I groaned as a sharp pain in the middle of my forehead brought me out of unconsciousness. Opening my eyes, I looked around and found myself in a small unfamiliar room with stone walls and wooden flooring. There was a single window that looked out at the ocean, and a large door on the opposite side of the room that, after shakily standing up and ensuring I could still move, proved to be shut firmly, keeping me in the room. On top of that, my weapons were missing, and refused to come when I summoned them, and every attempt to transport myself out of this room only ended with me red-faced and panting.

Great, I thought, the second Titanomachy is barely over for five years and I've already been captured. Again. Apollo is never going to let me live this down.

In the years since the second fall of Kronos at the hands of the demigod Perseus Jackson, strange happenings had been taking place not just around the United States, but around the world. Fewer and fewer demigods were arriving at either Camp Half-Blood or Camp Jupiter, with the latter even seeing some of the younger legacies who were born in New Rome leaving with only a few of them returning years later. Strangely, my hunters were the only ones who regularly saw new additions, but each girl who came to us was already older than eighteen, and all of them somehow happened to find us. Each person returned with dramatically increased combat skills, with the girls joining my Hunt defeating my lieutenant, Thalia, with ease when it came to close-quarters combat. They would then reveal that they had joined the Hunt because they wished to improve their skills in archery, among other things, as their previous instructor was unable to guide them in that case (and whenever it came up, they would always regard one another with sly grins, like they were sharing some sort of secret joke with one another).

Stranger still was the fact that these girls all seemed to know each other, and, like the few who had returned to New Rome, all of them constantly wore strange, silver pendants around their necks depicting a wolf's head.

When questioned about their pendants, every one of them would only reveal that it was in case they ever wanted to return to where they had been taken, before revealing that they were sworn to secrecy and physically unable to reveal anything else.

This immediately led the Olympian Council to question Lupa, the Wolf Mother, but she denied she or her offspring having anything to do with the rampant disappearances. She did allude to having some idea as to who was responsible, but stubbornly refused to say anything despite many threats from my father and a few others on the Council. The next day, she vanished without a trace, and once again we were left without any clues as to who was taking the demigods until one day, while hunting a group of basilisks that had been causing trouble in the Midwest, my hunters and I happened another group of demigods already dealing with them. By the time we had positioned ourselves and drawn the first arrows, the monsters had already been dealt with, and each of my newcomers had taken off at a run to join the other group, greeting them cries of happiness and tight embraces like they were all old friends who hadn't seen one another in a long time.

It turned out that wasn't an inaccurate assumption, as each of the young men and women in the group proudly wore necklaces depicting a wolf head that shone in the Texan sun. Even more irritating was the complete lack of respect they showed me and the other hunters. Rather than fall to their knees like any other mortal, the leader of the group, a young man named John, stepped forward and merely inclined his head before greeting me. The boy explained that he and his comrades were out on a training exercise while someone they simply referred to as the Alpha recruited a few others, and questioned their friends on their experience with the Hunt and when they would be returning to wherever they had come from.

Upon closer inspection of the group, I was astounded to find that they were comprised of both demigods and regular mortals. I was normally the only one who allowed the two to work together, and had been wondering why I had seen so few candidates among them to join my hunters in the last few years.

Once again, Lupa was suspected, when I reported what I had learned to the Council, and my father was beginning to worry that someone was building an army. We had met a few others, both demigod and mortal, who wore the lupine pendants and claimed to be part of a group called the Lost, but as my father grew more desperate, he began pressuring me more and more to lean on the handful of hunters who had joined me that also bore the pendants. I tried to convince him that the girls were sworn to secrecy, and therefore physically unable to reveal anything more about this elusive group, but my father refused to listen and it culminated in three of my girls being brought before the Council where they were harshly interrogated for hours, until one of them, breaking down into tears, clutched at her pendant and a frigid wind blew through Olympus. An echoing howl filled the Throne Room, and every god save myself, Demeter, Hera, and Hermes seemed to shiver in what a more suicidal individual might call fright. Then, a large black wolf strode through the doors without a sound. Its body looked like darkness given form, with fur that seemed to almost radiate shadow the same way the torches around us did light with the exception of three pale streaks on the top of its head, and glared at us with eyes that were aflame, like Hestia's, except, where her warm amber flames brought feelings of comfort and safety, the wolf's eyes were the same rich, destructive green as greek fire and burned just as fiercely. I'm ashamed to admit that even I hesitated at the sight of an unfamiliar monster barging into Olympus - into the the Throne Room of the Gods - especially that felt as powerful as this one. My moment of weakness passed, though, and I had just knocked an arrow and drawn the string when the girls all ran to the beast and embraced it, burying their faces in its long, shaggy fur.

"Last warning," the wolf snarled in a deep, rumbling voice, its lips curling back to reveal a dangerous set of teeth before another arctic wind blasted through the Throne Room, making us all close our eyes, and when we opened them, the girls and the wolf were both gone.

After that display of insolent and threatening behaviour(at least that was how my father had described it), I was ordered to hunt down the wolf and capture it, which I was more than happy to do when I returned to my camp to find it looked like a tornado had passed through, and Thalia reported that the remaining two girls who bore pendants were gone. I notified Thalia that I would be hunting down the perpetrator on my own, and she agreed to take the Hunt to Camp Half-Blood - though I didn't miss the concerned expression on her face as she no doubt thought about the last time I went off on a solo hunt under orders of our father. For a solid month I searched fruitlessly for the wolf as demigods and homeless people from all over the Western World continued vanishing without a trace. Occasionally, the families of the demigods would as well, and when I tried interrogating those that didn't, they were tight-lipped and unexpectantly hostile.

