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.