A/N: Thank you so much for the reviews and the favorites. I wasn't expecting them and I was pleasantly surprised, again. Another chapter in my odder-than-odd story. As usual, all spelling and grammar mistakes are mine; please be patient with me. Reviews are not needed, but they please me.

Disclaimer: See other disclaimers. I do not own Twillight. However, the characters have given permission to "try and do better." I've taken them up on the offer.

Chapter 4

Chief Billy Black's house was an old red cottage, nice for a reservation house, with a barn that had been redone into a car garage for his tool jockey son. I didn't see the son, but Paul told me about him as we walked over. He said that he was strong and talented, that he had the makings of a leader, but that he was selfish and dramatic (more dramatic than the woman who had given me the black eye I was currently nursing?) and unwilling to do what needed to be done. He seemed to have mixed feelings for the kid.

Once inside the house I was met by a group of people. It was unexpected.

"What did you do to her?" This yelled by a large man standing in the middle of the room.

"Sam, I-" So this was Sam. Somehow I didn't expect someone quite this aggressive.

"I told you to protect her!" I stared between the two. What was this about? Why did this guy care? Sam took a step forward and Paul averted his eyes, his whole body beginning to tremble.

Not cool.

"It wasn't him," I said, though it strained my throat to speak in a regular voice. My voice sounded off now, rougher than before. "He didn't hurt me."

Now that Sam was looking at me and under the full force of his stare I understood why Paul had looked away. He was fucking scary. There was power that floated around him like an aura. This man was a leader and a master of his domain. I'd met a few men like him in my life, a few CEOs, a few athletes, men you didn't mess with.

"Then what happened?"

I cleared my throat as Paul set me gently on my feet.

"Some girl came in, pissed off." I swallowed and took the thawed steak off my face. My eye had nearly swollen shut. "She yelled at Paul, called me a whore, and then hit me."

The woman from the night before gasped and a few of the men in the room gaped. Sam looked to Paul.

"Leah," Paul said flatly.

Sam's hands clenched into fists and for a few moments his entire body tremored, then he relaxed. It struck me as very odd. "I'll speak with her later," he said darkly, and then he stepped over to me and reached up to touch my face.

Involuntarily, I flinched back against Paul, who wrapped a warm hand comfortingly around my forearm. For a split second Sam looked wounded by my fear but he covered it up flawlessly a moment later.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he said, gentling his tone.

"I know that," I lied. He raised an eyebrow but didn't disagree, raising his hand again to gingerly feel the side of my face, where the cheek had split from the impact. I winced but said nothing. After a few minutes of probing he removed his hand.

"You're lucky she didn't break your cheek bone," he told me. No kidding, I was the one who got hit, I knew how hard it had been. I just nodded.

It was then that Sam turned around the room and introduced me.

"This is Chief Billy Black, and it's his house you're in. Beside him is Emily, my fiancé." Ah, that's who she was. He pointed at a young man who looked to be Paul's age, "This is Jared, and beside him is Embry. They were there when we found you."

I made a face. Was there anyone who hadn't been there?

Chief Black rolled up in his wheel chair, and I managed to only look surprised for a moment, before he shook my hand. He was handsome. When he was young he must have been stunning.

"It's nice to meet the girl whose been using my couch for the past several days," he said, a slight smile on his face. "You're looking better."

I blushed under his comments and his scrutiny. I just wanted to go home. "Thank you." I said softly.

Emily also came up and wrapped her arms gently around me. "Are you ok?" she asked. I nodded my head and tried to smile at her. The others came up and shook my hand. They seemed wary of me, though oddly hyper. I stood closer to Paul. The other boys watched us very closely, close enough to leave me a little unnerved.

Still, they sat next to me on Chief Black's couch. I couldn't bring myself to call him Billy, it just seemed too informal. They were as hot as Paul, and their warmth seeped into me from either side.

Finally Embry reached up to gingerly touch the beanie I wore. "Any of that hair growing back?" His thumb slipped under the lip and ran over the back of my head. I swallowed and nodded, if I'd ever had any brothers I might have said I felt as though they were siblings I hadn't seen in a long time, but I didn't know how that would feel to make the comparison. "Yeah," the hoarseness in my voice didn't look like it would be going anywhere soon, "just a little."

Embry removed his hand. Jared didn't look at me. I swallowed again. My throat hurt from the effort to talk, but talk I did.

"It used to be curly, you know."

Embry looked at me in confusion. "What, you're hair?"

I nodded and glanced up, imagining I could still see the curls falling over my brow. "Yeah. Really curly."

For a moment Embry stared at me and I knew he was imagining me with hair, how different I must have looked. Then he smiled kindly.

"I bet it's pretty."

I couldn't help but smile back. "It is."

A few minutes later the others walked back into the living room.

Billy Black cleared his throat. "The roads are still washed out but we've called the Forks police and told them about you. They'll be over to get you as soon as the roads get cleaned up, but there's been some landslides so it could be a few days. In the mean time, and considering what happened with that big dog yesterday, you're going to stay with Sam and Emily. That alright?"

