Sorry in advanced for the text block. That's the problem with copying from Word to here, it doesn't preserve the paragraph spacing. I could go through and hit enter after each line, easier when I was releasing just two scenes for free a month, but I only have one subscriber on Patreon, and I'm doing this because I want an audience a lot more than because I want money. So I'd like to start offering the full chapters for free here, in the messy formatting if need be, and if you really want a friendly reading experience, you can subscribe at patreon.com/99geek for the properly formatted PDFs. This month I included all 3 chapters of Dakotah Slade so far released, but don't expect that for everything going forward. I try to write my chapters to be at least somewhat self contained, and friendly to new readers, so next month's Adrift Homeless "episode" you'll have to jump into cold, unless you pay the dollar and get access to my entire archived library. Now over a thousand pages of content. Nearing Two thousand even. Stories that crossover. Like the story below. Enjoy the entire text of Dakotah Slade so far, a gift for Thanksgiving. My thanks to you. Without further ado, 99geek.ca presents:

DAKOTAH SLADE PARANORMAL/DETECTIVE
Season One: “Love Burns”
By: Andrew Geczy
Cover by: Rafael Gallardo

Andrew Geczy
99geek.ca
Twitter: @AndrewGeczy
Gamertag: WingcommanderIV

Act One
“Dakotah’s Coda”

1x00 “Ashes”

Released on http://www.patreon.com/99geek on April 2018

“I hate you!” Dakotah said with a giggle, holding her glasses in place while clenching her legs together. “You’re the god damned worst.”

“Mmmf,” came her boyfriend’s muffled sounds from between her thighs. He replaced his tongue with two of his fingers, and stood up to kiss her passionately. She was tall, but he was taller, and she’d have had to go on her tippy-toes had he not sat her on the wooden bar of their favourite pub. His kiss was deep and passionate, and she could taste herself on his lips as she drew him into her embrace. She wrapped her long black boots around his torso, as he continued to play her like an instrument.

“Stop,” she whispered in his ear though she knew she didn’t want him to. And he didn’t seem to want to either. With a shudder, she felt an orgasm roll through her body, and felt her juices leak over the counter and off onto the floor.

“Oh my god!” she said with a laugh as she could feel her face turn red, and her boyfriend Cale laughed too, grabbing napkins and a towel to mop it up. “Look what you made me do.”

“I love you so much,” Cale said, kissing her even while he cleaned up her mess with his hands. She was about to say the same back at him, affectionately touching his large bare muscular arms protruding from his sleeveless shirt, but she was interrupted as the bartender came in from the back.

“You two are still here?” Carol asked, an older short round Asian lady who ran the bar and made a habit of putting up with them. She was like a mother figure to them, more than their mothers had ever been. Dakotah had met Cale in that very bar; Carol had been the one who had introduced them.

From the moment Dakotah’s eyes landed on Cale, and locked with his own dark wells, she knew that she loved him at first sight. She knew, before they’d ever even touched, that her spirit or soul would be forever entangled with Cale’s, at least for as long as they drew breath. It wasn’t long after that moment before they were entangling both in spirit and every other way they could come up with. He filled all her holes, both figuratively and literally.

“Did you spill a drink?” Carol asked, spotting the rag Cale had just been using. Crossing the bar he threw out the napkins and seemed about to correct the bartender.

“Yes,” Dakotah said quickly, glad Carol hadn’t caught what they’d been up to before she’d come in. She gave a warning look to her boyfriend.

He answered the bartender’s first question instead. “We’re waiting for a business associate,” he told her, “He’ll be by soon, and then we can help you flip the chairs.”

“Will your business associate be wanting a drink?” Carol asked with a raise of her eyebrow.

“I can take care of it,” Cale told her, flashing the woman a charismatic grin, a toothy smile that made Dakotah wanna reach out and kiss him. “You can go upstairs and rest, I’ve got things from here.”

“I love you,” Dakotah said, reaching her arms out to Cale from her place still on the bar. He came to her, and they re-embraced. His comforting warmth was like a safety blanket around her. As long as she had him by her side she no longer felt afraid.

Love was everything. It was all encompassing and all consuming. When love grabbed hold of someone, good luck to any attempts at rationale. Good luck getting out alive. Like John Carpenter’s The Thing, love tears at a person, rips them to shreds. Murders the person they were. And then becomes them, or at least some facsimile that looks like them but doesn’t act quite like they used to.

And then one day it’s just gone. And then you’re alone.

She woke with a start, lifting her head off the bar where she must have passed out the night before. Her cheek had been resting on the very spot her butt had sat only one year before. She could still remember all of it, as if it had been yesterday. How he smelled, how he tasted. She could still feel his strong arms carrying her to their bed, she could still feel his warm body pressing against her, enveloping her. Smothering her under his weight, just the way she liked it.

“You’re awake,” Carol said, coming down the stairs from her loft above in a bathrobe.

“Did I sleep here last night?” Dakotah asked groggily, unable to remember anything from the night before as her head pounded with the king of all headaches. There was still half a pint of beer in a glass beside her, and she drank it down in one large gulp, feeling the warm alcohol slide comfortably down her hatch. Her stomach twisted, and her headache subsided slightly.

“Well if you’re trying to suggest that I took you home last night, undressed you, put you to bed, then redressed you in the morning with the same clothes you wore last night and repositioned you at my bar…” Carol trailed off as Dakotah looked at her expectantly. “I didn’t do that.”

“Well can I have another?” Dakotah asked, raising her glass to Carol. She looked around the large empty bar, where Carol had clearly cleaned up around her. Whatever insanity had happened last night, there was no sign of it now as the dingy old pub had been reset for the next night of drunken debauchery.

Carol got behind the bar to set a kettle to boil, and she crossed her arms as she looked disapprovingly down on Dakotah. “You still haven’t paid me for all your drinks last night,” Carol told her surrogate daughter. “Pay me for just one and you can have another.”

Dakotah slid her huge black purse from her arm, and started rummaging through it. “I’m gonna come into a little money any day now,” Dakotah insisted, pushing aside her Witchblade comic book and eyeliner. Her tazer. Empty change purse.

“Like trip over it on your way out the door?” Carol asked Dakotah with arms still crossed. “Dakotah. I love you. But I’m cutting you off.”

“Come on,” Dakotah said to herself, digging her hand deep into her purse. “I only need two toonies and a loonie.”

Carol turned on the TV as Dakotah continued searching every corner of her unwieldly large bag. The bartender switched it to the news where a reporter seemed to be doing a story out of their neighbouring town of Oakville.

