Anita Blake has been hired to find the person or persons killing Vampires, and not just by any Vampire, but by the Ruler of the city, Nikolaos, a vampire who looks perhaps 12 years old, young and blonde, but in actuality is over 1000. After Jean-Claude took her to see Nikolaos, another vampire attacked her, and he marked her as a permanent servant to help her recover from the attack, for which he was punished by Nikolaos.
Now, Anita finds herself craving foods she doesn't even like and eating more than she ever has before, and she's gone to a "freak party", where Vampire junkies go to get sucked on by vampires with a hopefully former vampire junkie named Phillip. But when Vampires from the Church of Eternal Life attack the party, Anita has already left and finds Nikolaos' reanimator being forced to reanimate a corpse to prove his power. But the corpse has been a hundred years dead, which is difficult for any reanimator to bring back... unless they are as powerful as Anita. She helps him reanimate the corpse, then leaves after a confrontation with Nikolaos and the Church of Eternal Life Vampires.
Phillip confesses that Nikolaos told him to stick to her, and Anita is being pressured to roll on all the vampires by a fellow Vampire Hunter named Edward, who used to be an assassin before he gave up killing humans as too easy and moved on to Weres and Vampires. He scares her, and for Anita, that's not easy to do.
She dreams of Jean-Claude offering her blood to drink, and wakes to a call from Dolph asking her to take a look at the body of a dead vampire found downtown. Anita recognizes her as Theresa, one of Nikolaos' retinue. That night, Anita is summoned by Nikolaos, who has captured Phillip and is torturing him for telling Anita what he was doing for Nikolaos. Nikolaos knows that Jean-Claude has marked Anita, through the two marks he gave her, has been living off her energy, which explains all the extra eating she's been doing. Nikolaos bites Anita to block Jean-Claude's marks, but when Dolph shows up at her house, he helps her cleanse the bite with Holy Water.
She tells him just about everything, and asks for his help in taking down Nikolaos. He looks forward to the challenge. He gets her a shotgun and helps her to learn to shoot it. That night, they are decoyed for a while by a supposed job for Anita putting a re-animated soul to rest, but it is a trap and they are attacked by the real killer and his raised set of ghouls.
After they escape, they go to the Were-rats, who have agreed to show them the back way into Nikolaos' lair, but from there, they are on their own. Alone in Nikolaos's lair, they must free Phillip, kill Nikolaos, and her vampire attendants. But can two hunters stand up against the might of a pissed-off thousand year old vampire who can frighten even Anita?
This book translated well from book to comic/graphic novel, and I liked reading about Anita when she was still a kick-ass heroine who didn't take shit from anyone and thought about things besides getting her rocks off with everything supernatural in range. Back when she was still mostly purely human.
It was good to go back to those times, and even though I know there were things missing from the graphic novel that were in the original book, I didn't really miss them. The story hung together well and made logical sense. The story is very exciting, and i kept going back to read other parts of it even after I had finished. Most especially the ending, which attracted me to the book back when I first read it.
"I'm the Executioner. I don't date vampires. I kill them." Still makes me grin to read it, even now.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment