MASKED
POSSESSION
The
Masked Arcana #1
by
Alana Delacroix
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Pub
Date: 8/8/2017
A Man
Who Can Wear Any Face
Caro Yeats
doesn’t run from much. As a former investigative reporter now
working PR for Toronto’s supernaturals, what she hasn’t seen
mostly isn’t worth seeing. But the assignment to “rebrand” Eric
Kelton’s out-of-control alter egos has her on edge from the start.
Kelton is the heirarch of the Masquerada, beings able to change their
face—their entire persona—on a whim. Eric’s charisma muddles
her instincts. How can she trust a man who can become anybody?
A Woman
Without A Past
Eric has
never met anyone like Caro, with her lightning wit and uncanny
insight. But desirable as she is, he’d be a fool to let her near.
Struggling to hide the sudden loss of his powers, Eric can’t risk
becoming entangled with a woman who scorns her supernatural side and
claims not to play politics. The enemies on her trail are strong,
clever, and vicious. And when they force Eric and Caro together, the
fallout could shatter far more than two hearts . . .
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Chapter 1
Caro Yeats entered the lobby cursing her new
stilettos. Sure, they were sexy as hell and made her legs look a mile long but
they were terrible for, say, walking. It had been a mistake to wear
them, but they’d sat at the back of her closet for weeks and she’d grabbed them
in a moment of uncharacteristic boldness brought on by the perfect spring day.
Estelle, receptionist at Julien D’Aurant Public Relations, gave a low
whistle as Caro strutted past her desk. The strutting wasn’t deliberate; it was
impossible to walk any other way in the damn shoes. “What’s the occasion? Hot
date tonight? It’s sure not for any of us here.”
“Not true,” Caro said.
“I wore my mouthwatering baggy jeans and stained sweatshirt ensemble to impress
you last week.”
Estelle winced.
“Forgot about that. Anyway, you clean up nice. The boss will be impressed.”
Caro rolled her eyes.
Julien D’Aurant was so stereotypically French that she suspected it had to be
an act. “Why do you not dress plus comme une femme?” was a question
she’d had to dodge on multiple occasions. Her usual wardrobe of jeans and
ballet flats seemed to cause him real anguish.
“Speak of the devil,” Estelle muttered.
Julien strolled into
the lobby, his crisp, pressed, blue button-down tucked into his perfectly
creased gray dress pants. The caramel-brown belt was the exact shade of his
casual summer loafers, which he naturally wore without socks. In his
hand—Estelle had told Caro that he went for weekly manicures and she’d never
been able to look at his buffed and shiny nails again—he held his phone,
regarding it as warily as he would a snake coiled to strike.
He glanced up, then back at the phone. After a moment, his head flew up
in such a comical double take that Estelle burst out laughing and Caro felt a
bit insulted.
“Mon ange. This is what I mean by dressing like a woman.”
He strode over and grasped Caro by the shoulders, giving her a lingering kiss on both cheeks before stepping back and looking her over in admiration. “Quelle différence. Dress like this every day. You must.” His
expensive Hermès cologne wafted over her.
Although it was nice to have her efforts appreciated, Caro
suddenly had the impression that her black pencil skirt was a little too tight
and definitely too short. Time to deflect his attention. “Good morning, Julien.
What were you frowning about?”
“Ah. Yes, that.” He waved the phone at her. “Emergency meeting
in the boardroom in an hour. New client.”
“Who?” She didn’t particularly care, but knew enough to feign
enthusiasm once in a while. Or at least interest.
The phone rang out with the opening bars of Nina Simone’s “I Put
a Spell on You.” Instead of answering, Julien pointed a single, pampered finger
at her before murmuring “Allô?” and breaking into rapid French.
Caro raised an eyebrow and looked over at Estelle, who
shrugged and shook her short, black, Louise Brooks bob into place. Caro caught
a quick glimpse of Estelle’s wickedly pointed fangs. How the
vampire avoided slicing up her own lip was something Caro always wondered but
was afraid to ask. Friendly as she was, Estelle could bring on the predator
when she wanted. She called it her resting-death bitch face and Caro had seen
it reduce grown men to inarticulate lumps.
