Page 27 of Claimed By the Mothman

Rupturing.

The air thickened around her. She couldn’t breathe through it, couldn’t see through it, but shefeltit.

She heard breathing. Her own, wet and ragged. And something else. Older. Hungrier.

Her knees buckled. Except—she no longer had knees. Or was she still standing?

The opal on her finger pulsed—steady, soft, strangelysoothing.

Athingunfolded in front of her. Its limbs curved in spirals, not joints. Its mouth parted along the wrong axis. Its eyes—too many? too few?—were scattered across its body like constellations in the midst of rearranging themselves.

It was vast in a way that collapsed direction. Time flattened.

Nell didn’t know if she was real, or just the echo of someone who had been remembered fondly. Her skin tingled and her breath shivered out of her.

The thing before her opened its mouth—mouths—mind and spoke in a surprisingly gentle tone.

What do you think you are? What did you hope to become?What do you want that has not already been touched by grief?

She tried to answer, but language bent sideways. Her vision shimmered. Doubled. Tripled.

You are the key and the cost,the thing went on, the words curling in her mind like smoke.You are sacrifice. You are meant.

She tasted metal. Her tongue went thick. The opal flared brilliantly and the heat surged up her throat, into her eyes.

This is it,she thought distantly.

Her spine lost its alignment. Her thoughts spilled like water from a cracked glass.

The thing loomed above her. Its hands moved to her face. Its mouth widened.

Come home.

And the Lustrum inhaled.

—

Sig dropped to his knees.

It had her. She had opened the door.

And now the Lustrum was beginning to unmake her.

His claws hit the floor, digging into the carpet.

“No,”he intoned.“No—mine.”

The sigils along his throat flared white, then splintered. With a scream that was neither word nor sound, Sig launched forward, flinging himself into the doors she had willingly entered.

The moment he crossed the threshold, the space recoiled.

Pressure slammed into him from all sides, and the voice of the Lustrum crawled along his skin:Watcher. Witness. Warning.

Every cell in him screamed with resistance as the Lustrum reached into his essence, dragging spectral fingers along the structure of his being.

Harbinger? Omen? Intruder?

And then—there. There she was. Body half-folded, the shape of her already softening, starting to dissolve at the edges.