I, Harry Dresden, am an idiot. I'd spent nearly two hours in the Blue Beetle with Lauren and Spike driving from Madison, Wisconsin back to Chicago, and I'd heard enough about Spike before then to realize that letting him and my brother Thomas meet was a bad idea. And what did I do? I introduced them.

I repeat: I, Harry Dresden, am an idiot.

Thomas and Spike were sitting at my kitchen table drinking from bottles of Mac's ale while they did their best to make me die of embarrassment. They'd started swapping stories almost an hour before and showed no sign of stopping any time soon.

"So he said 'I thought you were getting sacrificed' and then Lauren said 'Is that why you tried to set us on fire?'" Spike smirked and took a sip of his ale while Thomas laughed.

"You weren't even there when that happened," I muttered into my own bottle.

I looked across the table to where my dog Mouse (he was a lot smaller when I named him) was playing tug-of-war with my mathematically improbable daughter. Lauren stumbled when Mouse gave the rope toy a particularly enthusiastic yank and landed on the rug-covered floor, which gave Mouse the opportunity to pounce on her and lick her face.

"Stories get passed around the Council real quick," Spike said. "Some of the girls compared it to high school." He was also watching Mouse and Lauren, who was giggling as she tried to fend off the attack of doggy kisses. A look I couldn't quite read passed over his face. Worry, maybe. I knew that he cared about my daughter, anyone who'd seen their interactions on the drive over could have figured that out, and she wasn't in the healthiest place at the moment. To put it bluntly, she was high off the earth magic that the witches of the Slayers, Guardians and Watchers Council had used to save the world and could have decided to start throwing around powerful magic at the drop of a hat. Spike had said something about being the only babysitter whose heart she couldn't stop and I wasn't keen to find out exactly what that meant.

"Sounds like high school," Thomas agreed.

"Did you even go to high school?" I asked. Thomas was a White Court vampire, one of the several flavours of vampire in the world. His family, the Raiths, fed on lust. They weren't born that way, and they weren't told that they'd eventually have a perpetual Hunger living inside them, but it did seem like it would be a little awkward to go to school with hormonal teenagers when most of your family worked in the porn industry.

Seriously, I met Lara Raith on the set of an adult film. She's very popular in some circles.

"Private school," Thomas said. Of course. Still awkward, but more in line with Raith tastes.

Spike tilted his head back and drained his drink. "You getting tired yet, niblet?"

Lauren hopped to her feet. "I'm not tired. Can we go on patrol?"

Mouse whined. Spike and I winched. Patrolling, what the SGWC called patrolling, was basically wandering around looking for trouble. Running into trouble with an unstable witch would not end well. Luckily for us and at least half of Chicago, Lauren almost immediately stopped smiling and got a confused look on her face. A second later she was sprawled on the floor, fast asleep.

Spike sighed. "About time. It's only been three bloody days." He got up and moved Lauren to the couch. Mouse padded after him and gave a great big doggie yawn before curling up on the floor next to her. Man, did that looked like a good idea. It's amazing how you can feel wide awake until someone yawns. It hadn't even crossed my mind that it had to be getting close to midnight.

I drank the last of my beer and stood. "I'm going to head to bed. If you destroy my apartment I'm billing you for it."

Thomas flashed a dazzling grin. "Who, us? Never."

I didn't bother to dignify that with a reply.

I was woken up in the morning by the sound of my phone ringing. I groaned. There weren't tiny little dwarfs with hammers and pickaxes working away inside my skull, but the late night drinking hadn't done me any favours. I crawled out of bed and pulled a T-shirt over my head. Mister meowed grumpily as I took away his personal heater, curled up in the spot I had vacated and went back to sleep. Cats, am I right?

By the time I'd made my way into the main room of my apartment, Thomas had already answered the phone. Despite the fact that he'd either slept on the floor or at the table since Lauren and Spike were occupying the only comfortable pieces of furniture, he looked like he'd stepped out of a photo shoot. Seeing as it was five in the morning, I didn't bother trying not to hate him for it.

"He just stepped into the room," Thomas said. "Hold on a minute." He covered the mouthpiece of my rotary phone with one hand. "It's Karrin."

I took the phone from him. "Morning, Murphy. What's up?"

The voice of Karrin Murphy, head of Special Investigations at Chicago P.D., came over the phone, sounding tinny and distant, which was probably my fault considering the anti-technology field we wizards tend to carry around with us. "What's up is body in a circle of occult symbols on top of a grave in Graceland. We need you here before the press."

I winced. Graceland Cemetery is a pretty famous plot of land with some important people buried there. A murder there would definitely get a lot of attention. "I'll be there in five."

"Don't have breakfast," Murphy said flatly before hanging up. That wasn't a good sign.

I hung up the phone and turned to Thomas, who was rummaging through the ice box. "I'm heading to Graceland. Let Lauren and Spike know."

"No need, mate," Spike said from right behind me.

I jumped and spun around. Spike grinned. I'm not sure if silently sneaking up on people was something the SGWC taught all its operatives or if it was something that came with being Spike's kind of vampire. Unlike Thomas, Spike wasn't a White Court supermodel. He was a literal bloodsucking demon from the Aurelius line of the loosely organized Blood Clans. They're so loosely organized that no one can actually agree if they signed the Unseelie Accords or not. Based on Spike, I tended to go with "not".

"Sure, give me a heart attack," I muttered.

Spike clapped a hand on my shoulder. "You're alright. Best head out before your lady gets angry."

I didn't bother to ask how long he'd been listening to Murphy's call.

There weren't any people with cameras around Graceland when I arrived, despite the police cars in the parking lot. That wouldn't last long. Reporters are like freaking bloodhounds when it comes to bodies, I swear.

