THE FORBIDDEN

Fifth in the Afro-American hip-hop Damali Richards Vampire Huntress series.

Damali’s lover, Carlos Rivera, was turned. So what’s a Vampire Huntress gonna do when her lover’s on the other team? In Bitten (2004), Carlos was led by the chairman of the Vampire Council, on the Dark Force’s sixth level of Hell, to impregnate Damali (after having bitten her) and thus to cause the Neteru (Damali), a creature born once in a millennium, to give birth to an Antichrist who will fight for the Dark Force when Armageddon bursts forth. But Carlos is lured by angels to fly into the Light and hence gets reduced to ash. Now, Damali plunges the powerful Isis blade into the heart of the ashes and Carlos bubbles up, rebuilt and confused but human once more. Damali has a miscarriage, bloodying herself, and Carlos vows revenge against the chairman. But Hell’s in turmoil. While Carlos, their master, was still ashes, many of his pack’s top vampires also turned to ash. And so the chairman has his problems. The seductress Lilith, next in power to the Devil, rises from the seventh and deepest level and tells the chairman that the Devil, fed up with him, has issued a bounty on Carlos and has freed were-cats and other demons from the upper five levels to hunt him down and return the Neteru so that a new Antichrist may be born. Carlos, no longer a master, worries that he’s human again, with no income and seemingly no superpowers. And he knows that Damali is the Neteru. About to be sterilized on a plane to the Vatican, Damali is carried off in an electric cloud to a conclave of goddesses in Philadelphia, among them the Eve whose Adam was seduced by Lilith, who then gave birth to demons. Now Lilith’s stolen Damali’s miscarried fertilized egg and will herself give birth to the Antichrist. The goddesses assign Damali one task: smoke the bitch.

Wow. Gripping. But smoke Lilith? Not likely. Next: The Damned.