Page 17 of Claimed By the Mothman (Greymarket Towers #1)

S unlight slanted through the blinds at just the wrong angle, bright enough to stab behind her eyelids yet warm enough to pretend it was an apology. Nell’s mouth tasted like old wine and newer mistakes. She rubbed her eyes, stretched, and froze and everything from yesterday came crashing back.

Oh gods. Oh no.

The Lustrum. The way the world had twisted sideways. Sig Samora.

She groaned, rolled over, and buried her face in the pillow.

“This is bad,” she whispered into the pillow. “This is so, so bad.”

This sort of thing should not be happening to her. She was just Nell. Just a thirty-six-year-old with one and two-halves college degrees, too many tea tins, a threadbare bank account, and a backlog of unprocessed relationship trauma long enough to knit a blanket.

She was not someone who attracted the attention of buildings with opinions. She was not someone who walked into a sentient, interdimensional door that tried to unmake her.

And she was definitely not someone who responded to that fucking her cryptid neighbor so thoroughly she saw constellations and may or may not have briefly forgotten her own name.

Except, apparently, she was.

The opal ring pulsed faintly on her finger.

Nell sat up, shoved the covers aside, and listened. The apartment was quiet. Normal quiet. Not the charged, vibrating stillness of the night previous. Just the whisper of the radiator, the creak of old pipes, the faint rustle of curtains flirting with the windowsill breeze.

No hum, no vibrating walls, no red doors whispering in her bones. Just the ache between her legs and a bite on her neck throbbing in time to her heartbeat.

She shuffled barefoot into the bathroom, flicked on the light, and caught sight of herself in the mirror.

“Oh, fuck off!”

Her brown curls were flattened on one side and feral on the other. Her skin was pale, her eyes were rimmed with deep gray smudges, and her cheek was creased with pillow lines. A raw, slowly scabbing bite stood out on her shoulder like a fanged hickey.

She yanked open a drawer and rummaged until her fingers closed around a red paisley handkerchief. With a hushed curse, she tied it around her neck with trembling fingers, the knot askew and accusatory.

She looked like a regretful Girl Scout. A regretful Girl Scout with smutty secrets.

The ring pulsed again. She flipped it off for good measure.

From the kitchen came a yawn loud enough to register on the Richter scale, followed by the clatter of cupboard doors and the comforting clink of ceramic. Nell sighed and tentatively staggered into the kitchen.

Goldie stood at the counter in a glamorous pair of silk pajamas and Nell’s oldest hoodie, stirring sugar into a mug with the precision of a high priestess invoking her morning rites.

She looked magnificent and not even a little bit like someone who’d crashed on a secondhand couch in yesterday’s eyeliner.

“Morning, sunshine,” she said, without turning around. “How’s the afterglow?”

Groaning, Nell threw herself face-first into the window seat.

Goldie cackled. “That good, huh?”

There was a long pause. The window seat shifted as Goldie sat down beside her, lifting Nell’s feet and settling them into her lap.

“I had sex with a weird moth cryptid,” Nell muttered into the cushion.

“Mmhm,” Goldie said. “Sure did.”

Nell scooted upright and clutched a pillow to her chest like a shield. “Do you realize how awful this is? What the hell am I supposed to do now? What if someone noticed? What if he says something? What if I see him in the hallway? What if I—”

“Babe,” Goldie interrupted, raising one hand mid-rant.

“You almost died yesterday. You walked into a weird-ass haunted door thing that tried to eat you. Your extremely-sexy-sounding neighbor turned into a rage-winged death god, claimed you, and took you back to his apartment for brain-breaking sex.”

She sipped her tea with exaggerated calm. “I’m sorry, but yes. Someone probably noticed.”

Nell groaned and pulled the pillow over her face.

Goldie let her sulk for a beat, then softened. “Okay. But real question. How are you?”

“I’m overwhelmed,” Nell mumbled. “I’m confused. My thighs hurt. There are wounds in my shoulder. I almost died.”

Goldie grabbed one of her hands and laced their fingers together. They sat in that stillness for a moment together—warm window seat, warm mug, too much to say and not enough breath to say it.

Nell pulled the pillow from her face, still clasping Goldie’s hand. “Also, I had like seventeen orgasms.”

Goldie smiled like a cat with a crime she’d do again. “That’s my girl.”

Nell smacked her arm. Goldie let out a dramatic yelp, half-offended, half-delighted.

For a moment, it felt like they were in a bad sitcom with too much canned laughter and a ridiculous multicam angle, where the moment would resolve itself in twenty-two minutes with a witty one-liner and a hug.

