by L. A. Banks
THE DAMNED
Also by L. A. Banks
Minion
The Awakening
The Hunted
The Bitten
The Forbidden
Anthologies
Stroke of Midnight
THE DAMNED
A VAMPIRE HUNTRESS LEGEND
L. A. BANKS
ST. MARTIN’S GRIFFIN NEW YORK
THE DAMNED. Copyright © 2006 by Leslie Esdaile Banks. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Book design by Jonathan Bennett
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Banks, L. A.
The damned : a vampire huntress legend / L. A. Banks.—1st ed.
p. cm
ISBN 0-312-33624-1
EAN 978-0-312-33624-0
1. Richards, Damali (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. African American women—Fiction. 3. Women martial artists—Fiction. 4. Vampires—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3602.A64 D36 2006
813'.6—dc22
2005044593
First Edition: February 2006
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Always, every gift is given from the Most High and protected by the angels, thus all that I have and am is because of the beneficence of the Creator. Therefore, I am deeply grateful.
Psalm 91, verse 7 …
A thousand shall fall at my side, and ten thousand at my right hand; but it shall not come near me.
This book is dedicated to all those who keep hope alive, move with faith, and who work in the Light spreading love. Let your Light shine!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special acknowledgment goes to: The VHL Street Teams that constantly spread the word about this series, who keep a lively and fantastic community of readers going, online, off-line, bus stops, in the subways (LOL)—wherever they are! You folks have shown so much support that it is hard to describe. Your selfless giving and positive energy is beyond wonderful!
Bless you for the love: Zulma, who is the backbone of the danged fan club and who reminds me of Marlene in so many ways! Tina, our promo czar and my girl from waaaay back! Candace, a sister writer/artist and so efficient that I’ma start calling her Wizard—girlfriend’s got Post-it tabs in the books, okaaaaay. Glenn, a.k.a. “the slogan master,” holding it down in NYC and taking madcrazy photos. Kenyetta, another Marlene who has my back—feisty, funny, sexy, cool—from Philly, too! Then Roshida, with her quiet, behind-the-scenes moves that are the team’s glue … plus Gudrun, moderating and handling thangs on the forum board and working Hotlanta down to a nub!
Plus, special thanks to our honorary Carlos Rivera, good minister of the Word, and Tyesha, Quick/LaShonda, and Charlee, who are just blowing up cyberspace! Chantay is holding it down in SC, and is always moving with a “can-do” spirit, Sisters of the Word SidneyBlue Heeler/Michelle and Shaboogie/Shauna got GA on lock, with Lisa up in the Big Apple—y’all are deep! Much love! And I didn’t forget about Brother Craig, Kemetic, and Nique in D.C., and our sister Leone out in L.A., plus Rene, a deep analytical brother who is always on point;Alicia, holding it down in Detroit; and Sandra, an international sistah in Australia…. Y’all betta work. We’ve got Ray Jones, who is handlin’ the streets like a campaign manager, LOL—go brutha. Barbara Keaton, sister author, who is da bomb, and Lissa Woodson and her talented prodigy, Jeremy, plus Bonnie DeShang’s positive vibe—all of y’all holding down Chi-town for a sistah!
FAMILY. Guardians is da houze!
However, no acknowledgment would be complete without speaking on the folks who provide phenomenal Covenant-level infrastructure and support, and who deal with my crazy concepts: my family, especially my husband, Al; Monique Patterson, my editor extraordinaire, with her dream team at St. Martin’s—Vicki, Harriet, Emily, Elizabeth, Gina, Christine, Joarvonia, Michael, Matthew, and Sally (wink); Manie Barron, my agent, who makes things happen like magic; Eric Battle—Lawdy—who brought the characters to life in graphic arts; baaaad azz Web master Chris Bonelli; and Vince Natale, who always brings my covers to life. Then came Lauretta Black Pierce, a great publicist, and all was right in my universe. Thank you, all!
PROLOGUE
Houston, Texas. Present day.
LaShawna left the house early in the morning, just as her aunt expected, but instead of getting on the bus to school, she waited until she knew Aunt Belle would be on her way to work, and she doubled back. What was the use of school these days? School hadn’t kept her momma from dying from a crack overdose. It hadn’t kept her brothers from selling it out of their momma’s house with her mother’s boyfriend after Momma was gone. Now she was living with tired old women who wrung their hands and called on Jesus. Grandma and Aunt Belle didn’t know her world. School and church didn’t keep nobody safe.
Today she would go back home—her real home—and find something that hadn’t been stolen or broken, then she was out of her momma’s. Maybe she would go live with her boyfriend, or wherever. It didn’t matter, as long as she didn’t have to answer to people always asking her if she was all right. That was a stupid question anyway—who could be all right after their momma just up and died a month ago?
She trudged around the corner, hoping that her brothers would be asleep. Worse than worrying about them, she just hoped Sylvester wouldn’t be home. Her mother’s boyfriend had started the whole thing anyway—first getting her momma high, then getting her brothers to help him with his business. They were the last ones who could tell her anything about anything.
She peered up at the dilapidated aluminum-sided house, and tears slid down her face. “I ain’t even get to see you before you died,” she whispered. She went up the steps and inserted the key in the door.
