The Last Vampire

The Last Vampire Series is a 6 book set written by Christopher Pike and chronicles the 5,000 year life of the "last vampire", Sita.

"The Last Vampire"

The book opens with a brief narration. A young woman, who appears to be in her late teens named Alisa Perne, is not what she appears to be. She is a 5,000 year old vampire, and to her knowledge the last of her kind. Many of the tales about vampires are wrong. None of the things that can supposedly be harmful to a vampire, are really true. She can stay out during the day, but such a feat was incredibly difficult until she aged a couple thousand years. She could die from sufficient injuries, such as decapitation or impalment and still needed to eat food. However, she possessed many of the same attributes of modern vampire legends, such as stamina, strength, vision, hearing, speed, accelerated healing and perfect memory. She also explains that as she aged, more powers manifested themselves, such as telepathy and telekinesis.

The story begins. She arrives at an office where a man named Michael Riley called her. He identifies himself as a private investigator that had been digging into her affairs and had noticed not only her age, but her immense and untraceable fortune. Deciding that he knows too much, she kills him and before she kills him, however, he reveals that a man called Slim hired him. She tries to find more about Slim, but her best shot is Michael's computer. She then decides to use his son, Ray Riley, whom she finds a picture of, to hack into Michael's computer and find information.

Alisa then enters high school and changes her name to Lara Adams, and befriends Ray. She also ends up befriending another young man named Seymour. Seymour is HIV positive, and is so uncannily perceptive that she readily admits what she is and heals him of his illness. He becomes one of her closest friends for the rest of the series, and she depends on him for advice on numerous occasions.

She uses Ray to get information from his father's computers, however she doesn't know who hired Ray's father. She lets herself be abducted by the unknown client's men. After learning what she can, she brutally kills Slim and some of his crew (the rest escape in a shootout with the police). She then learns that Slim has been acting on behalf of someone else - someone whom she realizes is Yaksha, apparently not as dead as she'd been led to believe.

Lara begins to narrate her life and who is Yaksha for the reader-In 2130 B.C. Lara, or Sita (her real name) was born in India. When she was but a child, a disease struck her village, and most of the villagers died, including her closest friend who was with her child. A traveling man convinced the elders that he could drive away the disease by performing a ritual; it involved invoking a demon into the recently deceased corpse of Sita's friend. During the ceremony, the man calls forth a yakshini (demon) which kills the man. Only a handful of the male villagers witnessed the demon killing the man before apparently vanishing, but Sita, hiding in the bushes, noticed that it had instead entered the corpse of the child, still in his mother. Before vanishing, the demon seems to stare straight at Sita though she is hidden behind a rock. When her father rushes to save the child from its mother's womb, Sita runs forth and states that it is not the child that cries out, but the demon possessing the child's corpse.

Her father gave her a choice - she could let the child live or she could take his knife and strike it down now. She chose to let it live, and named the child "Yaksha", as in "begot from a Yakshini." Yaksha grew to be a beautiful man in a short space of time, who'd always had an eye for Sita. By this time, she was grown up as well, and married to Rama, her husband, and even had a daughter. It was about that time the men that had witnessed the long-ago ritual vanished, one after another, including Sita's father. One night, after he disappeared, Sita was awoken by a strange noise, and upon leaving her home, was attacked and dragged away by Yaksha. He explained what he was; though the word for vampire did not exist then. Some of the men were with him, transformed as he was (though being the first, he was forever more powerful than any of them, including Sita). He convinced her to join him, threatening to kill her sleeping husband and child if she did not.

It did not take long for the civilized world to realize what they were up against, and they begged Krishna, the 6th incarnation of the deity, to intervene. His troops slaughtered most of the fleeing vampires, but Yaksha and Sita survived. Krishna and Yaksha fought, and in the end Sita was given his grace under the condition that she never created another vampire. Yaksha was pardoned as well, but the pact Krishna spoke to him was unheard by Sita. Yaksha spent nearly the next 5,000 years slowly hunting down the remaining vampires and destroying them before apparently being chased and murdered by a mob during the Middle Ages. Sita lived through the ages, in Egypt first, and gradually on and toward America as it was settled until the present day setting (1990s).

Switching back to the present, Sita falls in love with the exceptionally handsome Ray, and soon after she realizes he is none other than the 5,000 year later incarnation of her long dead husband, Rama. When Yaksha finally tracks her down, he mortally wounds Ray, forcing Sita to save him by turning him into a vampire, thus breaking her vow and removing Krishna's protection.