The officer standing by one of the cars was one I recognized but couldn't name. It had been a few months since I'd last worked with Special Investigations, so she must have recently reached the limit of trouble she was allowed to cause in another department and gotten booted down to SI. It used to be that SI was where cop careers went to die. That'd changed with Murphy in charge. Whatever that officer had done, she stood a good chance of having a long career that would mostly involve lying on official paperwork.

"Harry Dresden?" the officer asked.

"Present," I said. Not up to my usual levels of eloquence, but I was hungry and hungover. I had to save my energy for the job Murphy had called me there to do.

The officer pointed into the trees. "They're just down that way. You can't miss it."

"Murphy said it was bad," I said.

The officer grimaced. "You can't miss it," she repeated. "Even though you'll really wish you had."

That made it twice that I'd been warned about the state of the crime scene. Considering that I'd seen people torn apart by werewolves and had a case where people had their hearts literally burst out of their chests, I was starting to worry that this one would be really bad.

Murphy was standing under a tree just off the path that wove deeper into the cemetery. Police tape starting a few feet away enclosed about two dozen headstones ranging from obelisks to stones that barely rose above the blades of grass. It was an area I knew pretty well. We were only a few rows away from my grave.

"Harry," Murphy said in lieu of greeting.

"Murphy," I replied. "What happened?"

Murphy sighed. "I'll show you. Come on."

I followed Murphy under the police tape. The body was lying on one of the graves with a knee-high headstone in the middle of the area that had been cordoned off. I assumed that the burnt grass around it was the circle that Murphy had mentioned. Murphy and I stopped a few feet away. I stared at the body for a few minutes, trying to process what I was seeing.

"Where's his skin?" I asked.

"That's what I'd like to know," Murphy said.

The body was lying on its side with its feet pointed towards us. All of the muscles right below the skin were exposed.

Yeah, this one was bad.

"Did you get pictures already?" I asked. Murphy nodded.

I got closer. The muscles were red and wet looking, almost shimmering in the early dawn light. There was a stab wound just below the shoulders that exposed parts of a rib and the spine. There was more bone visible on the head, places where muscle stopped and fat should have begun. The face had been ripped away. The lips had been removed especially thoroughly. I could see teeth.

"Hell's bells," I muttered. "That's...wow." Poor Vivian Kathrine Lake, Beloved Wife and Mother couldn't have imagined what her grave site would go through.

Most of the burnt areas around the body looked like they were part of a circle. I got out the paper and pencil I'd stuffed into one of the pockets of my duster on my way out the door and started drawing the bits of it that I could see. The circle appeared to have two layers, the inner ring where the body lay and the outer ring that contained most of the aforementioned occult symbols. The symbols were actually writing. They usually are. It's just that most people don't learn to read the languages that are commonly used in magic, Latin being the major exception. One of the languages used in the circle was either Sumerian or Akkadian; they use the same writing system. Whoever made the circle had the patience of a saint. Burning all those little lines and triangles into the ground had to have taken forever. I didn't recognize the other language that made up more than half of the writing, but I was sure Bob would know what it was.

"Any idea what it does?" Murphy asked. "Is it real?" Real magic, she meant.

"Not sure," I said. The circle didn't look like anything I'd learned about or used before, but that didn't mean it wasn't real. Plenty of self-taught wizards made up stuff that worked perfectly well but was unrecognizable to those of us who had gone through formal apprenticeships. Witches also had a habit of modifying spells and creating new ones from basic parts like circles and pentacles. It was going to take research to figure out what this one was meant for.

Given the dead body, I was sure it wasn't meant for anything good.

Lauren was awake when I got home. She was sitting at the kitchen table glaring at a can of Coke like it had done her a personal injustice.

"Morning," I said. "How are you feeling?"

"I feel like..." Lauren frowned and looked at Spike, who was browsing my bookshelves. "Remember that time we drank Kalaxin rum? Like that, except I'm not blue."

"So like you drank two bottles of vodka and then went five rounds with Faith," Spike said. I assumed the Faith he was talking about was the so-called Dark Slayer who was in charge of SGWC operations in Cleveland alongside Lauren and a guy called Robin.

Lauren put her head down on the table. "Uh huh. Never magicking a volcano again."

I took my drawing out of my pocket and hung up my coat. "Did Thomas take Mouse for a walk?"

"Yes, he did," Spike said. "What's the story on your corpse?"

I showed him my incomplete diagram. Murphy had promised to get me photos of the whole circle once they moved the body, but I had enough to start researching. Spike raised an eyebrow as he studied my sketch.

"Do you recognize it?" I asked. The SGWC dealt with magic users fairly often. I wouldn't have been surprised if Spike had seen a similar circle before.

"Not a bit," Spike said. "Elphaba, you up for a puzzle?"

"What's it?" Lauren asked.

"Magic circle. Have a look." Spike handed her the drawing.

Lauren looked at the paper and immediately went very pale. She squeezed her eyes shut and looked again.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"It's one of mine." Lauren dropped the paper on the table and reached for her can of Coke. "I used it in L.A. just after Sunnydale sank, before the Jasmine Cult riots."

An image of the skinned corpse flashed across my mind. I went to the ice box to get my own can of Coke and took a long drink.

Spike looked grim. "That'd explain why I don't know it then."

"Can you tell me what it does?" I asked. Knowing the magic that came out of Sunnydale, I could only hope that we weren't dealing with what the SGWC calls an apocalypse.

Lauren put her soda can back on the table with exaggerated care. "It raises the dead."

And it had been in a graveyard.

Hells bells.