Free Jace (River Pack Wolves 2) (Paranormal Romance) by Alisa Woods Page B

meaning. “If we work together, we’ll have a much better chance of solving this whole thing. Including finding Noah.”
    So maybe that was it. He came after her because he believed she had vital information that could help him and the rest of his brothers find the missing shifters and this Agent Smith character. It wasn’t that he was worried about her or any such nonsense.
    “Understood.” She was a little disappointed it wasn’t more than that, but that helped focus her back on her mission: finding Noah.
    Jaxson tugged on Jace’s arm, pulling him back to give Piper and Olivia room. Olivia produced a small baggie filled with whitish powder from the pocket of her jeans. She poured it out into the palm of her hand and waved her other hand over it. She said some strange words in a hesitating kind of way, like she didn’t quite know what they were. Great. A beginner half-witch. But the spell must be working because a whitish cloud started to swirl above the tiny pile of powder. Blue sparks shot through the cloud, forming a little torrent of magic.
    “Are you ready?” Olivia looked her in the eyes, little more uncertainty there than Piper wanted to see.
    “Um… sure.” Piper braced herself, but the last thing she expected was for Olivia to blow the small cloud into her face. The world went blurry at the edges, and Piper tried not to panic. She clutched at the table top next to her, bracing herself as her vision wobbled. All the shifters in the room seemed to blur like she was seeing them from underwater.
    Olivia’s voice boomed, suddenly loud like she was in a giant hall. “Focus on your brother, Noah, and some particularly poignant memory that you have. The stronger, the better.”
    A dozen memories flashed through Piper’s head, mostly text conversations that were particularly funny or sad. There was something about communicating by typed words on her phone that allowed her and Noah to share things they never could face-to-face. In fact, there was literally no one else on earth she would say those things to, even in a text. But even as strong as those memories were, they still wobbled away from her, like her mind was searching for something more tangible. Something in person.
    Her thoughts suddenly zoomed all the way back to the day their mother died. Piper’s mind snapped to the on-base housing that was more like a prison. Her mother had always stayed in the house. The Colonel liked it that way and forbade her from showing her beautiful face outside its four walls. There was something about the mating bond that held her captive. The one time Piper had tried to get her mother to leave—for some school function or play date or normal thing of childhood she couldn’t even recall now—her mother had something akin to a panic attack. Piper never asked again. That was when her mother’s slow descent started. Piper could see it in retrospect, but at the time, she just thought her mom was sick a lot.
    Then that day came when Piper came home late from school. Even before she was halfway across the living room, she knew something had gone terribly wrong. Noah stormed out of the kitchen, eyes red, face streaked with tears, so angry-looking that Piper thought he might explode. Or shift. Something. But Noah kept his rage locked inside, even then, just as they had all learned to do.
    “What happened?” she remembered asking. Noah just shook his head, the rage making his whole body vibrate. It wasn’t until Piper stumbled into the kitchen herself that she understood. Her mother was sprawled out on the kitchen floor. A bottle of pills had spilled across the kitchen table, and a bottle of whiskey had smashed into the floor, spilling its amber liquid into a thin lake that stretched across the span of the kitchen.
    Piper remembered that she screamed. She didn’t remember actually doing it, but her throat was sore for days afterward. There was no sense in calling 911 because it was obvious her mother was dead.
    Noah had