Now both of them, on the run from Yaksha, figure out a way to survive the coming confrontation. Sita, sure that Yaksha is ready to die with her, sets up a trick. Dynamite is put in the sitting room, with the button on Yaksha's chair (so he can kill both himself, tired of his long life, and ensure the last of the vampires goes with him). Unknown to him, Sita's and Ray's chairs sit on top of a separate set of dynamite and a protective sheet of metal, and are designed to be thrown from the explosion when their dynamite goes off slightly early. The idea is to be set clear "before" the final explosion that should kill Yaksha.

Before she could set her plan in motion, Yaksha asks her what Krishna whispered in her ear thousands of years before and realizes the whole time that she was protected; Krishna had told Sita "Wherever there is love, there is my grace". Her love for Ray is what allowed her to break her vow and yet still keep it. When she originally became a vampire, she did so for love of her family, and therefore from the beginning she had always had Krishna's grace. Yaksha knows that Krishna would not want him to harm Sita and Ray, and instead he tells her to flee as the dynamite fuse burns down, destroying the house, apparently killing Yaksha, and injuring Sita (who survives into the next book).

"The Last Vampire 2: Black Blood"

Sita, now healed for the most part, but still suffering from continual pain and her healing factor operating at a decelerated rate after being struck in the heart by a piece of flaming wood after the explosion that destroyed her home, hears of a group of vampires in LA that have been brutally murdering people in the area. As she is the oldest vampire now that Yaksha is dead, it is up to her to figure out what is happening.

She runs into the group, and quickly kills most of them only to find herself out-matched by the leader, Eddie Fender whose vampiric abilities rival those of Yaksha himself. Surprised, she flees, and with Ray's help, deduces that Eddie must have found the remains of Yaksha from the explosion and used his blood to change himself.

When she attempts a sneak attack to destroy him and his group during the day at their hideout, an abandoned warehouse complex, Eddie instead springs the trap on her and kills her lover, Ray. The explosion forces Eddie to flee, and seriously injures Sita, who is rescued from the flames by Joel, an FBI agent whom she had met earlier in the book.

Joel, unable to believe his eyes as Sita heals right there, in the car, takes her to a motel, where she admits what she is, but leaves after admonishing him to never seek her out.

She finds the dying Yaksha stored in an ice-cream truck (vampires hate the cold, but can still withstand Antarctic-like temperatures without protection), near the site of the earlier battle with Eddie, and, comforting him as he dies, does as he asks; she drinks the rest of his blood, increasing her abilities far beyond what they were, hopefully putting her on par with Eddie.

Eddie kidnaps Joel and in retaliation Sita kidnaps his mother, who he has a strange relationship with, though her tactic fails; he tricks her into releasing his mother, mortally wounds Joel, and then breaks his mother's neck. With Joel bleeding to death, Sita gives in to Eddie, who starts to drain her of her blood. As she eases in and out of consciousness and lucidity, she remembers a song Krishna once played for long ago in the duel against Yaksha, and starts to hum one of its frequencies, realizing that she could hypnotize Eddie and stimulate him to blind lust. She lures him into a freezer where she chops his head off with the emergency axe and rescues Joel, turning him into a vampire (against his wishes) and falling unconscious as the book ends.

"The Last Vampire 3: Red Dice"

This third volume of the novel follows on directly from the events recounted in “The Last Vampire 2: Black Blood”. Sita regains consciousness and finds herself surrounded by the police, S.W.A.T, and the higher government. Realizing that she cannot allow Eddie Fender's blood to fall into the wrong hands, Sita comes to the conclusion that she must burn down the entire house. She retrieves a pair of gasoline drums from the back of the house where the freezer is located and douses the entire living room in the flammable fluid. She also notes how light the drums feel as she carries them. This is the first indication of her newly increased powers. The second one comes when she finds she is able to read the thoughts of the assembled police and S.W.A.T members outside, something she has never been able to do before. Joel, who is now a vampire, convinces Sita that he can negotiate their safe release since he is FBI. Upon setting foot outside Eddie's residence Joel is taken into custody despite showing his badge, which leaves Sita no choice but to surrender in order to protect Joel. But not before she sets the house ablaze. The police are unable to put out the fire, and Eddie's body and blood are safely destroyed in the conflagration.

In the armoured van she and Joel ride in, Sita breaks free and takes control of the vehicle leading to a high speed chase in Los Angeles. Upon seeing the skyscrapers of downtown LA, Sita realizes that there are helicopters parks upon their rooftops. Struck by the idea of an escape by flight she begins to drive towards those cut-glass monoliths. In transit, Sita shoots down helicopters and, on one occasion, jumps from one skyscraper window to another hundreds of feet away – injuring herself slightly in the process, discovering that the strength of her healing factor is much greater than it was before. It is upon the roof of this second skyscraper that she comes upon the desired helicopter, that one by which she and Joel make their escape.

