Page 15 of Claimed By the Mothman

This was different. Like the world had been tilted ever so slightly, and she had fallen into the space that had been waiting for her all along.

Apparently, even the walls agreed.

—

Nell woke that night with a start with the inexplicable feeling ofwrongnesstugging her out of sleep.

She lay still, listening. The building creaked faintly above her.

A faint red glow was spilling out from the bottom of her bedroom door, just enough to paint a thin line across the floorboards.

She sat up. The ring on her finger tightened, like a hand clenching out of reflex. Slowly, she slid out of bed and padded barefoot to the door. She opened it carefully, peering out—

—and discovered the glow was leaking out from beneath the front door.

She crept down the hallway, toes curling slightly against the cool floorboards. As she drew closer, the light flickered like firelight, like memory, like something that was trying to draw her attention and sayHere. I am here.

She opened the front door and looked out. The corridor felt off, somehow, like a photo that had been stretched sideways and reprinted with the wrong proportions. The walls were slightly too far apart.

Nell stepped one foot over the threshold, and her skin prickled all at once. The silence had depth,as if something behind the walls was holding its breath and waiting.

She withdrew. Closed the door quietly behind her. Exhaled shakily.

When she looked down, the red glow had vanished.

Chapter 3

Sig moved through the hallway in silence. His feet didn’t echo. The floor didn’t creak. Shadows blurred slightly as he passed. Light dimmed politely. Even the air parted with gentle reluctance.

She wore a ring of tangled light.

He’d known bondstones before, the resonant links shared by Harbingers and their mates. But the opal did not sing to him, strangely. Instead, it sang to the building, and the building wasanswering.

Most humans struck him as unfinished. Brash and beautiful in their unhinged, loud way. They burned hot and left ashes, collapsing in strange and sudden ways. Lovely in the way fireworks were lovely: short-lived, too loud, and always fading quickly away from the sky they’d come from.

He had been trying not to notice any of them. He had been very intentional about that.

And still, he’d let her enter the elevator.

She had stepped in just before the doors could close, and had felt a tremor in the air. Not Doom, but something adjacent to it.

He told himself it was observation, the same ritual he’d performed one hundred and forty-seven times. Because that’s what this was, was it not? The beginning of the ending.

He had felt this before. He’d felt it in the hollow-eyed child in Apartment 7D who had dreamed in duplicate and vanished without a trace. In the breathless quiet before Margaret wandered into the Lustrum and returned days later, rimed with frost and missing her name. In the silence before Seven Pines fell. In all the other half-forgotten, mournful songs that had become the soundtrack of his too-long life.

Always the same pattern: They were chosen. He witnessed.

You cannot stop a thing meant to happen,the Elders had told him.Let them fall. That is the order of things. To stop one Doom is to trade for another.

And yet, this one didn’t move like the others had.

She didn’t feel thin the way the doomed did, like they were shadows that were stretching too long on the ground. Her presence was chaotic, awake, and loud.He chirred quietly, a low harmonic click behind his teeth.She is different. Gods help me, she might actually fight.

He pressed open the door to the community room. The scent hit him first: dust, burnt popcorn, and something faintly metallic that wasn’t from this plane of existence.

The room itself was large, open, and only slightly lopsided, with mismatched couches arranged in conversation clumps. Two teenagers—one human, one clearly half-dragon from the glittering scales on her neck—were locked in a fierce foosball match. A cluster of children buzzed around the play nook, building an elaborate tower of blocks and solemnly naming itDoomtown.

On the far wall, a community bulletin board fluttered gently under the AC vent. Notices were tacked over one another in layers: