RiTS: Forever Knight: Intimations of Mortality, Chapter 4
GOOD AFTERNOOOOOOOOOON, SNOWFLAKES!
Are you awake now? Yeah, well, sorry. Here: let me help you back to sleep!
Human!Nick is sleeping at his desk, and Tracy's giving him shit about it. He drinks coffee. There's a heat wave, and Tracy gets to wear shorts because she's a detective. 
Oh, but Nick has some ideas about how Tracy's wardrobe would cut down on chases: "The outfit screams freeze better than you can."
WHY ARE ALL THESE CHAPTERS 20+ PAGES? You know, I realized last night as we started season two of Voyager, that I should just have been recapping THAT instead. At least when it's a little boring, I can still find jokes. All you get today is my ranting about how vampires taking over the world would not mean the end of civilization or the economy or GAH.
To borrow from the amazing Jenny Trout: This book. This fucking book.
Oh, but! Good time to talk about chapter length, eh? Because yes: 20 years ago, you could get away with a 20-pg chapter. Easily. People would sit through it. In the intervening years, the trend is for shorter chapters. I try to keep them around 10 pages, sometimes less - sometimes quite a bit less - but only very, very rarely more.
Some writers have taken to making every scene its own chapter, but honestly, that's so choppy and weird to me. I like to think of chapters as the end of an episode - and maybe there's commercial breaks between scenes, but you're definitely going to press that "next episode" button for me.
Where was I? OH! Downfall of civilization, right.
So, the conceit of this book - and of other things I've read where vamps take over - is that they would just turn, like, everyone important, and then let the rest of the world go. And yes, I know I mentioned this already, but I hate it JUST THAT MUCH.
Because it doesn't make a damn bit of sense! WHERE IS THE FOOD COMING FROM IF ALL THE HUMANS HATE THEM? Where's the food, if they turn everyone? I mean, and this is just first of all!
We get some exposition shoved in about the open house they had at the precinct recently, so humans could come and see the station and meet their keepers. Nick brought Urs and Vachon, so they could learn the layout of the station, but no other humans showed. Tracy thinks Vachon is dreamy, but also that they should repeat the open house and make it mandatory, because then, people would feel safe with vampire cops.
They stop chatting when Reese comes in, and the description of him as a vampire are some nicely-veiled fat shaming. (All vampires get skinny when they die, because they have to be tHE moSt BeaUTifUL or some shit to get the good victims.) Miss me with that shamey shit.
Anyway. Reese is here about the vamp that Nick took out earlier in the day. Apparently all these vamps are on a ration system - they're only allowed approved donations that fit within their blood allotment. The dude they took out had been assaulting mortals to pad his allotment, and they think it's a vigilante killing. Reese and Nick have some weird, unnecessary staredown so that Nick can think about how vamps aren't allowed to hypnotize people to get the truth out of them, so it shouldn't be a problem, but vamps broke those rules all the time.
Where do I even start?! With the fact that the vampires have thought through and implemented a complicated system of blood donors and donor rations and run an entire city police force and there's no indication that they've done anything super untoward to humans, but society is still falling apart?
Or Nick's hypocrisy? He hypnotized every last one of those perps!
Or Reese's subsequent soliloquy about how much he misses his kids and his wife, wherein he shows us that his wife was only there to be pretty for him? (He literally mentions her diet pills and that vampires don't age, and that's it. He had a family and a life with her, and it's her incipient eating disorder and fixation on ageing that he remembers. Jesus fucking Christ.)
They're on their way out when Reese pulls them into his office. Nick's promotion has come through! Now he just has to become a vampire, et voila! Job security!
Nick wants time to think about it, because he's human now. He heads back to his desk because Reese has to talk to Tracy about being late all week. Convenient for Vamp!Nat to come bug him, and we get literally a PAGE about how pretty she is - but how much prettier she'd be if she were human.
It's like the author wants me to hate Nick.
Turns out, Nat is Nick. She regrets her vampirism, she's looking for a cure, and she and Nick have just exactly the same fucked up relationship - only she thought she'd have the chance to turn him, and he's saying no.
He won't take the promotion.
They move back on to work quickly, because if those two are good at anything, it's avoidance. But that's also a chance for Nick to ask if Nat's had any word of Janette, and she hasn't. So Janette hasn't been picked up, and is probably fine. Even though she was out of the show well before it ended and these books were written, and we don't actually need to hear about her at all, because she moved the fuck on, you guys.
Nat leaves, Tracy comes out of Reese's office, and we have two pages of Tracy and Nick discussing sponsors - vamps who bring people across - and how the process works. Then a bomb goes off at The Raven - oh, excuse me, DayClub. Yes, that is the literal name of the club. - and then Nick wakes up. In the precinct. Where it's been just a 15-minute nap.
Tracy and Reese tell him to go home, he looks like crap, he needs to take sick days. He agrees. On his way out, he sticks his hand in his pocket and feels the doll. It escaped the box and is rattling around, and now both its legs are all curled up. Nick puts it back in the box and wraps it with a rubber band, but thinks he should just throw the thing out.
AND NOW IT'S FINALLY THE END. I don't know if I'm gonna last, you guys. We're only 4 chapters in! It's so bad!
Bah. We all know I'll be back next week. Till then, Snowflakes!