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Chacal stiffened when Mireille bolted toward her- but relaxed against her sister's shoulder as soon as she remembered that she had painstakingly bathed herself several times already, to remove any trace of the poisons from her fur. A hint of red stained the golden fur at her shoulders; not a trace of poison or blood, but from the earth in the Roja den where the poisons had been buried. 

She squeezed her eyes shut but tears crept through freely, seeping between her lashes to slide down her cheeks and mix into the cinnamon fur of her sister. When asked, it took Chacal a few moments, and a number of shaky breaths to be able to summon an answer. 

"I 'ave not seen Mother since.
She chased de bear, I 'ave seen deir pawprints.
De bear left be'ind a trail of blood and vomit-
de poison dat Maman an' I bore...It...."

She choked on her words and whined. 

It had been the poison which had killed her mother. Once the blood had cleared from her eyes, she'd seen the evidence of it on Erzulie's lips. It killed her that she had not been able to cleanse her mother before putting her in the ground- and for a long while, she'd considered doing it, and accepting the same fate-

-but she was a mother too. And she would not let her children know the pain of losing their mother, not yet. They would struggle enough with losing their grandmothers and their uncle, and Theo...He had witnessed it all. 

She felt a stirring in her belly, the pulsing and pawing of little feet.