PARENTS: Nassir McNair and Frannie Tallchief
SIBLINGS: Ethan Tallchief (40), Brother
OTHERS: Owen (39), Husband

Toni is the second child of a First Nation Athabaskan mother and a British Irish-Indian sustainable energy doctorate. Having almost nothing in common, they raised their two children as though they were playing Tug Of War. Frannie was born and raised in Alaska and had no desire to ever leave, even for vacation. A hippie in the extreme, she valued family above all else, saw little value in monetary wealth and wanted to teach her children to love and appreciate the natural world. Nassir was a violent alcoholic married to his work as much as he was Frannie. Time spent with him in childhood was infrequent. He preferred his lab to home life, and felt inadequate living in the family's perfectly respectable middle class Fairbanks home. Sometimes he took his lack of self-esteem out on the kids. Despite Frannie's fierce championing of the environment, she failed to step in to protect them. He knew that Frannie was a shifter, and that their children might also inherit the gene. The only way in which Frannie ever put her foot down in the home was over the issue of Nassir studying their children, but now and then a hairbrush would mysteriously disappear, or rags from bloody noses would go missing.

When the weather was good, Toni would spend the long daylight hours outside as much as possible. She built forts out of sticks in the woods, played Pirates with her brother, Ethan, before he decided that it was uncool to play with his little sister, or sat reading comic books streamside with her feet in the freezing glacial waters, testing to see how long she could keep them under before she lost feeling in her toes. Sometimes it would hurt to warm them back up, to regain feeling. Her feet would prickle and burn, but she couldn't shut off feeling for too long without doing damage. It wasn't until later in life that she realized that was an on the nose metaphor for most of her childhood.

Nassir moved back to the UK when she was twelve. His research lab was closing down and there was opportunity elsewhere. He left divorce papers on the kitchen counter and didn't say goodbye. Toni hadn't been fond of him, but he was still her father. It was brutal. It was also the best thing for her long term. With her choice in the matter removed Frannie sold the house and relocated the family to Kenai, a few hundred miles south. Cost of living was less strenuous there and extended family was available to help her raise the kids as a newly single mother.

Life changed quickly for Toni after the move. She started shifting three months later. Her brother had started to go through the change a year before, so she was ready for it in theory. In practice, matters were different. She suddenly had too much energy. She felt like she was going to burst from her skin in the week leading up to each moon, or like she didn't belong in her skin at all. To help her blow off steam and lessen her discomfort, Frannie enrolled her in survival camps, extramural dance programs and lacrosse. It was a good idea, but didn't work. Toni fell in with a bad group of teens. Cooking methamphetamine in trailers on the outskirts of town was one of the local youths favorite past times. Making inroads wasn't difficult, particularly when she had access to some valuable chemical equipment her father had left behind in his hasty exit. She was injecting by age thirteen.

She got too high one afternoon while skipping school. An older boy in the trailer (one like all the rest) told her she was pretty and kept touching her arms and back. The attention was kind of nice. She wasn't used to it. He gave her a hit far larger than she normally would have taken. Euphoria turned to disoriented haze, then there was a lot of screaming and a lot of blood. Toni woke up several hours later in a home cluttered with old tribal paraphernalia, floral tablecloths and the smell of clove cigarettes. A snarky old woman was pressing a cold cloth to her head. A boy she recognized from the trailer sat across from her, staring at her through narrowed eyes. He smelled like death hanging around a hunter. He felt like a stretch of woods where there had been too much death and birds no longer sang. The cat in her, now sobering, immediately recognized another, far stranger predator. She called her mother and lied about a sleepover at a new friend's house.

Within a few weeks, Toni and Owen were close friends. Whenever she needed a release or an escape, she found him instead of a rusted trailer with shady inhabitants. Meeting Owen helped her get clean, and set her life on an entirely different course.

They didn't stay friends for long. If the stereotype for first teen loves is that they burn fast and end in dramatics, by the beginning of Toni's Freshman year in high school she and Owen had been dating steadily for so long that they seemed like an old married couple among their peers. He graduated two years ahead of her, in her brother's class. In their time together, she'd come to understand how alienated he was from the first nation community. She asked him to leave, to go find adventure elsewhere and make a place for himself where he was less of a tool to be used, and more of a person. He refused, saying he'd stay and wait for her.

When Toni graduated, the idea was that the pair would leave Kenai and go explore the world together. A month before she received her diploma, she was called to the principal's office in the middle of a class. Her brother had been in a climbing accident. He'd been flown to Anchorage for care, but was unlikely to ever walk again. Plans were dashed. Frannie couldn't take care of Ethan on her own, so when Toni graduated she stayed to help. She and Owen mortgaged a small piece of land outside town. The lived in an RV for two years while Owen built them a small but cozy house in his free hours. Toni opened a modest dance and yoga studio downtown, catering to the growing population and the summering wealthy with a taste for such things. The local shaman would sometimes stop by, asking Owen to step in on behalf of the community like some shady CIA handler triggering an agent. It disgusted her. He'd saved her from damaging habits years before, but his conviction was so strong that he wouldn't let her save him from his. It became a hotbutton issue in their infrequent arguments.

Owen's Nan, who had been like a second mother to her, died in 2014. She left for the woods on her own after a dire cancer prognosis. Owen followed her and didn't return to several days. When he did, he was uncharacteristically quiet and melancholy. She never asked him, but she knew what he'd done for her. Ethan started refusing to see her shortly afterward. It wasn't vicious, he had just recognized that he was the last string tying his sister to Kenai, preventing her from seeing the world as she'd wanted to. It still stings, but she's thankful for his strength and talks to him as frequently as she can, or when he feels like picking up the phone.

For the last five years she's been traveling the globe, fitting as much living into the last fifteen years Owen has on his clock before they're forced to face a heartbreaking truth head on. They've made a good life. They've been happier than two mismatched predators have any right to expect. However, Owen is her best friend and the only family she really has left. Faced with the reality that she'll have nothing in just a decade, Toni has started to fret. When they arrived in New Orleans, she pushed to sign a short term contract at the Cirque when they chanced upon it. If anything might help her convince him to give the possibility of a cure another look, she hopes it will be living among other supernaturals, and making connections with others that aren't based on what he can offer them. In the mean time, she's quietly begun hunting for options in the cirque, and the surrounding city.