“That means that—” Jace began, but I interrupted, ignoring his irritated growl. The next part would be better coming from a fellow tabby.
“Okay, you met Melody and Patricia this morning, right? And you’ve known me for years,” I said, and Robyn nodded as she lifted her glass. “Well, we’re the only female shifters in this entire territory. Just the three of us. Only two of us are young enough to…propagate. And Melody’s clearly jumped into that role with both feet. But my point is that there are dozens of tomcats in the Appalachian territory. Right?” I glanced at Jace for confirmation, and he nodded. “But only a couple of tabbies.”
Because Patricia was actually a dam—a mother beyond childbearing years.
“Wait.” I frowned and reconsidered. “Technically, I belong to my birth Pride again—my father’s territory—which means you and Melody are the only tabbies here, and that’s actually a very high ratio of tabbies to toms, compared with the average.”
“That’s a high ratio?” Robyn said, and I could see that she might soon draw for herself the conclusion I was leading up to.
“Yes. Right now in my birth Pride, I’m the only woman of childbearing age, and the Southeast Territory has none, because Sara Di Carlo died almost five years ago.” She’d been killed right in front of me, in the cage across from mine.
“So, what, they want you to have a bunch of babies for them?” Robyn forced a laugh, obviously expecting me to say she’d drawn a hilariously inaccurate conclusion. But my silence spoke volumes. “Wait, that can’t be what they want from me! I’m not having a whole litter of some random tomcat’s shifter babies, and they can’t make me!”
She stood again, and this time when she backed away from me, the betrayal in her eyes burned all the way to my soul. She thought I’d sold her out.
“No, they can’t make you, and they won’t even try,” Jace assured her.
I sat straighter when I heard the distant rumble of an engine heading toward us. My parents were minutes away, and I wanted Robyn to understand everything before she met my dad, the council chairman.
“But that is the expectation for tabbies born into our society,” Jace continued. “Which—until you—has been all tabbies.”
“That’s barbaric.”
“Actually, it’s just very old-fashioned,” Patricia insisted, and when she started a fresh pot of coffee, I knew she’d heard the engine too. “It’s also somewhat unavoidable, at least until men start growing uteruses. They can’t have babies, so we must, or the species will fail. I’ve had six myself.”
“Six?” Robyn’s voice was practically a squeak.
Patricia nodded. “Five sons before I finally got a girl.” She turned to me. “That’s about the average, wouldn’t you say?”
I nodded. Like Melody, I was the youngest of six. Dams almost always stop breeding once they get that precious daughter.
“Okay, but what’s with the gender imbalance?” Robyn asked. “Why are girls so rare?”
“Doctors have been trying to figure that out forever,” I said, as the car engine rumbled closer. “And you’re the very first human woman—at least the first confirmed in the US—to survive being infected. Which means you’re our only female stray. That makes you very precious, somewhat of a commodity, and a success story to be studied.”
Creating strays was forbidden, but understanding why Robyn had survived could only benefit us all. Which I knew. But I also knew that…
“I don’t want to be studied.” Robyn’s pulse was racing. She was terrified, and I wondered if she could hear the car. Her senses were as good as mine, but she’d had much less practice using them. “I don’t want to be part of your weird shifter mafia club. I don’t need to be protected—”
“You’re wrong about that,” Jace insisted. “At least for the moment.”
“—and I certainly don’t want to be some kind of anomalous freak baby machine, just so you guys can even out your fucked-up gender ratio.”
“I know.” I reached for her hand, but she pulled away from me. “That’s part of why I hid you from everyone else.”
Jace stood as the car pulled to a stop out front. “She broke several very serious rules to protect you, and because of that, Abby is in a lot of trouble.”
Robyn turned to me with wide, scared eyes. “What kind of trouble?”
A car door slammed out front, and Jace’s brief exhale was his only outward sign of tension. “The kind that might get her executed if she were a tomcat.”
“Executed? They would kill her if she were a boy?”