There are books you love, finish, put back on the shelf and eventually forget about.

And then there are books that somehow stay with you for decades.

For me, Christopher Pike’s Thirst series has always been the latter.

I honestly couldn’t tell you exactly how old I was when I first read these books. I was born in 1982, and somewhere along the way I found them at the library. What I can tell you is that I loved them. I loved them enough that all these years later, after countless other books, movies, TV shows and vampire stories, I still think about them.

Of course they were library books, which meant eventually I had to give them back.

Rude.

I’ve always loved vampires and the spooky side of things in general. Halloween is my favorite holiday, and give me a good vampire story pretty much any day. But there was something about Thirst that hit differently. Sita wasn’t just another vampire. She was ancient—thousands of years old—and I remember being fascinated by the mythology surrounding her, her history and the story of how she became what she was.

Do I remember the entire plot after all these years?

Absolutely not.

That’s actually part of what makes this so exciting.

For the last few months, I’ve had this overwhelming urge to read the series again. The problem was finding the damn books.

I could find individual copies online, but when you’re looking at somewhere around $15 or $20 for one book and there are five of them sitting there staring at you, suddenly nostalgia starts getting expensive. I wanted them, but not quite that badly.

And then Facebook Marketplace decided to perform a small miracle.

One day I came across someone selling the entire five-book series for $15.

Not $15 each.

Fifteen dollars. For all five.

And the seller lived about a mile away from me.

At that point, I’m pretty sure the universe was just telling me to go get my vampire books.

So I did.

And now, after all these years, Thirst is sitting in my house instead of living somewhere in the back of my memory.

Apparently, I Didn’t Know My Favorite Series as Well as I Thought

Something funny happened when I started looking into the books again.

I have always known this series as Thirst. That’s what these books are to me. So imagine my surprise when I discovered that Sita’s story actually started years earlier under another name.

Christopher Pike originally published the first books as The Last Vampire series beginning in 1994. Six books were published between 1994 and 1996. Years later, the stories were repackaged: the first three became Thirst No. 1 in 2009, and the next three became Thirst No. 2 in 2010. Pike then continued Sita’s story with new novels beginning with Thirst No. 3: The Eternal Dawn. 

I genuinely never knew that.

Apparently I can carry these books around in my brain for years and they can still surprise me before I’ve even started rereading them.

Now Comes the Part I’m Almost Nervous About

There’s something strange about going back to something you loved when you were younger.

Right now, Thirst exists in this almost perfect little place in my memory. I don’t remember every character. I don’t remember every twist. There are huge pieces of the story that are just gone.

But I remember how these books made me feel.

And somehow that survived.

So now I get to find out whether they still have that power.

Will I love Sita as much at 44 as I did when I first met her? Will the mythology that fascinated me then still fascinate me now? Am I going to suddenly hit a scene and think, OH MY GOD, I REMEMBER THIS?

Or am I going to discover that nostalgia has been doing some very generous editing for the last few decades?

I genuinely don’t know.

And I kind of love that I don’t know.

For now, though, I have something I’ve wanted back for a very long time: those vampire books I checked out from the library all those years ago are finally mine.

All five of them.

For fifteen freaking dollars.

Sometimes Facebook Marketplace really does come through.

Now I just have to start reading.