Meet the principal dramatis personae of The Midnight Front.
Cade Martin
At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Cade is just starting his third year of study at Oxford University in England. When the young American man and his parents try to flee England ahead of the coming conflict, their journey home takes a tragic turn: his parents are killed, and Cade nearly shares their fate. Rescued by a motley band of sorcerers known as the Midnight Front—the Allies’ top-secret magickal warfare program, created to disrupt the Nazis’ own black-magick cult, the Thule Society—Cade becomes an apprentice and secret soldier on the most secretive and bizarre front of the entire war.
Anja Kernova
Born to a poor family in a remote logging town in northwestern Russia, Anja was cast out of her home at the age of 13 in the wake of her brother’s murder—a tragedy she could not have prevented, but of which her mother refuses to absolve her. Taken under the protective wing of master sorcerer Adair Macrae, Anja has not been what one might call a natural in the Art of Magick, but she is resolute and determined, and extremely eager to use her skills as both a magician and a sharpshooter against the Nazis. Once Cade joins the Midnight Front, however, she soon comes to resent the favoritism shown to him by Adair.
Father Luis Roderigo Pérez
A native of Brazil, Luis was raised in the Jesuit tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. He entered the seminary in the 1920s, and served as a Catholic missionary to Imperial Japan in the early 1930s. Soon after his return from Japan, his superiors transferred him to Monte Albano, a monastery for the research and practice of White Magick. In 1954 he was sent to retrieve the Iron Codex from Anja Kernova. After completing that mission, he came to regret his actions and repented by freeing Anja and Cade Martin from Vatican custody, and helping them escape with the Iron Codex. He spent the following decade in seclusion, studying both the Pauline and Goetic arts, making him one of history’s few confirmed “gray” magicians.
Adair MacRae
Born in 1583 Scotland, Adair is a hulking vulgarian with voracious appetites, a short temper, and a fierce will to protect the Art of Magick from corruption by the Nazis or destruction by those who would see it erased from the face of the earth. With his faithful familiar, a raven he calls Kutcha, he leads the Midnight Front, a top-secret magickal warfare group he created at the request of Prime Minister Churchill. But the fight is going badly for his band of young sorcerers. By the time he recruits Cade Martin, he has only three other adepts left to send against the enemy—and he knows the Nazi “dabblers” outnumber them a hundred to one….
Nikostratos Le Beau
The son of a Greek mother and a French-Algerian father, Niko is a cheerful and good-natured man. He is driven by a desire for justice, a fascination with the beauty of magick, and his love for his younger sister, Camille. Niko’s chief fault is that he’s impatient. Impulsive by nature, he is not one to make complicated plans; he prefers just to do things and see how they shake out. He is very much a man driven by his emotions.
Stefan Van Ausdall
A young man from the Netherlands, he is in his early twenties but dresses like a banker twice his age. He is soft-spoken and a stickler for manners and etiquette. Jewish by upbringing, he had intended to study Kabbalah with his lover, Evert, but the two men’s paths diverged when Stefan succumbed to the siren call of ceremonial magick. Though he seems mild by nature, Stefan is a powerful karcist, one who exhibits a particular talent for illusions and deceptions, but who can also wield terrifying and deadly powers.
Kein Engel
Impeccable and handsome, with chiseled features and keen fashion sense, Kein is a master karcist and a contemporary of Adair Macrae. He might even be a few years older than the gruff Scotsman, but he looks a decade or two younger. He is verbose and prone to quoting literature or poetry. He has sophisticated appetites: he savors rare wines and gourmet cuisine, and he revels in fine art and music.
Kein is also cunning, cruel, vindictive, and utterly ruthless. He blames humanity’s embrace of Science and the Industrial Revolution for the degradation of society, and he foresees an environmental catastrophe many decades before anyone else—but his solution to the world’s ills is, it seems, to kill the patient in order to save it.
Briet Segfrunsdóttir
A native of Iceland, Briet is one of Kein’s two adepts and arguably the more disciplined and powerful. She has a rat familiar named Trixim, and is skilled in a wide range of magickal styles and techniques. Even moreso than her master, Briet is a strategist. She has a knack for reading a situation and predicting when the time has come to abandon bad positions for future gain. Though she is loath to admit it even to herself, she is far more interested in her own survival than in her master’s apocalyptic crusade.
Siegmar Tuomainen
Sadistic and driven, Siegmar is a true spiritual fellow-traveler with his master, Kein. He envies the power wielded by his fellow adept Briet, and he resents being tasked with tedious missions, as he thinks that such drudgery is beneath him. A native of Finland, he is at heart an authoritarian and a fascist, and more of a true believer in the Nazis’ cause than are his master or Briet. Well educated and widely read, he is an excellent karcist, one not to be underestimated.
