Do Your Worst

by Rosie Danan

It was like Gran always said: No one appreciates a curse breaker until they’re cursed.

It was curse breaking 101: pin down the origin. In their most basic form, curses were uncontrollable energy. And power stabilized when you completed a circuit back to the source. Riley’s first task was always uncovering specific details: who, when, why, and how.

Gran had taught Riley that curses came from people, born out of their most extreme emotions—suffering, longing, desperation—feelings so raw, so heavy, that they poured out and drew consequences from the universe.

“You’re going to prove this place is haunted?” “Cursed,” Riley corrected. Martin held up a finger. “What’s the difference?” “Whether the person fucking shit up still lives here.”

“Babysitting? Are you fucking kidding me?” Riley threw up her hands. “How about this—just stay away from me.” As much as he’d like to agree to such a simple suggestion, Clark couldn’t. “I won’t be able to stop worrying about you.” “You don’t even like me.” She barely bit out the sentence around her mounting fury. “That’s not the point.”

Sheesh. You catch on fire one time, and they never let you forget it.

Ceilidh’s working today.” (Eilean took the time to explain that even though it was pronounced like Kay-lee, the spelling was Gaelic.)

“Crìoch air naimhdean,” he read, his voice hoarse and low. She took out her phone, using an app she’d downloaded the other night for translation. “An end to enemies,” she read. “What do you think that means?” “I think it’s the curse,” Riley said, face grim.

Riley figured that if cats could eat tuna, they could eat chicken—since tuna was the chicken of the sea. Shout-out to Jessica Simpson and elder millennials.

Done right, he thought, teasing gave you permission to take yourself less seriously.

He thought she was beneath him. She wanted to be.

You could fuck someone and still loathe them. People did that all the time.

Bho a bilean, bàs Immediately, he thought of the cave, though the etching here looked different, thin and slanted, and when Clark translated the line he didn’t see an immediate correlation. His phone showed the phrase in English. From her lips, death.

“Joining a band is the worst occupation you can imagine?” Her lips curved into the ghost of a smile. “There is literally nothing more awful than having someone sit in front of you with an acoustic guitar and play a song they just wrote. It should be illegal. Where am I supposed to look? Your hands? Your mouth? What if it sounds terrible? I don’t wanna tell you.”

Riley backing him against the wall with the dagger pointed at his throat, him throwing her to the ground when her clothes caught flame, the way she’d grabbed his hand to run from the snake, him catching her as she fell from the ladder, their rain-soaked bodies in his bed.

Besides, even if he was a…god help him, freak in the sheets, he was still a gentleman in the streets, thank you very much.

Riley gave him a sardonic grin. “I’m saying I think the ancient, horny fae magic might not be satisfied until you rail me.”

“An enemies-to-lovers sex ritual with a smoldering Englishman?” The Scotswoman groaned. “Why are the requirements of your job so much better than mine?”

I hope it’s the same for him. That he doesn’t just hear the words, but that they stay somewhere safe behind his ribs—a light that doesn’t burn out.

Sometimes his face made her want to punch his mouth with her mouth.

A crushing sort of helplessness came with the knowledge that Clark couldn’t fix his dad. But he could fix the way he responded to him.

“We all hurt the ones we love,” he said, softly, pointedly. “It’s why we must learn to make amends.”

“Tha gràdh agam ort.” There was something amazing about looking at someone you’d once thought you loathed and realizing how wrong you could be—about other people, about yourself. “Tha gràdh agam ort,” Clark said back, his low voice becoming a tether between her restless heart and his.

Riley laughed after him. “Have you ever seen a man go so completely to pieces over a woman he just met?” Clark gave that remark the only reply it deserved: a long, heated look. “Oh,” she said, flushing prettily. “Well, I guess it runs in the family.”