Back in the 1600's, in Wales, a woman, having seemingly lost her mind after the death of her only child, stole the baby of the well-to-do couple who so generously employed her. The woman's name was Cecelia. The baby was called Francis, after his great-grandfather. Nobody (not the distraught father of Francis or the best tracker in the village) had any luck in finding the stolen child and bringing him home to his heartbroken mother. A year after he went missing, the bones of a baby would be discovered in a trench near an abandoned horse stable, and those bones would be mistaken for Francis and buried below a gravestone bearing his name.

While his mother and father mourned him, Francis was off in the woods somewhere, being raised by Cecelia and her brother, who was an outlaw and a convicted murderer. His kidnapper renamed him Ira, after her dead son. She loved him. In her delusional state, she was his mother and he was her son and that was all there was to it. The second-Ira didn't know any better and loved Cecelia in return. He called her mother and he called her brother uncle and the three of them lived not-quite-contently in their tiny home for ten years. During the ten years Ira spent in the forest, he learned to hunt and to gather food, to skin his kills and to mend his own clothing. Though he had no playmates but Cecelia and occasionally Cecelia's glowering sibling, he was not unhappy and rarely ever suffered. In his own way, he was even happy.

A werewolf appeared during his eleventh year, on a full moon, mauled his surrogate mother and dragged her brother off into the night for snacking. As she lay dying, Cecelia urged Ira to flee, and he did as he was told because he was a good boy who listened to his mother. In the woods, Ira got lost. On the fifth night of being all alone, unable to find enough food to sate his hunger, Ira fell down and began to throw a tantrum. His tantrum was so loud and so impressive that it caught the attention of a man passing through. His name was Malachi and he was a hunter of wolves. Malachi came to Ira, lifted him onto his horse, told him to shut up and then took him out of the woods.

The hunter of wolves turned out to be a hunter of werewolves. Begrudgingly, just to please his sister, Penelope, Malachi took Ira under his wing, allowed the boy to travel at his side as he stalked his prey all across Great Britain. Over time, Malachi would grow very fond of Ira and Penelope would grow very maternal and treat him as if he were her own flesh and blood. Sterling, Malachi's son, would share none of his father's fondness and would, in stark contrast, learn to despise Ira. Sterling and Ira quarreled often and most of their clashes stemmed from jealousy. Sterling hated that his father seemed so enamored with such a backwoods brat and Ira hated that Sterling was constantly looking to pick a fight with him.

Somewhere along the line, Ira decided that he was going to be all about werewolf rights. His blatant disapproval of Malachi's profession tore a hole right through their once pleasant relationship. They would fight and make up and fight up make up again. It was probably like Christmas for Sterling, when Ira yelled something insulting to Malachi and walked out the door, never to be seen or heard from again. Out in the streets of London, in an attempt to cool off his temper, Ira drank too much and fell into a ditch that was far too deep. A woman pulled him out and laughed at him. After she laughed at him, she led him off into an alley and... well, he doesn't really remember much of what happened in the alley, or after the alley, for that matter.

Sorcha was all about tradition, and her tradition stated that, after you turned some unsuspecting teenager into a vampire, you buried them in the dirt and waited for them to find their way out. His triumphant escape from his own grave marked his entrance into a brand new life, complete with a new mother figure and a new name. Sorcha decided to call him Knox.

With Knox in tow, still bewildered and wanting to eat everybody in sight, Sorcha made her way back to her home in Italy and to her own sire. In the beginning, his desire to return to Malachi was overbearing, but Sorcha was able to convince him that Malachi, as a hunter, would kill him on sight. Knowing this to be true, his yearning for his old companion dwindled. In Italy, Knox was tutored in the ways of his kind, and he was spoiled by both his sire and his grand-sire and introduced to vampire society once the moment was right. He spent two centuries with Sorcha before venturing out on his own, with her blessing, of course.

It was in one of the worst slums in London, where he first crossed paths with a little guttersnipe named Esther. She was fifteen, foul mouthed and mean. Knox saved her from a group of boys who were trying to get up under her dress. Esther was an experiment more than anything else. He wanted to see if he had enough self control to turn somebody. He did. Following in Sorcha's footsteps, he put her in the dirt and waited for her to come out. Esther loved being a vampire, and she loved being a vicious little terror even more. Like a rabid dog, Esther would and did attack anybody and anything she could catch. Esther slaughtered men and women, little girls and boys and even babies on occasion. Sometimes she and Knox had fun together, but mostly, Knox spent his time trying to control her and failing spectacularly. Twenty years after meeting her, he would call it quits, and abandon her in some little town in Scotland.

In the mid 1800's, he came to the United States. His destination was Virginia, to stay temporarily with an old friend of Sorcha's. The old friend, whose name was Lysandra, had, under her employment, a human man. The man had a son, Seth, barely nineteen. Knox befriended him, introduced himself as Lysandra's nephew, let Seth show him around and keep him company. Seth's turning was violent, forced, a struggle. He did it in the woods, and felt like a monster afterwards, sitting in the dirt, waiting for Seth to come out of his grave.

Seth hated him for a long time, didn't leave him only because he didn't know how to survive on his own, didn't think that he could. They reconciled and it took a decade. Seth learned to love him. They traveled everywhere together, slept in the same bed, hunted the same streets. Seth was the calm to his storm. In a way, they evened each other out.

By the early 1990's, there was five of them. Knox and Seth, and a woman named Fritz, who Knox had turned himself. Rex, Fritz's boyfriend. Cindy, a teenage vampire, a stray they had taken in. All of them would have survived, if Rex hadn't been so stupid. He killed and left bodies in his wake, started fights with anybody who looked at him the wrong way. His behavior brought hunters right to their doorstep.