The Last Vampire - The Last Vampire 3: Red Dice (1995)

The Last Vampire 3: Red Dice (1995)

This third volume follows 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 higher government groups. 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 Los Angeles, Sita realizes that there are helicopters parked 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, the 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, they quickly decide 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 with 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.

After she tells the truth to Andy, he 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 which 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 failed, due to an alteration in Ralphe's emotional aura, and rather than the idealised hybrid of vampiric invulnerability and human purity, the boy was turned into a creature baser than either. While 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, was 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 that Arturo had made the savage demon Ralphe, and Sita believed he was burned at the stake. Arturo confessed he turned into a vampire-human hybrid and managed to stay alive.

Sita uses her powers to incite a riot at the base and gets out of her cell, but not before reluctantly killing many of the soldiers there. Sita captures General Havor, the base commander 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 with 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 alchemy equipment to turn herself into a human. At the end of the book, she figures out she is human and then hears someone knocking at the door. She does not answer it. Then Seymour comes to the door and is angry and upset with her for what she has done