The Altered by Annabelle Jacobs

with a sneer. “I would have thought
he’d be more cautious, considering.”
    Yeah, Jordan
had been a bit surprised too, but then, if they’d wanted to hurt
Daniel, they would have done it outside the bar. “Well, he didn’t
tell me which one, and London has bloody loads.”
    Charlie
smothered a surprised laugh with the back of his hand, but Keira
looked anything but amused. She set her fork down on the table and
glared at him. “So, what, you’ve been trawling around the city
trying to find him for the past week?”
    Jordan
fidgeted in his seat. She made him sound rather pathetic when she
put it like that. “Not exactly.” It wasn’t as though he’d spent all
day every day looking for Daniel. He’d only tried a few on the off
chance.
    “But you did
go looking for him?”
    Jordan sighed,
but nodded.
    “Why?”
    And this was
the part he didn’t want to discuss, because he didn’t know why. He couldn’t explain what had made him go into that first
library and why the disappointment he’d felt had compelled him to
keep looking for Daniel until he found him.
    He shrugged,
hoping they’d both just drop it, but was not surprised when they
didn’t.
    “So, what
happened?” Keira had all but abandoned her food now, one hand
holding tight to Charlie’s thigh, and the other screwed into a fist
on the table. “Are you two friends now, or—”
    “No. Nothing
happened. Well….” God . He hated talking about shit like
this. “We spoke for a bit. I guess I wanted to make sure he was
okay after Thursday night—which he was. Turns out seers have
accelerated healing too.” Both Charlie and Keira raised their
eyebrows at that. “Then things got a little weird, and I left.”
    “Weird how?”
Keira asked, looking a lot less frosty and a lot more
incredulous.
    “I don’t know
how to explain it. He kind of stared at me, and I felt…. I wanted
to jump over the counter and just bury my face in his neck. That
sort of weird.”
    Charlie
coughed and glanced down, and Keira looked as though her eyebrows
were going to disappear into her hairline. Jordan felt the colour
rising in his cheeks and suddenly wanted to be anywhere but there.
He hadn’t meant to say quite that much.
    “For fuck’s
sake, Jordan. He’s a seer . Have you forgotten what that
means?”
    “Of course I
haven’t.”
    “Well, it sure
as hell seems that way.” She shrugged Charlie’s arm off her
shoulders and stood, palms flat on the table as she leaned toward
Jordan. “You wanted to scent him. People would smell you on him,
and what the hell would they think then? Hey? Of all the people to
get involved with, you had—”
    “We’re not involved , Keira. I as good as threatened him before I left,
so you don’t have to worry about anything happening between
us.”
    That stopped
her in her tracks, and her expression changed from furious to
confused in a heartbeat. “But… I don’t understand. You either like
him or you don’t.”
    Jordan pushed
his chair back and stood to face her. “I did it because he made me
feel vulnerable and open, and I can’t afford that. We can’t
afford that. I was walking out of that library already making plans
to go in the next day, and then I realised… he’s a seer and they
can’t be trusted. No matter who he’s friends with.”
    He turned on
his heel and headed out the door toward the stairs, dinner
forgotten.
    “Jordan…
wait!”
    Keira shouted
after him, but he was done talking about it. He was done thinking about it.
    The change lurked under the surface of his skin, too much anger
bubbling through him to keep it in check. God , he wanted to
run so badly. Wanted to let his wolf out and forget about this crap
for a while.
    It wasn’t
often he wished he was back home in Devon, but at times like this
he longed for the endless rolling hills of Dartmoor, where he could
run for hours without interruption. But it hadn’t been easy to hide
what you were in a small town, and London had offered too much