearing was merely slightly muffled. Since I was inside the circle, I assumed that whatever level of participation I could muster would be appropriate, so when you all started chanting, I . . . tried to sing along in my head, as it were." The physicist looked vaguely embarrassed, but a smile played at his lips.

"We heard you. All of us except Winston, anyway. And Ray said he felt your energy in the circle." Peter shivered a little, but his eyes were warm. "He knew you were still in there with us."

"And I could feel it when he cut the link between me and the egg. Up until that point, it had taken a great deal of concentration on my part not to just . . . drift." A flicker of fear crossed Egon's features. "It was easier not to think, to let the effect render me only semiconscious. Once he'd broken the link, it was still difficult to stay focused when the room was empty, but I could hear clearly and concentrate on what I was hearing as long as anything was occurring in the room."

Peter didn't reply; his gaze turned inward. Egon must have guessed what he was thinking, because his voice lowered and he said, gently, "Ray's not the only one who has nursed a grievance in secret for decades, either."

"God, Egon, please don't hold me accountable for what I said when I thought you might be gone," wailed Peter, but Egon leaned forward and laid a hand on his knee to still him. "I am not going to 'hold you accountable' for it, Peter. I merely think that it has weighed on both our minds for too long, and we ought to discuss it."

"Both our minds?" asked Peter, surprised.

"Very much so," agreed Egon.

Peter paused, his mouth partway open, and then he shut it with a snap. "I kinda said my piece already, Egon. You've already told me you could hear, so let me just admit that I meant every word of it. The only other thing I can think to say is that I think Ray already knows how I feel about you, and Janine at least suspects."

"Janine knows how I feel about you, because I have told her," Egon confessed. "I probably should not have done so; I know how much it hurt her. But I needed to tell someone, and while I agree with you that Ray most likely deduced it shortly after meeting us, it seemed inappropriate to burden him with my feelings. At least it was a gesture of intimacy with Janine, if not the sort she might have wanted."

Green eyes met blue in the fading light from the windows. "So tell me. How do you feel about me, Egon?"

Egon gazed back. "You are the fire that burns at the center of my life, Peter. I fell in mad, passionate love with you after knowing you for a mere month, the first time I ever truly fell in love, and still the strongest. And I have never fallen out. Not all the logic in the world, not all the strength of will I have ever mustered, not all the time that has passed, have dented that love in the slightest." Egon combed his fingers through his pipecurl, breaking it into several ringlets. "The one kiss we shared is seared into my memory like a brand. I replay it every night before I fall asleep. Some nights, it is the only thing that keeps me sane." He sighed, the weight of years laying on him. "I love you, Peter, like a brother and like a lover. I need you. No matter how frustrated you make me, no matter how your irresponsible behavior may enrage me sometimes, you are the missing half of my soul and I am incomplete without you."

Peter blinked, then slid from his chair and settled on the couch next to Egon. "Really?"

Egon's eyes were steady as planets among the twinkling stars. "Really, Peter."

Peter shuffled his feet on the floor. "So now that we know . . . what do we do about it?"

Egon looked thoughtfully at the ceiling. "Whatever you want, Peter. If you are well and truly attached to your playboy lifestyle, then things shall go on as they always have, except that I will have one more declaration of your feelings for me to cherish. If, on the other hand, you would like to 'try this out,' as I believe you said last night, I . . . would dearly like to make the attempt with you."

As soon as he stopped speaking, Peter leaned in and pressed his lips hesitantly onto Egon's. The taller man carefully wrapped his arms around Peter, settling one hand at Peter's side and the other at the back of his neck, and pulled him in closer. Their lips moved against each other, hungry and sweet and oh, god, so long! Peter tangled a hand in Egon's hair, the other somewhere near the small of his back, and made a tiny whimpering noise against the older man's mouth. Suddenly Egon's tongue was exploring his, and they were breathing hard against each other. Peter shifted position, Egon curling against him, and they were laying on the couch, Peter on top, Egon's legs tangled around his. Peter moved against his colleague, his friend, his partner, his beloved, and the entire universe collapsed into this one room, two people, two hearts and an expanse of famished skin . . . .

---

"Are you okay?" Ray followed Janine up the stairs from her office; she'd just shut down her computer for the day.

"I'll be fine. I meant every word I said about living for him. Besides," her eyes suddenly sparkled with her usual mischief, "the next time Peter loses a bet with me, I'm going to make him let me watch."

"Nice one," whistled Ray as they reached the second floor. The rest of the team was scattered around the rec room. Peter and Egon were occupying the couch, engaging in their usual banter, except for one long, pale hand clasping one smaller one with a thin white scar across the palm. Winston had taken the overstuffed chair, and was alternately tossing verbal jabs into the conversation and idly re-reading a mystery novel someone had left on the coffee table. The scent of sage and sweetgrass hung lightly in the air.

"All right, Professor Stantz, the class is all here," announced Peter as the last two members of the crew arrived.

"Are we ready for our first lesson?" Ray fell into the role easily enough, even though Egon and Peter had been the ones who'd actually taught classes at Columbia.

"Yes, teacher," Egon said, deadpan, and Winston's vaguely nervous look dissolved into laughter.

"Okay. Before we actually talk about magic, there are some basic skills that I think we all already have, we just don't necessarily have the same language for them. We're going to practice those until we're all on the same page," started Ray.

"Practice?" groaned Peter, raising a hand to his forehead. Egon poked him in the ribs, and Peter scowled back at him, but his eyes twinkled.

Ray ignored Peter's outburst. "So we're going to start with a simple grounding and centering exercise. I need everyone to sit in a relaxed position, feet on the floor, spine straight, and breathe from your diaphragm."

"If you even think it I'll break your kneecap," Janine muttered at Peter, who gave her the most innocent look he could muster. Truth be told, it wasn't all that innocent. Egon just rolled his eyes.

"Guys, come on," Ray complained. But he kept plowing through the visualization, and finally even Peter settled down.

Slimer drifted through the room, happily floating through the currents of energy that only he and Ray could see, so far. "Oooo, pwretty," he whispered, careful not to disturb his friends, all of them glowing with new light. If he noticed anything different about the way their energies twined together, he kept it to himself.