Nita’s place in the world as both an unnatural-someone or something classified as having supernatural abilities-and as a dealer of unnatural body parts makes her crisis of morality that much more complicated and interesting to watch. Nita and her zannie companion, Kovit, are fully developed, three-dimensional characters that bring depth and complexity to what could otherwise be a simplistic slasher-style narrative. When things go full topsy-turvy, Nita and the zannie are forced to team up in order to escape the death market and find their way to safety (if such a thing can be said to exist for either of them anymore.) Using her own unnatural abilities for self-healing and body manipulation, Nita grapples with her place in the food chain and her existence as a villain in the world, but perhaps one with slightly less questionable morals. While trapped in a glass cage, Nita comes face to face with a zannie-a supernatural creature known for feeding off the pain of others-with whom she can’t help but feel a strange connection. Was it her mother? Was it her father? Was it some rival unnatural hunter? Nita begins to wonder who it is that sold her out. When she helps him escape, she finds herself kidnapped and held at one of the black markets to which she and her mother had sold their own wares. But one night, after her mother brings home a live subject from one of her expeditions, Nita starts to wonder if she can handle watching him slowly cut up and sold off.

Most nights she goes to bed after a nice, soothing evening of dissecting the body of an “unnatural” so her mother can sell the parts on the black market. Nita is a little bit too used to seeing death.

Rebecca schaeffer book not even bones