Page 51 of Dark Dragon’s Wolf

She kissed his shoulder. “Then they don’t get how lucky they are. And anyway, I have the hottest date, so all the other women are jealous of me.”

He pulled her into a doorway and kissed her, his lips lingering on hers. “They’re not. The other guys are all jealous of me.” He kissed her again. “And that purple drink tastes pretty good. Or maybe that’s just you.”

“Or maybe it’s all that meat. Yum. I can’t believe they give you as much as you want.”

“Neither can they, now that we’ve been there. Come on. We have rooftop drinking to do.”

The rooftop bar was spectacular. Portland was a city of bridges, seven of them spanning the Willamette River near downtown.

All of them sparkled with lights and traffic. They could see boats on the river, and all the city lights below them.

“I want a city,” Mayah said. “Of my own.”

Tristan laughed. “I bet you could take one over, if you tried. But they’re a pain in the ass to keep up. I’d recommend leaving that to the humans, and just buying a penthouse so you could look out at it.”

“Fine,” Mayah said. “Ruin my fantasy.”

She’d had a large number of purple drinks, and Tristan had felt duty-bound to keep up with her. Despite his shifter metabolism, things were pleasantly glowy.

Now Mayah was leaning backward, craning her neck to look up at the pyramid that topped the building. It had a spire at its peak.

“Let’s go up there,” she said. “I totally want to jump off.”

Tristan choked on his purple drink. “You can’t jump off a building in downtown Portland,” he said. “People have video cameras.”

“Fiddle-faddle. I’ll be cloaked.”

“And where will I be?”

“You’ll be with me.”

Tristan didn’t even want to ask how that was going to work.

“Come on,” she coaxed. “There’s a ladder right over there. It goes all the way to the top.”

“Yeah, like building security is going to let us do that.”

Mayah gave a dramatic sigh. “You wolfses have no imagination.”

She pulled him over towards the restricted area where the access ladder was. “Watch this.”

She pointed up into the sky on the opposite side of the rooftop bar. A tiny missile shot from her fingers, and detonated into a colored firework, high above the building.

Everyone’s heads turned to see what it was, and Mayah vaulted over the low wall that separated them from the ladder.

Oh, fuck. Tristan followed, catching her as she got to the bottom of the ladder. “Hold on to me, Wolfie,” she said, and leaped piggyback onto him, wrapping her legs and arms around him.

He felt a shiver of magic.

“See? We’re cloaked. Now climb.”

With a martyred sigh, Tristan began climbing up the ladder, Mayah clinging to his back like a demented monkey. They topped the wall and began climbing at a slant up the side of the pyramid, until finally they reached the base of the spire.

Mayah was giggling like an idiot, and she was setting Tristan off. “Please don’t tell me you want me to climb the fucking spire,” he said. “Because no.”

“No, silly,” she said, sliding to the rooftop. “Now we jump off.”

“Have you forgotten that only one of us has wings?”