This is a subpage of Thorn Universe listing characters from Dora Wilk Series and Shaman Blues.
The muggles of Thornverse are largely oblivious to the existence of the supernatural, even if some of them may be vaguely aware that there's something off lurking about. However, thanks to extensive interbreeding between magicals and humans, some people manifest minor magical powers and there is a certain overlap between the two groups.
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Anita
Anita Czarny
Dora's commanding officer in the police force. Anita rules the so-called "Animal Kingdom" division, keeping in check a bunch of defective, yet ridiculously successful detectives, with an iron fist. One of the few woman Dora genuinely doesn't want to anger, Anita has no idea about magic, but knows that when strangeness abounds, she has to turn to Wilk or Witkacy.
- A Mother to Her Men: A stern mother, sure, but she's ready to defend her subordinates from whatever comes their way.
- Badass Normal: She has a steely glare and an attitude that makes Dora fear her.
- Da Chief: Has shades of this sometimes, as when pressing Dora to wrap up a politically-volatile case without further antagonizing. She takes Dora's side more often, though.
- Iron Lady: Proper, intense, and capable of subduing experienced cops with a glare alone.
- Lady of War: An Iron Lady who's a police officer.
- Muggle: She doesn't have any magical ability.
- Prim and Proper Bun: Wears one.
- Rag Tag Bunch Of Misfits: Her unit, called the "Animal Kingdom" because of how many oddballs and difficult cases it has.
- The Bus Came Back: She returns in Exorcisms of Dora Wilk to tell Dora she didn't fire her and bring her fully on the case of supernatural serial killer.
- The Captain: In the police, but a captain nevertheless.
- Turn in Your Badge: A strange example. She suspends Dora, technically doing this, but that's because she doesn't want to fire her.
Bogna
Bogna
A coroner at Dora's police station, and a woman very dedicated to her job. She's capable of seeing death auras and reading last moments of life off people's corpses, but fears this ability and hides it from everone around her, thinking herself a singular freak.- A Day in the Limelight: The short story Moving Shadows is this for her, exploring what it's like to be a muggle-born almost-magical with no contact with regular human community.
- All the Other Reindeer: How she felt when studying medicine, as others ostracized her for her affinity to the dead. This ended when she transferred to forensic medicine.
- Aura Vision: She can see auras, especially on dead people.
- Autopsy Snack Time: She's sometimes seen eating shortly before or shortly after autopsy.
- Blessed with Suck: She can see how a person died, but if she doesn't find a tangible proof, she has to let the true victim go. Auras can also impact her stronger than she wants - when she sees Baal for the first time, she nearly has a panic attack.
- Granola Girl: Apart from magic, she also worries greatly about healthy food, good lifestyle and whether her son doesn't eat too many snacks.
- Herald: Brings Dora in on the case of demonically-killed women.
- Psychometry: She can see cause of death and some glimpses of dead person's last moments when touching them.
- The Coroner: Works as one for the police.
- The Call Knows Where You Live: Some time after she refuses Dora to introduce her to magic, her son is attacked by something he describes as "strange wind". Bogna decides to answer the Call for his sake.
- Refusal of the Call: When Dora tells her she's a magical and offers to introduce her to the community, Bogna refuses, terrified of magic.
- Welcomed to the Masquerade: Dora introduces her to the world of magic and sends Katia to finish the formalities.
- You Are Not Alone: What Dora tells her after she realizes that Bogna's always thought herself a freak.
Krzysztof
Krzysztof
Dora's good friend in traffic police, who provides her with information on cars, as well as helps her deal with the aftermath of her Drives Like Crazy tendencies. He has no idea of the existence of magical world until his daughter Maja starts to manifest powers and he calls Dora, knowing that she's an expert on all things unusual.- Alliterative Family: He's the only one to break out - his wife is Monika and his daughters are Malina and Maja.
- Bit Character: He's the most developed of Dora's network of informants.
- Doting Parent: Absolutely loves his daughters.
- Friend on the Force: He helps Dora track down cars and nullifies her traffick bills.
