Page 19 of Claimed By the Mothman (Greymarket Towers #1)

Goldie grabbed a legal pad, scribbling furiously as she flipped through the pages like they might rearrange themselves into meaning if she moved fast enough.

“Nell, go take a walk,” she muttered, her pen slashing down another line. “I’m going to crack this. I’m excellent at puzzles and super caffeinated. Go get some tea. Or whiskey. Or both..”

“Goldie—”

Goldie looked up, eyes clear and unflinching.

“I mean it, Nell. I don’t want you spiraling, hon—” She held up a hand before Nell could protest. “—and you are spiraling. It’s fine.

Let your bestie Goldie, who currently has both feet on the floor and the full use of her executive function, do what she does best.”

She pointed the pen at Nell like a wand. “ Go, come back when you’re buzzed on anything other than dread, and we’ll debrief like professionals.”

Nell’s instinct to argue curled up under the weight of her own exhaustion. Goldie was right. Without another word, she turned and walked out, leaving her friend muttering at the table, already rifling through three books at once like the pages owed her answers.

–

Nell wandered without aim, the hush of the stacks wrapping around her like gauze.

Every corridor looked slightly unfamiliar, like the building had shifted half a breath to the left.

She passed a shelf that had definitely not been there before— Cryptogastronomy and Edible Portals —and didn’t bother questioning it.

Her fingers trailed across spines absently, grounding herself in texture and title. Anchoring herself, she thought, but the word only summoned an image she wasn’t ready for: Sig’s clawed hands, ruthless yet careful as he crushed her against him like he wanted to map her from the inside out.

And beneath all of it, that moment in the Lustrum. That split-second eternity when she had felt herself go and begin drifting away, like surrender, like goodbye. Like part of her had always been waiting for that opportunity.

That she hadn’t fought—that she’d been ready to let go—terrified her far more than the claiming.

She turned a corner and nearly ran into a small, hunched man holding a stack of books that reached his chin. “Excuse me,” he said, peering up at her through thick bifocals. “Do you know if Resonant Thresholds and Ritual Maintenance is shelved under Interplanar or Personal Metaphysics?”

Nell blinked. “Um…maybe both?”

He nodded sagely. “Ah. A Janus text. Thank you.” He waddled away.

She returned to the Special Collections Room about an hour later, a dusty styrofoam cup clutched in her hands. The port wine she’d found on a neglected shelf sloshed inside—too sweet, too old, and exactly what she’d needed.

Goldie’s work area looked like a war zone.

Books were fanned open in concentric circles around her chair, half of them marked with neon tabs and angry paper scraps.

Her legal pad had grown into a full-blown ecosystem with scrawled arrows, underlines, diagrams, a napkin with a hastily sketched mothman in the corner, and one ominous sheet labeled FUCK THIS SHIT in all caps.

As Nell stepped closer, Goldie set her pen down with a flourish like she’d just finished signing a treaty. “Sit,” she declared. “I have information.”

Nell handed over the port. Goldie took one sniff, grimaced, then knocked it back in a single heroic gulp.

“Oh gods,” she gasped, eyes watering. “That tastes like fermented regret and cherry cough syrup. Bless you.”

Nell sat, bracing herself.

“Okay,” Goldie said, dragging a piece of paper across the table toward her. “Behold: the Goldie Townsend Framework for Interdimensional Shit We Don’t Fully Understand Yet.”

Nell squinted down at it.

It was a matrix. The X-axis stretched across the top, labeled in blocky Sharpie: LUSTRUM , HARBINGER , BOND . The Y-axis ran down the left side, broken into oddly specific categories:

Known Behaviors

Observed Side Effects

Theoretical Protections

Residual Weirdness

Comparative Case Lore

Gut Feelings

“So, here’s what I’ve got.” Goldie tapped her pen against the HARBINGER column. “Sexy mothman cryptid is probably— more than likely —a Harbinger, which is a role within the established omen-bearing phenotype cluster.”

Nell squinted at what Goldie had doodled in the corner of the column—a long-limbed figure with exaggerated wings, dramatic thighs, and what might’ve been a strategically placed shimmer line across its lower half. “It’s his job?”

“It’s more like a purpose,” Goldie said, and spun Echoes of the Broodhome towards her, revealing a diagram.

A diagram filled most of the page: a figure rendered in rust-colored pencil, the lines delicate but deliberate.

Long limbs. Folded wings. Eyes like voids.

There were elegant symbols etched across its throat, and sharp at the ends like broken script. She’d seen them before. On him.

