“What the fuck?” I snarled. “You can’t say something like that and then not finish.”
“I know,” she responded quietly. “But I think I heard it about five thousand times when I was growing up. No one outside the community was ever supposed to hear about the legends and rituals of the area.”
“About what?” Nothing she was saying made any sense.
“Well, she and Brandon have been married almost two years,” Tria said. “They’d been trying to have a baby, but nothing has happened.”
“Okay.” I frowned. I understood why that might be upsetting for a couple, but that shit happened all the time. Usually it wasn’t anything serious.
“The doctor doesn’t think there is anything wrong with her, so they checked Brandon out. He has low sperm count or something. He isn’t going to be able to father any children.”
“Well, there are other options, right?” I had the sinking feeling I was missing a major point.
“I told you,” Tria said, “the community is shrinking. She has to have a baby from the Beals community.”
“So, who is going to father the kid?”
“All of them.” Tria’s eyes met mine, and she nodded to me slowly as I comprehended what she was saying. “They’ll just keep going until she’s pregnant.”
The implications of her words slammed into me, and images from a website Wade had found once rocketed around in my brain. It featured this chick lying back in a chair while a line of guys waited to fuck her. What I had considered kind of interesting at the time now seemed thoroughly sickening.
I was never one to bash another culture, but this was just fucked up.
Chapter 17—Kiss the Girl
For the next hour, Tria explained how the Beals council had determined the best way to make sure their culture and way of life continued, which was to make sure every couple had many children. There was a minimum of three required because you couldn’t just replace yourselves. You had to add to the population. Since then, any couple who didn’t have the allotted number of kids was “helped out” by the rest of the community—either by making a surrogate mother available to carry a child for a woman who wasn’t fertile or by making sure any fertile woman was impregnated by some man from Beals.
Husband or not.
Apparently they had been doing it for generations, which meant more and more often, the children they did have were more closely related to each other than the generation before, and their numbers were beginning to dwindle again. Cousins marrying cousins was common enough, but they were starting to have other relations intermingle as well.
“Brandon is technically Nikki’s uncle,” Tria told me. She sat down opposite me on the couch and handed me a refilled glass of apple juice. “They aren’t so far apart in age—her grandmother had him just a few years before Nikki’s mother gave birth to her. She says she loves him, but there is part of me that thinks it’s just because she was brought up there.”
“You were brought up there, too. So why aren’t you doing the same thing?”
“I certainly heard it enough,” Tria said. “But things were always different for me.”
“Because you weren’t born there?” I asked.
“Well…partially,” she said as she cringed. “I mean, I obviously didn’t fit in with everyone else. I was…accepted…but with reluctance, you know?”
I didn’t, but I nodded anyway.
“Leo is the leader of the council, so whatever he says goes. He said I was his daughter, so everyone kind of had to accept me. Still, I knew I was different, and even though I was young when it happened, I still remembered living outside of Beals with my mom and then in foster care. Even my dad was more a fringe member of the community.”
“What would your dad have thought of all this?” I wondered aloud.
“I don’t think he would have approved,” Tria said as she shook her head. “I know there were a lot of things he and Leo disagreed about, and sometimes they even argued. I don’t think Dad knew about a lot of the things the council decided. It doesn’t matter now, though. I have to go back.”
Tria had to physically stop me from grabbing my jacket and heading out the door.
“What are you doing?” she cried.
“I’m going to find that fuckhead Harrison and do what I told him I’d do—shove his severed dick down his throat!”
“Liam! You don’t even know where he is!”
“I know how to read a fucking map!” I shook my arm to get her hand off me.