Redhawk Caldera But you've got to come back a star

She didn't know what to expect, exactly, because this was all new territory to her. Wildfire braced herself, in case her mother decided to shout at her or, worse, force her to submit. Fox did neither of these things and when she calmly posed a question to her daughter, Wildfire felt a bit sheepish. No, she felt more than sheepish. Had Saena's poison already worked its way through her? That thought alone made the child want to retch.

"I didn't recognize her but she knew who I was. She said she visited us once, when we were really little, and that when she came back to teach me about Naturalism, you attacked her. I tried to tell her we don't let any outsiders visit but... she said she wasn't an outsider. Then she really started ranting. She said you and dad abandoned them without saying goodbye. She said Junior tried to kill herself because of it. She said it's dad's fault Junior attacked me and that you guys attacked a bunch of them. She told me to ask, um, Dante and Blue Willow about you guys."

There, that was most if not all of it. She hadn't embellished anything either, as far as she knew. She just repeated what she'd been told, then lapsed into silence. While she waited for Fox to react, she hunkered down, pressing her belly against the grass. Then she remembered one last thing Saena had said to her. She'd said it twice, actually. Wildfire had been so overloaded by all the information that she hadn't reacted to much, yet this particular urging had prompted an almost visceral reaction.

"She told me not to grow up to be like you and dad," she finished, finally raising her eyes a little. Although she had been through some hard times in young life already, Wildfire had never really looked or acted the part. She rolled with the punches, more or less. But her amber eyes looked different now, as if she really had been contaminated by Saena's words.