"We did, technically." Tina said bitterly. "But with the way things worked out…Nicholas wanted to keep Peter close to the family estate and that was all the way in Georgia. I was about to move back to L.A., in the end with my schedule and Nicholas being the slick devil he was he always came up with some excuse about why Peter couldn’t come stay with me…" Tina trailed off sadly, and looked down at her hands. Dana and Alice both sympathized with Tina. Though neither of them had children, neither could imagine being separated from their kids for most of their lives.

The fact was, until now, Peter had grown up with his mother a distant figure an entire country away. Born in Savannah but raised in the small town of Ingrid, Peter’s primary parental figure had been his father. Ingrid, Georgia (though it hadn’t been called such at the time) had been founded by the Tasso wereboar clan centuries ago when they had arrived in the new world after being chased from their ancestral home territory of Greece by werewolves. The Turkish wereboars had been completely exterminated by the werewolf packs who along with the werecats had hunted them into extinction. The Greek wereboars had avoided a similar fate by escaping to the new world, where they managed to exist on more equal footing with their ancient enemies and many founded settlements along the way. Either recruiting Native Americans or settlers passing through in an attempt to rebuild their depleted clans and fortify their position against immigrant werewolves who refused to let the old hatreds die. The North American werewolf bloodlines where larger and swifter than the European species that had decimated the wereboars in their home countries and though they had no previous dealings with them the wereboars took their vengeance out on the native werewolf packs. Carving out their own private empires populated by turned wereboars of every race religion and creed and building them on the shattered bodies of the native werewolf population.

Once such settlement was Ingrid, not far from Savannah, Georgia the city where Tina met and -briefly fell in love with- Nicholas Tasso. Ever since the town’s founding, the Tasso family had pretty much ruled Ingrid like their own feudal kingdom serving as either the Mayor or the Sheriff but always holding some position of power. Tina had met Nicholas before he had become mayor, before Grant Tasso died under mysterious circumstances and Nicholas was called back to Ingrid to take his place as next in line. Settling into the "Tasso Throne" had changed Nicholas, though they hadn’t known each other for very long. Maybe it had just brought out a side of him they hadn’t been together long enough to see. Peter was born right after Nicholas won his first election. There had been another candidate in the running, but it was nothing but token resistance against tradition. At the time the town was very much still strongly within the hands of the Tasso family. Peter and Tina had called off their engagement not long after that. A few months later, Tina left Ingrid and to her eternal regret she left Peter too, confident that she would soon have full custody of him. It was a mistake that had cost her only child. Nicholas Tasso was many thing, good and bad, but one of them was vengeful. He hadn’t taken her leaving him to well. He had used Peter to punish her, by isolating him from his mother as much as possible.