“It was at the scene behind me here,” the reporter said into the camera, standing in front of a dock, “where sixty vampire children set sail in a large shipping barge off to a new world where they might live free from the risk of hurting others.”

“Vampires?” Carol repeated, with a shake of her head. “Fake news is getting worse and worse these days.”

“I believe in vampires,” Dakotah said, checking her coin purse for a third time in hopes she might find some coins she hadn’t seen any of the previous times. “People who feed off the social energy of others. They exist.”

“You also believe in witchcraft and every conspiracy theory you’ve ever read,” Carol said. “I remain unconvinced.”

Carol returned to her kettle as it whistled away. The reporter on screen was just finishing her story. “This is Isabol Teung of Voice News, Signing off. Back to you Brian!”

“Ah hah!” Dakotah exclaimed with excitement as her finger brushed against something metal. She pulled the coin from her bag as the door to the bar opened, and she lifted it to the light that streamed in from the open doorway.

“Damn,” she said. Just a quarter. She looked past the coin to see two of her friends entering the bar. Brienne and Alex. She’d gone to high school with them, so many years ago now. They were all about the same age, and Dakotah had just turned twenty. Brienne had long frizzled dreadlocks, and she was supporting her boyfriend Alex who seemed to be feeling unwell.

“Dee!” Brienne called into the bar as she helped her boyfriend through the doorway. “Help!”

“Brienne!” Dakotah said her name in greeting, getting up to join them. “Alex! Can I borrow five bucks?”

“Give it a rest Dee,” Brienne said, as Dakotah took Alex’s other arm. “Something’s wrong with Alex.”

He doubled over against a table and Dakotah put down a chair for him to sit on. “I feel amazing,” he insisted smiling even as he was wincing in pain. “I mean except for my stomach.”

“He took something new,” Brienne told Dakotah.

“What?”

“Some kind of drug,” Brienne continued. “I told him not to. I swear to god. I was like ‘Don’t take it Alex. You gotta have scientists like tell us it’s okay first.’ But you know Alex and science.” Brienne rolled her eyes, obviously very concerned. Alex was more akin to Dakotah than Brienne. He was open to new experiences, and didn’t believe in the ‘conventional truths’ the government brainwashed society with.

“Carol,” Dakotah called to the bartender. “He needs some water.”

Alex groaned and doubled over in his seat, clutching desperately at his stomach.

“What can I do?” Brienne asked him in loud hysteria, crouching down beside him. “Tell me what I can do!”

“It hurts!” Alex barely managed to utter. “Feels like my stomach is burn’n up. Oh god it hurts! It hurts!”

Brienne clutched Alex’s hand, tears streaming down her face. She loved him, they were each other’s entire world. Dakotah had once had a love like theirs. But love burned like a fire, consuming everything, eating away until there was nothing left but ash.

Alex’s shirt caught fire. Dakotah couldn’t see where the flame had originated from, but it seemed to spread from his belly, quickly engulfing his torso. Brienne screamed, the bright orange flames lashing at her and forcing her to release Alex’s hand. Both women backed away from him, screaming as their friend spasmed and writhed in his seat. As loud as their screams were, it wasn’t enough to drown out his own, an agonizing wail the likes of which neither would hear quite the like of again.

It took less than a minute before his screams were nothing but a memory, and a smoking pile of ash was all that remained of Alex. There was silence in the bar, all except for Brienne’s sobs. Dakotah inhaled, gasping for breath though she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding it.

“What the hell was that?” she asked at last, as Carol picked up her phone. Dakotah heard her finger land three times.

* * *

Anderson woke up on his couch slowly, his hand clenching in pain. Remnants of a months-old wound. It was the joints, specifically the ones that had been broken. His other scars still ached as well. Two months of recovery, and he still didn’t feel quite the same. He didn’t think he’d ever feel completely the same again.

His apartment was a disaster. Dirty clothes littered the floor, mixed with empty potato chip bags and other junk food wrappers. He had nothing but a bath robe on, and couldn’t even remember the last time he’d showered. Or what day it was. He turned on the TV to a rerun of Price is Right. Getting off his ass, Anderson fumbled into his kitchen to cook himself up a bowl of cereal. Opening the fridge, he smelled the milk, disappointed it had gone sour. Only a week after its best before date. He’d had milk last twice that long.

Pouring the Fruit Loops into the cleanest bowl he could find on a counter littered with dirty dishes, Anderson was just about to collapse back on the couch and enjoy the comedy stylings of Drew Carry when his phone went off. He almost spilled his bowl of cereal in his lap as the loud ringtone blared. He’d not heard the phone ring in weeks. Grabbing his cellphone from the table in front of him, he took one look at the number on the screen and answered it.

“Chief,” Anderson said into the phone before the person on the other end could talk. “Is it time?” He glanced to the detective badge still sitting in the display case it had been presented to him in. Untouched.

“I think two months is long enough,” Sergeant Chief Sue Harrington said on the other end. “I have a case I’m hoping will be perfect to ease you in.” She gave him an address.

“I’ll be right there,” he said, hanging up the phone. Getting off his couch once more, he made for the bedroom and opened his closet to the only clean outfit he had left. A three piece suit.

He sniffed himself. Probably best he washed up first. And shaved.

1x01 “Directly into the Fire”

Released on http://www.patreon.com/99geek on June 2018

Love is everything. It’s all encompassing and all consuming. When love grabs hold, good luck to any attempts at rationale. Good luck getting out alive. Like John Carpenter’s The Thing, love rips you to shreds, murders the person you were. And then becomes you.

And then it’s just gone.

“That’s him,” a voice in her ear said, and Sarah squirmed. She wasn’t used to having a hidden ear piece deep in her ear canal. She also wasn’t used to walking in heels, especially with so many eyes on her. She crossed the club slowly, approaching her target in as inconspicuously a fashion as she could.

“Bartender!” she called, leaning over the wooden bar. “I’d like a Dackery.”

“I think you mean a Daiquiri,” her target said, leaning over.

She smiled at the short haired person of interest. “Hello,” she said trying to put on her best flirt in the five thousand dollar dress she’d been given on loan. “You look dangerous, what do you—“

“Cut!” yelled a voice off set. Her target, a fellow officer of the OPP, sighed and shook his head. “Dangerous?” the detective in charge said, stepping onto their training set with angry stomping footsteps. “Are you trying to get yourself tipped off and killed?” She was a hardened older Asian woman, lead detective of Missassauga’s second precinct.

Sarah dug her finger into her ear, digging out the earpiece and slapping it onto the table. “I suck at undercover,” she said to the older woman. “I always have.”

“Then why volunteer?” Detective Jiao complained angrily, pursing her lips.

