The First Extract from This Month's Release: (Pixie Dust Dreaming)

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 first entry in this month's release of Pixie Dust Dreaming, the 7th collection in my Collections series, which releases on the 4th and is currently available on pre-order. Links to the collection can be found at: https://books2read.com/u/mY6xvP.

Pixie Dust and Unicorns

Written on November 23, 2013, this short tale about a drug bust—or how a drug bust might look if magic were to return to the world, with all the magical creatures that go with it—first appeared in 365 Days of Flash Fiction.

 Pixie dust. It’s as addictive as it comes. It’s death on pixies, too, and I don’t mean through ingestion, injection or inhalation, which are the three most common methods of getting high on the stuff. No, I mean because the quickest way of getting a large amount of pixie dust isn’t to wait until the pixie sheds it, but to disintegrate the little critter.

You see, a pixie sheds dust throughout its lifetime, but when you kill it before the time the Fates ordain—and, yes, there is such a thing as the Fates; funny how the world has changed—then all the pixie dust that pixie would have ever shed explodes out of it in a single rush… and rush is exactly what you get. Who needs sex? Who needs drugs—other drugs, I mean? Pixie dust is it.

And that’s why I’m standing outside this bunkered warehouse with a small army of special-operations guys, waiting for the signal. Oh, we tried negotiation. We tried buying them out—except the budget doesn’t extend to covering a village of pixies, and there’s a whole lot more than that in the cages inside. We even tried a hostage swap, but it seems what we’ve got incarcerated isn’t worth what they’ve got in pixilated profit potential, so we’re just gonna have to do this the hard way.

I move when the signal comes through, slide in through the extra entrance we’ve cut and hit the back of the cages as quick as I can. The main plan is to get the pixies out of here before the dust runners can gas them into nothing. Seems dust runners have the philosophy of ‘if we can’t have it, no one can’ down pat, and that includes the rightful owners. I give up on the main plan when I see just how many pixies are crammed in here.

The rest of this extract can be found as part of the 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.