Blood Rites (The Dresden Files #6) - Jim Butcher Page 0,89
then began scratching a drawing of the lair on the parchment. Bob's voice, a little indistinct now, said, "You aren't going to like this."
"Why not?"
"It's a shelter."
"A homeless shelter?"
"Yeah," Bob said. "Does some rehab work with drug addicts, too."
"Stars and stones," I murmured. "How could vampires take something that public?"
"There's no real threshold on a public building, so they didn't need an invitation, I think they probably came in from Undertown, right into the shelter's basement."
"How many people have they hurt?"
Bob's pen flickered over the parchment. When I draw maps I usually end up with a series of lopsided squares and wavery lines and incomplete circles. Bob's drawing looked like it could have been done by da Vinci. "There were three bodies stacked up in a corner of the basement," Bob said. "A few of the shelter's staff had been made into rough thralls and are covering for them, sort of. Maybe half a dozen people hadn't been enthralled, but they were tied up and locked into a cedar closet."
"Any goons?"
"Big-time. Half a dozen Renfields, and each of them has a darkhound to boot."
"Renfields?" I asked.
"How in the world can you exist in this century and not know about Renfields?" Bob demanded. "You need a life, stat."
"I read the book. I know who Renfield was. I'm not familiar with the parlance for Renfield in the plural."
"Oh," Bob said. "What do you need to know?"
"Well. First off, what did they call them before Stoker published the book?" I asked.
"They didn't call them anything, Harry," Bob said in a tone of gentle patience. "That's why the White Court had Stoker publish the book. To tell people about them."
"Oh. Right." I rubbed at my eyes. "How do the vampires do their recruiting?"
"Mind-control magic," Bob said. "The usual."
"Always with the mental control," I muttered. "Let me make sure my facts are straight. Rough thralls just stand around looking blank until they get orders, right?"
"Yeah," Bob said, pen scratching. "Sort of like zombies, but they still have to go to the bathroom."
"So a Renfield is the fine version of thralldom?"
"No," Bob said. "A fine thrall is so controlled that they might not even know that they're a thrall at all, and it lasts long-term."
"Like what DuMorne did to Elaine."
"Uh, I guess so, yeah. Like that. That kind of thing takes a subtle hand, though. Enthralling someone also requires a lot of time and a certain amount of empathy, neither of which has been readily available to Mavra."
"So?" I said, getting impatient. "A Renfield is a…?"
Bob put the pen down. "It's the quick, dirty way for the Black Court to pick up some cheap muscle, Renfields have been crushed into total thralldom through brute psychic force."
"You're kidding," I said. "The kind of mental damage that would do to someone…"
"It destroys their sanity when it happens," Bob confirmed. "Makes them no good for anything but gibbering violence, but since that's pretty much what the vampires wanted to begin with it works out."
"How do you get them out of it?" I asked.
"You don't," Bob said. "The original Merlin couldn't undo it, and neither could any of the saints on record who have tried. A thrall can be freed, or recover over time. Renfields can't. From the moment their minds break they've got an expiration date."
"Ugh," I said. "What do you mean?"
"Renfields get more and more violent and deranged, and they self-destruct in a year or two. You can't fix them. For all practical purposes, they're already dead."
I went over the facts in my head, and admired how much uglier the situation had just become. Over the years I've learned that ignorance is more than just bliss. It's freaking orgasmic ecstasy. I glanced at Bob and said, "Are you sure about your facts?"
The cloud of orange light flowed tiredly back into the skull on its shelf. "Yes. DuMorne did quite a bit of research on the subject back in the day."
"Murphy isn't going to like this," I said. "Dismembering monsters with a chain saw is one thing. People are another."
"Yeah. People are easier."
"Bob," I growled. "They're people."
"Renfields aren't, Harry," Bob said. "They might still be moving around but they're pretty much gone."
"Boy, would it be fun to explain that to a courtroom," I said. I shuddered. "Or to the White Council, for that matter. If I take out the wrong person, I could wind up in jail—or in a White Council star chamber trial. Mavra's using the laws to protect herself against us. That's so backward."