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The first time Amon meets a Witch, it’s his mother. It ends badly.
The second time Amon meets a Witch, he’s fifteen.
He doesn’t know the girl’s a Witch, of course. He doesn’t even know what Witches are, despite his mother. Amon never went to a Christian church or heard the old story about Lilith, or about the Seed she planted in Eve – this is civilized Tokyo, not some European backwater. All Amon knows is that he can’t go back to his stepmother’s house, and this girl with pretty green eyes, dressed in black, offered him food.
They go to a little café, the kind where soft jazz music plays in the background and candles sit on every table. Amon eats for the first time in two days. He doesn’t notice that the girl doesn’t eat, just watches him and asks casual questions about where Amon goes to school, and Amon’s family, and Amon’s future plans.
Amon’s sleepy by the time they leave the café. The girl takes hold of his wrist, gently tugging him along the street. They turn into an alleyway, and then the girl abruptly stops and turns around, the gentle tug turned into a hard yank. Amon stumbles –
- a short, hard sound that he doesn’t recognize, and a stripe of pain blooms on the side of his head –
- the girl drops onto the ground. There’s blood everywhere, on the ground, on Amon’s clothes. Amon stares down at the girl, terrified and confused.
“Hey. Hey, kid.”
Amon turns slowly. A man in a dark suit stands at the mouth of the alleyway, a gun in his hand. As Amon watches, the man holsters the gun, and steps toward him, other hand extended. “Did Fujiwara drain you at all?”
“Fujiwara?” Amon repeats blankly.
The man gestures to the girl – to the body on the ground. “Her.”
Amon looks down, opens his mouth to say he doesn’t think so (although he doesn’t know for sure – what would draining feel like?), except his head’s swimming and he can’t find words. He thinks he hears someone curse, but he’s not sure, just the thud of his knees hitting the ground.
When he wakes up again, he’s in the cold white of a medical clinic, lying down. A grown woman bends over him, hands moving steadily as she finishes wrapping his head in gauze. “-in seven to fourteen days,” she’s saying. “In the meantime, don’t let him get it wet. You can remove the bandage in a couple days. Meantime, concussion protocols –“
“Who said we were keeping him?” a male voice grumbles. Amon looks over that way. It’s the same guy from the alleyway, the one with the gun, at least he thinks so.
“You didn’t leave, Zaizen-kun,” the woman says dryly. “And you’re the one who nearly shot him. Take responsibility for your actions.” She stands up, and hits a button so the bed Amon’s lying on slowly bends, pushing him to sit up.
“Hmmm.” Zaizen looks down Amon. “Where’s your family?”
“I don’t have one any more.”
“School?”
“Graduated.”
“Got a job lined up?”
“Not yet.”
He isn’t sure Zaizen believes him, since all the man does is study him for what feels like forever. But finally the man shrugs, and says to the doctor, “My daughter can keep an eye on him for now. Once he’s better, we can see about that job.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” the doctor says, which is more faith in him than Amon’s heard from adults since his father died. She smiles down at Amon. “Good luck,” she tells him directly, and leaves the room.
(Much, much later, Amon investigates to see what happened to the doctor lady. She left Japan a year after he joined the STN-J, and went to Canada, of all places. He breathes a private sigh of relief, and doesn’t allow himself to think too hard about why he worried about not having seen her again.)
*
A decade later, as Amon walks out of that same café, he sees another girl in black with green eyes, and the whisper in the back of his mind – the one that woke up when Kate tried to kill him – says, Witch.
Amon ignores it with the ease of long practice. The same voice calls Karasuma a Witch, too, although softer. He can’t be sure without testing that he refuses to do, but he thinks that it just can’t tell any difference between a Craft User and a Witch.
(And what difference is there, Amon? How sure are you that every Witch you’ve hunted has done the things the Factory claims they’ve done?)
(Shut up, shut up, shut up…)
It doesn’t matter. There's no resemblance between his second Witch and this girl besides the color of their clothes and the color of their eyes. It's more likely that she's here from Solomon. If she is his new partner, he’ll work with her no matter what. And if she’s a Witch, she’ll show it soon enough, and he’ll deal with her.
(And if she’s not? How do you prove a negative, Amon?)
*
Solomon’s first and primary credo is: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
Zaizen tells Amon that he has another way, a better way. A way that means they won’t have to depend on Seeds and Craft Users to catch Witches, but can use ordinary humans. Zaizen’s way needs testing, development, but with Amon’s help…
(On the one hand, he owes Zaizen his life. On the other hand, Amon remembers his mother, and those feverish eyes that didn’t recognize him any more, and he wonders if that means he’s also expendable in the end. Then he wonders why he’s bothering to wonder.)
