Author's Note: Ladies and gents, what you've been waiting so patiently for – this chapter picks up where the first chapter ended. I meant to have this done two weeks ago, but real life blows. I'm as happy with this chapter as I'm ever going to be, so time to post!

Uh, soulgazes – something that's done a lot in fic, especially since Ghost Story, since that book kind of necessitates it. I hope it's satisfactory, I'm just going to say it was bewildering to write, and leave it at that. This chapter references one of my other fics (Detonate), the elevator incident in Storm Front and the short story Love Hurts. I had to put a lot of myself into conveying the kind of emotional whiplash going on here, so be gentle.

Thanks again for all of the wonderful reviews, and keep 'em coming, I want to make sure this is a story you guys enjoy reading. Whoa, gotta go fix those mistakes I missed last night when I was half-asleep.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting

—East Coker (part III, lines 23-26), T.S. Eliot

I am with you, forever, the end

—'Without You,' Breaking Benjamin

"Me too."

She had drawn her gun from beneath her jacket as she turned; leveling it in the direction of the voice. By now it was merely reflexive, but even a lifetime of experience under pressure couldn't keep her hands from trembling as a dark figure stepped from the shadows between ivy-wreathed monuments.

Though the sun had set, Karrin could see him clearly in the sepia-toned ambient light of the city trapped beneath the clouds; it was a very tall man in a long black coat. He stopped a few yards from her and stared down at the crimson dot of the laser sight as it blurred across his chest. The little circle of light flickered once, twice, and went out altogether.

He looked up, wearing a familiar smile and leaning slightly on the staff in his hand.

"Good to see you, too, Murph."

Somehow she had gotten to her feet – the legs beneath her trembled but refused to move, like in so many bad dreams. She had known this would happen eventually – something would try to trap her the same way the Nightmare had, all those years ago. She had tried to be ready for it, but how the hell are you supposed to prepare yourself for the day some monster pretends to be your dead friend?

This was just another trick, another demon to deal with. But if that was true, she should be able to run.

"Murphy."

She should be able to pull the damn trigger.

"…Karrin?"

"Who are you?" she demanded, her voice a toneless rasp. It was amazing that she could even speak at all, with her throat choked shut, her lungs on fire.

He blinked, looked around and then back at her, questioningly. He pointed at himself.

"Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Duh."

"No," she said. "No, no. You're lying. Harry's dead."

Dead. It still hurt to say, as much as seeing him now and knowing it wasn't real. It piqued an irrational anger in her – this was not how tonight was supposed to go. She was supposed to say her goodbyes, go home, get really drunk and maybe wake up sometime the next afternoon. It had been stupid to stay in the cemetery alone, after sunset – she'd been all but begging for this to happen.

The would-be Harry shook his head, as if she had somehow missed the point.

"Was dead. Past tense. And that was only merely dead, not really most sincerely dead."

He took a step toward her and stopped when she raised the SIG a little higher. An electric fear rushed through her, paralytic instead of being the means that pushed her into motion, growing worse every second this imposter didn't shift into something bloodthirsty and hideous. He—it didn't change, didn't lunge for her throat and end her where she stood.

With an enormous effort of will, she took a half-step backward.

"Gotcha. Not funny." His smile faltered, dark eyes searching her face. "Okay. Um. Murph?"

"Y-you should leave," she whispered, betrayed by the panic that shook her voice – though she had expected this happen sooner or later, she hadn't thought it would hurt so much. "Now."

Still, it didn't compare to the ache accumulated from all the little things missing from her life, so much worse because she had convinced herself she'd be gone long before he was, that the blessing in it was that she'd never have to deal with losing him.

Selfish, yes. And obviously misguided. Karrin liked to think she didn't have many weaknesses, but he had been one. Was still one.

Harry – the real one – probably hadn't known she had been through this before; even so, there was a touch of bitterness in her grief. All the adoration in her eleven year-old heart hadn't been enough to keep her own father from taking his life, and now it had happened to her again, had happened to another girl who would never know her dad beyond one terrifying memory.

"Karrin, it's me. I promise," he said softly, barely audible over the rain that pattered down around her. "You know I would never, ever hurt you. You know that."

They stared each other down, not quite meeting each other's eyes. He took her silence as the answer it was and looked away, something wounded and guilty in his expression.

Whoever or whatever he was, he didn't leave and she couldn't move, and it felt like she'd been standing there for a lifetime.

If it wanted her dead, surely she'd be dead already. Or maybe it was trying to pour as much salt in her wounds as possible before it killed her – it was hard to tell with supernatural beings, which seemed to range from wantonly malicious to vengeful and petty. It was entirely likely that she could expect capture and torture at the hands of whoever was currently fucking with her, and she'd die fighting before that happened.

Or it was Harry. And she wasn't sure which possibility frightened her more.

Night had well and truly fallen; the storm clouds darkened to a watercolor purple-gray as more lights began to warm to life around the cemetery. The candle in the little jack-o-lantern sputtered and hissed, sent eerie shadows flitting across marble marker and empty grave as the last of the leaves whispered overhead.

It would have been like him to show up tonight. He'd always been a tad…melodramatic.

The fact that she even considered it was evidence enough that she'd finally snapped. The words tumbled out before she could stop herself.

"If you are who you say you are, then you know what you have to do."

A long moment passed before he nodded.

"Okay." He dropped the staff and nudged it away with the toe of his boot. "I can do that, but it's not gonna be enough."

"Enough," she echoed as he pulled a pocket knife from his coat.

"Enough proof. I know it's not gonna be enough because I know you, Karrin Murphy."

There was a silvery sensation, a shiver down her spine and a tingling against her skin as he said her name – strange but not unwelcome, quietly demanding her attention.

"You don't know me."

"Yeah, I do. Better than anyone. I know that you share a birthday with Joan of Arc and that the rosary around your neck is the one your grandmother gave you at your confirmation. I know you can quote Pulp Fiction line for line, I've seen you do it, and that you—you sort your M&Ms by color before you eat them. I know that you're a stone-cold badass ninja-woman and could kill me sixteen different ways with your bare hands, but there's always a romance novel hidden underneath the coffee table in your living room. Yeah. I know about that."

He pulled the leather glove from his left hand and opened the knife with a flick of his wrist. He continued in an unnervingly conversational tone as he drew the blade across his palm.

"But I know it's not gonna be good enough for you, even if I told you something only the real me would know, like how you think I don't notice the way you hesitate before we get into an elevator, or how impressively bad you are at firecracker baseball. How the first time we kissed tasted like cotton candy—I know you remember that."

Every word he said ripped through her like the knife in his hand, cut through to memories that bled out in a surreal rush – the stomach-clenched, dizzy feeling of freefall and venom coursing through her veins. Sand in her shoes, the smell of black powder and lake water. Nervous laughter in the dark of a carnival haunted house, his lips pressed against hers, fervent and sugar-sweet and wrong. And right.

"You're too damn stubborn for your own good, Murph, and as annoying as it is, I've always loved that about you."

He pocketed the knife and held out his hand as if he was doing nothing more than asking her to dance.

Blood welled up in his palm, scarlet-black in the half light. Human.

Her pulse hammered in her ears in a sudden lightheadedness, sure that her heart had redlined in its roar against her ribcage. The trained, rational part of her scrambled to regain control of the situation, control over of rest of her, over the part that was cornered and helpless, the part that would never let her forgive herself if she didn't make sure.

"Get on the ground."

The would-be Harry raised an eyebrow.

"On the ground. Now," she ordered, her voice hard, ringing out among trees and tombstones. "Hands behind your head."

He stared at her, unsurprised, then put his hands behind his head and dropped to his knees in the wet grass with a longsuffering look skyward and a muttered 'Seriously?'

It took all the nerve she had, but Karrin closed the distance between them in a few long steps and pressed the muzzle of the gun against his forehead.

He closed his eyes and sighed — not a sound of fear but of resignation, his expression tired and sober, sad.

Murphy grabbed his left hand, which still bled in a slow trickle. The blood was a hot, rusty smell, competing with the faint scent of roses and rain and something else; new leather, soap, candle smoke, the empty non-smell of winter. Familiar warmth radiated from his skin and she could feel uneven burn scars on the back of his hand, guitar string calluses on his fingertips.

This was a person, a real one, not some faerie or monster, and the implications of it threatened to paralyze her again. The cop in her – because it was still there, regardless of whether she had a badge or not—shoved the thought aside and found what she was looking for under the sleeve of his coat; a chain of little medieval shields, looking battered and worse for wear. One was missing at the end near the bracelet's clasp.

Karrin let go of him, numbly stumbling over the evidence – it was stacking up in favor of the impossible.

He flinched when her hand slipped beneath the collar of his shirt. Her fingers found another silver chain under his shirt and she pulled it out – the pendant was a star in a circle, dented in a few places with a little red gem held in the center by a glob of gray glue. It seemed to hum with a subtle energy all its own.

She had seen him take down a werewolf with it, once – a half-ton mountain of teeth, fur and claws, killed with a fucking necklace. She had been there when he saved one little girl from a fortress of ice, one from a horde of demons and another from a temple of fire, was there when he exterminated an entire species with a single knife. She had seen him reverse the pull of gravity, for god's sake.

He had done a million things no man should be able to do – he would have brought down the stars from the sky if she'd asked him to do it. Or told him he couldn't.

The pendant fell from her fingers and she drew her hand away, trembling.

"Harry?"

"Cross my heart and hope to die."

And she could believe a million impossible things, but this was beyond her. She knew she should spare herself the disappointment, just pull the trigger and walk away while she still had the chance.

But they never found his body.

People don't come back from the dead.

Since when had he ever played by the rules?

There was one way to know for sure. It was a potentially lethal risk but something inside of her was demanding it, that vicious little flicker of conviction, the ability to blindly, recklessly believe; things she thought she'd lost when he had gone on.

Karrin pushed his head back with the muzzle of the gun, tipping his face up toward her.

It certainly looked like Harry Dresden; dark hair and striking features, unshaven, scars in the right places, but she knew well enough that what was on the outside wasn't necessarily on the inside.

"If you took those from him – if you're not who you say you are," she whispered coldly, "I'll kill you. I won't think twice."

He said nothing, eyes downcast, breathing shallow and rapid. Not a drop of rain touched him, she noticed absently. There were snowflakes in his hair, caught in the creases of his coat.

"Look at me."

"Karrin, please—"

"Look at me," she demanded, and thumbed back the SIG's hammer. The sound was too loud in the empty cemetery, jarring, unmistakable.

His eyes fixed on hers, dark and intent – Harry had always claimed hazel or green, and from a distance they looked that way. Standing so close, though, his eyes were the same color they had always been; a cold and fathomless gray, flecked with an odd contrast of gold that forever made her think of those false-color photographs of space.

Otherworldly.

There was a ferocious pressure against the inside of her head, a flash of something like sunlight and fire—

And then she was standing on a bridge in a hazy but accurate approximation of Chicago.

On her side of the bridge, the skyline rose as mundane and flat as the cardboard set of a school play. The river below was ink-black and placid, offering up neither ripple nor reflection, and stretched out on either side to disappear into mist.

The city on the other side was shadowy, dangerous, half-destroyed and backlit by the hellish glow of flame, the flare of disembodied lightning. The stars above were eerily bright and a too-large moon rose over knife-edged skyscrapers. Shadows fell at uneasy angles to a soundtrack of mad laughter, whispered threats, animal noises. Something moved in the ruins beyond the bridge and at a second look she saw them – every dark and sinister thing they had ever fought and some he had faced without her. Screams echoed and reverberated; with a chill, she recognized her own.

Between her and this stood Harry.

He looked precisely the same as he had standing before her in the cemetery, leaning on his staff as if he had been waiting for her, one hand out like he was reaching for her. Smiling slightly, as if he knew something she didn't. The ghost of a breeze pulled at the hem of his coat.

It was him. Really and truly; she felt it in her very soul, and she knew it was true because they had never really left this place.

This is what he was, where he had always been – holding the line, keeping the darkness at bay.

Harry glanced down and so did she. The bridge beneath them had begun to crack, slowly and silently crumbling away at the edges. In places she could see through to the black water below.

He stepped backward across the widening chasm, to the side with the monsters, the side with all the things he had killed to keep them safe. No sooner had he done it than he changed into a figure all but unrecognizable in a gray cloak and heavy plate armor rimed with frost, drenched in someone else's blood.

Karrin reached for his hand, and in his eyes she could see a vague reflection – something white and winged that wept as she held the point of a sword to his throat.

Her vision blurred, hot tears mingled with the cold rain on her face. Strong hands wrapped around hers and gently pulled the gun from her grip. She heard the click of the safety and the leaden thump of the pistol as it landed at her feet.

