Extract 23 from This Month's New Release: Pixie Dust Dreaming (C.M.'s Collections #7)

 Pixies, trolls and urban policing, things got interesting when the Otherworld renewed its connection to ours. A new suite of crimes sprang into existence overnight…and a new breed of officer had to be found to combat them. This volume brings together all the stories, so far published, of the officers in the Paranormal Operations Squad…and the world in which they strive to maintain the peace.

Here's an extract from the twenty-third entry in this month's release of Pixie Dust Dreaming, the 7th collection in my Collections series, which released on the 4th. Links to the collection can be found at: https://books2read.com/u/mY6xvP.

Of Sugar Plums and Souls

Written on February 8, 2014, this piece first appeared as 365 Days of Flash Fiction.

I live in a world of sorrow, where once there was a world of joy. The raiders come in the soft light of morning, opening a rift right over the town and taking what they knew we wouldn’t give by choice—the sugar-plum trees. I hate witches; they’ve sold their souls to the worst kind of buyer. We’d call them demons, but they’re not… they’re really not. No amount of power is worth what those girls have given away.

Anyway, without those plums, the town is dead. But I will get them back. The witches will open the rift one last time; I’ve planted the last sugar-plum pit; it’ll be a seedling by dawn—and then those women will pay their soul price.

I wait for the pixies and unicorns to arrive. Seems they hate witches as much as I do—and they’re our main customers for the sugar plums. Of course, this means we’re going to have to cut them a discount for their aid, but die, or survive at a price, it’s not much of a choice. They’ve brought along a couple of extra clans, enough pixies that my eyes boggle. I didn’t know our customer base was that big, our sugar-plums that valued.

“You don’t know what witches do with quality like that,” the clan leader assures me. “It cannot be allowed.”

Fine words for someone hitting us with the discount he’s asking.

 

...

The rest of this entry can be found in the Pixie Dust Dreaming collection.

 

Cover art is by Jake at JCaleb Design, and links to Pixie Dust Dreaming can be found on Books2Read at: https://books2read.com/u/mY6xvP.