“I had to do something,” Sarah said, kicking off her clumsy high heels. “As long as the Cyclops gang continues distributing narcotics in our city, more and more poverty stricken kids are going to throw away their lives.” Jiao gave her a scrutinizing look. “Okay, I was also hoping having a role in bringing down the gang would finally push my application forward for detective.”

“I don’t understand, Officer Warley,” Jian said, her hands going to her hips. “You came with nothing but the most glowing recommendations from Sue. I can’t imagine any reason you shouldn’t already be up for detective.”

“I was,” Sarah said bitterly. “And then ‘extraneous circumstances’ happened and my badge, that was meant to be mine, got given away to a newbie. Some rookie officer fresh out of academy.”

“You mean some man,” Jian said, and she gave the officer who had been working the scene with Sarah a scathing look.

“What did I do?” the man said, frowning at both women.

“Go get changed,” Jian said to him with disdain. She turned back to Sarah. “You can return back to District three and tell Chief Harrington that we’ll be continuing with our sting without you. You can let her know that your performance was exemplary, and I merely thought your investigational talents would be best used distinguishing potential grow-op sites in your district.”

“Yes Ma’am,” Sarah said to her. She looked around the wooden training set to find her combat boots kicked into a corner.

“I’ll want that report on grow-op sites by next Monday,” she said sternly, but with a kind smile. “I’ll tell you the results of our sting then. Operation Odysseus can be a success if all the police precincts in Mississauga can just work together.”

* * *

As soon as Anderson approached the entrance of the bar, his nostrils were assaulted with the smell of what seemed like very off bacon. Burnt and rotten, it was a strange mixture the likes of which Anderson had never quite experienced before.

“Holy hell,” he heard his sergeant curse angrily, wheeling through the crime scene. He could see her over the shoulder of the officer blocking entrance to the bar, as she was wheeling towards the center of the establishment.

Stacy was there, a junior officer who had failed every exam he needed to pass to ever get a promotion. The oldest junior officer at their precinct. He was taking pictures of the scene with a large flash bulb camera. There was a flash as he took another one, along with a loud mechanical whir.

“I have a reoccurring dream,” Sergeant Chief Harrington said to Stacy with a chair between them, “this very same thing happens to me.” Anderson could hear the chief sigh. “Is that a rational fear?”

Stacy looked up from his camera. “I have a fear of spiders,” he told the chief. “But science apparently says we shouldn’t kill them. They’re good for the environment or something.”

Harrington shook her head. “Shut up Stacy.”

“Yes Ma’am.”

“Officer Richards,” the officer at the door greeted Anderson.

“It’s not officer anymore,” Anderson told the man, flashing his new badge.

“That’s right I’m sorry,” the man said, and Anderson didn’t blame him. He couldn’t even remember the officer’s name, a far worse offense. The man whistled. “Looking good though, Detective. You’ve got my condolences on everything.” He fumbled to step aside for Anderson to pass. “I’ve got your back” he said, trying to smile a disgusting supportive smile, “if anyone gives you trouble.”

“Thanks Officer Coulter,” Anderson said, reading the officer’s nametag. The man gave him a funny look. It was one Anderson ignored as he stepped into the bar and took off his sunglasses, placing them in a pocket inside his suit.

“Detective Richards,” The police chief said from across the bar, wheeling towards him. She was an older black woman in her fifties, trapped to a wheelchair because of a wound she sustained in the line of duty. Anderson had heard multiple stories of how she got paralyzed from the waist down, and they all contradicted each other. “I wasn’t sure you’d answer your phone.”

“Figured I couldn’t hide away forever,” Anderson muttered quietly. The pub seemed mostly evacuated except for a pale black haired girl at the bar. The establishment had the decor of the kind of place one would go to pick a fight with a biker. Neon lights on the walls, traffic signs. Novelty posters. It was exactly the kind of place Anderson would avoid, the kind of place his old partner used to frequent on the regular. Before everything happened.

“Eventually we’d stop paying you,” Harrington said, just passingly enough for Anderson to know she was kidding. She swiveled her chair around to lead him towards the cordoned off area of the bar. “You know I wouldn’t have thought of you for this case if I didn’t think it was your speed.”

“Didn’t think I could handle anything too hard?” Anderson asked her.

“I didn’t want to throw you directly into the fire on your first day back,” Chief Harrington said with a frown, giving Anderson a sideways glance, “considering what you’ve been through --” She trailed off.

“I’m fine.”

“Gonna feel weird calling you detective,” Stacy said, looking up from his camera, “Eh Richards?”

“Shut up Stacy,” Anderson muttered.

“Shut up Stacy,” Harrington said at the same time.

“So you’re gonna give me a case no one else wants,” Anderson speculated to Harrington. “Something under the radar to test my effectiveness.” The closer they got to the chair in the center of the cordoned off area, the worse the smell of burnt bacon assaulted his nose.

“It’s not a test,” Harrington said with a frown. “It might not even be a homicide. Do you believe in spontaneous combustion?”

Anderson’s mind raced as he mentally sorted through everything he’d ever absorbed about spontaneous combustion, trying the best he could to separate the myths from reality. “In warmer climates like California, the high temperatures can cause trees and compost to seemingly spontaneous combust.”

Harrington rolled under the yellow tape, and Anderson followed after her, seeing for the first time the charred ashen remains upon the seat. “What about people?” Harrington asked.

“Jesus,” Anderson Richards said, covering his mouth and nose from the smell. “That’s a person?” He realized the chief was staring at him expectantly. “It’s not nearly as common, I’m pretty sure. What do the witnesses say?”

“That the victim entered the bar with a pain in his stomach,” Sue told him. “Collapsed in that chair, and cooked himself inside out in front of everyone.” She thrust a thumb over her shoulder. “I left the girlfriend outside with a paramedic. The rest of the customers I sent home.”

Anderson looked across the establishment at the pale girl sitting on a stool and draining back shots of whiskey. “What about her?”

“She’s family!” an elder Asian woman yelled, coming down the stairs with a full garbage bag.

“That’s the owner,” Harrington told the detective. “She called it in.” The chief backhanded Anderson supportively in the stomach. “It’s your case now. You figure it out. Ask some questions, if nothing comes up just file it under unexplained.”

Anderson wasn’t a scientist. “Don’t I get the Brain Train for this one?” he asked the chief.

“God no,” Chief Harrington said, shaking her head and large bushy curly mane of peppered black hair. “If I thought this case was serious enough to pull them off Odysseus, I certainly wouldn’t have called you.”

