Page 26 of Claimed By the Mothman

“Sorry,” he grunted.

Sig hadn’t answered. He hadn’t trusted his voice.

—

He was in the greenhouse. Not where residents swapped clippings and gossip, but the other one. The hidden one.

He reached out to a pot of nightblooms, and they shivered at his touch. They had never done that before. As his hand withdrew, something ripped through him like a faultline breaking open.

She was moving. The moment her feet touched the carpeted floor of the hallway—the hallway that was there and wasn’t, a hallway more ancient than the building itself—it hit him like a lightning bolt.

His body went rigid. His wings jolted out of their folded state, unfurling in a blur of instinct and panic. They scraped the glass, shattered a planter, and knocked three shelves sideways.

His hand shot out, bracing against the wall. “No,” he whispered.

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—