She’d made her daring into the sword she couldn’t wield, her body a vessel for her clan’s vengeance.
Riley felt like an echo the choice that was no choice. The helplessness. The ambition. Philippa had come to that cave at the very end of what must have been an exhaustive search for her family as they struggled for so long to find another way to hold the castle—their home.
Even now, tucked under her quilt at the inn—the clock by her bedside flashing almost midnight—Riley still felt the unbridled power of that cave thrumming in her ears.
Born of rock and salt water, carved by the hand of the tides as a monument, that place was proof that even the unyielding could yield.
Thousands of years ago, the people who had left those symbols had marked that spot as sacred, determined to use their tools and their language to bear witness to a force they otherwise couldn’t process, couldn’t name. Whatever ran through the seams of those rocks had proven both ancient and enduring. And way more intense than anything Riley had ever faced before.
She’d stared at those cave walls, two sets of etchings carved centuries apart, each holy in their own way. And for the first time in a long time, she’d been afraid, not of failing but of falling.
Fresh off another betrayal from Clark that she should have seen coming, she missed Gran like a homesickness for a place she could never return to.
Ever since she was a little girl, even when she hadn’t been practicing, Riley had carried the words curse breaker like a golden sun inside her chest, warding against rainy days and bad dates and double shifts with terrible tips. She’d been content to wait for fame and fortune, secure in the knowledge that when her chance came to prove what she could do, she’d seize it, make the loneliness of her chosen life worthwhile.
But then she’d come here and met Clark. And just when she’d begun to worry that his doubt was so powerful it would shatter the confidence she needed to succeed, he became the answer. The key.
An end to enemies.
Riley read through her notes again.
Philippa Campbell. Malcolm Graphm. Two forces fighting for opposing sides. Both believing they deserved domain over the castle.
Malcolm with an army at his back, with the advantage of battle training, the resources and privilege of being born a man.
Philippa, alone, the last daughter, force of will her only weapon besides a decorative dagger. She’d outmaneuvered him—almost. Had set the curse in motion, captured a valuable hostage, tried to drive the rival clan away in the only fashion she could fathom. But as Riley had suspected, there was no safety in her magic words. No guarantee against the greed of the men on the other side.
Riley flipped through the moth-wing pages of Gran’s journal, looking for an illustration marked by a series of circles, one inside the other. There. And beneath the image, two sentences. Curses are patterns. Inescapable repetition.
Setting the book aside, she Googled for the portrait of Malcolm Graphm.
Fuck. They even looked alike. Dark eyebrows. Thin lips. Hard jaw. She hadn’t seen it before. Probably hadn’t wanted to.
“It’s us,” she said to the hum of the heater in her room.
The curse had cast her and Clark as modern-day proxies for ancient foes.
An end to enemies.
A second chance to fulfill Philippa’s vow for vengeance.
One of them had to drive the other away. The evidence was right there in front of her. Clark goaded by circumstance into creating a fake map he’d hoped would lead her to turn tail.
But Riley didn’t scare that easy. No, if the curse wanted them to repeat Philippa and Malcolm’s battle to banish each other, she intended to be the last one standing.
Eilean had told her that first night in the pub that the castle found ways to drive away everyone who entered. Riley didn’t know if the curse commonly used people against one another to achieve those ends, or if the chance to put her and Clark—with all their similarities to Philippa and Malcolm—at each other’s throats was just too juicy to resist.
She slept fitfully that night—too keyed up, knowing what she had to do—and woke reciting the strategies: Charms, cleansing, sacrifice, ritual.
Gran had taught her well. “Start small and work your way up by process of elimination.”
Plants and herbs pruned from within the closest possible proximity to the curse would be her best bet for making a banishment charm.
As she entered the castle grounds, the sky remained a sleepy gray, the sun barely peeking over the cresting waves of the sea below the cliff. Aggressively thriving gardens stood in stark contrast to the crumbling deterioration of the castle structure. It was like nature slithering forward to erase all evidence of humanity with endless flora.
As she got closer, she realized the view—rows of wild purple heather with Arden lurking menacingly in the background—would have made the perfect setting for one of the romance novels her mom loved. A silly wave of missing her had Riley reaching into her pocket and pulling out her phone to snap a pink-cheeked selfie.
After sending the image, she made her way over to where a cluster of ancient ash trees stood tall and twisting on the edge of the property, their bark so weathered it had begun to calcify in certain places, emulating stone. Riley pressed her hand to a trunk, almost expecting a heartbeat as she tilted her head back to take in the canopy of leaves above. She’d never seen trees like this, never encountered anything that had existed on the earth for so long. To this ash, her life was nothing more than a handful of seasons.
With a sharp pocketknife, Riley carefully carved off a few pieces of dried bark. She made sure to take only chips in the process of natural shedding, borrowing a bit of the deep-rooted tree’s strength and stability for the base of her charm.
It had seemed like a game all those years ago. Gran bartering with Riley’s adolescent attention span to share what she knew of tapping into the natural world’s innate power. Looking back, Riley would give anything for more advice. She’d had to make up so much on her own, trying to fill in the gaps in the journal. Half the time, she didn’t know what she was doing.
She tried to be bullish, as confident in her abilities as her fore-mother, but it was work to harness bravado, constantly trying to mask the fear that deep down she was exactly what Clark and her father before him had said: nothing special, a pathetic pretender.
At least she’d always found spite motivating. The more Clark doubted her abilities, the more Riley had no choice but to back herself.
Besides, she’d effectively created repellant charms in the past, even if the circumstances here weren’t exactly the same. Kettle Brook Farms in southeastern New Jersey—the place where she’d gotten the scar on her knee—had almost gone out of business a few years back because of a mysterious blight on their tomato crop.
Not only had the farmers, Fred and Ike, been embarrassed that their Jersey tomatoes disgraced the name—pale and undersized, the flesh unbearably mealy—but they also couldn’t afford to weather the financial blow of another season lost to cursed crops. Riley made a face just remembering all the terrible tomatoes she’d tested during the long weeks she’d spent trying to figure out how the husbands had run afoul of dark spirits.
In the end, she planted crimson amaranth along their crop beds for protection, and hung a handwoven wreath of blackberry, ivy, and rowan as a shield above their door. And this year’s offering had been different—the tomatoes came in huge and vibrant, fire-engine red, so good you could take a bite of them like an apple, devouring one after the other with just a pinch of salt across the top.