Читать книгу Masked Possession - Alana Delacroix - Страница 7

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?