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She turned to Sampson. She gazed up at him, her head tilted back, very childlike, but I would have bet anything I had that the searching look on her face wouldn’t be childlike. I’d had her stare at me before, and knew that the face didn’t match the intensity and personality in the eyes. “Is this your son?”

“Yes, his name is Sampson.”

She held her tiny hand out to him, too. He took it, but seemed unsure what to do with it. “I am not a vampire,” he said, “nor anyone’s servant, or animal to call.”

“But you are his son, his heir. I am just one more vampire. I am not even a true master.” She was saying that he outranked her.

Sampson glanced at his father, who must have given him some look, because he raised the tiny hand to his mouth. He, like his father, did the minimum touch he could get away with. He, like his father, kept eye contact with her while he did it. It reminded me of how you bow on the mat in judo. You keep your eyes up as you do it, never looking away from your opponent, just in case. But there was a difference between the two men. One was a very master vampire. The other was not. He was part human and part mermaid, and maybe someday he would be more, but tonight, he wasn’t.

“Pick me up,” she said, in that high little-girl voice.

He picked her up and sat her in his lap. She cuddled against him. He was blinking out at the room, frowning. His face looked almost like he was in pain.

“Shit,” I said softly. She had rolled him, rolled him with her eyes.

Jean-Claude said, “Valentina, he is our guest.”

Samuel raised a hand up. “I run my kiss in the old way. He is my son, my eldest; if he cannot win free of a vampire who is not even a master…” He left the sentence unfinished.

“You make him earn his place constantly,” Jean-Claude said.

Samuel nodded.

I’d never even heard of the rule he was talking about. I said so. “I don’t even know this rule.”

“It is a version of survival of the fittest, ma petite. If Sampson is not strong enough to break free, or avoid Valentina’s trickery, then he is a little less worthy in his master’s eyes. It is a way that some Masters of the City separate the weak from the strong. Those who fail these tests often are demoted, traded to other lands, or killed.” His voice was matter-of-fact, but I knew him well enough to taste the faint disapproval. “Very few American masters run their lands with this rule.”

“I am older than most of the American masters,” Samuel said.

I looked at Jean-Claude and he met my look. “But she’s our vampire, and we don’t live by this rule.”

Richard hugged me, one-armed, as if he were afraid of what I’d do, or say.

“If his father decrees that Sampson must break free of her gaze by himself, then it is so, but we will make it very clear to all our vampires that this gaze is illegal in our country. It is seen as coercion.” He stared at Valentina as he said it.

She pouted her lower lip out at him, and snuggled in tighter to Sampson. He put his arms around her, as if in response to the cuddling, or maybe she’d used mind tricks. If she’d rolled him enough not to need words to boss him around, we were in deeper trouble than I’d thought. Because once vampires roll you that much, they own you. They can reclaim their victims at any time. They can stand under their windows and call them out into the night. Hell, some of them can call their victims across town like sleepwalkers. If Valentina had rolled him that badly, he’d give her blood anytime she asked. He’d have no choice.

I don’t know what I would have done, but suddenly there was new energy in the room. The air smelled fresher, faintly of salt and sea. Sampson’s eyes cleared, that confused, bemused look fading. His eyes changed from the hazel of his father’s to the flat black of his mother’s. He stared down at the vampire in his lap, and his face had a look that I’d seen before. It was a look that said his seemingly youthful face held wisdom decades beyond the outside packaging. He gazed down at Valentina with a face that showed