Blood Rites characters

Appears from the start

Chicago's professional wizard, taking a paying job as a favor to the White Court vampire Thomas Raith: someone is killing the women around an adult film producer with an entropy curse, and Harry goes undercover on the production to stop it. At the same time an old enemy from the Black Court is hunting him in earnest. Between the two cases, this book digs into the deepest questions of Harry's life - who his mother was, why she died, and what family he might still have - and leaves him permanently changed in body and in heart.

Appears from the start

The White Court vampire who has kept turning up at Harry's side since Bianca's masquerade, now calling in the acquaintance: he asks Harry to protect a film producer friend from a lethal curse. Thomas is vain, flippant, and deliberately hard to take seriously, an incubus who feeds on desire and lives under the contempt of his own family. Why he keeps risking himself for a wizard he barely knows is a question Harry has never gotten a straight answer to - and this case finally answers it.

First appears in chapter 2

A shaggy gray puppy Harry ends up keeping after rescuing a litter of rare Foo dog pups from demonic pursuers at the book's opening. Small now, he will not stay that way. Quietly watchful and braver than any dog should be, the puppy - eventually named Mouse - becomes a permanent member of Harry's household alongside Mister the cat.

First appears in chapter 3

An aging, warm-hearted adult film producer and director striking out with his own independent production - and the target of an entropy curse that is killing the women connected to him, one by one. Genosa is a decent man in a disreputable business, genuinely loved by the people who work with him, and baffled about who would want him destroyed. The answer lies in whom he intends to marry.

First appears in chapter 5

The Archive's mercenary bodyguard, hired on by Harry for a different kind of job: a daylight raid on a nest of Black Court vampires. Kincaid is precise, professional, and cheerfully mercenary about terms, with a depth of experience against the undead that no ordinary gunman could have - and unsettling hints keep surfacing that his own nature is something other than human. He and Murphy strike sparks.

First appears in chapter 4

The ancient Black Court sorceress who survived Bianca's masquerade and has come to collect the grudge. Mavra's scourge of vampires is hunting Harry, and she is the reason he plans the most dangerous raid of his career. A centuries-old corpse with a wizard's command of magic, she is among the deadliest single creatures Harry has ever faced, and killing things like her is the reason the Black Court is nearly extinct - nearly.

First appears in chapter 6

Head of Special Investigations and Harry's partner in all but title. When Harry needs someone he trusts absolutely for the raid on the Black Court nest, he asks Murphy - and tells her the truth about what they will be walking into. Off duty and out of her jurisdiction, she fights with a soldier's discipline in the dark, and the raid marks how far she has come from the detective who once arrested Harry over things she could not believe.

First appears in chapter 11

Thomas's eldest sister: poised, dazzling, and the sharpest political mind in the White Court. Lara manages the public face of her family's power in the entertainment industry, and beneath the silk she is a predator of patience and precision who plays a longer game than almost anyone around her. Events in this book hand her an opportunity, and she does not waste it.

Also known as The White King

First appears in chapter 12

Lord Raith, king of the White Court: Thomas and Lara's father, an incubus of legendary beauty and cruelty who has ruled his court for centuries by seduction, terror, and the quiet murder of rivals. He holds his children in elegant contempt and disposes of anyone who threatens him. His history is entangled with Harry's own family in ways Harry does not yet suspect, and his court's games turn out to run beneath the whole case.

First appears in chapter 15

Harry's old mentor from the Senior Council, the plainspoken Missouri farmer-wizard who taught him after the darkest passage of his youth. Ebenezar arrives to back Harry against the Black Court threat, but this reunion breaks something: Harry learns a truth about the old man's real office on the Council that upends what Ebenezar taught him about the Laws of Magic, and their bond, the closest thing Harry has to family trust, is left badly cracked.

Also known as Margaret LeFay

First appears in chapter 18

Harry's mother, dead since his birth, a wizard who ran with dangerous company and died under circumstances Harry has never understood. In this book she is no longer just an absence: the case keeps turning up threads of her life - where she went in her wild years, whom she knew, and what she left behind for her son to find. What Harry learns about her redraws his entire sense of who he is.