There’s something eerie about how quiet River is, slipping down corridors like a shadow without so much as uttering a sound. Her rare smile is slick and cold, tainted by a sadness that enshrouds her like a cloak. Those who know of her say she’s fearless, diving head first into danger, not appearing to regret it afterwards. They don't know how right and wrong they are, what it's like not caring if you live or die but having too much fearful instinct and pride to intentionally do either. Her secret weighs her down like an anchor.

She smells of flowers, like the first day of spring or more aptly a funeral.

River holds her head high, but new recruits make the mistake of thinking it's for show. They think her harmless in where they're concerned. Sharp teeth lurk beneath the curves of her lips; the dark color of her chipped nail polish there to hide that of blood. She fights, hard and dirty, and cries only when she's alone. She breaks hearts and forgets she has one too. She has her way of shutting up and never ever asking for help, because she's smart enough, capable enough to handle it. Because she has to. She is her innocent face that hides the darkest mind. She is her coldness, how she has locked away her resentment to fester.

River's a white blooming rose with petals soft and enticing, but her thorns prick skin at the slightest touch. Anyone that tries to hold her tight in their fist will watch the blood drip down their hand.

"I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the car-lit in a tender, confused misery, my burning cheek pressed against the tear stained upholstery of the backseat and the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the pistons ceaselessly thrusting the vehicle that bore me through the night, away from my old life, away from the gray enclosed quietude of my childhood home, into the unguessable.

My mother, even in all her speed and fervor, drove as if it was with reluctance that she might banish the specter of that grisly scene from our minds. For she had once gladly, scandalously, defiantly thrown herself into love; and on that night, her love--her gallant werewolf--had been strung from the boughs of the oak that once stood proudly in their yard, leaving his wife and child a scarring memory and legacy of tears that they'd soon discover would never quite dry."

How could you say goodbye to such a memory of the one you loved? But in the same respect, how could you not? This is supposed to be a story about River, but River isn't quite a story but rather a ghost of one that had been told before her. The story of her parents.

"I knew it then as we approached our destination...Into the ghettos, into exile; I sensed it--that, henceforth, I would always be lonely. I would always be a dirty little secret to be held at distance. 'You will be safer here,' she said to me in her resonant voice that was like the tolling of a bell and I felt, all at once, a sharp premonition of dread. She then pulled the car to a slow crawl as strange woman approached from behind a wall that we had pulled up along side of. I could see her white, broad face as if it were hovering, disembodied, above the window, illuminated from the headlights below like a grotesque carnival head. Her scent filled the compartment with a remembered wolfish fragrance that made me think of my father, how he would pull me into his warm comforting embrace, when I was younger still, before he kissed me and left me and died.

They began to speak in hushed whispers, my mother, utterly dazed and at a loss, giving a tortured account of my father's death as a bystander, not his wife. She guarded my identity even with those who were supposed to take me in, sowing the seed of a little girl that differed from me in all the ways that mattered. She, the girl, wasn't a mongrel at all, but rather the daughter of a werewolf couple who had BOTH been lynched for the simple crime of existing outside the ghettos. She was an orphan, pitied by a human neighbor who stole her away to sanctuary, thought her place to be here with her own kind. The lie tasted bitter on my tongue as I chewed it over thoughtfully. I was losing both parents in very different ways in the same night. One meeting the noose for defiling a human woman by daring to love her and granting her a child, the other abandoning me to strangers least I meet the same end.

I didn't know it at the time, but she would eventually answer for her sins as well. An unpure thing could never exist to deceive the pure into touching her and sullying their hands, after all. She'd have to wear her crime in the form of a brand, a shame that could never be washed away. As was the all too common fate for mixed race couples at the time.

A thick darkness, unlit by any star, glazed the windows. The headlights still burned, to keep the dark outside, yet it seemed still to encroach on me, to be present beside me, the night like a permeable substance that could seep into my skin. The woman hearing all she needed nodded once coldly, and came along to my door to pull me free of the metal trap and the human world. I wanted to resist, I knew it to be the last time I'd ever see my mother, but I did not. I left the remnants of the old River in my seat, for my mother to keep. The bold, happy creature who once joyfully played in the light of the sun, who loved without hesitation, whose eyes crinkled like her father's and smile blossomed like her mother's. I emerged a new being, older than her seven years and cold as the hostile environment that greeted her. To love is to lose all that you are and all that you have. It is not a sentiment worth protecting. Now I wear a wolf's mask, and fight a wolf's battles more fervently than any beast around me. I will not be that girl I left behind who I know to be less than."