Witch Hunter Robin Fan Fiction ❯ Binah (Understanding) ❯ Ensnared ( Chapter 5 )
[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]
By: M Mehiel 
“It’s a trap,” Robin whispered.
Anime/Manga: Witch Hunter Robin Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Drama | Type: Continuation | Uploaded On: 04.19.2006 | Pages: 3 | Words: 3.0K | Visits: 756 | Status: Completed
“It’s a trap,” Robin whispered.
Anime/Manga: Witch Hunter Robin Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Drama | Type: Continuation | Uploaded On: 04.19.2006 | Pages: 3 | Words: 3.0K | Visits: 756 | Status: Completed
Decorum said that removing her wet jacket, shoes, and socks was all right. For this, she was awake, or something like awake, her toes curling a little when he tugged off the sodden socks. She'd been sweating in them; it was then he realized she must have been using immense amounts of energy to keep up her shield while simultaneously making her way to him. Remotely killing Single-Eye must have sapped her last reserves. He placed the jacket on a chair in her room, and the socks and shoes at the foot of the bed. His only light was that streaming in from the hallway; why Robin was so against electric light was beyond him.
“Legs under the covers, now,” he urged. Slowly, she curled them up to her chest, and he had to do the rest himself, covering her up. Although her eyes remained closed, her wandering hands fluttered up to her hair, trying to blindly tug out the ridiculous ribbons there.
“You'd have things a lot easier if you could braid your hair like a normal girl your age,” Amon remarked, batting her hands out of the way and pulling the ribbons out himself. Pins came with them. Her hair was damp, the scalp beneath it felt feverish.
“Can't,” she murmured. “Don't know how.” He was silent, his hands still. “No, really,” she continued. “Sister Eucharia says I should have horns on my head, like the devil I am.”
It took Amon a full moment to understand the import of her words. “Be quiet,” he whispered, and removed the ribbons, balling them up in his hand when he was finished, and shoving them in a pocket somewhere he hoped they'd never be found again.
***
Michael Lee still lived at STN-J. His own modest little apartment there on the first floor still suited his purposes, and he could always run the stairs when he was feeling restless. There was a little kitchen meant for office staff on the first floor, and his overgrown broom closet equipped with a bed and showerhead was what he'd known for the last couple of years. He didn't feel the need to leave.
It was also handy that he could intercept messages on his communicator in the dead of two a.m., hastily grabbing for the comm unit only to hear Margarethe Bonn's careful, hopelessly accented Japanese in his ear.
“Michael, there has been a self-immolation inside the Walled City,” she informed him briskly. “Tokyo PD called us because it often becomes STN-J's jurisdiction when there's a death in that place.”
“Okay,” he muttered stupidly into the phone.
“Please call up all other data on immolations within the Walled City in the last year,” she asked. “I will call the other members of the team, to investigate the scene of the crime.”
“Understood,” he said. Margarethe hung up, and Michael crashed back to his bed. Immolation: the act of setting oneself or someone else on fire.
“Robin,” he murmured.
***
Miho arrived with no makeup, but combed hair, and shoes that actually matched. She emerged from her vehicle only to find Margarethe Bonn making a futile attempt at clarifying something with Tokyo PD. Sighing, Miho stepped forward and listened to the argument. It was plain what Margarethe wanted: control of the case. She obviously didn't believe it was a suicide.
“Where was the accelerant?” she kept on repeating.
“Miss Bonn?” Miho asked tentatively. The detectives flashed a grateful look, and immediately left Miho to handle the older woman. There were dark circles under Margarethe's eyes. Obviously, she was the first to have been called by Tokyo law enforcement. “You don't think it was a suicide?” she asked.
“Where is the gasoline?” Margarethe asked in response. She gestured around them. The detectives, crime scene investigators, and STN-J members had gathered on a rooftop overlooking a particularly seedy section of the Walled City. Police cars and flashing lights waited in the dirty street below. Each apartment window around them had its windows firmly closed with blinds drawn, even in the muggy summer night. No one wanted to be seen. When it came to the Craft, Miho reflected, even curiosity was a crime.
