Chapter Three: Relations

A/N: Hello Everyone! Well, now that I've said that there's not much else I can say, so I'll just let you read and enjoy – hopefully! Oh, and I don't own Twilight, even if that would make me a multi millionaire with a bestselling novel series (and let's face it, not many people don't want that). Well ... let's begin ... *spooking music plays and velvet curtains open*

When I started noticing my surroundings again I saw that I was lying (once again) in a rough clearing of wood and ferns, with Beckett behind me and nothing in front of me but the cold, dark night. A crescent moon shone from beneath a canopy of trees and creepers, bathing the place in an aura of blue-white light that illuminated all corners from the place where the forest was thick with undergrowth to the young, beautiful girl kneeling in front of me and waving her hand in my face. My eyes focused and I jumped up in a movement that almost seemed like I had teleported and suddenly I was at the other end of the clearing, stiff with fright and glaring at the thirteen year old girl like she was an alien species.

My mind was reeling from an onslaught of information, and after finding out ... so many things, the girl was just one more thing I had to think about. I had never been too good at repressing things, and the brick wall that once separated me from my memories had crumbled, leaving a frosted glass window behind. I could see shadows of my old life behind the glass, and the pain I had revisited on my way to the clearing was bubbling somewhere close to the surface, so I tried to think as much in the future as possible. I knew the time would come to curl up and cry for ages, but with so much uncertainty about where I was going, the time was not now.

Finally I realised that while I had been thinking about all of that in my head, I had still been standing frozen at the other end of the clearing, glaring at a spot that was now somewhere in the empty space above Beckett's head. I cringed, thinking of the negative connotations he might have attached to this glaring and slowly slid to the ground, stunned and defeated by none other than my own mind, which was filled with horror stories about what he probably would be thinking about me now.

I was still lying there when I heard the rustle of grass as Beckett and the stranger girl walked tentatively over to where I was lying, and sat down. The girl was about to lean over and wave at me again, but a restraining hand and a reproachful look from Beckett stopped her, and as I lay there, I wondered what to do next. Things seemed to slow down for a fraction of a second, just so I could figure things through, and start to relate them in my mind.

I was lying in a clearing, in a forest, in the middle of the night. I was with two almost complete strangers, one of whom I had a strange and possibly not returned attraction for and the other who couldn't seem to get her hands out of my face. They both seemed pale (and as much as it jested me to admit it, sparkly), and also didn't seem to mind eating at all hours, judging from my strange conversation with Beckett. I myself was feeling strange, a kind of thirst was pulsing though me that was impossible to ignore. I wasn't tired either, and could see, hear, smell and even taste everything in fine detail. My heart wasn't beating.

Maybe I was dead, and had gone to heaven. That would explain the people that looked like angels (even hyper 13 year old looking ones) and the fact that my heart didn't pound in my chest anymore. Maybe I had died – I forced myself to go on – in the car crash with my parents. But why weren't they here then? And why was I so thirsty? People aren't supposed to be thirsty in heaven, are they? And if this was heaven, why was Beckett looking so sad? He looked like the heart-wrenching sadness that I had felt, when I had heard, barely an hour before (I don't know how I knew the time, I just did) about my family. I tried to imagine how they might have felt, to get over the pain of losing them one more time. It was worth a try, as much as it ripped at my insides to do it.

What had Beckett said about it? Snippets of his words wormed their way through my mind, like electric eels, stinging me with every thought. They crashed, Anna ... lost control ... off-road and into this ditch ... couldn't stop them ... it rolled back across ...no one could save them ... no one ... My head snapped up and my eyes glazed over, only just seeing the startled faces of Beckett and the stranger girl as the stared at me in alarm. I saw a different scene, and unfortunately, one I knew all too well.

A dark, winding road, and a suburban car careering off it. The hollow ditch next to it, and the car crashing into it and slowing as it went straight through, reached the lip of the hole and began to roll back down. The girl who could be no younger than fifteen, lying underneath and the girls family screaming, all screaming for someone to help them. In the shadows, a pale man in a blood-spattered suit and dark hair, watching.

It was me. The car crash was my family's and the dark haired, smoky skinned girl who was trapped was me. And there was Beckett, standing and watching my family – and me – die.

A single thought flashed through my head and suddenly I was running, faster than I could ever have imagined, away from the clearing and Beckett and my visions of something that was the past and was now at the same time. And all the time I was thinking about one thing, the single thing that was keeping me from running until I came to the nearest cliff and jumped off it.

If my family had died in that car crash like I had seen and Beckett had seen, and it was me that had been trapped under that suburban car and presumably crushed, and if all I had seen and heard and known and felt, if all of that was true ...

Then why was I still alive?

A/N : *lights brighten and curtains close * Cliffhanger! But only because I don't know what to do next! Help me please! And don't forget to review!