"I can taste blood even with no cut in my mouth. I can smell dead things from miles away. Since waking up in that hospital bed, I've been cursed with a freaking cornucopia of morbid abilities. I'd better be getting a T-shirt deal out of this because my talents beat that silly kid's "I see dead people" schtick by a country mile."
He stared at her for a moment before putting his head back and laughing hard. It looked...odd until she realized she'd hardly seen him smile much less laugh. The cords of his neck stretched long and hard; she felt the wildest urge to capture those cords between her teeth, to burrow into his scent.
"I've been having this dream, too." She found herself telling him the wildest of her latest experiences without a clue as to why. "I'm in the woods...and there's this wolf, huge, black. And we're racing through the trees...and I'm on his back, arms and legs wrapped around him, holding tight. I don't know where we're going, who we're fleeing from, but he's warm and hard beneath me...and I feel completely safe."
He wasn't laughing anymore because, well, you weren't supposed to laugh at crazy people. Not real polite. But there was something about his eyes, something hot and almost feral as he stepped closer, his shadow covering her, blocking out the sun.
"Safe is not something you need to worry about," he told her, voice barely audible as he grasped her by the back of the neck and buried his face in her throat just as she had pictured herself doing only moments before. "Nothing's going to harm you again in these woods unless it gets through me. There's nothing walking beneath these trees that could get through me. And believe me, Lissa," he whispered against her lips, "the only wolf you're going to be riding is me."
