Page 12 of Claimed By the Mothman (Greymarket Towers #1)

S omething was wrong with the hallway light. It flickered, but not in that irritated, attention-seeking way of a bulb that needs changing. It pulsed, slowly and deliberately, like it was breathing.

Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

Nell’s notebook had gone strange. Pages she knew she’d written had faded into soft spirals of graphite.

Entire entries were missing. Her handwriting was unfamiliar, with too-tight loops and pressure that vibrated from the barest mark to deep, tearing grooves.

Just yesterday she had looked down and the page in front of her had been filled with a single word, scrawled again and again:

wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong

Her opal ring had warmed steadily through the day until it was almost too hot to wear.

At work, she dropped a glass in the staff kitchen. One second it was in her hand, the next it was shattered on the floor. It was like her fingers had forgotten how to hold on.

Ms. Kephra had laid a cool hand on her shoulder. “Take a break,” she said softly. Her voice was kind, but there was a thrum behind it, like the tolling of bells at a funeral.

It wasn’t until Nell entered the Greymarket Towers lobby that she realized she couldn’t remember walking home.

She had taken the stairs—the elevator had refused to be called.

Dev and Carol from 6C passed her in the stairwell and had given her small, quiet smiles, the kind reserved for hospitals and funerals.

Even Goldie hadn’t texted in days. Not since that weirdly intense conversation about whether ghosts could haunt themselves. Nell had typed out a message three times and deleted it each time. Hey, do I seem weird lately? Like… wrong?

She stood at the window for a long time, staring out over Bellwether as the sun dipped low. The towers across the skyline blurred into apricot and gold, as if they were being painted in real time by an unsteady hand.

There was a precise knock on her apartment door. Nell jumped and moved quietly to the peephole, heart skittering.

Mr. Lyle stood in the hallway, posture immaculate, a slim black folder tucked under one arm. He inclined his head, as if acknowledging her presence on the other side of the wood.

She opened the door. “Mr. Lyle?”

“Ms. Townsend,” he said smoothly. “May I come in for a moment?”

She stepped aside. He didn’t wait for an invitation.

He moved into the apartment with careful efficiency, scanning the room curiously like someone auditing the aftermath of a minor miracle. His eyes flicked to the window. To the ring on her hand. To the floor beneath her feet, like he could hear something pulsing in the foundations.

“I apologize for the interruption,” he said, adjusting a cuff. “But the building is becoming...animated.”

Nell frowned. “Animated how?”

“Attentive. Restless.” He paused. “Hungry, perhaps, but not for you. Not yet.”

She swallowed. “Is this about the red doors?”

“It is all about all doors,” he said gently. “Visible or not. Fixed or not.”

He turned toward her fully, and for the first time, his poise seemed less bureaucratic and more ceremonial.

“Some thresholds remake you,” he said softly. “Some offer more than you can carry. Others ask for what you didn’t know you were willing to give.” He held out the folder but did not press it into her hands.

“I cannot stop what’s unfolding,” he said. “But you deserve to know the shape of it.”

The folder hovered between them. She took it. He nodded once, more a benediction than a farewell, and walked out, leaving behind the faint scent of pine and snow and something older than either.

Nell stood still for a long moment, the folder cool and weighty in her hands. Then, she looked down at the folder in her hands. Slowly, she opened it. Inside was a single page, typed neatly.

Some are born to survive the Lustrum.

Some are born to become it.

If you are reading this, you already know which you are.

She reread the final line three times, but it didn’t change. The circled date at the bottom was today’s.

—

She woke up in the middle of the night, heart hammering, sheets tangled around her legs.

The hum had grown closer. Like it had pressed its face to the glass of her reality and was breathing fog onto the surface.

She sat up slowly, the dream dissolving her. She couldn’t recall the path, but she remembered the feeling of it: red doors that opened silently. Corridors bending like breath held too long. Her own hand outstretched, as if it knew the way even while her mind reeled.

She pressed her palms to her eyes—and suddenly—

Chopsticks clacking, the sound echoing merrily in the kitchen while she and Goldie ate takeout and watched the setting sun. “You’re not a disaster,” Goldie had said. “You’re just a story in-between drafts right now.”

Her name , said too casually— “Oh, hey, Nell” —as if she’d just interrupted a podcast, not her marriage. Elinore’s bare skin gleaming like a pearl in the tangled sheets in their bed. Edward’s hand frozen mid-motion on her thigh.

