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Claire grew up on the move. Her father, Seamus, started his life as an Irish immigrant on the streets of New York, but he made his big break when his employer, a warehouse manager, was nearly killed in an accident. Her father saved his life, diving in the way of a set of falling barrels and knocking him aside. Her father survived and while he was recovering from his injuries, his boss came to visit the hospital. In thanks for his life, the man recommended her father for a position with a friend of his, a real estate broker. Claire’s father quickly found that he had a talent for the work, both because of his sharp mind and his gregarious personality, and rose from being an assistant and a copyist to working on land deals himself as a broker. With his new position came wealth and he proposed to his fiancée, one Abigail Fitzgerald, shortly before being asked to move out west to act as the broker’s representative. Abigail and Seamus married in St. Louise on their way out to the southwest territories.

Claire was born a little more than a year later, in a small town near the Texas/Mexico border. Her parents hardly let her birth slow them down, adding the energetic baby girl to their traveling family. As such, Claire had a bit of an unusual childhood. She was walking the instant her legs were strong enough and running days later. She never could sit still, always exploring and running round the the towns they passed through while looking for profitable places to buy and sell to the settlers moving west behind them. She didn’t have traditional schooling of any kind, though plenty of places didn’t even have them. Instead, her father made sure to teach her what he could. She picked up reading and writing quick enough once she was old enough, and numbers came easy to her. Her parents were enormously proud of their bright girl, though more than a few people found the bright, wild girl to be distinctly ‘unladylike’ and ‘uncouth’. Claire hardly cared, since they didn’t stick around most towns long. Her only constant companions became books and stories, either told by the locals in bars and saloons or purchases by her parents by mail. Adventure serials became her favorite way to pass the time as she imagined the wild adventures that she could go on one day.

As she grew older, it became clear that Claire was going to be as beautiful as she was quick witted and she developed a fiery disposition. Whoa to any of the boys in the frontier towns that thought the pretty traveling girl would be easily susceptible to their charms. Her father seemed to get quieter and more somber as their travels continued and Claire began to notice that her father’s individual trips were getting longer and his deals were becoming more private and even secretive. Any attempts to draw out what was going on were met with blunt stonewalling. This was a surprise to her usual treatment, as she was a bit of a daddy’s girl, and Claire became surly and quicker tempered as a result. Then one day when she was sixteen, her father never came home.

Claire never learned who pulled the trigger, but she did learn that there was a gunman. Her father was tracked down while surveying a plot of land by an unknown figure that put a bullet in his heart. Claire’s mother was hardly better off. When she returned home, bearing the horrible news, she found her mother on the floor in much the same state. Now she knew that it wasn’t just robbery, it was personal. So she could make it personal too. Before the killer could hunt her down too, she gathered all of her father’s things, packed up what cash she could, and split town as fast as the family horse could let her. She didn’t stop riding until she hit the next town over, well away from someone that might be on her trail. She sold the horse and found a place to stay while she sorted things out. Unfortunately for her, she had no real leads to go on and the money from the sale of the family horse and wagon could only last so long. Eventually, Claire continued her traveling, hopping carriages and trains and hoofing it as far as she could. When money began to run short, she started taking odd jobs to pay for inn rooms and basic necessities. She worked bars, labored along with men, and generally made herself useful when she could.

For the next three years, she kept moving, shifting from one town to the next. As she adjusted to life without her family, she found herself picking up a new series of penny tales to pass the time, written by one Doctor John Henry Holliday. His stories were full of supposedly true tales of his adventures across the Wild West, filling her head with her old dreams of wild adventure and exploration. A quest for vengeance wasn’t quite the same as one of Doc’s tales, but it was certainly worthy of her time. Through 1979, she managed to get her hands on every one of his books, enjoying the humorous tone and the wild adventure. But her sharp mind started to pick up on something. His pages had strange little messages mixed in, hiding odd details and watermarks made of strange symbols. At first she thought Doc Holliday had gone a bit mad over the years, leaving secret codes and mythical symbols in his serials. Then she found her father’s journal. And she learned that everything she knew was a lie.

In a secret compartment in the bottom of her father’s steamer trunk, Claire found a journal, kept over her entire childhood and even before. It began with her father rescuing his old friend in New York, but it revealed some shocking details. The accident was no accident, but rather an attempted murder. A strange man who looked exactly like his boss attempted to murder his twin in what looked like an industrial accident. Seamus knocked his boss aside and ran the man down, only to find the stranger changing his appearance into a facsimile of his own face. The two fought and her father beat the man unconscious with a wrench. Injured and exhausted, he collapsed, only to wake up in the custody of a secret branch of the Union government. These secret agents, only addressed as the Agency in his diary, told Seamus what the world was really like. And a shapeshifting twin was only the beginning. Undead monsters, black magic users, and more roamed the west, stirring up trouble and harming innocent folks. And now Seamus was in on a secret that the Agency wanted kept nice and quiet to prevent a panic. So they offered Seamus a job.

Seamus became a field operative for the Agency. The same intelligence and social skills that made his cover as a land dealer so believable made him an excellent secret agent. His deals were more often than not covers for him tracking down threats to the peace and taking them down fast and hard. They moved south when the Union shifted Seamus to more undercover work, placing him inside Confederate territory to continue his missions and to pass information on the southern states back north. Unfortunately, someone caught up with him. Claire didn’t know who killed her father, but now she knew exactly why he was killed. Combining the cryptic and often encoded records in her father’s journal with the strange symbols in Holliday’s books, she began to piece together exactly how magic worked. If she was going to find her father’s killer, she needed every advantage she could get. Taking her father’s back-up revolver and a bowie knife, she carved her first rune mark into the weapon and felt the power surge through her body. Now she had a weapon that could fight back against the man that killed her father.

More than a year passed as she worked her way through the southwest slowly, picking up every tip and trick she could on both gun fighting and hexslinging. However, she’s started to feel that she’s reaching as far as she can go without more help. So she picked up once again and headed toward Tombstone, the last known residence of Holliday himself. Surely he’d be willing to help an aspiring Hexslinger with a grudge to settle…

Claire is easily recognizable in any barroom in the southwest. She's beautiful, slim and strong with fiery red hair that anyone with half a brain could pick out from across the room. She's a practical woman most of the time, though she keeps a dress or two on hand for when she needs to look pretty. More often than not though, she'll be wearing her 'work' clothes: a simple white shirt, tight leather pants, high riding boots, a long leather duster, and a slightly tattered stetson. She has no shame in keeping her weapons visible and at hand whenever possible, with a bowie knife at one hip and her father's revolver at the other. And that revolver is something else. It seems to gleam like silver no matter what angle you look at it from and the handle looks like it's made from ivory. At a distance it just looks scratched or notched with age and use. However, up close the scratches begin to form pattern of Celtic runes that occasionally light up if you look at them long enough.

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