The young Nekra grew up despised by her parents and hated by other children. When she was ten years old, she ran away from home, and met her male counterpart Jerome Beechman (who had been similarly mistreated) in the New Mexico desert. Sensing the kinship between them, the two began to wander together. For the next six years, they lived on the edge of civilization, surviving by stealth and cunning, and educating themselves by reading stolen books. But one night, angry New Mexican townspeople, believing the two children to be “monsters,” attacked them with pitchforks and guns. Nekra responded to their fear and hatred in kind, and as her rage grew within her, her latent mutant powers surfaced. She and young Beechman slew some of their attackers and drove off the rest.

In the years that followed, Nekra developed fangs and grew more vampiric in appearance while Beechman grew to resemble a mandrill. Beechman conceived the ambitious scheme of overthrowing three small West African governments and consolidating the nations under his rule. He took the name Mandrill, and made Nekra the priestess of his personality cult. But that plan was thwarted by the jungle adventurer Shanna O’Hara. In the aftermath of their African fiasco, Mandrill and Nekra regrouped and formed Black Spectre, an organization of black women dedicated to the overthrow of the United States government. Their plot, which culminated with a brief takeover of the White House, was thwarted by Daredevil, with the help of Shanna O’Hara and the Black Widow. While the Mandrill escaped, Nekra was taken into custody by SHIELD.

Nekra spent several months confined in a SHIELD holding facility, drugged so that she would be unable to use her powers. But during her incarceration, she saw the television broadcast of a rally held by the Hate-Monger, and responded to subliminal frequencies designed to stimulate hatred in the viewing audience. This overwhelmed the effects of the drugs given her, and Nekra escaped, vowing vengeance on the Mandrill, who had abandoned her.

Nekra soon happened upon a den of fanatics in an abandoned subway tunnel in New York City and, sensing opportunity, offered herself as a sacrifice to their death-goddess, Kali, knowing that her power would make it impossible for them to kill her. When she “miraculously” survived the sacrifice, she told the cultists that she was their goddess incarnate, and demanded that the current priestesses of the cult, Shaya and Ushas, submit themselves to sacrifice as she had done. Those priestesses failed to survive, and with their deaths Nekra became the High Priestess of the Cult of Kali.

Later, Nekra established a base of operations on the West Coast by murdering Adrienne Hatos, the reclusive widow of the founder of a clinic for emotional research, and taking her place. Nekra hoped to use the clinic’s resources to learn why her powers depended on violent emotion, and why softer emotions made her vulnerable. Nekra’s connection to the clinic was discovered by Jessica Drew, the original Spider-Woman, and in the ensuing battle, weakened as she was by the Spider-Woman’s pheromone emissions, Nekra sustained severe injuries. Nekra was once again taken into SHIELD custody, and kept in a research hospital until she was well enough to be moved to prison.

But Nekra recovered more quickly than her doctors had anticipated, and escaped from the hospital before she could be moved. Abandoning the Cult of Kali, she made contact with the voodoo-master known as the Black Talon, and through him met the Grim Reaper. In him, Nekra found a man whose passion for hatred matched her own, and they became lovers in spite of their very different backgrounds. Nekra joined the Grim Reaper’s Lethal Legion, and assisted the Black Talon in capturing the Grim Reaper’s enemy the Vision, and in creating a zombie that resembles the Grim Reaper’s brother Simon Williams, alias Wonder Man. The Grim Reaper planned to give the zombie those brain patterns which the Vision and Wonder Man had in common in order to create a Simon Williams closer to what he remembered his brother to be than were either Wonder Man or the Vision. The plan failed, however, and while fleeing the two in a cave, the Grim Reaper fell off a ledge and was impaled on a stalagmite. Nekra found his lifeless body and brought it back to life as a zombie in order to exact revenge on the Vision. Her subsequent activities are as yet unknown.