Page 36 of Claimed By the Mothman

Sig broke first. Wings sagging. Chest heaving. Power slinking back beneath his skin.

“You cannot assure her safety,” Lyle said with a restrained voice.

“I know, ” Sig rasped. “But I… have to try.”

The apartment manager’s face softened infinitesimally. He turned toward the door, which opened of its own accord. He brushed imaginary dust from his sleeve, adjusting the crimson square of his breast pocket with the same care one might use to reset a ritual circle. “I know,” he said with a sigh. “I know, Sig.”

Lyle stepped through the door without looking back.

Sig was left alone, buzzing and broken, still feeling the shape of her in his arms. Still glowing from a bond half-sung, half-born, and reeling with the knowledge that unless he learned how to make her choose him, the Lustrum would finish what he had interrupted.

Chapter 8

Sunlight slanted through the blinds at just the wrong angle, bright enough to stab behind her eyelids yet warm enough to pretend it was an apology. Nell’s mouth tasted like old wine and newer mistakes. She rubbed her eyes, stretched, and froze and everything from yesterday came crashing back.

Oh gods. Oh no.

The Lustrum. The way the world had twisted sideways. Sig Samora.

She groaned, rolled over, and buried her face in the pillow.

“This is bad,” she whispered into the pillow. “This is so,sobad.”

This sort of thingshould not be happeningto her. She was just Nell. Just a thirty-six-year-old with one and two-halves college degrees, too many tea tins, a threadbare bank account, and a backlog of unprocessed relationship trauma long enough to knit a blanket.

She was not someone who attracted the attention of buildings with opinions. She was not someone who walked into a sentient, interdimensional door that tried to unmake her.

And she wasdefinitely notsomeone who responded to thatfucking her cryptid neighbor so thoroughly she saw constellations and may or may not have briefly forgotten her own name.

Except, apparently, she was.

The opal ring pulsed faintly on her finger.

Nell sat up, shoved the covers aside, and listened. The apartment was quiet. Normal quiet. Not the charged, vibrating stillness of the night previous. Just the whisper of the radiator, the creak of old pipes, the faint rustle of curtains flirting with the windowsill breeze.

No hum, no vibrating walls, no red doors whispering in her bones. Just the ache between her legs and a bite on her neck throbbing in time to her heartbeat.

She shuffled barefoot into the bathroom, flicked on the light, and caught sight of herself in the mirror.

“Oh, fuckoff!”

Her brown curls were flattened on one side and feral on the other. Her skin was pale, her eyes were rimmed with deep gray smudges, and her cheek was creased with pillow lines. A raw, slowly scabbing bite stood out on her shoulder like a fanged hickey.

She yanked open a drawer and rummaged until her fingers closed around a red paisley handkerchief. With a hushed curse, she tied it around her neck with trembling fingers, the knot askew and accusatory.

She looked like a regretful Girl Scout. A regretful Girl Scout withsmutty secrets.

The ring pulsed again. She flipped it off for good measure.

From the kitchen came a yawn loud enough to register on the Richter scale, followed by the clatter of cupboard doors and the comforting clink of ceramic. Nell sighed and tentatively staggered into the kitchen.

Goldie stood at the counter in a glamorous pair of silk pajamas and Nell’s oldest hoodie, stirring sugar into a mug with the precision of a high priestess invoking her morning rites. She looked magnificent and not even a little bit like someone who’d crashed on a secondhand couch in yesterday’s eyeliner.

“Morning, sunshine,” she said, without turning around. “How’s the afterglow?”

Groaning, Nell threw herself face-first into the window seat.

Goldie cackled. “That good, huh?”