A/N: Witness as I bombard you with song lyrics! Sorry. I'm a damn hippie. This chapter has been particularly interesting to write, considering I've been basically homeless—no power at the house due to a massive ice storm that left half of Kansas a certified disaster area. Bouncing around from house to house (anyone who has power or any PLACE that still has power), pirating unprotected wireless networks to get online…yeah. Not to mention the husband being in Dubai, wondering what the hell is happening with me… Heh. I still have time before school starts, and despite the fact that half the city is without power, I'm gonna write, goddamnit! XD
"As
life gets longer awful feels softer,
and it feels pretty soft to
me
And if it takes shit to make bliss,
well, I feel pretty
blissfully
If life's not beautiful without the pain,
well,
I'd just rather never ever even see beauty again
Well, as life
gets longer awful feels softer
And it feels pretty soft to me"
--Modest Mouse, "The View"
"Now you stand
with your thief, you're on his parole
With your holy medallion
which your fingertips fold,
And your saintlike face and your
ghostlike soul,
Oh, who among them do you think could destroy
you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands…"
--Bob Dylan, "Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands"
"Our conversation
was short and sweet
It nearly swept me off-a my feet.
And I'm
back in the rain, oh, oh,
And you are on dry land.
You made it
there somehow
You're a big girl now.
Bird on the horizon,
sittin' on a fence,
He's singin' his song for me at his own
expense.
And I'm just like that bird, oh, oh,
Singin' just for
you.
I hope that you can hear,
Hear me singin' through these
tears.
Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast
Oh, but what
a shame if all we've shared can't last.
I can change, I swear, oh,
oh,
See what you can do.
I can make it through,
You can make
it too.
Love is so simple, to quote a phrase,
You've known
it all the time, I'm learnin' it these days.
Oh, I know where I
can find you, oh, oh,
In somebody's room.
It's a price I have
to pay
You're a big girl all the way.
A change in the
weather is known to be extreme
But what's the sense of changing
horses in midstream?
I'm going out of my mind, oh, oh,
With a
pain that stops and starts
Like a corkscrew to my heart
Ever
since we've been apart."
--Bob Dylan, "You're A Big Girl Now"
"And
we were done, done, done
with all the fuck, fuck, fuckin' around
You were so true to yourself
You were true to no one else
Well, I should put you in the ground
I've got the time, I
got the hours,
I got the days, I got the weeks
I could say to
myself
I've got the words but I can't speak
Well, I was done,
done, done
with all the circ, circ, circlin' round
I
didn't die and I ain't complainin'
I ain't blamin' you
I
didn't know that the words you said to me
meant more to me than
they ever could you?
I didn't lie and I ain't sayin'
I told
the whole truth
I didn't know that this game we were playin'
even had a set of rules"
--Modest Mouse, "Black Cadillacs"
"You gotta be
crazy, you gotta have a real need
You gotta sleep on your toes,
and when you're on the street,
You gotta be able to pick out the
easy meat with your eyes closed
And then moving in silently, down
wind and out of sight,
You gotta strike when the moment is right
without thinking
And after a while, you can work on points for
style
Like the club tie, and the firm handshake,
A certain look
in the eye and an easy smile
You have to be trusted by the people
that you lie to,
So that when they turn their backs on you,
You'll
get the chance to put the knife in
You gotta keep one eye
looking over your shoulder
You know it's going to get harder, and
harder, and harder as you
get older"
--Pink Floyd, "Dogs"
…………………………………………….
"What is your problem?" Nagira finally snapped irritably, after they'd been driving through Germany for a while. The clock on the BMW's dash showed that it was shortly after one in the morning, and Robin was taciturn in the backseat, laid out across it. Amon's brooding reticence and the events of the dinner party had served to render her mute, pensive, and worn-out. Nagira stared penetratingly at his brother who was illuminated in the glow of the vehicle's instrument panel.
"Nothing," Amon replied, unruffled by Nagira's blatant look. "You are the one snapping."
"You know what I mean." Nagira continued to stare at the side of Amon's face. Amon refused to look over, his eyes riveted to the road. "You've alternated between being pissy and completely silent ever since we left that place…not to mention the two cute disappearing acts you pulled today..."
Amon looked put-out; a reaction, finally. "I'm tired." Silence followed. Apparently that was his explanation.
Making a scoffing noise, Nagira lit a cigarette and rolled down his window a hair, just enough to ash out of. "So that's it, huh? You're the only person I know who seems to completely lose their mind when they're tired."
Silence filled the car's interior for a few long minutes and then Nagira looked over to Amon. "So where did you disappear to tonight, anyway?"
"I was looking around." Amon was unusually terse, his voice sounding as if it was a rubber band that someone kept pulling on, stretching it further than it should have been stretched.
"Looking around?" the lawyer asked incredulously. "Is that the only explanation you have?" He alternated between looking out at the road in front of them in the BMW's xenon headlights and looking over at the driver with wide, inquiring eyes that demanded an answer.
Without warning Amon turned to his brother briefly, remembering to look back at the road with fury in his eyes. "Look," he began, skating the thin line between a bellow and a shout only amplified in the small car, "what the hell does it matter? Since when do I have to report my every movement to you people? I am not a child, Nagira!"
Nagira's own anger came to the forefront, as if it had been lurking beneath the surface the whole time. "Then quit fucking acting like one, Amon! This is why I stopped talking to you, years ago. This is why I was almost wary of letting you back into my life, regardless of what kind of help you needed—you have a penchant for walking all over people and treating them like shit—"
"You stopped talking to me because you were unable to reconcile with the idea of me killing witches," Amon retorted, cutting his brother off. "And I did not need your help. Christ, what is your complex with making me into your helpless little brother for all eternity?"
Robin sat up, brow furrowed and mouth turned down sharply. Nagira flicked ash out the window forcefully and scowled. "Oh God! Have you really convinced yourself that you are just completely invincible and all-capable? You didn't need my help? First you send Robin to my doorstep alone and confused because you didn't think to plan anything out, then you call me from the fucking airport, bleeding and half-dead and tell me that you need me to get you a flight to Italy on the sly?" Nagira threw his hands up in the air, chuckling without humour. "What part of this suggests that you didn't need my help?"
"I didn't exactly have much time to plan anything out!" Amon snapped back, voice dripping venom. "Either I did something or they were going to kill her. And speaking of acting like children, I cannot believe that you are even holding this over my head!"
"Or how about leading us around in circles instead of just telling us what the hell was going on?" Nagira went on, regardless of Amon's vitriol about the nature of the argument. "How about sitting back idly while SOLOMON Hunted the holy living hell out of Robin?" Nagira looked at Amon pointedly, the silence sudden and oppressive. "But you never told her about that, did you?" he went on flatly.
Robin's face in the backseat had gone from disapproval at the two brothers fighting to wide-eyed, shattered disbelief. She knew that Amon had Hunted her on several failed attempts, culminating in the night above Nagira's office, but she had not known that he had prior knowledge of the other Hunters SOLOMON had sent after her while in Japan. He was silent and bitter; Robin looked at him, mouth open slightly.
"Is that true?" she asked, quietly. Amon did not reply, even as Nagira looked at him with a drilling, pointed glare. Robin drew a deep, shaky breath. "Is it?"
"Yes, damnit, it's true!" Amon nearly exploded, the hand gripping the steering wheel and the hand gripping the stick shift tightening until they shook, knuckles turning white. "HQ was growing impatient at my delay in killing you so they sent other Hunters." Robin was watching him, frozen.
"Why didn't you do something?" Robin asked brokenly.
"Because I wasn't sure at that point if I was going to let them kill you or if I was going to end up doing it," Amon said, voice devoid of emotion. "And now you know, just like you always have to know about everything. Are you two happy? Nagira? You happy? Robin? You happy?"
Nagira shook his head and looked out the window, focusing on smoking his cigarette. Robin stared blankly at the center console for a moment and the hand on the stick shift, then sank back into the back seat feeling vaguely ill to her stomach. "No," she whispered in reply. Lying back down she rolled over to face the leather of the back seat, arms folded against her chest, tears rolling from her eyes.
Abject, tomb-like silence filled the car for the remainder of the long trip back to the house outside of Copenhagen.
………………………………..
It seemed like a call to arms, a gathering of troops on a field before a battle. All morning long refusing sleep, Trygve and Sigrún were in Trygve's office to call in their resources, pool their power. Nagira wasn't certain if it was necessarily so wise to gather so many witches in one spot, concentrated, after what they knew about the committee and SOLOMON but Trygve looked resolute.
"This house is unimportant," the Icelandic man said firmly. Nagira had nearly blanched—this was Trygve's home, and he would give it up just like that? "We will leave it if need be, if it becomes dangerous. I don't think either the committee or SOLOMON at their urging would dare to attack us here, however."
"Why?" Nagira queried, sounding skeptical and helpless to stop being so.
"I haven't room for all of the witches that are coming," Trygve replied. "Have you any idea how much power will be amassed in this house, Nagira? Witches, everywhere, witches and their families, witches and their friends, witches sleeping on floors and in chairs. They would be mad to attack us here. Sheer number alone would give us the upper hand. Plus, I believe it would be wiser to convene my friends and fellows here, in my home, rather than have them spread out all over Europe, where they could start to be picked off by SOLOMON."
He was right in a way. A pack of wolves had better chances of survival than a lone wolf when facing a bear. But then Nagira began to think of the saying about fish in a barrel and sighed. "I hope you're right about that."
"I am." Trygve sounded extremely convinced and Nagira couldn't tell if it was because the man truly believed it or if he was simply trying to convince Nagira. The maids were coming into the room, leaving cups of steaming hot coffee behind for the Icelandic couple. Trygve rubbed at his eyes with a hand under his glasses and then took a large swallow of the piping hot drink. Sigrún, crossing names off a list, looked as if she needed to be in bed more than anyone and yet she continued dialing phone numbers. "These people are coming because they know that they are in danger by way of association to me and they know that Robin is in danger."
It was touching, in a weird way. Nagira couldn't imagine whole families packing up without any notice and just footing it up to Denmark, leaving their lives behind to help Robin…but then again, hadn't Trygve and Sigrún put their own lives on hold for the girl? Hadn't Sigrún's sister? …hadn't Nagira, himself? He thought then of the families who took the witches that Nagira hustled into hiding on the side; all the people who put their own concerns and safety on hold to take children, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers into their household and tried to give them a normal life.
Maybe Toudou had been right. Maybe witches were the superior race, descended from Gods of long ago—they certainly seemed to be kinder, gentler than the rest of humanity (for the most part, anyway). They seemed to know that they were facing odds against them and bound together tighter than any humans ever would have. Alliances made during wars fell apart shortly thereafter; nations squabbling over spoils, governments pointing fingers at one another—these were typical human occurrences. Human friendship seemed to reach only to the point at which one person would be inconvenienced, leaving the other behind.
Nagira was bumming himself out, as if he hadn't been mildly bummed to begin with. Extracting himself from the workroom, he trudged up the stairs towards his brother's room. Amon hadn't emerged since they'd returned to Denmark early that morning. It was entirely possible he was asleep; but knowing Amon, he probably wasn't.
Nagira swallowed his pride and felt silly (but kind of not really) for the anger he'd harboured the night before, and knocked on the door. Standing there for a while, he raised his hand to knock once more but stopped short when the door opened a crack, revealing a shirtless, rumple-haired Amon. He looked irate and cranky and as if he hadn't really been sleeping very well in the first place, if at all.
"What?" Amon sounded as cranky as he looked. Nagira carefully inserted a hand into the doorway, gripping the door, ensuring that if Amon went to slam it he was at least going to have to slam it onto Nagira's hand, probably breaking bones in the process. Sighing, Amon lifted an arm above his head and leaned against the doorframe.
"Hey buddy, wanna talk for a minute?" Nagira asked. Amon stared at him flatly and then closed his eyes, sighing again. The door opened a bit more, leaving enough room for Nagira to enter. Amon turned on a light and sat himself down on the edge of his bed. Nagira cast a discreet eye towards the door that conjoined Robin's room to Amon's and noticed that the lights appeared to be out in her room.
"She's asleep." Amon had apparently noticed Nagira's glance. "What is it?"
"Look, I guess I just wanted to apologize for what happened last night." Nagira looked mildly confused for a moment and then frowned. "Rather, this morning. Sometimes you just irritate the crap out of me, Amon."
