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Chapter Fourteen
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Shea stared out the window of the cabin into the driving rain. The droplets looked like tiny silver threads streaming from the gray sky. She shivered for no reason and crossed her arms protectively across her breasts.
“What’s wrong, Shea?” Raven asked softly, not wanting to intrude.
“Jacques just cut himself off completely from me.” Shea swallowed hard. All this time she had been so certain she needed her freedom from the continuous bond between them, but now that Jacques had withdrawn, she felt almost as if she couldn’t breathe. “I can’t reach him. He won’t let me.”
Raven sat up straighter, her face going very still. Mikhail?
Leave me for now, he ordered. Raven caught the impression of fear for Jacques’ sanity, the swirling, violent rage that had welled up in the Carpathian males just before Mikhail broke the mind contact with her. She cleared her throat cautiously. “Sometimes they try to protect us from the harsher aspects of their lives.”
Shea whirled around to face her, eyebrows up. “Their lives? Aren’t we bound to them? Haven’t they done something to irrevocably bind us to them so that there is no way to leave them? It isn’t just their lives. They brought us into this, and they have no right to arbitrarily decide what we can and can’t know.”
Raven swept a hand through her blue-black hair. “I felt the same way for a long time.” She sighed. “The truth is, I still feel the same way. But we persist in judging them by our human standards. They are a different species of people altogether. They are predators and have a completely different view of right and wrong.”
Raven shoved a hand through her hair, frowning as she did so. “I wanted to wait to have a baby. But Mikhail has been noticing differences in Gregori, and we both knew he needed some hope to continue. It worries me, though, because I still have such a hard time fitting into their world.”
Shea crossed the room and sat on the bed beside Raven’s chair. She could hear the fear in the woman’s voice, and something in her instantly responded. “At least there are two of us now. We can gang up on them.”
Raven laughed softly. “It’s such a fight all the time, maintaining any kind of control in my life with Mikhail. I have this feeling he’s only going to get worse with this pregnancy.”
“And you’re obviously going to have the healer on your back,” Shea pointed out. “He’s more daunting than Jacques’ brother.”
Raven sighed. “I wish I could say that wasn’t true, but he’s going to be horrible, really horrible. I can’t blame him, though.”
“I don’t understand what he meant exactly, but I could tell it was imperative I take good care of you.”
Raven tucked her feet beneath her. “Carpathians rarely have children. There’s something that prevents them from having a female child when they do conceive.”
Shea’s mind instantly focused on amassing data. “Can you tell me more?”
Raven obliged. “About eighty percent of all children conceived are male. No one knows why. Only about seventy percent of pregnancies are carried to term. Most miscarry, and it isn’t even within the first three months. It can happen at any time. Of those children born, only a handful survive the first year. Again, no one knows why. The last female child to survive was born over five hundred years ago.” Raven sighed. “The men are desperate. Mikhail and Gregori have a theory that only human women with true psychic ability can make the change and have the right chemistry to be a lifemate. Even if they’re right, you can see the magnitude of the problem. Without women and children, the species cannot survive. The males turn vampire because they have no hope.”
“Perhaps it’s nature’s way of population control. They’re able to live so long,” Shea mused, more to herself than to Raven.
“The species will be extinct soon if they can’t find out what’s wrong,” Raven said sadly. “Gregori is a great man. He’s given so much to his people and suffered for so long. He deserves a better fate than turning vampire and being hated and feared by the world. Out of respect, Mikhail would never allow any other to hunt and destroy him, yet doing so himself would be agony. I’m not even certain anyone could actually destroy one such as Gregori alone. It would be a terrible thing for Gregori to be hunted by the very people he protected and healed.”