My own wolves refused to track the scent of the wolf whenever it appeared, and even when I tried turning into one myself, I always found myself upwind of the creature, or would manage to track it all the way to a coast, only for it to suddenly vanish. Luckily, it had a set pattern of behaviour, so it wasn't too much of a challenge to bait the creature; I only needed to find a child in need - preferably a demigod - and wait patiently for my prey to come to me.

Eventually I settled on a small girl on living on the streets of San Diego. For two weeks, I watched as the girl lied, cheated, and stole from unsuspecting strangers. Worse yet, she seemed to genuinely enjoy her dishonourable behaviour, and when I transformed into a dog so as to keep my ears and nose open for any changes, I caught a whiff of the sickenly sweet perfume that indicated she was a demigod - and a daughter of Aphrodite at that. As much as I disliked the Goddess of Love, I was glad that I had found a prime piece of bait.

While I knew this illusive Alpha harbored both demigods and mortals, there was no way to reliably find a homeless person that it would happen to also be targeting. A demigod, however, was sure to lure it in.

I spent another six weeks disguised as various animals around the San Diego area, constantly searching the air for any unfamiliar scents. The last thing I remembered was finally catching a whiff of something before everything became a blur.

The sound of the door opening brought me back to the present and I cursed my defenselessness as I turned to face my captors.

The door swung open to reveal a large, muscular man dressed in a crisp, button-up shirt tucked into a pair of jeans. At this proximity, with just the two of us present, I could sense that he was definitely a demigod, however, for some reason, I couldn't tell whose child he was; normally I could instinctively tell who the sire of each demigod I met was, but it seemed that whatever was blocking my other godly powers was stopping that too. The man had dark, messy curls on top of of his head that connected with a beard that almost reminded me of my father, except there was a distinctly windswept look to him. He had harsh, dark eyes that that looked me up and down with a careful, calculating eye, seemingly ignoring me as I glared at him, which only made me angrier. On one of his hips there was a modern-looking gun that hummed with the familiar resonance of celestial bronze, while on his other hung a wicked-looking cutlass.

"Good to see yeh finally decided to join us, Milady," he grunted.

"Who are you?" I demanded. "Where are we? Why did you kidnap me?"

"There will be time to answer all of your questions soon, Milady," the man replied. "Right now, I need yeh ter be followin' me."

"And if I say no?" I challenged, crossing my arms angrily.

"Then none of the questions you or the other gods have will be answered," the man countered. "Yeh'll be given a wee potion to get rid of the memories you have what be associated with this place, and brought back to yer hunters unharmed. Also, I should be tellin' yeh now," he added. "There be no turning anybody into jackalopes here. Myself and me men have spent long enough as rodents for several lifetimes, and made preparations so as to not repeat the experience, so I wouldn't be bothering ter - HEY!"

Rather than continue listening to yet another man continue to boast and brag, I quickly rushed my captor, delivering a sharp punch to his throat with one hand while my other reached down and pulled his cutlass from its scabbard on his waist and spun low, slicing open both his calves and sprinting away before he had even crumpled to the ground.

As I ran, I reached inward and called upon the magic within me. Many of my abilities may have been somehow inaccessible to me, but it seemed that only those that had to do with leaving my current prison with ease were blocked off, as I was able to still transform myself into a variety of animals as I blasted through hallway after hallway (though I still couldn't turn into any sort of bird, presumably for the same reason), in search of an exit. Eventually, I settled on a turning myself into a massive white wolf, and charged towards the now recognizable smell of saltwater in the air.

I finally reached a door to the outside, and plowed past the mortal holding it open as I came out onto what looked like an island paradise in the early years of its naissance. Short tropical trees grew sporadically, and a healthy coating of grass was starting to grow through the hard, volcanic ground beneath my paws. Small buildings made of stone stood grouped together, with small signs indicating shops and other services used from day to day. There were at least thirty people outside with me, all going about their own business before spotting me and freezing. Surprisingly, most of them reached for their weapons, and I growled a low warning at these humans, making them hesitate. What was more shocking still, though, was their expressions: many of them looked fearful, but it wasn't what was causing them to still their hands. Instead, it looked like they were simply indecisive, as if they weren't sure if they should attack me or not.

"It's alright, everyone," a voice called out, drawing my attention. Out of one of the buildings strolled another man. This one, however, was much larger than the last. He had to be close to eight feet tall, and was dressed casually in a pair of baggy shorts and loose button-up that hung open revealing tanned skin with a multitude of scars around his midriff. His dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and his grey eyes shone with warmth from his heavily scarred face.

"Prometheus," I snarled.

A/N: So, I've been looking around, and I found that there aren't many Percy/Artemis fics, and those that have been written usually center around Percy becoming the Guardian of the Hunt, or Artemis seeing him as the only male in the entire world that's not a piece of slime. While I know I'm not going to be avoiding a few cliches myself, I did want to try writing something that was a little different. The war with the giants hasn't happened yet, but this is taking place five years after the fall of Kronos. I'll try not to spend entire chapters trying to rush through everything that has happened since, like I did here, but hopefully framing it as Artemis trying to piece together how she got where she is made it a bit more bearable. The POV will mainly shift between Percy and Artemis for the duration of the story, but that's because I want this to be more about them, meaning there will be times where things will happen off-screen, so to speak, and we'll learn about them through second-hand accounts.

I know that I'm gonna be getting a lot of hate for starting yet another fic when I have so many unfinished projects, but I just got back from Spain and have been itching to do some writing involving Greek Gods and other similar things. I'm sorry for disappointing anyone, but, this account is ultimately a platform to share my hobby with people. I'm not paid to do any of this, so when I have the free time to do what I love, I'd rather enjoy it than wasting it trying to force out something that won't meet my standards for myself.

With that said, I hope you guys liked this little preview, and tell me what you think in the reviews.