- Gentle Giant: He's a big, bulky guy, but genuinely nice and a family man.
- Happily Married: Him and Monika are a very happy couple.
- Muggle: Likely subverted, as while he doesn't manifest any powers, his daughter does.
- Optional Traffic Laws: Provides Dora with this.
Claudia
Claudia
A daughter of two magicals from Thorn. She was, however, born without any magical ability whatsoever and, out of jealousy, reached for black magic to give herself powers. Dora's hired to track her down when she runs off with a vampire boyfriend.- Abusive Offspring: Going by Dora's impression of her mother, Claudia was the one abusing her parents, what with poisoning their land with Black Magic (her mother's something of a Genius Loci) and emotionally torturing them for giving birth to a muggle daughter.
- Ambition Is Evil: She wants to have power, and she's ready to go on a murder spree for it.
- A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: She pretends being so enamored with her beloved, she's been only doing what he asked of her, while in fact, she was the one behind their killing spree.
- Black Magic: She goes to sacrifices and trapping spirits to gain supernatural power.
- Black Sheep: Her entire family are benevolent earth witches, while she herself is a Black Magic practicioner.
- Big Bad: Of the short story Wolf In Sheep's Clothing, being behind Bonawentura's killing spree.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: She feigns being a wounded little girl, too naive to realize that this big bad vampire was no good for her. In fact, she's a scheming manipulator who pushed Bonawentura into killing by seducing him.
- Creepy Child: She's a teenage girl who commits murder and dabbles in Black Magic.
- Driven by Envy: She wants power because she's envious of her family.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Extremely envious of other magicals' powers, and willing to kill to get hers.
- Muggle Born of Mages: Both of her parents are witches, but she herself was born with not a shred of a magical ability.
- Obviously Evil: Wears black, has real skulls and grimoires on Black Magic in her closet, and acts like a Spoiled Brat. It takes Dora seconds to see through her "naive, innocent girl" façade.
- Serial Killer: She took her boyfriend on a murder spree to fuel her magic.
- Spoiled Brat: Her parents have never complained to her about her lack of powers and doted on their only child. She still grew up bitter and ungrateful.
- The Resenter: She resents magic users for having powers she doesn't possess.
- The Vamp: She seduced Bonawentura so that he'd kill for her.
- Ungrateful Bastard: Doesn't care for her parents' love and devotion to her, only calling them bastards because they have magic and she doesn't. Made even more jerkassy by the fact that usually, when a situation like her crops up, the child is given up for an adoption by humans.
- Un-Sorcerer: She's a Muggle Born of Mages who was raised in Thorn, a city of magicals. She doesn't take it well.
- Unholy Matrimony: She's accompanied in her killing spree by her vampire boyfriend.
Alina
Dr. Alina Stawarska
A veterinarian running an animal shelter and animal help foundation "Four Paws". She used to be unaware of existence of magical world, but when Dora calls her to help with a pack of injured werewolves, she takes the revelation with calm resolve.
- Back-Alley Doctor: Back alley vet for the werewolves of Thorn and Alliance.
- Berserk Button: Any harm coming to animals. When she hears that Dora's busted a animal fights ringnote , she immediately demands being brough in on the case.
- Better with Non-Human Company: She prefers company of animals, would rather Bjorn stayed in his wolf form rather than turned into human and has nothing against two poachers dying if it protects her animals.
- Brass Balls: What Bjorn thinks of her when he learns that she stood up to three huge poachers in defence of an animal they've killed.
- Broken Bird: Something in her past made her extremely wary of men, to the point that she prefers a giant wolf walking around her house to a giant man, even though she knows they're the same person.
- Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: She initially complains when Bjorn arrives to protect her, even though she's under death threats.
- Dark and Troubled Past: The man she's been with before left a bad impression; bad enough that for the first few days, she prefers Bjorn to be around her only in his wolf form.
- Deadpan Snarker: Her most emotional reaction to the revelation that werewolves are real:Do they ask for permission before urinating on a hydrant?