Margarethe was right; there was no gasoline to be found. The air did not smell of an accelerant like lighter fluid or kerosene, either. Moreover, there was no container lying around that might suggest anything useful. “How did he light himself on fire without fuel?” Margarethe continued. “It's not possible.”
“Unless you're a Witch,” Miho sighed heavily. “Maybe it was an accident; some Witches just coming into their power often have trouble controlling it, and hurt themselves.”
“What was he doing on the roof?” Margarethe asked, rounding on Miho. “Practicing his newfound skill? With what? The television antenna?” She breathed deeply, calming herself. “I apologize. I did not mean to be short with you.”
“It's early in the morning,” Miho said, waving off the apology. “You were right to jump in on the case and ask questions.” The rumble of a motorcycle was heard below, on the street. “That will be Sakaki,” Miho said. “I'll go fetch him.”
She was on her way, when something glinting brightly in the midst of the human-shaped scorch pattern on the rooftop caught her eye. She knelt. “What is it?” Margarethe asked.
“It looks like melted glass,” Miho answered. She reached down carefully to touch it, and her scrying sense was assaulted with the memory of pain, fear, and fire. “It started here,” she murmured. “This is the first part of him that caught fire.”
“Your Craft tells you this?”
Miho nodded. “This part, his glass eye…” Realization crept over her. She looked up at Margarethe, who was wearing the barest hint of a smug smile.
“This case is ours, I think,” she said.
***
After all the photos were taken, and all parties satisfied, it was time to go home. Doujima yawned widely. “I for one am going home and having a shower,” she declared, and slid into her pretty little red car and gunned it out of there.
“How did she get a position at Solomon, being such a slacker?” Sakaki asked, staring after her car. Light was just beginning to dawn over the Walled City. Police cars were leaving.
“Who knows? Maybe she is special, like she always said,” Miho responded. “Where did you park your bike?”
“Over there, where I could see it,” Sakaki answered, pointing at an alley made of the backsides of a few buildings. “I should have checked for mud, first, though. I'll have to wash it, later.”
“It's muddy, over there?” Margarethe asked sharply.
Sakaki's eyebrows rose in surprise. “Yeah…does that mean something?”
“It hasn't rained all week; how can there be mud?” the German Hunter asked, marching into the alley and looking at the ground carefully. She stepped over to Sakaki's motorcycle and examined the splashes of mud on his tires. “It was wet, earlier, obviously,” she called out. She looked at the ground. “It's dried up in this heat.”
“I'm not sure I understand; couldn't someone have just thrown dishwater out their window?” Sakaki asked.
“At two-thirty in the morning, when you arrived here?” Margarethe asked, standing up. “I was here before you were, and so was Miho. No one was splashing water anywhere.”
“They were hiding from us,” Miho confirmed.
Margarethe looked at the pale dawn sky. “How do you make it rain in one alley in all of Tokyo, in the small hours of a clear summer morning?” she asked rhetorically. “Not even the strongest Witch can really control the weather. Nor are they so frivolous with their power.”
“Then, how did anything get on my tires?” Sakaki asked, beginning to see the problem.
“That's the winning question,” Margarethe murmured. She looked at Miho. “May I ask you to scrye the ground?”
Miho nodded, and knelt. Opening herself to the power, she felt a hundred different feelings assail her. She reeled. Immediately, Sakaki's hand was at her back. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“There's too much,” she whispered. “Too many of them…”
“Emotions, or people having them?” Margarethe asked.
“Both,” Miho answered. “I can't tell them apart, but something happened here.” She stood shakily. “There was rage, and fear, and shame, and something else…” She searched for the proper word. “Determination,” she said. “And then triumph.”
“And one dead man with a glass eye, on that rooftop,” Margarethe finished. “This is sounding less and less like a suicide, wouldn't you agree?”
Miho could only nod. She couldn't yet identify what was so troubling to her; the fact that feelings lingering on the ground in the Walled City were so intense, or that they seemed so shockingly familiar.
