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    Veiled Threats: The Charm Collector, #0
    Veiled Threats: The Charm Collector, #0
    Veiled Threats: The Charm Collector, #0
    Ebook83 pages1 hour

    Veiled Threats: The Charm Collector, #0

    By Melissa Erin Jackson

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    About this ebook

    This is a short prequel story that takes place before Diabolical Sword, book 1 in The Charm Collector urban fantasy series. 

     

    Camila Fletcher has made a career out of finding missing people. Despite being a full-blooded human, she's often contacted by members of the fae population hiding amongst mundanes. When a young fae girl asks for help finding her sister, Camila is thrust into an investigation that involves much more than one missing girl …

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMelissa Erin Jackson
    Release dateFeb 10, 2022
    ISBN9781956335040
    Veiled Threats: The Charm Collector, #0

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      Book preview

      Veiled Threats - Melissa Erin Jackson

      CHAPTER ONE

      Dear Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher,

      Your investigative work has piqued our interest. We are constantly on the lookout for mundanes such as yourselves with the fortitude to see more than what their senses tell them. You saw the truth and ran toward it while others would have run away. It is because of this that we would like to extend an invitation to visit Luma—California’s magical hub.

      In Luma, the abnormal is normal. Vampires and magic aren’t to be whispered about behind cupped hands, nor will such concepts be ridiculed as fanciful nonsense. Desperate politicians won’t offer you hush money to keep their citizens in the dark. Here, you’ll receive a competitive salary, allowing you to live in financial freedom in a city brimming with opportunity.

      If you are interested in seeing what Luma has to offer, please call the number listed below and a representative will be happy to answer your questions.

      Sincerely,

      The Collective

      The letter had arrived a week ago, slipped under the door of our bungalow office building on the outskirts of downtown Sacramento. It wasn’t a location that got much foot traffic; we’d chosen it for that very reason. There was no return address on the envelope. Stalkers rarely coughed up personal information.

      During brief lulls over the past week, my husband Nelson or I would pull the letter out and reread it, sometimes to ourselves, and sometimes out loud to each other. Nelson currently banged around in the back of the office, looking for replacement light bulbs for the bathroom. New light bulbs weren’t on our meticulously organized expenses spreadsheet for the month. Despite business being steady, the bungalow was all we could afford right now. Between this office and rent prices on our small house climbing every year, we weren’t sure if we could afford to stay in the city much longer—let alone California.

      Babe! Nelson called out. Are you sure we have extra bulbs? Something crashed. My God, it’s so dark back here …

      Did you check the supply closet?

      Obviously!

      I rolled my eyes, smiling to myself. He’d only been looking for them for ten minutes and he’d already grown huffy. Did you just open the door and glance in, or did you actually move stuff around?

      A long pause. The slight creak of the closet’s hinges. Just as I thought.

      I returned my focus to the letter. The Collective? Who were these people—a cult? The mob? A band of nutters pulling a fast one on us?

      Our lives had become so strange lately. Being recruited by the mob sounded more plausible than this being a hoax. This was too specific. A few months ago, Nelson and I had taken on a missing persons case that resulted in our uncovering a vampire nest in a Sacramento suburb. Before he and I had ever met, we’d encountered bizarre happenings in our hometown. Chasing down those bizarre happenings had been the reason we’d met and fallen in love four years ago. Nothing said romance like discovering that the string of odd, gruesome deaths plaguing our hometown was due not to wild animals, but bloodsucking humans from our nightmares. When weird activity started up here a few months ago, we immediately knew what was going on: we’d recognized the signs.

      With help from the local police and a small contingent of National Guard sent out by the governor, we’d helped get the vampires cleared out, with no one in the mundane population finding out about it. The help we’d supplied had come in the form of intel, rather than muscle. The undead were unnervingly fast, and our untrained-in-combat human bodies couldn’t keep up—we learned that one the hard way. But the cops needed people in the know, like us, to inform them about the important stuff—like the fact that bullets rarely took vampires down, but severing heads always did. We’d learned quite a bit from bona fide vampire hunters over the years—just not enough to take on a whole nest by ourselves. We might have been certifiable, but we weren’t stupid.

      Law enforcement in most places knew about this kind of thing to some extent—after all, when weird crap happened, you called the police. There’s a rule upheld by those in the know, though: keep the details of the weird crap to yourself. This brand of weird shook most people’s belief systems to their foundations, while scaring the bejesus out of the rest. When people got scared, they reacted. Law enforcement of most stripes wanted the reactions kept to a minimum.

      The governor had called us up personally to request we keep the whole undead monster thing to ourselves in exchange for a nice chunk of change that had kept us solvent for several more months. How had The Collective known about the governor’s payoff?

      The incident hadn’t made national or even local news, but clearly it had reached someone. Someones, I supposed, since the Collective was probably more than one person. Unless it was a singular entity with a monumental ego.

      I eyed the phone number. I’d almost called it nearly half a dozen times, but always abandoned ship before I hit the seventh digit. Nelson was fully on board with meeting these people. This kind of thing was our bread and butter. We weren’t the type of people desperate for the unexplained to be real—we knew it was real. And ever since that vampire case, our clientele had grown stranger still. The day I had been gardening—only to come face-to-face with an honest-to-God goblin—was a day I wouldn’t soon forget. I’d let out such a bloodcurdling scream that our elderly next-door neighbor had come running out of the house in nothing but his boxers and wielding a meat cleaver, hurrying to my aid because surely I was being murdered.

      Fearsome monster hunter, that was me.

      Nelson and I experienced the unexplained on a weekly basis—things most people

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