Hold the Line

HOLD THE LINE WATCHDOGS OF THE VEIL™ BOOK THREE MICHAEL ANDERLE DON’T MISS OUR NEW RELEASES Join the LMBPN email list to be notified of new releases and special promotions (which happen often) by following this link: http://lmbpn.com/email/ This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both. Copyright © 2023 LMBPN Publishing Cover Art by Jake @ J Caleb Design http://jcalebdesign.com / [email protected] Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing A Michael Anderle Production LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture. The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights. LMBPN Publishing PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy Las Vegas, NV 89109 Version 1.00, May 2023 eBook ISBN: 979-8-88878-285-9 Print ISBN: 979-8-88878-286-6 THE HOLD THE LINE TEAM Thanks to the JIT Readers Dorothy Lloyd Rachel Beckford Paul Westman Jan Hunnicutt Editor The SkyFyre Editing Team CONTENTS Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Author Notes Books By Michael Anderle CHAPTER ONE The nightclubs of Miami were famous for a reason, but none of them had a wilder reputation than Papa’s. Carlton Priez Pierce, also known as operative Charlie, discovered why as soon as he walked in the door with his new teammates from the SUUE. The whole place was a spectacle, with too many details to notice at once. Girls spun from the ceiling on long silks as they performed dance moves in midair. Dancers wore outlandish costumes like a bikini combined with a gas mask. Performers in bright pink zoot suits juggled on a stage—Papa’s was a chaos of clashing images and wild colors. The beat was loud and almost hostile, and it infected the dancers with desperate energy as if they were dancing for the last time in their lives and wanted to make the most of it. The club was packed with young people, dancing and grinding on each other to the beat provided by the club’s DJ. The young woman with spiky hair spun a mix with a darker edge than the typical Miami nightspot. Truly, nothing about Papa’s could be described as typical. The one word that occurred to Carlton when he walked in was “Babylon,” although he didn’t know exactly what he meant by that. The music was not to Carlton’s taste, but it was impossible to ignore the women. Many wore as little as they could legally get away with and danced to show it off. He had to remind himself to focus. The Society had come to Papa’s for a reason. Carlton was an operative for the Society for Unexplained Unquiet Ephemera, often referred to as the UUE or the Society for short. For roughly a hundred thirty years, the UUE had kept the world’s supernatural entities or “creeps” from becoming too dangerous to the human population. They also kept the human population from discovering the truth about the creeps. Since the UUE recruited him, he’d fought everything from undead revenants to trolls to vampires, and he’d helped to break up a gang that had taken to grinding up the bodies of the undead to make a narcotic known as Bone Dust. He’d never really had teammates he could trust in the UUE. When they first recruited him, after he tried and failed to get a job with the FBI, a vengeful necromancer attacked the Society and virtually wiped them out in Miami. Before they fled the city for the next few months, Carlton’s teammate Amber had manipulated him into a situation where he’d accidentally killed a witch girl named Kimberly Walker, who now lived inside his head. After Amber left the Society, he’d been rejected by most of his new coworkers because his initiation ritual had gone wrong due to having this ghost inside him. They didn’t know about that, but they knew something was wrong and didn’t trust him. When he returned to Miami, his new supervisor Agent Earl didn’t approve of his admittedly shady past and openly condemned him. That led his teammates Kendra and Jon to reject him, which nearly led to disaster after Earl’s death. He’d prevailed against the Bone Grinders but with no thanks to anyone in the Society. All of that was a few months past, and for the first time since joining the SUUE, Carlton was glad to be part of a team. He could count on them to watch his back, and as he moved through the nightclub crowd, it was nice to have a partner—posing as his girlfriend—working alongside him. Their mission was to meet with a vampire named Anastasia who was eager to betray her master. She hoped this treachery would elevate her to the next level of the supernatural pecking order. If everything worked out the way they planned, tonight would be the last night of Papa Tiburón’s reign over the vampires of Miami. Squeezing through the throngs of dancers beside his partner and pretend girlfriend, Carlton glanced across the room and glimpsed agent Esther Pennirose, his new supervisor. Esther was a fierce and practical black woman who had cut her teeth hunting skinchangers in the bayous of Louisiana. She stood against a wall near the back of the room, watching the operation unfold. Many Society operatives disdained to work with creeps for any reason, but Esther saw the whole thing the way a hunter or a fisherman would. She had no problem using the greed and ambition