It was well into the next day before Clay and Bernadette could travel to Charleston. Clay was eager to see Ivan alive and well, especially considering that no form of communication worked while the repulsive force was still wedged between them. They could not hear or see one another on phones and Clay could not physically advance any closer to the city than the position he held in Bluffton at the home of his aunt.
Bernadette was at a loss; the work of Anes, the bitter spider, to separate Ivan and Clay was unfamiliar to Bernadette and even despite her skills, she was unable to undo the complex knot of repulsive energies that Anes had managed in a very short time with a very small amount of repulsive energies. Her ex-husband Kyrie in Charleston could manage it, and he did in the late afternoon when the day was hottest.
“I feel it auntie, it’s gone,” Clay said eagerly as he stared north.
“Well, get in the car, let’s go,” she started.
“I can jump us there,” Clay said. “We can be there in ten minutes.”
“Get in the damn car, boy!” Bernadette said playfully. “I’m too old to be jumping across the state.”
In Charleston, Ivan had been sprung from MUSC by a woman he had met a while before named Wendy who was working at the campus when he was transported. She took him to her house where he met Kyrie, the ex-husband of Bernadette. The man was handsome and he had an affable personality that made it easier to accept his actions that defied physical reality; like how he had flown through the air and landed on the front lawn of the house where Wendy had brought him.
After he introduced himself, he and Ivan stood in the backyard of the home under the heat of the day. Kyrie stared at Ivan. Ivan withered under his close gaze, suddenly self conscious of his appearance.
Kyrie could see the tangled ropes of repulsive energies that Anes had attached to Ivan and Clay that made it impossible for the two to be together, and he studied them closely to determine the best approach for undoing it. He stood close to Ivan, silently inspecting the attachments of the ropes to his fiery, green form; they were entrenched like hooks with many barbs that dug in deep. He smiled at Ivan, who nervously returned it, and then he ripped one of the ropes out of Ivan to gauge the effect of just ripping them all lose.
Ivan exploded in a ball of flames that changed between green, blue, and yellow, and the force of the explosion at the point when Kyrie ripped the string from Ivan sent Kyrie smashing against the side of Wendy’s house. There was damage that Kyrie apologized for and tried to fix, but it was still noticeable even after his effort.
Wendy was looking on and she winced at Kyrie’s misfortune, though mostly at the damage to the house that was a rental.
When Ivan calmed after several minutes, he yelled at Kyrie, “Please don’t do that again!”
“Easy, big fella, calm down. That was stupid, I just woulda kicked myself if it was that easy and I didn’t try.”
Kyrie nodded as if he was listening to a voice that no one else in the yard could hear, though Ivan could see a large, faint form next to Kyrie after the explosion. It was like a faint shadow stood in for something or someone else, and Ivan assumed that this was the thing Kyrie conversed with.
“If I try to recall them, it’s the same thing, just ripping it out,” Kyrie reasoned with seemingly nothing from Wendy’s vantage point. She was confused but understood that she too had spoken with a voice with no body that onlookers could perceive and she watched silently
“Seduce them out?” Kyrie said skeptically. “I don’t know how to do that. Like make them let go? Make them reverse. With seduction? Shut up, I’ll figure it out.”
Kyrie approached Ivan again and the flame around him flared up; it could be seen from miles away.
“Easy,” Kyrie said calmly as Ivan relaxed and his flame subsided. When he was close, Kyrie held a hand at one of the hooks buried into Ivan’s fiery form. He inhaled deeply, and the hook pulled at Ivan. Kyrie reset and breathed more evenly, rhythmically. Seduce it out, he thought to himself, and he moved his hands gracefully through the air, retracing the trajectory that the hooks had to have taken to ensnare Ivan. The first rope unhooked and then the line dissipated.
After a while, Kyrie said an incantation and he backed away from Ivan.
“I figured it out and that thing I said will do the slow work. Should be done by tomorrow.”
Ivan could feel the ropes slipping out of him and he felt more relief as each one fell off. He hugged Kyrie who seemed very happy to have helped.
“I guess Bernie will be here soon,” he said, smiling.
The next day, Ivan went with Wendy to do something that he did not quite understand.
“I have to get as high up as I can so I can make the cursed spirit energies dissipate,” she had explained to him.
Ivan nodded and followed her out of the house. Occasionally she spoke with people that Ivan could not see and he understood that two of her ancestors were with her to help her complete her mission.
