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Carling’s side in all of this.”
    The conversation had slipped squarely into Vampyre territory, and Seremela frowned, unsure about how comfortable she felt with the subject. She looked down at her hands as she said carefully, “The bond between a Vampyre maker and her progeny is something difficult to understand from the outside. I suppose you must take Carling’s side, mustn’t you?”
    “Do you mean, did Carling order me to take her side?” Duncan asked. He smiled at her, all vestiges of the hard edged stranger gone. “No, she didn’t. She wouldn’t do that. I must take Carling’s side because I love her, and I agree with her stance more than I agree with Julian’s. But that doesn’t mean I can’t see Julian’s side of things too.”
    His ability to see all perspectives of a situation would be one of the things that made him such an outstanding attorney. She had to smile. It could make him an outstanding friend as well. Or enemy. It was one more thing that she liked so much about him. His quiet, incisive intelligence had its own kind of bite.
    He was still speaking. He said, “And there’s also a big difference between me and Julian.”
    “What difference is that?” she asked, growing fascinated despite her initial discomfort.
    A thrill ran through her nerve endings as Duncan took one of her hands and played with her fingers. “Thousands of years,” he told her. “You see, I accept Carling’s rule over me. She made me, and I’m young enough to remember how I felt when I agreed to that. Yes, she has the Power to force me to her will, but in the last hundred and seventy years, she has almost never done so, and she never has without having a compelling reason for it. But Julian was turned at the height of the Roman Empire. He and Carling, and Rune too—the three of them are different from us.”
    “Us?” she repeated in surprise. “As in you and me?”
    “Yes, as in you and me,” he said.
    She smiled at him, amused. “Do you realize I’m probably close to two hundred years older than you?”
    He grinned. “I was thirty when I was turned, so if you’re over three hundred and fifty, then yes, you are. But the age difference between you and me is a drop in the bucket when you look at millennia. They are all so much older than we are. I think it makes them fundamentally different in some way. And Julian is very dominant. Carling has never changed anyone against their will, so he must have once, long, long ago, agreed to her dominance, but I think he has chafed under her Power for a very long time. Imagine what it must have been like for him when it looked like she was dying.”
    She frowned. “I suppose, even if he cared for her, in some ways it must have felt like a relief.”
    “That is how I see it,” Duncan said. “For many years they worked well in partnership with each other. They played off each other’s strengths very well. But she didn’t die when she was supposed to, and he wasn’t freed. Now he can’t stand the thought of being under her Power again. And if they ever saw each other in person, she could potentially force him to her will—he is her progeny, after all. I don’t think Julian ever hated Carling before. But I think maybe he has learned to hate her now.”
    “The way you describe it, it sounds like they’re in the middle of some kind of duel.”
    “That’s a good way to describe it,” Duncan said. “Only this duel may take centuries to play out.”
    She shuddered and curled her fingers around his. “It disturbs me to think about you possibly getting caught in the middle of their—” What should she call it? Disagreement sounded far too simple. “Their clash of wills.”
    “Oh well,” he said wryly. “’Every family has its ups and downs.’”
    Seremela went into delighted shock. “Did you just quote Katherine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine from The Lion in Winter , or was that an accident?”
    He smiled into her gaze. “What if I did?”
    Under the