Character Profile: Heather Felton
Hi, everyone. It’s a hot, muggy Friday
morning in Charlotte, NC, and I’m grabbing a coffee at the local Caribou and
getting to ready to go work an afternoon/evening shift at my day job. I made it
through my first 40-hour work week since September of 2009; I got a small but
much-needed paycheck; and I’m looking forward to a weekend all to myself. But,
best of all, I managed to find a small amount of time to write this week, and
the third Red Wolf novel, Red Wolf Rising,
is beginning to take shape!
Now…
I’m announcing the overall winner of the new
cover art for The Draculata Nest. My
thanks to everyone who took the time to vote and express their opinions across
the various electronic venues the past few weeks. And again, my apologies for
not being able to get the voting gadget to work on this blog! I’m pretty happy
with the selection myself, and thrilled that Ray DeLotell’s signature will
grace the next cover of DN at the bottom of this…
Next, because I got such a good reaction
when I posted a character profile of Nicole Deerfoot Black a month or so back, I’ve
decided to make it a regular feature of my blog to elaborate on the background
of some of the cool characters that live in my head almost 24/7. This is stuff
you won’t get from reading the Red Wolf novels, although some of it appears
between the lines I suppose. Occasionally, a character might reveal something
of their past in conversation, but mostly they’re too busy dealing with the
action of the present. Yet, I assure you, every bit player has a rich history
and often a good bit of baggage to drag into their relationships with Clifford
Crane. Today I’m going to share some of Heather Felton’s…
The little town of Troy, NC, nestled in the
middle of what is now the Uwharrie National Forest, was founded largely by
werewolves, and the Feltons are one of the oldest and richest families in the
community. Heather’s father, Chas, was one of the original settlers in the
area, one of a minority of English among the mostly Scottish immigrants to
settle there in the mid-1700’s. Chas was a dominant wolf and the leader of his
little band, but he wasn’t quite alpha material, and the wolves of Troy were
soon approached by Two Black Feathers (who later took the name Charlie Black),
alpha of the Uwharrie Pack.
Chas Felton was already well-to-do when gold
was discovered nearby in 1799. He was able to profit further from the mining
and related industry and continued to invest his earnings wisely, as did many
of the Uwharrie wolves, over the next few hundred years. When he lost his life
in a drowning accident on Badin Lake in 1982, his fourteenth human wife and
their two children were left with the financial resources to do pretty much
whatever they wanted. Heather Felton was only three years old at the time. Her
older brother, Joseph, was twelve. The
mother, Christine, was only in her mid-twenties, and soon abandoned the
children to run away with a young human she’d met in Raleigh at a charity event
six months later. Charlie Black and the rest of the Uwharrie werewolves took
over raising the two kids.
Puberty, and the stress of losing both his
father and mother, brought Joseph’s wolf out at an early age. He became one of
the major dominant wolves in the pack by the time he was sixteen. It was
unavoidable that Heather be immersed in the pack culture and surrounded by
werewolves at all times. Naturally a free spirit, she found the werewolf way of
life restrictive and stifling, especially for a female. She hated it, and she
immersed herself in school and extra-curricular activities in an effort to
spend as much time away from it as she could. In high school, she was both head
cheerleader and student body president.
When
she couldn’t find something to keep her physically away from her home, she
retreated into the historical past. She became an avid student of history and
ultimately fell in love with anthropology and archeology. The summer before her
senior year, she qualified for a special scholarship to join a group of college
students and their professor from the University of North Carolina at an
archeological dig in Peru that unearthed evidence of a previously unknown
pre-Incan civilization. Her work there earned her a full scholarship to UNC
after her senior year in high school.
During all the manic activity in her teens,
Heather lived with the constant fear that she would herself become a werewolf.
The lycanthropic gene often skipped generations in a family. It had actually
skipped three generations of Feltons before Joseph showed signs. But when the
gene did appear, it was often shared by siblings. So most of the pack expected
Heather to become one, and although she fought it tooth and nail, the other
wolves prepared her for it. But when she made it through puberty and into young
adulthood without changing, she was convinced she had been spared the unwanted
lifestyle.
In the Fall of 1996, Heather left for
college expecting never to return home except for the occasional holiday visit.
But during the summer after her sophomore year, even though she had taken great
care to isolate herself from both werewolves and vampires (traditionally the
triggers that activate the gene) she underwent her first transformation.
She
briefly considered staying in school, but she knew what would happen if she was
a lone wolf. Without the pack bond she would eventually go insane, so she
dropped out of college and returned to Troy broken and depressed. The pack
welcomed her and did their best to help her transition into the culture she’d
resisted all her life, but she didn’t respond. Luckily, Claire Deerfoot, the
pack shaman, chose that time to return from almost a century of wandering to
spend what she expected to be the final years of her life with her pack, and
the two bonded.
Claire was able to bring Heather out of her
despondency and encouraged her not to give up entirely on her vision of a
purposeful life. Claire believed that a new age was coming for the wolves and
instilled in Heather the hope that she wouldn’t always have to be “just a
female.”
Heather held on to that hope. She began to
share some of that hope and some of the ideas Claire had with her older
brother, who had by then become the pack second. When Joseph ultimately fought
the aging Charlie Black for the alpha position, she urged him to break with
tradition and spare the old alpha’s life. She resisted the efforts of the other
females to get her to choose a mate, and although genetically unable to exert
dominance over the males, managed to carve out a position of respect within the
pack by out-performing most of them and by providing her alpha brother with
such good counsel that he began to rely on her for it. By the time Clifford Crane appears on the
scene, she is one of the unspoken leaders of the pack, unheard of for a female
werewolf.
To see what happens next, click on one
of the links below.
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