***
It was the early morning, now, and Amon was finally asleep. He'd left his door and Robin's open, so that he could hear her if something went wrong. Her fever made him nervous, but there was little to be done for it after he'd coaxed her into swallowing some ibuprofen—sleep would help more than anything else he could dream up. So he slept on top of the blankets, with one ear open. Thus it was that frantic pounding on his door sometime around five startled him awake, shooting adrenaline through his body and forcing him into a state of hyper-awareness. He blinked awake, listening to the sound. There was more pounding; the screen door in the kitchen rattled on its hinges. He slipped one hand under a pillow; found his gun with his right hand, and carefully moved to the floor. The loud knocking continued as he padded across the hall, and looked in on Robin. She was sitting up in bed with a sheet clutched up around her, eyes wide.
“Amon…” she whispered. He held a single finger to his lips, showed her the gun, and moved on. In the kitchen darkness he hugged the walls with his back, and slid behind the door to open it, letting the visitor crash through, and instantly holding the gun on them when he slammed the door shut again.
Doujima screamed. Her hands, still holding keys and a white leather clutch purse, rose to her face instinctively. She froze. Amon let the gun fall, sighing. “Jesus Christ, Doujima,” he muttered.
“What the hell kind of a welcome is that, shoving a gun in my face?” Doujima shrilled. “You asshole!” She sat down abruptly at the kitchen table, arms crossed tightly.
“Good morning to you, too,” Amon commented dryly. “To what do we owe the unexpected pleasure?”
“Put the gun away.” Dutifully, he did so, and she opened her mouth to speak. Just then, Robin shuffled hesitantly into the room. She was wearing something impossible; a knee-length robe in black satin that tied at the waist. Her hair was still tangled from its earlier state, sticking out at odd angles from her face.
“What the hell is that?” Amon spat, narrowing his eyes at Robin's clothes.
“Oh, Robin, do you like that one?” Doujima asked, brightening immediately. “The other one in your size was pink, and I just didn't think it suited you—”
“Shut up, Yukira,” Amon cut her off. Doujima sputtered with inarticulate rage. He looked at Robin, and pointed at her room. “Go put on real pajamas.”
Robin shook her head. “Doujima didn't get me any with pants.”
Approaching a state of near-madness, Amon wheeled on Doujima. The detective was now pointing at Robin's room. “Go try that yoga outfit I got you,” she suggested. “It covers up most everything.”
Robin nodded and began to leave. “Wait!” Amon barked. She stopped, turning around. He sighed, and held one hand to her forehead quietly. Robin's eyes closed. She leaned into the touch ever so slightly. The fever seemed to be gone, although her skin was a little clammy. “Better?” he asked, his tone entirely different. Mutely, Robin nodded. He released her; she opened her eyes. “When you come back, I want you to eat something.” Again, she nodded, and trundled off to her room.
Amon wrenched open the freezer door and was hit with a sudden blast of cold air. It dawned on him that he wasn't wearing much in terms of clothes, either. As though reading his mind, Doujima cracked “Hypocrite,” behind his turned back.
“Is that what you came here to tell me?” he asked, tearing into a box of frozen instant miso soup. He fetched a saucepan from a cupboard above, and broke off a brick of the mix into the pan, turning up the heat beneath it.
“Go put on a shirt, and I'll think about it,” Doujima teased. “You should be providing a better example for your little patient, you know.”
“This had better be good,” Amon muttered, leaving the kitchen only to tug on a shirt and return.
“It's not good,” Doujima said, upon his arrival. “STN-J may find you sooner than we'd hoped.”
***
Robin sat with her knees gathered to her chest as usual. As Doujima had predicted, the yoga outfit did cover up most of her. The fact that it was skintight black microfiber, however, was another matter. While it modestly covered even her upper arms, it silhouetted them perfectly, and made every other inch of her shape more than apparent to the watchful eye. Amon looked at her face instead, still wan and tired, with her hair still a mess. She sat placidly before her steaming soup, not eating it.
“Robin, dear, why aren't you eating?” Doujima asked.
“No spoon,” Robin whispered.
Amon cursed himself, yanked a spoon from a drawer with more violence than necessary, and offered it to her. Quietly, she began eating.
“It's good,” she murmured.
He ignored the comment, and turned back to Doujima. “What else?” he asked.