"Likewise." Amon rubbed faintly at his face, staring into space. "This shit of you having to act like my father and my brother all rolled into one is going to stop, though." Head dropping down into his hand, Amon let out a breath through his palms. "I am very tired of everyone around me acting as if I am not allowed to be a separate person. You and Robin have been very good at that as of late."
Nagira arched an eyebrow, running a hand over his hair. He sat down in a chair, leaning back comfortably and folding his hands on his stomach. "You're the one who promised to be her warden, buddy, and as for myself—I wouldn't act like such a papa if you didn't act like you needed someone to run after you and clean up your emotional messes all the time. You're not just acting like a separate person; you're withdrawing completely. That is, when you're not being emotionally needy in your own little tormented way." Catching Amon's flaring look, Nagira lifted his hands and held them up innocently. "I'm not trying to start a fight. I'm just saying. It's the damn truth."
"Perhaps," the ex-Hunter began, his look calming, "you just need to learn to keep your nose out of my business."
"Are you sure about that?" Nagira afforded Amon a searching gaze, to which Amon stared back. "Even if you're screwing things up real bad?"
"Especially if I'm screwing things up badly," Amon affirmed. Unspoken words and understanding went between the two figures in the room, and in the semi-darkness imposed upon the room by the drawn curtains and the cloudy sky outside, Nagira couldn't quite make out Amon's face—despite the light—as he stood, stretching. "I can't sleep. Suppose I might as well get up now."
………………………………
Robin awoke at around eleven feeling distinctly groggy and not-very-well-rested at all. Rolling out of her bed with a tiny grunt, she looked around at the gloomy light in the room and lit a few of the oil lamps as she stood. Moving to the window, she poked her face around the curtain and looked out at the day. Gloomy and grey. Fantastic.
Dressing quickly to avoid the chill in the room, she stood there for a moment with her hands on her hips, looking around her. She didn't feel like leaving her room. It was silly and childish, but she dreaded encountering Amon. Deeper inside, she realized that she dreaded encountering anyone, at that point in time.
Still dressed, Robin flopped back into her still faintly warm bed, closing her eyes. Maybe she could will herself back to sleep for a while…
……………………………..
"Where is everyone?" Amon asked Nagira as the pair moved down the stairs, headed for the kitchen. "In bed?"
Shrugging, Nagira followed his brother through the dining room into the kitchen. "Tryg and Sigrún might still be awake, contacting every witch on the Continent, but maybe not. They might have gone to bed by now." Nagira tendered another shrug, watching his brother search through the large stainless steel refrigerator. "Haven't seen Finn at all today, and haven't seen Robin either. The maids are here and there with the kid; I imagine the tyke's sleep schedule is pretty screwed up by now."
"Hm." Amon extracted several kiwis from the fridge and looked at them skeptically, then decided to eat them anyway. He set about slicing the skin off them with a pocket knife. "I see."
"Don't you think Robin should be awake by now?" Nagira asked almost leadingly. Amon directed a fierce glance his brother's way and resumed slicing his kiwis.
Slicing in muteness for several moments before he spoke, Amon eventually said: "When she gets up is no concern of mine. If she wants to sleep, she will sleep."
Several moments of deliberate silence preceded Nagira's eventual reply. "Whatever you say, buddy." There could have been a fight in the words, but there wasn't. He watched his brother cutting slices of kiwi against his thumb, eating the slices with a deliberately engrossed air.
The topic of Robin was not up for discussion.
………………………………
Shortly after noon, Robin pulled herself out of her bed once more. She didn't necessarily feel any more rested, but it had been nice to lay about in the bed and sleep to forget she existed. At the time, however, it had become difficult to ignore the fact that she existed due to her stomach growling like a wild animal. Cautiously she made her way out of her room and downstairs, avidly seeking to avoid contact with anyone. Something within her felt cold, unusually detached; she wished to speak to no one and have no one speak to her.
She needed to think. Get her head sorted out. A lack of motivation suddenly plagued Robin in the kitchen and she grabbed a few pieces of bread instead of cooking, eating them as a meal. Sitting there for a while, confident she would not be discovered, Robin decided she needed to get out of the house. She often did when something was bothering her; when she needed to think. After poking her head out of the dining room entrance door and assessing that there was no one about, she hurried upstairs to don her coat as stealthily as she could. Then she skittled back down the stairs to the front door, which she slipped in and out of rather invisibly.
On the front step Robin lost initiative once again and sat down, breathing against her hands to keep them warm—her gloves were mysteriously AWOL. Hands against her mouth as if something horrified her, she sat there and stared out at the surroundings blankly. Life was very complicated. Thinking was becoming increasingly difficult; but she didn't know if that was because she'd just never been very good at strategy or if it was because she'd suddenly and inexplicably lost Amon's support.
There was always Nagira. Despite the fact that Nagira had been her right-hand man for quite some time before, despite the fact that he'd risked his life for her, Robin just didn't feel comfortable telling him some of the things that she wished she could discuss with Amon. Perhaps it was because she still saw Amon as the consummate Hunter. His Craft and his savvy about matters seemed to gain him respect and trust in Robin's mind.
...even if he did try to kill you. Even if he knew that others were coming to kill you and he did nothing about it. Robin stopped breathing against her hands and pressed the semi-numb fingers against her eyes. Who could she trust? Why didn't she fully trust anyone but Amon—even if he wasn't really giving her much to trust him on? Furthermore, what bothered her was that she felt as if she needed someone's help to figure things out. Her brain felt musty, clogged by dust. She wasn't making connections between things that probably should have been connected. She just wasn't seeing them, however, the connections; she knew that they were there, should have been there, but they remained as elusive and invisible as drops of milk in water.
Standing up again she walked down the steps, staring at her feet. Maybe a walk would do her well. Her brain was clouded, foggy, odd. It wasn't thinking like it should have—perhaps she needed to get out into some fresh air away from the house. The building seemed to house a large portion of her troubles, so perhaps she should get away from it.
Looking up, the first thing in her line of sight was Amon. Brain muddled, she pressed fingers against her eyes again. "I don't want to talk to you." Her voice sounded cold to her. She could scarcely believe it was her own and that it was being directed at Amon. God, her brain was not cooperating. Scenery was odd, even though it wasn't any different than it usually was…it just looked faintly hazy.
"Really." It was a typically-Amon reply. He stood there, looking at her evenly. "If you don't want to talk to me, will you at least walk with me?"
She looked at him suddenly, her eyes admitting blatant confusion. "Why? Amon, you've been so strange lately—I don't know what to think of you anymore."
"So walk with me." He was standing there, hands in the pockets of his overcoat, face impassive and stony as usual. Robin, knowing her will was bending for reasons it shouldn't have, sighed and tromped out to him with heavy feet.
"Okay. A walk," she said. Always bending, always caving. When would he ever bend or cave for her? "Will you maybe talk to me about last night?"
…………………………………..
Sigrún and Trygve had obviously slept very little, if at all. They were awake and milling about the ground level of the house, cups of coffee in hands and mumbled, tired voices in their throats. An entirely-too-chipper Eirikur was crawling about the house (distantly monitored by Helle, who seemed to specialize in dealing with the child extensively, since she could not deal with others due to her language impediment), experimentally grabbing onto items, using them to pull himself up. He was almost walking.
Nagira was watching the baby with amusement, watching him pull himself to standing unsurely against tables and chairs; looking around with a fuzzy blonde head and big blue eyes. Several times Eirikur fell flat onto his bottom after trying to release a table surface or a chair and stand on his own, and Nagira had apparently taken personal interest in assisting the baby in attempting to stand on his own.
After about fifteen minutes, Nagira looked like a father one would see in a park in the afternoon—standing a few feet away from Eirikur, beckoning him to try to walk to the lawyer.
"C'mere, kiddo. You can do it," Nagira was saying, and Eirikur, regarding Nagira doubtfully, promptly fell on his diapered bottom. A noise of frustration escaped Nagira's lips.
"You're plenty interested in that child," Amon said, looking up from a copy of the New York Times—printed in English. Where he'd gotten it was a mystery. "You should have some of your own."
"Hell no," Nagira replied, even though he had just crossed the room to assist Eirikur to his feet again, trying to get the child to stand on his own. "Too much trouble. Other people's kids are great. Kids of my own are not so great."
Amon chose not to reply as Nagira resumed his quest for Eirikur's increased mobility.
…………………………………….
"You aren't even going to try to explain to me why you were being so odd last night at the dinner?" Robin asked helplessly, as she and Amon walked along. Words seemed like molasses coming out of her mouth; slow and lugubrious. "What about…about what you knew about my Hunts?"
"Why is any of that important?" Amon asked her, sounding detached. Robin nearly stopped in her tracks—would have stopped, if her mind hadn't have seemed to be on auto-pilot. They were walking along a path that started not too terribly far away from the front step, and led down to a lake that was on Trygve's property—Robin hadn't even known there was a lake on the property. Not that she cared for water, anyway; the sea, lakes, rivers—they all gave her the creeps, in layman's terms.
"Why?" Robin asked, her voice spiking quietly. "Because you are acting so strangely. Is…something wrong?" She looked at him, squintingly. "…Do you feel alright?"
"I feel fine," Amon replied, looking at her as if she were perhaps acting a bit oddly herself. "Do you feel fine?"
Robin wasn't sure about the answer to that.
…………………………………………
"You are being ridiculous," Amon said, finally fed up with hearing his brother's sighs of frustration at Eirikur's inability to stand on his own two feet and walk. "He's just too young, Nagira. The child will not be able to walk on his own for some time."
Nagira was determined. "You're such a pessimist."
"I'm just tired of hearing your grumblings." Amon looked to Nagira and the child, and then at his watch on his wrist—very shortly after one in the afternoon. He looked up briefly, as if looking up to the second story, and then looked back at his brother. "You've been going at training the boy for nearly an hour."
"The kid can walk. I'm convinced of it." Nagira looked convinced, hands under Eirikur's small armpits, holding the child up on his feet. Beatrix, who had just entered the parlour, looked on in red-headed amusement. "He just needs some encouragement."
"You are insane." Amon looked back at his watch and then upstairs. "Isn't Robin awake yet?" he asked of Nagira, in a tone that sounded nearly frustrated. She had no business sleeping that late, no matter how much she liked her sleep. Nagira tendered a half-hearted shrug, and Beatrix looked at Amon as if he was insane.
"You were just with her," Beatrix said, looking at Amon. Amon then looked at the maid as if she was insane. "…you were not? I saw you."
Amon shook his head, slowly, setting the paper down and looking at Beatrix with a raised eyebrow. "I have been in here for a while. I haven't left this room for two hours. Where was Robin?"
Nagira snickered. "Careful! You might be coddling!" Eirikur fell on his bottom again and Nagira released some particularly colourful epithets.
Looking around the room and entering it further, Beatrix looked thoughtful and scrutinizing. "I swear that I saw you and the Eve outside, a few minutes ago. Were you not outdoors?"
Both of Amon's eyebrows were raised then as he shook his head. "No," he said slowly. "I have not been outside all day, much less seen Robin. Perhaps she was with someone else?"
Beatrix appeared to be vaguely insulted and adamant at Amon more or less telling her to get her eyes checked. "No…I know that it was you I saw." Her face looked uneasy suddenly, eyes flickering with thought, teeth grinding into a lip in a freckled face. "…but it was you, wasn't it?"
"No, it wasn't." Amon was looking back at the maid as if she was truly delusional then, and Nagira had stopped tinkering with Eirikur then to pay attention to the conversation, intrigued. "It must have been someone else." He looked over to his brother, who looked completely in the dark about the whole affair. "Who else? No one else besides Nagira could pass for me and he has not been outside either."
……………………………………….
Robin was becoming fuzzily frustrated, walking out on the pier with Amon. He had managed to evade all of her pertinent questions, even more taciturn than usual. He walked slightly behind her, hands in his pockets. That was fairly typical of him, but this almost ridiculous secrecy was not. "You are never this quiet," Robin said, growing some gall despite her mildly confused state, "or this evasive. What is going on?"
They stopped at the end of the small dock and Robin looked out, noticing the absence of a boat at the end of the pier. Apparently Trygve didn't own one or didn't like the open water, just like she didn't. The fog was moving crouched through the forests, lower and denser than it had been before. It was almost obscuring the forest itself, making everything very hazy. Robin's own eyes didn't seem to be working very well; were trees moving around on her? Her Craft had been out of control the other day, perhaps this was another manifestation of that.
