The elevator opened on the seventh floor, where the office of the owner of WPBS—the Paranormal Broadcasting Station—was located. Lucy walked across the plush gray carpet and announced herself to Mr. Moody's secretary. "The boss wanted to see me?" she asked the plump matron.
The secretary nodded, then added in a low, warning voice, "He's on the warpath."
Lucy thanked her; then, steeling herself for the meeting, she walked inside, wondering what burr had gotten stuck under the man's saddle now.
Glancing toward Moody's massive mahogany desk, she noted that the old crab was on the phone. Short, gruff, and about twenty pounds overweight, in broadcasting he was a force with which to be reckoned.
Mr. Moody hung up the phone and took in what Lucy was wearing, a cornflower-blue dress with a low-cut back and beaded bodice. "You must have a hot date planned tonight," he remarked.
Lucy shrugged. Her date was a first date, and she suspected it would be anything but hot. The man in question was handsome, but in a spoiled good looks kind of way. She wasn't sure why she'd agreed to the date.
She fought back annoyance at Moody's comment. What bad luck that he'd noticed. Usually she didn't date after her show, which was on weekdays and started at 9:00 p.m., an hour before primetime. Since the supernatural world had barged into the mortal world with much more bite than bark, most nations had revamped their workdays. The average shift now started at 11:00 a.m. and finished at 8:00 p.m., and many stores stayed open all night. This enabled paranormal clients and customers to shop 'til they dropped—unless they got home before sunrise.
"Is he a paranormal?" her boss asked curiously.
Lucy knew her personal life was just that, but what could she do? This was the boss, even if he was a nosy busybody who liked to point his pug nose into everything.
"No," she said.
Moody looked put out. "Damn! You need to make some better connections. You'd better start poking around in some coffins and loup garou dens."
Lucy frowned. She wasn't the type to sleep her way to the top, especially in coffins. Not after her past. Deciding not to reply, she sat down in a green plaid chair as Mr. Moody pointed his finger at her.
"I'm not happy with the cost of your show, Lucy Campbell. No, missy, I am not," he warned, his thick brows drawn together in a frown.
Lucy rolled her eyes. Her boss's name fit him like a perfectly tailored suit. He was cantankerous, contrary, cheap—and alternately creative and charming. One night he was as high as a kite, and other nights he was channeling Satan.
"So, I'm in the soup again, am I?" she said.
"I had to replace our specialty chair and the coffee table this week alone," he growled with firm displeasure. "And the show was a flop."
This was definitely one of his moody nights. Lucy grimaced as she recalled the Great Appalachian Troll. Over seven feet tall and massively built, the creature had flopped down hard on the specially made chair designed for guests who weighed more than three but less than five hundred pounds. There had been a loud creaking noise, and then suddenly both chair and troll had collapsed. Naturally the troll—never the calmest of species in the best of circumstances—had gotten angry and had smashed the matching coffee table as well, scattering cups and food everywhere. The guests had shouted and cheered, but Lucy had been left with coffee and egg on her face. And now this bill. Dang! Moody would bring up the troll episode.
"Who knew that Appalachian Trolls weighed over five hundred pounds?" she asked, her eyes wide with innocent indignation.
"Perhaps if you had researched a bit more about this particular guest?" Mr. Moody retorted.
"I did! But the troll must have been embarrassed about her weight and lied. She was a female troll, after all. And I apologized until I was blue in the face, but she was still surly. We also didn't have another chair sturdy enough to accommodate her, so she had to stand through the rest of the interview. I guess I have to admit the whole show went downhill from there."
Scowling, Mr. Moody made a face that made his thick brushy brows meet in the middle of his forehead, the look clearly saying the troll mess was all her fault. Dang, she had seen that look before. And so Lucy added, "I did stand up with her so she wouldn't feel out of place."
"You know she'll tell all her troll buddies about us. We'll probably never get another troll on our show again—at least, not on this side of the Appalachians!"
That would be a loss, Lucy thought snidely. No more egg on her face? But she said, "I'm sorry. Accidents do happen."
"You can say that again. You're accident-prone, Lucy. I tell you, accident-prone."
Lucy kept a straight face, neither accepting nor denying the statement. Just because she had been bitten by gremlins, slimed by ghosts, and cursed by warlocks, that didn't mean she was any unluckier than other people were. Other people just didn't spend their nights with the Amityville horror or wacked-out witches. Of course, there was one encounter in the past that made her feel unlucky. A vampire. One who…
She tore her thoughts away from that as Moody said, "I don't spend half as much money on my other shows as I do on yours. Why, Creature Comforts hardly costs a dime."
"Why should it?" Lucy snapped. "All your host has to do is walk around stylish homes of rich and famous monsters." Having seen mausoleums of some famous undead, Lucy personally thought it was a dream job—for a mortician.
Mr. Moody continued, ignoring her. "Besides the large antebellum ballroom, I hardly incur any expenses for Monster Mash."
"What kind of expenses would you incur on a show where everyone is dancing? Maybe a few broken high heels? A lost sense of rhythm? All Ginger your ghost host has to do is announce the odd couples."
"They still don't cost much to produce," Moody grumbled.
Holding up a hand, Lucy defended herself staunchly—and with the few words that would most count. "I have the highest ratings of all the shows you produce."
Mr. Moody slammed down a bill from Billy's Barbecue on his desk. Giving her a black look, he asked, "Well, what the hell is this? Three hundred dollars for a single meal?"
"That was lunch, of course," Lucy explained patiently. The man could be an unreasonable monster at times, worse than a vampire trying to squeeze blood from turnips. But one had to be stupid to get in his way when he got on the warpath. "A five-hundred-pound Appalachian Troll has a mighty big appetite. Heck, when we were done, she ordered a whole goat to go."