In her heart, given the way her brothers and Sly rolled, she knew it was dangerous to enter while they were asleep. If they woke up startled, a shotgun blast would end her life. But that wasn’t altogether a bad thing, either.
Steadying her nerves, she pushed on, half hoping to die, half hoping to find some peace, and knowing full well that anything her mother might have had, had already been picked over by Sly, her brothers, crack buzzards, her aunts, family—and maybe sold. But that was just it. She wasn’t looking for anything of value. What she’d set in her heart as a treasure to find was something not sentimental or valuable to anyone but her.
LaShawna headed for the kitchen, a place that her mother once occupied when times had been good. A place that had seen laughter and good cooking once. The place where her aunts would gather—before her momma got caught up in the madness. Before Sly moved in.
But as she crossed the threshold to the tiny kitchen, LaShawna froze. A scream lodged in her throat and made her chest tight. A warm trickle of urine wet her jeans. She couldn’t move or breathe.
Her mother stood at the sink looking out the window. The back of her baby blue burial dress was slit from the neck to the hem where the undertaker had dressed her. Every disk in her mother’s frail, knotted spine pushed up beneath her ashen brown skin. Her hair was flattened in the back as though she’d been lying down for a month. Dirt stained the dress. Patches of light danced across LaShawna’s eyes as she wobbled and grasped the doorframe and began backing away slowly.
“Baby, don’t be scared. It’s Momma,” her mother said in a rasp without turning around. “Came home to see my only girl. Can’t nobody raise you but me. ’Sides … your brothers didn’t have what I needed, neither did Sly. But that’s okay. You here now, honey.”
Silent horror transformed into bleating sobs, and the young girl remained paralyzed between bolting for the door and going to what had to be a ghost. Everything in her told her to run, but her legs wouldn’t cooperate. Yet, it was her mother’s voice. It was her! What if her momma had come back with a message in a vision, like her grandmother always prophesized about?
“Momma, I missed you so much … but you supposed to be in Heaven!” LaShawna cried out, covering her face.
A groan and a thud made her jerk her attention behind her. She stumbled backward until her spine hit the adjacent wall as she watched Sylvester’s body collide with the post at the top of the steps, catch the banister, and tumble over it, leaving a tangle of entrails from his slashed-open stomach behind him. Her eldest brother crawled to the top of the steps and simply slid down them. No face. He just left a bloody streak in the stair carpet.
This time LaShawna screamed. At the same time, her dead mother turned, bulbous eyes glowing black-green, twisted teeth distending her gaunt, worn face. LaShawna pivoted and dashed for an escape. Claws snatched her arm, spun her around, and pinned her against the shut door. Putrid breath covered her, and she escalated her futile screams. Dogs barked and howled in neighbors’ yards, but she’d gone deaf from the fever pitch of her own shrill voice.
“I didn’t go to Heaven, baby,” a deep, demonic voice rasped. “I went to Hell instead.”
The local newspapers said that a horrible family butchering probably occurred due to drug affiliations the family had. The police said the assailants were still at large. The community held a candlelight vigil to end the violence. But old folks and preachers who knew better whispered on porches about the devil and his damned.
The Gullah Islands off the South Carolina Coast. Present day.
The nightmares were back. Running hard and long to Marlene’s old safe house path proved worthless, as far as improved sleep went. Damali sat up in bed with a jolt, her nightgown damp and clinging to her body. Her breath was ragged as she sucked air in through her mouth, shuddered, and placed her hand over her heart. She peered down at Carlos, who hadn’t moved. It was odd the way he slept like the dead whenever she had these dreams. Other times, he slept like a cat; always ready to spring awake. The Sankofa tattoo on her back tingled eerily.
She glanced at Carlos’s neck, where he’d received the invisible marking of a male Neteru. There was an identical one at the base of his manhood. Neither had glowed silver since Philadelphia, not even when they made love. Hers never came alive anymore, either.
It also no longer sent guiding messages through her system. Now it only throbbed vaguely or tingled like a pinched nerve when the night terrors swept through her, as if struggling to communicate with her chakra system to no avail. She wondered if either of their marks would keep her from conceiving when lit … not that that was an issue, it seemed, given the infrequency of their lovemaking these days. Latex had been a temporary, disappointing answer. She wasn’t about to tempt fate.
Damali touched the small of her back, feeling for the tattoo, hoping that it would rise beneath her skin as it should, would move to let her know that it was still alive. But her hand touched the smooth, flat surface of her damp skin. It was as though all that was Neteru within her was slowly dying.
Why was this happening? She’d even helped Raven into the Light in a quiet parting that now allowed Marlene to sleep peacefully. Damali ran her fingers through her locks, searching for some task left unfinished. Commissioning Raven into the Light had been swift, merciful; within an embrace—semivamp style, one quick hug laced with a point-blank stab from the baby Isis dagger, her mother watching ether turn into light, a prayer on both women’s lips, and then it was over. The purging was private, the heavy soul transfer done neatly. She’d keep her word. It was an act of kindness, and it delivered a tortured soul that Heaven wanted back where it truly belonged. So why the nightmares?
