Hunted

Prologue

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Prologue

{Texas, 2001}

The old fisherman exited his cozy house on the waterfront before dawn one morning in March. His shoulders were slumped and the curvature of his back reflected the many days he had spent, exactly as he would this one, a fishing pole in hand, looking out over serene waters as he hoped to catch a couple big ones.

His small box of bait and tackle in hand, he walked the familiar, short path down the dock to the water’s edge where he would sit in his fold-up chair and wait for a tug on the line.

Heaving a sigh, he realized he was already tired and his day had yet to begin. This day would be no different than the day before, or the day before that. It wasn’t that he disliked this lifestyle; in fact, he had nothing to complain about, he reasoned. He had a beautiful wife to whom he’d been married for coming up on forty-five years now, and two grown children. It was just tiresome to go through the same routine every day.

Little did the old man know that this day would change the course of history.

Halfway to his destination at the end of the dock, the fisherman just so happened to look to his right, to the beach that signaled the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico. In later years he would wish he hadn’t turned his eyes that way. He would wish he’d just kept on walking down that dock and never noticed something strange on the sand.

Nevertheless, he did look. And what he saw he almost didn’t comprehend.

He stopped in his tracks, his box full of supplies falling from his hands and rolling off the edge of the dock onto the ground below. He took not notice, staring at the strange creature in front of him, not ten yards away.

He knew right away it was a woman, with hair an otherworldly color of coral. She had striking facial features, not so different from a regular person’s but just enough so that if you looked at her you would know she was in fact not regular. Her skin color was just so slightly off that again, it wasn’t that much different from the old fisherman’s, but at the same time it was.

All this, however, was not why the fisherman continued to stare at her, unmoving and in shock.

Firstly, the woman wasn’t moving. Her eyes were shut and he couldn’t get a close enough look to tell if she was even breathing. Secondly, she had a long, blue, shimmering… mermaid tail.