#anyways yes. jet didn’t die but got healing and then went on a long adventure to get some therapy and made a point to stay away from zuko

[backhurtyy]

9, 16, or 51, whichever you want to do/haven’t done yet 🥰!

9. “You really thought I was dead?”

16. “I want you to be happy…even if its not with me.”

i guess warning for jealousy?? not possessive or anything, more nervous i-really-love-you-and-this-person-unexpectedly-came-back-into-our-life-please-don’t-leave-me jealousy

Returning to Ba Sing Se after the war always felt distinctly like coming home to Zuko. He loved the Fire Nation, he really did, but there were so many bad memories locked away inside empty rooms and shadows decorating blank walls to ever allow it to feel like home. But in Ba Sing Se, strolling into his uncle’s teashop with Sokka’s hand clasped in his and his crown tossed into the bottom of the bag on his shoulder, those memories and shadows slipped away. Instead, there were warm memories of lazy afternoons serving tea to his uncle and friends and the sounds of bright laughter filling the shop, and he felt like he was home.

“You’re awfully smiley,” Sokka laughed as they approached the Jasmine Dragon. “What’re you thinking about?”

“Just that it feels like I’m home, is all. We haven’t been here in a long time, and it’s... It’s really nice. I don’t know if that sounds crazy, but-“

“No, it doesn’t. I feel it too,” he said warmly. “It’s easier here, somehow.”

Zuko nodded, pressing a kiss to Sokka’s forehead as they crossed the threshold of the shop. His uncle was standing behind the counter, and when he saw them come in his face split into a wide grin.

“Zuko! Sokka!” he exclaimed, rushing towards them. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

He dropped Sokka’s hand to meet his uncle’s embrace, sighing at the familiar smell of jasmine tea that hung around him. “Hi Uncle. I’ve missed you.”

“Me too. It’s been too long.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I just got so busy with work and it was hard to find the time to come visit.”

“It’s okay to take breaks, Zuko. You don’t have to be Fire Lord all the time.”

Zuko wanted to say that wasn’t true- that the Fire Nation still had so far to go and that work couldn’t always wait, and also point out that he was the one to insist Zuko take this job- but before he could Sokka was hugging his uncle and proclaiming, “Yeah, that’s why he has me. To make sure he’s talking a whole bunch of breaks.”

His uncle laughed. “I knew he’d be in good hands.”

“Yeah yeah,” he muttered, though he smiled at Sokka fondly and began walking toward the kitchen, where the stairs leading to his uncle’s apartment were. “Can we just drop our bags off, the come back down?”

“Of course. Although this reminds me I have a new employee, and I think it’s someone you’ll be relieved to see! He’s in the back.”

Zuko furrowed his brow, wondering who he could possibly be talking about considering all the people he would want to see were very much not in Ba Sing Se. Well, except Sokka, but it wasn’t like he was his new employe. Still, he just shrugged and pushed aside the curtain to go into the kitchen- only to stop when he saw a tall figure with shaggy black hair, a persistent stalk of wheat sticking out of his mouth. Suddenly, he felt like he was on the ferry to Ba Sing Se all over again.

Sokka, not noticing that Zuko had stopped, crashed into him. “Zuko, wha-“ He stopped too, staring at Jet with his jaw hanging open. “Jet?”

He looked up them, one eyebrow raised and smirking. “Hey Sokka,” he greeted coolly. “And if it isn’t Lee... Or I guess Fire Lord Zuko, I should say.”

“I- What?” he stuttered, not entirely understanding how, much less why, Jet was in his uncle’s tea shop. The first because last he’d heard Jet was dead, and the second because last he’d checked Jet hated him and his uncle. “What are you doing here?”

“Uh, I work here? I’m the new hire,” he said, crossing his arms and cocking his hip out.

“You- How?” Sokka asked, his face wrinkled in confusion. “At Lake Laogai you died. I mean, you got crushed under the rock and you-“

“Wait,” Jet laughed. “You really thought I was dead?”

Sokka and Zuko shared a confused glance, then looked back to him. “Yes?” Zuko asked. “I mean, we’ve seen Smellerbee and Longshot since then and they never said anything so...”