The escape is not as smooth as Sita might have liked however. While their helicopter is nothing more than a businessman’s runabout, they soon find themselves pursued by Apache helicopters. Certain that they cannot lose their pursuers in their company helicopter, the decision is quickly reached to crash it into a lake. Flying towards the nearest substantial body of water, she and Joel make a jump into the water after Sita convinces Joel that faking their deaths is the only way to avoid capture. Sita escapes but Joel, still uncomfortable in his newly discovered stamina and abilities, rises to the surface of the lake too soon and is captured by the military. Sita decides to follow and finds Joel taken into a heavily-gunned government base. Sita meets a man from the base named Andrew Kane, and she tries to seduce him to get him to get her to Joel. She is shocked to discover he has cracked the DNA of a vampire.

Telling the truth to Andy later on, Andy helps Sita to enter the military base. Her attempt is defeated and she is taken captive. To make matters worse, Andy confesses he is not Andy, but her old lover, Arturo Evola, a brilliant priest and alchemist from the Inquisition who attempted to use Sita's blood to recreate the blood of Christ. This would, he believed, allow humanity to ascend beyond mortality; Arturo saw himself as doing God's work in offering immortality to Christendom. However, despite the high aims from whence he drew his initial inspiration, he turned into a megalomaniac in the process. Going against Sita's wishes, he experimented upon their young friend Ralphe. The experiment fails, due to an alteration in Ralphe's emotional aura, and rather than the idealised hybrid of vampiric invulnerability and human purity, the boy is turned into a creature baser than either. Whilst Ralphe possessed that same superhuman strength, he lacked all control. A vampire only feeds upon blood when needed - and can control this craving, should such control prove necessary - Ralphe however is gripped by an insatiable hunger for flesh. The Inquisitors went after Ralphe but Sita killed him before they got to him. However the Inquisitors found out about that Arturo made the savage demon Ralphe and Sita believed he was burned at the stake. Arturo confesses he turned into a vampire-human hybrid and managed to stay alive.

Sita uses her powers and gets out of her cell. Sita captures the general of the base, and uses him to set off a nuclear warhead so as to destroy all the information regarding vampire DNA, as well as those samples of her and Joel's blood which are stored in the base. At this moment Arturo arrives with a legion of soldiers and prepares for a final battle. In the face of seemingly inescapable defeat, Sita - becoming, after a fashion, her own "deus ex machina" - discovers that the recent infusion of Yaksha's blood has imbued her with a new power: flight. Filled by the rays of the moon, Sita becomes transparent. When she tries to carry Joel with her she discovers that she cannot, indeed she cannot even touch him. The warhead explodes as she escapes, a loving Joel and contrite Arturo perishing in the blast. Sita then uses Arturo's alchemic equipment to turn herself into a human. At the end of the book, someone comes to the house she is staying at, but Sita is just opening the doors when the book ends.

"The Last Vampire 4: Phantom"

Sita, having turned herself back into a human at the end of Book Three realizes she is indeed human. The man at the door tries to make Sita open the door, but says he understands and will come back. However, he comes back and suddenly finds herself not only pregnant, but back with Ray, who claims that he didn't die in the fight, but that Eddie had indeed revived him. She and Ray move to a suburb, and she starts to go about a normal, human life, befriending a very pregnant woman named Paula (who claims she has no idea how she was impregnated).

It takes little time to find out that her child (Kalika) is indeed a vampire, and none other than the earthly incarnation of Kali Ma, the Supreme Goddess of Destruction. The child ages incredibly fast and begins craving blood, and becomes very interested in Paula's child. To save Paula's child (who Sita believes is none other than the messiah, the new incarnation of both Krishna and Jesus), Sita acquires a portion of Yaksha's frozen and preserved blood from the ice cream truck in which Eddie kept him prisoner. The truck was being watched over by a strange homeless man whom believed that she was going to come back for it one day.

Sita returns to the Las Vegas residence of her former lover Arturo, the alchemist, and finds a startling resemblance between him and Kalika from a picture of his that she picks up. Sita discovers right then and there that Arturo fathered Kalika, because Arturo was a hybrid he became the only being capable of making Sita pregnant while she was a Vampire. She also finds that Ray had not returned to her, that he was a phantom and was no longer real. Sita 'kills' Ray at his request and turns back into a vampire, by once again using Arturo's alchemist equipment.

