Grave Peril by Jim Butcher

He can barely call up a ghost and talk to it. He’s got to fake it most of the time.” Besides. Had he been a real necromancer, the White Council would already have hounded him down and beheaded him. Doubtless, the man I was thinking of had already been visited by at least one Warden and warned of the consequences of dabbling too much into the dark arts.
    “If he’s so inept, why speak to him at all?”
    “He’s probably closer to the spirit world than anyone else in town. Other than me, I mean. I’ll send out Bob, too, and see what kind of information he can run down. We’re bound to have different contacts.”
    Michael frowned at me. “I don’t trust this business of communing with spirits, Harry. If Father Forthill and the others knew about this familiar of yours—”
    “Bob isn’t a familiar,” I shot back.
    “He performs the same function, doesn’t he?”
    I snorted. “Familiars work for free. I’ve got to pay Bob.”
    “Pay him?” he asked, his tone suspicious. “Pay what?”
    “Mostly romance novels. Sometimes I splurge on a—”
    Michael looked pained. “Harry, I really don’t want to know. Isn’t there some way that you could work some kind of spell here, instead of relying upon these unholy beings?”
    I sighed, and shook my head. “Sorry, Michael. If it was a demon, it would have left footprints, and maybe some kind of psychic trail I could follow. But I’m pretty sure this was pure spirit. And a god-damned strong one.”
    “Harry,” Michael said, voice stern.
    “Sorry, I forgot. Ghosts don’t usually inhabit a construct—a magical body. They’re just energy. They don’t leave any physical traces behind—at least none that last for hours at a time. If it was here, I could tell you all kinds of things about it, probably, and work magic on it directly. But it’s not here, so—”
    Michael sighed. “Very well. I will put out the word to those I know to be on the lookout for the girl. Lydia, you said her name was?”
    “Yeah.” I described her to Michael. “And she had a charm on her wrist. The one I’d been wearing the past few nights.”
    “Would it protect her?” Michael asked.
    I shrugged. “From something as mean as this thing sounded . . . I don’t know. We’ve got to find out who this ghost was when it was alive and shut it down.”
    “Which still will not tell us who or what is stirring up the spirits of the city.” Michael unlocked his truck, and we got inside.
    “That’s what I like about you, Michael. You’re always thinking so positively.”
    He grinned at me. “Faith, Harry. God has a way of seeing to it that things fall into place.”
    He started driving, and I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes. First off to see the psychic. Then to send Bob out to find out more about what looked to be the most dangerous ghost I’d seen in a long time. And then to keep on looking for whoever it was behind all the spooky goings-on and to rap them politely on the head until they stopped. Easy as one, two, three. Sure.
    I whimpered, sunk down in my seat a little more, and wished that I had kept my aching, sore self in bed.

Chapter Ten
    Mortimer Lindquist had tried to give his house that gothic feel. Greyish gargoyles stood at the corners of his roof. Black iron gates glowered at the front of his house and statuary lined the walk to his front door. Long grass had overgrown his yard. If his house hadn’t been a red-roofed, white-walled stucco transplant from somewhere in southern California, it might have worked.
    The results looked more like the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland than an ominous abode of a speaker to the dead. The black iron gates stood surrounded by plain chain-link fence. The gargoyles, on closer inspection, proved to be plastic reproductions. The statuary, too, had the rough outlines of plaster, rather than the clean, sweeping profile of marble. You could have plopped a pink flamingo down right in the middle of the unmowed weeds, and it would have