Frost Fire (Tortured Elements) Read Free Page B

smiled back just a little bit. But they both knew that chance was small, and probably nonexistent. Ambassadors weren’t sent for the happy stuff in life.
    Shieldak nodded to her. “Sleep well, Allai.” He didn’t say anything else before walking out the door, closing it with nearly as much force as Luke had.
    Allai sighed and leaned back in her pillows. She wouldn’t be sleeping anytime soon, and if by any chance she did, it wouldn’t be good sleep. She snatched her MP3 player off her nightstand and put in her earbuds. Allai didn’t bother choosing a song, and instead set it on shuffle-mode and let the device do its thing. That was how she liked her music: Completely random. That way every song had a fair chance.
    Music blasted in her ears, and she wondered if she was the only one in the world who would recognize this song, other than the people singing it. The band she was listening to was a tiny indie band she’d stumbled across. She’d found it the way she found most of her music: Holed up in Luke’s room, surfing the internet on his laptop, with the door closed to keep Shieldak from catching her.
    Allai didn’t remember the exact name of this band, but she knew it was really odd and had something in it about vampires and dinosaurs. It always made her smile, because both those things were way extinct.
    Allai sighed and focused on the beat of the music. It was a love song, and that made her want to skip over it, because she had no luck in that area. She was a Nox—a human who lived among Demons. That made her undesirable to Demons, and invisible to normal humans—the Luxs. But she waited until the ending lines of the song before she skipped to the next:
    ‘You whisper a hello and vow against goodbyes,
    Swearing you’ll never let what we have die.’
    Why was she even worrying about any of this stuff? She didn’t have time to think about a relationship, let alone actually
have
one. She had to worry about the Sentinel, about Rhaize. About Drake.
    She still didn’t know what to think of Drake. Her memories were so vivid, but that one memory of him lowering his claws to her neck was also real.
    She reached up and touched the small scar he’d given her. Why would he have tried to kill her, if he’d protected her for all those years? She sighed and rested her chin on her knees. Maybe Luke was right. Maybe all those other memories of him weren’t real.
    Her gaze found the only window in her room, and she stared at it, alert for danger and for any intruders.
    Alert for him.

Chapter Two
    Pine trees flashed by, the pattern of their bark blurring in the corner of Allai’s eye. She gulped in air and focused on the ground, trying not to trip as she ran.
    Sometimes she loved living at the headquarters of the Sentinel; it was an aging mansion called the Manor, located deep in rural New York State. It’d been built on an old pine tree plantation, which gave the place a decidedly west-coast feel, despite the east-coast weather.
    And sometimes she hated living here. Like right now. The forest terrain was making her morning running-routine a living nightmare, as always. And nature couldn’t decide if it was late winter or early spring, and had decided on her least favorite type of weather: a foggy drizzle.
    She skirted around boulders and fallen branches that marked her running path. Leap there, dodge here, bound over there. The pattern of the path was ingrained in her mind from years of daily running. But today it felt more challenging, like it was more of an obstacle course than a running path. That was probably because she’d gotten a grand total of four hours of sleep the night before. And the rain wasn’t helping as it drizzled down on her, muddying the path and her Converse shoes.
    She knew she shouldn’t run in Converse, but she looked dorky in running shoes. They always looked way too big on her. Actually, most things looked way too big on her. That was the problem with being four-foot-ten. Of course, her dad