She combines Yaksha's blood with the blood of Paula's baby (Sita had stolen a vial of the baby's blood from the hospital). Because of the combination, she is even more powerful than before, but is still no match for Kalika. In a final fight with her daughter, Kalika kills Seymour and escapes (but without the baby).

Sita takes Seymour's body to a funeral pyre to cremate him. In her tears, Sita knows that Seymour should not be dead. Using the remaining blood from the little saviour, Sita uses it to bring Seymour back to life. Overcome with happiness, Sita does not tell Seymour of Kalika's doing, but vows to stop her daughter from getting ahold of Paula's child.

"The Last Vampire 5: Evil Thirst"

*Evil Thirst is one of the hardest to find in the series, because it is out of print*

Sita's daughter, Kalika, has transformed into a blood-thirsty monster with power far beyond Sita's. It is Sita's task to track her down and destroy her, yet Sita still has trouble believing her daughter is totally evil. She still hopes to save Kalika, even if it means risking her own life--and perhaps the lives of everyone in the world.

The story opens as Sita and the newly revived Seymour attend a seminar of an ancient Egyptian Seer named Suzama. Sita knew her personally, and is interested to know that, in her Seer's eye, Suzama predicted the birth of God into three mortal forms at exact times. Two of these incarnations are Krishna and Jesus Christ. Sita learns from Dr. Seter, the man who discovered Suzama's Scripture, that Christ has been born again, as her friend Paula's new born son (and Paula herself is actually Suzama reincarnated. Unlike Ray, Paula begins to remember her previous life). Using her powerful powers of persuasion, Sita befriends Seter and his son James, authenticates the text, and discovers that Kalika wishes to kill the baby.

Mother and Daughter speak over the phone and through what appears to be a miscalculation on Kalika's part, Sita discovers where her daughter lives. Sita goes with Dr. Seter, James, and their followers to Kalika's home. There all the men and women are brutally murdered by Kalika, despite their automatic weaponry. Aware that such an assault could only end in failure, Sita - having earlier attempted to talk Dr. Seter and his son out of such foolhardiness - confronts Kalika herself. Mother proves no match for her daughter and their confrontation ends with Sita thrown from the window into the apartment block's swimming pool far below. The fall, while not fatal, results in terrible injuries and so it is only after an agonizing time spent underwater, waiting for her body to heal itself that she can flee to Paula. Paula is only now beginning to remember her previous life as Suzama. She helps Sita to realize James, and his followers are evil beings, from another world, here to prevent the saviour from ensuring Earth one day moves towards the "light side". Kalika never intended to hurt the child, but instead was ensuring his protection.

During a confrontation, Kalika is mortally injured and gives her blood to her mother, finally saying, for the first time, that she loves her mother now, and forever. Sita, now incredibly powerful, with abilities beyond those of normal vampires, defeats Ory (Sita and Suzama's supernatural enemy in Egypt who later disguised himself as Dr. Seter's son) and his group, returning to Paula her unharmed son.

"The Last Vampire 6: Creatures of Forever"

After the events of Book Five, where Sita learns that there is more to the world than Vampires, Paula, who she now knows in the incarnation of her oldest friend, Suzama, the great Egyptian Seer, tells her that something is going to happen. Distraught, Sita asks if she will ever see Paula again, and she says no.

Leaving Seymour and Paula behind, Sita begins delving deeper into the secrets of the group of powerful beings that stalk her. Along the way, she confronts another of these creatures, only to find that their time is soon at hand, brought about by a centuries-old mistake, committed by none other than the last vampire herself. After dispatching this foe, Sita is approached by a young woman claiming to be a friend, and who offers Sita the chance to set right what went wrong nearly a thousand years earlier.

Using a revamped version of time travelling which projects her mind into herself 1000 years ago. Sita embarks on this journey into the heart of darkness and confronts the evil that not only deceived and used Sita's power for evil before wiping her mind of the event, but who now has the power to upset the balance of life itself, tipping the scales in the favor of evil. In this epic conclusion to the Last Vampire, Sita must confront her darkest fears and face an unthinkable choice: To go on as a creature of forever, or forsake her life and power for a destiny turned to ash five thousand years ago.

She chooses to prevent vampires from ever coming into being by projecting her mind to when she was a child and this time killed Yaksha rather then spare him and lived out her life as a mortal, meaning her vampire existence had never happened. Years later, Seymour is alive and writes a story about Sita. However, as she chose not to become a vampire and as they met, he considers Sita one of his friend and resigns himself to a human fate.