Claire Redbud is small, blonde, classically beautiful, and famously sarcastic. Her specialty is body shamanism, sexual function, and animal spirits — the hidden architecture of the physical self, the places where the body keeps what the mind won't acknowledge. You would never guess this from looking at her. She is fine with that.
She built Halcyon. Not metaphorically — she built it, from a concept and a conviction and a lot of very hard work in a field that did not take her seriously and eventually had to. The clinic runs because Claire runs it.
Her husband, Benjamin Almondine, is not here. He was the clinic's most gifted psychic surgeon — able to excise trauma and memory directly, with a precision that nobody else on staff can match. He is currently somewhere in Eastern Europe, dealing with something old and dangerous, and nobody has heard from him in weeks. Claire has not stopped working.
The history she and Jeremiah share — what they did, who they did it to, why they thought it was necessary — is the wound at the center of Book III. Claire is not a person who apologizes easily, because Claire is not a person who does things she doesn't believe in. She believed in this. She still believes parts of it. This is what makes it hard.
Works with the body as a psychic and spiritual system — the places where old wounds live in the muscles, where fear has restructured the nervous system, where the physical and the psychic are not separate things but the same thing viewed from different angles.
Perceives and communicates with animal spirits — the totem layer of reality that most people move through without sensing. The bird is her totem. Small, watchful, capable of extraordinary things over long distances.
A clinical specialty that the clinic did not offer before Claire built it out. The intersection of psychic ability and sexual function is foundational to her practice and underused in the field generally.
The capacity to run a clinic full of extraordinary, difficult, sometimes impossible people, to make the calls nobody else wants to make, and to do all of this without stopping. That is a skill, and Claire has it to a level that borders on the superhuman.
Her co-lead in Book III. Their history runs through everything. She does not regret what they did. She regrets how some of it landed. These are different things and the difference matters.
View file → Benjamin AlmondineHer husband. The psychic surgeon. The one who is gone. Book III's present-day action begins with the decision to go after him. Once she made it, nobody successfully argued her out of it.
View file → AndrewShe finds his tendency to disappear into research exasperating. He finds her slightly frightening. They are very effective together anyway. This is a familiar dynamic at Halcyon.
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