“Not much,” Doujima answered. “They know it was Witch-related; they know it was a fire. It won't take them long to pull up all of the data.” Her words carried all the weight they needed. All three of them knew what she meant; Robin was the last known Witch in the Tokyo area to possess the powers of the Fire Craft. The evidence would inevitably point to her. And with her body (and Amon's) as yet unaccounted for, STN-J would be forced to ask questions that the force had tacitly avoided, but that under new management, could no longer refuse to face.
“We'll have to lie low,” Amon understated.
“You can't leave the apartment, Amon.”
“It's a trap,” Robin whispered. Her eyes had attained that sharp and rare clarity that usually preceded a prediction that inevitably proved correct. Her eyes, no longer tired, flicked to Amon. “Why Single-Eye?” she asked. “Why now?”
Cold realization washed over him. Of late, he had been too distracted by other events to even consider the reason that Single-Eye had emerged again, although it was obvious from the late Witch's modus operandi that he hated being recognized. Moreover, why had he specifically come out of the shadows to challenge them, when hiding would have been safer? And how (here fear gripped him) had Single-Eye known about his power? In the moment, Amon had assumed it had something to do with the mind-control, but what if it…didn't? What if…
“He was following orders,” Robin breathed.
Amon's eyes bored into hers. “We're being watched. And tested.”
Fear crept into her eyes. “Amon,” she whispered. His mouth and eyes hardened. If it was a fight they wanted, then that was what his enemies would receive. In the meantime, his power was whistling through him at the very thought of a set-up, whipping around like the beginnings of a winter storm.
Doujima coughed. Both former Hunters turned abruptly to face her. “Doujima, how long can you throw STN-J off the scent?” Amon asked. It sounded like an order.
“I'm not sure…I can't do it without telling everyone.” She shrugged helplessly.
“Please don't do that,” Robin implored. “You're in enough danger as it is, helping us. There is no reason to further endanger the rest of the team.”
“Robin's right,” Amon continued. “It will be easier for the team to deceive the replacement if they themselves are also deceived.” He paused. “Tell them only as a last resort, Doujima.”
“You got it,” Doujima answered doubtfully. “But please be careful, okay, you guys?”
“We'll be fine,” Robin said, trying to placate the other woman. Her voice was comforting, if distant. Her mind was obviously elsewhere, on what a trap could mean. Amon's gaze drifted from her to Doujima.
“Thank you, Yurika,” he said. “Go home, and rest.”
“Yes, thank you, Doujima,” Robin concurred. She said nothing else when Doujima got up slowly, collected her purse, and left the kitchen to its two silent residents.
“Legs under the covers, now,” he urged. Slowly, she curled them up to her chest, and he had to do the rest himself, covering her up. Although her eyes remained closed, her wandering hands fluttered up to her hair, trying to blindly tug out the ridiculous ribbons there.
“You'd have things a lot easier if you could braid your hair like a normal girl your age,” Amon remarked, batting her hands out of the way and pulling the ribbons out himself. Pins came with them. Her hair was damp, the scalp beneath it felt feverish.
“Can't,” she murmured. “Don't know how.” He was silent, his hands still. “No, really,” she continued. “Sister Eucharia says I should have horns on my head, like the devil I am.”
It took Amon a full moment to understand the import of her words. “Be quiet,” he whispered, and removed the ribbons, balling them up in his hand when he was finished, and shoving them in a pocket somewhere he hoped they'd never be found again.
***
Michael Lee still lived at STN-J. His own modest little apartment there on the first floor still suited his purposes, and he could always run the stairs when he was feeling restless. There was a little kitchen meant for office staff on the first floor, and his overgrown broom closet equipped with a bed and showerhead was what he'd known for the last couple of years. He didn't feel the need to leave.
It was also handy that he could intercept messages on his communicator in the dead of two a.m., hastily grabbing for the comm unit only to hear Margarethe Bonn's careful, hopelessly accented Japanese in his ear.
“Michael, there has been a self-immolation inside the Walled City,” she informed him briskly. “Tokyo PD called us because it often becomes STN-J's jurisdiction when there's a death in that place.”
