Changes: The Dresden Files, Book 12 recap

Susan Rodriguez calls Harry with the truth she hid for years: they have a daughter, Maggie, and the Red Court has taken her. Duchess Arianna Ortega means to sacrifice the girl in a bloodline curse that will kill everyone of Harry's blood - and its true target is the line's eldest, Ebenezar McCoy, revealed to Harry as his own grandfather and the Council's secret assassin, the Blackstaff. Stripped of everything as the Red Court burns his office and home, and paralyzed by a broken back, Harry takes the bargain he swore he never would: he becomes Mab's Winter Knight in exchange for the power to save his daughter. With Susan, Martin, Murphy, Sanya, Molly, Thomas, Mouse, and his faerie godmother Lea, Harry assaults the Red King's ritual at Chichen Itza. Martin is revealed as a traitor and engineers his own death at Susan's hands, turning her into a full vampire - so Harry kills her on the altar, and the hijacked curse annihilates the entire Red Court worldwide. Maggie is placed safely with trusted friends. Then, back in Chicago, an unseen sniper shoots Harry, and he falls into Lake Michigan and sinks. The book ends with his death.

Previously in the series: Harry Dresden, Chicago's professional wizard and a Warden of the White Council, has spent years at the center of the Council's war with the Red Court of vampires - a war that began when he burned down a Red noble's house to rescue his lover, the reporter Susan Rodriguez. Susan was half-turned by the vampires: she gained their strength and thirst but has never killed, which is all that keeps her human. She refused Harry's proposal and left to fight the Red Court with the Fellowship of St. Giles, a network of the half-turned. Harry killed Duke Ortega of the Red Court in a formal duel, making lasting enemies. His circle includes Karrin Murphy of Chicago PD; his apprentice Molly Carpenter; the medical examiner Waldo Butters; Bob the skull; his temple dog Mouse; his old mentor Ebenezar McCoy of the Senior Council; and Thomas Raith of the White Court - secretly his half-brother. Queen Mab of the Winter Court has long wanted Harry as her Winter Knight, an offer he keeps refusing because the mantle corrupts its bearers. Recently a traitor inside the Council was exposed and killed, proving the shadowy Black Council is real; the Warden Morgan died taking the blame to protect the Council's unity; and word has begun to circulate of peace negotiations between the exhausted Council and the Red Court.

Susan Rodriguez calls Harry with news that rewrites his life twice in one sentence: they have a daughter, and the Red Court has taken her. Maggie is eight years old; Susan hid the pregnancy and the child from Harry - and from their enemies - by placing her with foster families and telling no one, and now the vampires have found her anyway. Susan and her Fellowship partner Martin arrive in Chicago to hunt for leads, and the reunion is raw: Harry's fury at being kept from his daughter's existence collides with Susan's certainty that secrecy was the only protection she could give. The kidnapping traces to Duchess Arianna Ortega of the Red Court, widow of the duke Harry killed in a duel years ago. Before Harry can even get his footing, the enemy demonstrates how thoroughly he is outmatched: his office building is destroyed, burned with his wards barely slowing the attackers, and it becomes clear the Red Court is systematically stripping away his resources and lines of retreat. Whatever Arianna wants Maggie for, she is willing to spend enormous effort making sure the girl's father cannot interfere.

Harry takes the fight to official channels and finds them closed. At Edinburgh he petitions the White Council for help recovering Maggie, but the Council - bled white by the war and maneuvering toward peace talks with the Red Court - refuses to act for one wizard's child, with the smooth Senior Council member Cristos championing diplomacy. Arianna herself appears under diplomatic protections, untouchable, and all but dares Harry to do something rash; when Harry publicly demands his daughter back, it becomes plain that provoking him is part of her design. Ebenezar McCoy, Harry's old mentor, makes clear privately that some on the Council understand exactly what is happening and cannot officially do anything about it - and that unofficial help may exist. Back home the pressure mounts from the mortal side too: federal agents, steered by hostile hands, harass Harry and his allies with investigations designed to tie him down. Susan and Martin work their Fellowship sources while old wounds between Susan and Harry keep tearing open. Every institution Harry has ever served or leaned on - Council, law, church, and courts of faerie - is either unwilling or unable to help him, and he begins to understand he will have to buy power somewhere, at a price.

Harry learns what Maggie is actually for. Consulting Donar Vadderung - the one-eyed head of Monoc Securities, who knows more about the old powers than any living wizard - Harry is told the Red Court means to perform a bloodline curse: a ritual sacrifice that kills not just the victim but every living member of the victim's bloodline, death rippling up the family tree. Sacrificing Maggie would kill Harry and everyone of his blood - and Harry realizes the curse must be aimed at someone above him in the line, a bigger target than a single Chicago wizard. The ritual will be performed at Chichen Itza, the Red Court's ancient seat of power, at an astronomically fixed moment, which gives Harry a deadline he cannot move. The Red Court keeps up its campaign of attrition: professional kill teams - among them the cheerfully murderous Eebs - hit Harry and his allies in Chicago, and the violence escalates from surveillance and sabotage to open assassination attempts. Susan's control over her vampire nature frays as her daughter's deadline approaches, Martin remains coldly focused on the mission, and Harry starts making a list of every power that might sell him the strength he needs, knowing exactly what kind of sellers are on it.

The Red Court takes everything else. Harry's apartment - his home, his lab, his sanctuary of a decade - is firebombed, and in the chaos of the aftermath Harry falls and breaks his back. He wakes paralyzed from the waist down, a wizard with a war to fight and a body that no magic he can lawfully use will mend in time. With the deadline fixed and his daughter's life on the other side of it, Harry works through his options and finds them all closed, ruinous, or worse - until only one remains. He accepts the bargain he has refused for years: he gives himself to Mab, Queen of Air and Darkness, as her Winter Knight. Mab mends his broken body, and Harry takes on the mantle's power along with its price - lifelong service to the most dangerous being he knows, and the corrosion that has destroyed every man who bore it before him. He tells himself he will find a way to remain who he is, and does not entirely believe it. Around him the team for the impossible assault begins to assemble, and his faerie godmother, the Leanansidhe, takes an active hand - Winter, it seems, has its own interest in the Red Court's ambitions.