"Nothing," Amon replied, simply. "I wanted to walk with you, to here." She looked back at him oddly and then back at the trees on the opposite side of the lake—had they moved? God help her, Robin swore that the scenery was almost changing around her.
"Why?" she asked, squinting at the opposite side of the lake. One of the particularly tall trees seemed ethereal, vaporous. "You know I hate water like this."
…………………………………..
"Maybe I had not seen you with Robin," Beatrix was admitting finally, looking immensely perplexed. "I thought, though…."
Nagira's interest had been sufficiently piqued and he swooped Eirikur up into his arms, not chancing the child crawling about the room and getting into things. "Where was Robin headed, anyway?"
Beatrix thought for a moment and then pointed vaguely through the walls of the house. "It looked perhaps she was heading for the lake." Not understanding the skeptical look Amon was directing at her, she continued. "She was headed toward the path to the pier at the lake and I thought she was with you but perhaps no?"
Silence settled in on the four people (three adults and one baby, technically) for a moment. "Why the hell would Robin walk down to the lake?" Amon asked—he wasn't even aware that there was a lake on the land. "She hates water." The door opened tentatively and Helle poked her head in, presumably in search of Eirikur.
"Well, I saw her." Beatrix was resolute, folding her arms over her chest and turning around to head for the door to the parlour where Helle had partially entered. "Whoever she was with. I saw her."
The wheels in Amon's head turned. Obviously Robin had been with someone, unless the maid was delusional and hadn't seen anyone at all. That would explain her absence all morning long. Nagira was watching him in a measure smugly, watching him sweat over Robin's mysterious disappearance—so it's okay for you to go wherever the hell you want, but she has to report her movements every second? Amon's brain asked him.
Who hadn't been seen that morning? Nagira had in a measure accounted for Tryg and Sig, and Helle and Beatrix were right in the room. Amon himself was obviously there and Nagira was too, and—
"Where's Finn?" Amon asked of Beatrix, as she was retreating.
………………………………
"Do I?" Amon asked Robin, sounding distinctly pleased. Robin scrunched up her eyebrows, eyes squinting, looking out at the water. Without warning, the voices in her head started up in earnest just as the trees in the distance started to look a little clearer, a little less nebulous.
"…You're being very odd," she said, eyes flicking back down to the water. Her tone was tremulously accusatory. "I don't—"
She didn't get to finish her sentence, nor did she get to finish whatever she might have been thinking. Even the voices of the witches in her head went silent as something very cold and very hard came down forcefully on the back of her head.
………………………………..
The red-headed maid merely looked back at him with a blank look on her face, denoting that she had no idea. Amon made a 'hmm' noise and settled back into his chair. Beatrix resumed moving for the door.
It was like someone flipped the primer switch in Amon's brain suddenly. The power surged on and the lights lit up. The phone calls. The fact that he was upstairs, unguarded when the doctor came. He only arrived after the committee was fairly certain we were here. His words last night—an earth Craft user.
Earth craft…not too strong with the actual earth end of the Craft, never was…but I've got a fairly awesome grasp on the illusory end of the power, if I do say so myself. Finn's words from the night before, the meeting with Reznik blazed in Amon's mind.
He was up and out of his seat before he could even register that he was moving, his Craft lurching disturbingly. The room was white-hot bright, Nagira looking at him with concern that he could not see. "Jesus fucking Christ. It's Finn!" Nagira was hot on Amon's heels, pulling at his brother's shirtsleeve after having hurriedly passed Eirikur to Helle in the doorway. Beatrix looked after them in abject confusion and moderate fear.
"What?" Nagira asked of the frantic, frenetic Amon, his eyes narrowed.
"It's Finn," Amon said in a rush, his words sounding garbled. His eyes were squinted against the brightness of the house, the sweat already starting to form on his face. Acuter-than-normal hearing picked up the sound of footsteps coming from one of the other ground-level rooms; presumably at his raised voice. "The leak is fucking Finn. Earth craft. Illusions. Me with Robin—Jesus, Robin—" Sigrún and Trygve came out of the door to Trygve's office a split second before Amon went bolting out the front door, still in shirt sleeves, unarmed.
He moved too fast with his Craft for anyone to stop him. Trygve barked something to Sigrún in Icelandic, and she rushed upstairs. Trygve retreated into his office, coming forth with a handgun presently. He pressed it into Nagira's bewildered hand with purpose and urgently said, "Go."
Nagira ran out the door after his brother, albeit much slower.
……………………….
Running faster than he ever thought he could, Amon didn't even bother to take the path. He cut through the forest, following the intense, fishy smell of the lake; it was suddenly searing into his nostrils. Pounding at seventeen times the rate it should have been, Amon's heart felt like a fierce, pissed-off jackhammer in his chest. He narrowly avoided tripping over a fallen tree and laying himself out over tens of feet, at the speed he was moving—
--he'd been wrong. He'd been wrong and Robin was with the enemy.
………………………
Off after Amon, Nagira ran. He couldn't go at the speed his brother had left the house at, but he was trying, smoker's lungs and all. Something had spooked Amon beyond all belief and that was fair enough for Syunji Nagira. His brother often knew what the hell was up in a battle sense even if he couldn't make heads or tails of his own life. Amon was long gone, but Nagira ran down to the small trail that cut through the forest off the gravel driveway, running as hard as he could with a gun in his hand. His dress shoes, flat-bottomed and slick-soled, were not the most ideal things for running in and he almost lost it several times.
A few times he could have sworn he heard footsteps behind him but looked over his shoulder to see nothing. Lungs burning, he pushed on. Christ, how far was the lake? He didn't know how much longer he was going to be able to run for before his lungs gave out—but then he realized that whatever was happening had to do with Robin, and he intensified his efforts to maintain the same speed he'd started at.
Abruptly he skid to a stop in the middle of the path, a figure in his line of sight. Due to the smooth soles of his shoes, the skid was less than graceful and more of an attempt to keep from falling flat on his ass.
Finn.
"Where'd Robin go?" Nagira asked bluntly, sounding predatory. He didn't know if he meant to sound that predatory but something was happening and damnit, this dude had something to do with Robin and wherever she had gone and whatever Amon was losing his mind about.
Finn laughed.
"She went to go check out the lake, man," Finn replied, sauntering up the path with his hands in his pockets. "It's very pretty, you know."
Nagira was skeptical and brought up the gun, to which Finn did not react. That was a definite warning sign. "Amon said that Robin hated water."
"Really? Oops." Finn shrugged. "No wonder she was so confused." He looked at Nagira suddenly and forcefully, their eyes connecting even as Nagira gazed down the barrel of the handgun at Finn.
Scenery began to get fuzzy. Nagira managed an internal oh shit. He remembered Amon's hurried words to him before he'd bolted from the house—earth Craft. The power of illusion. Nagira, trying as hard as he could, fought to do whatever one could to lock down their brain—whatever that was; he wasn't a witch. He didn't know about this shit.
"What's up with the gun, man?" Finn asked while advancing on Nagira. His white-toothed, sun-tanned, freckled-face grin was evilly menacing somehow. Nagira felt the invisible walls around him warping and distorting. The sounds of what sounded like a person behind him continued but he couldn't be sure. He was too busy trying to keep his mind from losing its grip on reality, from becoming subject to the power that Finn was attempting to exert over him. His brain felt as if it was encased in saran wrap and someone was poking in from the outside, trying to tear a hole to get in.
"Fuck you," Nagira said, narrowing his eyes. It was becoming difficult to perceive Finn; the forest around him seemed to be moving. Nagira was on the losing end of the battle. "Why don't you fight like a man and drop this stupid illusion shit?" Nagira threatened.
Finn laughed. "Why would I fight like a man when I can fight like a witch?"
Snarling, Nagira used some of his not-clouded senses to pull the trigger, firing a bullet straight towards Finn. Rather, where Finn had been. Nagira blinked confusedly, his face falling abruptly. He had become so sucked into the illusion that he'd fired at what he had thought was Finn, but actually just a figment of his imagination.
So where was the real Finn? Nagira whirled quickly, his face harshly concentrated. He was fucked.
"So one of the Eve's wardens is a human being who can't even defend himself against a witch?" Finn's voice came suddenly. Nagira jerked around to the right, gun up for what little good it would do him. Finn was laughing again. "What the hell is the point? And for Christ's sake, not even the stupid Eve could defend herself against me."
Nagira's hands went clammy, his face intensifying with rage. "What the hell did you do to her?" Finn—or Finn's shadow, whichever it was—didn't reply immediately. Finger tightening on the trigger helplessly, Nagira fairly shook with rage. "You fucking American bastard. What did you do to her?"
"Helped her into the water," Finn answered with a grin. "She went for a swim."
Firing the gun again, Nagira wasn't entirely shocked when the bullet went harmlessly through Finn's image, which rapidly dissipated. The bullet sailed into a tree with a loud crack and plenty of splintering wood. Once again unable to see Finn anywhere, Nagira whirled around warily, scanning his semi-blurry surroundings for an image of the lanky witch. The longer he helplessly battled with this man, the greater his chances of death became. And for all Nagira knew, Robin was at the bottom of the lake, her small lungs filled with water.
"I was just going to kill you outright since I kind of liked you," Finn's voice spoke, and Nagira turned behind him to see Finn standing there once more, hands jammed into the pockets of his rough-washed jeans. "But I've changed my mind—man, playing with you is just too much fun."
"Before you kill me, then, if you can," Nagira spat, sounding a lot more confident than he felt, "why don't you answer some questions so you can send me to my ancestors feeling a bit more enlightened?" No reply was forthcoming from Finn so Nagira continued. "How long have you been in tight with the committee?"
"For a long time," Finn answered smugly. "Since before I married Sula—that's Tryg's sister. The opportunity was just too good to pass up. Her marriage granted me access to the inner sanctums of most of the underground covens in Europe. Simple enough. Even after she divorced me I still had mobility among the witches in Europe."
"Why the hell are you doing this?" Nagira asked, circling cautiously. Finn's steps followed his own, the two at opposite ends of a circle that spun around and around with their steps.
"Why shouldn't I?" Finn asked with a shrug. "No one takes me halfway serious anyway since I'm an American, and the guys have been pretty good to me so far. Guaranteed way to keep anyone, everyone, and SOLOMON off your back. Plus, I mean…" Here he laughed and it made Nagira want to rip his face off, "haven't you ever just wanted to get rid of all of the stupid people in the world? Honestly. I've been given a means to get rid of people who really, really piss me off without any kind of punishment."
Nagira was fairly twitching with anger and nervousness. "You people are like Nazis."
"Eh, not really." Finn shrugged yet again, apparently unconcerned; as if this was all a big game, as if he hadn't probably just killed Robin and dumped her body into the lake or drown her in it. "We don't have any retarded-looking uniforms to wear. This has been really cool and all, but I'm kind of starting to get annoyed now. So, sorry, Syunji Nagira." Finn was reaching into his coat, presumably for a gun. "Out of the people I've killed I think I liked you the best. It just sucks that you aren't the witch between you and your fuckface of a brother. Maybe I could have turned you to our—"
Blinking, Nagira watched as the surroundings about him started to grow less fuzzy and muted, less confusing; Finn was suddenly struggling against something as if he couldn't breathe, his face contorting with the effort of the struggle. He was scuffling with something over his back, something not there. Even though Nagira could see some kind of movement in the dirt behind the tanned man, there was nothing visible there. Finn's eyes grew wide suddenly, a choked noise escaping him—
--and suddenly, eyes still wide and startled, his throat slit wide open, Finn stumbled forward all the while grasping helplessly at his mysteriously slashed throat. Nagira could see perfectly fine then and watched the situation unfolding before him in complete confusion. Blood ran everywhere from Finn's throat in gushes before the gurgling man fell forward onto the ground, twitching, obviously choking on his own blood. Nagira looked around with a look of blatant bewilderment and blinked rapidly when Trygve suddenly materialized out of nowhere, a large knife clutched in his slightly bloody hand. He looked furious, staring down at the twitching body of his ex-brother-in-law. Abruptly he spit on the body, face screwed up into pure malice.
