PRL Serials

from Fusion – Issue 27 – Step Up 

Koyu and Anes worked together to lure the legend Anansi into a long sleep with an elixir they mixed into his drink, and they siphoned his fiery energy to Desperation in the physical realm. 

It was difficult to keep Anansi’s wives from growing suspicious of their plans, but they organized a trip for the ladies that took them away from home and kept them distracted. 

“We cannot keep this up forever woman,” Koyu complained often as they made the egress from the special realm and into the physical one, feeding the spider that wrapped Desperation as he stalked swamps in pursuit of Ivan Santana. 

“I can’t imagine that this will last much longer. The soldier was rattled to his core, and the shaman is scared. When our man catches up, this will be over quickly and we can spring in to take what is ours.”

“So you say,” Koyu said refusing to be optimistic. 

– Issue 29 – Circle of Influence Part 1 of 2

When love is real it is not painful, even though that flies in the face of many accounts of the sensation. The problem is that love has gained a bad reputation because of the company that it keeps. Love is like the good, decent person who surrounds themselves with horrible, disgusting creatures so that by contrast, it is the Belle of the ball. Which says something about the nature of love I suppose, that perhaps it is insecure or petty or that it hopes that its good attributes will rub off on the foul. It explains the infamous thin line between love and hate. They are like best friends forever those two, it seems one cannot exist without the other.

And then love seems to have the constant companionship of jealousy and insecurity, of despair and longing, among other truly contemptible characters.

Love seems to lack repulsion to unwanted emotions. It is not like happiness, the natural repulsor of the deleterious sort often in love’s consort. Which explains why love and happiness together are devoid of negative emotions. 

Love needs happiness, or some other repulsive emotion, in order to be free of its bad friends, or else it will fall into old habits. 

Clay was not happy after his last confrontation with Desperation. He was in a lot of pain and his face took a while to heal into a shape that his loved ones recognized. Clay’s jaw had been broken and the jagged bone had bruised the muscle tissue, causing the right side of his face to swell. The bruising of his face had changed the color of his skin to a dark blue-black, and the normally smooth planes of his face were now interrupted on one side with traumatic hills and valleys. Clay wore a bandage around his face as the blood and puss seeped the parts of his skin that had been broken, and Ivan dutifully changed them three times a day, happy to play nurse. 

He stayed with his aunt Bernadette while he healed and he was like a shadow in her house. He was happy to go unnoticed because he hated the way people looked at him; their looks of shock or compassion just reminded him of his disfigurement and that made him unjustifiably angry at those meaning to show sympathy. 

He did enjoy being with Ivan, but Clay would pull him into shadows so the two could disappear together. When he wasn’t with Ivan, Clay played a game that he had created in the solitude of his youth. His siblings easily forgot him as they played games with their friends and Clay didn’t care because he could always occupy himself. When he wasn’t practicing the boxing moves that his father had taught him in the backyard on the rare occasions he was home and not traveling the country fighting matches, Clay sat in the living room with the tv off, staring at the door, wondering what mischief had found his mother as she went about her second shift job at the local fast food restaurant. He imagined her walking the sidewalk in front of the house and attempting to cross the six lane highway to the restaurant before she was barreled down by a semi truck, or a midsize sedan, or a pick up truck, or any of the numbers of cars he had seen commercials for a hundred times. He imagined her being attacked by one of the many pit bulls that the men of his neighborhood owned as indicators of their manhood. He imagined her being shot by men similar to the pit bull owners who used guns and bravado as place holders for interesting personalities. Until the sun set and his siblings crowded onto the couch to watch TV and pushed him onto the floor where he sat cross-legged and continued his macabre game. Until his mother came through the front door, usually smelling of French fries. He would hug her around her waist, relieved to see her well and intact. 

He hadn’t played that game in many years, but when he was alone, he wondered if Desperation had returned and somehow breached the magical defenses around his aunt’s house and was brutalizing Ivan in every way possible. He wanted to find Ivan when his fear turned to anger, but he would catch himself when he walked into light and shirk back away from it like a vampire; the looks of others really made him feel less than himself and he could not bare that. When Ivan did come to him, Clay had to be consoled; his anger was piqued and he barked at Ivan for worrying him, until Ivan wrapped his arms around his neck and assured him that he was not going anywhere. 

One day Ivan was holding Clay’s head carefully in his lap, Bernadette interrupted them for her regular inspection of his wounds. She had a lot of experience mending wounds with the magic she had learned from her ex-husband, Kyrie, and even though Clay felt like a deformed monster, his wounds were healing much faster than they would have if he had sought medical attention. He mostly looked like himself, Bernadette had carefully stinted the bones with the bright blue magic that danced from her fingertips and into the skin of Clay’s cheek to hold them securely in place until they were sufficiently healed. The spell, or incantation, was one of her own design that she had crafted under the watch of Kyrie who is a human master of the repulsive force. Bernadette managed to concentrate repulsive forces as a gentle nudge completely around a shattered bone to hold it stable without further trauma to the surface of the skin that could result from a rigid cast. Bernadette had an interest in becoming a doctor in her youth, but after years of tending to wounded men who had challenged her father to a fight, she sought other employment opportunities in her adulthood and had hoped she’d never have to use that magic again.

She didn’t talk to him as she focused on refining the very dangerous force that she wielded as a master to heal his wounds; she focused on applying the right amount of pressure in the right places. She had learned to repurpose the repulsive force in a way that no one else had; it was like she was threading a needle with a backhoe and she could do it with her eyes closed.

