Free K.J. Emrick - Darcy Sweet 13 - Ghost Story by K.J. Emrick Page A

it’s always been.  It’s right where it belongs.”
    Then Darcy woke up.
     
    ***
    She was on the floor, a warm, dark liquid seeping out under her.  A dark form hovered over her, shadows that might have been someone or no one or nothing at all.  Darcy could feel the pain of the beating she had just taken, the attack that had woken her up from her sleep.  Everywhere hurt.  Was she bleeding?  She reached up with her hands to ward off her attacker.
    His hands grabbed hers.  He held her down, held her in place, and shouted at her.
    Darcy screamed.
    “Hold on!” he said.  A very strange thing for an attacker to say.  “Calm down.  Darcy, calm down.  It’s me.”
    Her eyes finally managed to come back into focus and she forced herself to concentrate on the face that hovered so close to hers, on the man who was holding her down on her own living room floor.
    Jon.  It was Jon.
    Sobbing, breaking down into hot tears, Darcy allowed him to scoop her up into his arms and hold her.  “Ow,” she managed, sucking in a breath between her tears.  “Jon.  Careful, it hurts.”
    “What happened?” he asked her, loosening his grip but not letting go.  “I came in the house and I found you here on the floor.  What happened?”
    She remembered feeling the warm wetness under her and in a panic she reached up to feel the back of her head, her neck, her shoulders…there.  Her fingers came away wet and she brought them up in front of her face and for a moment she was sure it was blood until she smelled the bittersweet aroma and realized she had landed in the spilled tea from where it had been knocked off the coffee table.  She looked down now and saw the broken teacups.
    Two cups.  Hers… and Aunt Millie’s.
    “I was attacked,” Darcy told Jon.  “Somebody…somebody broke into the house and they were…hitting…beating me…”  She couldn’t remember what had happened, now that she was trying to.  There had been the very vivid dream with her and Smudge and Millie and then there had just been this topsy-turvy feeling of being dragged off the couch and thrown around and now everything hurt.
    Jon was looking at her very intently.  “Darcy.  There’s no one else in the house but us.  The door was still locked when I got here.”
    “But Jon, it was real.  It happened.”
    “Okay, okay.  I believe you.”  His tone didn’t sound all that convinced.  “But if you were attacked, where is the guy?  How could he get by me?  Do you think he’s still in the house?”
    Darcy wasn’t thinking that at all.  She was thinking about possessing spirits and how the people who were possessed rarely remembered what the ghost had done through them.  She was thinking how she had woken up being beaten and then seen Jon standing directly over her.
    No.  Oh, God no.
    “Jon,” she said slowly.  “Can you stand over there?  For just a minute.  Please?”
    His brows knitted.  “What’s wrong?”
    “Just go over there.  On the other side of the living room.”  She pushed at him, gently but firmly, and he let her go.  She stepped back, slowly, wishing she wasn’t thinking what she was thinking.
    One of the people at the party had been possessed and forced to kill a woman.  Now Jon was here, right here, while she was being beaten.  It couldn’t be him.  It couldn’t.
    The pain in her arms and legs and all the rest of her said otherwise.
    “Jon, please don’t panic.  I need to check your spirit.”
    “You need to…what?”
    “Your aura, Jon.  You need to let me see if Williams is still in you.”
    His eyes practically bugged out of his head.  “Darcy don’t be stupid.  I’m fine.  I didn’t do anything.”
    “You wouldn’t remember if you did.  Just stand there.  Right there, no closer.  Please, Jon?  Just for a few seconds.”
    While he was trying to stutter an argument Darcy raised her hands towards him and closed her eyes and reached out with her own spirit, the energies of her