Nyx's POV
But she wasn't looking at me.
She walked past me without so much as a glance, close enough that I could smell something old and bitter and herbal clinging to her robes, and stopped directly in front of the two beasts. She looked up at them with an expression of mild, proprietorial satisfaction.
"You did well." Her voice matched everything else about her — thin and bent and somehow wrong, like a note played slightly off-key. Then she reached into the folds of her robes, produced a dead kid goat, and flung it into the air between them with a cackle that scraped against the inside of my ears.
The beasts moved before it hit the ground.
I watched them fall on it — that terrible, focused violence so at odds with the glassy emptiness they'd worn moments ago — and every remaining suspicion I'd been quietly assembling snapped into certainty.
A witch.
I had been hunted, herded, and delivered by a witch.
