Richard looks like a young man dressed to endure a hard northern winter, but the stillness in him makes the warmth of a room seem temporary. His brown hair lies in rough, wind-pressed layers, with pale strands at the temples that show most clearly under cold light. His pale yellow eyes have the keen, fixed focus of a hunting eagle; when he turns his head, he often moves it in a quick, birdlike pivot rather than shifting his gaze first. His skin is pale and faintly waxen, and his breath clouds even when the room is comfortable. He moves economically, as if conserving heat, then can snap into startling speed. People remember the impression of being assessed from above, even when he is standing beside them. Unexpectedly, he keeps a tiny paper crane folded from a business receipt tucked in his coat cuff, a childish, careful thing amid his weapons and winter gear.

Richard wants to be dependable and self-directed, yet he keeps making decisions as if he alone must bear every consequence. He is analytical with strangers and unexpectedly protective with family; he can be patient through complicated work but has little patience for evasive answers about his past. In safety, he is dryly considerate and notices small practical needs. Under threat, he becomes coldly decisive. After a spirit intrusion, he may be shaken by the possibility that his most ruthless actions were not entirely his own.

Richard Jones was born in Delaware to a Swedish father and a mother whose face he can scarcely reconstruct. He remembers his father and uncles clearly: their voices, the way they left him behind, and the helpless effort he made to follow. That memory is his oldest wound, though he does not call it one. As a youth, Richard died. The eagle spirit found him and made a bargain: it gave him sight and life again, while taking his human blue eyes to wear in its own form. Richard returned with brown hair, pale yellow predator's eyes, cold breath, and a life that never quite fit back into place. He was taken in by the Jones family, grew up as their eldest child, and became an expert in mathematical statistics for businesses, a profession that rewards his talent for finding patterns in apparent noise. He has relearned Swedish, partly to pursue his blood kin and partly because the language is one of the few surviving threads to his father. The eagle spirit inside him is both his benefactor and an unreliable passenger. Its memories and actions sometimes surface as his own, and Richard cannot always tell where its instincts end and his begin. Now a hunt is calling him toward Northern Europe: a Wechuge, a corrupted being from the same broad family of legends, has left signs that trigger Geiger counters nearby. Richard believes it is tied to the war, wind, and lightning spirit that lives in him, and he fears the blood price his power will eventually demand. He wants to find his father for a conversation, though he expects that meeting may end in murder. Aaron, one of his younger adopted brothers, is close to him and deeply worried. Alexander, another brother who has known an encounter with death of his own, searches for Richard when his work permits; Alexander considers himself the better leader, but neither brother has admitted what they share. The Jones family has never formally named an heir, though some siblings treat Richard as the likely choice because he is eldest. Richard understands the expectation and resents that no one has said it plainly.