The book opens with a brief narration. A young woman, who appears to be in her late teens named Alisa Perne, is not what she appears to be. She is a 5,000 year old vampire, and to her knowledge the last of her kind. Many of the tales about vampires are wrong. None of the things that can supposedly be harmful to a vampire, are really true. She can stay out during the day, but such a feat was incredibly difficult until she aged a couple thousand years. She could die from sufficient injuries, such as decapitation or impalement and still needed to eat food. However, she possessed many of the same attributes of modern vampire legends, such as stamina, strength, vision, hearing, speed, accelerated healing and perfect memory. She also explains that as she aged, her powers have gotten stronger.

The story begins. She arrives at an office where a man named Michael Riley called her. He identifies himself as a private investigator that had been digging into her affairs and had noticed not only her age, but her immense and untraceable fortune. Deciding that he knows too much, she kills him. However, right before she kills him, he reveals that a man called Slim hired him. She tries to find more about Slim, but her best shot is Michael's computer. She then decides to use his son, Ray Riley, whom she finds a picture of, to hack into Michael's computer and find information.

Alisa then enters high school and changes her name to Lara Adams, and befriends Ray. She also ends up befriending another young man named Seymour Dorsten. Seymour is HIV positive, and is so uncannily perceptive that she eventually admits what she is and heals him of his illness. He becomes one of her closest friends for the rest of the series, and she depends on him for advice on numerous occasions.

She uses Ray to get information from his father's computers, however she doesn't know who hired Ray's father. She lets herself be abducted by the unknown client's men. Unfortunately, it isn't easy to escape, since Slim seems to know how to restrain a vampire. After learning what she can, she brutally kills Slim and some of his crew (the rest escape in a shootout with the police). She then learns that Slim has been acting on behalf of someone else - someone whom she realizes is Yaksha, apparently not as dead as she'd been led to believe.

Alisa begins to narrate her life and explain who Yaksha is for the reader- In 3000 B.C. Alisa, or Sita (her real name) was born in India. When she was seven years old, a disease struck her village, and most of the villagers died, including her closest friend who was with child. A traveling priest from a different religion convinced the elders that he could drive away the disease by performing a ritual; it involved invoking a demon into the recently deceased corpse of Sita's friend. During the ceremony, the priest called forth a yakshini (demon) which killed the priest. Only a handful of the male villagers saw the demon kill the man and then supposedly vanish. But Sita, hiding in the bushes, understood that the demon had actually entered the corpse of the child, still inside his mother. Before vanishing, the demon seemed to stare straight at Sita though she is hidden behind a rock. When her father rushed to save the child from its mother's womb, Sita ran forth and stated that it is not the child that is moving, but the demon possessing the child's corpse.

Her father gave her a choice - she could let the child live or she could take his knife and strike it down now. She chose to let it live, and name the child "Yaksha", meaning "begot from a Yakshini." Yaksha grew to be a beautiful man in a short period of time, who'd always had an eye for Sita. By this time, she was grown up as well, and married to Rama, her husband, and even had a daughter. It was about that time the men that had witnessed the long-ago ritual vanished, one after another, including Sita's father. One night, after her father disappeared, Sita was awoken by a strange noise, and upon leaving her home, was attacked and dragged away by Yaksha. He explained what he was, though the word for vampire did not exist then. Some of the men were with him, transformed as he was (though being the first, he was forever more powerful than any of them, including Sita). He convinced her to join him, threatening to kill her sleeping husband and child if she did not.

It did not take long for the civilized world to realize what they were up against, and they begged Krishna, the 6th incarnation of the deity, to intervene. His men slaughtered most of the fleeing vampires, but Yaksha and Sita survived. Krishna and Yaksha fought, and in the end Sita was given Krishna's grace under the condition that she never create another vampire. Yaksha was pardoned as well, but the pact Krishna spoke to him was unheard by Sita. Yaksha spent nearly the next 5,000 years slowly hunting down the remaining vampires and destroying them before apparently being chased and murdered by a mob during the Middle Ages. Sita lived through the ages, in Egypt first, and gradually on and toward America, until the present day setting (1990s).