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They parted ways. Finch stepped into the other room, found the medical gown in question, and
changed. Cautiously, he got onto the exam table and lay down, then took in the room while he
waited for Harrison to join him. All things considered, Harrison’s private examination room did
look professional. It was sterile and tidy, stocked with the kinds of things you’d expect to find
in a doctor’s office. It was strange, since Finch was convinced he’d been told that Harrison was
a doctor of herpetology, but it seemed there was much he didn’t know about the Drakes and
their mates.
A short while later, there came a polite knock at the door. “Can I come in?” Harrison asked.
“Yes. I’m decent.”
“Wonderful.” The door opened and in came Harrison. He swept across the room, washed his
hands a second time, and snapped on a pair of blue examination gloves. Finch watched with
a clinical eye. While Harrison could be rather enthusiastic, he was surprisingly professional
when he needed to be, which was now. Especially once he wheeled over an ultrasound
machine and unhooked a wand destined for unspeakable places.
It was awkward, of course, but made a little less so by Harrison’s steady stream of overly
intrusive questions. At first, Finch found it frustrating, but he warmed to it as the conversation
went on. Harrison truly was something else, and while his sensibilities were as distant from
Finch’s as the sun was from Pluto, they found common ground in an unexpected subject—
their pets.
“That lizard on your son’s shoulder,” Finch said. “What’s the story there?”
“Oh, Steve? He’s Darwin’s big brother. I adopted him when I was working toward my PhD and
we’ve been together ever since. I don’t know what I’d do without him.”
“And his wings?”
“Iguanas don’t have wings,” Harrison provided helpfully. He probed the wand into a place that
made Finch blush. “They do have a dewlap, which is that flap of skin that hangs beneath his
jaw and neck. If you use your imagination, I guess you could see that as a single wing, but you
need two wings to fly. And hollow bones. Or magic. It’s quite a complicated process. I’m still
trying to figure out exactly how much magic goes into dragon flight, but there are only so many
hours in the day, and I have so many other experiments underway that I don’t have time to get
to it right now. I’m hoping in the next five years or so I’ll have some availability, which will be
