Nothing else.
“Clark.” She leaned back to tell him but saw tears tracking down his stubbled cheeks.
“What is it?” She dried the damp skin gently with her knuckles, a pit forming in her chest. “What’s wrong?”
He turned to kiss her hands as they stroked his face.
“I could have missed this.”
She didn’t understand. “Missed what?”
Clark brought her hand to his heart. The beat was even, steady, under her palm.
“I felt it.”
“What?” Her mouth fell open on a gasp. “You did?”
It wasn’t that unusual for someone to experience a curse in the moment it broke. Occasionally, one of her clients did. But most of those people had lived with the oppressive weight of malevolent power in their lives for years.
She had never considered that Clark—who had been so adamantly opposed to the idea of supernatural forces less than a month ago, who earlier today had told her might never be able to fully believe—could have a similar response.
“It’s the stomach-swooping, breathless, terrifying thrill that happens at the top of a roller coaster, that single frozen second at the peak right before you descend. The release of all that buildup, the mounting pressure. The hardest part is over—you’re already falling, but it’s okay. It’s good. It’s what’s supposed to happen.” He frowned. “Is that—does that sound right?”
Riley nodded against his mouth, already on her way to kiss him.
As it turned out, sometimes what you needed was someone who brought out the worst in you. There was a gift, she realized, that could only be exchanged between former enemies—permission to forgive yourself. Because if someone could see all your failures and faults, could actively seek out every possible reason to dislike you, and somehow still come around in the end, well, maybe your worst wasn’t so bad after all.
The next morning, Riley and Clark woke up to find that for the first time in three hundred years, indigo angel’s-trumpet had bloomed on the grounds of Arden Castle.
Epilogue
“I can’t keep having this same fight with you. I’m at my wit’s end.”
Clark came out of the shower to find Riley arguing with the cat, who seemed to have gone into a protective crouch over a bunch of bananas.
“We just bought you all those cans of fancy French cat food,” she continued, a note of imploring in her voice. “The least you could do is let me try to make this bowl of steel-cut oats less boring.”
“Félicité,” Clark said sternly.
At the sound of her name—or at least, at the sound of his voice, since he wasn’t sure the cat had actually accepted their adoption so much as she’d enjoyed the camper enough to stow away in it when they left Scotland—Félicité turned and, blinking innocently at him, abandoned the fruit as if she’d suddenly lost interest.
“I never should have let you give her a French name,” Riley grumbled, retrieving her prize and returning to breakfast prep. “I can’t even pronounce it.”
“Sure you can.” He came over and wrapped his arms around her waist, then softly said the word against her neck.
Riley leaned back against him, arching to encourage him to kiss her pulse point, and reluctantly repeated, “Félicité.”
Clark had no shame. He got a silly thrill every time she said it in her terrible accent. It meant a very great happiness—a feeling he’d become increasingly acquainted with in the eighteen months since they’d left Arden Castle.
After exhilarated local press swore in print that they’d seen the land of Arden Castle change overnight, the story of their curse breaking got picked up internationally. Interview requests and assignment inquiries came pouring in from around the world.
Even Clark’s father had been begrudgingly intrigued. He offered to introduce them to his literary agent—suggesting that their story might work “if appropriately adapted for fiction audiences, of course.” They’d politely but passionately turned him down.
After the dust settled, Clark and Riley had followed their original plan to the Dordogne region of France, chasing a lead that guided them to the Lascaux caves where Paleolithic paintings had sparked rumors of mysticism for over fifteen thousand years. （Riley assured him that both of the curses he’d been exposed to having ties to caves was nothing more than coincidence.）
Unfortunately, getting extended access and proper resources to investigate such a unique and treasured historical site required calling in a few favors.
For example, the clanging noises and intermittent cursing coming from directly outside their window this morning suggested Clark’s father was already up and wrestling with his snow-climbing equipment.
Though they’d simply asked for his endorsement with the French Heritage Society, in order to secure the proper permits, Alfie had insisted on “supervising” this phase of research firsthand. Clark suspected that his father was experiencing a mounting sense of FOMO that other people were going on potentially dangerous adventures without him.
A bit later, when Clark had managed to get dressed and Riley had finished her breakfast, a pounding on the camper’s front door preceded it flying open.
“Oy. Would you lot quit faffing about in there?” Patrick, decked out in full winter regalia, stepped inside. Behind him, Clark could see that once again it had started to snow, turning the mountainside into an endless sea of white. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep Dad from leaving without you. The man keeps muttering that we’re wasting daylight.”
“Wind your neck in,” Clark hollered back, though he couldn’t fully suppress the desire to grin that came at seeing his brother hale and in the flesh. “We’re coming.”
After returning to Europe following reconciliation with his father, Patrick had agreed to come out to France. He was helping them use a handheld lidar device to create 3D scans of the cave so they could better study the extensive ancient markings.
The “family project” was going a long way toward repairing relationships between the Edgeware men. And while Patrick had turned down his father’s somewhat reluctant offer to have his PR firm “quietly” work on a “professional rehabilitation plan,” he was considering trying to teach once he got a bit more settled back in the UK.
Spotting Riley, his brother straightened up.
“Good morning.” The wanker even made his accent more posh. “Say, will Ceilidh be joining us on the trek today?”
He’d been introduced to Riley’s tiny redheaded friend—who had come out for a weekend visit—last night when they’d all gone to dinner at the nearby mountain chalet where she was staying.
“No.” Riley smirked, probably picturing the way his brother had chatted Ceilidh’s ear off all evening. “But I told her we’d meet her after for fondue.”
“Brilliant.” Patrick ducked out again with a tiny sigh.
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.”