Dance with the Devil

Dance with the Devil is a paranormal romance by the American writer Sherrilyn Kenyon, published in 2003 as part of her Dark-Hunter series. Much of its account of its male lead is given in his own voice, and the book opens with him making his case directly to the reader.

Zarek has spent nine hundred years as a Dark-Hunter, one of the immortal guardians who stand between humanity and the forces that would destroy it, and most of that time in exile for an act whose truth he has never been allowed to establish. He was born a slave in Rome and has been treated as a danger ever since, and he has come to accept that he is exactly as bad as he has been told he is.

Astrid is the one person who can see straight to what is true, and she becomes the point of light in a life that has gone dark. The novel moves between Zarek's own account of himself and the judgement being made of him, and asks whether a man who has been treated as a monster for nine centuries has any interest in becoming anything else.