Tokens by Sam Sisavath

Author:Sam Sisavath [Sisavath, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-04-17T22:00:00+00:00

About two miles out from the city of Talico, Ana abandoned the road and traveled in a westward direction for about thirty minutes, before starting to angle back south again. The highway she’d been on all this time went through Talico, and this was the only way to go around it. She didn’t know what she was avoiding—just how big of an area did Talico make up, anyway?—but that big red X on the map stuck out in her mind. If slayers—men and women who voluntarily went into the darkness to hunt monsters—said to steer clear of a place, it made perfect sense to heed that advice.

“The towns with red X’s over them?” Shelby had said. “Do I even have to explain what those X’s mean?”

No, he hadn’t, but it was a good reminder anyway.

Once she was riding south again, she could see the rooftops of buildings to her left, marking the presence of the highway as it ran through Talico. It was a good-size town, from what she could tell, and after about ten minutes of slow trotting, she still hadn’t reached the end of the city yet. She was too far away to get a really good look at the place, though, but it wasn’t hard to see that Talico was built around the state highway. There was something in the background that might have been a billboard, and even farther back, a white-painted water tower that looked like a rocket getting ready to launch.

Ana kept going, using the reflections of sunlight against metal and aluminum to her left as an indicator she was going in the right direction. As long as she kept Talico over there, while she remained over here, there was no need to worry—

The crack! of a rifle, followed by something striking the ground a few inches to the right of the thoroughbred, made Ana pull up on the horse’s reins abruptly. A puff of cloud lifted into the air almost lazily before dispersing against the sunlight.

What the hell was that?

Stopping had been reflexive, and she realized too late that the smarter move would have been to keep going. By the time she recognized that mistake, though, a second crack! had rang out, and the animal underneath her lifted its head and let out a loud whinny and began thrashing its head left and right.

No. No, no, no!

Ana leapt off the saddle even as the horse collapsed onto its side. She hit the ground and rolled, all the precious supplies in the bulky pack behind her jamming into her back. She grunted through the pain (Ignore it! Someone’s shooting at you! Ignore the pain for now!) and scrambled to her knees.

The thoroughbred had been shot and lay on its side, the animal attempting in vain to lift its head. Ana’s heart broke at the sight of its wound.

No, no, no…

But she didn’t have time to do anything for the horse, because a third crack! snapped her back to her own situation. The gunshot was

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