This short story (55 pages) is told almost entirely from the perspective of Liam Cuelebre, the son of Dragos and Pia, affectionately known to us as Peanut. Peanut is a Wyr, a dragon who can take human form, like his father. Peanut is only 6 months old, but he has been growing rapidly in both body and mind. He looks like a large 5 year old boy, and is already doing high school algebra with Hugh. His parents decide it would be beneficial for him to go to elementary school and socialize with other children. They feel he will be so powerful when he is grown up that there will be no one capable of providing checks and balances to him, so he must learn to think of others, and earn that lesson early, as he will have to police himself.
Liam goes off to his first day of school in first grade, which is quite momentous. He figures out how to deal with elementary schoolyard bullies, stands up to an adult bully, and gets a girlfriend.
"Hey, would you like to be my girlfriend for a couple of days?"
A startled wash of color stained her pale cheeks. She stared at him. "Only for a couple of days?"
He had forgotten- she didn't know who he really was, or anything about him. "Or maybe a week. It's kind of hard to explain," he told her. "I'm not going to be a kid for very long, so I can't make any long-term commitments."
Liam is learning how to control his temper and grow up emotionally, and it's heartwarming to see. I love how Thea shows us that he is still a child, showing how when he gets scared it makes his tummy feel funny. We are inside his head watching him process what to do when he interacts with others at school, and seeing how an Elder child works through issues. Dragos tells him, "If you were to talk to humans about this, they would probably say that things should be handled in a different way, and I respect that- but Liam, it's important to remember, we're not human, and neither are those boys. They're stronger than humans, more dangerous. They're predators, and they crossed a line. You know what happens when Wyr go bad, don't you? They can hurt a lot of people before they're brought down."
We also see a little of the behind-the-scenes of how Dragos is recovering from his memory loss from Pia Saves the Day (Elder Races 6.6). This little snippet is enough to quell my jitters for the next full length Elder Races novel, but I'm craving the next release, Night's Honor, with its expected publication date of September 2014.
No excerpt available.