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Five
Savannah
Six weeks later
Four days before Christmas
There wasa noise on my terrace.
Now, that might not have freaked out a lot of people, but I wasn’t a lot of people.
Plus, I lived seventy-four stories up. It wasn’t like Spider-Man could get onto my patio. But neither was it accessible to squirrels or opossum. I was also pretty sure that birds didn’t fly this high after midnight. Weren't they supposed to be asleep? Preparing their little voices for their morning choir?
Did I mention that birdsong drove me nuts?
Goddamn noisy fuckers.
Still, I'd take an orchestral movement from a thousand of them if it meant that noise was a skyrat.
Sitting up, I stared around my bedroom, and tried not to be freaked out.
"You shouldn’t have watchedIT, Savannah. What a stupid thing to do," I muttered to myself.
Horror movies were my biggest weakness.
I didn’t have the stomach for them, but I was oddly addicted to the sheer insanity of their stories.
As a journalist, I’d learned over the years that the truth was stranger than fiction so horror movies were a weird comfort to me.
But last night’s choice was definitely an idiotic move on my part. I’d been jumpy ever since, to the point where a soft noise on my terrace was waking me up.
I sighed. "You really are a dumbass."
My ears strained in the silence of my place, half expecting Pennywise to mutter back, "Your ass is definitely dumb but oh, so tasty."
To which, of course, I had to reply, "Thanks, I spend a lot of time in the gym working on it."
Grinning to myself at my ridiculousness, I picked up my phone to look at the time, grunted at the number of notifications, then as I rolled out of bed so I could go check things out, slipped my cellphone into the pocket of my sweats.
The joy of living alone was the ability to have open doors. No privacy needed when you had three-thousand square feet to yourself. Of course, that was all well and good most days and nights, but I’d admit to getting a bit spooked as of late.
It wasn’t every day you were helping to crack open a conspiracy.
The New World Sparrows were a secret society that functioned within the boundaries of the justice and political arena. It sounded hokey as hell to me, but I’d learned the truth when an old friend had asked me to help get the story out there.
At first, I hadn’t believed in any of that. Star had always been weird, and so prone to coming up with stories that she made the students in my Creative Writing class in college look unimaginative, so I’d come close to ignoring her.
Because my career had stagnated ever since I’d become a whistleblower at TVGM, and with very little rep left, I didn’t feel like damaging it over Star’s nonsense until, of course, I’d come to realize that all her ‘stories’ were fact.
Not fiction.
Jesus, I felt so bad about that.
An old family friend told you she’d been a sex slave, and you went and blocked her?
"Man, I’m such a bitch," I grumbled to myself as I tripped over a couple of pillows that had taken up too much room on the bed so I’d tossed them onto the floor while I slept.
Of course, I’d been conceited and arrogant for years. It was only since I’d been knocked off my pedestal that I’d come to realize any of that.
