Page 97 of Claimed By the Mothman
Edward’s pupils dilated. The flush drained from his cheeks. A muscle jumped in his jaw.
“You will build your home on quiet regret,”Sig intoned, voice dipped in inevitability.“And when the noise dies down, you will find no one left who speaks your language. The hum in your chest will still long before your children know you.”
Edward’s lips parted, then closed. Then parted again. No sound emerged.
The café’s jazz remained dead. The breeze continued to hold its breath. A jam jar toppled from a nearby cart and rolled in a perfect spiral, untouched, until it stopped at Nell’s feet.
Then Sig turned toher.The Elinore.
The young woman froze. Her grip on Edward’s arm tightened, manicured nails pressing into his sleeve. For the first time since she arrived, the confident lift of her head faltered.
He saw her clearly. Not the shine, or the skin-deep beauty, but the absence beneath. An echo of everything Nell had been told she should be, but nothing else.
“And you.”Sig’s voice lowered even further, like the sea pulling back before the tsunami strikes.“You, who sip sweetness like wine and spit back bitterness.”
Elinore blinked—once. Slowly. As if the words didn’t make sense until they lodged deep and refused to dislodge.
“You who measure love in mirrors. Who mistake adoration for security. You whose voice echoes only when reflected.”
The young woman shook her head, a tiny, brittle movement. “I—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But she did. Oh, she did. Sigsawher reflection in the spiral of futures. Watched her paraded on arm and pedestal, smiling through years of curated moments and beautiful silences. She would be cherished, yes. Until novelty faded. Until fatigue set in. Until laughter became performance. Until devotion dulled and she was no longer the trophy, but the weight.
“You will be worshiped,”he intoned,“until the novelty fades. Until silence finds you.”
His eyes—terrible, glowing—held hers.“And when the end comes, you will look into the dark and realize your own name no longer answers. Your reflection will be your only witness and your only mourner.”
Elinore recoiled a half-step like the ground had shifted beneath her. Her gaze darted to Edward, to Nell, to anyone who might soften the moment. But no one spoke.
A woman at a nearby table sipped her tea, eyes lowered. The man behind the bakery counter ducked into the back. Two tables away, a man calmly stirred his coffee, then folded his napkin with delicate precision.
A Sasquatch child on the curb whispered, “That was so cool,” before her pixie nanny covered her mouth and briskly ushered her away with wings flared in quiet alarm.
One of the fruit vendors nearby nodded solemnly before turning back to rearrange his peaches.
Sig straightened andreached silently into the lattice of threads that curled and twisted from the space Edward and Elinore occupied. Watched it writhe, jitter, react like a creature disturbed. Future upon future blooming from the echo of his words.
One path showed a sleepless night: Edward staring at the ceiling, a phantom ache in his chest he would never be able to name. Another spun out years—decades—until his child asked a question he couldn’t answer, and the silence that followed became a chasm he could never bridge.
Elinore’s threads were softer, more fragile, less formed. He saw a mirror kissed nightly, a makeup brush stilled mid-motion. He saw her laugh too brightly at a dinner party, then excuse herself to cry where no one noticed her absence. He saw the moment, years from now, when someone whispered a cruel truth behind her back and she felt it settle into her like lead.
None of it was certain, but it could be. And that was enough.
Nell stirred beneath Sig’s hands, and he touched a claw gently to the crown of her head. With a click, he bent—his eyes never leaving the two traitorous figures before him—and pressed a kiss to her sparrow-brown hair. Love burned in his chest.
“Leave.”The Harbinger’s voice cut clean through the silence.
Edward turned without a word, jaw slack, eyes too wide. He stumbled on a crate of apricots and did not pause to apologize. Elinore muttered something sharp under her breath, her words angry and laced with confusion, like someone whose reflection had just cracked and shown them something they couldn’t unsee. The two vanished into the crowd like a bad smell on the wind.
A smack echoed through the air as a woman at the adjacent table slapped her husband on the arm.“Why can’t you ever stand up for me like that?” she hissed.
Her husband opened his mouth, closed it, and took a long, contemplative bite of his pain au chocolat.
Sig looked down. Nell hadn’t moved, but she glanced up at him with eyes that were wet with unshed tears. He crouched beside her, silent and massive, and lifted a claw to brush a lock of hair behind her ear,
“I apologize,” he said softly, his voice no longer resonating with the weight of ages. “But I could not allow them to continue to speak to you as if they mattered.”
Nell Townsend smiled and reached a hand to the Harbinger’s cheek, brushing her fingers along the smear of powdered sugar still clinging to his jaw.
