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 . . .
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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