Free The Moonlight Monsters Detective Agency Volume One by Maggie Harper

wishing she hadn’t let the vampire slip through her fingers so easily.
    The newscast ended and the deluge of Christmas classics began again. Well, Tina reflected, she still had Parker’s money so chances were she’d get to ask him in person soon enough.
    As Frank Sinatra sang “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” she reflected for a moment that she still hadn’t gotten a chance to do her Christmas shopping yet. It was the same every year – never enough time. She pulled the car off the interstate and rejoined the interminable traffic of Moonlight City. Oh well, she sighed as she looked out at the bright lights overhead, there wasn’t much else to do now but just sit back and try to enjoy the music.
     
     
    # # #
     
     

 
     
    Sand Wedged
     
     
    The boardwalks of Moonlight City were swarmed with revelers and party-goers – hardly surprising since it was new years’ eve – and Tina Peterson pushed her way past them as she followed the wooden sidewalk down along the line of casinos, hotels and restaurants that overlooked the Atlantic Ocean.
    It was a clean, crisp night and the sea was calm beneath the sparse black sky. The calm before the storm perhaps, Tina reflected and she didn’t mean the midnight blowout that would cause a furor amongst the partiers in an hour or two.
    Tina Peterson was a detective, but not with the regular police force. She worked for the Moonlight City SDA – the Supernatural Detective Agency, also known as the Moonlight Monsters Detective Agency to those familiar with the more unconventional citizens of the city – and tonight she wasn’t on the Boardwalk for pleasure. (Hardly, she snorted as some drunken frat boy barged past her on his way to the ocean-side of the boardwalk and threw up a deluge of sick over the railings.)
    No, tonight she was here on a case – just like she had been every night for the past half-week. Because something strange was happening along the beaches and coastlines of Moonlight City. Though just what exactly, she still wasn’t sure.
     
    It had all started a few days earlier – just after Christmas in fact, since fate had a way of making sure Tina never seemed to have any time off at all – when reports of a minor-earthquake on the coast began to emerge. Strange? Certainly, since Moonlight City was fairly far away from any fault lines, but supernatural? Hardly.
    Or so she’d thought. But within two hours of catching the first report of the tremors on the news Tina got a call from Ernie the Egghead, the local agency’s lab technician and IT guy (and stranded extra-terrestrial alien, as he just so happened to be). Ernie said he had a problem and needed her back at the office as soon as possible. And no, it couldn’t wait.
    So Tina had had to bid farewell to her family early and leave her parents’ house upstate to return to Moonlight City and the grind of Supernatural Detection. Oh well, at least some day she’d be retired and could then do all the things a normal person gets to do – if she made it that long, that was.
    When she arrived back at HQ her partner Boris Rachmaninoff was already there, looking even more irate than she was about getting called back in on a case. Boris was a werebear – a man who can turn into a bear at will – who’d emigrated from Russia after the Berlin Wall fell twenty years previously. His wife had died a couple of years back and now he juggled looking after his huge clan of offspring with his career with the SDA. When he was off on the job his sister looked after the kids.
    Not long after that Ernie scuttled in on his little mechanical walker (Ernie, as an alien greyling , was no more than three feet tall and used a machine to compensate). He had a wad of documents in his hand, which was never a good sign, and proceeded to tell the detectives that whatever it was that was happening underneath the beaches of Moonlight City, a natural occurrence it most certainly was not.
     
    So it wasn’t an earthquake, Tina