When Angel met Buffy.....

There are a lot of things going on in Raven Hart's The Vampire's Betrayal. While not all of them are original ideas, they're still quite entertaining.

As we sort of saw at the end of the last volume, Renee and William are home following events in England, arriving just in time for Connie to cross the line between life an death in an attempt to meet up with the soul of her son and ex husband. Since Melaphia has no intention of bringing her back, since she's the Slayer prophesied in a few ancient traditions, Jack invokes Papa Legba and goes to the other side to bring Connie back. While he's there, he witnesses the angels giving Connie her marching orders.

William, on the other hand, is a bit busy with issues of his own, such as dealing with ongoing plots from the vampire council and dealing with the fact that killing off one of his children has made her a sluagh, as vampires who die get special punishments, and this child in particular holds a grudge like a Sicilian.

Anyway, most of the focus in this one is on Jack, who's trying to reconcile his love of Connie with the fact that she's destined to kill him and every other vampire. He resigns himself to killing her before she comes into her powers, but stops himself when he hears a second heartbeat in her womb, which means he's just sired a baby dhampir, which is likely going to also be a bad thing. (Dhampirs are traditionally children born of a vampire parent and a human parent. Usually they get really coolk vampire hunting powers.)

As everyone could have guessed, Connie finds out about most of the backstabbing, then gets hit with her activation at the worst possible moment. We also have a few fairly major developments in the lifestyles on the Savannah Vampires, which should make book five that much more interesting.

As I stated at the outset, none of this is particularly original, and I had to remind myself these were written in the early mid 00's, thus all the 2012 references. However, it's well written and well paced, which makes most of the egregious sins quite forgivable.