- Friend to All Living Things: She has twenty dogs and an undisclosed number of other lame and injured animals that no-one else would take in, and loves caring for them. In return, they're extremely obedient and loyal to her.
- Honor Before Reason: Stands up for poached animals despite brothers of imprisoned poacher throwing thinly-veiled death threats at her.
- Interspecies Romance: With Bjorn, a werewolf.
- Kindly Vet: She's an excellent veterinarian who runs a foundation to help injured and homeless animals.
- Muggles Do It Better: When someone has to patch up werewolves, she, not someone with Healing Hands, is summoned.
- Muggle: Not even a little magical power.
- Secret-Keeper: She's a friend of Olaf's pack and keeps their secret.
- Single Woman Seeks Good Man: She falls for Bjorn when she learns of his caring, protective and Endearingly Dorky qualities.
- The Medic: For the werewolves, despite technically being a veterinarian.
- The Stoic: She mostly keeps her feelings in, and any sort of emotional turmoil on her part is rarely visible.
- Unfazed Everyman: She takes in the fact that werewolves exist with unflappable calm. Subverted in Four Paws, when it turns out she's still coming to terms with the fact, and just doesn't show it as much.
- Welcomed to the Masquerade: Dora introduces her to werewolves when she needs someone who'd know how to help a wolf.
Konstancja
Konstancja
Witkacy's ex-girlfriend from his student times. She ran away from him without any explanation and, years later, became a nurse at a hospital in Toruń. She can sense auras, and comes to Witkacy because something very similar to what she sensed in him is threatening children at her workplace and because she's worried that their daughter inherited Witkacy's "something".
- Amicable Exes: Double-subverted with Witkacy. At first, while he has feelings for her, he despises her because she ran away from him, and she in turn is extremely uncomfortable around him. As time goes on, though, they get more at ease with each other.
- Aura Vision: She can sense other people's auras, which is what drove her away from Witkacy - that and his spiral into drug abuse.
- Buffy Speak: She calls auras and magical abilities "the something".
- Dark Secret: She left Witkacy because she was pregnant with his child and didn't believe he could be a good father.
- Femme Fatale: Witkacy lampshades her as such - she's an attractive ex of the protagonist who pulls him into the intrigue by playing on his dormant feelings for her.
- First-Name Basis: The only person to call Witkacy Piotr. The meaning of this is inverted, though - for his friends, Witkacy is Only Known By His Nickname, and Konstancja using his given name shows the distance between them.
- Glamorous Single Mother: Skirts the edge of this trope and its aversion; she's a hard-working nurse at a hospital and raises a daughter alone, but has money for fairly fashionable clothes and Wiktoria doesn't seem neglected.
- Ghostly Chill: She can sense presence of ghosts as a drop in temperature.
- Herald: Brings Witkacy into the plot by knocking at his door.
- Hospital Hottie: She's an attractive nurse.
- Lady in Red: Every time Witkacy sees her, she's dressed almost wholly in red.
- My Secret Pregnancy: She hid being pregnant from the father of her child.
- Old Flame: For Witkacy. It's slowly getting reignited.
- The Masquerade Will Kill Your Dating Life: Without her knowledge of it, even. Her aura sense led to her detecting death magic on Witkacy and though neither knew what it was, it scared her into running away.
- The One That Got Away: Quite literally for Witkacy.
- The Reveal: She's had a daughter with Witkacy.
- The Scapegoat: The hospital blames her for children's death, as they don't believe it's a ghost.
- Working with the Ex: She's forced to work with Witkacy, as she believes him the only one capable of solving her problem.
Wiktoria
See Thorn Universe - Magicals (as a spoiler character)
Tadeusz
Tadeusz Dzwon
Brother of a supposed murder victim Anna Dzwon and currently a patient at a nursing house because of his medical issues. He pretends to be helpful to Witkacy, but is in fact terrified of the truth coming to light, as he's associated with Anna's case much closer than he lets on.- Bad Liar: He's so afraid Witkacy will discover something that he constantly slips and can't feign calm, leading Witkacy to searching his house and discovering the truth.
