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2024 Nostalgia Re-readathon | The Last Vampire #4: Phantom
After five thousand years she was again mortal.
The dead alchemist's experiment has worked. Alisa is no longer a vampire, but a frail and confused human. Not only that - she is pregnant. The baby grows in her at supernatural speed. As the stranger watches. The stranger from the past.
But what child will Alisa's seed produce?
A demon or an angel? Alisa does not know.
But the stranger does. He knows everything that ever was.
And he knows everything that is to be.
WOW.
I pretty much had to read this in one fell swoop, and then we get to the end - the dreaded cliffhanger! This the first book in this series that is not completely self-contained.
So as per the back cover summary, Alisa has awakened from the experiment that ended Book #3 and finds herself to be human again. She is weak, confused, frail, and afraid, but also happy? She's longed for this for 5,000 years and is determined to have her life back, 50 centuries after it originally started. There's a knock on the door that she doesn't answer, and then another: good ol' Seymour has found her again!
Alisa is incredibly dumb as a human. She gets herself into a situation where, as a vampire, she would've easily come out on top, but ends up hurt herself. Then suddenly Ray reappears. Yes, the same Ray who died at the end of Book #1, the man she believed to be the reincarnation of her husband. He looks exactly as he did in death, and she just...accepts him at face value. They agree that they want to be together and start a life, so Alisa leaves Seymour without a word of where she's going and runs off with Ray.
Two months into their new life, she finds herself pregnant and of course is ecstatic. Rama has come back to her, now her daughter will return as well! She even bonds with another pregnant woman, Paula Ramirez, during a chance encounter at a bookstore. Only, Alisa's pregnancy is superhuman. She gives birth about two days after meeting Paula, and her baby is no reincarnation of her beloved long-lost Lalita. Indeed, she names her Kalika, and brings into the story a new dimension of Hinduism: the goddess Kali.
As if her super sped up pregnancy isn't enough of a warning that Kalika is definitely not human, Alisa is incredibly upset when she realizes that Kalika desires human blood. Ray is strangely unhelpful in this regard; he refuses to do anything but plead with Alisa to go out and find a fresh source of food for their daughter. Alisa is reluctant to do this, but does. She kidnaps a boy named Eric from a random park and brings him to her house, where she systematically drains him of his blood to sake Kalika's thirst.
Just as she did in the womb, Kalika matures very quickly. Within 2 weeks, she's a young adult and hunting on her own. Alisa continues to be confused and upset, especially when Kalika shows obsessive interest in Paula's baby. As much as she loves her daughter, her instincts tell her that she has to protect this baby. She manages to secret Paula out of town to give birth, hiding her from Ray and Kalika, and also manages to smuggle a vial of the newborn's blood out of the hospital before she sends the pair away with instructions not to tell her where they're going. Kalika has taunted Alisa about what she'll do if she can't find the baby, which includes killing Eric and kidnapping Seymour.
Alisa decides that she has to turn herself back into a vampire if she's going to be strong enough to face her daughter in a standoff. And then things get really weird: she manages to find a frozen disc of Yaksha's blood from the time he was held in an ice cream truck (Book #2) and on the wayu back to the Las Vegas house to reverse the alchemy experiment, she faces certain facts: like the fact that Ray is, indeed, not Ray, but someone she conjured in her mind because she wanted to see him again. And since the father of Kalika can't be Ray, it's actually----Arturo! From the one time they had sex in Book #3 before the nuclear bomb exploded and killed him and everyone else out in the desert.
I'm just completely WTF??? at this point, but the twists are coming so fast and hard that they don't make sense in a way that makes sense, if you squint really hard. The justification that "Ray" gave for how he "survived" being killed way back in Book #1 is pretty awful, but mercifully the truth isn't so bad. There's no bad vampire blood floating around anymore, even if that still doesn't explain the evil void that is Kalika.
So here we are, the book racing to its exciting conclusion as Alisa meets her daughter for their final showdown on the Santa Monica Pier. Kalika has brought Seymour along and actually ends up killing him, in retaliation for Alisa demanding to know why she wants Paula's baby. Alisa abandons the fight with Kalika in order to save Seymour (sort of)...she fishes him out of the water and he dies in her arms, but she revives him with the vial of blood from Paula's baby.
The end.
So there are still lots of threads of plot hanging around, with more questions than answers. What happend to Kalika? To Paula and her baby? Who was the mysterious old man who kept watch over the ice cream truck with Yaksha's blood? Paula claims that her baby was conceived basically immaculately, in an interesting mix of Hindu and Christian theology. So who is the (still nameless) baby? Jesus? Krishna? Some other god entirely? I guess we'll have to wait a year to find out!