“So this is like a case with training wheels,” Anderson said as Harrington wheeled past him for the door. “No offense, I’m just happy to know you have so much confidence in me.” He turned around to find the chief was already out the door. She was fast in that chair. “And now I’m talking to myself.”

“I’m still here,” Stacy said with his camera. “Least now we can see how messed up you are in the head after everything you went through, without putting other people’s lives in danger.”

“Shut up Stacy,” Anderson muttered. He hated when Officer Stacy was right. The elderly junior officer got back to his crime scene photos as Anderson turned around, pulling a notepad from his pocket and tapping it against his hand.

“I guess I should interview the girlfriend.” He said to himself. His head was messy with ideas and avenues he might take in tackling this, but he knew he had to just take things one step at a time.

“Doon’t do that,” a girl’s voice said from the bar. “Leave her alone. I knew Alex.” It was the pale girl with long black hair. He approached her at the bar, quickly scribbling Victim = Alex into his notepad.

“What’s your name?” Anderson asked as he reached the bar and sat down beside her. She sloppily poured herself another shot of whiskey from the bottle the bartender had left carelessly with her.

“Dakotah Slade,” she slurred, draining back the shot in one gulp. He’d never seen anyone throw back straight whiskey quite that hungrily, not even his old partner. Witness = Dakotah Slade (Alcoholic?)

“My name is Detective Anderson Richards with Missassauga’s third district of the Peel regional police.”

“That’s a mouthful,” Dakotah said to him, giving him a quick glance through the corner of her eye. Now that he was looking at her, he could see she was beautiful. She had pale white skin, a sharp jaw line, angular nose, dazzling blue eyes, and a seductively wry smile. She was skinny, almost unhealthily so, and fitted in a tight corset under her leather jacket and massive black leather boots. They were like platform boots, with steel toes and a small flat heel, and they snaked up her leg to her knee.

“How many of those have you had?” Anderson asked her, his gaze falling on her shot glass as she filled it again.

“Not enough,” she managed to slur before taking another one. Her eyes seemed to water, and she was already swaying. Anderson scribbled out the question mark on his pad.

He’d had better get his questions out fast before she became too intoxicated to be of any value. “My chief said Alex came in with a stomach ache,” Anderson told the bar rat. “You think that might have been where the fire sparked.”

“You sound more like a white coat than a detective,” Dakotah said. “You sure you don’t belong more in a lab?”

“I wouldn’t argue with you,” Anderson told her. Stomach pains source of flame? “Are you aware of any food he ate in the last twenty-four hours? Something he metabolised that might-” he cut himself off, feeling like an idiot. “I don’t know. Like a litre of gasoline?”

“He was saying something about a new drug,” Dakotah said, pouring herself another shot. Anderson dropped his notepad in surprise onto the alcohol soaked countertop.

“You sure?” he asked, picking up his notepad with disdain. It was properly soaked through. He didn’t need it, however, to know he was on to something.

“Came in here bragging about it n’ everything.”

He threw aside his notepad. “Well at least now we have a place to start,” he said, giving her his attention. “What was the name of the drug?”

“I don’t know,” Dakotah said with a shrug and a shake of her head. Anderson frowned at her with disappointment. “Brienne might though.”

“Okay,” Detective Richards said glad to be done with the bar, and its burnt person smell. “Thank you for your help Mrs. Slade.” He got off his stool.

“Oh no you don’t,” Dakotah said, turning around and jabbing her finger into Anderson’s chest. “Detective Richards. She’s been through enough today.”

Anderson sighed, frowning at the beautiful pale young woman gently assaulting him with her drunken attitude. “I know how to talk to a traumatized witness.”

“What,” she said loud and sarcastically as she passed him to be the first out the door. “Did they teach that at police school?”

“Yeah actually,” he said with a frown.

He followed her to the door where Coulter had blocked her way out. “Sorry ma’am, you have to get permission from the detective on duty before I can let you through this checkpoint. In or out.”

“Let her pass Officer Coulter,” Anderson told the man, and he caught Dakotah stick her tongue out at him.

Outside the bar, numerous police cars had made a line in the parking lot, leaving just enough room for an ambulance to fit through. It was on the back of that ambulance that paramedics were looking over Brienne.

“Let me do the talking,” Dakotah said to Anderson.

He shook his head. “Absolutely not,” he said, but she seemed to take that as an affirmative and continued approaching. One of the paramedics got off the ambulance to talk to him.

“Is she alright?” Anderson asked the medic.

The paramedic nodded, muscular arms jutting from his T-shirt. “Who’s she?” he asked.

“A civilian helping me interview the witness,” Anderson explained.

“That’s oddly irregular,” the medic said.

Anderson shrugged. “She’s a friend. I thought she could calm the witness down.” When did paramedics start judging detectives on how they chose to do their jobs?

The medic surrendered with a shrug, and the detective passed him. Dakotah was already talking to the witness.

“I told him not to take it,” she told Dakotah. “Said we could just sell it and make some money instead. But you know what that moron was like.” Brienne had white freckled skin, and long brown dreadlocks that covered her large ear spacers. “Always chasing the dragon.”

“Ask her for the name of the drug,” Anderson suggested, joining them at Dakotah’s side.

“Do you mind?” Dakotah asked with a look at Anderson. She turned back to her friend. “This is the detective assigned to get justice for Alex.”

“That’s not my exact job description,” Anderson interrupted.

“Do you know what they called the drug?” Dakotah asked Brienne. Anderson was impressed how together Dakotah was, considering how many drinks he’d just watched her consume. In fact, he was rather impressed she made it out the door without falling over.

“Neither of us did,” Brienne said with a shake of her head. “We called it Rudolph as a joke, but the guy who sold it to Alex just said it was something new. Something we’d like.”

“Why Rudolph?” Detective Richards asked the girlfriend. Dakotah gave him a scathing look.

“It glowed,” Brienne said.

“Glowed?”

“I said I’d talk to her,” Dakotah muttered angrily.

“Glowed like how?” Anderson Richards asked Brienne.

“It just glowed,” she insisted. “Like an amber yellow.” She made a circle with one hand and stuck her index finger through it. “from inside.”

Anderson crossed his arms. “Who in their right minds would swallow something that glowed?” he asked rhetorically.

“You obviously don’t know Alex,” Dakotah said, accidentally using the wrong tense. If she caught her mistake, she didn’t correct herself.

“Do you know anything about the guy who sold Alex the drug?” Anderson asked Brienne.

“Maybe where they met,” Dakotah suggested.

Brienne nodded. “We followed him back to his apartment,” she told them. “I remember Alex remarking the guy was big. Notably so.”

“Do you remember where his apartment was?” Anderson asked her. She shook her head.

