luxken27 | 2025 Nostalgia Re-readathon | The Last Vampire #5: Evil Thirst

The Last Vampire's love and pride.

Alisa's daughter, Kalika, a bloodthirsty monster with powers far beyond Alisa's, is gone. It is Alisa's task to track her down and destroy her.

Yet Alisa still has trouble beliving her daughter is total evil. She still hopes to save Kalika, even it is means risking her own life - and perhaps the lives of everyone in the world.

I remember being unimpressed with the previous book in this series, and weary of the idea of a trilogy of Alisa v Kalika shenanigans. Mercifully, Pike cut us a break, though his way of backing out of this corner is apparently to just make shit up.

This book opens 3 months after the end of the previous one. Alisa confirms to us that she saved Seymour's life with the vial of blood from Paula's child, and that Kalika vanished before she could do anything else. She is worried about her daughter's whereabouts, both as a mother and as an enemy. It's hard for her to wrap her head about the idea of her daughter being 100% evil, but given what we were shown in the previous book - up to and including Seymour's death - I'd say we pretty much have to believe what we see.

Alisa's attention has been attracted to a Suzama Society meeting, a small group led by a brilliant scientist who claims to have found a piece of ancient Egyptian scripture that foretold not only the previous birth of the messiah (as Jesus), but also that the messiah has been re-born, right here in California! Alisa attends the meeting and wants to meet the elderly man who has devoted his career to this heretofore unknown scripture, which he keeps secreted away because he believes he's on a mission to find and protect the new Christ child. The doctor is protected pretty fiercely by his incredibly young and handsome son, James, so Alisa reluctantly includes him and Seymour in her plans.

Once she sees the scripture and realizes that it's the real deal, she formulates a plan to use the Suzama Society to unearth and kill Kalika. You see, Alisa knew the real Suzama back in ancient Egypt, so the idea that her friend and the high priestess of Isis predicted that she would one day give birth to the monstrous Kalika is both interesting and frightening. Now more than ever she believes it is her destiny to kill Kalika and save Paula's baby, who is indeed the second coming of Christ.

As we are on the rollercoaster with Alisa in the present day, we also learn another chapter of her earlier life: when she studied with Suzama, and accompanied her to the royal palace when she was invited to interpret the queen's dream. This put Suzama in direct opposition to Ory, the high priest who held the king's ear, and it was Sita's job to protect Suzama from Ory and his reptilian Setians, who are evil incarnate and interested in taking over the human world, power for power's sake.

Alisa makes a lot of mistakes in her quest to run her child to ground, but ultimately discovers that her fatal mistake was in misreading the entire situation. Turns out that Kalika isn't the evil one in this scenario, James the son of the Suzama Society founder is! James is using Alisa to find Kalika and steal the Christ child, because he is really a reincarnation of Ory and their mission in life is to capture this baby for their own nefarious ends. Alisa realizes this too late, after James seriously wounds her and Kalika and takes the child. He's also given his "father" a fatal heart attack and attacked poor Seymour (seriously, this kid goes through SO MUCH in this series, poor boy!) on his way out the door.

Other revelations include the fact that Paula is a reincarnation of Suzama, and Mike the dude who guarded the ice cream truck is also some sort of itinerant oracle who helps Alisa find the baby. Kalika gives her mother the final hints about how to destroy James and save the child as she also give her her life's blood in order to save her and give her the chance to avenge not only her death, but Sazuma's from 5000 years ago.

Alisa does indeed find and kill James and save the child. She also finally grants Seymour's greatest wish and saves him this time with her own blood, thus making him a vampire at long last.

This was an epic story and I read it all in one sitting. I enjoyed the parallel plot from ancient Egypt, but I do not like Pike successfully reformed Kalika from a bloodthirsty evil entity into a misplaced angel who was actually doing her job re: the baby. What about all those people she killed? Her murders in this book are especially gory, ngl.

And where do we go from here? Now that Kalika has been vanquished and the baby John saved, what else is there for Alisa to do? And will Seymour make it to the end of this series alive? We have one more OG book to find out!