Cover

Half Title Page

The Last Vampire

Also By

Also by Whitley Strieber

FICTION

The Forbidden Zone

Unholy Fire

Billy

Majestic

Catmagic

The Wild

Nature’s End

Warday

Wolf of Shadows

The Night Church

Black Magic

The Hunger

The Wolfen

SHORT STORIES (PRIVATE PUBLICATION)

Evenings with Demons: Stories from Thirty Years

NONFICTION

Confirmation

The Secret School

Breakthrough

The Communion Letters

Transformation

Communion

The Coming Global Superstorm

Title Page

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

POCKET BOOKS, Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

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Copyright © 2001 by Whitley Strieber

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN-10: 0-7434-1808-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-7434-1808-9

First Pocket Books hardcover printing August 2001

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Dedication

To Michael Talbot,
of sacred memory,
author of
The Delicate Dependency and
The Holographic Universe

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the help of my editor, Mitchell Ivers; my agent, Sandra Martin; and my wife, Anne Strieber; all of whom have made essential contributions to the creation of this book.

Epigraph

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

—The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats

“I am part of the justice of the earth.”

—Miriam Blaylock, The Hunger

The Last Vampire

ONE: The Conclave

ONE

The Conclave

Everyone knew the sins of Miriam Blaylock.

Her crime, and it was an unforgivable one, was to enjoy human beings as friends and lovers, rather than to simply exploit them. She could kiss them and find it sweet, have sex with them and afterward sleep like a contented tiger. To her own kind, this was perversion, like a man with a sheep.

The fact that this prejudice was nonsense did not make what she was doing now any easier. She pressed herself back against the seat of the pedicab, instinctively keeping her face hidden, not only from man, but from her own kind. The samlor moved swiftly down the wet street, spattering through puddles left by the last storm. From the shadows of the passenger compartment, she watched a concealing fog rising from the moat that surrounded the ancient Thai city of Chiang Mai.

How could she ever do this impossible thing? How could she ever face her own kind?