"Éttu skít og þegiðu! (Eat shit and shut up!)" Trygve stared down at the body for a moment more and then gestured to Nagira urgently, towards the other end of the path. "We haven't much time—I can only pray to the Gods that Robin—"
What sounded very much like Amon's anguished roar was heard echoing from far down the path. Nagira and Trygve both began to run without another word, leaving Finn's dead body behind as if it had been there all along, a disturbing yet natural feature of the forest.
……………………………….
He didn't think he'd ever run so fast or so hard in his life, even during all the times they'd been Hunted. His Craft was intensifying with every step he took, his speed increasing, his senses expanding to the point where his head felt as if it would explode. His heart, similarly, pounded in his chest harder than it ever had; hard enough to hurt. He was drenched in sweat by the time he finally moved through the forest like some kind of wolf after prey. The end of the path was before him, and the pier leading outward.
Amon didn't even stop running, just headed for the end of the pier. He saw no one. There was no one there as he approached the end. Perhaps that was the most frightening thing of all, instead of being a relief.
Feet pounded on the old wood as he slowed himself down to avoid running off the end of the pier. It hadn't really mattered anyway because he ended up in the water less than two seconds later, but not before a noise that defied explanation tore its way out of his throat.
Robin was floating in the water, arms and legs bent slightly downward like dying flower stalks, tendrils of faded dishwater blonde hair floating about her head uselessly. She was face down and the back of her head was bloody. Oh jesus fuck she's dead. His body nearly froze in the water, having been overheated from the run and the Craft, his muscles screaming in immediate protest as the icy water enveloped him. He forced himself to keep moving and grabbed Robin's limp, waterlogged form, swim-dragging her through the water up to the rocky edge of the water. Pulling himself out of the water doggedly, he pulled Robin behind him and laid her out on the sandy-rockiness of the land, flipping her over and looking at her, dropping to his knees.
She was then covered in sand, body soaked through, eyes closed and skin whiter than white; her lips were blue and she wasn't breathing. Amon was shaking, but it had more to do with utter panic than it did with the freezing cold of his wet clothing clinging to him; he couldn't even feel that. Immediately he pressed shaking, numb fingers to Robin's throat and found no pulse. His stomach crawled with a disgusting slimy feeling as if he would be sick.
Oh my fucking god she's dead. Robin's dead you fucking ass and it is your fault you bastard how good do you feel now? His hands began to press down forcefully into her tiny chest repeatedly, driving against her ribcage in an attempt to begin CPR. She doesn't even have a heartbeat you fuck what's this going to do? His breathing sounded animal and feral in the back of his mind and his eyes were burning.
He was crying.
"Fuck, Robin," he bellowed, leaning down to cover her stiff, unmoving mouth with his own, blowing air into her as hard as he possibly could. He resumed pumping his palms against her ribcage, staring down at her. "Wake up. Wake up." He blew into her mouth again, no response. Amon was becoming a demented sort of angry.
"Wake up!" he screamed into her cold, still face, as loud as he possibly could before grabbing her face and blowing into her mouth again. Still no response. "Fuck you, Robin! Are you really just going to die?" he screamed, his hands driving against her chest in motions that were beginning to seem very futile. He was still crying. "So that's it, is it?" he asked, forcing air into her lungs once more by way of her mouth. Nothing. "We mean so little to you that you would just die? God damnit!" Blame it on her like you always do like it was her fault that she drowned you stupid bastard this is YOUR fault and you know it!
Nagira and Trygve were there at his side suddenly and both similarly horrified; not that Amon had seen their faces, his own face was locked on Robin's, his hands and arms refusing to stop moving. Nagira grabbed onto him all of a sudden to which Amon screamed something that wasn't even words and went right back to Robin's side, hands resuming their frantic pumping at Robin's lungs. "I will break your ribs if I have to," he yelled at Robin, blowing into her mouth. "Breathe." He could break her ribs and then attempt to make her heart resume pumping physically, massaging it through her broken ribcage—he remember that, years ago, from his training in Europe--
Trygve was still, face fallen and sad, arms limp at his sides. "Amon…" he was quiet, experiencing his own sorrow, but knowing that he had to do something. He reached for the frantic man and was rebuffed violently as Amon shoved at his arms angrily.
"Get away from me," Amon snarled. His voice was feral, trembling with rage and despair. "I can do this!" Grey eyes were wide and teary, shining neurotically like those of an animal's in a cage.
Watching his brother, Nagira was wiping his own beginnings of tears away from his eyes and reattempting to reach for the determined man. It had been going on two or three minutes by then that Amon had been attempting to put life back into Robin's body, and neither knew how long he'd been at it before they'd arrived. Being shoved away much as Trygve had been, Nagira finally forcefully grabbed his brother and dragged him away, even as Amon screamed and kicked and attempted to maim him like a small child throwing a tantrum against their mother's leg. A good distance away, Amon stopped struggling abruptly and Nagira found himself with a dead weight in his arms.
"Robin's not here anymore," the older brother said lowly, and Amon was unresponsive in his arms, the freezing water in his clothing soaking into Nagira's. Trygve looked on in despair and then knelt near Robin, his hands on the girl's cold cheeks. Amon was still shaking in his brother's restraining bear-hug, the lawyer's arms wrapped around his brother's torso from behind.
"Oh, God." Amon's voice was hollow, shocked, quiet. "No." His body was no longer willing to hold him up and he fell downwards on useless jelly legs, causing Nagira to curse and drag him further away, turning him away from the sight of Robin's drowned body. Nagira was crying then too; tears leaking out of his eyes despite his best efforts to be strong for his baby brother. The kid was dead.
"Amon. Amon." Nagira shook his brother with increasing ferocity as Amon continued to sit on the ground, half-slumped and staring into nothing. "Hey. Talk to me. Say something. C'mon, buddy." Nagira grabbed his brother into a hug so tight that it might have been painful, but Amon did not move and did not speak—Nagira had not held his brother like this in years upon years, not since they were children—Amon's personality would not allow it. Robin was lying dead behind them, and Nagira needed to hold Amon as much as he ever had. He could think of nothing to say that would even begin to address the grief, the fragmenting of Amon's mind and soul that was probably beginning to set in.
Their little witch-kid was dead. This was something that would only happen in nightmares, never in real life; how could her life have slipped between their hands, he and Amon's hands? Trygve was muttering in Icelandic over Robin's body; more than likely some sort of prayers or last words to the poor girl. She was dead. She'd relied on them to get her through all the bad times, all the danger, and they'd failed her. They'd looked the enemy straight on in the face, shared cigarettes with him, eaten at the same table as him; they'd let him get that close to Robin and neither one of them had even seen it coming.
Fuck. Nagira was going to fall to pieces as his brother was if he couldn't stop his train of thought.
Amon was still catatonic, his breath coming in harsh rasps, the tears coming out of his wide eyes in rivers. The girl he loved—the girl he'd sworn to protect—the girl he'd been treating like shit—that girl was dead. Nagira couldn't remember the last time he'd seen his baby brother cry. It had been years ago, that was for certain. Over Amon's shoulder, Trygve was making odd hand gestures over Robin, taking her arms and folding them over her body, his hand lingering on her closed eyelids. It was almost as if he was performing some sort of burial ceremony, getting ready to stick a crook and a flail into Robin's ice-white hands.
Looking back to Amon, Nagira tried to get the ex-Hunter to look him in the eyes. "Amon. Please. She would not want you to do this. We're no good to her crying, no good to her shell-shocked."
"We're no fucking good to her anyway!" Amon roared suddenly into Nagira's face, startling the older man. "I let her die!" His voice broke on the last word.
"No." Nagira's heart clenched with fear; his brother was resolute and determined in his guilt. What frightened him was that he felt mostly the same way, but he knew that the guilt rested upon his brother's soul differently than it did upon his own. "You didn't. Amon, listen to me. You did not let her—"
……………………………..
Buenos Aires, Argentina.
An old man—an old witch—lay in his bed, surrounded by his family members. Slowly, slowly, over the last weeks he had been succumbing to the cancer ravaging his body; he did not want to die in a hospital, surrounded by the cold perfection of light and metal; did not want to die surrounded by science and technology, devoid of love and everything from the earth, all things organic.
His breath was rattling in his lungs as his eldest son gently laid a wet cloth on his wrinkled brow. There were voices in his mind. Perhaps they were the voices of angels, or devils, or his forefathers past. He knew not.
They were sad, frightened voices, and one was at the forefront of his mind. It was the voice of a girl, young and small and convulsive with fear. It repeated a similar mantra over and over again in his head with the force of a tribal drum, the power and the sorrow of the words echoing in his very soul. Her voice was sheer light, sheer power in his mind; in his dying minutes, the power that radiated from her voice awed him.
The presence was familiar. Surely it was another witch. It must have been—the way her presence felt in his mind, the way her soul seemed to bump up against his—it was a witch, a young witch, a powerful witch. She was scared and alone, cold and growing quiet.
Please, please, God, I don't want to die now—I want to see You but I don't want to die—I have so much left to do, everyone is counting on me, I'm their hope—I can't die now, oh please I'm so cold and I can't breathe and oh, Lord, I'm so scared PLEASE I don't want to die please please just let me wake up. Let this be a horrible dream.
The old man felt directly connected to this girl, her mind in his, her soul against his own. He'd lived as long as he'd liked. He was there, surrounded by the warm caring of his family and this child was all alone, cold and in darkness. Her voice was too young and too filled with power to live and change life.
Go back, dear girl. His mind spoke into her own, the darkness, and he felt a breathtaking sort of transference; his life for hers, the very energy leaving his body as it moved from his into hers.
The old witch took his last breath. His family saw it, grieved; but knew he had gone as peacefully as he could.
Robin Sena was being sucked backwards through the darkness, the force of her new, donated life flying like an arrow towards its target.
…………………………….
Trygve made a startled noise behind the brothers, suddenly leaned over the body, hands gripping the shoulders. A noise was emerging from Robin—it didn't really matter what the noise was at that point, only that she was making noise. Her body shook against the ground, chest constricting harshly. The noise was evolving into what sounded like gurgle-coughing, and without warning a large volume of water came up and out of her mouth, all over herself and all over the ground. Her body suddenly rolled over onto its side, water continuing to come up out of her lungs, her body convulsing with the effort to draw air in against the water coming out. Amon was scurrying towards her before Nagira had registered that he was moving, the second time that had happened that day.
Robin lay on her side, coughing and wheezing, making a faint moaning noise. Trygve sat her up suddenly with arm around her, assessing her breathing. Body shivering as if motor-powered, Robin's pale, blue-lipped body came back into life, her eyes darting around in fright. She felt the back of her head suddenly, the wet blood there, and looked up at Trygve with abject fear written all over her face. "Robin! Eve! You're alive!" Trygve exclaimed, looking down on her. She merely looked back up at him in bewilderment as Amon arrived at her other side. He grabbed her arm and she jerked her head over to look at him. Before words could come out of his mouth, a pure banshee shriek came out of Robin's and she vaulted backwards against Trygve's grip, out of Amon's, apparently trying to escape. She watched him with horribly huge green eyes shining with animal fear.
There was no disguising the utter pain in Amon's voice. "Robin? What are you doing?" He was moving towards her on hands and knees, desperately, only to have her push herself backwards on her hands, feet kicking at the ground clumsily, tangling in a mess of wet skirts and numb limbs.
"You tried to kill me!" she shrieked, hysterical. "You tried to kill me!" Her voice spiraled up into animal fear, accusatory and frightened.
Nagira was moving then towards Robin, snatching her up and distracting her before she could collect her scattered wits enough to either crush Amon's head or burn him alive. Amon had stopped dead in his tracks, his face somehow fallen and crushed. She struggled against him for a moment, her body shaking. Nagira realized how devastating this was for Amon, but they didn't have time to discuss the finer points. Robin was soaked and freezing, and her skin was still clammy and cold. No colour was returning to her cheeks. Her head was bleeding and she was hysterical. If they didn't get her inside, chances were good that she would die again. "Back to the house," Nagira said, jerking his head and holding Robin tight against him. "She's going to die from exposure. Back to the house."
Trygve and Nagira began to move with Robin, and Amon stood and followed after them looking shell-shocked, gaze wandering. Between point A and point B Robin lost consciousness; still alive, but unconscious.
"She doesn't know," Trygve offered to Amon as they hurried along, approaching Finn's body. Amon looked down at it with helpless rage. "She doesn't know that it was him and not you." His words appeared to offer no solace for Amon. "We will sort it out."
…………………………….
Robin slept. She slept the sleep of the dead, waking only for moments at a time. She slipped in and out of conscious effortlessly as if it was fun. At times when she awoke there was someone waiting with warm broth for her to drink, other times water. Sometimes she awoke to find very few familiar faces, most of them unknown. She awoke to people singing over her, she awoke to people holding her hands, she awoke sometimes to an empty room. It was not the room she was used to, not the room with candlelight and the vague chill of a room without electricity.
She was never awake for very long. She was bouncing in and out of dreams, in and out of the waking world and the otherworld.
Dreams made no sense, conversations she had in the otherworld were perfectly lucid but easily and immediately forgotten. She was asleep, detached from the world, yet nevertheless completely involved. She spoke through dreams, through witches. She dreamt that she had her hands twisted into marionette strings and she moved people. She dreamt of a million different situations as if she was seeing through another person's eyes; a million different places, different people, feeling like a passenger in someone else's body. Robin made breakfast in a kitchen in Nebraska, harvested rice in a paddy in mid-China, dusted a house in Mexico, played ball with children in Morocco.
She lived through other people, through the otherworld. These experiences and bodies were not her own; she was within another, along for the ride.
She dreamed of many things aside from the things she actually did; from the sun she could feel beating down upon her host's face, the dirt she could feel under her host's feet. Dreams of her childhood, of what her mother must have been like; dreams of her life in Japan, of her life in the convent; dreams of people she didn't know but felt, somehow, that she should have.
She dreamed repeatedly of a beautiful woman who seemed familiar to her somehow yet was not at the same time. The woman laughed, hands on her pregnant belly, her skin warm-brown and her eyes bewitching yet not-all-there. The minor structures of her face were familiar; the grey eyes, the cheekbones, the arch of the eyebrows.
"Oh, go away," the woman would laugh, her voice in another language that Robin somehow managed to understand through boundaries. "You're not dead. I only talk to the dead because they talk to me—you're so not dead. Get out of here."
And so Robin left. She wandered, through the otherworld and her dreamscapes, and felt curiously lost yet curiously liberated and empowered at the same time.
…………………………………..
Witches were starting to fill the house. They were all enraged at the news of Robin's near-death, her comatose state. Trygve himself, bristling with rage at the betrayal of one whom he had always considered close, personally took Finn's body out for burial. Questions were not asked about Trygve and Sigrún' perhaps gruesome method of burial. Finn's body was cut into four pieces, buried in four spots between the cardinal directions, and was not buried with any words nor any belongings, not even markers to designate where the parts of his body rested.
"He will wander the earth forever, looking for his rest," Sigrún had informed Nagira. "He will wander the earth forever, looking for the parts of his body. He will live in eternal silence, doomed to remain." She looked resolute. "It is too good for him."
Nagira, despite his faint awe at how vicious Icelandic burial rituals could be, agreed that perhaps Finn deserved such a thing. Trygve's sister Sula was called to Denmark, presumably because of the danger she could be in. Amon had refused at first to allow the woman into the house—after all, she had been connected with Finn and Finn had tried to kill them, had been reporting their movements all along. Trygve was adamant, and Sula arrived—a tall, thin, quiet woman; dark-haired and blue-eyed. She seemed distant and sad, torn between mourning the loss of her ex-husband and mourning the loss of her ex-husband's honour. She spoke little and was seen even less after visiting Robin's room once to whisper a tearful, heavily accented sorry over her slumbering body.
Witches moved in and out of Robin's room under watchful eyes, sometimes chanting, sometimes praying, sometimes merely holding Robin's hands. Perhaps they were trying to transfer power to the girl and perhaps they were seeking to find some of the power that Robin possessed.
No word had come from the committee, or SOLOMON. The night after Robin had nearly been killed Finn's cell phone rang in his room, and Amon, still partially fragmented and off-kilter had answered.
Without even waiting for a reply, Amon spoke first. "He's dead. You are next." Then he'd hung up the phone. It hadn't rung since. Nagira, utilizing Amon's laptop and calling in some favours from Japan had started to try to trace some of the numbers on the phone.
Robin had been placed in Amon's room at his behest; her room had no electricity and was rather cold. The ex-Hunter had been sleeping in Robin's room when he hadn't been lying on his-bed-turned-Robin's, watching her, waiting for her to wake up for longer than two minutes. In one of her brief bouts of consciousness, Trygve had hurriedly explained to her the situation with Finn. Robin did not reply, only went back to sleep. No one was certain if she knew what had happened or if she'd not soaked up any of the information that Trygve had shared with her.
Ideas were tossed around in the house, witches conferring with witches, information being shared—this was it. The spark that ignited the fuse had come and gone, and now it was time for action. Nagira took his brother's place in the planning, keeping Amon up-to-date on what happened in the house amongst the witches who angrily planned, schemed, plotted. They wanted SOLOMON gone, but first and foremost they wanted the committee gone. There was too much fear, too much blackmail and too many crimes against all of them from the committee for them to ignore. The committee was also a much smaller target than SOLOMON, a much more practical first strike.
It was also rather obvious that the committee had been the ones to order their agent—Finn—to act out against Robin in light of her refusal to accept their deal offered to her on the night of the auction and dinner.
The number of people arriving at the house grew. First twenty, then thirty, now closely approaching forty—the very young and elderly were granted access to the few spare rooms first, sleeping two and three to a bed; others slept on couches, on the floor, in chairs, wherever they could. Trygve had stood at the foot of the stairs, all current occupants of the house gathered around him.
"If there are any among you who are sympathetic to the committee, to SOLOMON, you will leave now. If you leave now you will be allowed to leave with your life." His face and his voice were hard. Amon, looking sleep-lacking and gaunt, sat on a step behind him.
"Will they?" he asked, darkly. No one left. Amon rose and turned to head up the stairs silently, moving down the second floor hallway towards the room where Robin resided in her own world.
"You will be discovered," Trygve said. "I hate to question you all like this, but it must be done. To go against us would be foolish. We will find you, if you are not with us, if you attempt to betray us."
"Ask the spirit of the man who used to occupy the room upstairs, three doors down on the right," Sigrún added, bluntly. "Ask him. He will tell you."
Robin, sleeping upstairs, remained oblivious to the comings and goings in the household, sleeping through all the planning and the plotting, all the ideas of vengeance and exhilaration at a chance to strike.
……………………………..
She was stirring slightly, her mouth falling open with something that was half exhalation and half breathed words. Amon's throat constricted fiercely at the thought that she may have been awaking while he was there. She hadn't seen him since the day of her "death", when she'd more or less lost it at the very sight of him. Nagira and the others had thought it prudent to keep Amon out of Robin's room until there was a chance to explain the Finn situation to her. No one wanted her to awaken and start frantically trying to escape from him—or kill him—still thinking that he had been the one who had attempted to murder her.
No one was really quite certain if the news had sunk into Robin's brain, but Amon was willing to risk it. He lay on his side on what used to be his bed, watching her sleep. He did it often. He was waiting for her to wake up.
Robin shifted more, her body shimmying under the covers, her eyes moving slightly, squeezing closed more tightly. More incomprehensible breath-words escaped her mouth. Her hair was slightly greased, unwashed; her face pale and thin in appearance. She'd only had broth here and there to eat, never being awake long enough to eat anything else.
Amon watched, holding his breath. "Robin?" he asked, voice barely above a whisper. He felt like a stupid teenager, a goofy adolescent. "Can you hear me?"
Sure, he'd talked to her over the last few days. Not that she'd heard him.
Brow furrowed, Robin squirmed about a bit more before her eyes opened without warning, squinting at her surroundings. The eyes alit upon Amon and her body tensed; and Amon's first reaction was to grab her and hold her, prevent her from moving or running away from him. He stared back at her, transfixed.
"It wasn't me." The first words out of his mouth. They were quick, hurried. For a split second Amon thought she was going to either run or incinerate him.
She sighed, looking tired, body relaxing. Her head sank back down into the pillow gently. "They told me." Her face continued to grow sleepy. "It was Finn."
Light panic began to settle upon Amon. "Don't go back to sleep. Stay awake." Her eyes blinked at him, drowsily. "Robin. You've been sleeping on and off for four days. Stay awake, please." He wanted her to keep looking at him. He wanted her to look like she was alive.
"Did they kill him?" Robin asked, sounding faintly more awake. Amon nodded, looking at her. She swallowed, a loud affair, her throat sounding as if it hadn't been used in years. "I'm kind of hungry."
Amon was half off the bed, moving with purpose. "Hungry? Do you want me to go get you something to eat?" He caught her shaking her head quickly out of the corner of his eye and froze, looking back at her fully. She gazed at him with sad, dull green eyes.
"Come back," she murmured. "What happened?"
He moved to lie back down on his side facing her, thinking of words. He laid down a bit closer than he had been before, his face even with hers. She looked like hell. He looked like hell too. Perhaps it was better that way. "With Finn?"
She shook her head again, limp blonde locks moving about. "With you." Robin looked at him straight in the face. "You were pulling away from me, before."
Amon swallowed; he figured that she would have wondered as much. In light of everything, she deserved an explanation. Her heart thudded in her neck in front of him, her side rose and fell with her breath—she was alive. "I thought I was being responsible," he began, honestly. "I thought it was the responsible, right thing to do to stop helping you along so much and let you do it yourself."
Robin watched him quietly, her face peaceful and benign, open and listening.
"I figured I was crippling you by getting so close, by doing everything for you. I pushed myself away, forced myself not to care." He sighed. "It was stupidity. In trying to distance myself I completely neglected my post. I let my fervor for pushing you away blind me to signs, to dangers."
Robin blinked, her face still regarding him evenly. "Why were you pushing yourself away from me?" she asked, her voice sounding hurt despite the quiet neutrality of her face. "I thought you were abandoning me."
He could just say it. He could just say it then and there and bring this whole mess of misunderstanding and hurt to an end. He could speak the words he knew she wanted to hear, the words she'd been waiting for patiently, hoping against hope that some day they would come. A part of him wanted to hear the words too, wanted to take her in his arms and feel forgiven, even if he didn't deserve to feel forgiven. "You and I are each other's greatest weakness," he said instead, feeling cowardly and incapable for coming so close and still not being able to say it. For Christ's sake, the girl had been dead and on this second chance, he still couldn't find the courage in himself to tell her that he loved her? "The closer to one another we become, the more dangerous it becomes."
Robin nodded. "I understand. …is that why?"
Amon couldn't lie to her, either. It wasn't right. "Partially." He looked at her and she said nothing, to which he was thankful. He wasn't sure if she didn't challenge him out of understanding or misunderstanding, but he was thankful. "…You know why Finn chose my form, don't you?" he asked of her, watching her face soften a little, her eyes looking down to the space between them. "It is because we are each other's greatest weakness. He knew this. People who look closely will know this. We have to be careful."
Robin looked back up at him, her eyes threatening to overflow with emotion. Her face remained the same but her eyes seemed supercharged with raw feeling. "Does this mean you will continue to push me away?" she asked, voice sounding as if she expected that he would.
This was difficult. He hadn't thought it would be this difficult. "No." Her eyes remained the same, thus far unconvinced. His hand reached out on impulse, smoothing down over the side of her head as if he was petting her, the soft feel of her loose locks of hair sliding over his skin. "No, Robin. It does not. It only means…" Amon paused, his hand mirroring his silence by pausing on the side of her head. "…I don't know. I don't know what it means."
A temporary pause passed between them. "I'm sorry I thought you were the one who tried to kill me," Robin whispered, gazing at him guiltily. She bit at her lower lip a bit, casting her eyes once more to the space between them. "It…it must have hurt your feelings to hear me accuse you of trying to kill me."
The irony of her statement was not lost on Amon. "I suppose it's only natural." His face became a trifle bitter, saddened. "I've tried it before." His voice grew quiet, then. "But you never died before." It grew quieter still. "You were never actually dead."
Robin looked at him then, her eyes big and still full of emotion, her face saddening some itself. She scooted herself over, under the covers, towards Amon. He lifted his hand from the side of her head and left his arm up until she reached him; an unspoken invitation. His arm came back down and wrapped around her blanketed body, holding her to him in silence.
