As an act of tough love wealthy oil man Patrick Killroy made a lot of big talk about how he'd officially disinherited the boy. All of Patrick's money, he said, would go to his daughter Mallory, charities, and other worthy causes...but that his son would be forced to earn his own fiefdom, to become a man of consequence on his own merits. That was Patrick in a nutshell...all machismo, high principles, extreme positions, and little common sense or empathy. James' mother Edith was a passive doormat of a woman who offered no resistance to her husband's notions, and had little maternal attention to offer her children. Raised half wild on the family estate in the oil country of Texas, reminded weekly that none of it was to be his, James learned to hunt and to fend for himself. Guns were everywhere on the ranch and easily available, but when he was 15 James saved up all his pennies from odd farm hand jobs and bought himself a rifle of his very own and promptly wandered off into the scrublands of Texas for the entire summer. Having lived off the land for the duration of his "vacation", he returned both rugged and quite skilled with his chosen weapon. After that, James began participating in shooting competitions, taking home various prize money awards, which he showed an unusual maturity in smartly investing.
Patrick was true to his word, tossing James out of the house as soon as he graduated high school and providing no financial assistance for college or anything else...fortunately James had done will enough academically to gain admittance and a modest scholarship. That plus his shooting prize money was enough for him to make it on his own and he obtained an MBA which he immediately put to use by getting a job at a large land development firm in Dallas. Starting off on the bottom rung, James showed a predatory skill in finding undervalued properties to acquire and flip and rose quickly in the firm. Success also afforded more time and dispensible income for James to continue to pursue his hobbies of match shooting and eventually big game hunting.
Meanwhile, James' younger sister Mallory, spoiled and coddled, had grown up to be a wild and irresponsible young woman. At college she got mixed up with an intense crowd of hard partiers...some of whom were not just hedonists but also heading into ill-advised occult pursuits. Unbeknownst to her family, Mallory was drawn in and became impregnated by the group's leader. Eventually daddy found out she was pregnant and pulled her out of college back to the ranch. Mallory gave birth to a beautiful daughter a few months later, whom she named Melody. James only occasionally visited his parent's home, but became quite fond of little Melody as she grew from infant to schoolgirl. Eventually Patrick died, and Mallory took her child and returned to the fold of her "friends" in Austin...the group of which had secretly blossomed into a full blown cult. Visting his sister after this a few times, James started to become suspicious of her "boyfriend", the living conditions his neice was being subjected to, and the general state of his sister's life. However, due to the schism in the way their father had raised the two of them, James was ambivalent about whether he should interfere or not. And of course he did not know anything about the supernatural or that his sister's weird friends were actual sorcerers and cult members. Though conflicted, to his later eternal shame, he did nothing to protect or shield his niece. When Melody was 13, her own father sacrificed her to gain favor with the demon Belphegor, while her own drugged out and euphoric mother participated in the horrific ritual.
James did not immediately discover that his niece was dead...it was a couple of months later when he tried to get in touch with Mallory to schedule a visit and could not reach her that James began to become aware that something wasn't right. Eventually, he filed missing person reports on his sister and niece. Finally tiring of the lack of progress made by the police, he retained the services of a private eye...who also failed to come up with anything useful. Deciding to take matters into his own hands, James cancelled a hunting safari he had been planning and spent a week in Austin looking for his sister and niece himself...and bit by bit began to put the entire story together which led him inevitably into a crash course encounter with the supernatural. Though not unscathed, James survived; the members of that particular cult most assuredly did not. James was no longer the same man as when he had started his investigation...he could never put the blinders back on and return to a normal life. He knows now that almost nothing is as it seems, and that true evil does exist. That it must be hunted. That it must be killed.