“Kyrie was able to stop new curses from joining up with spirits,” Wendy said when the gang was all together again near the prison in downtown Charleston. “But there are a lot of cursed spirits out all over the city. My ancestors and I can pull the energies, stretch them, and where it’s thin, it will disappear. A lot of people have been dying here recently.”
“How can I help?” Ivan asked. He didn’t fully understand, but he was happy to lend a hand.
“Just fly me up, as high as you can, and I’ll take care of the rest.”
Ivan grabbed Wendy and as they ascended, there was a loud screeching noise and a streak of yellow sparks energy flew past Ivan, almost knocking him out of the air. When they looked down, Ivan didn’t see anything, but Wendy saw many of the cursed souls, swarming with the yellow sparks, yelling angrily up at her and throwing whatever energy they could spare.
“They know what I’m trying to do,” Wendy said. “Go faster!”
Ivan concentrated and the two rose faster. Soon they hovered over the city.
Wendy focused and she drew the yellow sparks up; to Ivan it was a faint twinkle that he squinted to see.
“It’s done,” Wendy sighed after a few minutes and they landed at Wendy’s rented home. By the time they did, Wendy was fast asleep in Ivan’s arms and he lay her gently on the couch inside.
“She’s pretty impressive,” Kyrie said. He had followed Ivan when they returned. “You too. Do you see the pink pterodactyl?”
It sounded like a code to Ivan, but Kyrie had asked it sincerely. “I’ve seen one before,” he said honestly. “I got my bell rung pretty hard in middle school and I saw all of these weird things.”
Kyrie smiled. “Then you’ll have to meet my friend Lorne.”
When they arrived at the home where Kyrie told Bernadette they would find Ivan, Clay jumped eagerly out of the car and he ran through the front door without knocking. The two embraced, Ivan was surprised and then relieved to be reunited and Clay could not stop smiling.
“I thought you said you would never step foot in this city ever again,” Kyrie said to Bernadette.
“You always make a liar out if me, don’t you?” Bernadette said.
“So you here cause of me?”
“I’m here cause of them, but if you was doing what you supposed to be doing out here, then they wouldn’t be here would they?”
Kyrie laughed. “So now you want me to do this magic stuff, cause all them years ago you was singing a different song.”
“That’s what you want to do?” Bernadette asked. “You just want to fight with me? We can’t be nice to each other?”
Kyrie hugged her. “We can be nice.”
Wendy slept for the next twenty four hours and Ivan convinced everyone to stay at the house until she woke up. That night, they all say outside around the small fire pit.
“I’ve been thinking about y’alls predicament,” Kyrie said to Ivan and Clay. “Bernadette been watching y’all and she thinks the reason Clay ain’t like his daddy or her own is because you don’t just use the spider powers. You use the same power Ivan use. It’s the spider mixed with something else. And if the two of you can get rid of the spider, and whatever the other thing is that make it green, then y’all can master those powers you got like me and Bernie.”
“Don’t include me in that,” Bernadette said. “I ain’t no master of nothing.”
“There you go again, denying yourself the respect you due,” Kyrie said. “Y’all know what this woman can do, and she do it with a power we share. The entity I get it from, Lorne, ain’t trying to kill me like that spider trying to kill y’all. He give me the power I have and he told me that if I share it with someone I trust with my life, then I can be a master. So I did.”
“And he ruined our marriage,” Bernadette interjected.
“I bound us together forever. Y’all managed even though the entities didn’t want you to. So now it’s time to get rid of them, or y’all gonna be dealing with this for the rest of your life.”
Clay grabbed Ivan’s hand and looked into his eyes. They both nodded at one another.
“Good,” Kyrie said. “So when the medium is awake, we can all go back to Bernie’s…”
“You don’t need to be at my house,” Bernadette said.
“And we should get back home,” Clay said. He was feeling like himself again and he knew that he needed to return to his responsibilities.
“Fine,” Kyrie pouted, “but we will all get together again soon to strategize. You too Bernie, don’t deprive your nephew of your expertise.”
“Fine,” she said defiantly. “But if you call me Bernie one more time I will repulse you into the sun.”
“Fair enough. We’ll meet at Clay’s house. Lorne is telling me that the Don should be there too. Who is the Don?”
“My grandfather,” Ivan said. “Why does he need to be there?”
Kyrie shrugged. “I would call him up though. Lorne is a solid guy, I would trust him if I were you.”
So it was settled. When Wendy awoke the next evening, everyone said goodbye.
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