Yes, with a vampire.
That had a lot to do with my growing psychic skills. Long story.
Anyway, one of the perks of being friends with a vampire—or, rather, allowing one to feed from me, but not kill me, of course—was that my own psychic abilities were amplified with each feeding.
Apparently, just being in close proximity to a vampire also increased my psychic abilities.
So weird.
Happily, Samantha Moon and I did a lot more than just hang out and watch The Vampire Diaries, which I had gotten her hooked on. At least once a week, I allowed her to feed from me. Often, it was right after we’d watched The Vampire Diaries. There was a strange synchronicity to that. More than once, I had caught her making a mental note or two while watching the show. Samantha Moon was still a relatively new vampire, as vampires went. And her “condition,” as she called it, didn’t come with a user’s manual. So, while I was watching the show—because I, and most of the rest of the viewers, had the world’s biggest crush on Damon—Samantha was making mental “how-to” notes about the vampire mystique.
Yes, our lives were that weird.
Mine was only getting weirder.
Apparently, my friendship with Samantha stretched back through the ages, along with another friend of ours named Millicent, who was now deceased...and who was presently haunting my apartment. Millicent, Samantha and I had once formed a “triad” of witches.
Powerful witches.
Except, in this life, Samantha had to go and get herself turned into a vampire, and Millicent had pretty much insisted on ousting Sam from our witchy clique. So now, the witch triad was missing one of us.
Millicent, the strongest of the three of us, had purposely passed on well before us, so that she could guide and coach us from the spirit world. An interesting concept, surely. Now my apartment here in Beverly Hills was haunted by a deceased witch...and an old friend.
So very, very weird.
Of course, I didn’t know any of this until Millicent had appeared in my life...quite literally. That was the nature of this world: we came here with a clean slate, only to be filled with that which moved us, inspired and pushed us forward.
I had never thought that I might be a powerful witch. Or even a not-so-powerful witch. Yes, I had always been intrigued by Wicca and witchcraft, but not inordinately so. Mild curiosity only.
Now, Wicca was my life, as Millicent trained and coached me almost daily...coached me from beyond.
“I’m afraid to ask what else you know about me,” said Billy, after a moment. He was standing now, having moved over to the big glass sliding door. I went over there, too, shifting my focus so that I saw what he saw: a wide expanse of back yard that was surrounded in a lot of dead ivy and high walls. The back yard looked like something mentioned in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland: empty, dark, and dead.
“Then don’t ask,” I said.
“You know a lot more than you’re telling, don’t you?” He held the phone loosely against his ear. He was smiling now, having pushed past the weirdness of the situation.
“Maybe a little more,” I said.
“I wasn’t expecting a phone call like this.”
“I don’t suppose you were.”
“What else might you know about me?” he asked.
“Are you sure you want to know?”
“Yes. I think.” He laughed lightly at that, but I sensed his growing discomfort. He shrugged his shoulder and rolled his head around his neck. Classic manliness.
I said, “Okay. Here goes...you’re standing in your living room, looking out your sliding glass door.”
He didn’t move or speak for perhaps twenty seconds. Then he did what most people did when I laid the “I-can-see-you” card on the table. He turned and looked over his shoulder and, for good measure, he shuddered.
“You can see me now?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“So, you really are psychic?”