Harry gathers his people for a raid on the heart of an empire. The strike team comes together: Susan and Martin; Murphy, to whom Harry entrusts the holy sword Fidelacchius for the night; the Knight Sanya with Esperacchius; Molly, over Harry's objections; Thomas; Mouse; and the Leanansidhe, delighted at the prospect of proper bloodshed. Lea equips them from Winter's armories with armor and weapons out of legend, and Ebenezar McCoy makes clear Harry will not be entirely without wizardry at his back - there are those beyond the Council's paralysis, a hooded and unofficial Grey Council, who understand what the Red Court's ritual means. Intelligence from the Fellowship and from Winter fixes the target: the sacrifice will be performed atop the great temple at Chichen Itza, before the assembled Lords of Outer Night and the Red King himself, at the appointed hour. The team travels through the Ways of the Nevernever to Mexico, and even the smallest of Harry's allies - Toot-Toot and the pizza-fed fae of the Za-Lord's Guard - come to war. On the threshold of the Red Court's holiest ground, the raiders make their final preparations, knowing they are a handful against a nation and that retreat is not among the plans.

The battle of Chichen Itza begins. Harry's raiders smash through the Red Court's outer defenses and into the temple complex, where the vampire nation's elite - the masked Lords of Outer Night and the ancient Red King - are assembled for the sacrifice. The fighting is savage and the team pays for every yard: jaguar warriors, vampire hordes, and the Red Court's monstrous devourer are met by faerie steel, the two holy swords, Molly's veils, Mouse's fury, and wizardry pushed past its limits. Duchess Arianna, the architect of Maggie's abduction, finally faces Harry directly - and Harry kills her, repaying the widow of Duke Ortega in full. The hooded wizards of the Grey Council, Ebenezar McCoy among them, reveal themselves at the turning point, matching the Lords of Outer Night power for power. And amid the carnage the curse's true design becomes clear to Harry: the bloodline sacrifice was never merely revenge on him. It is aimed up his family tree at its eldest living member - at Ebenezar McCoy, whom Harry now understands to be his own grandfather, a secret the old man kept for Harry's whole life. The Red King, unimpressed by the ruin of his court, takes personal charge of the ritual, and Maggie is brought to the altar.

At the altar atop the great temple, everything Harry built his assault on turns in his hand. Martin reveals that he has been the Red Court's agent inside the Fellowship for decades - a betrayal delivered with perfect calm, and calculated to its real purpose: provoked past reason, Susan kills him, and with her first kill her half-turned state ends. Susan Rodriguez becomes a full vampire of the Red Court - the newest vampire of its bloodline - and in the same instant everyone understands what Martin has arranged. With the Red King's curse primed and the altar waiting, Susan asks Harry to use it. Harry kills the woman he loved on the Red Court's own altar, and the bloodline curse detonates through the youngest member of the Red Court's line - through Susan - and up into every vampire of the Red Court in the world. The entire species dies in a single moment: the Red King, the Lords of Outer Night, the armies at Chichen Itza, and every Red Court vampire everywhere, the war ended not by treaty but by annihilation. Maggie is safe in her father's arms. Amid the ash, Harry and Ebenezar speak plainly at last as grandfather and grandson, and the survivors carry the wounded home. Harry has his daughter, his victory, and a debt to Winter that is about to come due.

The aftermath settles over Chicago. Maggie is placed quietly with trusted friends - Harry, hunted by everything his name attracts and now bound to Mab besides, judges that the safest gift he can give his daughter is his absence, and Mouse goes with her as her guardian. Susan is dead by Harry's hand; the Red Court's destruction has ended the war and, as sober voices already note, torn a power vacuum in the supernatural world that something will move to fill. Harry's own accounting is grim: office, apartment, and old life burned away, the Winter Knight's mantle waiting to be paid for, and Mab's summons imminent. Aboard Thomas's boat, the Water Beetle, Harry cleans up and gathers himself for what comes next. It never arrives. A rifle shot from somewhere across the water takes him in the chest, and Harry Dresden falls into the freezing dark of Lake Michigan and sinks. The book ends there: the Red Court destroyed, Maggie saved, and Harry - hours into his service as the Winter Knight - dead in the water, with his murderer unknown.

The Red Court of vampires is gone - all of it. At Chichen Itza, with Maggie on the altar and the bloodline curse primed, Martin provoked the newly-vengeful Susan into killing him, completing her transformation into a full Red Court vampire; Susan, understanding what it meant, asked Harry to do what came next. Harry killed her on the altar, and the curse the Red King built to annihilate Harry's bloodline ran down the Red Court's own instead, destroying every Red Court vampire in the world in a single moment. Maggie is safe, carried out of the ruins and placed quietly with trusted friends, with Harry choosing to stay out of her life for her own protection; Mouse goes with her. The victory's price is everywhere: Susan is dead by Harry's hand, the war's end leaves a global power vacuum where the Red Court ruled, and Harry is now the Winter Knight, owing Mab service he dreads. His grandfather Ebenezar McCoy - the curse's true target, and the Blackstaff of the White Council - survives, the family secret now shared between them. Then, on the deck of Thomas's boat, before he can even report to Mab, a rifle shot takes Harry in the chest and drops him into the freezing water of Lake Michigan, where he sinks into darkness. The book ends with Harry Dresden dead.