“Ah!” Ginny squealed, snatching her hand towards her chest and backpedaling clumsily from her crouched position in front of the tiniest (and snappiest) reptilian hatchling she had ever seen. Grabbing her by the back of the sweater and hauling her to her feet, Charlie laughed and shook his head.
“I told you to be ready, Gin. Little guy doesn’t exactly move slow when it comes to snapping up food! But he seems to like you,” Charlie chuckled, watching the tiny serpentine figure weakly tumble out of its nest and scrabble towards Ginny’s feet. “And it’s a good thing, he was refusing to imprint on any of the other handlers here, and he was the only one out of the whole clutch to actually make it. I was half convinced the little guy was going to starve to death before we found someone he would take to like that. He’s lucky you came along.”
Ginny crinkled her nose at her older brother, sensing that he had just thrown her into the deep end of the pool—and with no life jackets, no cute little duckie floaties, nothing. And then it dawned on her.
“Wait a second, you mean you want me to raise a dragon? Charlie, have you lost your mind? I’ve been on the Reserve for all of three hours and I know next to nothing about hatchlings! What if I drop it?”
“Ginny, did you not pay any attention at all in Care of Magical Creatures? Two legs, not four, so I’m giving you a wyvern to raise. And he’s got wings, he’ll slow himself down before he hits the ground. Plus they’re rather bouncy for the first few months. And Mum said to give you a project to keep you away from boys this summer, after all,” Charlie said, grinning widely, his dimples creating deep indents in his cheeks. Ginny had forgotten how well he could mock her.
Ginny merely glared before yelping again—she had just registered that the hatchling was dragging himself up over her left trainer and up her bare ankle. A small trickle of blood ran down into Ginny’s sock from a fresh scratch courtesy of the hatchling’s wickedly sharp talons. Charlie frowned down at the little beast for a moment, then at Ginny’s bare legs, and shrugged off his jacket. “We’re going to have to get you some more practical clothing though. And a crash course in dragon rearing,” he mused, scooping the little dragonlet up carefully. The creature turned his head and hissed, claws moving fretfully against Charlie’s tough dragonhide jacket as the stocky man wrapped him in it securely. “Cranky little bugger, aren’tcha?”
“Understatement of the century, Charlie, he’s like an Ebeneezer Scrooge, Draco Malfoy, and Gollum all rolled up into one tiny leathery package,” she murmured, squinting thoughtfully at the creature’s narrow little face, “though he is rather pretty, so maybe he’s like just Draco Malfoy.”
“Mm. Borrowing books from Hermione again, huh? And he’ll be prettier when he puts on some extra weight and fills out all these wrinkles,” Charlie noted, pinching the extra skin above the hatchlings shoulder blades. “Here, put out your arms,” he commanded, plopping the bundle in Ginny’s grasp before she had time to think twice. The baby wyvern stopped struggling immediately and a strange rumbling purr began to shake her bones as her iridescent bundle wrapped himself into a tight ball, flipping his overlong tail up over his own shoulder. “Aww, he’s almost cute like that,” Ginny crooned, stroking the tiny scales running down the beast’s tiny muzzle.
One sleepy amber eye opened momentarily, fixing her with a baleful glare.