Amon works with several people over the years. Sato, who learns new languages like breathing, and reorganizes STN-J’s files so Amon can actually find information for their Hunts; Watanabe, who can track anyone like a hound if she knows their name, and dies because she runs ahead of Amon and doesn’t know their target has back-up; Haruko, who looks through the eyes of her pet pigeons, and vanishes without explanation one winter.
Kate. Kate who studies Runes, and laughs when Amon tells her it’s a dangerous study. Kate who calls her Craft Silvertongue, and tells Amon stories about the Norse Gods of long ago, so vividly he can almost see them.
Kate, who runs away. Amon takes two guns with him – the air-gun that shoots Orbo, and the unlicensed gun that shoots rune bullets – and goes to her favorite shop, right on the edge of the Walled City. She’s sitting on a bench, just outside it, and looks up at the sound of his footsteps.
They stare at each other for what feels like a long time. At last Amon says, “Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Steal the STN-J’s secrets. Our secrets.”
Kate bursts out laughing, a hollow, cackling laugh. “Oh, Amon – does it actually matter?”
“Kate – what have you done?”
“Nothing you know about,” she says, her voice a low, persuasive croon. Amon feels it as a tickle in his ears, only partially nullified by the Orbo he’s wearing. “Nothing you need to worry about. Let me go, sweetheart. I haven’t done anything to you.”
“Are you a Witch?”
He shouldn’t ask. He knows better than to ask. He’ll never ask again, because Kate laughs again, and says, “Amon, listen to me.”
He does – and a voice in the back of his head says, clearly understandable for the first time, Witch.
He blinks twice, then reaches blindly for a gun. He doesn’t realize which one he’s grabbed until its barrel is leveled at Kate, and she’s smiling at him, gentle as a mother. She's holding a knife in her hand, raised, ready to throw. “Oh, good,” she says. “Aim carefully, Amon. I’d rather die than go to the Factory, but you’ll only get one shot.”
That evening, Zaizen hits him, hard. “You idiot, I told you to stay away! The Factory had plans for her!”
Amon keeps his mouth shut. There’s nothing he can say.
(He didn’t trust her. But for some reason, she trusted him, if only with her death.)
*
Robin – well.
Amon spends the first few weeks trying very hard to view Robin as a child. She doesn’t know how their office does anything (because she hasn’t been trained), she refuses to let go of an idea once it enters her head (like he’s any better), she’s actively a danger with that fire of hers (until the whisper suggests that maybe it’s a physical issue, not a training problem, try giving her glasses).
She cares. She risks her life to help people.
She doesn’t flinch from killing. All the others believe in Zaizen’s rhetoric, that Orbo is somehow more humane. Amon’s killed Witches before, and will again. So does Robin.
He tries to tell Zaizen that she’s not dangerous. Zaizen leans back in his chair, and asks if he’s allowing his emotions to get in the way of his objectivity.
He takes the shot when he’s ordered to shoot.
He misses. And not just because of Robin’s Craft. Because he looks down from his sniper’s point, and Robin’s vivid green eyes aren’t the blank, lost eyes of his mother, of Kate.
Witch, the whisper says, and he pushes it away, because it’s wrong. It has to be wrong. He trusts Robin. (More than he trusts himself.)
*
Amon absolutely does not understand romance.
He’s not charming. He doesn’t offer empty compliments. He doesn’t see the point in buying flowers that will die in a week, and he doesn’t eat sweet things. For some reason, a lot of girls notice these things about him, and decide that makes him a challenge, that they will be the one who win compliments from him, and flowers, and chocolates.
(It’s Robin’s bad luck that she’s the third teenage girl to turn up that week looking for Amon. Dojima wasn’t being petty. All right, Dojima wasn’t just being petty, this is Dojima after all.)
Amon started to date Toko – well, to be perfectly honest, he drifts into dating her, like a stick in a stream. He knows her through Zaizen, so he doesn’t have to worry about explaining why he cancels some dates on short notice, or talk about his job with an organization that doesn’t publicly exist, or why he sometimes smells of blood or the metallic-green of Orbo. Even better, she doesn’t demand flowers or compliments or any of the things that normal girlfriends want.
On their third date, she invites him to her apartment.
“For dinner?”
“If that’s all you’re interested in, of course,” she says, and smiles at him. “But if you’d like to stay for morning coffee…”
“Mm.” He hesitates for a moment, then leans down and kisses her. It feels…pleasant? She smiles against his lips, and kisses him back, so he must be doing something right.
Amon feels like they drift back out of dating as smoothly and as naturally as starting to date. Too many Witches, too little time, and besides it’s awkward now that Toko has a roommate. Toko disagrees. “Is it because of Robin?”
“No,” Amon says, almost too quickly, and doesn’t look up at his partner, standing just outside his car window.