He managed to stay out of trouble with the law, though. As a youth, he was always physically active and tended to well in sports. He was also a voracious reader, especially of mystery novels; first, the Hardy Boys and then moving on to Mickey Spillane and hard-boiled detectives as he got older. It seemed wherever he went, he would always have some animal at his side, a cat or a dog, or sometimes a squirrel. The animals were usually his closest companions.

Although there were some adults in his life, foster parents, coaches, and teachers; none were ever around long enough to be an influence on him, though. Things changed on the night of his twelfth birthday. During the night, in what he thought was a dream, he found himself in a vast, open area of haze and mist. From the recesses of the dark, he was approached by a beautiful black woman. She told Izzy that she knew who he was and that she had been called to him in this spirit realm. This was her story.

Philomise was a beautiful young woman in the early nineteenth century. In a small village of Haiti, she was the slave of a French blacksmith. She was also his lover and a powerful manbo asogwe, High Priestess, of the Orisha Lao, Ogoun, the vodun of war and deity of smiths. Philomise’s lover prospered and was quickly recognized as one of the most talented young smiths in Haiti. The couple’s happiness ended when a plague of evil spirits infected the community’s children. The mambo was eventually able to drive the spirits from the village, but her lover had been killed. Unkown to the villagers, the mambo was pregnant. Filled with anger and grief, she left the village to hunt down and destroy the spirits that had killed her lover. She never seen or heard from again.

That woman, the mambo, was an ancestor of Izzy. She had been called to Izzy in this spirit world. In his budding adulthood, his spirit was awakening with the kind of power and passion that Philomise had possessed in her lifetime. In the years that followed, Philomese would meet him in the spirit realm and teach him the ways of a houngan and to understand the ways of the lao. He quickly grew adept in the vodun arts and the creole language of his ancestors. Finding he had a natural ability with metals, his first enchantment was knuckles of brass that he had forged himself. He amazed himself with how comfortable he felt using them, like they were an extension of himself.

Now, as a young adult under the tutelage of Philomese, he seeks his identity and to grow stronger in his commune with the lao spirits.