“It is a curse to be so damn good at what I do,” Bernadette said gravely in the silence of the room. She had sat Clay up and she knelt in front of him as she worked. “You know why nephew? It’s cause fools know where to go to get back on they feet. What you planning to do when I make you all good-looking again? You gonna marry this man right here that been watching over you like a hawk since y’all rolled up in here? No, you ain’t. You ain’t that type.”

As she finished her reinforcements, she recalled the excess forces and sent them through the roof without any destruction because Bernadette was adept at casting the forces she siphoned back to their source that fuels the universe. She pulled both her hands away from Clay’s face and the excess blue magic danced back, and then flew away in an instant when she flicked both wrists.

“I hardly know you Clay,” Bernadette said when she was done. “You was just a little boy when your daddy ruined his family so we ain’t spent no time together. I want to know the man you are, and I want to protect you from things that’s trying to get you. It got your daddy, it almost got mine. Now I guess you the next one. And it ain’t coincidence you here now. Both of y’all. I can help you if you let me, but I won’t waste my time with another dummy with his heart set on dying like a dummy. Help me get rid of your spider now. It’s waiting just outside my spell around this property and the minute you walk off it’s gon be right back on you.”

She had expressed her displeasure before at the powers Clay could wield that changed the size of his body and made him stronger. She had told him that the powers were characteristic of Anes, a bad spirit that he should not be involved with. That day, she was earnest and trying to drive the point home.

“There are swarms of spiders all around my perimeter right now and every day I have to sweep them back. They won’t go until you give it up. Let me help you and you help me. Then we can catch up, make some new family traditions. When was the last time you was out this way? We can go see some birds, go to a beach. But you have to help me get rid of those spiders because either they stronger than I remember or I’m not as strong as I used to be. We got to do it for keeps too. Ain’t no getting that power back after this. You either give up that power and help me with this repulsion spell or those spiders will overrun us by the end of the day tomorrow.”

Clay looked to Ivan. Ivan had noticed the neon spiders in the distance when he was outside but had a feeling that it was Desperation come back for his revenge and kept at bay by Bernadette’s magic. The threat was real, Clay could see it in Ivan’s eyes. And both of them wondered if Clay could sacrifice his preternatural abilities considering the threats lose in the world. Clay had fought mutated zombie people, and he was in constant battle with Desperation who, even without the aid of the spiders had a preternatural ability that made him stronger than Clay without the size-changing powers associated with the spider Anes. Repulsing the spiders might slow Desperation down, but it would not stop him for good. 

“Why is this not an easy decision for you?” Bernadette asked. “Why you want that spider on you?”

“Cause,” Clay said, “with Ivan, I can, I have used it to save people. It’s worse stuff out there auntie, happening to people that don’t deserve it, and I can do something about it. I know you understand that.” 

“You a good man. Good men always got good reasons to be dummies. We don’t have time to debate you being a hero. We need a plan to reinforce my spell or we all in trouble.”

“We can figure it out,” Ivan said. “We will. All of us together.”

Later in the day, Ivan stood on the front porch of Bernadette’s house. He stared out at the skittering forms of spiders just outside of the perimeter of Bernadette’s magic that repelled the influence of Anes. And then he saw a man in the distance and he knew who it was. He could practically see his full-toothed grin. Ivan walked out to meet the man on the dirt road that led out to paved roads. He stood at the invisible perimeter that was visible to him because of his abilities and he confronted the man Desperation Jackson who was bigger than Ivan remembered. There were neon spiders skittering around his body, others that came too close to the barrier were instantly obliterated.

“I ain’t seen you in months,” Desperation said, his voice much more angry than the jovial look on his face. 

“You’ve been waiting out here for me?”

“I have.” Desperation took a step closer to the barrier. “You know I been chasing your man so long I can’t really do much else. I don’t like loose ends. And these spiders seem to want him worse than I do. I got a message for you Ivan, from the bad-bitch spider, she say both of y’all give up that magic y’all do and she’ll let you go. She will call me off. All that mean is I’m gonna kill Sweetness without no enhancements. But at least you’ll get to walk away alive. You and your boyfriend give up the magic show and all this magic stuff disappear.”

Bernadette stood beside Ivan then and he only noticed her when Desperation bowed to her.

“This woman here!” Desperation said with a laugh. “The spiders hate you. They scared of you. But you getting tired ain’t you? You ain’t been attacked like this in years and your best is giving out on you. You can’t like having these faggots in your house. Kick em out and let me deal with them.”

Bernadette laughed. “Boy, you so far gone you don’t even know it.” She doubled over laughing. “You think you give them what they want, you get whatever it is you asked them for? Good luck with that.”

“You only got so much left in you old bird. Good luck.”

Desperation flew off in a chaos of fire and more spiders began to gather. They were big, some as tall as Ivan, and they fixed all of their eyes on him as they moved around, looking for a way to get closer.

“What will they do if they get in?” Ivan asked.

“I don’t know, but it won’t be good,” Bernadette said gravely.

Meanwhile, in the Quinspace…

Koyu hated spiders. All of them, even the ones he didn’t know personally. The ones that he had met were hard to trust and they only interacted with other Quinspace beings to use them in some scheme they were hatching. He hated Anes most of all, and he rued the day that their destinies became intertwined. 

Koyu reluctantly occupied the wives of Anansi while Anes drugged him and funneled his unique energies to their champion in the physical world. Koyu enjoyed the sexual pleasures that he received from the lady spiders, but this plan was taking much longer than either he or Anes had anticipated.

Koyu hoped that it would be over soon, Anes had promised to increase her pressure. His body was chafing and his ability to seduce the women would strain soon enough.