When Caro first started working at JDPR, she’d been surprised
that a vampire could be out during the day—Estelle was the first
one she’d ever met. Estelle had laughed and said silly rumors made for amazing
camouflage. “You can see us in mirrors and I put garlic in everything,” she had
said. “We’re like humans. Except for being almost immortal and drinking blood.
Minor differences.”
Now Estelle said, “It’s a masquerada. That’s all I
know.”
“Masquerada?”
A fine tension weighed down Caro’s shoulders—
her usual reaction to masquerada, the powerful shapeshifters who took on human forms.
“We don’t usually get many but why are you complaining? You were
the one who pulled the ghoul client last month. This should be a cakewalk.”
Caro could not deny the sewer-dwelling ghoul had been a nasty piece of work.
The office had to be professionally cleaned after his visit to dispose of the
residue he’d left behind, and the meeting room had both looked and
smelled like a post-plague charnel
house.
She shuddered and slowly teetered her way to her office, where
she kicked off the shoes with a sigh of relief. Taking one poor foot in
her hand, she gently rubbed the feeling back into her toes as she waited for
her computer to boot up.
A light-brown ring showed where her coffee cup should be—and
wasn’t. One of the misfortunes of working for a fey man was that items
constantly went missing. Apparently minor theft was a fey thing. Last week
Julien had pilfered her lipstick. When she first started, Caro had thought he
did it as some sort of hazing prank, a test for how much the newbie could take.
Now, many discussions with Estelle later, she realized that Julien often didn’t
even notice his thieving.
Not for the first time, she wondered if she’d made the right
decision by taking this job. The supernatural arcane world was one that she had
avoided for years. Now she had deliberately placed herself in the direct heart
of it. Inside the drawer of her minimalist white acrylic desk lay evidence of
her past life—a battered envelope containing a single Washington Post newspaper clipping, the pages still crisp. Lynn Butler’s first A1, over-the- fold story was an exclusive scoop tracing criminal kingpin Franz Iverson to a string of illegal activities that reached right to the Mayor’s Office and even to the Senate.
Every time she looked at it, she felt a thrill that
was immediately followed by deep aches in the year-old scars that traced pale,
jagged paths along her abdomen, chest and back. The doctor had said the pain
might never completely subside. It was a miracle she wasn’t dead from the
attack, he’d added. “I don’t understand how you didn’t bleed out from those
wounds. You’re one lucky woman.”
She rubbed her stomach with a shaking hand. The police had never
caught the men who left her for dead and she didn’t expect them to. There was
no need. She knew exactly who had ordered the hit.
Not even incarceration had limited Franz Iverson’s reach, or his
need for revenge.
Those knife thrusts had ended her career in journalism and her
life as Lynn Butler. When she finally got enough courage to walk back into the Post’s newsroom after her recovery, she barely managed to smile through her colleagues’ standing ovation before limping to the bathroom and collapsing in a shaking heap. The thought of writing another story made her hands shake uncontrollably and she had known, suddenly and without a doubt, that the life she loved as a reporter was done. Over.
That had been a year ago. The sea of multi-colored
project folders that sat in neat layers on her desk made a knot twist in her
stomach. Caro twirled her chair away to cast her eyes over the gray accent wall
in her office. A single print hung there, a huge close-up of Banksy’s
iconic protestor throwing his bouquet. Trendy and ironic, exactly the image
that Julien worked hard to maintain in an industry where perception was
everything. Caro rubbed her eyes. The job at JDPR was as far away from
investigative reporting as she could get while still staying, however
peripherally, in media. She’d left Washington in a panic to create a new life
for herself in Toronto at JDPR. She was lucky the city was big enough to hide
under a new name and new job, but with neighborhoods that gave her the homey
feel she craved. It had turned out as best it could, but sometimes she
regretted the move from hack to flack so much she felt numb.