Moody looked up at the ceiling as if the answer to his dilemma were written there. "Lucy, your show costs twice what my other shows cost. And may I remind you that I am paying you an exorbitant salary? Do I need to remind you that I gave you this job even though your only credits beforehand were merely some work in a small-town television station in Texas where you were the weather girl?"
Exorbitant salary, her aunt Fanny! Although Mr. Moody was paying her more per week than her job in Round Rock as a weather girl had, she would never be wearing Prada at this rate.
"I was a great weather girl," she argued. "That station loved me." Lucy had been slowly moving up in the ranks. "I also got to do the television news for two weeks when our anchorman got bitten by a ghoul. The ratings went up for those two weeks too."
"Only because you fell out of your chair twice. Hell, you weren't even drinking."
Lucy glared at him, mortified. "That could have happened to anybody. I was nervous, and miscalculated when I sat down."
Mr. Moody only shook his head. "That should have warned me."
"Besides, I was still upset about my mother's accident," Lucy continued. Ten months after she'd gotten the job, a grizzly werebear driver had hit her mother with his van. Fortunately her mother had lived to tell the tale, but unfortunately she didn't have any insurance. The medical costs were huge, and since the werebear had also been seriously hurt, her mother had been fined for harming an endangered species.
Staring hard at her, Moody conceded gruffly, "You were doing an okay job at that podunk station, but being a weather girl is not hosting your very own show. Think what you can accomplish here if you cut back expenses. You are doing important work, showcasing the supernatural!"
And she was killing all hope of any progress or of the more elite of the professional paranormal world to appear as her guests if the show didn't focus on more serious—or at least believable—issues. Well, as believable as any issue could be in a world where people could turn into bats or chomp your leg off if they got hungry on the night of a full moon and all the local takeout restaurants were closed.
"My fans love me," she said. For a long time, she had wanted to be famous and respected like Oprah or Ellen. Now she was. And while those two women didn't have fans who wore black lipstick and stuck pins in dolls, fans were fans, and those fans provided almighty ratings. That was something.
It was funny. Lucy had always had something to prove to the world and to herself. Middle school had been a nightmare. She had been short, fat, and in eighth grade her skin had broken out. It was also in eighth grade that she'd learned what fear was—and that people were a lot like animals.
Chicks would peck and peck the runt of a litter, until they pecked it to death. The popular crowd had done the same to Lucy. She had been tormented and made fun of not once or twice, but daily for the whole of her eighth-grade year. Lunchtime had loomed, a hulking, menacing presence to be endured on a day-to-day basis, and Lucy had hid in the girls' restroom, hoping no one would find her. That had saved her from death by peckers.
In high school she had fortunately blossomed, losing her baby fat while her skin cleared up into a peaches-and-cream complexion. The ugly duckling became a pretty girl with an infectious laugh, and she had been head cheerleader, most popular girl, and most beautiful. But the earlier scars remained, and they influenced her life to this day. She had a driving ambition, a deep-seated need to be successful and famous; famous enough to show those hometown girls that she'd always been worth knowing and always would be—something they had been too superficial and self-involved to notice.
"Fans. Well," Mr. Moody said, hating to concede anything good about his most expensive employee. "You do seem to have a following. That's why you're still working, in spite of the exorbitant costs you incur."
"I'm always signing autographs," Lucy added, stretching the truth a bit. She had signed autographs now and again, but most people who came up to her told her how funny they found her show. If her show was a situation comedy she would have been a bit more flattered.
"Well, maybe you are. But if they knew the high costs that you run up…" Moody trailed off, mentally calculating the accidents, the destruction of property, the raise he was probably not going to give her this year…
"There was that Monty's python show. That was hard to swallow," he recalled grumpily. "I had to pay a fortune for that Harry Wizard fellow's warty, potbellied pig. He went potty! His grief counseling sessions—what hogwash!"
"I did try to keep that python from eating his pig."
"It was a disaster. In fact, I don't think I can ever look at bacon the same way," Mr. Moody went on, staring at Lucy. Shaking his head, he said, "Still, you do seem to have that loyal following. Despite the sliming and the leaf sprouting."
Lucy groaned silently. He wasn't going to bring this up now, was he? She recalled well enough the time when an enraged Druid warlock had put a curse on her, causing tiny leaves to sprout from her scalp. She had been doing the show for a little over six months, and had been wearing new high heels with wooden spikes—all the rage with the female vampire hunters on her show that day. Unfortunately, the spiked wooden heel had broken, and Lucy had fallen into the lap of the Druid warlock, Monsieur Chestnuts, causing her to squash monsieur's chestnuts along with his warlocky wand.
Mr. Moody rubbed his hands together gleefully, remarking, "The ratings shot up by six points. We should do that again."
"I… don't think so." Lucy declined with great conviction. It had taken her two days and numerous phone calls to find a hair-dressing hedge trimmer who could deal with the leaves until she found a witch to lift the Druid's curse.
Glancing at her watch, she remarked, "Is that all? My date is waiting."
"All right, all right," Mr. Moody said. He watched her stand, his face craftily thoughtful. "But you do know Tuesday's show is dealing with witches and warlocks?"
"Yes," she replied. To be honest, she was a tiny bit uneasy. "The two covens have promised to behave themselves. We got their John Hancock on the agreement. No bespelling, no curses. None. Nada." And there'd be no wooden-spike-heel shoes for her, either.
Escaping Moody's office, she rode down in the elevator with her head leaned against the wall. She was tired and wondering how her date was going to go with Desmond. Maybe she would be pleasantly surprised and have a really good time—or at least an okay time. The way her dates had been going lately, she would settle for harmless.
And she didn't want to think about that vampire from her past…