“No,” she said. Suddenly she straightened and fished her phone from her pocket. “Wait, maybe.” She started tapping furiously on her device. “We keep our location data on when we text each other. There’s no privacy between us.”

She frowned at what she’d just said. “There WAS no privacy between us.” She slowed, slouched, and her demeanor became somber as she remembered that the man she loved was dead.

“You know where this is?” she asked mournfully as she handed him her phone. It seemed to have a location highlighted on Google maps. “Somewhere in the Erin Mills area?”

“I know the low rise buildings around there,” Dakotah said, looking over Anderson’s shoulder.

“Yeah,” Anderson said. “So do I.”

Beside them, Brienne started to sob, and Dakotah stepped forward to give her friend a hug.

“I don’t know what to do with myself now,” Brienne said, sobbing into Dakotah’s small breast.

“Go home,” Richards told her.

“Try to get some sleep,” Dakotah said, giving her friend a warm smile with her cute small mouth.

“You should go with your friend,” Anderson said. “Make sure she’s okay.” He left them at the ambulance, returning to his car.

“Shouldn’t you have back up?” Dakotah’s voice said behind him as she hurried to catch up. “I mean, don’t most detectives usually have partners?”

“I had a partner,” Anderson muttered bitterly. Unpleasant memories of his partner resurfacing in his mind. “We didn’t really get along.”

“Then what happened?” Dakotah asked as they got to his parked blue 1990 Chevy Corvette ZR-1.

Anderson wasn’t sure how to respond to that question. “Then I got promoted,” he said at last. Going around his car, he unlocked the driver’s seat.

“Wait,” she said, looking down at his car. “This is yours?” her gaze fell on the forward lights, ducktaped open. “This thing is a clunker.”

“It’s old but reliable,” he told her. Opening the door, he got behind the wheel. She leaned over the passenger side and looked inside.

“Did the garbage come with the car?” she asked, observing all the fast food wrappings littered around his car from late night binges through the drive thru. “Open the door. I’m coming with you.”

“That’s absolutely not happening,” he said, lowering the passenger window.

“You closed my bar,” she said to him. “Where else am I supposed to go?”

“That’s really not my problem.”

Placing both hands on the roof of the car, she lifted her scrawny matchstick legs through his open window, and slid herself into the passenger seat, clicking her seatbelt into place.

“My friend is dead,” she said firmly. “because of tainted drugs being sold in MY city. I want to see justice.”

“YOUR city?” Anderson asked her with mock surprise. “And here I was thinking Sylvia Gray had been mayor here since before you were born.”

“Was she driving this car?” Dakotah asked him.

Anderson looked her over, and couldn’t deny he was attracted to her. There was something about her. It was obvious she was a complete mess, but a sexy sort of disaster you couldn’t look away from. Maybe it was the darkness in him, attracted to the darkness in her. Whatever it was, Anderson was certain she wasn’t about to just get out of his car.

“Fine,” he said at last. “You can come. But I want you to stay in here if anything happens.”

“Yes!” Dakotah exclaimed excitedly with a cheer and a pump of her fist. “You know,” she said, “I’ve been in a car with the police before, but never in the front seat.”

* * *

It wasn’t until she was all the way back at her precinct that Sarah noticed she hadn’t taken off the dress they’d given her for the training scenario. Only now, as everyone’s heads were turning towards her, did she wonder how she ever forgot. The dress was lacy and shimmered in the light a royal blue.

“Looking good Officer Warley,” the man behind the desk said as she stepped into the precinct. He was an elderly moustached man named Stan.

“Bite me Stan,” she said, giving him the finger.

Stan frowned. “She’s rude today,” he muttered to himself.

Sarah made it to her desk and begun typing up her report to the sergeant. She hadn’t gotten far into Detective Jian’s plans for Operation Odysseus before two hands planted themselves on her desk.

“Victim of the walk of shame, Officer Warley?” Derek said, leaning over her. Sarah was pretty sure he was trying to get a peek down her dress. She covered her C-cup bra with her arm and gave him a scathing look.

“I was doing undercover training,” she told him. “Can I help you detective Blake?”

Derek Blake had spikey black hair, that he obviously spent too much time grooming in the mirror every morning to look just right. Taking his hands off her desk, he slid one into the grey blazer of his suit, and popped a stick of gum in his mouth.

“When are you gonna give up this ice queen act and go on a date with me?” Derek asked, harassing her for what must have been the millionth time. “One date. Wear that dress and I guarantee it’ll be on my floor by morning.”

Sarah felt a shudder run through her spine. “Is that supposed to be a selling point?” She made a face, and tried to ignore the precinct’s creepiest detective to continue her work.

“Come on Warley,” Blake said. “Don’t be a prune.”

“You mean a prude?”

Derek leaned in so close she could smell his breath and feel it against her neck. “I’ve dated every woman who works here except for you and the chief. What’s the problem? You think you’re better than them? You gay or something?”

Sarah grabbed a pen on her desk. “How do you think I knew my first fucking day to avoid you?” she asked him. “I’d sooner date women than date you. Now back the fuck up before I jam this pen in your eye.” He didn’t do as he was told.

Instead he frowned and reached his arm across her keyboard to troll her backspace key. “Why are you always such a bitch,” he started to say but she didn’t even give him the chance. Springing from her chair, she grabbed his hand and twisted it behind his back, slamming him face first into her desk and knocking a days old cup of coffee all over the floor.

There was a quiet clapping, and across the sea of desks, cubicles and through a glass wall Sarah spotted Makayla in the science lab applauding her in support. A spattering of claps around the room joined with hers and quickly died away. The black computer nerd gave Sarah a nod and returned to her work.

Derek squirmed under her grip, but it was pretty clear while he’d been busy creeping on women, she’d been spending her time lifting weights in the gym.

“Let the hell go of me Warley,” he shouted, and she twisted harder until she got a yelp from him. “I’ll go to IA with this.”

“Show them the camera footage you mean,” Sarah asked, looking at the camera pointed right at her. “I guess I came to YOUR desk to harass YOU, pulled you from your chair, dragged you over here, and slammed you into my desk.” She leaned in close so that he could feel her breath on his neck. “You think that’s what the cameras will show.”

She released Detective Blake, his spray on tan doing little to hide the new shade of white he’d turned. Backing away from her, he looked down at the coffee she’d spilt on the floor and pointed to it. “Clean that up Warley,” he said loudly for the precinct to hear. A pathetic attempt to salvage his dignity in front of his men. “That’s an order.” With that, he turned his back to her and slunk defeated back to his cubicle across the precinct.