“Yeah, I told them not too. I needed time after I recovered to figure myself out, and wasn’t sure I could handle seeing any old flames- no pun intended- or enemies,” he said, pointedly sliding his eyes from Zuko to Sokka. “But I didn’t think you’d actually think I was dead… I told Katara I’d be fine. That wasn’t a lie.”

Zuko... Zuko didn’t know what to do. He had spent the past five years feeling so guilty for being the reason Jet ended up in Lake Laogai and blaming himself for his death, that seeing him in front of him brought on an overwhelming onslaught of memories and emotions and confusion. But with it was also a huge sense of relief, and he smiled at him softly.

“I’m really happy to see you, Jet,” he said honestly. “I’m glad you’re alright.”

“Don’t think I’m not still pissed at the fact that you lied to me, or for the pain the Fire Nation has caused me and my friends,” he said evenly, though his mouth ticked up in a smile, the wheat jumping as it did. “But I’m glad to see you too. You look good.”

Zuko rolled his eyes but smiled and leaned into Sokka, who had shifted to stand at his side rather than behind him. Sokka grabbed his hand immediately. “Thanks. There’s a lot that’s happened, recently, and if you were willing to, I’d like to catch up and... Well, I know there’s a lot of history, but maybe we could try to be friends?”

There was a slight twinkle in Jet’s eye as he watched Zuko and Sokka, one that reminded him of sneaking around the ferry and running down the streets of Ba Sing Se, and Zuko knew he’d realized they were together. He didn’t say anything though, just smiled. “Yeah. I’d like that. And you too, Sokka. I think I owe you a few apologies.”

Sokka snorted, though Zuko recognized it as one of begrudging amusement rather than actual anger. “Yeah, whatever man.”

Jet nodded and turned away, apparently satisfied with that, and Zuko tugged on Sokka’s hand to lead him up the stairs.

“So…” Sokka said nonchalantly when they had shut the door to the apartment. “Jet. Your ex. He’s downstairs.”

“Yeah…” he hummed, setting down his bag and turning to grab Sokka’s. “That was not at all what I was expecting, gotta be honest.”

“How do you feel about it?” There was something odd to his tone, something curious but also apprehensive, as if he didn’t really want to know.

He shrugged, stepping into Sokka’s space to pull him into a hug- although Sokka would never say it, he knew his boyfriend. After what happened with the village during the war and then later seeing him die- so they thought- that Jet’s presence had to have shaken him. He wondered if that was why his tone of voice was so odd.

“I don’t know yet. But he seems… He seems alright. Happier than he ever was when we had our thing, at least. And I think maybe… Maybe I’d like to try to be friends with him.”

Sokka hugged him back tightly, nodding thoughtfully. When he spoke, it was careful and deliberate. “If you ever decide you want to date him again, I need you to just tell me, okay?”

He pulled back, staring at him in confusion. “Sokka, what?”

“I mean it! I want you to be happy, even if it’s not with me. So… If you ever decide you’re into him-“

“For spirits sake,” he rolled his eyes lightly, realizing what was up with his tone of voice- he was nervous that now Jet was back, Zuko wouldn’t want to be with him anymore. “Sokka, that’s not going to happen. I love you, and I’m going to keep loving you for the rest of time. I already know that you’re it for me, love. Plus,” he dropped his voice into a conspiratorial whisper, “when I kiss you it doesn’t taste like wheat.”

Sokka laughed, shoulders relaxing. “I love you. And you’re it me, too. I’m sorry for being weird about him, it’s just… I don’t know how to explain it. Seeing him and remembering you had a thing and just... I got jealous, I guess.”

“It’s okay, love, I understand,” he said as he smoothed his palm over Sokka’s cheek, before kissing him softly. “Now, come on. I’m sure Uncle is dying to make us some tea.”

