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I look up only to catch him watching me instead of the skyline.

"I've watched this city for a hundred and thirty years," he says. "From up here. I've watched every one of those bridges go up." His wings shift, very slightly, adjusting. "I've never taken anyone up because I wanted to show them."

He banks, slow and wide, in a long curve back toward the Pearl, and brings us down out of the sky one stroke at a time.

The landing is soft. His feet hit the gravel, and his wings snap open wide to brake us, and he takes three long running steps across the roof to bleed off the speed, and stops, holding me the whole time like he's carrying a glass of water. When we're still, he lowers my feet to the roof, slowly, and keeps one arm around me until my legs decide to work.

They do, eventually.

He doesn't step back.

I'm standing on the roof of the Monster Club with my hair everywhere and my face stiff from the wind and my whole body buzzing, and William is right in front of me, close, his wings half open behind him like he hasn't decided whether to fold them yet.

"I'm not good at saying things," he says.

"I've noticed."

He looks down at me.

"I wanted tonight to be different," he says. "I wanted to show you something that had nothing to do with security or somebody trying to hurt you."

"Well, you succeeded." I push my windblown hair out of my face. "I wore the good jeans and everything."

His eyes drop to my jeans.

"I noticed."

I step up onto the low brick ledge around the base of the water tower, which puts my eyes almost level with his, and put my hands flat on his chest, and kiss him.

He's careful at first. His mouth is cool, and he holds very still.

Then his hands come up and settle on my hips.

They're enormous. His claws are curled in, away from me, so all I feel is the wide flat warmth of his palms through my jeans. And then I feel them change. The give of skin goes out of them. They go hard and heavy and cool on my hips, stone from the fingertips to the wrist, and he doesn't stop it this time. He doesn't take them back. He just holds on.

He kisses me back.

Deep and slow and certain. He pulls me against him with those stone hands until I'm pressed against his chest, and the wind gusts across the roof, cold, and his wings come forward around us both, the whole dark span of them curving in on either side, until there's no wind and no city and no sky, just the warm dark inside his wings and his mouth on mine.

I grab the back of his neck and hang on.

When he finally lifts his head, his breathing is ragged, and he doesn't seem to notice or care.

"Okay," I say, when I can. "I have to ask. Do you take all your dates flying?"

"No," William says.

"What do you do with them?"

He looks down at me from the dark inside his wings with those pale silver eyes, calm as anything.

"Usually," he says, "I tie them up."

I laugh. I can't help it.

He doesn't.

My laugh dies out, slowly, into a very different kind of silence, and the corner of his mouth finally moves.