The younger son of the McCartney Meat Products dynasty, Ivan fell into a life of crime as an overreaction to his brother's craft, taught to Gerald by one of his private tutors - a mechanomancer. At the tender age of eight, Ivan encountered one of his brother's earliest experiments, a clockwork in a cat's skin, which Ivan maintains to this day had escaped from Gerald's room. Gerald staunchly maintains the opposite, though with his memory problems it is impossible to be sure. In either case, this early encounter had Ivan thinking about a path as different from his brother's as he could take. Confusing mechanomancy with the trappings of privilege and civilisation his family appeared to be, Ivan turned to crime, and was safely ensconced in juvie for the second time by his fifteenth birthday, an act which led to their father's decisive disowning and disinheriting of him.
It was while in juvie that he met Alex Dulane, and the two quickly realised they had a lively partnership available to them - Alex's budding talent with locks matched with Ivan's careful watchfulness and physical ability. Over the next few years the pair travelled the States, doing what they could. It was during these travels that Ivan first found himself treading the path of the Pilgrim. While on the open road, Ivan had an open mind toward the possibility of magic - a consequence of his early childhood - and amassed a small store of knowledge about the occult underground. It wasn't long before he recognised his travels as a Pilgrim for more or less what they were.
Ivan's parents passed away when he was twenty-four; during the last four years, Ivan has been working on and off for his brother as part of a group Gerald maintains for the purpose of obtaining artefacts for use in his creations. When all else fails, Ivan and Alex form an unorthodox acquisitions branch, travelling with Gerald, an unorthodox bibliomantic trucker by the name of Dane Corso, an English paranormalist stung by a false medium in her childhood, and a scholar of occult practices the two criminals refer to as 'Geekboy'.
Ivan wants to be accepted back into the family by his brother, the sole heir to the fortune, but refuses to give up his criminal connections. A romantic man, he sees a glamour to the life that it perhaps does not possess; similarly, his view of himself as a true knight of the road often causes confusion among the group.