#i love how these are supposed to be short and then my brain decided..... no 💖 #also i felt like david tennant writing this... ‘just this once everybody lives!!’ #anyways yes. jet didn’t die but got healing and then went on a long adventure to get some therapy and made a point to stay away from zuko #and the gaang for a while and then went to ba sing se again and had a long conversation with iroh about stuff and then decided to work there #or something like that idk #anyways #yeah hopefully this is okay as i am once again chucking it on here without reading it over and writing it in one sitting #n e ways #i’m slowly working my way through..... i have three more??? #ellen’s 400 follower celebration #zukosadragon ace writes #zukosadragon ace speaks #lesmiserablol

[passable-talent]

Hey! I saw your post about Jet and I was wondering if you could do some sort of angst with him? Thx love :)

ooooo jet angst

Jet had many adventures with the Freedom Fighters before they made it to Ba Sing Se. Some of which ended well, and some of which ended very, very badly. 

That takes us to the situation that currently befell him. 

Jet had taken himself up against a tree, leaning against its base and hoping that even sitting upright would keep him awake. He’d been in worse scrapes than this, he told himself, even as he watched his leg bleed, the scarlet liquid staining the dirt around him and turning it into sluggish, russet mud. 

The wound was deep. He’d taken a slice of a sword through the muscle of his inner thigh, where the skin was softer, and the arteries ran closer to the surface. It was bleeding, hard, fast, soaking through his pants. His vision started to get blurry.

He was lucky, he thought, a stupid laugh making its way through his body, that the sword had missed a certain other part of his body. 

His head was swimming. He barely knew where he was- just that his injury let the rest of the Freedom Fighters get away, and they were gone. He’d had hopes of catching up to them, but he couldn’t imagine that now. He couldn’t walk, and their head start was substantial. He knew they’d be fine. Smellerbee could handle Longshot, she knew the mission. They’d make it to Ba Sing Se, and they’d get the fresh start they needed. He knew they’d be okay.

Jet, he just, well, he didn’t want to die. Not here. 

“Are you okay?” said a voice, in a direction Jet could hardly place. His muscles all seemed to want to stay still, and so it was a challenge to move his head toward the sound. 

“Oh, spirits,” you breathed, running to the side of the figure, when you saw the amount of blood they were losing. “My name’s Y/N,” you told him, not even sure he was conscious, “I’m gonna take you home. You’re gonna be fine.” You grabbed his arms, trying to haul him to his feet, or at least one of them. He seemed awake enough to try to help, though how much he truly was helping was... up to debate. 

“Jet,” he murmured, his head limp in front of his chest, eyes barely peeking out from under their lids. 

“Jet, is that your name? Jet?” You kept hold of his wrist, its grip keeping his arm slung over your shoulders, your other arm under his. You didn’t know much first aid, but you knew enough. He wasn’t the first war casualty you’d come across. Keep him talking- that’s what your mother had always told you. Keep them talking. 

You wished there was a waterbender in town. You’d heard, a few towns over, about a sweet woman from the Northern Water Tribe who could heal the injured and sick thanks to waterbending. If that was an option, you knew he would heal much better than he would under your hand. 

“Yeah,” he breathed, eyes closing, his leg dragging between the two of you. His good leg, when his toes didn’t catch in the grass of the path, hopped along, keeping as much weight as he could from his other leg, as the blood still slid down his skin. It was a win, and a loss, in that he was helping you, but the elevation of his heartbeat only served to push more blood out of his body. 

“Where do you come from, Jet?” You asked, trying to keep up a light hearted conversation even through gritted teeth, as you hurried home. Home- how far away were you? You’d only been at the river, that wasn’t far, but you didn’t know how much distance Jet had in him. 

“West,” he murmured, the sound of the latter letters slurring on as he teetered closer to unconsciousness. 

“No, no, Jet,” you growled, forcing him further upright. “You pass out on me, this gets a lot harder, come on.” He groaned, gave another hop on his good foot, and tumbled into you as he lost consciousness. 

“Nope, not today,” you snarled, gritted teeth supporting your strength as you hauled him up. “You’re not going to die on me today.” You pulled both of his arms over your shoulders, collecting most of his mass onto your back, and hauled him home. 

Jet woke up three days later. Three days, in which you stitched up the wound as best you could, changed the bandages a dozen times, forced him to swallow water even as he slept, and being pretty sure it was going to somehow lead to him choking.

Three days, in which he was alive, but you couldn’t be sure he’d stay that way. He’d lost so much blood, what if his body just gave out? What if all of your help had been for nothing? Sure, you knew nothing about him, you’d just met him, but you couldn’t let him die. You’d rescued him- you were supposed to be his rescuer. 

You didn’t think you’d be able to handle it if he died, right here in your home. 

You’d taken up to sleeping, not in your bedroom, but instead in the main room, where he had been sleeping on a low table for the full three days. You’d gotten him a pillow, and tried to make him comfortable, but there was only so much you could do, thanks to his unconscious state. 

This, luckily, was where you were when he woke up. 

He let out a groan, and you heard him shift his head. You lifted your own, gazing across the room, and lifting a hand to rub your eyes to make sure your mind wasn’t playing tricks on you. 

“Jet?” You asked, and you watched as he tried to crane his head toward you. 

“Y/N, right? Do I remember it right?” He asked, and you nodded, standing up with maybe a bit too much excitement. 

“You’re awake,” you said, your smile bright as you cupped his cheek. “I can’t believe you’re awake.” His eyebrows knotted, and he blinked once or twice. 

“What do you mean?” He asked, “how long have I been out?” 

“Three days,” you said, and his eyes went wide. 

“Three days,” he breathed, looking away. “I’m never going to catch up with them now.”

“Who?”

“My friends. I got hurt so that they could escape- they’re headed to Ba Sing Se.” You wouldn’t admit it, but you didn’t want to say goodbye to him so soon. Your next words, however, were entirely true, and not rooted in selfishness whatsoever. 

“Jet, you can’t walk yet, much less travel. It might be a long time before you can.” You saw it in his eyes, when he made the decision to sit up and do it anyway, and so before he could you grabbed his shoulders and forced them back down. 

“Jet, I’m serious. Whatever cut you went straight through some of your muscles. If you try to walk now, you might just reopen it.” He swore, and laid back down, closing his eyes. 

“Thank you,” he whispered, after a moment collecting his thoughts. “You’re doing a lot to help me, and you don’t need to.” You felt a little bit of heat on your cheeks, and smiled. 

“Yeah, well,” you whispered, turning away to get him a cup of water. 

“If you come across bleeding out in the woods, it’s like, well, you probably should help, right?” He chuckled, a smirk pulling on his lips and revealing teeth on one side of his mouth. 

“Yeah, right.” You gave him a cup, and he sat up, taking a long drink, only pulling it from his mouth when it was empty. 

“Y/N,” he said, pulling your attention again. “I’m gonna repay you.”

“You don’t have to, Jet. Like I said, its the right thing to do.” You felt his fingers curl around your wrist, and you turned to him. 

“Y/N,” he said again, keeping eye contact. It was intoxicating, like he knew exactly his effect on you. “I’m alive because of you.” You broke his gaze and looked away, but as you did, his hand brushed back some of your hair. 

“Can I kiss you?” 

The question caught you off guard, and your eyes returned to his, wide, surprised. But you couldn’t- in no world would your answer be anything but:

“Yes.” 

-🦌 Roe

tag list- @lammello @kittyddandnyla

#angst #atla #atla imagine #atla imagines #atla reader insert #atla x reader #avatar #avatar fluff #avatar imagine #avatar imagines #avatar reader insert #avatar x reader #avatar: the last airbender #drabble #jet #jett #jet fluff #fluff #imagine #imagines #jet angst #jet x reader #reader insert #x reader #jet imagine #jet imagines #jet reader insert #atla jet #avatar jet

[ayearofpike]

The Last Vampire 3: Red Dice

Pocket Books, 1995 193 pages, 17 chapters + epilogue ISBN 0-671-87268-0 LOC: PZ7.P626 Las 1995 OCLC: 32331239 Released March 31, 1995 (per B&N)

Sita has just ended the reign of terror of a horrible sociopathic self-made vampire, but his killing spree did not escape the notice of the military. It seems they already know who and what she is, as well as her unwilling accomplice turned against his will to save his life. When he’s captured, she resolves to save him before the military can do horrible things with his blood. This mission is all the more urgent when she realizes that the scientist leading the research efforts is an old friend. Like, a REALLY old friend.

