So I spent 2 years finishing the first draft of my Urban Fantasy WIP, and I've been editing for almost a year now, but I've found a pretty strong plot-hole at around the 1/3 mark and my brainstorm-fu has thus far failed me. Could I get some fresh eyes on this? My villain protagonists (the lead, a woman named Charlie, and the peripheral narrator, a man named Alec the third protagonist Amy "The Richmond Ripper" Carmine is not in the picture until the 2nd half, and her brother Jason is only physically present for a few scenes in the middle) owe money to the opening antagonists (a loan shark named "Lipstick" Tony Davis and his bodyguards "Mr. Black" and "Mr. White"), try to rob banks to pay it off, and run afoul of the lead antagonist, a bomber who reveals herself to Charlie and Alec as being a 120-year-old vampire witch. The vampire forces Charlie/Alec to take her to Tony, but she quickly loses interest in him for reasons She asks why Charlie and Alec are afraid of a guy who calls himself "Lipstick Tony," so Alec explains that Tony brags about biting people's fingers off if they cross him, and (now knowing that vampires are real) he asks if he might be a vampire. Vampires in my world don't tend to like other vampires, so she's initially planning to kill him, but she takes one whiff and realizes he's a human who's not worth her time. Tony has his bodyguards break Charlie's and Alec's fingers as their first warning for missing their deadline, and he scoffs at them for trying to tell him that the woman he just met is the bomber who's been all over the news. The vampire doesn't like it when people aren't afraid of her, so she brutally murders Tony. Tony's bodyguards are now unemployed, and Charlie forces them to work for her: they have one job as a bodyguard, "don't let the boss get killed," and when word gets out that Tony died on their watch, nobody will ever hire them again. It wasn't their fault Tony died – they were up against a vampire more powerful than anybody could've hoped to defend against – but Charlie's the only one who knows that. The bodyguards admit that they're familiar with the supernatural, and they offer to teach Charlie and her friends magic as part of their new employment. The vampire (an insatiable show-off) offers to teach Charlie more powerful magic than the bodyguards could, but when the vampire gets taken out of the picture for the second half of the story, the bodyguards are the ones she starts learning magic from after all. So here's the problem I just noticed: it would be really easy for the bodyguards to skip town under new names and get work under a new boss in a new state who's never heard of them or Tony. If Charlie's going to get them under her employ, then she first needs a way to keep them in town to begin with (or else to make them bring her and her friends with them when they leave). So far, I have Spoiler: Possible ideas Charlie threatens that if the bodyguards don't agree to work for her, then she'll to come clean to the police about how she and her friends were forced to rob banks for Tony and that this had gotten them involved with the bomber, but will pretend that the bodyguards killed Tony to work for the bomber. That way, their faces will be plastered all over the news and nobody will hire bodyguards who became national celebrities for betraying their boss This probably wouldn't work: why don't they just shoot her and Alec when she threatened to lie about that? Charlie talks herself and her friends up, either as a) worthwhile bosses for them to work for, or as b) worthwhile assistants to work for them This probably won't work either: the bodyguards don't respect her as a criminal. They only see her as a 20-year-old college dork who thinks watching an episode of Breaking Bad taught her everything she needs to know about how to make it in the criminal underworld, and who got her friends hurt when it turned out she didn't Her criminal history is more complicated than that and she's more competent than they think, but if she tries to tell them that, then I need a way to make them believe her I also want to re-write this as Charlie figuring out for herself that the bodyguards are mages, but I'm still not sure how to fit that in with the other changes I need to make.
