"Yes, the killing," Hecate echoed with a slow sad nod, and reached to gently lay a hand on Qebhet's back. This was the shoulder the hellhound/sluagh's claws had sliced into, a creature who'd come from hell, and a creature who'd been rejected from heaven, hell and the earth. If the beast had killed Hecate, she thought, she would have understood that. It was the death and the wounds that came from the hands of humans that carried a sick sense of wrongness.
"Humans are capable of such good, it burns all the deeper when they choose harm instead," Hecate said, returning her hands to her mug. "But I burned them back, those boys. I visited them the night they killed me, and stripped them of all the scraps of fortune that clung to them. Whatever difference it will make in the end, I don't know."