One CoyWolf

She wakes to a bed that’s hard and thin, looking at walls a painted gray, Alba had made a mistake. 

If she were to trust the foreign copper smell on her skin it was rather large. 

She looked down at her hands knowing that they were nothing less than claws and paws, in diligence of their most recent use. The only thing she could say in defense of her lacking memory was that she’d been hungry. 

Alba had been hungry for a while before this, that was something she remembered. Creatures like her had needs, but what a waste it was on her hands. The dark proof of life turned to putrid rust. Yet she was full.

Still lethargic from her unfamiliar lodging, she looked around her small cell.

An overcautious steel door was what separated her from the halls of whatever facility had caught her. The bed frame was barely padded at all by the mattress, the entire configuration was compact, in that way expected of any penitentiary or boarding school. Her father would’ve been proud.

Not so much with the mystery prison, but Alba would’ve at least liked to appear rugged in her stoicism.

While she didn’t know how she came to be there, she knew that a normal prison wouldn’t have left her covered in blood. It simply wasn’t kosher to just leave that much evidence behind, it wasn’t exactly sanitary either. 

Alba made herself move from the undignified plank she’d mistaken for a mattress, the fact of its decompression upon her shifting off it, was not enough to convince her of it’s previous correct designation.

She stretched in an excessive way, knowing that while the bed was not in fact a coffin, and the cell not a crypt, she would be unlikely to escape without regaining her usual flexibility.

Alba would prefer to be reasonable against duress after all.

As she restretched her legs from the night before, Alba thought back to simpler times.

When she was small, and easily fed.

She remembered her parents wandering in her youth, so much of her early life was had on the way to somewhere else, her mother quiet and dour under the strong sunlight. The glint of it in her hair rarely matching her smell.

They were all stronger at night, but humans didn’t trust night travelers, which left the road best taken in the daylight. So she was quieted as a child in the rumble between towns. 

Summer was no fun to travel in, sweat holding the mood down on their path, only remedied by the monotony of movement. Alba remembered it as her first truly hot summer days, and she couldn’t help but think of those times in the tiny cell.

It was believed at the time that there weren’t all that many small places left in the world, this was something better known to Alba as a lie, at least when she finally learned it. 

She remembered how they’d use the roads that humans built, to hunt. Her mother needed to drink at least twice a week after all, while her father could manage on the moon's waning, they only went hunting together during the full moon back then.

From what she remembered that changed when she was about seven.

Alba’s life became startlingly less erratic around then, they’d found one of those lost places, and like the fringe beings they were, they held up there for over a year. Her mother was drinking more, and was much less dower as she hunted in the unquestioned night. Her father would even follow along, not to eat in moonlit hunger, but in weariness of her health.

She really hadn’t known back then how worrying her family's health had become. Hematophagy wasn’t the most calorie-dense diet for a creature of her size, and while her diet was fine for a time she needed to eat well if she didn’t want to go into stasis for a year.

So her father would follow after her mother in temperance of her health.

Alba, being very young and somewhat used to daylight, was often left to her own devices, sleeping in their home while her parents went off to eat. They would be out for most of the night, only to come back home reenergized and full.

It was on one of those nights that Alba woke up curious as to her parent’s whereabouts.

It was also the first time she was properly hungry. Alba hadn’t been thinking all that clearly when she went outside, to quiet someone overstepping about ‘the squatters and their kid’. It was the first time she took that kind of chance.

There was blood, and a yowling yelp from someone who should’ve known better than to lower her neck to a child she didn’t respect.

Leave it to say her parents came home to a mess.

The woman being a resident gossip wasn’t expected to simply go missing, which stopped up their little break rather quickly. At least she’d thought it would, as it turned out being lost in towns with abandoned places is the kind of thing that rarely worries anyone important.

She seems to have worried somebody important.

The catalyst to which she couldn’t recall, as while she could remember her first hot summer, Alba had managed to wipe the incident that got her here totally from her mind.

She wasn’t sure why that time came to mind, her hungry mother, and her first lone kill. 

Some pitiable childishness begging for her parents' help, worlds away in a near warded cell. 

She knew what it would be to them now, she was grown, she didn’t need to burden them with this foolish mistake of hers.

She felt dirty with it.

The steel door hung wide into the cell, a shock to the small hushed room. Alba having grown used to the silence made an embarrassing hiss.

Her distressed action startled an officer of implied jurisdiction, before she rearranged herself. 

There was only a forthright greeting before being led from the cell, down a hall she could measure by stride, to an interrogation room.

She wondered, what do they think she is?