“Okay,” he muttered stupidly into the phone.
“Please call up all other data on immolations within the Walled City in the last year,” she asked. “I will call the other members of the team, to investigate the scene of the crime.”
“Understood,” he said. Margarethe hung up, and Michael crashed back to his bed. Immolation: the act of setting oneself or someone else on fire.
“Robin,” he murmured.
***
Miho arrived with no makeup, but combed hair, and shoes that actually matched. She emerged from her vehicle only to find Margarethe Bonn making a futile attempt at clarifying something with Tokyo PD. Sighing, Miho stepped forward and listened to the argument. It was plain what Margarethe wanted: control of the case. She obviously didn't believe it was a suicide.
“Where was the accelerant?” she kept on repeating.
“Miss Bonn?” Miho asked tentatively. The detectives flashed a grateful look, and immediately left Miho to handle the older woman. There were dark circles under Margarethe's eyes. Obviously, she was the first to have been called by Tokyo law enforcement. “You don't think it was a suicide?” she asked.
“Where is the gasoline?” Margarethe asked in response. She gestured around them. The detectives, crime scene investigators, and STN-J members had gathered on a rooftop overlooking a particularly seedy section of the Walled City. Police cars and flashing lights waited in the dirty street below. Each apartment window around them had its windows firmly closed with blinds drawn, even in the muggy summer night. No one wanted to be seen. When it came to the Craft, Miho reflected, even curiosity was a crime.
Margarethe was right; there was no gasoline to be found. The air did not smell of an accelerant like lighter fluid or kerosene, either. Moreover, there was no container lying around that might suggest anything useful. “How did he light himself on fire without fuel?” Margarethe continued. “It's not possible.”
“Unless you're a Witch,” Miho sighed heavily. “Maybe it was an accident; some Witches just coming into their power often have trouble controlling it, and hurt themselves.”
“What was he doing on the roof?” Margarethe asked, rounding on Miho. “Practicing his newfound skill? With what? The television antenna?” She breathed deeply, calming herself. “I apologize. I did not mean to be short with you.”
“It's early in the morning,” Miho said, waving off the apology. “You were right to jump in on the case and ask questions.” The rumble of a motorcycle was heard below, on the street. “That will be Sakaki,” Miho said. “I'll go fetch him.”
She was on her way, when something glinting brightly in the midst of the human-shaped scorch pattern on the rooftop caught her eye. She knelt. “What is it?” Margarethe asked.
“It looks like melted glass,” Miho answered. She reached down carefully to touch it, and her scrying sense was assaulted with the memory of pain, fear, and fire. “It started here,” she murmured. “This is the first part of him that caught fire.”
“Your Craft tells you this?”
Miho nodded. “This part, his glass eye…” Realization crept over her. She looked up at Margarethe, who was wearing the barest hint of a smug smile.
“This case is ours, I think,” she said.
***
After all the photos were taken, and all parties satisfied, it was time to go home. Doujima yawned widely. “I for one am going home and having a shower,” she declared, and slid into her pretty little red car and gunned it out of there.
“How did she get a position at Solomon, being such a slacker?” Sakaki asked, staring after her car. Light was just beginning to dawn over the Walled City. Police cars were leaving.
“Who knows? Maybe she is special, like she always said,” Miho responded. “Where did you park your bike?”
“Over there, where I could see it,” Sakaki answered, pointing at an alley made of the backsides of a few buildings. “I should have checked for mud, first, though. I'll have to wash it, later.”
“It's muddy, over there?” Margarethe asked sharply.
Sakaki's eyebrows rose in surprise. “Yeah…does that mean something?”
“It hasn't rained all week; how can there be mud?” the German Hunter asked, marching into the alley and looking at the ground carefully. She stepped over to Sakaki's motorcycle and examined the splashes of mud on his tires. “It was wet, earlier, obviously,” she called out. She looked at the ground. “It's dried up in this heat.”
“I'm not sure I understand; couldn't someone have just thrown dishwater out their window?” Sakaki asked.
“At two-thirty in the morning, when you arrived here?” Margarethe asked, standing up. “I was here before you were, and so was Miho. No one was splashing water anywhere.”
