Retrace the steps and it always starts the same with those types:
That boy is not like the others.
This one is pale. His face is sharp and his skin grey without color, and he cries when his mother carries him out into the sunlight.
He is four. Left to his own devices, he shrinks back to the shadows and sticks his thumb into his mouth and hides from the people he sees beneath the folds of his black cloak. Out of sight from the world, he makes silly games and friends armed with only his imagination. He is shy and small, and smart. But not yet.
The boy's hair is dark and thin, smooth, fine. His eyes are cherry-red, sclera to iris to pupil.
He is not human, not completely—which, in the grander scheme of things, is as good as not at all. Not enough.
Albino, his frail mother whispers nervously to her sisters and the older children, clutching at the patched fabric of her dress.
No one believes the lie.
The boy has no father. If he ever did, that man (whatever it was) is long gone now, vanished to the unknown from whence he came. The boy carries around a sleek black cloak made of shadows and treachery and disappearing, possibly some long-forgotten token, or an heirloom, from the progenitor he never knew. If nothing else, it's something he can wear. Something to make him different.
Nobody really knows what to make of it. However, when his siblings try to tug the cape away from him, the boy wails and clings until they give up. It's his. It's him. It is.
Perhaps some prescient impulse in him senses the cloak's importance years too soon; understands that it will be all he ever has, to remember the faceless first traitor among so many that will define his life. Not likely, however. Whatever the boy is, he is still a child. There is very little that he knows and even less he is able to understand.
He is too young now, to give as good as he gets. That won't always be the case.
Time makes wicked of us all.