Nell’s shoulders sagged. “Something’s off,” she said, quietly. “I don’t know how to explain it. My skin doesn’t fit right. And this stupid thing won’t stop pulsing. I swear, it’s acting like it has feelings.” She held up her left hand with the offending item.

The opal ring shimmered. The colors inside the stone swirled slowly, like a storm seen through glass. Where the light used to catch in blues and greens, now there were flickers of rose-gold and something deeper—violet? Rust?

Goldie leaned in, her expression shifting from mischief to concern. “Okay. That’s definitely weird. Opals are emotional stones, sure, but not usually with Fitbit levels of feedback.”

“It’s not just the ring.” Nell looked down, voice barely audible. “It’s me. I feel like I’m vibrating out of sync with the world.”

Goldie tilted her head. “Maybe you are.”

Nell glanced at her sharply.

“You’ve changed, you know.”

“Changed how?”

“You’re thrumming. And something else.” Goldie threw back the last of her tea. “Like…you’re more than but also less than at the same time. That doesn’t even make sense.”

Nell exhaled shakily. Goldie reached over and gently squeezed her knee.

“I’m not scared,” Nell said quietly, almost surprised to hear the words aloud, and even more surprised to realize that they were true. “But I need to know what happened. I need to understand. ”

Goldie tilted her head again, softer now. “Then we figure it out.”

Nell snorted. “How? ”

“I’ll give you three guesses, and the first two don’t count.” Goldie exclaimed, setting her mug down with theatrical finality. “But here’s a hint: we’re going to find out the old-fashioned way.”

A pause. A breath. Nell’s eyes narrowed. “…We work at a paranormal library.”

Goldie grinned like a victorious gremlin. “Ding ding ding.”

Nell’s gaze flicked toward the kitchen, where Mr. Lyle’s black folder still sat. The air around it felt a little too still, like it was waiting.

“…and, hey,” she said slowly, voice sharpening, “it’s technically our day off, but what better place to have an existential breakdown than at our employer?”

Goldie stood and extended a hand to Nell. “Let’s go to work.”

–

Bellwether shimmered that morning in the kind of way that made you question whether the city was real—buildings too tall, light too golden, shadows that held their breath a second too long.

Nell stood outside the Bellwether Center for Alternative Literacy and adjusted the knot on her scarf—the one Goldie had unearthed from her pocket and tied properly after making a tragic noise at Nell’s attempt with the red paisley Girl Scout one.

Nell had dressed with a kind of fragile defiance: high-waisted black slacks, a soft cotton blouse, and the cardigan she’d almost donated last fall but couldn’t quite let go of.

It was her I am a person outfit. Casual-cute without being flashy.

Nothing that screamed my soul is currently duct-taped together.

Goldie stood beside her in a purple jumpsuit and a faux-fur vest that looked like a skinned Muppet, sipping iced coffee so serenely that you’d never know she’d spent the speed-walk from the apartment ruminating whether cryptids needed caffeine as much as humans, or if they just liked the ritual of it all.

Now, as they stood in front of the building, Nell took a long, steadying breath, clutched Mr. Lyle’s folder to her chest, and tried not to think about wings. pulsing rings, or how her thighs still ached in the most existentially upsetting way.

“Ready?” Goldie asked.

“No.”

“Excellent.”

They pushed through the glass doors.

The Center smelled like ink, old paper, and something faintly herbal, like chamomile and clove had been ground into the stone when the building was built and had been seeping upward ever since.

Light filtered through stained glass skylights high above, casting abstract runes across the white tile floors that shifted and recalibrated themselves throughout the day.

At the entrance was a display case that held cryptid-authored cookbooks under thick, rune-inscribed glass. Each tome was covered in hand-scripted warning labels:

Caution: Volume shifts tone when wet.

This book is not edible.

Do not attempt pie recipe on page 86 unless fully braced in a salt circle.

At the front desk was Mrs. Kephra. Tall and elegant, she had the kind of posture that made you wonder if she had an extra vertebrae or two. Today, she was wrapped in a pale cream sari and carried a gravity that instantly made you speak in hushed tones—not a bad trait for a head librarian.

She looked up as they entered, and her smoky, gray-blue eyes landed on Nell. A look of relief crossed her face.

“Oh, thank the gods,” Mrs. Kephra said, in that soft, floating way of hers. “You came back.”

Nell offered a smile, hesitant at the edges, like it might crack if pressed too hard. “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

Mrs. Kephra nodded her head infinitesimally. “I had a dream. Your ring was on the floor.”

“Um,” Nell said. Awkwardly, she raised her hand with the pulsing opal. “It’s not.”