This was a rollercoaster of a read, and I'm still not sure how I feel about it, tbh. Pike is playing so fast and loose with everything that you basically have to roll with it and just believe that he knows what he's doing and is not just flying by the seat of his pants. This reads like the first book in a trilogy, so are we in for another sophomore slump, as Book #2?
I didn't really like Kalika or find her a compelling villain. There are so many questions about her, too - what happened to the people she hunted? She claims karma, but what is that? She's also forever shielding herself with humans or other creatures, which is supremely irritating. IDK if I can take two more books of a cat and mouse game between mother and daughter. I'm glad we're only reading one of these a year, LOL.
All in all, a nice way to cap our Halloween nostalgia re-readathon this year!
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Hard agree on human!Alisa being dumb as a rock, especially once the magical baby started thirsting for blood and Ray of all people was urging her to go get victims. RAY who couldn't stand hurting people? He's gonna tell you to go kill people for the magical vampire baby before offering up his blood instead? Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Pretty sure Kalika redeems herself in some way in one of the future books because I did name one of the cats after her, and I would not have done so for this book's version of her. Very vexed that Kalika kills Seymour and doesn't tell Alisa who the kid is/was, as per the agreement. Then again, since she knows all/sees all and would've seen the blood vial being stolen, I suppose knowing her mother, she'd know she'd use it on Seymour and bring him back from the dead, which would kinda answer things. But not really. Uncool, baby fangs. Uncool.
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As we are officially in territory I didn't even know existed back in 1996, I will say I gasped out loud when Ray turned up again. But the whole story he gave her about how Eddie kept him alive with his blood, and that he just happened to find the alchemy equipment and turned himself back into a human? I was seriously side-eyeing him the whole time and was dumbfounded when Alisa just accepted it all at face value. I honestly thought that whole plotline was going in a different direction (re-introducing an even less welcome character, Eddie, back into the mix) so Ray just turning out to be a ghost actually was a relief and made sense in this weird madcap crazy that was the second half of this book. Not sure I bought the whole "she conjured him up from her own memories and his turning on her re: the killing and blood made sense because she was actually turning on him" biz, but whatever. Just glad there's no extra evil lurking about.
Pretty sure Kalika redeems herself in some way in one of the future books because I did name one of the cats after her, and I would not have done so for this book's version of her.
Reading the summaries of the remaining two books, it looks like the Kalika storyline might wrap up at least partly in the next book, and then there's one final adventure in #6 that, according to reviews, may possibly have a downer ending? Dare we even consider reading the Thirst sequels, which sound way more sci-fi than urban fantasy?
Very vexed that Kalika kills Seymour and doesn't tell Alisa who the kid is/was, as per the agreement.
YES! UGH. I know Alisa wanted to save her actual BFF in that moment, but that lingering question was just totally uncalled for.
she'd know she'd use it on Seymour and bring him back from the dead, which would kinda answer things. But not really.
I'm not sure I understood how Seymour was revived at the end. Alisa was babbling about turning him into a vampire, but it was the magical baby blood that revived him. So is a vampire, or some sort of messiah child? Another annoying question, but I'm glad Seymour survived. I like him.
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Should've gone less convoluted and had it simply be her needing someone to be the bad guy now that she was human and still needed to kill (either her kid or people for her kid) and since fauxRay wasn't real anyway, he was the only option.
one final adventure in #6 that, according to reviews, may possibly have a downer ending? Dare we even consider reading the Thirst sequels, which sound way more sci-fi than urban fantasy
I don't remember a TON about how the original arc plays out, but I do remember how it ends. And had I not, I asked Cass about Kalika and while her memory also seems rusty (mwerp) on that front, she and I both remembered the same ending, more or less. Then she started going on about Thirst, which I had to "lalala, no spoilers!" so if you want to give 'em a whirl, we can both go in blind. :D But uh, I think we should possibly set expectations much, much lower since they're all written post his *gestures vaguely to anything past The Hollow Skull* objectively good period?
YES! UGH. I know Alisa wanted to save her actual BFF in that moment, but that lingering question was just totally uncalled for.
Right?! While I appreciate the last couple of lines in the book, I do not appreciate being cliffhangered so damn hard. Ironically, we'll have to wait longer to find out than I did when I was younger because man, did he churn these out like crazy. o_O
So is a vampire, or some sort of messiah child? Another annoying question, but I'm glad Seymour survived. I like him
It's weird. I remember how Seymour's story ends, but I don't remember if he's a vampire or not in the next couple of books. By all rights, he shouldn't be since the baby's blood is what brought him back, but I also wouldn't put it past Pike to just go nuts. Respectfully, of course. :p
Seymour! We luv him. ♥
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Please be the Pike sci-fi I enjoy and not the stuff that's basically just brain hemorrhaging crap.