Page 35 of Claimed By the Mothman (Greymarket Towers #1)

T he pen in Mr. Lyle’s hand paused mid-stroke, like a foot hovering over a stair before landing.

The lights dimmed, but not gently. The glow warped slightly blue, then green, then back to warm amber like it had momentarily remembered every sun it had ever seen anywhere. Outside his stained glass windows, the corridor shadows hiccuped once, then snapped back into straight lines.

A crack spidered across the vase on the shelf across from him. His ledger—one of the old ones, the bark-and-bone variety that indexed events before they happened—began smoking delicately from its spine.

Mr. Lyle closed it with two fingers and exhaled with the weight of ages behind it. The spoon standing in his coffee stirred once, feebly, then gave up.

He stood, crossed to the window, and closed his eyes as he looked inwards to Greymarket Towers.

Not at the tenants, not at the floors or the hallways or the well-meaning gargoyle on 6 that had recently started humming Gregorian chants.

Instead, he searched the bones of the building, the shape behind the architecture, the lines that had not been drawn by human hands.

He turned his eye all the way down, past wood and stone and time itself, to the place where the Lustrum curled around the foundation, vast and coiled. It hadn’t shifted, but it had stirred.

“Oh, you bastard,” Lyle hissed.

He returned to his desk and opened another, older ledger. The page had already begun to form, curling out of the spine like a tongue.

Townsend, N. / Samora, S.

Bond reciprocated and acknowledged.

Lustrum Response: Inconclusive.

Door twitch: 1.5cm, clockwise.

Intention unclear.

The rest of the page was blank.

Mr. Lyle rubbed his temples. Glared at his cold coffee, whose saucer had begun bleeding.

In the past week alone, he had contained a floorfold in the stairwell by convincing it it wasn’t wanted, rescheduled three hauntings to accommodate an ice machine repair, mediated a tenant complaint about a temporal neighbor who kept stealing last Tuesday’s mail, and extinguished a spontaneous hallway rebellion involving animated parking citations and an extremely rude door.

And now, this.

Sighing, Lyle picked up his pen and neatly scrawled on a Post-it: CHECK STAIRWELL 3B FOR RED DOOR MOOD.

He closed the ledger, pinched the bridge of his nose, and waited for the next disaster to arrive.

The bond had sealed. But the Lustrum had not yet decided what it would do.