“They were hiding from us,” Miho confirmed.
Margarethe looked at the pale dawn sky. “How do you make it rain in one alley in all of Tokyo, in the small hours of a clear summer morning?” she asked rhetorically. “Not even the strongest Witch can really control the weather. Nor are they so frivolous with their power.”
“Then, how did anything get on my tires?” Sakaki asked, beginning to see the problem.
“That's the winning question,” Margarethe murmured. She looked at Miho. “May I ask you to scrye the ground?”
Miho nodded, and knelt. Opening herself to the power, she felt a hundred different feelings assail her. She reeled. Immediately, Sakaki's hand was at her back. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“There's too much,” she whispered. “Too many of them…”
“Emotions, or people having them?” Margarethe asked.
“Both,” Miho answered. “I can't tell them apart, but something happened here.” She stood shakily. “There was rage, and fear, and shame, and something else…” She searched for the proper word. “Determination,” she said. “And then triumph.”
“And one dead man with a glass eye, on that rooftop,” Margarethe finished. “This is sounding less and less like a suicide, wouldn't you agree?”
Miho could only nod. She couldn't yet identify what was so troubling to her; the fact that feelings lingering on the ground in the Walled City were so intense, or that they seemed so shockingly familiar.
***
It was the early morning, now, and Amon was finally asleep. He'd left his door and Robin's open, so that he could hear her if something went wrong. Her fever made him nervous, but there was little to be done for it after he'd coaxed her into swallowing some ibuprofen—sleep would help more than anything else he could dream up. So he slept on top of the blankets, with one ear open. Thus it was that frantic pounding on his door sometime around five startled him awake, shooting adrenaline through his body and forcing him into a state of hyper-awareness. He blinked awake, listening to the sound. There was more pounding; the screen door in the kitchen rattled on its hinges. He slipped one hand under a pillow; found his gun with his right hand, and carefully moved to the floor. The loud knocking continued as he padded across the hall, and looked in on Robin. She was sitting up in bed with a sheet clutched up around her, eyes wide.
“Amon…” she whispered. He held a single finger to his lips, showed her the gun, and moved on. In the kitchen darkness he hugged the walls with his back, and slid behind the door to open it, letting the visitor crash through, and instantly holding the gun on them when he slammed the door shut again.
Doujima screamed. Her hands, still holding keys and a white leather clutch purse, rose to her face instinctively. She froze. Amon let the gun fall, sighing. “Jesus Christ, Doujima,” he muttered.
“What the hell kind of a welcome is that, shoving a gun in my face?” Doujima shrilled. “You asshole!” She sat down abruptly at the kitchen table, arms crossed tightly.
“Good morning to you, too,” Amon commented dryly. “To what do we owe the unexpected pleasure?”
“Put the gun away.” Dutifully, he did so, and she opened her mouth to speak. Just then, Robin shuffled hesitantly into the room. She was wearing something impossible; a knee-length robe in black satin that tied at the waist. Her hair was still tangled from its earlier state, sticking out at odd angles from her face.
“What the hell is that?” Amon spat, narrowing his eyes at Robin's clothes.
“Oh, Robin, do you like that one?” Doujima asked, brightening immediately. “The other one in your size was pink, and I just didn't think it suited you—”
“Shut up, Yukira,” Amon cut her off. Doujima sputtered with inarticulate rage. He looked at Robin, and pointed at her room. “Go put on real pajamas.”
Robin shook her head. “Doujima didn't get me any with pants.”
Approaching a state of near-madness, Amon wheeled on Doujima. The detective was now pointing at Robin's room. “Go try that yoga outfit I got you,” she suggested. “It covers up most everything.”
Robin nodded and began to leave. “Wait!” Amon barked. She stopped, turning around. He sighed, and held one hand to her forehead quietly. Robin's eyes closed. She leaned into the touch ever so slightly. The fever seemed to be gone, although her skin was a little clammy. “Better?” he asked, his tone entirely different. Mutely, Robin nodded. He released her; she opened her eyes. “When you come back, I want you to eat something.” Again, she nodded, and trundled off to her room.
