"I like cooking."

"Ah, and if you already know that you probably don't need the 101."

He giggles.

"You got any other things you like?"

Shrug.

"Windsurfing?"

"You get a surfboard, you stick a sail on it," says Kerron, "you go out when it's windy."

"Is it fun?"

"Yeah! Sort of like sailing except you don't have to fuss with maintaining an entire boat."

He laughs.

"My roommate's got a sailboat. He likes it. I like borrowing it."

Giggle.

"I live in Safesun, which is one of the imperial capitals but has a large permanent population of mostly hybrids," Kerron adds. "It's on a beach in Florida. I moved there with Brandon - he's the Princess's cousin, if you take all the ostensible adoptive relationships in the coven at face value - when I turned five."

"It's still weird that you guys grow up at five."

"Well, we don't stop growing altogether till we're seven. And the superhuman memory helps with the picking up enough life skills thing."

"Doesn't make it not weird," he asserts.

"Wolves do it differently. They work like humans till they activate, when they're about your age - and then they take less than six months to look twenty-five. Is that more or less strange? Same amount of strange?"

"No, that's weirder."

"And then there's vampires, who are humans for however long and then they stop right where they are. Turning humans who aren't your age bare minimum is extremely not allowed."

"Why's that?"

"Psychological development. Little kids who get turned - stay little kids. For centuries. Nowadays if somebody turned a kid anyway, you could fix that with magic or torching or whatever, but the dead vampire children who've been resurrected had a hell of an adjustment period getting used to being human again with childlike emotional processing. Grownups can swap between species without too much of an issue, not so much seven-year-olds."

"Sucks for them, I guess."

"Yeah. Not a particularly happy chapter in supernatural history."