What choice did I have, really? I nodded.

"Great."

I held up my hand and they all stopped and stared at me like I'd just grown a second head. What? I'd just spent the last 17 years of my life raising my hand, it was second nature.

"Um, I really want to contact my family. I'm sure they're in hysterics by now. Can I use your cell?"

They all looked at me as though it hadn't occurred to them and Chief black wheeled way, I wondered how he'd gotten in the chair in the first place, and came back a few minutes later.

He handed me a large, ancient, cell phone. I stared at it.

"It's all I've got, and it doesn't have much long distance, but if it'll do the trick go ahead."

I was pretty sure the thing didn't even work on the same frequency as my parents' droid phones. I handed it back to him feeling a bit freaked out myself.

"Internet?" I managed to ask.

Billy sighed and nodded, motioning me over to a small desk and chair in the corner. The computer was a clunker, and large and ancient as well. Again, I found myself amazed that an antique like that even worked.

"I've only got dial up," Chief black said, "but it works, so go ahead." I just stared at him. Dial up? There was still dial up? With wires? The Chief cleared his throat and looked away. "Well, we'll just be outside, discussing…things. Let us know when you've contacted your family." And with that everyone turned and left out a side door near the kitchen. I just stared at the thing for several minutes, before pulling out the chair and sitting down.

The dialup took almost ten minutes to connect. No wonder no one used it anymore.

It was bad enough I was using dial up, when I'd been convinced dial up didn't exist anymore, and I was distressed to realize I couldn't use skype to contact my parents. But, I was determined. I decided to email them, my whole family received emails on their phones so it would get to them just as fast.

Except that my Gmail password didn't work. Neither did my Yahoo, or my Hotmail.

I tried Twitter. I tried Facebook. I tried the account I'd had when I was ten on MySpace. I tried every forum I could ever remember signing up for. Nothing. Everything came up with the suggestion that I'd gotten my password or ID wrong. They weren't wrong.

I could feel myself beginning to tremble uncontrollably. It was getting difficult to type. I wanted to go home. I was tired of this game, this craziness. My grandpa would send a helicopter to get me if I could just tell him where I was.

I went onto the online yellow pages and put in the names of everyone I knew. Nothing. I went to another and another. Every sight I could find that offered people. I searched my own name. Nothing.

Tears were streaming down my face as I googled my dad. He was a fucking international rugby player. He'd been in the fucking tabloids. Nothing. My mother, nothing. My grandpa, head of a hospital and famous in his own right for his research on cancer during his younger years, nothing. I searched my own name. Renee Esme Kullen. Nothing.

I searched for my friends, my aunts, I searched the boy who I'd dated my junior year at college. Not even he came up.

I choked on my own tears as the umpteenth search came up with "no results".

I didn't exist. My family didn't exist. My mom, my dad, my grandparents. Gone. There was no one to go home to. No one to miss me, or even know I was gone. I was alone.

The wailing cry that was torn from my chest as I slid to the floor was not of my own doing. It was pain ripping its way out of my body.

My mom, my dad. Everyone.

I laid my head on the hardwood floor and vomited.

I don't remember much after that until the rez doctor, and elderly man, snapped a smelling salt under my nose. I was surrounded by these people, and I didn't know if they were real or imaginary but I needed to get away. I needed to find my family.

I gasped and tried to fight them, but I wasn't strong enough to break away.

"Please!" I begged, "Please! No! Oh, fucking God, please!" I was asking them to kill me. I was asking Him to kill me. Never in my life, never in my wildest imaginings would I have predicted everyone in my life being gone, that everything would be gone.

I felt a sharp prick in my arm and the world began to spin. Then it fell into blackness.

My birth mother married my father the summer after their senior year in high school. They'd known each other just under 12 months. Year round school. Neither of their rather affluent families approved, considering both of them too emotionally immature, but they wanted to be supportive, and couldn't find a way to stop them, so they consented.

There was a boy from a nearby reservation who my mother dated before she met my father. He had continued to try and win her, under the guise of being her friend, until she got married. At the wedding he I-objected. It didn't work. They still got married. Apparently he stopped wanting my mother a few weeks later when she informed everyone that she was pregnant. My father was ecstatic. My mother was not.

My mother had never wanted to be a mother. She wanted to live with her beautiful husband and be young forever. I had just put a major kink in her plans. My father, an aspiring model, got a good gig, and they moved to an apartment in L.A. My mom's old-boyfriend-turned-just-friend came down to visit often, as did both sides of the family.

Pregnancy did not treat my mother well. To everyone it seemed as though she was unraveling at the edges, unable to take care of herself or keep up with a regular life. My father did his best to help her, but with long hours and though he adored being the care taker, and maybe that's why he'd married my mother in the first place, he could only do so much. He worried about the baby and before too long his mother came to help with daily life. It didn't stop the fights. My mother screaming about not wanting a baby, about her body being ruined, my father just shouting back anything that came to mind. I've seen his work from that period. Very Victorian goth.