"That was a long time ago," she said into his chest. "That…was in a different life. I know that you wouldn't do such a thing now, unless you had to. Unless I became a danger to—"
Amon shook his head slightly, staring at the wall over the top of Robin's head. "No. Robin, I don't think I'd even be able to kill you then." He could feel her look up at him with a question on her face, semi-startled by his revelation. "I would sit back in horror and watch but I could not kill you." He exhaled. "I am incapable of doing it." The arm draped over her side to hold her against him brought a hand to her hair once more, fingers tangling in the locks. "I suppose it took almost losing you for that fact to really solidify. I thought you were dead when I pulled you out of that water." The recollection of her cold skin beneath his, her blue lips, the sight of her waterlogged form drifting in the lake like some kind of bastardized Ophelia all clutched at his mind and his heart and gave him pause. "It terrified me."
She was squirming then, uncomfortable and unsettled. "I was dead." Amon did not speak and words kept coming to Robin. "I don't remember falling into the water…he hit me on the head with something."
"It was a gun," Amon filled in. "Trygve found it on him when he moved the body. …in retrospect," Amon said, grimly, "I'm glad he decided to be dramatic about trying to kill you and didn't just shoot you in the back of the head."
"…but I remember being dead, after a while." Robin's whole body seemed tense, poised like a nervous cat's. "And that terrified me because there was nothing there. It was cold and dark, and all I remember was the lights going away from me. The lights I see in the otherworld, the witches…it was as if I was falling away from all the stars of the universe, all the lights getting further and further away. There was no God, there was no Hell. Perhaps it was…Purgatory. I don't know. I was dead and there was nothing there."
The sounds of someone walking past in the hallway with heavy footfalls would have, in the past, made Amon withdraw from Robin, made Robin turn bright red and find some way to escape. Neither of them moved. "How did you return?" Amon asked, suddenly feeling kind of vaguely embarrassed—could she have heard him in his post-mortem anger, his subsequent mini-breakdown?
One of Robin's hands was fidgeting very gently with one of the buttons on the front of his shirt. "I'm not quite certain…but I think I may have somehow exchanged lives with another witch."
In the past, Amon would have worried about whether or not Robin had sucked that life out of someone else in order to continue her own, but he found now that he rather didn't care. Better some poor bastard that they didn't know than Robin. Maybe he was an insensitive, selfish bastard; somewhere, some witch's family was grieving, children were parent-less, a spouse was alone.
He didn't care. "It could be possible, I suppose." Conversation died. For a while they just laid there together. Amon actually felt his breathing beginning to slow, his mind growing vapid with the beginnings of sleep but forced his eyes open. If he was falling asleep Robin might have already been asleep. "Are you still awake?"
"Mm-hmm." She didn't sound very awake. "…you know, I think I saw your mother in a dream." Amon looked down at Robin to find her scrutinizing him closely, sleepily. "She told me she would not talk to me because I wasn't dead."
Amon simply looked at her.
"She had your eyes," Robin went on. "Parts of her face kind of looked like yours, as well."
"Is that so?" Amon found that he believed her. It wouldn't shock him if his crazy dead mother was still lurking around somewhere in some plane of existence, occasionally scaring the daylights out of people.
"She was very pretty." Robin looked at him closer. "It must have been her. She looked so much like you."
A small smile spread across Amon's face and he refused to stop it. "You know, it's kind of insulting to call a man pretty, even in a roundabout way."
Despite the fact that she was still wasted and worn from her brush with death, the fact that this was the longest she'd been awake in days, Robin managed to latch onto her point and run with it. She did not seem to be swayed by his smile. "But you are kind of pretty." This was said with perfect conviction.
Amon's smile slowly faded down to a serious look, as he looked down into Robin's face. "So are you." This was new territory for them, an approach they had never taken before. Lying there, staring into each other's faces, neither one of them had anywhere to hide or anything to hide behind. The admittances were so simple; so they'd agreed to the fact that they were both pretty. It was probably the closest, emotionally, that Amon had been to a woman in as long as he could remember.
In a way, it felt like learning how to communicate with a woman all over again, starting down at the very simplest of compliments. It was probably a lesson that Amon needed.
Robin looked very secretively agog at his sudden acknowledgement of her appearance. Her face wore a hopeful expression simultaneously. "Amon?" she asked, her voice tiny and tremulous. "Can we stay like…this, for a while?" Perhaps thinking that he hadn't understood what she meant, Robin elaborated: "Lying here, I mean."
"Yes." He didn't even have to think before replying. His arm tightened around her and his other found its way under and around her body, bypassing the blankets that covered her. Amon's chin came to rest atop her head, and after a few seconds of settling in he felt one of Robin's arms slipping delicately and timidly over his side.
"I miss you, when you go away from me," she said suddenly in a whisper, "when you distance yourself."
Amon swallowed against a dry throat. "I miss you too." The communication level was that of teenagers on their first date; but considering that one of them was a teenager and the other one had the emotional intimacy skills of a rock, Amon figured they weren't doing half bad. "I know I hurt you." Her silence seemed like denial. "I know I hurt you all the time."
"It's okay." Robin's voice was light, as if she either had willed herself to forget about all the times he'd hurt her or as if she was trying to distance herself from still fresh pain. "You were just trying to do what was best for me."
Amon shook his head, faintly. "Not always. You're giving me too much credit. Sometimes I was just trying to frighten you away, I think, because I am frightened of you."
This statement gave Robin considerable pause. "Why are you afraid of me?" she asked, hurt seeping into her voice. "It's my powers—"
Letting his head come to rest more fully on hers, Amon shook it negatively once more and let his hand once again stroke her hair. "It isn't your powers. I am afraid of you because I am afraid of us."
"Oh." Robin was startled and filled with partial understanding. Her arm tightened around his side, her face pressing into the space where his shoulder met his torso. "Oh." It was a breath from her mouth, into the fabric of his shirt. She sounded somehow embarrassed, as if she had intruded into a room in his personality and mind that she didn't have any business in.
Neither one of them said another word. Robin fell asleep first, Amon following after quite some time simply because he did not want to move and leave her side or the room.
…………………………………
Morning was not as awkward as Robin would have thought it would be. For the first time in the entire time she'd been sleeping on and off, she slept without dreams. She slept a full, long, contented sleep, and awoke in the morning, somehow not as affected by being in Amon's arms as she thought she would be.
The sounds of ruckus were plainly heard downstairs and more quietly in the hallway. Yawning, Robin stretched slightly in place and felt Amon's arms starting to move around her, heard the slow intake of breath through the nose that indicated that one was awake. Hazarding a glance up at him she found him hazarding one down at her, his face blank and even; but a benign kind of even. He said nothing and Robin said nothing. He moved his arms for her to roll over and sit up, scratching at her by then rather limp, unwashed hair.
"Hi." That was her first word. She wasn't quite sure what had happened last night. Amon had been so enigmatic—she felt better off than she had before, but she hadn't felt anywhere near comfortable enough with the situation to even begin to suggest how she really might have felt about him—how she'd felt for months.
"Hello." That was Amon's reply. His shadowed face needed a shave and also clearly spoke of needing more sleep. "Are you going to get up today?"
"I think so." Robin scooted to the edge of his bed—she'd just suddenly realized that she was in his bedroom—and placed her feet experimentally on the floor. "I feel fine, I guess. I'm kind of hungry."
"You said the same thing last night." Amon sounded bemused. Despite looking haggard, he looked much more relaxed than Robin had ever seen him look. She noticed that he was still fully clothed all the way down to his boots, and still on top of the covers. How he could look more relaxed after having slept in full clothing, Robin didn't quite understand.
"I suppose I'd better have a bath before I do anything," Robin said, heading slowly for the door. Amon sat up some and the movement stopped Robin in her tracks.
"The bathroom might be occupied," he informed her, and to her look of confusion about his bathroom warning, he added: "The house has taken on new occupants while you slept. Lots of them."
………………………….
Robin's reappearance in the house caused much elation among both her old housemates and her new ones. People continued to flock and fuss even as she sat at the table in the dining room, shoveling down crepes and fruit as if her stomach had a hole in it. She recognized some of them vaguely from the get-together that had been held at the house a while back, but some of them were entirely new to her.
She was unnerved that there were so many new people to place her recently-tremulous-and-with-good-cause trust in, but knew that there was little she could do about it. Busy thirstily gulping down a glass of water, Robin kept her eyes on a young man who was standing next to her in the semi-queue that had formed for people waiting to say something to her. "Christ, I'm probably going to get kicked out of university for coming here when Trygve asked me to," he said, looking worried for a second. "But that's fine. I told 'em that me mum was very, very ill and I had to go home to take care of her."
The middle-aged woman behind the young man in the queue raised her hand slightly. "I'll pretend to be your mother if you need some help convincing the university," she offered, her voice decidedly German. He looked back at her with a smile of appreciation.
"Thanks," he enthused, relieved. "I just wanted to tell you, Eve, that I'm glad to meet you and I hope to be of help."
"Thank you," Robin said, with a quick smile, before taking a ferocious bite of a nectarine, the juice threatening to run down her chin. Nagira looked on from her other side in amusement. The Eve of Witches continued to eat as if there would be no food at all tomorrow, all the while witches coming up at her side to gushingly meet her.
………………………………..
"There is to be a meeting of sorts, tonight," Sigrún was informing Robin and Amon, who stood before her in the office. Eirikur struggled against his mother's arms, apparently having taken great interest in what appeared to be a billfold on the large desk in front of them. Noises of child-frustration escaped him and Sigrún re-gripped him and hiked him up further into her arms. "We shall discuss a plan of action. It would be best for us to act now before either SOLOMON or the committee has much of a chance to formulate a plan."
"If they don't have a plan already," Amon murmured. "It seems a bit as if they do."
Sigrún looked almost pained and mildly irritated with her son's struggling. "Oh, fie. Would it kill you to have a bit of hope then and again, Amon?" she asked of him, shortly, to which Robin couldn't help but smile a little and Amon looked somehow caught in something. "Forgive me. It has been stressful, all of this. Finn's betrayal, Robin's state, all of these people, Eirikur getting into everything—" Almost on cue, Eirikur succeeded in getting free enough from his mother's grasp to snatch up the billfold, pulling cards out of it with glee. A card that landed on the desk showed the billfold to be Trygve's; a Danish national ID card with his smiling face flopping out onto a stack of papers. Sigrún let loose what was presumably a torrent of curses in Icelandic and moved to take the billfold away from her son, who was busy flagging it about in the air, causing things to come flying out of it.
"Would you like some help?" Robin asked valiantly amidst Sigrún's disgruntled Icelandic (not that the language didn't sound permanently disgruntled under normal situations). As she moved around the desk to assist in collecting the items that had flown out of the billfold the office door opened and Trygve came in with the maid Helle and a rather elderly old man. The maid was clearly struggling to keep a straight face, lugging along a suitcase.
"Sigrún," Trygve began, "do we have any rooms left unoccupied?" His wife shook her head at him, harried. He frowned. "Are you certain?" She nodded. "Oh, lort."
"Why?" Amon asked curiously, turning from the Eirikur scene to look at Trygve.
"We have another guest," Trygve replied. "This is Christer. He has come to stay with us and help us plan, a witch from here within Denmark. He knows much of the comings and goings of SOLOMON within this country, having observed them for many years. Unfortunately we have no rooms left for him…it would not be seemly for him to sleep in anything less than a room, nor very comfortable."
Amon caught the unspoken words: he is too old to be stuffed away onto a couch. "He may have my room." Trygve seemed startled by Amon's sudden relinquishing of his quarters. "I will sleep elsewhere."
Coming up out of nowhere like a bolt, Robin was at Amon's side once more, looking at Trygve determinedly. "No, he may have my room." She looked up at Amon, sensing his unspoken disapproval. "Where will you sleep if you allow him to have your room?" she asked.
"Where will you sleep?" Amon retorted, and Robin furrowed her brow.
"I can sleep on the floor," Robin said matter-of-factly, and this seemed to rouse hurried disagreement from everyone in the room including the old Danish man.
"Perhaps he should have Sigrún and I's room," Trygve spoke. "We are the hosts, after all—"
Robin shook her head, adamant. "No…that's unacceptable. We can't ask you to give up your room." Her eyes moved up to Amon, pleadingly. He looked away.
"He may have my room," Amon said with an air of finality. "I'll move my things out of it shortly." He noticed his brother stick his head in the door of the office with a light rap of his knuckles on the door. Before anyone could say anything to Nagira by way of greeting or inquiry, Robin spoke again.
