Page 2 of Knot Cursed

The lobby had descended into chaos while I was gone. There were shouts, clucks, and feathers flying everywhere.

“Are you going to handle these chickens?” the secretary asked, her voice high-pitched and frantic as she stood on top of her desk. It looked like the chickens were organizing at this point, circling around it as if she had food up there with her.

“Nope,” I said as I walked past, the chickens not even turning to look my way. “In fact, High Magistrate Barlow said he was going to clean up this mess. There’s thirty-two of them, by the way. You might want to keep an eye out.”

Then I was pushing open the front door, not bothering to look back.

I let out a breath as the afternoon sun hit me. I tilted my face up. Even with an autumn chill in the air it was the perfect day.

“Yet another slap on the wrist?” my best friend’s sarcastic voice echoed out, her lips tilted up into a teasing grin and there was a little witch hat headband on her head. She was perched on the bench in front waiting for the verdict.

If there was anyone who knew the full extent of my crazy, it was Blake. My curse was still listed as ‘unidentified’ in the records. I just called it pure fucking chaos. There was no rhyme or reason to it. If something strange, inconvenient, or wildly embarrassing could happen, it usually found me first.

On the other hand, Blake’s curse was one I’d never want. She heard people’s thoughts. Not the polite, filtered ones people actually said out loud, but the random nonsense bouncing around in their heads. Half-finished grocery lists. Song lyrics. Existential crises. Weird questions about whether raccoons had knees.

To her, it sounded like everyone was talking. Which meant she had a tendency to answer things she absolutely shouldn’t have heard in the first place. And one time she was able to get in a magister’s head. That is what got her sent here.

Most people steered clear of us. Apparently, accidentally releasing chaos and occasionally answering intrusive thoughts made us difficult to socialize with.

So, naturally, we became best friends.

Honestly, who else was going to put up with us?

“So, what happened?” she demanded, hungry for the details.

“I may or may not have released thirty-two chickens in there.”

“Released?” she questioned, her eyebrows rising.

I collapsed onto the bench she was waiting on, shoving my dark hair out of my eyes as I looked at her.

“So, this experiment was supposed to calm errant magic. It required a bird feather. I guess I found a chicken feather that blew in from one of the farms or something, and it seemed like it worked.”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “Until…”

Blake dragged out the word, waiting for the response, her hand motioning for me to continue.

“I thought it was a one-and-done situation. I was walking down the street, heading for my shop… and I hiccuped.”

“You hiccupped?” she said, her voice dry.

“A single hiccup, then boom, chicken. Well, chickens, to be exact. One was on Main Street, and then I hiccupped again and three more flew out of the void. Apparently, there was havoc at the grocery store. I got called in here because the magistrate was already in town. Otherwise, I think this would’ve been swept under the rug.”

“Gross. Why are they in town?” She wrinkled her nose at the mention of the magistrate. They weren’t exactly a favorite among the people of Moonlight Grove.

They were the reason we were here, after all.

“Something about me causing too much trouble over the years, so they’re sending in a curse expert. He’s supposed to be moving to town soon.”

“They’re throwing an un-cursed person among all these cursed people?” she asked.

She tucked a strand of platinum hair behind her ear that had escaped the headband and waited for me to continue.

“When he saw the chickens, Mayor Wilder forced me to go in, but then I had a hiccup attack in the lobby because I was nervous.”

“No,” she gasped, eyes wide with delight. “Tell me it was pure chaos.”

“Does thirty-two chickens being loose in the lobby and infiltrating the ventilation system of City Hall sound like chaos?”