Eliza Crow turned up in Vegas a few years ago, claiming she was a recent widow who had come west to find a new life after her husband's untimely death. She started off making a name as a lounge singer in several casinos and developing a reputation as a notorious flirt. She eventually fell in with a mob enforcer as arm candy. Her lover died about a year ago in a mysterious hit that no one could solve and in a surprising twist, she signed on with the 'detective agency' that made the most progress in solving the case.
Every word of that story is true, but it leaves out some very, very important details. She is a widow, because she's the one who stabbed her husband in the chest then blew out his brains and burned the house down for good measure. Not that he didn't deserve it. After all, he was just as bad as the rest of their family. Yes their family, considering he was her first cousin. Eliza's darkest secret is that Eliza doesn't really exist. It's nothing more than an alias to hide the fact that she didn't die with her husband that night. She was born Lilith Curwen, a member of the wealthy and powerful Curwen family in Providence, Rhode Island. And, unknown to their neighbors, a branch family of the Whateley clan, a family of black sorcerers who can trace their degenerate, inbred history back to Morgan le Fey herself. After the disaster in Gamorrah, the remaining Whateley's moved back East to join with one of their stronger branches and rebuild their power base so they could attempt to fulfill their demonic patron's plans again and bring Hell to Earth. As a member of a particularly genetically stable branch of the family, she was chosen to marry the heir of the Whateley main branch and provide the next generation of their bloodline.
Lilith played along as long as she needed to. In truth, she has discovered the relics of Nicodemus Whateley, the family patriarch before the Gamorrah branch was nearly annihilated, when she was young. In his later years, Nicodemus had come to the conclusion that their patron, the incredibly powerful demon Knicknevin, would simply use them as step stones to manifest on Earth, then toss them aside as tools that had served their purpose. However, their long history of careful breeding had granted them incredible arcane power in their blood, hundreds of years of black magical knowledge, and generations of wealth and influence. Why bother serving Hell when they could rule on Earth with their own power? Lilith took his lessons to heart, drinking down all the magical knowledge her mother could give her while secretly experimenting with hucksterism, blood magic, and grifting.
Lilith went along with her family's plans until she was in her marriage bed on her wedding night. Then she stabbed her husband in the chest with the very ritual dagger her mother had given her as a wedding gift. Just to be sure, she blew out his brains then she tossed the body of some poor drifter who looked enough like her that the family wouldn't know the difference into her bed with the corpse and burned the whole building down to cover her tracks. With the corpses horrifically burned, no one knew that Lilith Curwen lived. Taking an alias, she went West to get as far from her family as she could. She made decent money as a singer, but took the chance to get in good with the local mob when she saw it. She was planning to work her way through the ranks and get in good with the local bosses. Unfortunately, her lover's death at the hands of a monster ruined that plan. She signed on with the Rippers as a chance to gain influence with another powerful organization, one that would certainly be happy to help her oppose her family if she was forced to confront them.
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