Her throat tightened. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “That’s about right.”

“Most of the Harbinger accounts mention a Doom,” Goldie said, her voice pitching up like an over-caffeinated professor halfway through a TED Talk. “Not like an apocalypse per se, but more like a tipping point.”

She flipped a few pages. “One journal—like, mid-century, kind of rambling—talked about the wings that beat before the breach . Said that Harbingers don’t predict disaster, but they do show up to witness it.”

Nell’s gaze dropped back to the drawing of the Harbinger. The eyes were just dark shapes, but they felt like they were watching. She imagined them glowing red, and gulped.

Goldie kept going. “It’s not that they want destruction. It’s that they recognize when that destruction is happening and they move towards it. Like moths to…well. You know.”

“And that’s what was happening to me,” Nell said softly.

“Yeah,” Goldie replied. “But one of the accounts I found talked about a Doom that was arrested by something they called a claiming.”

The word landed like an arrow in Nell’s chest. She saw him again. Not the quiet, awkward presence in the hallway, but the one who’d stood blazing in the dark, all wings and fire and will , with his voice like thunder splitting the silence:

I CLAIM HER.

She remembered feeling yanked sideways through her own skin and dragged back from the edge of something she hadn’t known was happening.

“Apparently, Harbinger-class cryptids are the only ones in their broader cryptid family who have the drive to claim—bond.” Goldie tapped the BOND . "From everything I found, it’s always species-exclusive, mothperson to mothperson. There’s no record of it crossing that boundary.”

She looked up and winked. “Until you, apparently. So…congrats on being a biological outlier?”

“You’re welcome,” Nell muttered.

“According to one of these dusty old sources, a bond is usually a courtship-type situation. A Harbinger tunes into someone’s resonance —”she made dramatic air quotes around the word “—and there’s this whole formal process before it escalates into a claiming.

Signals, consent, ceremony—basically, cryptid dating. ”

Goldie flipped a few pages, then circled something with her pen.

“But here’s where it gets messy. Bonds don’t actually fully take unless they’re mutually reciprocated.

It’s not supposed to be an instinctual grab.

Think of it like a marriage proposal. Most people don’t drop to one knee unless they’re pretty sure the answer is yes.

But that’s kinda what happened here, best I can tell.

He proposed. Mid-crisis. And boom—the bonding cycle started. ”

Nell stared at the matrix, incredulous. “You’re telling me this is basically some kind of metaphysical arranged marriage?”

Goldie’s mouth twitching at the corners.

“What it boils down to is that by claiming you, your sexy mothboy started an official bonding process, tethering it to himself and casting it out towards you like a lure. But unless you —the recipient—respond in kind by accepting it and claiming him back, the whole thing stays unbalanced until it detonates and dissolves.”

“So, you’re saying I have to accept it or everything goes to shit.”

Goldie held up a finger. “No. Yes. Maybe. ”

Nell’s eyes narrowed.

“It’s technically voluntary,” Goldie went on, carefully. “The claimee—you—can choose to accept the bond or not. That’s part of the system. It’s not a trap. But…”

She flipped through a nearby book. “If the bond’s rejected?

It can backfire on the claimer. Depends on how deep the claim went when it was cast, how long it’s been open, and how entangled they are in it.

That’s why it’s like a marriage proposal.

They usually only risk it when they’re damn sure the answer’s going to be yes. Because if it’s a no, it’s not pretty.”

“Like… he might die.” Nell’s voice was barely a whisper.

“Like he might die. But not always. It’s complicated. which brings us to this problem.”

Goldie tapped the LUSTRUM column like it might bite and took a breath.

“Okay, now we’re into the deep end. The Lustrum’s…

weird. It’s kind of a liminal place? A threshold?

One journal called it a ritual sink and another called it a reverberation of unmet fate.

" She tapped an open book with her pen cap. “This one said it’s a mirror that eats . It reflects what you are, strips out everything that doesn’t fit, and offers you the remainder. ”

Nell felt something twist low in her chest. She remembered the weightlessness, the unraveling, the way her own name had started to feel like a stranger’s. “That’s what it was doing to me?”

Goldie nodded slowly. “It was unraveling you to make room for whatever version came next. Or absorbing you. Or syncing with you.”

She paused, eyes flicking toward the typed letter Mr. Lyle had given Nell. “Which…makes this weird-ass note even weirder, now that I’m thinking about it.”

Nell looked down at Goldie’s frenzied matrix, drawing a slow, thoughtful line down it with her finger. “So… Sig is a Harbinger. And he’s drawn to Doom.”