Naeva-To Fight a Monster

Chapter 9

This woman was very dangerous.

Valerian glanced up at them, but otherwise continued stacking objects in the house into a wall. He'd turned off all the lights; only the orange evening light from Erin's reading window illuminated them now.

Naeva took a deep breath, realizing she was shaking. "I usually prefer to know what I'm doing, especially when relying on someone else. Why are we not walking or taking a carriage to the job?"

"She has a point, yeah?" Erin said, watching warily as Valerian checked his work, "but if my guess is right, these experiments of his can save entire villages, arriving within seconds of a report instead of hours."

Naeva nodded, trying to calm her nerves. "You don't even know his powers, though. What kind of experiment is he doing? He killed a Libra, but you never talk about that. Instead, you talk about him showing up out of nowhere."

Radley smiled at her, but Naeva found herself avoiding his gaze. He was just as off-putting as Polina, but she couldn't figure out why in his case. "He killed a shadow person that tried to kidnap his little brother while they were out camping. It was so quiet that my uncle didn't wake up, but Valerian noticed just in time. He took his dad's knife and killed it. Now he can Umbra Jump. In other words, he can step into one shadow and emerge from another."

The three women stared at him, and he smile slowly vanished. "What's wrong?"

"You knew this whole time, yeah?" Erin accused, pointing a finger at him. "You let him startle us every time he arrived, and you didn't say anything!"

"If a shadow person can catch a person with that power, why didn't he ever help us travel?" Polina asked.

"That one, I don't know," Radley admitted. "Maybe that's why he's been experimenting?"

"You would have been crushed in the Umbra Stream," Valerian said, reaching out and closing the window blinds. "I would compare it to squeezing through a steel pipe that barely fits you, and that gets tighter the farther you go. Now that I can negate forces, I can manage with one other person at a time, and I can go much further. It saved Radley's life the other day when I carried him back here."

"And that's why I volunteer to go first," Radley said. "You ready, cousin?"

Valerian nodded and extended his hand. Radley took it, and they both disappeared into the blackness. Twenty seconds later, he returned. "He is fighting the Cerberus pack now. Polina, your skills would be a big help to him."

They melted into the shadows, and Erin shivered. "I tried not to think of him as a ghost, yeah? But now..."

"Now he can float in the air and melt into shadows?" Naeva asked, staring at the darkest shadow in the room.

Erin nodded, and Valerian reappeared, wordlessly extending his hand. Erin hesitantly took it, and they were gone once again. Naeva was left to ponder on his power until he came back. "Do not let go," he instructed, extending his hand.

Naeva tightened her sling and the bag they'd given her, then extended her hand.  The moment she grabbed it, she was pulled into a tunnel that looked like it was made of inky black stone. It didn't feel like stone, however. It felt more like she was being pulled, hand-first, through the inky blackness of a patch of Finstrese quicksand, only there was no end to it. It pressed in all around her as it grew darker, rendering the weird tunnel walls invisible, even when she tried using her griffin's eyes. Valerian's hand became the only clear sense to her, so she clung to that for dear life.

Why aren't we there yet?  Naeva thought, panicking. It's been far longer than twenty seconds, hasn't it?

Her hand began to slip.