Page 29 of Claimed By the Mothman
She looked around at where she lay. The walls curved and bent like the inside of a shell or a cocoon. The greenish light spilled from softly glowing orbs suspended in a kind of netting above her. The air was thick with a warm, mineral scent.
A tremor ran down Nell’s spine. Her breath hitched again, catching like fabric on a nail. Her body achedeverywhere. Her skin tingled rawly, like she’d been scrubbed with steel wool and rinsed in saltwater.
She shifted uncomfortably, and the sheet dragged against her skin. Herbareskin. A sharp, animal jolt of panic knifed up her spine.
Why am I naked?
Memory hit her like a splash of cold water.
The thing,vast and ancient, looming over her as her mind began unraveling one frayed memory at a time. The overwhelming desire to justlet it happen,to let everything be claimed and washed away like characters in the sand.
Sig Samora, appearing like an avenging angel or an eldritch god, his wings glowing like lanterns as he roared at the thing above her like he was declaring war on heaven itself.
“I CLAIM HER!”
She squeezed her legs together instinctively and gasped. Her bodypulsed, and for a moment all her senses flared and she felt the air on her skin move sensuously, heard the thrum of her heartbeat like it was a chord being strummed.
She swallowed hard and, tentatively, lifted the sheet to peer beneath. On the inside of her thighs, just below her core, something glowed like a coal banked beneath her skin.
Tentatively, Nell reached out her finger and brushed against the glow and—
—sensation cleaved through her, arcing up her spine, igniting her belly, blooming at the tender apex of her thighs. A moan wrenched from her lips as her nipples tightened into peaks, every nerve alive as shock waves bloomed beneath her skin.
“Do not panic,” a voice said suddenly.
Nell shrieked, her eyes wildly flailing around the room until they landed on the source of the voice. Sig Samora sat in the far corner of the room, half-swathed in shadow, perched on a low, curved stool.
His shoulders were hunched. His wings were pulled tight to his back, the burnished edges tucked in awkwardly as if he were trying to make himself smaller.
Gone was the towering figure from the Lustrum. Gone was the god-voice. His shirt was wrinkled like he’d been twisting it in his fists. The cuffs were pushed to his elbows, exposing the velvet-gray shimmer of his forearms. His antennae drooped slightly as if weighted by exhaustion or worry.
Nell opened her mouth. Her lips parted but words wouldn’t come. Her tongue sat heavy behind her teeth, as if it had been burned off in the Lustrum and hadn’t yet grown back.
“Why am I naked?” she squeaked finally.
Sig flinched. “I did not…” He shook his head, a soft clack rising from his throat. His gaze skated past her face, fixing instead on a point above her shoulder. “That is… I undressed you.”
The words began to spill from his mouth, fast, like if he could get the sentence out it would fix something. “You were burning up. Your skin was resonating. I had to—I had to get you out of the clothes. I swear to you, I did not look, I just covered you. I stayed over here.”
His eyes flicked toward the farthest curve of the room, where a pillow and a rumpled blanket lay. Very obvious signs of someone who had slept elsewhere on purpose, desperate to stay but just as desperate to keep a distance.
Nell stared at him, one hand clenched white-knuckled in the sheet against her chest, the other braced on the mattress like an anchor.
Their eyes met. His, deep crimson, glowing faintly in the dim. Hers, green, wide, shaking, uncertain.
“Whathappened?”
Sig’s jaw clenched. She saw the muscle jump beneath the fine gray skin, the elegant line of his throat pulled taut like a bowstring.
“I claimed you.”
“You claimed me.” Her voice trembled. “Okay, so what does that mean?”
Sig’s red eyes flicked to her. And in that look she saw guilt, awe, fear … andhunger.
“You were about to be taken,” he said softly. “You would have been unmade. You were being rewritten before my eyes.”
Nell’s heart lurched, and the achepulsedagain, insistent. “And you stopped it by—what?” she said, voice climbing. “By—by sayinghands off?”
