Token Huntress Read Online Free Page A

efficient, and most importantly, safe. They cropped their own food, gathered their own water. Finding a location for camps is hard. Soil for farming was scarce. The camp nearest to us was connected to the same stream of water as us. The humans then had to boil the water to purify it and make it drinkable. Every two weeks our transport team would go to them, supplying them with what we found on raids and what we had hunted for them. In the human camp, only few could hunt properly. It made me question whether all human camps were like this, or if other Guilds across the world had to provide so much more to keep their humans alive. I had never come across another Guild. There were less of us than there were humans.
    I heard a splash of water and I crept to the ground as I listened. The vampires were ahead, not that far from me. I crept closer to peer at my unsuspecting prey. There was a female figure caught in the net. Her very youthful, glowing skin implied that she was not a vampire, but a human. I examined them for a moment. The male vampire wasn’t overly aggressive toward her. Instead it seemed he was using his elongated nails to cut through the net. He was obviously on the border of becoming a saber. Sabers were vampires of any age that had lost their minds. Once they become a saber they cannot retract their claws or fangs. They were monstrous and animalistic. At least the vampire members within the Council could control themselves slightly, but this kind was the worst. This one had not fully turned. I estimated he had about a week. Actually, I estimated he had about twenty seconds.
    I stood out from the bushes. The girl looked up at me, frightened. “Run, Chris!” she shouted to him as she noted the crossbow in my hand. I cocked my head slightly to the side in curiosity. Was the human trying to protect the vampire?
    The pale, blue-eyed vampire turned on me, his fangs ejecting as he stretched out his fingers. I must admit that the absence of the iridescent eyes that marked me as hunter often gave me an advantage. Usually they did not know who they were pointing their disgusting fangs at.
    I raised my crossbow to him. If I were only human, I would never be able to match his speed. I would never be able to pull the trigger so quickly. But human was something I was not, and pulling the trigger brought me much satisfaction. His instant, surprised expression startled the girl and she screamed. I had pierced him through the chest. He staggered before falling backward into the dark water. His pale skin turned to a ghastly black as he floated limply in the water. By nightfall his corpse would deteriorate into the ground, polluting the earth further.
    “Nooooo!” The human girl tangled herself up more as she tried to reach him. Her scream pierced my sensitive ears. She thrashed in the water as she tried swimming toward him.
    “You do understand what he was, don’t you?” I asked her, mostly out of curiosity. I had never received this reaction from a human I had just saved from a vampire.
    “I love him!” she wailed. My eyes bulged at her confession and then I simply laughed. I strapped my crossbow to my back. “Dear child, vampires do not feel. He was merely trying to eat you.” Within seconds I was by her side, cutting away the fishing nets.
    “Don’t touch me!” she screeched, pointing her finger at me. “We only just escaped the Council together, and now I have nowhere to go!”
    “The Vampire Council?” I asked in surprise. “Where is it?”
    She lifted her head in defiance, but quickly crumbled under my intimidating glare. “I don’t know,” she admitted, looking back at the decomposing vampire corpse. “When we fled, he took me on his back. I was asleep. We just wanted to be happy…” she trailed off. “I loved him.”
    “You don’t know what love is. We need to go now,” I stated bluntly. I assessed her age; she must have been sixteen at the most. What could she possibly know of love?
    “With