Sarah returned to her desk, she didn’t even get the luxury of a cubicle, and was about to get back to her report when a young junior officer bent down beside her desk to clean up the spill with a paper towel.

“That was really bad ass,” Claire said, cleaning Sarah’s mess.

“Did I give you permission to talk to me,” Sarah snapped, immediately feeling guilty but not being in the mood to be reminded of her old partner.

“Go easy on her,” he old partner said, Karl joining them at her desk. Sarah had been Karl’s mentor for years, and the time had finally come both for him to mentor someone of his own, and for her to advance to detective. A promotion that still hadn’t come.

“Did I ever go easy on you?” Sarah asked him, saving her progress before anyone attempted to troll her again.

“I suppose not,” he said with a shrug.

Sarah sighed and offered Claire a hand back to her feet. She threw out the soiled paper towels in Sarah’s garbage bin. “He ever try anything with you?” Sarah asked, referring to Derek.

Claire shook her head, obviously knowing what Sarah meant. “Detective Blake has only talked to me a few times,” she told Sarah.

“I always try to be nearby anytime we’re in the station,” Karl added. “At least until she gets used to things around here.”

“Well here’s your first lesson from your teacher’s teacher,” Sarah told the kid. Claire had blonde hair like Sarah’s but while Sarah’s was straight and to just under her shoulders, Claire’s was shorter and curved in a pretty bob at her neck. She had a wide innocent smile and blue eyes, looked no older than nineteen, though she was apparently twenty three. Sarah just turned thirty last week.

“If someone told you the hashtag me too movement meant the end of sexism,” she continued, “Someone lied.”

“Did you hear the news,” Karl said, Sarah’s words reminding him of something. “The new detective starts today.”

“You’re kidding me,” Sarah said, dropping her hand on her keyboard. At this rate she was never going to get her report done. “Is he here? I’ll kick his ass, where is he?”

“He’s not in yet,” Karl told her with a smile.

“I’ll tell you when I see him,” Claire said.

“Don’t do that,” Karl told Claire. “Didn’t you hear her? She said she’s going to kick his ass.”

“Right,” Claire said. “Sorry. So I should keep them away from each other.”

“Just stay out of it,” Sarah told her. “I’m sure this new detective is a big boy. He can handle whatever’s coming for him.”

* * *

“Thanks,” Dakotah said as Anderson parked his car across the street from the low rise Brienne had pointed out on her map. “This is the first real meal I’ve had in days.” Anderson looked down at his half eaten burger and almost polished fries. Dakotah had an interesting opinion on what constituted a real meal.

“You really think we’re going to just recognize this guy?” Dakotah asked, finishing off her second burger and stuffing the rest of her fries in her mouth before she even finished swallowing. “Also you gonna finish that?”

Anderson motioned for her to take it, and she did hungrily. “Your friend said he’d be notably large,” Anderson reminded the black haired goth princess in his passenger seat.

“Right,” she said between large bites. “Cause I’m sure there’s only one large man who lives in this area.” She shoved more burger into her small mouth, and ketchup drizzled on her chin. As she wiped it off, Anderson noticed a small crucifix tattoo on her arm, just on the inside of her wrist.

“What are you looking at?” she asked him. Her eyes followed his gaze. “It’s upside down,” she said, giving him her arm. “It means the devil.”

“But right side up it’s a symbol of Christianity,” Anderson pointed out, raising her arm.

“It depends on what mood I’m in I guess,” she said with a shrug. “Angel or devil.” She growled and shook her hair wildly over her face, giving him a dark look from underneath. With a slight smile, she stuck her tongue out at him and then kept munching down on her burger.

She looked back at him, her dazzling blue eyes gazing into his own. Finally he looked away, back out towards the entrance of the low rise.

“I feel like I should ask what happened with your last partner,” Dakotah said slowly, finishing off the rest of his meal. “Not that I care.” She smiled wryly at him again.

“And I could ask,” Anderson countered, “what you were doing drinking at a bar in the middle of the day.”

“I feel like you just answered your own question,” Dakotah said quickly. Anderson didn’t say anything. “I was drinking. Don’t change the topic. What’s your story.”

Anderson watched an old lady leave the building with her dog, the mutt instantly peeing on the door, apparently desperately holding it in. “It’s not really that kind of story,” he said at last, Dakotah waiting expectantly.

“What kind of story?” Dakotah asked, frustrated. She threw a fast food wrapper at him.

“The kind you tell people.”

“Oh boo hoo,” Dakotah said, pretending to cry. “Poor me, I’m Anderson Richards and I have two last names.”

“Hey!” Anderson said, throwing the wrapper back at her. “I bought you lunch.”

“So what,” Dakotah said. “I’m supposed to be your submissive girlfriend now?”

Anderson crinkled his nose. “Being someone’s girlfriend doesn’t mean you have to be submissive to them.”

“If you really believe that,” Dakotah said with a frown. “You’re not like any guy I’ve ever dated.” She clicked on his radio.

“terrorist attack on the Oakville city hall today where…” a voice on the radio started to say. Dakotah changed the station.

“News?” she said. “No thank you. Let’s get some music going here.”

“Look!” Anderson said, noticing someone on the sidewalk and turning off the radio. He snapped for her attention and pointed out the windshield at a huge muscular body builder type. “He seem notably large to you?” The guy was built like a linebacker. He was tall, like over six feet, and thick. He could have likely given Andre the Giant a run for his money.

Dakotah looked at where Anderson was pointing, then did a double take. “That’s one man?” The man turned into the building, opening the front door and stepping inside.

“He’s going in,” Anderson said. That he’d gone in the right address was enough for Anderson to think he had the right guy. “I need you to stay in the car,” he told Dakotah. “If I’m gone a long time, radio for back up.” He pointed to the CB radio under his dash. “Otherwise just keep the engine running.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice,” Dakotah said to him, filling him with confidence. “What are you going to do?”

Anderson opened his car door, and waited for a car to pass before getting out. “I’m going to follow him and maybe ask him a few questions,” Anderson assured her, leaning over his door. He closed it and started across the street.

The apartment building wasn’t more than seven stories, and looked suited for a lower income. For one thing, a glass pane on the door was missing, and covered over in cardboard. On top of that, there was a net that ran along the balconies, either to keep birds out, or keep people from jumping. Either way, the building looked cheap and tacky.

Inside, the lobby of the building was sparse, with shoddy misshapen mail cubbies for people’s mail and a hard wooden bench across from a large mirror. There were two elevators across from the front doors, and one of the elevator doors was just closing as Anderson stepped inside the lobby. For a split moment Anderson saw the shape of Alex’s large man on the elevator just as the doors closed. Anderson hit the button for the other lift, as he watched the numbers on the first elevator go up.