- Big Bad: He's behind child murders and Anna's disappearance.
- Evil All Along: He plays the part of an elderly nursing home patient, while in fact he's the one behind the murders.
- Evil Old Folks: He's an elderly man who kills children to become immortal.
- Immortality Immorality: He has Anna's wraith murder children so that he may become immortal.
- Immortality Seeker: His motive behind sending Anna to kill children is to save himself from dying of old age.
- No Immortal Inertia: He dies a few days after Anna is banished, as without her murders fuelling him, his body can't keep him going.
- Parental Favoritism: His and Anna's mother visibly favoured him, to the point of bonding Anna to him so that whatever bad happens to him, happens to her.
- Playing Sick: He's legitimately ill, but when Witkacy starts pressing for sensitive information, he feigns a sudden attack of his heart illness to get the detective out of the room.
- Psychic Link: Shares one with Anna courtesy of the Curse of Cain. She can send him life force this way.
- Serial Killer: By proxy; he has Anna kill for him. He was also her accomplice back in the sixties.
- The Man Behind the Man: Well, Behind the Woman: The man behind Anna's present-day murders.
- Unreliable Narrator: His description of Anna's first murder spree should be taken with a grain of salt; notably, he doesn't mention Anna as the murderess, only a victim.
- Would Hurt a Child: Has no problem siccing Anna at a hospital full of children.
- Your Soul Is Mine!: Feeds on childrens' souls to keep himself alive.
Róża
Róża
A middle-aged woman with the ability to see ghosts and knowledge of how to banish them. She can't hear ghost or lead them to the Other Side, though, but this didn't stop her from making money as a psychic. When a furious ghost comes to Witkacy demanding justice and her entire scam is exposed, she retreats into her house and prepares vengeance.- Ambition Is Evil: She starts dabbling in Black Magic and imprisons ghosts because she wants to get real power.
- Anti-Climax Boss: Despite all the magic being flung around in the final confrontation, she's killed by a bullet to the chest.
- Beneath Notice: She's been experimenting with Black Magic for over a decade and no-one noticed because she wasn't deemed capable of pulling something like this off.
- Big Bad: She's behind the appearance of "gutsies", a small army of deranged poltergeists.
- Black Magic: She uses sacrifice and deals with creatures from beyond to gain power.
- Dark Is Evil: She conducts her rituals in the dark, had the windows covered not to let in any light, and the walls inside her house are painted pitch black.
- Evil Is Petty: She foregoes her plans of hiding her involvement in Black Magic to get back at Witkacy for ruining her Phony Psychic career.
- Human Sacrifice: Implied; there's a small pile of bones found in her basement.
- Lack of Empathy: She doesn't seem to be capable of empathizing with people, dead or alive.
- Necromancer: Of a different variety than Katia; rather than raise the dead, she can use borrowed power to bind ghosts.
- I See Dead People: She can see ghosts.
- Phony Psychic: While she sees ghosts, she can't hear them. She used to present herself to owners of a haunted house as a person who can talk with the deceased and propose that it'd dictate her its final message before she helps it pass on to the afterlife. As a matter of fact, she would make up he "final message" from whole cloth and then cast a simple charm that would banish the ghost out of the house.
- Powered by a Forsaken Child: Her constructs are powered by trapped and captured ghosts.
- Revenge: She goes after Witkacy to get a revenge after he exposed her as a Phony Psychic.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: For most ghosts, leaving their haunting zone equals Cessation of Existence. But it gives her money, so who cares about the dead?
- Worf Effect: She easily subdues Dora and Katia, both experienced magicals, to show how dangerous she is.
Irena
Irena
Head of the Polish branch of the Order of Shadows, and an accomplished assassin herself. She's also Nikita's mother, and tries hard to hide it- Abusive Mom: She would do stuff like withholding food from Nikita to make her train, and fired all people who'd show Nikita a shred of kindness.
- Archnemesis Mom: To Nikita, after the girl realizes just how much emotional control her mother has over her.
- Asskicking Leads to Leadership: She got to the rank she currently holds by being excellent at her job.
