A/N: Thank you guys for sticking with me so far! This is a bit of a longer chapter, but more will come soon...

Do you mean "Natasha Hawthorne"?

"No, I bloody well do not, you stupid machine!" Natasha Hathaway put her head in her hands and fought to not exclaim at the pounding headache, which had been pursuing her for a good few hours. Never, not in her wildest dreams, had she imagined that researching her family tree would prove this difficult and frustrating.

When she had received a phone call from her cousin, inquiring about Natasha's gift for her mother's upcoming birthday, and had realized that she had yet to even get a gift for her, she had gone for what she had assumed would be the easy option. She had set out to research her family tree, paste some pictures and names together in a book and be finished in fifteen minutes tops. But , and had surprisingly all carried not a shred of information relating to her family history.

A siren went off somewhere in the distant black beyond her window, and Natasha glanced warily at the alarm clock on her desk, and groaned at the glowing 2:04. For a twenty-year-old woman, her steady job at the local coffee shop paid reasonably well, with the downside of her having to get up at six o'clock every morning. She had cleverly stowed her mirror out of sight, but now was sure that her flame-like curls were sticking up in all the wrong places. Her mother's own red hair had gone grey with age, but when her father had been alive he had always called Natasha his "little flame", based on her hair.

The loud buzzing of her phone snapped her back to reality, and Natasha warily flicked it open, only to see an anonymous number light up the screen with a message.

778 312 1197: Happy Afternoon, or as it may be by now, evening. the trouble with our obnoxiously selfish, overly Zealous community could possibly be due to the severe lAck of organization. this, i bLame on you. good day.

Perhaps it was the late hour that was the cause for Natasha's confusion, but she was pretty sure that she did not recognize the number. Even if she had, the message clearly made no sense at all, and the sender obviously did not know a thing about capital letters and where to put them.

Probably some schoolgirls playing a prank, she thought to herself, and yet for some reason did not delete the message before putting her phone away. Deciding that she would try to uncover the secrets of her family tree another day, Natasha shut down her computer, yawning widely, began to amble down the hall to her bedroom.

A dog howled somewhere outside in the black, and Natasha smiled to herself, recalling a time not so long ago when she had been scared of black cats and howling dogs—the fears of childhood that she had once taken so seriously. Suddenly, she fell. Landing with a crash that was sure to wake the neighbors at this hour, Natasha massaged her ankle and flicked the hall light on in confusion. That morning's newspaper was lying on the carpet before her, but upon closer inspection she discovered that the headlines were not, in fact, the same as they had been that morning, but entirely different.

missing cHild continues to bAffle local police authorities.

Zebra escapEs from Local zoo—be on your guard for stripes!

At this, Natasha felt a bit uncertain; the newspaper had read something about a missing child, and it was true that the local zoo had allowed a few animals to escape, but…frowning, she pulled her phone out of her pocked and re-read the message from earlier. It was funny that the same capitalization mistake could occur twice, and that neither messages bore any sense at all just didn't make sense! Natasha blinked twice, and then realized that it did.

She selected the capital letters in both messages and was hardly surprised when she realized that hey formed the word HAZEL. A car honked somewhere far off, and Natasha jumped to her feet, terrified. What was she doing? The middle of the night, alone in her apartment, and she had been looking for riddles, of all things?

Nothing, nothing at all, was about to disturb Natasha from her peaceful, orderly life. She liked the way things ran; her early mornings, her quiet neighbors, her polite friends and family. Every element of her life was perfectly normal, so why on earth would she deliberately seek for something to make it not so? Abandoning both her phone and the newspaper in the hallway, she marched smartly to bed and sank down onto it, her exhaustion coming back to her. She lay down, ready to drift off and forget. Then the phone rang.

Natasha sat back up, trembling, and checked her home phone for caller ID. The monitor read, 'Mum' and she sighed in relief, straightened up and pressed 'answer'.

"Hello?" She was greeted with silence. "Hello? Mum?" Then Natasha realized—it was two in the morning. There was no way her mother would be up at two in the morning. She made to hang up, but before she could a someone answered.

"Hazel." A raspy voice gasped on the other end of the phone. "…run…tried to…Hazel!" Natasha screamed, and threw the phone across the room at the opposite wall.

It smashed and fell to the ground, but now she was shaking so badly that the bed was moving with her. Burying her head in her pillow, Natasha screamed and screamed until her throat was raw and her lungs were burning for air. It seemed like ages until she raised her head to glance around her room with wild eyes.

Then she caught sight of her phone, lying on the ground. Shiny, brand new and whole.