The Witch and the Gentleman (6 page)

Definitely too weird for someone sober.

Yes, I still wanted that drink.

First, I hobbled into the bathroom. My toe had quit bleeding on its own, but it needed some doctoring. I did the best I could with my foot up on the sink, cleaning it first with hot water, then applying alcohol and peroxide. The attention to the wound had started the blood moving again, but not by much. Soon, my little piggie was bandaged and ready to face the world.

Ghosts and all.

I limped back into the kitchen and spent the next fifteen minutes sweeping and hunting down glass fragments like the
Inglourious Basterds
hunted down Nazis. Or not. When I had done my best sweeping and eyeballing the shards, I next used a small kitchen vacuum that I kept in a front closet. Now sweating a little, I finally had that glass of wine.

As I poured, I said, “Whoever you are, can you please wait until I’m sitting before scaring the unholy shit out of me?”

I waited for a response, didn’t get one—which relieved the hell out of me—and made my way into the living room. Once there, I set the glass down on a coaster on the glass coffee table, like a good girl, and, as I reached for the remote with every intention of wasting my night away in front of the TV, watching everything from nerds to half men to country singing contests, I saw something very strange lying by the remote.

It was the Wicca instructional book for beginners. A book that I’d left in my bedroom, by the Spirit Chair.

“Holy hell,” I said.

I glanced around my small apartment, hoping like crazy that I wasn’t about to see a floating old lady who, I was now fairly certain, was Peter’s departed mother.

I drank more wine.

A lot more wine.

Almost all of it.

The book. It was sitting on the arm of my couch, as if I’d just set it there minutes earlier. I hadn’t, of course. I’d been out cold on the carpet minutes earlier, and prior to that, I had last seen the book in my bedroom.

Even more curious, I could see that there was something in the book, something I hadn’t put there myself.

“
Curiouser and curiouser,” I said.

I tentatively picked up the book. That something strange and miraculous was happening to me
right now
, I had no doubt. I could feel it. My skin was tingling. The hair on my head and arms bristled. It was as if the room was suddenly filled with a low dose of electricity. Although I was still new to the psychic world, I knew that something bigger than me was happening, happening right now, and that I needed to be strong and power through and, most importantly...

“
No more fainting,” I whispered to myself.

I opened the worn book carefully, turning to the page with the bookmark. The bookmark consisted of an old receipt of mine. Really, really old. I looked again, blinking. Three years old, in fact. From a car wash in North Hollywood. NoHo, as we called it here. I continued blinking, staring at it. The receipt must have been in an old pair of jeans. Or dropped and forgotten at the back of my closet. Or in an old drawer or even in my car. All I knew was that I sure as hell hadn’t seen it in years, and, quite, frankly, I barely remembered going to the car wash.

I was about to wad it up and toss it aside when a flash of memory occurred to me. Yes, I did, in fact, recall going to the car wash. This was back before I had met Victor, the man—or creature—who would first introduce me to the world of vampires.

Three years ago, I had been a personal trainer and somewhat aimless. Yes, I’d always known that I had some psychic skills, and a part of me had always wanted to explore that. But mostly, those thoughts had been in the background, flaring only briefly when I’d get a psychic hit, only to recede again quickly.

But one day, all that had changed, hadn’t it?

I nodded to myself.
It had.

And it had changed at the car wash.

As I looked at the receipt and thought about that day, I gasped and said aloud, “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

*  *  *

I didn’t remember much about the car wash, but I did remember the old woman watching me.

I had been sitting in the waiting area, probably reading a book or a magazine or on my phone texting. I’d just gotten into texting back then, and that had been the death of me. I both loved and loathed texting, as technology was both loved and reviled by me. It put a degree of separation between me and other people, and yet in some ways, like the Psychic Network, it was a tool to bring me close to people with whom I would not otherwise ever connect.

Anyway, I now remembered, more than anything about that day, the overwhelming feeling that someone had been watching me. The feeling was very familiar to what I was feeling now, here in my apartment. A slow, steady, ripple of electrical current. Almost a buzzing in my ears.
Almost.
A sense that eyes were on me, moving over me, penetrating me, looking so deeply that nothing was hidden. Nothing.

I remember shivering and looking up, glancing around...and seeing her sitting across from me. She was alone. And old. Very, very old. So old that I thought someone should be with her. But there was no one. No grandkids, no bored sons or daughters. She was also staring at me. Intently. I smiled. She didn’t. I looked away. She didn’t. I knew this because when I sneaked a peek back at her, she was still staring at me. I swallowed uncomfortably and shifted and tried to read but I couldn’t. After all,
she
was staring at me.
She
was distracting me.
She
was unnerving me.

And that’s when a towel boy waved his towel and indicated that my Accord was done. I had leaped up quickly. I tipped the kid, got in, and was about to pull out of the car wash and onto busy Ventura Boulevard when I forced myself to look back...and saw that the old lady was gone.

As if she hadn’t ever stood there.

It had been unnerving.

I’d forgotten about it totally.

Until now.

“That was you, wasn’t it?” I said to the empty room, still looking at the receipt.

“
Of course, dear,” said a voice just behind my ear. “Now, can we talk?”

Chapter Thirteen

I jumped and squealed and nearly peed myself, but just as quickly as the fear and panic gripped me, it subsided, and I was left gasping and catching my breath, one hand clutching my chest. The other, clutching the wine.

