Do Your Worst
Rosie Danan
For Ruby Barrett.
The beginning and end of it is, having you as my friend makes everything better.
Chapter One
While other women inherited a knack for singing or swearing from their grandmothers, Riley Rhodes received a faded leather journal, a few adolescent summers of field training, and the guarantee that she’d die alone.
Okay, fine, maybe that last thing was a slight exaggeration. But a unique talent for vanquishing the occult, passed down from one generation to the next like heirloom china, certainly didn’t make dating any easier. Her matrilineal line’s track record for lasting love was . . . bleak, to say the least.
Curse breaking—the Rhodes family talent—was a mysterious and often misunderstood practice, especially in the modern age. Lack of demand wasn’t the problem. If anything, the world was more cursed than ever. But as the presence of an angry mob in any good folktale will tell you, people fear what they don’t understand.
To be fair, Gran had warned Riley about the inherent hazards of curse breaking out of the gate. There was, of course, the whole physical danger aspect that came part and parcel with facing off against the supernatural. Riley had experienced everything from singed fingertips to the occasional accidental poisoning in the name of her calling.
As for the personal pitfalls? Well, those hurt in a different way.
She’d grown up practicing chants at recess and trying to trade homemade tonics for Twinkies at lunch. Was it any wonder that, through middle school, her only friend had been a kindly art teacher in her late fifties? It wasn’t until tenth grade when her tits came in that guys decided “freaky curse girl” was suddenly code for “performs pagan sex rituals.” Riley had been almost popular for a week—until that rumor withered on the vine.
It was like Gran always said: No one appreciates a curse breaker until they’re cursed.
Since she couldn’t be adored for her talents, Riley figured she could at least get paid. So, at thirty-one years old, she’d vowed to be the first to turn the family hobby into a legitimate business.
Still, no one would call her practical. She’d flown thousands of miles to a tiny village in the Scottish Highlands to risk life and limb facing down an ancient and unknowable power—but hey, at least she’d gotten fifty percent up front.
Hours after landing, strung out on jet lag and new-job nerves, Riley decided the village’s single pub was as good a place as any to start her investigation into the infamous curse on Arden Castle.
The Hare’s Heart had a decent crowd for a Sunday night, considering the total population of the village didn’t break two hundred. Dark wood-paneled walls and a low ceiling covered in crimson wallpaper gave the already small space an extra intimate feel. More like an elderly family member’s living room than the slick, open-concept spots filled with almost as many screens as people that Riley knew all too well back home.
Hopefully after this job put her services on the map she could stop picking up bartending shifts in Fishtown during lean months. For now, her business was still finding its feet. The meager income she managed to bring in from curse breaking remained firmly in the “side hustle” category—though it was still more than anyone else in her family had ever made from their highly specialized skills. Riley had always thought it was kind of funny, in a morbid way, that a family of curse breakers could help everyone but themselves.
Whether out of fear or a sense of self-preservation, Gran had never charged for her practice. In fact, she’d kept curse breaking a secret her whole life, serving only her tiny rural mountain community. As a consequence, she’d never had two nickels to rub together. She and Riley’s mom had weathered a few rough winters without heat, going to bed on lean nights—if not hungry, then certainly not full.
Riley had never faulted her mom for ditching Appalachia and the family mantle in favor of getting her nursing degree in scenic South Jersey. It was only because she’d never been good at anything practical that Riley found herself here in the Highlands, hoping this contract changed more than the number in her bank account.
If word got out that Riley had taken down the notorious curse on Arden Castle, she could go from serving small-time personal clients to big corporate or even government jobs. (She had it on good authority they’d been looking for someone to remove the curse on Area 51 since the seventies).
Perching herself on a faded leather stool at the mahogany bar that divided the pub into two sections, Riley had an excellent vantage point to observe the locals. Up front in the dining room, patrons ranging in age from two to eighty occupied various farm tables brimming with frothing pints and steaming plates.
Her stomach growled as the scent of melting butter and roasted meat wafted across the room. After ordering a drink, she’d ask for a menu. As much as Riley didn’t mind charging into battle against mystical mysteries, she was terrified of plane food, so she hadn’t eaten much in the last sixteen hours.
Next to her, a middle-aged man with face-paint-streaked cheeks bellied up to the bar to speak to the hot older woman pulling pints.
“Eilean, come and sit with us.” He thumbed at the more casual area in the back of the pub.
Over her shoulder, Riley followed his direction to a cluster of rowdier guests on the edge of their seats in a haphazard cluster of well-loved armchairs. They all had their necks bent at uncomfortable angles to watch a small, shitty-looking TV hanging from the wall.
“We need you. The game’s tied and you’re good luck.”
The bartender—Eilean—waved him off. “Even if that were true, I wouldn’t waste it on you lot and that piss-poor excuse for a rugby club.”
She smiled at Riley when he turned tail back to his buddies, but her eyes held the kind of guarded interest reserved for interlopers at a place that served almost exclusively regulars. “Can I get you something?”
Without hesitating, Riley ordered an aged local scotch on the rocks, hoping the quick, simple order would convey that she came in peace.
While she waited, the face-painted man and several of his buddies took turns heckling the sports teams onscreen, their impassioned shouts cutting above the dining room’s steady din of conversation.
Riley smiled to herself at the colorful insults delivered in their thick Scottish brogues. A similar disorderly air erupted in her mother’s living room every time neighbors and friends gathered to get their hearts broken by the Eagles. Even though she’d never traveled abroad before, suddenly Riley felt a little more at home.
“You’ve got good taste in scotch.” Eilean placed the highball glass of amber liquid in front of her. “For an American,” she said, warm, teasing.