Ward of the Vampire Read Free Page B

to the guests who had arrived after us.
    Again I followed Miss Delilah’s lead and handed the wrap she had draped over my shoulders, a twin of her own, to the coat check. I slipped my ticket in the tiny, beaded black clutch Miss Delilah had let me borrow.
    She linked her arm with mine, then, and leaned in close to whisper in a conspiratorial tone.
    “Now, Lina dear, this is as far as we go together. It’s a nice house, I’m sure you’ll enjoy exploring it and have fun meeting new people.” Her voice slipped into a deeper, thicker tone. “Be nice to my brother when you see him, and don’t you dare leave without me.”
    I was taken by the urge to laugh.
    Be nice to Mr. Ward? Why did she think she needed to tell me such a thing? Did she really expect me to be rude to our host, one of the most powerful men in town—or even in the world? Did she think I’d trade barbs with him and call him a jerk?
    If that was what she thought, she was entirely right.
    Before I could reply to her admonitions, she stepped away from me. In moments, she had disappeared into the crowd, the red of her dress blending with a hundred other red dresses that were twirling around a hundred black tuxedos. I don’t mind crowds, but all of a sudden I was feeling entirely out of my depth.
    Every single one of the people around me was the kind of person I’d usually welcome in Miss Delilah’s office with ‘May I take your coat?’ or ‘Can I offer you a refreshment?’ and I had this unshakable feeling that they would know, just by looking at me, that I didn’t belong to their world.
    I took a champagne cup from a passing waiter, hoping to give myself a countenance. Everyone around me was chatting, greeting old friends, and I felt utterly alone. Some part of me was upset with Miss Delilah. What game was she playing, bringing me to this party and then leaving me by myself?
    Not that I’d have felt much better if she’d stayed with me. She was my boss. We didn’t chitchat, or pretend to be friends. She told me what she wanted, and I did it, it was as simple as that and I was quite happy with it.
    Now it’s not to say my job was easy. If she said she wanted a bouquet of roses on her desk by the time she came to work, it wasn’t much of a challenge to call one of the four florists I used regularly. On the other hand, the one time she decided she wanted black orchids in the lobby… that was altogether trickier.
    As I quickly learned, there are plenty of plants called ‘black orchids’ but they aren’t actually black. Instead, they’re usually a very deep dark purple, so dark it does look black under the proper conditions. That? Is not what Miss Delilah asked for. I actually contacted orchid specialists and subsidized two of them into creating a new variety for Miss Delilah. But since that might take years, I had to improvise to provide her black orchids in the meantime.
    A chemist came up with a blend of dyes and additives that are injected into the flower bud before it opens so the petals turn black as ink without the flower losing its scent or dying prematurely. Miss Delilah loved it. She actually told me I’d done a good job.
    Three weeks later, she wanted bonsais in the lobby.
    I told a friend about the orchids saga, once. Okay, so he wasn’t a friend, he was a guy a friend had set me up with as a blind date. We were having fun, and I told him the orchid story thinking he’d find it amusing, like I had. All this work, all this money spent, and in the end when Miss Delilah got what she wanted, she moved on to the next shiny thing the way a kid would.
    He thought it was ‘horrible’ and ‘demeaning’ to me. He actually told me that if I wanted to find another job, he’d put in a good word with the bosses at his company. That was the first and last time we went out. I’ve never felt demeaned by my job with Miss Delilah, but I was rather insulted that this guy I barely knew decided that my job was meaningless and unworthy of me.
    The