Page 84 of Claimed By the Mothman

They sank to the floor in a heap of tangled limbs, shaking, gasping, still joined. Her legs still around his waist. His arms locked around her like he feared she might vanish. Mouths parted. Hearts pounding. Breath syncing in perfect rhythm.

The pressure at her waist made her blink. Then laugh. A soft, syrupy sound, cracked open with joy as warm as wine.

“Your claspers,” she murmured, voice gone honey-slow with bliss. “They’re locked again.”

A low, vibrating hum of mortified awareness pulsed through Sig’s chest. “I… I am sorry,” he churred, voice tight. “If it is uncomfortable, beloved, I can try to shift, or—”

She silenced him with a kiss. “It’s all right,” she whispered. “It’s sweet. Like…forced cuddling.”

He glanced down, eyes glowing but uncertain. “Truly?”

She stretched just a little and rolled her hips with lazy intent, feeling him still stiff and warm inside her. “Truly, Harbinger.”

His pupils flared and his wings gave a pleased twitch. A sub-harmonic hum began in his chest, steady and pleased-sounding as it vibrated through her rib cage like a lullaby sung in octaves her species had never developed.

“I am pleased to be useful in this manner,” he murmured carefully as he wrapped his arms tighter around her.

Nell laughed again, a soft exhale of disbelief and tenderness, and then winced slightly as the motion shifted him deeper inside.

“Does your kind ever rest during this locking thing?” she murmured, cheek to his chest, breath fluttering against the velvet there.

“Yes.” Sig traced his fingers along his spine. “It is soothing. A chance to remain close and to be known.

She smiled and tucked herself under his chin nose buried in the soft down of his chest. He shifted with gracefully, rolling gently onto his back, never slipping from her.

“I could stay like this forever,” she whispered and felt him press an answering kiss to the top of her head.

She drifted off to the sound of his heartbeat and the thrum of the bond.

Wrapped in wings. Wrapped in warmth. Wrapped inhim.

Interlude

The 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.