Quit this, she told herself sternly. Enough. You’re alive, you’re working. Just because you’re not a reporter, it doesn’t mean it’s a bad life. It’s different. You chose different, remember? It’s what you wanted. It’s what you needed. JDPR was definitely not a typical PR agency. It represented only arcane clients. Humans who stumbled across it were given such an outlandish rate list and cold welcome from Estelle that they didn’t return. For the most part, the company dealt in the delicate art of keeping humans unaware of the fantastic beings who shared the world with them.
Most arcana could either pass as human, pass as odd humans, or lived as isolated as possible from populated areas. Regardless, there were enough incidents to make for some
interesting days. She was grateful for that busyness at least.
Caro tapped her fingers on the table. Julien had made
it clear that she had gotten the job at JDPR because she was part masquerada,
although a latent and an extraordinarily and determinedly ignorant one at that.
Before her death, her mother had tried to train Caro in the basics of taking on
a masque, but Caro had stubbornly opposed any arcane education. Nor was there
anybody else to learn from, even if she changed her mind. Besides her mother,
she’d never knowingly met another masquerada and she often wondered if this
avoidance was as deliberate on their side as it was on hers. Her mother had
made it crystal clear that being a half-blood was nothing to be proud about, so
she wasn’t surprised if none of them wanted to make themselves known to a
pariah. One of the things Caro did know about masquerada culture was that it
was unusually hierarchical and status-driven, like some time-traveling medieval
court.
Not that any of this mattered to Caro, who had always despised
the fundamental trickiness of masquerada and had done her best to ignore that
entire part of her heritage. Her mother had changed masques the same way other
women changed clothes. As a child Caro would often kiss one woman good night
and wake to an unfamiliar one in the morning. It was years before Caro even
knew what her mother truly looked like and that was only because she had
found an old photo in a shoebox.
“Oh, her?” Her mother had shrugged dismissively when Caro showed
her the photo of the dark-haired, dark-eyed woman who looked like Caro herself.
“That’s my natural self. A bit of a wet blanket. I much prefer this one.” At
the time she was a curvy platinum blonde with Asian eyes and features, and so
stunning that people stopped on the street to watch her walk by.
“Can’t you at least look like this when you’re
with me?” Caro had asked, shaking the photo. She’d been nine or ten. Her mother
had glanced at Caro’s reflection in the mirror with an unreadable expression,
mascara wand steady in her hand.
“Sorry, darling.”
That was the day Caro
decided she would never take on a masque. She would never give in to that
pathological need to be someone else—she was going to be good enough as she
was.
However, Caro’s
boo-hoo, sad-face childhood issues turned out to be an advantage in her new
job. Although she’d rejected her arcane heritage, it meant JDPR’s clients would
trust her, Julien had explained when he’d hired her. “You have an insider’s
knowledge of the human world, without the taint of humanity,” he had said. “Our
clients don’t trust humans. Et bien sûr, protecting our clients’
confidentiality and interests requires more layered complexity than it does for
humans working with some vulgar reality star from Atlantic City.”
She had nodded, but wondered how on earth it was possible to keep
decrepit ghouls and pale creatures with fangs hidden from the public eye.
Julien had stressed that upholding the Law—the ancient agreement made by all
arcana to stay secret from humanity—was their primary task, but surely at least
one damning image would go viral. Then one did and Caro watched as it was
ripped apart, ridiculed as fake, and sent to join the ranks of fringe theories
about the Bermuda Triangle and the Illuminati. It wasn’t that hard to keep the
arcane world a secret after all, Caro reflected. What normal person would admit
to believing it?
Alana
Delacroix lives in a little house filled with books in Toronto,
Canada. She loves exploring the city, on the hunt for both the
perfect coffeeshop as well as ideal locations to set her paranormal
romances. A member of RWA, Alana worked as an archaeologist before
forging a slightly more stable career in corporate communications.
You can follow her at @AlanaDelacroix or learn more at
alanadelacroix.com.
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