Her mother’s laugh, bright and round like the summer sun. Her father’s arms, big and safe, smelling of leather and tobacco. “There’s my girl,” he rumbled. “Got your nose in a book again?”

The mildew smell of the weekly hotel that no candle could cover. The fridge that hummed too loud. The stain on the ceiling she refused to interpret. The dull, growing hole in her heart and her bank account.

Sig Samora’s glowing red eyes in the elevator. His voice, soothing as waves, dark as dusk. The feel of his clawed hand on her arm, grounding her.

—the present buckled.

The opal on her finger pulsed. It flickered green, then red, then a third color she didn’t have a name for.

The hum in her chest surged. In her blood now. In her lungs. Her skin itched with pressure.

She got up from the bed and walked to the front door in a daze. Opened it and walked through. Didn’t lock it. And walked. Letting her feet decide.

She hadn’t turned left. She hadn’t turned right. She’d just moved. And now—

Now she was standing in a corridor.

The carpeting here was older. Softer. A radiator to her left hissed in long, serpentine bursts.

And there, at the end of the hallway, loomed a pair of red doors.

They pulsed softly, like a heartbeat. The hum surged behind her ribs, up into her throat, to the tips of her tingling fingers. It throbbed in rhythm with the doors, like she was being called.

She took a step forward. Then another.

Nell.

The carpet under her feet darkened. She didn’t look down. She didn’t want to know if it was just shadow or if the floor itself had begun to bleed. Dark tendrils curled from the walls, which were leaning in slightly, eagerly. Watching.

Yes, the Voice said. This is what you were made to remember. This is what you are for. Now. Come. Come. Come.

The ring on her finger flared—the opal gleaming hot.

Her fingertips brushed the handle of the door and turned it.

—

In the days since the garden—since she’d bumped into him, flushed and breathless, bright with discomfort—something inside Sig had begun to unravel by degrees.

He pressed the tension into his rituals: the aeration of soil, the naming of plants. He whispered lullabies to the shadows when the building stilled in the nighttime hours, pretending that sleep was something he could attain.

But still, the unraveling continued.

The Doom had begun to echo again, the familiar thrum in his bones of the sound that came before endings. His body knew something was shifting, and it was preparing for its purpose.

We are not saviors, the Elders had warned him. We do not interfere. We witness. We become the shape of sorrow in the sky.

He remembered the first time he felt the Doom.

It was a collapse deep in the mountains.

Seven children, never to be found. The village had wept for days, weeks, months.

Sig had wept long before. His body had changed for the first time then, too—wings flaring, eyes burning.

He hadn’t known what it meant, only that the Broodhome Elders had pressed their foreheads to the floor when he returned.

For a century and a half, he had done what he was meant to do. He heard the thrum of the Doom here, there, across the world, across the hallway. And he stood still and let it happen.

Over and over and over again.

He had stopped visiting the common areas. The lights flickered red when he entered, and stayed that way until he left. The vents hissed behind his back. The radiator in 6B made a sound like teeth grinding whenever he walked past.

Even the residents noticed. “Sig’s been different lately,” someone whispered on the stairwell. “Restless. Last time he was like this, that family in 7B disappeared.”

Mr. Caracas, who once yelled at a tree for existing too loudly, had met Sig’s eyes in the common room and extended the TV remote.

"You want to watch something else?" he said.

Sig took it with trembling fingers. Set it down without changing the channel.

Caracas didn’t look away from the soap opera. Just muttered: “It’s close, isn’t it.”

Sig remained silent. Caracas’ eyes flicked over to him.

“Sorry,” he grunted.

Sig hadn’t answered. He hadn’t trusted his voice.

—

He was in the greenhouse. Not where residents swapped clippings and gossip, but the other one. The hidden one.

He reached out to a pot of nightblooms, and they shivered at his touch. They had never done that before. As his hand withdrew, something ripped through him like a faultline breaking open.

She was moving. The moment her feet touched the carpeted floor of the hallway—the hallway that was there and wasn’t, a hallway more ancient than the building itself—it hit him like a lightning bolt.

His body went rigid. His wings jolted out of their folded state, unfurling in a blur of instinct and panic. They scraped the glass, shattered a planter, and knocked three shelves sideways.

His hand shot out, bracing against the wall. “No,” he whispered.