Page 13 of Claimed By the Mothman (Greymarket Towers #1)

For one hundred and fifty years, he had been the shadow. He had stood witness as children vanished. As lovers were torn from each other like pages from a book. But this was different.

He felt her step forward and his body shifted. The crack of carapace echoed, and his skin shimmered darkly. The ash-velvet of his limbs began to darken into something harder, more chitinous. Symbols bloomed along his throat in phosphorescent red—the mark of the Harbinger.

Sig tore from the greenhouse in a blur of motion, glass and soil exploding behind him.

Wings snapped and narrowed, not for flight, but speed.

He vaulted the railing, hit the stairwell at an angle, and kept going—running, charging , Greymarket bending around him as if it too understood: this time was different .

Something raw and unwritten surged in him now. The sigils along his throat flared bright. He was running toward the fire. Toward her.

He felt the pattern form beneath his feet. It wanted to lift him into the air, to begin the vigil. His wings, meant to unfurl in silence above a tragedy, now crashed wide through the hallway like thunder.

“I will not be your omen,” he growled.

The building shrieked. Somewhere deep beneath the foundation, the plumbing howled.

And she was walking ever closer to the doors.

The walls stretched, angles warping as if the building were exhaling in confusion. The floor sloped left, then right, as Greymarket reshaped itself beneath his feet.

“I am Harbinger,” Sig hissed, fangs bared now. He launched forward, wings battering the air, his legs snapping and rebounding like pistons.

“I am not bound to walls. I do not kneel to doors.”

Walls warped. The ceiling bowed. A pulse moved through the building like a heartbeat gone wrong.Sig threw his head back and let the cry out—the one Harbingers were trained never to use unless the world was ending.

The air pulled taut. His vision snapped into clarity. And there she stood.

“Nell—”

Her hand was already lifting. Her fingers moved like they were underwater. Her fingers grasped the handle, and it knifed through him like a dagger through the chest.

The Lustrum opened like a mouth.

Sig lunged as she stepped forward, but he was too late.

—

She was falling.

No—

Floating.

No—

Rupturing.

The air thickened around her. She couldn’t breathe through it, couldn’t see through it, but she felt it.

She heard breathing. Her own, wet and ragged. And something else. Older. Hungrier.

Her knees buckled. Except—she no longer had knees. Or was she still standing?

The opal on her finger pulsed—steady, soft, strangely soothing.

A thing unfolded in front of her. Its limbs curved in spirals, not joints. Its mouth parted along the wrong axis. Its eyes—too many? too few?—were scattered across its body like constellations in the midst of rearranging themselves.

It was vast in a way that collapsed direction. Time flattened.

Nell didn’t know if she was real, or just the echo of someone who had been remembered fondly. Her skin tingled and her breath shivered out of her.

The thing before her opened its mouth—mouths—mind and spoke in a surprisingly gentle tone.

What do you think you are? What did you hope to become? What do you want that has not already been touched by grief?

She tried to answer, but language bent sideways. Her vision shimmered. Doubled. Tripled.

You are the key and the cost, the thing went on, the words curling in her mind like smoke. You are sacrifice. You are meant.

She tasted metal. Her tongue went thick. The opal flared brilliantly and the heat surged up her throat, into her eyes.

This is it, she thought distantly.

Her spine lost its alignment. Her thoughts spilled like water from a cracked glass.

The thing loomed above her. Its hands moved to her face. Its mouth widened.

Come home.

And the Lustrum inhaled.

—

Sig dropped to his knees.

It had her. She had opened the door.

And now the Lustrum was beginning to unmake her.

His claws hit the floor, digging into the carpet.

“No,” he intoned. “No —mine.”

The sigils along his throat flared white, then splintered. With a scream that was neither word nor sound, Sig launched forward, flinging himself into the doors she had willingly entered.

The moment he crossed the threshold, the space recoiled.

Pressure slammed into him from all sides, and the voice of the Lustrum crawled along his skin: Watcher. Witness. Warning.

Every cell in him screamed with resistance as the Lustrum reached into his essence, dragging spectral fingers along the structure of his being.

Harbinger? Omen? Intruder?

And then—there. There she was. Body half-folded, the shape of her already softening, starting to dissolve at the edges.

He felt it gathering like a fold pulling tight. The end of her . The version that laughed and fretted and burned bright. The Lustrum would make her into something perfect, and in doing so, unmake what she was.

He had to act, even if it meant stealing her from fate itself.

“I CLAIM HER!” The ragged howl ripped from his chest.

The Lustrum turned.

“I CLAIM HER!” Sig roared again, pushing through the press of ritual and resonance, through a thousand voices whispering you are not allowed.

The space tightened. Reality shrank. The ground below him folded like wet paper. The air squeezed like a fist.

You were not invited, the Lustrum hissed. She is already ours. Leave, or be undone.

Sig’s wings flared, and he declared it one last time. “I CLAIM HER!”

The bond caught like a snare. A raw stitch, half-formed and blazing with demand, jerked through his flesh and soul, lancing towards her and attaching.

—

She didn’t see him move, but she felt the roar tear through the space and envelop her. A jolt lanced through her skin and caught on something deep in her chest.

The Lustrum screamed, a sound that scraped across the skin of the not-place, high and skinned-raw, threaded with syllables that had never belonged in mouths, human or otherwise.

She felt herself being ripped free like a seam torn open, threads popping one by one. The ground gave a final, furious shudder and then—released her.

Silence descended.

Nellwas on her knees, collapsed against the carpet of one of Greymarket’s hallways. She couldn’t speak, but there was movement behind her. She looked up weakly.

Sig Samora towered over her, wings spread behind him, shimmering with iridescent fire, every vein of them pulsing like stained glass lit from within. Symbols glowed along his throat and chest.

He said something. Or maybe he didn’t. Her vision blurred, and the world went white.

-–

She was in his arms. Unconscious, warm, alive, and in his arms.

Her shape was here, yes, but her self was shifting, still folding back into her body.

His hands shook as he held her closely to him. He had not intended to claim her, but when he saw the Lustrum reaching for her, it had torn from him with an instinct woven deep into his marrow.

She breathed. Her wrist lay across his shoulder, limp. But every faint, steady pulse sent something through him.

His wings slowly folded around her. He had broken a pattern older than gods. His people would exile him if they knew. But her heartbeat thudded against his and it felt right.

And Sig Samora, Harbinger, realized as he held the small woman to his chest, that she was already worth whatever the cost would be.