Changes (The Dresden Files #12) - Jim Butcher Page 0,178

devised a spell to let us speak silently to each other in class. It was magic much like the speaking stone Ebenezar had crafted, but simpler, with a much shorter range. I had never used to it communicate with anyone but Elaine, but Susan had been intimate with me—and I thought that at that moment, the only thought on our minds was Maggie.

It might be enough to establish the link, even if it was only one-way.

I grasped for the minor magic, fighting to pull it together through the dragging chains of the wills of the Lords of Outer Night, and cast my thought at Susan as clearly as I could. He doesn’t know all of it, I sent to her desperately. He doesn’t know about the enchantment protecting your skin. He only knows about the cloak because he saw you use it when we got here.

Susan’s eyes widened briefly. She’d heard me.

The altar, I thought. The ritual meant to kill us can be turned back upon them. If one of them dies on that knife, the curse will go after their bloodline, not ours.

Her eyes widened more. I saw her thinking furiously.

“Martin,” she asked quietly. “Why did Arianna target my daughter?”

Martin looked down at Susan, at Maggie, and then away. “Because the child’s father is the son of Margaret LeFay, the daughter of the man who killed her husband. By killing her, this way she would avenge herself upon all of you.”

If I hadn’t already been more or less motionless, I would have frozen in place.

Margaret LeFay. Daughter of the man who had killed Arianna’s husband (and vampire child), Paolo Ortega.

Duke Ortega. Who had been destroyed by the Blackstaff.

Ebenezar McCoy.

One of the most dangerous wizards in the world. A man of such personal and political power that she would never have been able to take him down directly. So she had set out to strike at him through his bloodline. From him to my mother. From her to me. From me to Maggie. Kill the child and kill us all.

That was what Arianna had meant when she said it wasn’t about me.

It was about my grandfather.

Suddenly it made sense that the old man had put his life on the line by declaring himself my mentor when the Council would have killed me for slaying Justin DuMorne. Suddenly it made sense why he had been so patient with me, so considerate, so kind. It hadn’t just been an act of random kindness.

And suddenly it made sense why he would barely ever speak of his apprentice, Margaret LeFay—a name she’d earned for herself, when her birth certificate must have read Margaret McCoy. Hell, for that matter, he probably never told the Council that Margaret was his daughter. I sure as hell had no intentions of letting them know about Maggie, if I got her out of this mess.

My mother had eventually been killed by enemies she had made—and Ebenezar, her father, the most dangerous man on the White Council, had not been there to save her. The circumstances wouldn’t matter. No matter what he’d accomplished, I knew the old man would never forgive himself for not saving his daughter’s life, any more than I would if I failed Maggie. It was why he had made a statement, a demonstration of what would happen to those who came at me with a personal vengeance—he was trying, preemptively, to save his grandson.

And it explained why he had changed the Grey Council’s focus and led them here. He had to try to save me—and to save my little girl.

And, some cynical portion of me added, himself. Though I wasn’t even sure that would be a conscious thought on his part, underneath the mountain of issues he had accrued.

No wonder Arianna had been so hot and bothered to use the bloodline curse, starting with Maggie. She’d avenge herself upon me, who hadn’t had the good grace to die in a duel, and upon Ebenezar, who had simply killed Ortega as you would a dangerous animal, a workaday murder performed with expedience and an extremely high profile. Arianna must have lost a lot of face in the wake of that—and my ongoing exploits against the Reds and their allies would only have made her more determined to show me my place. With a single curse, she’d kill one of the Senior Council and the Blackstaff all at once. My death would be something to crow about, too—since, as Arianna herself had noted, no one had pulled it