Proven Guilty recap

Now a reluctant Warden, Harry witnesses a teenage warlock's execution, then is pointed at traces of black magic in Chicago. When Molly Carpenter's boyfriend is arrested at a horror convention, Harry finds phobophages - fear-eating shapeshifters out of Winter - attacking the con in the forms of movie monsters, and the trail of the black magic and the trail of the fetches converge on Molly herself: her awakened talent, used with the best intentions to mind-alter friends off drugs, has made her a warlock in the Council's eyes and Winter's prey. The fetches kidnap her to Arctis Tor; Harry, Charity (whose own abandoned magic is her buried secret), Murphy and Thomas raid Winter's capital - finding it already scarred by someone else's hellfire attack - and bring her home, destroying the Scarecrow. Before the Council, Harry saves Molly from execution by taking her as his apprentice under the shared Doom of Damocles. Murphy is demoted for her loyalty; the evidence of a traitor inside the Council hardens; and Harry begins training the girl whose life now depends on him.

Previously: Harry Dresden broke the Darkhallow - three necromancer disciples of Heinrich Kemmler warring to become a god on Halloween night - by riding a reanimated museum T. rex into battle, with the timid medical examiner Waldo Butters drumming the spell's beat. Grevane and the body-stealing Corpsetaker died; the hooded Cowl vanished unconfirmed; and Warden-Captain Luccio was left permanently in a stranger's young body. The gutted White Council drafted Harry into the Wardens as a regional commander. He carries hidden costs: the shadow of the fallen angel Lasciel lives in his mind, offering power against the day he digs up her buried coin; his left hand is burned and crippled; and his half-brother, the White Court vampire Thomas, shares his apartment. Karrin Murphy of Special Investigations knows his world and fights beside him. Molly, eldest child of Harry's friend Michael Carpenter, Knight of the Cross, is growing up fast. The war with the Red Court grinds on.

Harry's Warden cloak weighs heaviest at an execution: he stands witness as the Council beheads a teenage boy who used magic to enslave minds - the Laws of Magic applied without mercy, to children who often never knew the Laws existed. Afterward the Gatekeeper quietly sets him a task: something is working black magic in Chicago, and Harry should find it before the Wardens do. At home, the war news is grim and the Council's suspicions of a traitor in its ranks are growing. Then Molly Carpenter calls: her boyfriend Nelson has been arrested after a man was brutally attacked in a washroom at SplatterCon!!!, a horror-film convention - an attack with details no mundane assailant explains.

Harry works the convention and finds the truth worse than a haunting: phobophages, spirit predators that feed on fear, are manifesting in the shapes of the con's own movie monsters and attacking guests. The creatures are fetches - shapeshifters out of the Winter Court - and something is calling them to this place. Harry rigs wards, coordinates with Murphy and the SI-friendly officer Rawlins, and rides out a second night of attacks that turns bloody: people are hurt and killed, Harry is nearly overwhelmed, and the biggest of the fetches escapes back into the Nevernever. Along the way Harry notices what he least wants to see - the traces of black magic the Gatekeeper sent him hunting are here, tangled with the people around Molly.

Harry consults the Summer Court: Lily, the onetime changeling now Summer Lady, and Fix, the Summer Knight, receive him warmly but speak in careful circles - the Courts are moving strangely, Mab's behavior has Summer alarmed, and Winter's forces are massing in ways that make no sense if the fetches are mere raiders. Bound by her office, Lily cannot simply tell him what Winter is doing; what she can give him is context and a debt acknowledged. Meanwhile the fetches strike their real target: they take Molly. Harry establishes where she has been carried - Arctis Tor, Mab's own citadel, the frozen heart of Winter - and that no sane rescue is possible. Charity Carpenter, tearing the armor off her own past, reveals the secret under her hostility to wizards: she had power once, and a sorcerer she loved misused her for it; she gave up her talent, and Molly's inheritance of it is her oldest terror. With Michael away, the rescue party forms without a Knight: Harry, Charity in her husband's spare mail, Murphy, and Thomas.

The raid on Arctis Tor is Harry's deepest venture into Faerie. Winter's capital stands strangely quiet - its gates are blasted and its courtyard scorched with hellfire, the residue of an attack by some unknown third power that has already come and gone - and the Leanansidhe, Harry's godmother, is found imprisoned in the ice of Mab's fountain, her caretaking of Harry's debt claimed by Mab herself. The team fights through the citadel's remaining defenders to Molly, held by the Scarecrow and its fetches, and Harry burns through tricks, borrowed power, and the last of his strength to pull her out. The escape becomes a running battle: the Scarecrow pursues them between worlds, and is finally destroyed at the boundary of the mortal realm, with Summer's power turned against Winter's hunter. Molly is saved - and the source of the black magic in Chicago is now undeniable: it was Molly, her talent awakened, who twice bent her friends' minds to force them off drugs. Love was the motive; the Law is the Law.

Molly stands trial before the White Council as a warlock, and the Merlin - with the war bleeding the Council white and mercy in short supply - is prepared to execute her. Harry, who has spent the book watching what the Council's justice does to gifted children, puts his own life in the scale: Molly is granted the Doom of Damocles, her death sentence suspended, on the condition that she trains as Harry's apprentice - and that Harry answers for her with his head if she falls back into black magic. Michael returns to a family shaken but whole, Charity's secret now in the open between her and her daughter. Murphy's price also comes due: demoted to sergeant for her unexplained absences, she keeps her badge and her resolve. Harry closes the book with an apprentice in his lab, a growing certainty that a traitor inside the Council - and perhaps an organized 'Black Council' behind years of convenient catastrophes - is real, and the uneasy knowledge that the hellfire scars on Arctis Tor mean someone out there can make war on Mab herself.

The black magic in Chicago was Molly Carpenter's: her talent woke, and out of love she used mind-altering magic on two friends to force them off drugs - twice breaking one of the Laws of Magic, and drawing the attention of Winter, whose fetches hunted her through the horror convention and finally carried her to Arctis Tor. Harry, Charity, Murphy and Thomas raid Winter's capital to bring her back, finding its gates already blasted by someone else's hellfire and the Leanansidhe imprisoned in ice beneath Mab's fountain; they rescue Molly, and the pursuing Scarecrow is destroyed at the threshold of the mortal world with Summer's help. Then comes the harder fight: before the White Council, the Merlin is ready to execute Molly as a warlock. Harry stakes his own life on her - she is placed under the Doom of Damocles as his apprentice, her death sentence suspended so long as she stays clean, with Harry's falling with hers if she does not. Michael's family is shaken but intact, and Charity's secret - that she once wielded magic herself and abandoned it - is out. Murphy has been demoted to sergeant for standing with Harry, and accepts it. The war's larger shape darkens: the attack on Arctis Tor, the Council's stretched forces, and a suspicion Harry can no longer dismiss - that a traitor moves within the Council, and that some organized hand is behind years of supposedly separate catastrophes. Molly moves through Harry's door as his student, and the book closes with teacher and apprentice facing a long road.