One Silent Night by Sherrilyn Kenyon

Strykerius, better known as Stryker, is a Daimonite, a race that lives on the blood of others. For thousands of years, he's fought against humanity because of his immortal father, the God Apollo, cursing his offspring to die when they are twenty-seven because they killed one of Apollo's many mortal wives and children.

Even though Stryker had nothing to do with the crime, he was tarred with the same brush as the other Apollites. But through an alliance with Acheron's goddess mother Apollymi, he learned he could save himself by drinking the blood of other humans. And so he has, although it has doomed him to an existence where he can only go out in the darkness, as daylight is fatal to Daimonites.

To protect the humans from the Daimonites, the goddess Artemis created hunters to hunt down and kill the Daimonites. Known as Dark-Hunters, they are led by Acheron, Apollymi's divine son, whom she vowed to destroy the world for and whom she cannot meet lest the earth and all existence die. To kill the humans who she blamed for Acheron's death, she allied herself with Stryker and allowed him to use her divine bolthole to house him and his Daimonites. She also gets someone to talk to and pass the time with that she doesn't have to kill, but that's just another perk. She is unable to kill Stryker, even if she wants to, because she mingled their blood, tying his life to hers. should she die, or Stryker die, the other will die as well.

Now, though, Stryker has come up with his most ambitious plan yet to kill all the humans. He brought War, the incarnation, back to life after millennia imprisoned in Tartarus. His orders to War was to kill Acheron and Nick Gautier, both longtime thorns in his side. War agrees, but immediately runs into Trouble when Ash is saved by his allies and Nick Gautier turns out to be a Malachai demon, the last of his kind, and the only one who can defeat War, because the Malachai were bred for that purpose: to kill powers.

The only thing that can defeat Malachi demons are Sephiroth demons. And there is only one of those left alive also. But to save Acheron, whom she loves with a twisted sort of love, the Goddess Artemis sends out the only woman with a chance of defeating Stryker, and who hates him more than anything else: his ex-wife Zephyra. They were married once, in ancient Greece, when she was the daughter of a poor fisherman, and he was posing as a young nobleman. She loved him with everything in her heart, and then his father, Apollo, made him leave Zephyra and marry a young noblewoman. And he left, which she has never forgiven him for.

Now that Strykerius knows that War will turn on him, and use Zephyra and their daughter Medea against him, he must regain the love of the woman he left before War kills him and sets out to destroy the world. But when War goes after Zephyra and her daughter instead of him, he must do what he thought impossible and ally with Nick Gautier and Acheron to leash War and return him to his prison in Tartarus. But will Stryker be able to leash his rage against the both of them before they can take out War? Or will War's associate Ker, with her ability to use the spirits of the dead, use her abilities and erode the fragile trust between the three before they can do what other deities found impossible, and take War down?

This was an unusual novel for the Dark-Hunters, in that Stryker is their enemy, and therefore probably shouldn't be given a happy ending of his own, with a woman he loves. But that is pretty much what he gets, as Zephyra, despite her protestations of hating him and wanting to kill him, has never really stopped loving him, and as soon as he sucks up to her enough about his being truly sorry for having left her, she jumps back in his bed lickety-split.

Of course, it isn't really that easy, but Stryker is truly sorry for what he did. He only left her to prevent Apollo's goon squad from raping or raping and then killing her. She never knew about the threat Apollo made, and felt upset at what she felt was Stryker lying to her. But when she sees all the items of hers that he kept all through his life, she realizes that he was telling the truth, and forgives him eventually.

Unlike Acheron, though, we never get to see much of Stryker's former life, so we are basically mostly told their backstory and don't get to experience it much. For that reason, I never really felt for Stryker and didn't care whether or not he and Zephyra ever got back together.

It's not a bad book. Don't get me wrong on that score. But it's certainly not as gripping as her earlier book Acheron, nor as emotionally engaging. I honestly felt I couldn't care less about the protagonists, and only cared about them insofar as taking care of War, the loose cannon that Stryker unleashed in the first pages of the book. Sherrilyn Kenyon's best book it's not. In fact, it felt a lot like filler to me. But the glimpses of Acheron and Nick Gautier made the book into something I was glad I'd read. So, buy it not for Stryker, but the other characters.