Some characters creep up on you. They slip into the background, hovering at the edges of your mind until one day they demand your full attention. Dacey Menet kicked the door down. She crawled naked out of a crematorium oven with wings made of fire, looked around the room, and said, “Damn it! Did I die again?”
I knew right then she was going to be unforgettable.
Who Is Dacey Menet?
Dacey is a fixer – a subcontractor for a regional supernatural government agency called the Conclave. Her job is to investigate, track, and neutralize threats to the Mythical world. She’s sharp, fearless, and carries more weapons on her body than most people keep in their homes. She can strap a blade to her calf, a gun to her hip, and still look like a preschool teacher if the mission calls for it.
She’s also a bennu shifter. Which means she can die, be set on fire, and come back to life with a bang – literally.
When she’s not regenerating from the dead or tracking down killers across the Florida panhandle, she’s stealing your fries, charming your mother, and calling you a nickname you specifically asked her not to use. She’s infuriating and magnetic in equal measure.
Dacey is the person who walks into a room and immediately takes charge – not because she craves power, but because she’s seen what happens when no one steps up. She’s fierce, she’s funny, and she will absolutely threaten to eviscerate you if you call her Candy.
Born From the Ashes: The Mythology Behind the Bennu
When I sat down to build Dacey’s supernatural identity, I didn’t want another cookie-cutter phoenix. I wanted something older, deeper, and rooted in real mythology. That search led me to the bennu bird of ancient Egypt, and I was captivated.
The bennu was one of the most sacred creatures in Egyptian mythology, believed to be the ba, the living soul, of the sun god Ra himself. The ancient Egyptians depicted the bennu as a magnificent grey heron, often crowned with the sun disk or the Atef crown of Osiris. It was worshipped in Heliopolis, the great City of the Sun, alongside deities like Ra, Atum, and Osiris.
According to creation mythology, the bennu flew over the primordial waters of Nun before the world existed. It landed on the sacred Benben stone – the first solid ground to emerge from the watery void – and let out a single, piercing cry. That cry broke the eternal silence and sparked creation itself. The bennu literally called the world into being.
Its name derives from the Egyptian verb wbn, meaning “to rise in brilliance” or “to shine.” Its titles included “He Who Came Into Being by Himself” and “Lord of Jubilees.” The bennu represented the daily rebirth of the sun: each morning rising renewed, an eternal promise that light would always return after darkness.
The bennu was also intimately connected to Osiris and the cycle of death and resurrection. After Osiris was murdered and dismembered by Set, it was the bennu’s regenerative essence that aided in his restoration. The bird appeared on funerary scarab amulets as a symbol of rebirth; a talisman of hope for the dead.
When the Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt in the fifth century BC, the priests at Heliopolis described a sacred bird to him – one that lived five hundred years before dying and being reborn. Herodotus wrote about it with red and gold plumage reminiscent of the sun, and the Greek world transformed the bennu into their own legend: the phoenix.
But the phoenix is the cover version. The bennu is the original.
That distinction matters deeply to Dacey. As she tells Gideon: “My people believe that the Greeks and Romans used the bennu to create their own myths of the phoenix. I prefer the term bennu because I can transform into a heron, so that name is more accurate.” She’s protective of her heritage, and rightly so. The bennu’s story is older and richer than most people realize, and Dacey carries that ancient legacy in her blood and her fire.
A Fixer Who Breaks the Mold
Here’s what I love most about writing Dacey: she defies expectation at every turn.
When Gideon first sees her emerge from the crematorium oven – naked, ash-covered, and annoyed – he assumes she must be an angel. Or maybe a demon. She’s neither. She’s a woman with a job to do and a killer to catch, and she has zero time for existential crises that aren’t her own.
Dacey doesn’t soften herself for anyone’s comfort. She demands car keys, gives orders, and makes threats that are only partially jokes. She calls Gideon “dude” despite his repeated protests. She nicknames him “Giddy” and shows absolutely no remorse about it.
But here’s the thing: beneath all that bravado is someone who cares deeply.
She calls George’s widow, Isabel, even though she’s dreading it. She visits the parents of every victim to look them in the eye and tell them what really happened to their children. She pulls rank to stay by Gideon’s side when he’s airlifted to a burn center. She may act like an unstoppable force of nature, but the people she loves? She will burn the world down for them.
And I mean that literally.
The Dynamic With Gideon
I can’t talk about Dacey without talking about Gideon Bean, and the beautiful, awkward, slow-burn dynamic between them.
Gideon is everything Dacey isn’t: quiet, cautious, and painfully self-deprecating. He works two dead-end jobs, lives with his mom, and has spent years believing he was mentally ill because he could see things no one else could. Where Dacey charges in, Gideon hesitates. Where she demands, he deflects.
And yet, from the moment she crawls out of that oven, there’s a spark (pun very much intended).
Their dynamic crackles with banter. She jumps for his car keys; he holds them above her head. She threatens him; he gives it right back. She calls him Giddy; he fires back with Candy and watches the annoyance bloom across her face like he’s scored a direct hit.
They push each other’s buttons with expert precision, and underneath all the verbal sparring, there’s something tender trying to take root. Dacey sees Gideon’s potential before he does. She believes in what he can become when he’s still trying to convince himself he’s nobody special.
It’s not a love story; not yet. It’s the foundation of one. It’s two people who are drawn to each other’s edges, orbiting closer with every snarky exchange and every moment of unexpected vulnerability.
Dacey would probably describe their relationship as “professional with an annoying side of feelings.” And then she’d change the subject.
Fire as Identity
Writing a character whose power is fire – whose very survival depends on being burned – gave me something rich to explore thematically.
Dacey’s relationship with fire isn’t metaphorical. It is the most intimate thing in her life. Fire is how she dies and how she’s reborn. It is simultaneously her destruction and her salvation. She carries a lighter and accelerant not as weapons, but as a resurrection kit. She hands them to Gideon with the casual instruction: “If something happens to me, your number one priority is to get me somewhere secluded and set me on fire.”
There’s something beautiful and terrifying about a woman who has died multiple times and treats it with the same irritation most people reserve for a flat tire. When Gideon asks what happens when she dies… does she see a light? Her grandmother? She just says there’s nothing. A blank void, and then she’s waking up on fire.
That nonchalance is a shield, of course. Dying is never nothing, even when you come back. But Dacey doesn’t dwell, because dwelling doesn’t catch killers.
Why Dacey Matters to Me
Every character I write carries a piece of something I’m working through, and Dacey is about resilience. Not the pretty, inspirational-poster kind, but the messy, sharp-elbowed kind. The kind where you die – metaphorically or literally – and you get back up and keep going, even when you’re tired, even when you’re grieving, even when the mission seems impossible.
Dacey doesn’t wait for permission. She doesn’t ask for help unless she needs it, and when she does, she’s strategic about it. She makes hard phone calls. She does the emotional labor. She shows up for the people who matter.
She also steals your breakfast, insults your car, and threatens bodily harm with a mischievous grin. We contain multitudes.
Get to Know Dacey
If you haven’t met Dacey yet, Gideon Bean is where the fire starts. By the end, she’ll have charmed your mom, insulted your vehicle, and made you desperately want to see what happens next.
She’d tell you not to get attached. She’d also show up at your crematorium a month later, dressed like a librarian, and throw herself into your arms saying she missed you.
Ignore the first part. Get attached anyway.