It was about here when I realized that Pike didn’t actually have a single plotted story for Sita, that he was just writing her adventures as they came to him. I might be misremembering this, but I feel like we’d been led to understand that The Last Vampire was going to be a trilogy, like Remember Me and his favorite title-drop Lord of the Rings. (I have not been keeping track of LotR references, but there’s one in almost every book. Reread @mildhorror‘s recaps if you don’t believe me.) Getting hit with another “to be continued” was sort of a gut punch.

But beyond that, the way it puts an old character in a new situation made me aware that this was becoming a serial rather than one story. This book doesn’t really do anything new to tie up loose ends. That door was mostly closed in the previous one, when she dispatched the original vampire. But as soon as she turned a dude, it created new loose ends that Sita now has to shear off before the story closes up. It’s a perfectly fine self-contained story, if a lot more actiony and cartoon-violent than most of Pike’s work, but it’s not exactly clear how it belongs to the previous storyline (or whether it even does).

Let’s see if I can find or assume some context for how this book ended up getting constructed.

In 1995, the public at large had just been exposed to Quentin Tarantino’s stylized violence, with Pulp Fiction coming off a controversial Oscar loss and becoming a sleeper hit. Seeing how this was received by the teens who were ostensibly Pike’s audience, it makes sense that he would have wanted to incorporate some gory battle scenes. Especially as Interview With the Vampire had also just come out — I have no doubt Pike wanted to differentiate his cool-young-adult vampire from Tom Cruise’s brooding Gothic.

Spooksville would start in October of this year. I’ve mentioned this series before, but its importance to Sita’s story is that it tells semi-related juvenile horror tales linked to a handful of main characters living in a town where this kind of stuff happens. That is to say: the main kids are the only real common link between the events. I expect that he’d already started writing the series at this point, and that the structure affected how he told The Last Vampire stories (and probably in turn his love for Sita helped him define the structure of Spooksville; after all, Goosebumps didn’t have the same protagonist in every book.)

In any case, it’s both drastically different from the suspense thrillers and mysteries that Pike’s mostly written to date, and game-changing in terms of what we would now expect about Sita stories. I think I already made this analogy: The Last Vampire is Pike’s Final Fantasy, an inspired tale about the end of an era that would seize unexpected popularity and spawn sequels unto eternity.

So let’s try to blaze through the recap, because there’s not a whole bunch of plot. Sita wakes up the day after her battle with New Vampire with a tube still stretching between her and FBI Dude. She realizes she’s been out for nearly 24 hours because it was midnight when the fight started and now it’s still dark but her watch says it’s just before twelve. But also she hears police cars, and knows that they need to escape before they’re asked a lot of questions. (I have one: if they knew what she was, which they probably did, why wouldn’t they come at NOON?) Sita prefers to keep a low profile, because she knows that if someone suspects her supernatural abilities, she’s going to get tested and dissected and someone is going to try to make more (like the coroner’s assistant already did). She doesn’t need to be responsible for that.

But since she’s dealing with a baby vampire who thinks he can use the government bureaucracy to his advantage, they don’t get out. Instead, they’re thrown into an armored van with five armed guards (three in back with them, two in the front) and a driver behind bulletproof glass. This within a caravan of armored vehicles and under surveillance from a helicopter. Of course Sita has escaped from worse situations. She’s handcuffed and shackled, but her eyes are free, and that’s what she uses to hypnotize the guards into pointing their weapons away long enough to break the ankle restraints and kick two of them dead. The third she kills just by telling him to die, which is when she realizes that Original Vampire’s blood is starting to give her new and stronger powers. Because FBI Dude is squeamish, she knocks out the other two guards and then learns from the driver that they’re not going to jail, but to a high-security government facility.

This is where the book turns into an action movie. Sita has the driver crank a turn into a narrow alley and then floor it. They makes it across two streets before smashing into a fruit truck, which gives her enough cover to jump out of the van and start shooting. This clears out a police car from ... unidentified somewhere for them to steal, and they lead the chase into the basement parking garage of a tall building, where they hop an elevator to the top floor. Then Sita breaks a window and jumps across the street to the roof of another building, and roof-hops along that side of the street to one with a helicopter pad on the roof. She steals one and comes back for FBI Dude, and they take off into the desert. So much for that low profile.

