Welcome to my worlds. 

These are from the Book Feral

While dealing with the estate of her late grandmother, Nora comes across a box with her father’s name on it. It is his personal effects from the coroner’s office years before and hidden away by her Grandmother. In the box, she finds the remnants of a small micro-cassette tape recorder. It is partially melted and the battery has become a mass of corroded metal. But it might hold clues.

Unable to ignore the opportunity to hear her father’s voice one last time, Nora scans the internet for clues on how to repair the recorder. Her abilities as a nascent mind hunter come to the fore and she is able to repair the recorder, only to find it has recorded not only the last moments her father's life it also recorded the moments just after her father’s death. Now she knows it was no accident, he was killed to protect a secret.

Left with no answers and now even more questions, she is compelled to abandon her schooling at Vanderbilt University and travel to Charlotte, North Carolina to find answers. There she meets the mysterious Red Cloud, who claims to know nothing. Her hopes crushed, she begins her long slow bus journey back home.

But circumstances, or perhaps fate, intervene.

.

 They are a Feral, a hybrid with no clan, a far too common thing in the modern times. The Townsend Clan had ostracized him for not being pure clan when he was just a child, which is also another unfortunate aspect of modern times. Within a single body are the joined spirits of Jonathan and Greyback the Wolf. But they are not mingled as a true hybrid should be.

During his incarceration at the mental hospital in Asheville, the Wolf had taken control of the body in order to protect themselves from the threats it perceived, but doing so for so long has made Greyback too human to and powerful to simply coexist. It was Doctor Johnson that convinced Greyback that his human spirit could be trusted to help them navigate the world that Greyback found so strange. So Greyback allows Jonathan to do just that unless Greyback feels the need to come up and take control. At these times, Jonathan has no say in the matter. The complete separation of minds in a hybrid has never been heard of before. in this Greyback/Iain Pryce is unique among the Feral.

She is a Feral of a different sort. Unlike the common clanless rabble, (dogs, housecats and so forth) she is paired with the spirit of a snow leopard. The Snake-men knew that they had to keep her on a short leash so they convinced the Townsend hybrid wolf pack to create the safe house in Knoxville’s old city. The wolf pack agreed as they needed a place for their own unwieldy Feral. There are now four Feral hybrids living in the safe house, the other two being a pair of black bears hybrids. They live under the watchful eye of Zeus of the Snake-men.

He is young, only in his first lifetime, and being the lesser, he does not stand a chance of inheriting the accumulated power and menagerie of Gawain the elder of the seventh branch. He must, therefore, go out on his own and form the eighth branch in a new place at least that is the expectation. So he is traveling, looking for a new place, only he has another plan, a far more ambitious plan. One the other Blas will never see coming until it is too late.

But that was before, now he has met Nora, more than the herd, more than hybrid, she is unlike anything has ever heard of. But she is not part of the plan, she is a mere distraction.

 And yet, what is the point of owning the world if you have to do it all alone?

Zeus is something of a product of the modern age. Like all Snake-men, he walks with one foot in two worlds, and like so many his power is one of the sky. He is like a living capacitor, his movement through the air leaves a static charge in his body that he can control at will. He drapes himself copper ornaments and carries a wooden staff wound artistically with copper wire. All the better store more power. In an ancient world, his otherworldly abilities would make people consider him to be a god, but in this modern world, even at his most powerful, his “lightning’ is more like a TASER. And it takes him a whole day to recharge, if he runs. Magic in the modern world is no different than it was in ages past, it is the world that has changed.

Like Zeus, he is one of the Snake-men. His power is over water and he can create mists out of thin air…if it is a particularly humid day, but that is not the source of his name.

He is a descendant of the original Red Cloud who was a war leader and a chief of the Oglala Lakota who once led a great war against the agents of the Aphotic Terrene in 1876. He was victorious, but at a terrible cost. Today’s Red Cloud is not so great a man. He is simply trying to keep a lid on secrets that have been hidden for millennia, but he sees the future coming. Nora is that future, and he is not entirely sure that he is ready for it.

A Blood Taster and agent of the Aphotic Terrene, he, like all his kind, should be waging war for control of the terrestrial as their progenitor decreed. But the Blas Hulle (from Gaelic and pronounced Vlash Wheelay) are not the Deoc Huille (the Yayock Wheelay or blood drinkers) of 2000 years ago, they are a degenerate race, basking in their own creature comforts and ruling their little fiefdoms from behinds the curtain’s shadows with their blood magic influence. Over the years their numbers have grown, as has their power, over all who they regularly taste, each with a lifetime three times that of either the hybrids or the herd (what they call humans).

They could dominate the world…. but that would require effort and responsibility. Who needs that? For this Blas, the city of Knoxville is plenty. He has been here for two generations, and the familial bonds of this ridiculously large “small town” have made it possible to spread his influence over entire families through their blood relations. Taste the blood of the root, and you know the taste of the branches. That secret and his menagerie of feral hybrids have made him the one of the strongest solitary Blas Huille in the Eastern United States. With one more lifetime to go, he doesn’t plan on going anywhere.

.

A friend and colleague convince Doctor Frank Johnson to leave his practice in Charlotte,NC. to examine a patient in an Asheville mental hospital. At first, the patient is quite reticent, but over time he coaxes the patient to talk. He considers what the man says to be a mere delusion, but over the course of a year, he becomes positively convinced that there are two separate consciousnesses living in the man’s body. One is human, but the other is clearly not. He has discovered the existence of the Hybrids, a secret that some are willing to kill to protect.

After two years of study, the doctor is killed by persons unknown. (A pack of wolf hybrids under control of a Blas trying to keep the secret) The Mental Hospital is burned to the ground and many of the patients are found dead or go missing. In the absence of proof, and mostly to save face, the missing are presumed dead in the fire.

The Patent (Greyback/Johnathan Pryce) Is spirited away by the Pack, only to be abandoned on Red Cloud’s Doorstep. He was too human to be pack, but too wolf to be left to his own devices.

(This hospital is semi-historical, by the way)