The Hunter

Chapter 1

I'd kill anyone to keep my secrets. It's not like I haven't anytime before. That's why I'm so great at my job as a Mermen Hunter, anyone they send me to kill can't tell anyone else who or what I really am so it's easier to take them out. Other than being a Hunter I am a male model, but my real secret to keep is...I can't even say it in my head. My thoughts are interrupted by my target coming.
I swim quickly around the boulder I was hiding behind to reach my target, a blonde merman with dirty yellow tail. In his hands is my second target, a sew weed woven bag.
At the last moment before I get to the merman, he looks behind and sees me.
"I am on business for the King so you must stay at least-" He manages to get into my head.
I cut him off by diving for his neck. He struggles but suddenly he stops moving. This causes me to loosen my grip on him like a rookie. He slips out of my loose grip and starts swimming away. I just stay swimming in place until he realizes that while we were struggling I took his bag.
A few feet away he stops swimming and turns himself around to face me. "Hand over the bag, Peasant!" He shouts into my head and holds out his hand forcefully.
"Alright..." I tell him as I swim closer. Right before the seaweed bag leaves my hands and goes into his, I let go of the bag quickly, grab his hand to fling myself around him and snap his neck. I let his body sink to the ocean floor while I grab the bag and put it across my shoulders. I lift up the body and start swimming toward the nearest trench that I had mapped out before my mission. As I reach for the rock I left next to the trench earlier to tie it to the body, I don't feel it. I set his body down to look for it again and still do not see it. I try to look farther away without swimming anywhere but I can not see very far in the darkness of the ocean. Something moves in the water nearby but I can't see it. Instead of investigating, I press the glow in the dark button on my water-proof watch to see the time, 3:30 P.M. I am supposed to be at my photo shoot at 4:00 P.M.! I shove the merman's body into the trench, make sure the bag is secure on my shoulders, and start swimming back to my boat. Something moves from behind me so I stop for a moment to turn around and look for what it was. I see nothing and keep swimming towards my boat.

Before I get on my boat, I check to make sure no one is around. Then I pull myself aboard, pulling my ugly brown tail behind me as I reach for my brown leather satchel next to my fake diving gear. Inside my satchel I grab my medicine compartment where I keep my Change-mixtures in their syringes. I grab one of the green syringes and stick it in my arm. I feel its effects almost immediately, my tail shrivels into my human legs while the scales climbing up my torso fall off, my gills close up on the sides of my neck, and my eyes shrink back to their human size. I stretch as I stand up and grab my towel to wipe off any loose scales then put some new shorts on from my satchel. I hear a splash in the water behind me when I finish pulling on my shorts, yet I still do not see anything when I lean over the water. I glance at my watch to see how late I am, I have a half an hour drive to my photo shoot after getting back to my house and twenty minutes until it is supposed to start. Trying to forget about whatever was following me for now, I start driving my small boat back to my house.

Twenty minutes later I reach my house and pull into my boat house.
"I know, I did not see what time it was otherwise I would be there right now." I tell my manager over my cell phone.
"I figured you would be out on your boat again, James. That's why I waited here for you." I hear the sound of my manager, Dale, echo as the land door to my boat house opens. A short, middle aged man with a blue tooth in his ear walks in.
"Dale, I'm sorry. I know this one was important." I tell him as he comes to my boat.
"Listen, don't worry. Everyone wants you in all of their magazines and on their runways so it doesn't matter. Plus being the wonderful manager that I am, I told you that it started earlier than it actually does." Dale told me proudly, "we have an hour before it really starts."
"Good and thanks again." I tell Dale as I quickly take off the seaweed bag and put it in my satchel to hide it then hop off my boat to tie it to the dock in the boat house. While Dale starts talking about something I don't care enough about, I grab my satchel from the boat and start walking into my house with Dale following behind me as he continues talking. He sits on one if my dining room chairs and starts talking louder so I can hear him as I go to my bedroom to put my bag away. I can still hear him talking while I go into my walk-in closet and push my suits aside to get to my safe. When I hear the click that opens the safe after it scans my fingerprint, I open the safe and put my whole satchel in it to keep everything safe and secret.
When I leave my bedroom Dale jumps out if the chair he had been sitting on and walks out to his red sports car expecting me to follow, which I do.

I was planning on taking a detour to my favorite shell collecting spot when I saw a brown tailed merman kill a King's messager. Managing to get the body from the brown merman was easier than expected. I would have rather never touched a dead body but I need it to prove to everyone what I saw was real because who would trust the word of someone who never speaks? My plan was to go to the rest of my pod right away but I was intrigued by the brown merman. His tail was perhaps the most beautiful brown I have even seen with his hair just the same. That was just the thing to make me follow him, the real interesting thing about him was how he could change into full human instead of being half human. Maybe I could do the same. So I followed him until he stopped in this little structure over the water. I hid under the water when I heard him talking to another human and waited until I heard them leave. Swimming slowly up to his boat, I tried to copy what I saw him do before to get on it. It is much harder than it looks, who knew my tail was this heavy. Once I successfully pulled myself onto the deck of the boat I flopped around some more beforeI figured out how to drag myself across his deck where I started to look for where he kept those syringes. I kept looking even after it grew dark when I finally found a green one! I was not sure exactly what to do but I figured it out from watching the merman do it before. At first nothing happened, then all at once it felt as though my insides were burning while my bones were breaking into tiny pieces. The pain was too much to handle and made my pass out.