Amon wrenched open the freezer door and was hit with a sudden blast of cold air. It dawned on him that he wasn't wearing much in terms of clothes, either. As though reading his mind, Doujima cracked “Hypocrite,” behind his turned back.
“Is that what you came here to tell me?” he asked, tearing into a box of frozen instant miso soup. He fetched a saucepan from a cupboard above, and broke off a brick of the mix into the pan, turning up the heat beneath it.
“Go put on a shirt, and I'll think about it,” Doujima teased. “You should be providing a better example for your little patient, you know.”
“This had better be good,” Amon muttered, leaving the kitchen only to tug on a shirt and return.
“It's not good,” Doujima said, upon his arrival. “STN-J may find you sooner than we'd hoped.”
***
Robin sat with her knees gathered to her chest as usual. As Doujima had predicted, the yoga outfit did cover up most of her. The fact that it was skintight black microfiber, however, was another matter. While it modestly covered even her upper arms, it silhouetted them perfectly, and made every other inch of her shape more than apparent to the watchful eye. Amon looked at her face instead, still wan and tired, with her hair still a mess. She sat placidly before her steaming soup, not eating it.
“Robin, dear, why aren't you eating?” Doujima asked.
“No spoon,” Robin whispered.
Amon cursed himself, yanked a spoon from a drawer with more violence than necessary, and offered it to her. Quietly, she began eating.
“It's good,” she murmured.
He ignored the comment, and turned back to Doujima. “What else?” he asked.
“Not much,” Doujima answered. “They know it was Witch-related; they know it was a fire. It won't take them long to pull up all of the data.” Her words carried all the weight they needed. All three of them knew what she meant; Robin was the last known Witch in the Tokyo area to possess the powers of the Fire Craft. The evidence would inevitably point to her. And with her body (and Amon's) as yet unaccounted for, STN-J would be forced to ask questions that the force had tacitly avoided, but that under new management, could no longer refuse to face.
“We'll have to lie low,” Amon understated.
“You can't leave the apartment, Amon.”
“It's a trap,” Robin whispered. Her eyes had attained that sharp and rare clarity that usually preceded a prediction that inevitably proved correct. Her eyes, no longer tired, flicked to Amon. “Why Single-Eye?” she asked. “Why now?”
Cold realization washed over him. Of late, he had been too distracted by other events to even consider the reason that Single-Eye had emerged again, although it was obvious from the late Witch's modus operandi that he hated being recognized. Moreover, why had he specifically come out of the shadows to challenge them, when hiding would have been safer? And how (here fear gripped him) had Single-Eye known about his power? In the moment, Amon had assumed it had something to do with the mind-control, but what if it…didn't? What if…
“He was following orders,” Robin breathed.
Amon's eyes bored into hers. “We're being watched. And tested.”
Fear crept into her eyes. “Amon,” she whispered. His mouth and eyes hardened. If it was a fight they wanted, then that was what his enemies would receive. In the meantime, his power was whistling through him at the very thought of a set-up, whipping around like the beginnings of a winter storm.
Doujima coughed. Both former Hunters turned abruptly to face her. “Doujima, how long can you throw STN-J off the scent?” Amon asked. It sounded like an order.
“I'm not sure…I can't do it without telling everyone.” She shrugged helplessly.
“Please don't do that,” Robin implored. “You're in enough danger as it is, helping us. There is no reason to further endanger the rest of the team.”
“Robin's right,” Amon continued. “It will be easier for the team to deceive the replacement if they themselves are also deceived.” He paused. “Tell them only as a last resort, Doujima.”
“You got it,” Doujima answered doubtfully. “But please be careful, okay, you guys?”
“We'll be fine,” Robin said, trying to placate the other woman. Her voice was comforting, if distant. Her mind was obviously elsewhere, on what a trap could mean. Amon's gaze drifted from her to Doujima.
“Thank you, Yurika,” he said. “Go home, and rest.”
“Yes, thank you, Doujima,” Robin concurred. She said nothing else when Doujima got up slowly, collected her purse, and left the kitchen to its two silent residents.