RiTS: Forever Knight: A Stirring of Dust, Chapter 7
Snowflakes! I'm back from big (tiny), exciting (not at all) Holy Week adventures (working at church)! Did you miss me? I missed you. Let's get recapping!
So, Nick runs off, as usual, with little explanation. Nat just lets him go and tries to go back to work, but before she can, the body in the bag sits up and claws its way out of the bag. She grabs a long scalpel and cries for help. The thing lunges at her, but Nick comes back in just in time and grapples with it.
On the patio with Radu and Janette, Nick asks Radu where the zombie vamps come from. Are they Radu's children? Janette seems all put off by these questions, like Nick should already know, or something. But how? We never saw zombie vamps in the show. As far as we, the audience, know, Janette hasn't seen these things any more than Nick has.
Radu is resistant to answering, and so Nick has a bit of a monologue. He talks about how he saw the villagers kill one of the zombie vamps, and he's concerned they might come for the real vampires. It's a decent speech, not to whiny, but there's a maybe-typo, maybe-mistake here. Sizemore has Nick's dialogue spanning two paragraphs, and she ends one with a closed quote, then starts the next one immediately with an open quote. To wit:
"…There's more than one of them. I saw one die like a vampire this morning….Now here is a second one. Sometime soon the mortals are going to come after the source.""Are they some freak of nature?" he demanded of Radu….
See, the thing is, if you're writing dialogue across paragraphs, you don't close the quotes. Leaving the close quotes off indicates to the reader that the same person is continuing to speak. Closing them like that makes a reader think someone new has started talking, and they'll have to go back to re-establish the rhythm of the conversation. You don't ever want to make your readers go back like that.
Radu gives some non-answers – "They're mine." – without ever really explaining, and Janette's all, "It has nothing to do with him," despite its clearly having everything to do with him. So Nick kills the one on the patio by ripping out its heart, and Lacroix comes in, clapping lazily and saying he loves it when Nick overreacts to shit.
So Nick rips the heart out of the zombie vamp in the morgue, and tells Nat that he forgot to tell her: She can also take their hearts out to kill them.
Tracy, meanwhile, is on her own as far as the actual investigation goes. Nick did give her the courtesy of a call to tell her he was at the lab, and then he's going to follow a lead, but of course he doesn't tell her what lead or when he'll be back. She tries to run down some connection between Drezerdic and the homeless victim, but she can't find one, really. She thinks that Drezerdic may have been in the club district looking for Tammy, and that's how he ran into the homeless dude, who typically panhandled outside clubs and slept there, instead of the stockyard where he was found.
So she heads down to the clubs and manages to find Drezerdic outside the Raven. Of course. There's some exposition about how she's tried to figure out who owns the place, but it's hidden behind shell corporations, and there are never any crimes there, because of course not. They don't want attention.
There's also a misuse of parallel construction: "She'd asked Javier about the vampire hangout, of course, and he'd been, of course, evasive." Super frustrating, because clearly Sizemore was trying to get it right, and no one caught that she failed. (Or, worse, some editor changed it and made it wrong.) She should have put that second "of course" after "evasive", and it would have been lovely. Ah, well.
Tracy asks why he's there. She tells herself that obviously his daughter has nothing to do with vampires, despite him being at the Raven:
There weren't that many vampires roaming the world, were there? Not every crime of passion could be laid at their door.
Sure, Tracy, keep believing the dream. Don't ever ask Vachon how many famous people he knew back in the day.
Drezerdic says he's here for Tammy, since she's been calling the Nightcrawler, who broadcasts from the Raven. Tracy didn't know that, and doesn't know about Lacroix, apparently, since she reflects that she hates listening to the Nightcrawler in Nick's car. She tells Drezerdic that he's mistaken – how many Tammys are there in Toronto, after all? – but he sticks to his guns. She finally convinces him to go home just because the club is closed, and if he enters now, he'll be trespassing and in violation of his parole.
Of course Vachon is there, waiting for her to be done with Drezerdic. She gives him a ride home, and goes into his place to give him back his beeper and ask if vampires have anything to do with the beheading murders. He says no; he hasn't even heard about them.
He gives her a massage, because she starts trying to stretch out her own shoulders, and he wants to get her relaxed enough to ask if she's heard anything about zombies. Of course, he gets lost in his own thoughts about killing her or changing her, which are really the only two options to dealing with a human who knows about vampires and can' be mojo'd. He doesn't want to kill her – doesn't want to kill anyone, actually. Thinks it's not "fun" anymore. He would bring her across, but he thinks he should probably, you know, get her consent, considering women have all these new-fangled, 20th-century rights and shit.
Gee, thanks, Vachon. Good to know you might consider women human beings.
Next week: Chapter 8! Maybe we'll get to know how zombie vamps are made! Maybe they're Dracula's! I'm still hoping dumb Radu isn't all we get!