Nicolas Anderson
/ The RabbitMan

Nicolas was born in 1997. His mother, Anna Grace, was not well from the beginning — she told him constantly that he had a good father, that the man would come and take care of them both, that things would get better. The father never came. When Nicolas was six, his mother drove into something at speed and was ruled legally drunk at the scene. A psychiatric evaluation determined she was unfit to parent. She was committed to a facility in Washington State.

Nicolas was sent to an orphanage in the Great Lakes hill country, housed in a converted factory that had been abandoned for reasons no one explained. The building was old and poorly lit and the kind of place that shapes the people who grow up in it.

In the orphanage library he found a worn picture book called Where Is Mr. Rabbit? The story was simple: Mr. Rabbit punished the wicked and protected the good. Nicolas believed it completely. He believed in justice the way children believe in things before the world has had a chance to demonstrate its actual structure.

At eighteen he entered NYU Law School on merit, majoring in criminology and international law. He joined the FBI after graduation and was good at the work — methodical, precise, socially fluent in the specific way that makes people tell you things they intended to keep. He thought he had found what he was looking for.

In 2019, Director Anderson recruited him into the GIA, which Nicolas understood to be something beyond law enforcement — an organization that confronted evil directly, without the procedural constraints that let so many cases dissolve into nothing. He arrived expecting something closer to justice than what he had.

What he found instead, case by case, was the same machinery in a different building. A suspect in a child abuse case released on a technicality. The wealthy buyers in a human trafficking network attending charity galas the following weekend. An eight-year-old girl possessed by a demon, executed — while the father who had facilitated her abuse received compensation as a victim. The law protected power. The GIA eliminated the powerless. The pattern was consistent and it did not change.

Nicolas waited for Mr. Rabbit to appear. Mr. Rabbit did not appear.

In 2023, his mother died in the psychiatric facility. When he went to collect her belongings, he found a gift that had been sent to her — the handwriting on the card was unmistakably Anderson's. Nicolas stood there for a long time, working through the implications.

After that, something that had been held in place for a long time was no longer held in place.

If the law would not punish the guilty, then he would be the law. If Mr. Rabbit did not exist, then he would become Mr. Rabbit.

The RabbitMan appeared in Manhattan shortly after — moving through the city at night, leaving behind scenes that were carefully chosen to be impossible to ignore. Nicolas needs thirteen hearts from the guilty to summon the Seventh Sin of Wrath. He intends to use what follows to tear the rotting order down to its foundation.

During the day he is punctual, well-dressed, and unfailingly polite. He makes excellent conversation. His handshake is firm. His eyes, if you look at them for a moment too long, are completely still in a way that most people's eyes are not.

Most people don't look for that long.