- Badass Normal: She's a human, but managed to achieve top rank in a profession largely populated by creatures tougher and stronger than her.
- Control Freak: She wants to control every part of her daughter's life, and is annoyed when Nikita foils her attempts. To this effect she's assigned her seventeen partners over the last three years, and the last one she's sent had a two tracking chip to let Irena keep track of Nikita.
- Dark Secret: She treats Nikita's ties to her as one, and hides them.
- Denied Food as Punishment: She'd do this to Nikita to make her learn.
- Domestic Abuse: Ernest has been doing this to her, which is why she ran away from him.
- Evil Matriarch: She's Nikita's mother and very much a villainous character to her.
- Follow in My Footsteps: She's always wanted Nikita to become an assassin like her, to the point of taking her to assist her with her jobs when the girl was six.
- Ice Queen: Cold and emotionless. The most she expresses throughout the novel is annoyance.
- Jerkass: Has no trouble ordering her daughter shoot her half-brother, and acts like an overbearing, condescending control freak to Nikita.
- Lady of War: Graceful, reserved professional assassin.
- Muggle Born of Mages: She apparently comes from a bloodline in which magic manifest only in every second generation. She had the bad luck to be in the non-magical one, and she resents it greatly.
- Parental Neglect: When Ernest kidnapped Nikita and sent Irena two of his daughter's severed fingers as a proof. Irena ignored it, and continues to treat Nikita with indifference, because the girl doesn't have any powers (as far as Irena knows).
- Parental Favoritism: Seems to be the case, considering how, when running away from Ernest, she took Nikita but not Ture. In the present day, it's mellowed out, and is more like parental abandonment.
- Professional Killer: The head of a whole order of those.
- Properly Paranoid: She's spent Nikita's entire childhood running away, changing their place of living every year or so, and working hard to gain a high position - and protection - in the Order of Shadows. The moment Nikita settled down for a longer while, she got kidnapped.
- Vicariously Ambitious: Having no magic herself, she's poured all of her ambitions into her daughter, aiming to make her a magical Super-Soldier. The moment it turned out Nikita has no powers, she completely lost interest.
spoiler character
Ture
Nikita's twin brother, who stayed with Ernest while Irena has taken Nikita with her. Years later, he arrives in Wars to have his revenge on the mother who's left him with a monster of a father.- Always Identical Twins: Averted; him and Nikita are as different as night and day.
- Anti-Climax Boss: The final confrontation with him takes less than a minute.
- Badass Normal: He's able to go against berserk Nikita and various other supernatural threats of Wars and Sawa while being nothing more than a regular human - and that's not mentioning that he's somehow managed to survive growing up with Ernest.
- Big Bad: Of the first The Girl from the Miracles District book.
- Do Not Call Me "Paul": His birth name is Erwin, as in his father's culture, children are called after the first few leters of the father's name. Much like Nikita, he's changed his name to distance himself from Ernest.
- Fiery Redhead: Red-headed and with a short temper.
- Forgiven, but Not Forgotten: After his death, he forgives Nikita for killing him, but implies that he'll continue to plague her as a spectre.
- Kansas City Shuffle: His plan - to distract Nikita with a perceived danger and attack one person she wouldn't think threatened.
- Hair-Trigger Temper: He has a short fuse, to say the least.
- Herald: Gives Nikita a Mysterious Note that serves as the Sequel Hook.
- Long Haired Prettyboy: He has long hair, and one witness describes him as looking like a male model.
- Long-Lost Relative: He's Nikita's twin brother, and they both meet while they're in their early thirties.
- Separated at Birth: With Nikita. While Irena ran away with her, Ernest kept Ture.
- The Villain Knows Where You Live: He tracks down Nikita's hideouts with alarming ease.
- We Can Rule Together: Biefly tries to sway Nikita to his cause during their confrontation. Unfortunately, her mother's emotional programming prevails.
- We Hardly Knew Ye: He keeps to the shadows for most of the book, and the confrontation with him is very brief; he seems to be moving in the direction of Posthumous Character.