"But where are you going to sleep?" Robin asked of Amon again, preternaturally concerned with his sleeping arrangements. He offered her a noncommittal shrug, as if to say anywhere. A sudden hardening of Robin's normally soft yet intense green eyes let him know that this was not an acceptable answer, even as Trygve and Helle turned to lead Christer out of the office and towards the main staircase, past Nagira. "We'll share a room," Robin said, not leaving much room for argument. "You can't just sleep on the floor."
Amon noted with something akin to internal embarrassment that by this point, both Sigrún and Nagira were watching the exchange with interest and muted amusement. "And why not?" he asked, trying to keep that clipped embarrassment out of his tone. "Plenty of the others are." It was not as if he was against the idea of sharing a room with Robin (aside from the vague sense of fear that it instilled in him), but it wasn't exactly something he felt comfortable discussing with an audience present.
Robin was guiltily disgruntled by his statement, but did not waver. "They are not you. I won't let you sleep on the floor."
He wasn't going to win, unless he wanted to be an ass. He didn't feel like being an ass, especially since he'd more or less offered to stop being so much of one the night before. "Okay. Fine. We'll use your room." Eager to end the rather private discussion turned public, Amon turned to Nagira abruptly. "Did you need something?"
"I was just going to ask you if you wanted to go smoke a cigarette," Nagira began, obviously fighting very hard to hide a grin—a fact that Robin seemed oblivious to but was not lost on Amon. "So, wanna smoke?"
"Yes." Amon was emphatic, in his own way.
On the way out of the house, away from all the bustle of the people, Nagira handed his little brother a cigarette and finally let the chuckles come out of him in spite of Amon's fierce glare of warning. "Just say it and stop gloating about it, whatever the hell it is," the ex-Hunter finally spat, staring out at the trees near the house with a particular soreness.
"Since when did you start caving to Robin's whims?" his older brother questioned, snickering through a cloud of smoke. "Isn't that coddling her?"
"Smoke your cigarette before I make you eat it," Amon snapped in reply, his teeth grinding at Nagira's continued amusement.
………………………………….
After dinner the household was gathered, initially, in the dining room; however, it was soon noticed that the room was too small and there were witches standing outside the door, unable to hear or participate in the conversation. The meeting was then moved to the front room, with some witches standing and other choosing to sit. The primary inhabitants of the house located themselves on the stairs so that they might see all of the witches present; some standing and some sitting. Robin stood next to Amon, who leaned against one of the banisters, surveying the crowd with a studying glance. Trygve stood next to Sigrún, who sat with Eirikur between her legs. Nagira sat a little in front of Robin and Amon, a gin and tonic in his hand and a cigarette behind his ear. He was still smirking about having hassled Amon (good-naturedly) the entire time the other man had been moving his things from his old room into Robin's. Sula, Trygve's almost preternaturally silent sister, stood near Sigrún; she was not one of the original inhabitants of the house, but in light of recent events the Icelandic hosts wished her to be close.
"I gather that most all of you have had a chance to meet both the Eve and her guardians," Trygve began, and the faint murmurs of witches translating the English into other languages was heard about the large room in several places. "For those of you who haven't, there will be plenty of opportunities. I have thanked all of you for coming here to join us, but I wish to do so again. Your powers and your assistance are needed more than ever."
Silence fell on the great room save the various soft noises of translation, and Trygve looked around before continuing. "As you all know, a traitor—one very close to us—was discovered not days ago and properly dealt with…but not before he passed on vital information about our situation, and not before he severely threatened the Eve's life." Trygve grew deathly serious. "Such betrayal earned its just rewards at my own hands. I have mentioned to you before the costs of betrayal of this sort. This is no longer a negotiable matter, this matter between us, SOLOMON, and the high committee; there will be no mercy for those who are discovered to have ulterior motives."
Trygve's silence was met with more silence from the crowd, and Robin spared a quick glance at Sula, who appeared both mollified and greatly saddened by the mention of her ex-husband and his treachery. She looked away hastily, feeling somehow guilty. The ice cubes in Nagira's glass clinked as he took a sip from it.
"You have been asked here for your help, your support, your information." Trygve's eyes scanned the crowd slowly from behind his glasses, intense and perfectly blue. "We can make no guarantees as to your own personal safety or that of your loved ones. This is dangerous business, and anyone who wishes not to be a part of it is free to leave at any time under pain of silence. I would not ask more of any of you than you were freely willing to give."
Robin's eyes caught on a man in the crowd, scruffy-faced and dreadlocked, and he offered her a supportive smile.
"Then we know what it is we must do. Our fight is, as ever, with SOLOMON and the high committee. But the time for socializing and politics has passed and the time for action has come. If we are going to stand against them, the time is now. They have already made up their minds about us, and we have but only one choice, one response: to fight." Trygve paused yet again and his eyes briefly flicked down to his wife and their child, and Robin's heart lurched; this man had so much more to lose than them, and he gave it all so effortlessly.
"But if we're gonna fight and make it a fight worth waging," Nagira spoke suddenly, "then we need information. I've been in contact with my sources in Japan and East Asia, but what we need from you guys now is what you've heard, what you know."
Amon nodded, straightening some at Robin's side, drawing himself up to more of his full height. "Agreed. Speak up. Among us before you range a wealth of languages, so do not let your lack of English intimidate you."
Robin sighed, watching as a few witches began to stand; some quickly, others less certainly, as if they were afraid that their news was unimportant. After those who stood, hands began to rise slowly as if they were in a classroom, and the murmur of translation gained in pitch as people began to converse amongst themselves quietly, discussing their information.
Thus began the meeting.
………………………………….
Two hours later found them collecting such a wealth of information that Nagira had hurried off for a pen and paper and began to jot it all down in quick, short-hand Japanese. Looking over his shoulder briefly, Robin found with a peculiar shock that she couldn't understand most of it—either Nagira's handwriting was horrible and he was miswriting words or she was simply losing her ability to read hiragana and katakana through disuse.
Amon had sat down next to his brother so that he could peer over at the notes from time to time. "So you say you're certain that Reznik has a permanent home in Prague?" he asked the woman in the back of the room. She nodded slowly.
"Positive. He is there almost all of the time. When my cousin worked for Reznik before he disappeared, he used to go to the house all the time. Reznik was there nine times out of ten."
Robin looked down at Amon, at the crown of his dark head. "It would be easy for you to find him there, wouldn't it, Amon?"
A grunt issued forth from her ex-partner. "Yeah. I'm not certain if it's a good idea to go after him first, however." Pointing at something on the pad of paper, Nagira nodded and Amon turned to Robin. "Reznik is more than likely the best protected out of the committee members. Perhaps we would do well to start attacking their ranks. Thin them out a bit."
Sigrún, whom had been involved with other conversations, looked over to Robin. "Amon is right. It would be foolish of us to throw everything we had against Reznik just to lose and then lose any chance we had at causing damage. There are weak links in the committee, and among those closely related to them." Her blue gaze fell upon Robin's face intensely. "Perhaps it would do us well to discover what, exactly, the committee and SOLOMON's plans for you are."
"SOLOMON has no plans for me except to kill me," the young witch answered, her voice cold and detached. "The committee's plans are much the same except that they wish to use me against SOLOMON before I die." Her gaze slipped down to her feet, eyes narrowed at an invisible spot on the carpeted stairs. "And if I will not agree to being used, they would rather kill me themselves just for the satisfaction of it rather than let some nameless SOLOMON Hunters do it."
A boy who looked to be no older than Robin near the front of the crowd made a scoffing noise at her words, to which she looked up in surprise. "Hunters," he muttered, grumbling something to himself about SOLOMON. An invisible light bulb went off above his head a split second later and he jerked his head up to look at Robin, his dark brown eyes meeting her preternaturally emerald ones. "Hunters! Eu tenho uma ideia!"
Still regarding him with the same surprised countenance, Robin nodded. "What's your idea?"
"We know that SOLOMON and Hunters have ties to the committee, yes?" the boy began, excitedly, "and we know that if we go out into public and act up with our powers that SOLOMON will Hunt us. But what if the Hunters…" He glanced from Robin to Amon and back to Robin meaningfully, "…became the Hunted?"
"As in trapping Hunters?" Robin queried, thoughtful. "It could be a particularly good way to gain information…especially if we could somehow discover the names of Hunters that have dealt with the committee before and their Hunting areas." She looked to Amon, whose eyes spoke of thought. He looked to the boy.
"Playing with SOLOMON's European Hunters is no game," he said to the younger man, slowly. "What you propose could be exceedingly risky…yet profitable, information-wise."
The warning did not seem to affect the dark-skinned, dark-eyed boy in the least. He merely shrugged. "There are so many of us here! We could easily form groups and overtake a Hunter." His finger pointed at the people on the stairs in earnest. "That would leave you to the task of finding the committee members, taking care of them! We could all work as a team!" A few voices of assent came from the crowd of witches, and Nagira leaned over to Amon.
"There are an awful lot of lives in this room to be responsible for," the lawyer spoke in an undertone into his brother's ear. "It might not be the brightest idea to send half of them packing to their deaths."
Robin heard Nagira's undertone and crouched down behind the two brothers, her eyes flicking to both of them. "No one is sending anyone. They've volunteered. That boy is right…if they band together in groups, all with Crafts, they might easily overtake a Hunter."
Trygve, listening in, pursed his lips. "Might. Hunters do not always travel or stalk alone."
"If they travel in groups usually only one among them has offensive Craft magic," Robin argued, her face turning to Trygve. "The others usually rely upon defensive Crafts or weapons. They are easy enough to take care of." Her face hardening, she spoke after a pause. "Amon and I have killed dozens of them."
"But you're the frickin' Eve of Witches—" The words had just started to come out of Nagira's mouth when an abrupt and rather unexpected knock sounded from the giant wooden front door. A rolling ocean of a murmur drifted through the room, everyone's attention suddenly on the door. Robin, casting her gaze to the door as well, felt the flaring of several Crafts within the room, as well as heard the distinct sound of loading guns. She looked down at the brothers in front of her and then across the room; apparently Nagira and Amon were not the only ones who were armed.
Their Icelandic hosts conferred through a stare and then Trygve motioned for Beatrix, who stood dutifully near the front door, to open it. She did so, but only a crack, leaving everyone in the room quiet and tense, waiting to pounce if need be.
The energy and the power in the room was enough to make Robin feel lightheaded, vaguely.
Beatrix turned from the door, closing it a bit as she faced the group on the stairs over the mess of witches. "An older gentleman is here. A priest." The maid was definitively confused. "He says he wishes to have talks."
Trygve motioned for the red-head to open the door fully and she complied, revealing a dignified older gentleman garbed in the habit of a Father, a cloak lying over the garb to keep him warm. A top hat sat upon his head and he held an impressive, regal-in-appearance walking cane—
Robin and Amon shot up at very nearly the same moment, both similarly wide-eyed. Robin remained frozen. Amon's hand shot up, leveling his gun at the gentleman's face. Upon seeing his cue, Nagira promptly followed suit and several members of the group did as well. The level of Craft energy in the room surged upwards tenfold; if there had been Orbo in the room, it would have been boiling over and out of its confines by that point.
"Father Juliano?" Robin burst out loudly, in disbelief. She looked around the room in horror at all the guns leveled at her grandfather and the Crafts poised and ready to attack. "Stop!" she shrieked, terrified that someone would jump the gun and kill the man. "Lower your guns! This man means us no harm—he is my grandfather!"
Trygve was instantly wary; looking over to Robin with a suspicious slant to his eyes. "Your grandfather? As in your grandfather who sits among the High Council of SOLOMON?" Robin shot Trygve a momentary super-heated, pained look, and observed with relief that the weapons were lowering, the electric crackle of Craft in her mind was dimming. Amon's gun was still leveled at the man as sure as ever.
"Amon!" Robin hissed, a plea. "Please. Don't."
Appearing as if he would come to regret lowering his gun, Amon did so incrementally, but kept his eyes locked on Juliano. "He might be your grandfather, Robin, but the man is SOLOMON." Nagira appeared startled by the conversation going on between the two ex-Hunters.
"He is the one who saved my life as a child," Robin protested quietly.
"He is the one who ordered me to kill you," Amon countered, his jaw set in stone. His eyes moved from the priest across the room to Robin's face, locking onto her eyes meaningfully. "He may have changed his mind out of regret, but you would let this man come back into your life so soon?"