“Please,” I said after a moment, and after I was sure I had full control over my bladder, “please, never do that again.”

As I breathed and held my hand over my chest, knowing that I was either going crazy or was experiencing the mother of all hauntings, I felt the sizzle of an electric current pulse through me. Stronger than before.

Not crazy,
I thought.
Option B...a haunting.

The old woman materialized slowly before me, taking on substance and shape and detail, and had every skeptic in the world been here with me, watching this, they wouldn’t be a skeptic anymore. They would be a believer in all things supernatural. And my little apartment would be crowded as hell. Hell, I could charge admission.

“Holy shit,” I whispered.

“
Please, dear, you’re better than that.”

It took me a moment to realize that a ghost had just chastised me for swearing.

I didn’t apologize. I just closed my mouth and held my breath and listened to the small squeal that was trying to make its way out from my compressed lips, a squeal that very likely would turn into a scream. But I kept it bottled up, somehow.

In a matter of maybe half a minute, a woman who was mostly solid—after all, I could still see my fireplace mantel through her shoulder area—was standing before me, hands folded below her waist, rising and falling gently. She could have been standing in a boat in the middle of a lake. She wasn’t, of course. She was standing in my living room.

“Sweet mama,” I finally said.

“
Hello, Allison,” she said.

“
Erp,” I said. That was supposed to, of course, be a “hi.”

The woman was mostly white, which surprised me. Samantha Moon, my vampire friend, had described ghosts as pure energy. I wasn’t seeing pure energy. I was seeing something cottony, with splashes of color. Something mostly solid, but also opaque in spots, too. Whatever Samantha had been seeing, she hadn’t been seeing what I was seeing now. Then again, vampires were weird.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” said the ghost. Her voice had a slightly musical quality to it and seemed to reach me from everywhere at once. As if her voice was coming out of surround sound speakers.

That’s when I realized that her voice wasn’t coming from everywhere at once. It was coming from inside my ear. As in, inside my head.

“Sweet Jesus,” I whispered.

“
He is sweet,” said the woman. I watched her lips move, watched her speak, but the words appeared directly in my head. “The name has power, as do many names and words, for that matter. Do not speak it lightly, dear.”

“
This isn’t happening,” I said, suddenly sure I was dreaming. I looked around. I wasn’t in bed. I was on the couch. I stood suddenly, with the thought of splashing water on my face in the bathroom, but a sharp pain in my foot changed that plan. I gasped and sank back into the couch. The pain in my toe was enough to convince me I wasn’t dreaming.

Now breathing hard, I had worked myself up. “I need air,” I gasped.

“Then get some air, dear.”

I stood and staggered through the room, keeping one eye on the spirit who turned and watched me cross the room and head over to my balcony. There, I threw open the sliding glass door and breathed the not-so-fresh Beverly Hills air. I smelled traces of exhaust, yes, but I also smelled the nearby jacaranda trees, which were blooming, and the freshly cut grass, too. Good enough. I sucked and breathed and repeated, and was certain that by the time I turned around, the old woman who had appeared in my apartment would be gone.

Yes, of course, she would be gone,
I thought, looking out toward the massive apartment edifice before me with its glass facade and covered balconies and awnings and doorman. Yes, this was the real world. The physical world. A world where ghosts did not exist. Ghosts would not even be allowed in Beverly Hills, if Beverly Hills had any say in it. Ghosts were something out of…
Hollywood
.

And so, as I turned away from the balcony, I was certain that whatever I had seen—or imagined—would be gone. Samantha and I would have a good laugh over this during drinks later.
Maybe I should see a shrink,
I thought, and, as I turned, I felt the now-familiar buzz on my skin, and there she was, standing there in my living room, rising and falling on the unseen tides of time and space, watching me serenely.

My heart sank...but I was excited, too. “You’re Peter’s mother,” I realized, when I stepped back into the living room from the balcony.

“Yes, dear.”

“
You gave me the book.”

“
Of course.”

She spoke calmly, patiently, with no inflection in her voice and no gestures, either. She could have been a projected image in my room. Except that her eyes and head followed my movements.

“Why did you give me the book?”

“
I sense potential in you,” she said. “A lot of potential.”

“
But you’re dead.”

“
I’ve never been more alive, child.”

“
I need to sit down,” I said. “Wait. I need more wine.”

I got the wine, aware that she was watching me carefully, aware that I was already getting used to the light buzzing of static electricity on my skin.

Soon, I was back on the couch, sitting opposite a ghost who was still standing in my living room. Still drifting and floating and staring at me.

“
You are dead, right?” I asked. I’d never sounded crazier in my life.

“
I passed on a number of years ago, yes.”

“
So, how...how are you here now?”

I knew something of ghosts, thanks to all those damn ghost documentaries I’d seen. Ghosts needed to draw on energy to materialize. The buzzing...

“You’re drawing on
my
energy,” I said.

And now, for the first time, she smiled. Also, for the first time, I saw some color appear on her lips. Faint red lips. I knew what this meant. She was getting stronger, filling out, so to speak. From me.

Which could explain why I was feeling tired.

“
Yes, dear. I am drawing on you.”

Two things occurred to me: one, did she have a right to draw on my energy without asking? And two, had she just read my mind?

“The answer to both is yes, dear,” said the old woman in my living room.