The Perfect Witness

There's No Place Like Home

With a start, my eyes shot open. The low ding of a text startled me from my light sleep.

Slowly, I scanned the room only to find it still pitch black. Quietly, I stretched my arms before grabbing blindly towards my nightstand for my phone. As I reached for it, it again dingged softly with another text notification sprawling across the screen.

"Who the hell was texting me so late," I muttered, staring at the blindingly bright screen.

Four messages from an unknown number lie sprawled across my phone. The first three were videos and the fourth one was a picture.

"What the hell?" I said a little louder than intended. "It's too damn early for this..."

Vincent stired on the other side of the bed, causing me to throw my phone under the pillow and quickly lie back down, feigning sleep.

"You okay, Ivy?" Vincent quietly asked, flipping himself to face me. I felt his hands blindly searching the bed for my body to pull me closer to him.

"Yeah, I'm okay baby. My phone buzzed and woke me."

He mumbled something unintelligible and flipped back to the other side.

So much for cuddling.

Sliding my phone out from under my pillow, I turned on the screen to see the four messages plus a few new ones sprawled across my screen.

When opening the messages the first thing I noticed was the pictures...they were pictures of me.

The first one was of me at the funeral, snuggled up next to Vincent. The second and third were of me walking into my house and walking the halls of school.

Freaked out as to why someone would be taking pictures of me, I played the video next.

It seemed to be taken from outside my main bay window in my living room. I'm laying on the coach, napping with the tv playing in the background. The person filming got close to the window, slowly zooming in on my sleeping body. Toward the end of the video, the filmer flipped the camera around to showcase their middle finger up and a raven mask covering their face.

Unknown: Talk and you're dead

Unknown: We know where you live and have full and easy access to your house

Unknown: make one wrong move and we won't hesitate to kill you

Unknown: No cops, we're watching

You've got to be kidding me...it's four in the morning, couldn't a girl get some sleep after a day of funerals, fighting, and getting kidnapped?

You see, what I found odd about these messages was Cody and Dustin already talked to me.

They literally kidnapped me and made their point very clear.

Maybe they wanted to really hammer in their willingness to kill?

But they seemed like physical people, and they already made their point with violence, so why these pictures as well?

What really scared me right now was the fact that I wasn't scared. My heart wasn't racing, my mind wasn't spinning.

I was calm.

Completely, utterly calm.

I felt nothing but the nagging sensation of exhaustion taking over my body.

There was no need to answer them, especially if it's Cody and Dustin.

But maybe it's not...

Who cares, they got their point across, and I've used up all of my fear in the past 24 hours, so I had nothing left to give.