The police (or government agents, or whoever it is) pursue them but don’t try to catch up or engage. We learn why when, as they cross over southern Nevada, they’re set upon by two military combat helicopters. More questions: why not a fighter jet? Nellis is right there, and a jet is faster and more heavily armed than a chopper. But anyway, they cripple Sita’s chopper, forcing FBI Dude to bail into Lake Mead, and before she can crash it and escape herself they blow it up with a missile. When she wakes up she’s pinned underwater by the helicopter’s wreckage, but her unconscious mind has had the presence to not let her drown. She surfaces in the middle of the lake to see what’s up, and sure enough they’ve caught FBI Dude again and are throwing him in another armored van. Frickin’ baby vampires can’t do anything.

She steals a truck from a nearby campsite and follows the new military caravan out to some secure facility in the middle of the desert. She watches FBI Dude get trucked out and displayed to a uniformed general, and it’s confirmed that yes, the military knows what they are and yes, they were trying to take them alive. FBI Dude gets shunted into one of the buildings, and Sita takes special note of the scientist that the general talks to afterward. Just one scientist, yes. He leaves shortly afterward, and she goes to follow him, but realizes something weird as she gets in her truck to follow him.

She’s glowing.

That’s right, all y’all that were pissed about Edward Cullen! Pike did it first! Granted, this is in the moonlight and not the sun, but STILL.

She decides to worry about it later and follows the scientist to a casino, where he loses too much money and drinks too much, then to his house just before sunrise. If she’s going to use this dude to get close and figure out how to save her buddy, she needs to redo her identity again. So she gets her secretive business manager or whatever in New York to set her up with new ID, new credit cards, new hair, new clothes, the whole shebang. Yeah — from here until the end of the book we’re supposed to imagine her as a redhead, which is hard to do because we’ve already got two books of blonde Alisa Perne.

When the scientist goes to work, she follows him to see where he goes in, and then breaks into his house and sees a strange model. It looks like DNA, but it has twelve strands instead of two. She recognizes it immediately — it’s the same as a model made by an alchemist she knew seven hundred years ago in Italy during the Catholic Inquisition, a monk who she took as a lover, to whom she revealed the secrets of her life and her history when he watched her heal a kid’s broken spine. So if this guy has a similar model, they must have another vampire and have already been researching, which means Sita has more to save and/or destroy.

She goes back out to the military compound to try to plan an attack, and the glowing skin makes her curious, so she takes off all her clothes and watches her body light up and start to become transparent and feel lighter. She assumes this is another unexplainable power conveyed by Original Vampire’s blood, but to what end? She doesn’t have time to figure it out right now; there’s a scientist to seduce! They gamble for a while, then Sita buys him dinner and they go back to his house, where he tells her just enough about his research to make her feel both sorry for him and further set in her need to rescue FBI Dude ASAP.

While everyone’s asleep, Sita finishes the woeful tale of the alchemist. It seems that he drew some of her blood and used it to heal incurable illnesses in combination with crystals and moonlight. But then he went too far and tried to use it on someone healthy — the boy from before, in fact, with full midday sun streaming through. This ended up creating a monster ruled by fear, and Sita had to kill him, and the inquisitors took the alchemist and she never saw him again.

This wouldn’t be a Last Vampire book without two things: drinking blood and Seymour. She gets the first from a hapless high roller, first by beating him at the card table, then insulting him, then inviting him to what appears to be a desert gangbang, then scaring off his bodyguards and mercilessly drinking her fill. Seymour comes in because she’s not sure what’s coming next with the scientist and the military and the moon-glow, so she calls him to get some ideas and assistance. He says that the only way to be sure they don’t keep vampire blood is to blow up the entire base with the nuclear bombs they probably have on site, this being a secret military facility in Nevada and all.

So now she’s got a plan, and she needs to figure out how to carry it out. When the scientists opens up about his concerns about their test subject and what the scary general wants to do with his blood, Sita tells him everything. Like, literally everything: what her name is, that she’s a vampire, that she’s five thousand years old, that she was turned by the original vampire who she just killed this week, that she knew Krishna, the whole nine yards. In return, he tells her where they’re keeping FBI Dude and the other vampire they’ve had for a month. Her plan is to sneak into the compound in the scientist’s trunk, pose as a tech on loan from the Pentagon, and somehow break out the two vampires.