“He’s in the elevator?” Dakotah asked, sidling up beside him.

Anderson sighed, though he supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised. “I thought you said I didn’t have to tell you twice.”

“You could tell me a thousand times,” Dakotah said with a nod. “Don’t mean I’m gonna listen.”

“Alright,” Anderson said, noticing a door to his right. It probably led to stairs. “Call me when you know what floor he stops on.”

“Wait!” Dakotah called after him as he made for the door. “My phone is disconnected.”

He turned back to look at her.

“I haven’t paid my bill in months,” she said sheepishly.

“Use mine,” he told her, throwing her his iPhone. “Call work phone. Password is 4437.”

“Call work phone?” she said. “Wait you have two phones?” But the door was already closing behind him.

He rocketed up the cramped staircase, taking the stairs two at a time. Floor two. Floor three. His phone rang. He surged past floor four and answered it.

“He’s on six.”

Five.

“I’m there.” Anderson said quietly into his phone, trying to regulate his breathing as he opened the door into the hallway on the sixth floor. He just managed to catch sight of the large man as he stepped into his apartment and close the door.

“I know his room number,” Anderson said, crossing the hallway, and passing the elevators to the room the man had just entered. Six zero eight.

“Good,” Dakotah said over the phone. “I’m joining you.”

“No,” Richard said into his phone as the elevator behind him dinged. “Go back to the car and stay there until I’m--”

“Too late,” Dakotah said, stepping off the elevator. “I’m here.”

Anderson flailed his arms in frustration. “Of course.” He knocked on the door.

The door opened and the large form of the man they followed filled the frame. Dakotah took a step back, but Anderson wasn’t about to be intimidated.

“I’m Detective Anderson Richards, and this is my--” he tried to think of what to call Dakotah. “Civilian. I’d like to ask you a couple quest--” he was interrupted suddenly by a large hand grasping him by the throat and lifting him off his feet.

“I’m not going back!” the large man roared at Anderson, squeezing his windpipe and tossing him into the apartment like he was a ragdoll.

“Holy,” Dakotah said as Anderson struck a far wall and smacked the ground hard, “shit.”

“Oomf,” Anderson wheezed as the air was knocked out of him. Like a moron he tried to get back to his feet anyway and pull a gun. “Freeze,” he tried to say without air in his lungs. “You’re under a--” the man grabbed Anderson’s gun hand and crushed it in his large heavy hands.

Anderson screamed, trying to let go of the gun, but the man didn’t relent. Anderson was sure he felt a bone in his finger pop.

“I got him!” Dakotah yelled, jumping on the man’s back. The man threw her off easily, slinging her into a tall lamp. She snapped the lamp right in half as she hit the floor. “I don’t got him.”

He turned around then, and kicked Anderson so hard in the chest that the detective smashed through the closed wooden bathroom door into the man’s bathroom. He landed heavily on what remained of the door, taken right off its hinges, and could barely stay conscious as he watched Dakotah reach for something in her purse.

“That’s it,” Dakotah said, pulling a tazer from her purse and jabbing the weapon into the big man’s leg. She pulled the trigger and the large man screamed, spasming out of control from the electricity before smacking heavily into the ground. Dakotah sat herself triumphantly atop him, and noticed a cigarette pack on his coffee table.

“Don’t worry,” she said, snatching the pack of smokes, and lighting one with a lighter underneath it. “I got this.”

Richard tried to get himself up, reaching out his hand to steady himself, but his hand accidentally dropped into the cold water of the toilet bowl, touching against something solid. He really hoped to god it wasn’t poop.

And it wasn’t. Turned out in fact to be a Ziploc bag. Richard pulled the bag from the toilet and raised it for Dakotah to see. “Look what I found in the bathroom,” he said, rejoining her in the living room. The Ziploc bag contained a good twenty or more amber colored dimly glowing pills. “Now all we gotta do is drag this guy’s sorry ass to the car.”

Dakotah took a drag of her smoke. “We?” she said and laughed. “Hahaha, no. Honey, I’m too pretty.”

* * *

“Put your back into it,” The goth girl said, as the detective dragged the large unconscious man by his wrists to their car. Cale watched everything from his black SUV parked a couple blocks away, confident that they couldn’t see his face behind the tinted glass.

Dialing a number on his cellphone, he brought the phone to his ear. “You should probably expect some company,” he said to the person on the other end.

Was that her? Of course it was, Cale should have known he couldn’t put her behind him forever. It would only be a matter of time before they would be face to face again, and just the thought of that future moment made his heart race. He could still remember how she tasted, how she felt.

How she smelt.

* * *

“Special delivery,” Anderson said, dragging the unconscious and handcuffed form of the large man into the center of their precinct lobby. The public area was a large open concept lobby, with a large desk behind which Stan dealt with walk-in issues. To his left, their right, there was a gate to access the desks, cubicles, and offices of precinct three. “I need Interrogation room three prepped.”

“You’re Anderson Richards?” came Sarah’s voice from behind the gate, and she stepped through to join them. He’d noticed her a couple times, last time was when he’d been asked if he’d wanted her as a partner and Harrington had signalled her out through the window of her office. Apparently the detective badge had been meant for Sarah, and that she’d get the promotion anyway if he took her as his partner, but after what happened with his last partner he hadn’t been remotely ready to jump back in with another.

“Damn,” she said, whistling to the perp at his feet. “You caught that all on your own?” She was almost as tall as he was, stocky with thick muscular arms. Butch, with a pretty face and blonde hair to just under her shoulders.

He looked at her suspiciously. “Not exactly,” he admitted.

“Here,” she said. “I got it.”

“Oh no,” he said, getting between them. “This is my perp. That means I’m the one that questions him.” He didn’t trust her, anymore than anyone else at the precinct.

She crossed her arms, her face reddening. “I get that you don’t want me as your partner,” she said, which wasn’t exactly true. He didn’t want anyone as his new partner. He hadn’t considered how it might have come off to her, however. “But you’re gonna need my key to open the interrogation room.”

With a sigh, he handed the perp over to her. “Just take him,” he said defeated. “His license says his name is Gareth Delco. Just let me know as soon as he wakes.”

“Does he have something to do with the cyclops gang?” Sarah asked him, her face cooling.

“I don’t know,” Anderson admitted. “But he’s been trying to distribute some new narcotic,” Anderson showed her the pills. “I’m going to give these scary suckers over to the lab now.”

As Sarah took Gareth from Anderson’s hands, and Dakotah joined him from outside where she had been finishing her cigarette, Anderson heard the angry familiar voice of his chief from across the precinct. “Detective Richards!” she yelled, wheeling down the wide isle between desks to join him as he stepped through the gate.