Seven months into the marriage and six months into the pregnancy and my mother was already starting to talk about suicide. I was born a little over seven months in. I was a preemie.

My mother's ex-boyfriend, who was a deep friend of the family at this point, apparently even a grudging friend of my father, was named the god-father. He adored me as much as my birth father did.

The post partum depression was terrible. Family members took time off from their jobs, flew in from other countries, to change out duties watching her, and watching me. My father did his best, tried to support them, to take care of me, but he had never claimed to be a good man. I was five months old when my father started stepping out on my mother. No one would know until much much later. She was a waitress paying her way through community college, not as beautiful as my mother, but much more stable emotionally.

Two months later my father died in a mugging. He was coming late out of a photo shoot. Apparently pretty doesn't equal good in a fight. It wasn't personal, just evil.

My mother took it very personally. And, her family demanded that she move back to Washington while they made the arrangements.

I hear the funeral was rainy. I hear my father liked rain.

My god-father and my grandparents did most of the care taking, though my gramps did some too. Gran lived in Miami and couldn't afford to fly quite as often as my aunts and uncles so she didn't see me much. My mother was fine with this. She still resented her for getting remarried.

A few months later my mother packed me and all her belongings and told her family thank you very much for the help but she was moving back to her apartment in L.A.

A little over two weeks after that my god-father showed up at her apartment. She was lying in her bed hugging a photo of my father. She was dirty and half-starved.

I was in the living room floor crying. From what I hear I was not doing well. She had fed me only a handful of times since we'd returned and possibly hadn't changed me at all. The doctors said a couple more days and I would have been dead. My mother and god-father had quite a screaming match. It ended with him taking me and leaving.

My god-father wasn't thinking strait. He drove me to my Aunt Rose and Uncle Ems villa just outside of L.A. They were still unpacking their bags when he barged in and tearfully put a baby in their arms. Aunt Rose took me to the hospital while Uncle Em stayed with my god-father, who was thoroughly freaked out by the entire incident.

As soon as they told him I would live he got in his car and drove back to Washington.

In the meantime my mother finally made good on all those threats to kill herself, or at least she tried to. My grandpa called the E.R. as soon as he heard what was going on and told them to send an ambulance to her house. Good thing. She'd cut her wrists.

They transferred both of us to my grandpa's hospital. He forgot to tell them not to let her call anyone after she got out of intensive care. She called my god-father and told him she'd tried to kill herself. She begged him to come see her.

It was dark and cold and rainy. He died in a car crash on the way over.

Whatever had been left of my birth mother broke then, and I'm convinced it never came back. She was nearly catatonic for years, and when she did come around she would have frequent fits of hysteria, blaming herself for what happened, or blaming everyone else.

My god-father left me most of the shares of his mechanic business, and smaller shares to his workers, who were also his friends. It wasn't like I could use it, I was one, but I guess he thought I was the closest he'd ever have to a daughter.

My Aunt Rose filed the adoption papers first.

I woke up in a different house from the one I'd fallen asleep in. I was groggy and weak, clearly the sedatives were still in my system. It smelled of wood and looked like it too. I was laying in a small bed and beside me sat Emily.

"You're awake," she said with a soft smile.

I just turned away from her as the tears began to leak from my eyes again and I felt a soft hand rest on my shoulder.

"Can you tell me what happened?"

I shook my head, unable to speak for a long time, but she just waited.

Finally, I managed in a cracked whisper. "I can't find them."

Her voice was gentle and concerned, "Who? Your family?"

I just nodded my head and looked at the wood paneled wall.

"They're not there. I'm not there." It was amazing that Emily could even hear what I was saying considering how quiet my voice was, but I couldn't speak over the sound of my heart shattering.

She slipped her hand over my body in a soft hug and I felt myself trembling as tears dripped over my nose and onto the pillow beneath me. "Oh, Sweety, we'll find them. Don't worry. We'll find them."

I knew she was sincere, and I knew she truly believed what she said, but I knew she was wrong. They wouldn't find anything.

I was alone.

Post A/N: Struggling a touch with this story. Not with writing it, don't get me wrong. Writing it is no trouble (I've got 40 pages of it on my computer already). But, I worry how it sounds. Just take the qualities of the original Nessie Cullen. It's almost like a non-story. She's beautiful and perfect and has beautiful, perfect, never dying, parents, who were the main characters of the series. Her family is rich and famous (I mean, vegetarian vampires, not common, and the Voltouri want some of them, they're famous). She's beyond genius and cultured, you never find yourself wondering "what is that damn kid thinking now?" She is compelling and no one hates her. She is also the imprint of poor Jacob Black who would hate the situation dearly if it weren't for the pack magic. I mean, loving the daughter of the girl you spent a couple years pining for? That sucks. So, he's tied to them forever. Which neatly rids us of Jacob anxt, instead of giving him the opportunity to be truly angry over having been yanked around by Bella all that time. It sounds completely ridiculous, and this is the published stuff! How does one un-Marry-Sue a Marry-Sue? So, I know that the entire premise of my story is really really farfetched, but at least it can't be any worse than the original…