Harry caught her as her knees gave out and she melted against him, her arms around his neck.

"Oh my god," she breathed, over and over. "Oh my god."

She wasn't sure how long they stayed that way; after a moment, ten minutes or an eternity, he said her name, hoarse and happy.

"Karrie. Sweetheart. You're strangling me."

She pulled away, still clutching handfuls of his coat.

"It's you."

"Of course it is," Harry said with mock-indignation, quickly brushing the back of his hand across his eyes. "But hell's bells, Murph, you almost had me convinced it wasn't."

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I had to make sure—"

He grinned like he never meant to stop and cupped her face in one shaking hand.

"It's okay. Just, you know, tell me next time you plan to go all Boondock Saints, so I can be on a different continent."

Karrin laughed; a raw, unsteady sound, muffled when he pulled her into his arms again.

"I missed you." He pressed his lips against her forehead. "So much."

"Harry," she said when he let go. "You're here."

"Yeah. I am. Glad to see you've finally worked that one out."

"Mort said you were gone."

"Wishful thinking." He shrugged. "Mort's a good guy, I really hope this doesn't ruin his rep."

She blinked at him. "…But I talked to your ghost."

"I know," he said, digging through random pockets, "I was there—"

"Harry, you were dead."

"Sort of," he said, pulling a bandana from the depths of a coat pocket and awkwardly wrapping it around his still-bleeding hand. "For all intents and purposes, yeah, but it was never legally declared-"

"And you came back."

Karrin took his hand and neatly rewrapped it for him, tied it. She didn't let go, holding his hand between both of hers, and stared at him, not even trying to comprehend. Her mind was absolutely blown.

He stared back at her – it was an intense, strangely intimate thing, looking him in the eye, even more so when he kissed the back of her hands the same way he had that afternoon on the boat.

Then he smiled sadly and said, "You know. Of course you know."

"You did it," she whispered. "You set it up."

"Yeah." He bit his lip and looked away. "I did it."

The hot, barely-contained tears began to surface again, this time with a peculiar mixture of relief, vindication and guilt, affection, anger.

For the moment, at least, anger won out.

"You son of a bitch!" she seethed, pounding the sides of her fists against his chest though she was too close to him for the hit to carry any sort of momentum. "How could you?"

"Now, Murph, there are some things you need to hear before you commence with the ass-kicking—"

"Of all the idiotic stunts you've pulled—"

"I know you're upset—"

"This one really takes the fucking cake, Dresden—"

"Just hear me out—"

"Do you even realize what you put me through?" she snarled, and had pulled back her fists to hit him again when he caught both of her wrists. His voice was quiet, rough with emotion.

"Yes. I do. I was here, remember? I saw. And if you know I did it, then you know why, right? You know why." He took her face in his hands again and wiped fresh tears from her cheeks. "I'm not asking you to forgive me, 'cause you're right. I did it. I set it up. And I'm sorry. But you have to know, it wasn't exactly my idea."

"Wasn't your—what do you mean?"

"I mean I got hustled. I got played for a fool by somebody who knew how to get in my head, knew what to say to make me —make me do what I did." His left hand clenched, white-knuckled around the makeshift bandage. "That's why I got to come back, though. That's why I'm here."

His words plucked something from the whirlwind inside her head, something she hadn't yet considered.

"How. Um. How are you here?"

He smiled wryly. "It's a long and fucked-up story that I'll tell you just as soon as we get out of the rain."

Murphy looked around, realizing with a start that they were still in Graceland. She was abruptly cold, shivering as she collected her gun from the grass and holstered it. Harry pulled her to her feet and picked up his staff.

She ran her hands back through her damp hair, pressed her palms against the side of her head, still shaking all over.

"God. This is – I need a drink."

"That...that doesn't sound half-bad right now."

"Mac's?" she ventured. He frowned.

"Somewhere less..."

"Public."

"Yeah. I have a one gun-to-the-face-per-day limit."

She pressed her lips together and gave him a level stare, he smiled and ducked his head in that singularly Harry-ish way, the moment completely surreal and inexplicably normal, all at once. She turned, casting one last glance at the open grave, and a warm weight settled around her shoulders – his coat. Harry held out something in front of her; one of the roses from the bouquet she had brought.

Karrin took it and the hand he offered, and they walked out of the cemetery together.

To be continued