Free Christmas Wishes (novella) by Rhian Cahill Page A

for six, Dan. You’re gone.”
    Dan looked at Fluke to verify the emergence of this horror, both hands up as though to ward off the danger, to bounce the dirty truth of it away.
    “Yeah,” said Fluke, “Your dog days are over bar how fast she tells you to fuck off and how long you stay depressed about it.”

Keep reading for an excerpt from Chaos Born by Rebekah Turner
    As my eyes moved over Arthur Roper through the two-way mirror, it occurred to me the saying was true. It really was hard out there for a pimp.
    Roper sat on a ratty bed in a ratty room in a ratty brothel in Bangkok, haggling with a bored looking woman for a discount on her services. The woman wore a dirty blonde wig and a white spandex cat suit several sizes too small. Her scarlet lips were pressed to thin lines, as if she’d gotten Roper’s measure and found him a quart short. Who could blame her? If my job required me to wear an outfit that gave me a painful looking camel-toe, I’d be unimpressed by life as well. Not to mention having to touch individuals like Roper. Personally, I’d need a flea bath after touching such a rodent. And touch him I knew I’d have to. Retrieval jobs were never easy. In my experience, no thief ever likes giving up their ill-gotten goods and they always need some encouragement.
    Most of the time my jobs were security work, retrievals, sometimes even an exorcism or two. Here, in the Outlands, maybe I’d be called a mercenary. Back home, in The Weald, I was called a Runner. My work brought me into contact with all sorts of scum and Arthur Roper was no exception. Back home, past the tollbooths that guarded the entryway into the hidden world of The Weald, Roper ran a couple of low-budget brothels. Roper wasn’t a nice pimp; I’d seen his handiwork on a couple of women’s faces and it was the kind of hurt that never healed quite right. But now, this predator was my prey, and I was damned good at what I did.
    I read the dirty blonde’s lips as they worked around what looked like imaginative profanities, and wished there was sound in the cramped viewing room. The click of a latch sounded behind me and a noxious vapour of cheap perfume filled the room. A thick voice spoke. “I don’t need this trouble. I want him gone.”
    Turning my head, I saw Norma, the owner of the brothel leaning against the closed door. Her faced was scrunched as tight as her steel-blue perm and she wore a lemon-yellow velour tracksuit. Like Roper, she was otherkin: a crossbreed of the mystic races. Norma was lucky that she could pass for human, magic and glamour spells didn’t work for long beyond TheWeald. From the uneven shape of her ears and the slope of her nose, I guessed that after mostly human blood, she had some elf and maybe a sprinkling of hobgoblin thrown in.
    Roper wasn’t as lucky as Norma. A low-slung baseball cap couldn’t hide his diseased skin, crusty warts and piggy nose. As far as otherkin went, Roper was one ugly bastard.
    “He says I owe him money.” Norma’s voice was like dark treacle in my ears; rich and sweet. I didn’t know Norma myself, but she knew my boss, Gideon, and his business well enough to be on the lookout for Roper; she had sent Gideon the tip Roper would be here tonight.
    “He asks for too much,” Norma continued. “My debt to him is half what he claims. He would take everything I’ve worked so hard for. He tells me if I don’t pay, he’ll tip off the authorities in Harken City with where I am.”
    I heard the hint and made a show of thinking. As well as a pimp, Roper worked for Joseph Daleman, a loan shark nicknamed The Hacksaw. If Roper disappeared, Daleman might come looking. That wouldn’t have been a big deal in itself; trouble was I owed Daleman money and who wanted to remind him of that?
    My fingers absently traced the familiar grooves of the carved goat-head at the top of my cane. The brothel was in the Bang Phlat district and I could hear the pulse of the city outside: spluttering