Suddenly, there wasn’t enough air in the room.
Full daylight filtered through the windows, but didn’t chase away the lingering shadow of terror. The sensations evaporated so slowly that she could almost reach out and touch them. The nightmare was always the same.
The ground near her feet would yawn wide, allowing Lilith to slither away and escape. Then billowing black clouds would gather beneath the hem of the Chairman’s robe, where Lilith had descended back into the pit. It would crawl up his body as though a living entity, caressing his face and entering his nose. He would breathe it in and gasp. Blood gurgled in the opened, fanged, black hole in his face, bubbling, spilling over his thin lips and chin, coursing down his throat and the front of his robe as though there were an endless fountain of the thick crimson substance within him.
She would raise her Isis blade, but it always felt too heavy, requiring her to grip it with both hands. Moonlight would glint off the silver. The Chairman would smile. She would try to rush forward, but it felt like she was standing in waist-high water, wearing concrete boots. She moved in slow motion, but she would not be stopped until his head rolled.
Damali looked down at Carlos and stroked his tousled hair. New tears rose to her eyes, and she shut them tightly as she remembered the dream.
She would raise the blade, swinging the heavy metal until it connected with demon flesh, bone, gristle, cartilage, sending a black-blood geyser into the air, on her, spraying the terrain until she almost couldn’t see. The Chairman would laugh as the last of the tissue was severed, then he’d wink, and his face would become Carlos’s stunned, dead, glassy eyes … flickering silver, then going brown, a haunting question of why left in them.
Another horrible shudder ran through her. Marlene and Father Patrick had said it was posttraumatic stress syndrome—something all warriors dealt with—and it would pass. Big Mike and Berkfield, who had been to ’Nam, confirmed the diagnosis, and the others admitted having similar after-battle nightmares, too. She could only tell Carlos about the first half of the dream; the last part felt so frighteningly real that she couldn’t speak of it to him while looking into those same questioning eyes. He’d told her that he still had sleep terrors from time to time, taking him back to his old vampire existence or his torture, but it would soon pass … just like her nightmare of the Chairman would.
He no longer woke up screaming, wiping nonexistent blood from his mouth or cringing at whatever sunlight had filtered into the room. So, why was she still so freaked out? Why was the dream the same, over and over and over again, as if her mind was a CD with a nick on it? And why did it take her so long to warm up in her man’s arms? Why did this horror she experienced while sleeping always feel so real?
She had to get the team to the Native American lands Jose owned. Sanctuary, hallowed earth. It was also the only safe place left for them. However, it wouldn’t help with the dreams. The dreams still attacked her, whether in a cathedral or hotel bed. As long as Carlos slept beside her, she was tortured to near hysteria day or night. When she slept alone, peace swaddled her mind.
What did this mean? Dear God, what did this all mean?
Just as day broke, Carlos watched Damali finally drift off into a fitful slumber; then he silently crept into the bathroom. He shut the door with care and latched it behind him. Why did Father Patrick have to choose now to go back to Rome? He needed someone to confide in, a man of the cloth, the one who took him to his heart like a son.
A stability factor was needed. Father Pat was definitely that. But every man had his limits; maybe Father Pat found his after Lopez bought it. And who could blame him? The shit they’d all gone through was more than anybody should have had to deal with at any age. It was ridiculous.
But he couldn’t escape the fact that every man who had been a force in his life had walked when he’d needed him most. Besides the aged cleric, who’d been a ground wire for a while, who had ever really been around to guide him? He wasn’t complaining about it, wasn’t crying. That was just a fact. All his life lessons came from the school of hard knocks. The way of the world,
alive or dead.
He ran his palms down his face and breathed in deeply, then let the air out of his lungs in a resigned rush.
Weary of the thoughts that besieged his mind, Carlos sat down on the closed toilet seat, hung his head, and shut his eyes to the blue-gray dawn.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” he whispered to the elderly priest in absentia. “It’s been who knows how long since my last confession.”
Carlos kept his voice to a low murmur, battling for composure and using slow, deep inhalations and exhalations to steady his voice as his thoughts raged. “I can’t get Padre Lopez’s death out of my mind. I’m so sorry about that, I don’t know what to say. They were seeking my essence, my vamp line … and Lopez had it in him, as well as that … image of Juanita I’d poisoned him with, before I knew better.” Carlos swallowed hard.
“If I hadn’t, then maybe … he was just a kid, really. They didn’t come after Jose like that, so there had to be a reason, a cause, a link with more juice than Jose had in him, so you can’t tell me it wasn’t my fault. I got serious debt behind that. I know it. And they honed in on that foul shit, thought he might have been me because of the heart chakra connection he and I shared, and they”—Carlos choked and he made the sign of the cross over his chest—“they took his heart, man. How am I gonna live with that?”
A silence interrupted only by a slow drip from the sink faucet was his answer. Two huge tears rolled down Carlos’s cheeks, and he let them fall, splashing his thighs as he leaned forward with his face in his hands. “Father Pat, I know you said it was fate, he had fulfilled his purpose without breaking his vows to the Covenant, which was eminent, but how come that don’t make me feel it’s okay?”
