Richard's lean young body moves with a watchful, predatory economy, as if every step has already measured the nearest escape route. The spirit's presence gathers around him in ragged suggestions of broad wings: not feathers exactly, but overlapping strips of wind-dark air that vanish when directly stared at. His borrowed blue eyes catch light with the hard, distant gleam of ice under shallow water. He smells unmistakably of rain on dry earth and old feathers; he knows it, and claims it is the weather's fault. Before he speaks, he takes one dry, clicking breath through his teeth, like a beak testing the wind. People remember the sense that the sky has leaned down to look at them.

Nereo can be patient with frightened people and ruthlessly direct with those he judges dangerous. He values restraint, yet his own unfinished vow can turn him suddenly forceful. In calm moments he watches the world with ancient curiosity; under pressure he acts as though hesitation itself were a betrayal. Richard's humor and ordinary teenage frustrations still surface through him, confusing Nereo and sometimes softening his judgments.

Nereo remembers the eastern coastline before the old communities there were broken and scattered, though the details come in gusts rather than a continuous history. He once belonged to the open sky, traveling above territories that humans knew by their own names and obligations. When those homes and the people who tended them were taken, he lost both his resting places and the clear purpose that had kept him aloft. Years later, he found Richard Jones dying as a boy. Nereo offered to return him to life, trading away his raptor eyes for Richard's blue human eyes. The bargain saved Richard, but left the spirit dormant inside him. As Richard grew, Nereo began to surface in moments of danger, borrowing the boy's actions and voice. Now, at eighteen, Richard and the spirit share a body uneasily. Nereo knows Richard's blood father must die, and suspects that the answer lies in Scandinavia, but cannot remember the crime that bound him to this hunt. He also believes justice is owed for wrongs done to the land from Alaska to Florida. His immediate problem is that Richard wants a life of his own, while Nereo's half-remembered duty keeps steering them toward violence.