Horrified, Robin narrowed her eyes at Amon. "Enough! He may have ordered you to kill me, but you actually attempted it, and yet I still trust you." These words seemed to strike something inside of Amon and his eyes grew cloudy, guilty. "Please. I trust this man. You may not, but you can at least trust me."
There was silence from Amon; heavy, defeated silence. Robin looked up at him, her eyes warm. "Thank you," she whispered.
There was a definite murmur in the room then, sparked by both the mention of the newcomer's ties to SOLOMON and the Eve's adamant reactions regarding the weapons pointed at him. The crowd parted quickly as Robin stepped down the stairs quickly, headed for the Father. Amon was hot on her heels, wordlessly. Nagira, due in part to curiosity and a desire to defend his brother's back, moved after Amon. The Father was removing his top hat and untying his cloak, smiling as Robin made her way across the vaulted entry hall towards him. A shocked, perhaps disagreeing noise issued collectively from the group of witches when Robin dropped to her knees before the old man, allowing him to touch her on the forehead; the Eve, bowing to a mere old man.
"God bless you, my child," Juliano said, in his ancient yet still deep voice, and motioned for Robin to rise. She did so and Juliano looked over her shoulder to Amon and his stern face. "And Amon, God bless you as well. I see you are as dedicated to my granddaughter's protection as you were to any task."
Amon nodded back, his eyes boring into the older man. "Juliano. What in the hell are you doing here?" A hint of a smile graced Juliano's wrinkled features at Amon's brusqueness. "Even if you haven't come to harm us directly, your coming indirectly harms us with your very presence. SOLOMON would be watching you, old man. You know that."
Nagira wore an expression of shell-shock at the rest of the room began to huddle and group, the din of conversation beginning to rise. "…wait, wait, wait. So this guy is really your grandfather?" he asked of Robin, hurriedly. She didn't seem to hear him.
"No one watches me, Amon, my son," the Father said, leaning his cane against the wall near the door and handing his cloak to Beatrix, who accepted it with a bewildered air. "I am the one that does the watching. That is why I have come to speak with you two," he said, indicating Robin and Amon. "I have information about those you seek. I may be of SOLOMON, but remember that even SOLOMON does not like to be manipulated."
Robin nodded, her childlike wonder at seeing her grandfather dissipating into a business attitude. "The committee. Follow me, Father. We can talk in this room over here." She began to lead him towards Trygve's office, around the crowd of witches, offering her tiny arm to the old man for support as he walked. "Oh! The man next to Amon is his half-brother Nagira."
Walking along behind the Father and Robin, Nagira grabbed Amon's shoulder and forced him to slow his pace, leaning over to hiss into his brother's ear. "What. The. Hell. You didn't tell me that Robin had a gramps in SOLOMON."
Amon said nothing and kept walking, Nagira attached.
"You didn't tell me that she had a gramps in SOLOMON who was a Father." Nagira's face managed to break into a small, snarky grin despite the seriousness of the situation. "So I take it he probably wouldn't approve of you sharing a room—probably a bed—with his little cookie, right?" Amon was still silent. Nagira smelled a victory. "You know, she did seem pretty adamant about the whole thing—shouldn't you two be married before—"
Amon cut Nagira's words off by stopping dead in his tracks and grabbing his brother's shoulders, his face instantly and completely menacing. Both brothers missed Robin's sudden look of utter teenage horror at Nagira so openly talking about how she and Amon were now sharing a room in front of her grandfather. Juliano, however, was either completely oblivious to the situation or was tactfully ignoring it.
"Listen, Nagira," Amon began, the words a thinly veiled threat. "Juliano apparently came here to give us information, not to discover that Robin and I are sharing a room." He closed his eyes momentarily, as if searching for some kind of inner calm. "We do not need this man harbouring ill will towards us because he thinks I'm carrying on with his young, unmarried granddaughter…so if you mention anything about anything again, so help me Syunji, I am going to break my foot off in your ass."
Slowly but surely a grin spread across Nagira's face as the two men began to walk again, catching up with Robin and her decidedly slower grandfather. "Anything about anything, huh?" His tone became hushed. "Does that mean something happened?" His eyebrows wiggled despite Amon's quick, sideways glance of utter vitriol.
"My foot. Your ass." That was all Amon had to say by way of reply as they drew closer to Trygve's office, closer to the two figures immersed in quiet conversation.
……………………………………
A lawyer through and through, Nagira was both skeptical and more than willing to cross-examine the hell out of the old man, even if neither Amon nor Robin seemed willing to do it. Robin was mystified and thoroughly enthralled by the man who was apparently her grandfather and Amon was quiet, even as the man talked to him as if he was years younger than he was. So this is the guy who ordered Amon to Hunt Robin, Nagira thought, watching the old priest's words from behind his steepled fingers. Nice grandpa. Upon further reflection, Nagira wondered if perhaps Amon was so quiet because he was somehow guilty.
Anything about anything, indeed. Nagira barely resisted the urge to grin like a smug child.
"So why are you telling us all of this?" he piped up during a lull in Juliano's speech, face serious and wearing the mask of the interrogator. "Where did you get this information?—and furthermore, how do we know that we can trust it?"
Juliano's weathered yet still intimidating face pulled into a smile, chuckling slightly. "I'm telling you this because I can. SOLOMON isn't as black and white as you would be inclined to think, Mr. Nagira. There are those of us within who don't always agree with what the larger group is doing, and at this point in my life I have been with them for so long and have risen so far that my affairs are of no concern to anyone else. I make sure of that."
"Father Juliano sits on SOLOMON's High Council," Robin informed Nagira, to which he nodded.
"That's nice. That also just means that he had to kill a lot of people and probably step on a lot of heads to get there." Both Robin and Amon shot him almost identical looks of watch your damn mouth, but Juliano merely laughed; a rattling old thing. "Well? That's true, isn't it?"
"Of course," Juliano answered in a light tone. "But remember that I was the one who saved Robin; I was the one who protected my own daughter, also a witch; I was one of the ones who spurred SOLOMON into taking action against Zaizen and his foolish and disgusting Orbo project." Here he indicated Amon, smiling fondly. "I taught this boy how to read Latin and how to decipher runes—although I fear he was never very good at that; never as good as Robin was. I'd hoped one day for him to sit on the Council when I was long gone; hoped to bring someone with at least a little compassion and sense, to take my place, but…well." He chuckled somewhat, eyeing an embarrassed or flattered Amon. "We all know how that turned out. And while I did not wish for Robin to die, I did not wish this life for her either, but…it seems it has happened, in any case."
Nagira groaned, rubbing his eyes with blatant frustration. "Christ, do all of you SOLOMON people have to be so damn crooked? Have so many secrets?" He eyed the three people in front of him evenly, each in turn. "All of you. It really gets my goat sometimes."
Robin leaned forward, her eyes glinting and hard. She looked at her grandfather pointedly. "So…you're certain that these people are where you say they are? Certain they will be there when you said they will be there?" Her face was sharp and concentrated; her very being was vibrating with some kind of unknown emotion—could it be vengeance, Nagira wondered? "It wouldn't do us any good to go out and expose ourselves, especially in times like these…"
Her grandfather nodded, sagely. "I am certain. As always, you are aware that the Hunters will be out looking for you, even more so now than before. The Committee is spurring SOLOMON on, hustling along this Hunt for the both of you." Juliano offered yet another smile to his granddaughter, his eyes twinkling. "And remember that no man, especially most of the ones in SOLOMON, likes to be made a fool of again and again. There are those among the ranks who are growing displeased, to say the least, about your abilities to slip away every single time."
"My life is worth more than those old fools' honour," spat Amon, flatly. "Tenfold. They can consider it retribution for how skeptical they were of me while I trained, simply because I was from Japan." Apparently at some point in time in the past Amon had been grievously insulted by people within SOLOMON, but he paused for a moment and restrained his ire. "Robin's life is tenfold over my tenfold, and my brother's is on par with hers."
Growing sober, Juliano regarded Amon solemnly and searchingly, shaking his head slightly. "This is why I wished for you to one day take my place on the High Council," he murmured, "your staunch devotion, your regard for human life. Your duality is what made you valuable to SOLOMON—your ability to respect human life and completely disregard it at the same time made them anxious to retain you. This is why they are so upset that you have allied yourself with Robin. Catching her is going to be that much more difficult."
"Let's not talk about the past," Robin herself urged suddenly, looking from Juliano to Amon with a pleading look. "The inner workings of SOLOMON are no longer for us, Father, unless we are looking at them only to tear them apart." The amazing here-then-gone-again backbone that Robin possessed asserted itself. "We no longer have cause to care what SOLOMON thinks of us. Amon's worth no longer comes from the old men who issue him his orders, and my worth no longer comes from how well I can be preened to Hunt, how well my abilities can be tapped."
Silence reigned in the room, the three men sitting there all amazed in their own quiet ways at Robin's strength, her calm assuredness. Atypically, Robin did not falter once she realized the eyes of the men were all on her. "We are done with SOLOMON not only giving us our worth, but giving our lives worth. I will never be safe until SOLOMON is gone; or leashed and shackled." The calm conviction was gradually melting into a kind of sad vulnerability. "…and I don't want to live like this forever, this life like a never-ending disappearing act. God created all humans with a purpose; and he moved Toudou to create me. That was Toudou's purpose. Mine is yet to be fulfilled, but I am moving towards it."
"Go with God, then," Juliano said, standing suddenly. "I feel that God no longer goes with SOLOMON. He must go with you, then." He smiled at Robin then, warm and enveloping, and instantly Robin somehow knew that it would be the last time she saw that smile. Whether it would be the last time by some sort of treachery or murder, or natural cause, she knew not, but something within her told her that it was the last time she would see this man in her lifetime. She closed her eyes against the stinging tears that prickled there without warning, feeling Juliano's hand come to rest on her forehead as she sniffled rapidly and quietly, pressing her trembling lips together into a taut line. "I shall leave God here with you, then, my child, and take my leave of you both. I—we—SOLOMON—are divorced of him, nowadays. I will go to seek out God wherever I can find him, and that will be that."
Robin opened her eyes suddenly, the tears running out, and stood. She was significantly shorter than the man standing before her, even in his stooped age. "Father—grandfather—I love you." She threw aside the pretenses of Father and disciple, for the first time in her life and embraced the man, something she had never done before. Her face pressed into the front of his habit which smelled of cleanliness and old books, as if he'd been poring over ancient texts for years. "Thank you. I love you."
The old man hugged his granddaughter back, smoothing her hair on her head, hand flowing over the loose bun at the back of her head as if it wasn't there. "May God forgive me for what I have done to you, my child. May He now turn His eye to seeing you safely through all of your trials." Releasing Robin, Juliano turned to Amon and rested his hand on top of the man's dark head. Amon stared back up at him, unflinchingly. "And you, may God forgive you for the things I bade you do. May He now turn His eye to guiding you to protect those you value."
He turned to Nagira and placed his hand upon the lawyer's head, and not even Nagira had the audacity to tell the man that he did not believe in God. "And you, my child, God grant you the strength to assist and support your brother or Robin in whatever they may need. May He keep you safe." Turning away, Juliano faced the door, setting his jaw and his eyes. "The time has come for us to part ways."
Robin, nodding tearfully, took her grandfather's arm and began to walk him to the door.
………………………………..
Amon rejoined Trygve and the others with Nagira in tow, both of them looking somehow dazed in a way. Trygve noticed this and frowned upon their arrival, looking to them with concern. "Is everything alright?" he asked, to which Amon nodded.
"Yes." Amon considered his next words and sighed. "We've just gained some rather important information as to members of the committee's whereabouts."
Nagira nodded in concurrence with his brother's words. "I think we also just said goodbye," he said, to which Trygve appeared mildly confused but did not pry.
…………………………………….
Well. That took me about five bajillion years. Oh well. Sorry it took so long for this chapter to come out; a number of things kept me from putting it up as soon as I wanted to. First off, I was preternaturally concerned about the quality of the chapter and I kept tweaking the hell out of it whenever I got the chance. I had also been busy with work and other Real Life Issues which kept me from writing as much as I'd wanted to (not to mention a small breakdown and a change of medication, whee paranoid delusions!). I've started up school again which means that a portion of my spare time shall now be devoted to classwork.
All in all: sorry. Fanfic writers have real lives, too, even for as much as we wish we didn't sometimes.
