The Last Vampire

de Christopher Pike

As the story begins, Alisa arrives at the office of a man named Michael who lied to her, invited her. He identifies himself as a private investigator. She tries to find out about a guy named Slim, but her best shot is Michael's computer. Alisa then enters high school as a student named Lara Adams and befriends Ray. She also befriends another young man named Seymour Dorsten. She uses Ray to get information from his father's computer. She lets herself be trapped by the unknown client's men. Unfortunately, it isn't easy to escape. After learning what she can, she kills Slim and some of his crew (the rest escape in a shootout with the police). A flashback narrates Alisa's life and explains who Yaksha is. In 3000 B.C. Sita was born in India. When she was seven years old, a disease struck her village, and most of the villagers died, including her closest friend who was pregnant with a child. A traveling priest from a different religion 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 priest called forth a yakshini (demon) which killed the priest. Only a handful of the male villagers saw the demon kill the man and then supposedly vanish. But Sita, hiding in the bushes, understood that the demon had actually entered the corpse of the child, still inside his mother. Before vanishing, the demon seemed to stare straight at Sita though she is hidden behind a rock. When her father rushed to save the child from its mother's womb, Sita ran forth and stated that it is not the child that is moving, but the demon possessing the child's corpse. Her father decided to let her choose to let the child to live or die but she was afraid and confused. He said the only way to find out if it were evil or not was if they let it live. The father saved the child and Sita decided to name the child "Yaksha", meaning "begot from a Yakshini." Yaksha grew to be a beautiful man in a short period 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 named Lalita. 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 her father 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 men slaughtered most of the fleeing vampires, but Yaksha and Sita survived. Krishna and Yaksha fought, and in the end Sita was given Krishna's grace under the condition that she never create 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, until the present day setting (1990s). Both Sita and Ray, 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. Bombs are put in the sitting room, with the button on Yaksha's chair (so he can kill himself, tired of his long life, and ensure that Sita goes with him). Unknown to him, Sita's and Ray's chairs sit on top of a thick steel plate beneath which are a separate set of bombs intended to send them flying high narrowly before the big explosion. Before she can 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 Krishna's grace. 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 thus decides that she was not intended to be killed to fulfill Krishna's injunction to him, and lets them go while he waits his end. Sita manages to shove Ray afar before the explosion but she was close enough to be pierced by a stake right through her heart from behind. With Sita in Ray's hands contemplating Krishna's grace, the book ends in suspense as to whether or not she survives.