Disclaimer: The Dark Hunters are the creation of Sherrilyn Kenyon, I'm certainly not that creative! I use them only to hopefully provide some entertainment while we wait for the next book to come out!

Blackness.

That was all that Michael could think of when he tried to remember what had happened to him. Blackness, and then the woman.

The Goddess, more correctly. Artemis, who had brought him to her because his soul had cried out so loud it had reverberated through to the very halls of Mount Olympus itself. His sense of betrayal as he died had been enough for her to bring him. To be the newest of her troops, her fighters and killers of the Daimons.

The newest of the Dark Hunters.

Artemis had smiled when she had heard that oh-so-familiar sound of a soul crying out for vengeance. It had been a while, and with the rate that her Dark-Hunters were managing to get their souls back off her, it was about time she had a new one. She had brought him immediately to the realm she used just for this purpose. She couldn't take him to her temple – only Apollo and Acheron were allowed in those hallowed halls. So she brought each of the men – and women – selected to be her fighters, in return for a single act of vengeance, here.

But this man was different. The vengeance he wanted and the job he would be assigned for it were one and the same.

For his family– and ultimately Michael himself – had been slain by the man Michael had always considered his closest friend, his brother in all but words. But a friend who had been something other than human. The man he had known as his best mate since primary school had been an Appolite. And he had chosen, on his 27th birthday, when all Appolites were doomed to die, to instead hunt down a human and take their soul into his body, to further his own life on that stolen time.

And for Leon, that soul had been Michael's pregnant wife, Jasmine.

And then, the Daimon had had the audacity to pretend to grieve with Michael. The death had been made to look like an auto accident. And Michael had leaned heavy on his 'brother', never knowing the truth.

Until the day that Leon had come for his soul.

That day, the boy Michael had grown into a man with had ruthlessly taken his life with no apology or remorse. And would have taken his soul also, if Artemis had not gotten there first.

For Michael, it felt as if his heart was being torn out, seeing Leon there, above him with a gun. Then there had been a flash, and a physical pain in his heart, as the bullet exploded into his chest cavity.

Then blackness.

Next he knew, he was before the auburn-haired Goddess, and she was offering him an exchange. His soul for revenge on the one that had killed him. Or, for what mattered much more to him than the taking of his own life. Vengeance on the one who had killed his wife, and their child that had never had even a chance to be born before being killed.

He had accepted of course.

But his chance to kill Leon had never come. Another Dark-Hunter had got there before him, unknowing of the vengeance hanging over the Daimon's head, and doing his job as he always had.

So instead, Michael took his vengeance on all the other swine of Daimon-kind.