It all goes according to plan, except there’s only one vampire in the cell. At least until Sita opens the door and goes to rescue FBI Dude, at which point the door slams shut and the scientist talks to her in Italian. Yep! The other vampire he had was her, way back in the thirteenth century! He used her blood on himself, although imperfectly, so in the last seven centuries he’s aged about twenty years. And now he’s got her right where he wants her, so he can keep doing his experiments and improving humanity through vampirism.

The general doesn’t care about any of that shit — he just wants to be stronger than anyone else. This is his weakness, knowing Sita’s power and being afraid of it until he gets it for himself. So she manipulates the guards into panic (more powers she didn’t have before, being able to hypnotize someone without even seeing them) and then breaks all the lights in the cell and starts pounding on the door. So they amass a whole fighting force and open the door, but of course Sita has used her magical vampire powers to ... hide behind it. She has to kill a guard slowly and messily to keep up the fear paralysis, and then she mows most of the rest of them down with a machine gun. All the killing is starting to upset her, or so she says, maybe because of Squeamish FBI Dude, because it doesn’t stop her from planning to nuke the joint.

The general is already upstairs, trying to escape, so Sita JUMPS THROUGH THE CEILING and shoots him in the leg so he can’t go anywhere. Then she gets him to take her to the weapons stockpile and arm a nuclear bomb with a timer, supposedly long enough for everyone to get away from the blast. She has to fry his brain with her hypnosis to get him to do it, but now Science Alchemist is in command and he’s got orders from the president to not let her get away under any circumstances. (Like he might have otherwise, right?) The nuke’s ticking down, and they’re in a standoff, but she finally convinces him to let the rest of the troops get out and away, so now it’s just Sita and FBI Dude and Fried General and Science Alchemist, waiting for the bomb to go off.

And Sita starts glowing again.

This time, she lights up all the way, becoming light itself, and floats off the ground and away in the wind, saying her goodbyes to the old monk who has stolen her blood and the new friend who she turned against his will and the military leader who she has effectively lobotomized. By the time the nuke blows, she’s long gone. 

The next thing we see is Science Alchemist’s basement. No, Pike doesn’t explain how Sita reassembled her body or whatever after floating away as a being of light. No, he doesn’t spend any time on what it means or how she should use it. Yes, it would have been a perfect time to close with an epilogue about how she’s come back to Krishna and her life is complete, along the lines of the dreams she has throughout these books. But instead, she’s in a basement in Las Vegas, where there’s a complicated array of crystals and mirrors, and she’s going to turn human with Seymour’s help (and blood). So she falls asleep doing it, and when she wakes up, someone is pounding on the door insisting she let him in. And that’s it!

So, I have to say it, and you should imagine the clapping emoji between each of the words in the following sentence: THERE WAS NO PURPOSE BEHIND SITA TURNING FBI DUDE EXCEPT TO KEEP THE AUDIENCE HANGING. Seriously, his name should have been Plot Devicerson. He gave us a springboard into the third book, he gave Sita a reason to act throughout it, and now he’s fuckin’ dead. He’s not even a tie to her life before, any more than a divorce lawyer is a tie to a marriage. The whole book could have conceivably done without him, although it would have admittedly taken a little more thought to get her out to the military installation in the first place.

You know, I wish Pike would have called a spade a spade with this series. If it had been a stand-alone serial novel set called The Last Vampire, I would have been totally fine. The stories themselves and Sita as a character I don’t necessarily have a problem with. But they DO NOT FIT TOGETHER. And by now it’s too late to retcon this into another Baby-Sitters Club or Nancy Drew type of series, so he’s stuck attemping to link one unique narrative to another.

It’s gonna be another year before we see Sita again, so I have to deduce that Pike just couldn’t bring himself to kill her off even though he didn’t know exactly what she would be doing next. And it’s OK to keep that door open — if you just admit you’re doing a serial rather than a continuance. In retrospect, I think that’s what annoyed me so much about these books, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. I guess we have to wait and see if Pike can save this series as a continued story, sometime in the next ... six books GODDAMMIT.