Small Favor characters

Appears from the start

Chicago's wizard and Warden, enjoying a rare stretch of quiet - which ends when the Queen of Winter comes to collect. Harry still owes Mab two favors from an old bargain, and the one she calls in drops him between the Winter and Summer Courts, the city's underworld, and the return of the worst enemies he has: the Knights of the Blackened Denarius. Something is also subtly wrong with his own magic, a gap he cannot quite see - and working out who arranged that, and why, is part of the game.

Also known as Queen of Air and Darkness

First appears in chapter 4

The Queen of the Winter Court, holder of two favors Harry has owed since she bought his debt years ago. Mab appears in person to call in the second: Harry will act as her Emissary and protect - of all people - John Marcone. Her motives, as always, are layered beneath centuries of ice; she gives Harry neither reasons nor mercy, and some of her help arrives in forms that look, until the last moment, exactly like sabotage.

First appears in chapter 3

Sergeant Karrin Murphy, Harry's partner in everything the law has no words for. She works the Marcone abduction from the mortal side, walks knowingly into a war between fallen angels and faerie queens, and in the book's darkest hour proves - in a way that surprises everyone, herself included - exactly what kind of person can hold a holy blade.

First appears in chapter 2

Chicago's crime lord - recently become the first ordinary mortal to sign the Unseelie Accords as a freeholding lord, making him a recognized power among the supernatural nations. When he is taken from a fortified panic room by enemies who went through his defenses like paper, his abduction is the small favor of the title: Mab wants him found and protected, and Harry has to swallow years of enmity to do it. Even as a prisoner, Marcone plays a cold, disciplined long game.

First appears in chapter 8

Marcone's security consultant: a tall, blonde, terrifyingly capable woman who is far more than human - a valkyrie on contract from Monoc Securities. Gard's professional loyalty to Marcone survives his abduction, and her knowledge of the powers in play, her runes, and her axe make her one of the most valuable allies in the hunt for her employer.

First appears in chapter 6

Knight of the Cross, bearer of Amoracchius, Harry's oldest ally in the war against the Denarians - and a father and husband whose family has already paid dearly for his calling. When Nicodemus and the coins return, Michael takes the field with his usual unshakable faith. The question that has always hung over the Knights - how far God's protection extends, and what happens when the plan requires a sacrifice - has never pressed harder than it does in this book.

First appears in chapter 10

The agnostic Russian Knight of the Cross, bearer of Esperacchius, cheerful in the face of horrors that would break most soldiers. Sanya arrives to stand with Michael and Harry against the Denarians he once served, bringing his rifle, his good humor, and his firsthand understanding of what the coins do to the people who carry them.

Also known as Ivy

First appears in chapter 12

The Archive - the living sum of everything humanity has ever written - still vested in a small, solemn girl whom Harry calls Ivy. Bound to absolute neutrality, she is summoned to preside over a formal parley under the Accords when the Denarian crisis becomes a matter between nations. Her power is oceanic; her situation - one child, neutral, alone, and unique - is precisely the kind of thing an enemy who thinks in millennia knows how to exploit.

First appears in chapter 12

The Archive's bodyguard, the mercenary who has kept her alive through everything her office attracts. Kincaid fights the book's battles with his usual meticulous, inhuman competence, and his bond with his young charge - gruff, unsentimental, and absolute - is tested by the worst thing that has ever happened on his watch.

First appears in chapter 15

The two-thousand-year-old leader of the Order of the Blackened Denarius, back in Chicago with his wife Tessa, his daughter Deirdre, and a full muster of coin-bound fallen angels. Nicodemus abducted Marcone as an opening move in a scheme aimed at a far greater prize, and he negotiates, betrays, and murders with the genial patience of a man who has been winning for twenty centuries. The noose at his throat remains one of the few things in creation that can hurt him.

First appears in chapter 5

Harry's apprentice, whose subtle magic - veils and senses - now has real polish, and whose greatest contribution to this case is noticing something everyone else missed: a precise, surgical absence in Harry's own behavior. Molly stays largely behind the lines of the book's battles, but her perception changes the course of the endgame.

First appears in chapter 46

A quiet man pushing a mop in a hospital corridor, who turns out to be something else entirely: Uriel, an archangel, appearing to Harry in the aftermath of the book's battles. Softly spoken and precise about the limits of what he may do, he confirms the nature of the new silver-white fire that has crept into Harry's magic, and leaves Harry with the sense that the war he can see is a small corner of a much larger one.