“Who the hell was that,” the police chief asked harshly. “I thought your case was an accidental death.” She spotted Dakotah come in behind Anderson. “And who the hell is SHE?”

“Dakotah,” Anderson muttered, “meet Chief Harrington.”

Dakotah waved her hand. “Hullo.”

“Please tell me this is relevant to the case,” the chief asked Anderson.

“All of it. She’s a civilian assisting me on the case,” Anderson explained to his boss. “He-man back there might have pertinent information related to the case, and I need the brain train to analyze this potentially new narcotic that may or may not be related to the case.”

Harrington crossed her arms. “Well don’t let me stop you.”

Anderson led Dakotah through the automatic sliding glass doors into the Brain Train lab. Their lab was larger than the cubicles most officers and detectives were stuck with, and also was a little larger than most walk-in closets. But only by a little. It consisted of mainly one long work table, cluttered with more equipment and junk than Anderson thought possible in such a small area.

The three members of the Brain Train sat in a row along the work table, each working away on at least one or more computers of their own. “Dakotah,” Anderson said. “Meet Albert Kine, Makayla Davis, and Glen Spiner. Our Brain Train.”

Bert was a skinny German with blonde hair and always wore turtlenecks. Makayla was a young black hippie tech expert freshly flunked out of university after she hacked their mainframe to get one of her professors fired for being a sexual predator. Spiner was a black physicist with a very chill attitude.

“Vee are too busy,” Albert said, pouring contents from one beaker into many smaller test tubes.

Makayla didn’t look at them as she typed away at her keyboard. “I’m trying to track a target through nine thousand cameras across the city,” she told them, “and the formula I’ve written to run the whole thing keeps presenting me with a feedback loop. WHY?” They were formidable minds when they were apart, but Anderson found in his experience they worked best when they were focused on one problem at a time together as a group.

“I’m just playing Minecraft while I wait for a three dee model to finish rendering,” Spiner told them, pushing back from his computer screen. “What do you need?”

“It’s apparently a new drug on the street,” Detective Richards said, showing Spiner the Ziploc bag. “I need to know what’s in it.”

Before Spiner could grab the bag, Albert snatched it away.

“I vill take that,” the man said with a tone of resignment. “Giving it to him vould be like giving candy to a man with no teeth.” Makayla and Spiner both looked at him confused. “It is a vaste, yes?”

“Bert,” Spiner said with a shake of his head. “Jesus man, how many times I gotta tell you your jokes don’t translate to English.”

Makayla shook her head. “This is why we don’t have friends,” she said, suddenly spotting Dakotah and turning around quickly. “Uh hi!”

Harrington entered the lab behind them. “You think this might be drug related?”

“The evidence so far is consequential at best,” Anderson admitted to her. “Once I find a solid connection linking this new drug to the death of Alex, you’ll be the first to know.”

Harrington frowned, pulling Richards away from the rest of them, as far away as they could get in the small space. “If Alex’s death is in anyway connected to a new drug outbreak,” she said softly, “I’ll have no choice but to take you off the case. Sarah is running all gang and drug related cases, co-ordinating with Precinct two. I can’t have a detective freshly back from two months leave ruin everything they’re working towards in catching the Cyclops gang.”

“I’m still really loving that confidence, chief. I haven’t found any concrete links between my investigation and any Cyclops gang,” Anderson told his boss. “But until I’ve followed this lead, and questioned my witness, we can’t be certain of anything.”

Harrington sighed, leaning back in her chair. “I want a report on my desk Monday morning,” she said. “Before I come in.”

As Anderson watched the chief leave, Albert spoke from the microscope where he was examining the pill, “I vont ‘ave anything useful for a number of hours yet.” Anderson stroked the growing stubble on his chin.

“You know damn right this drug killed Alex,” Dakotah said angrily, leaning into Anderson’s personal space.

“Maybe,” Anderson said. Not that it mattered. If they were right, it only meant the worst case scenario. That the chief would take their case away. The same thing would happen if he found no conclusions in seventy two hours. So what was the right play?

“If they take the case away from you,” Dakotah continued, “I’m not gonna get the chance to avenge my friend.”

Anderson looked at her in surprise. “That’s what you care about right now?” she nodded. “Not that someone out there is distributing a drug that could potentially make innocent people explode?” He frowned. “I’m not about to let them take this case from me.” He turned back to the Brain Train. “We just have to solve it before the end of the weekend.”

Dakotah nodded again. “Well I’m glad you’re tackling this rationally.”

Anderson put his hands on the backs of Makayla and Spiner’s chairs. “Can you guys give me anything?”

Makayla seemed to be absorbing herself into one of the pills, her gaze turning hollow. “This is some trippy shit,” she told him. “Where did you come across these?”

“A toilet,” he said quickly, and she dropped the pill on the table.

“Okay,” Makayla said, wiping her hand with a wetnap, and smiling awkwardly at Dakotah.

“I can give you some of my initial impressions on the stuff,” Spiner said, sneaking between Makayla and Bert to look at one through Bert’s microscope. He then picked one up for presentation. “Like I can tell you these little things defy the very laws of physics.”

Dakotah crossed her arms, and even Makayla seemed interested. Bert kept working away at his microscope however, seeming like he already knew what Spiner was going to say.

“What does that even mean?” Dakotah asked what everyone was thinking.

“To sustain luminescence,” Spiner explained to them, “quite like these? They’d have to be consuming an awful lot of energy. At least proportionally speaking. Whether it be heat or kinetic or electromagnetic.” Spiner poked the pill in his palm. “These babies aren’t even hot. They have no fuel. They just glow.” He smiled and gave a small laugh. “It’s impossible.” The thought of defying the laws of science only seemed to excite him more.

“I seem to remember reading something about that,” Makayla said, turning to her computer and typing furiously on google. “A one of a kind material that surfaced in a recent auction.” She typed away as Dakotah leaned over her chair. She smiled up at Dakotah who smiled back.

“Here it is,” she said to them, giving Dakotah another smile. This time Dakotah was too busy reading over her shoulder to notice. “An item sold two years ago. Had scientists baffled due to glowing properties that seemed to defy the laws of physics.” She leaned back with a grin.

“Yes yes,” Bert said distractedly. “Ve’re all so impressed by your eidetic memory.”

“You wouldn’t think they would be so quick to sell something like that,” Anderson said, leaning over Makayla’s other side. She seemed only too happy to be their sandwich. “Does the article list a buyer?”

Makayla kept scrolling. “Scientific academies across the country put bids in but it was Mayor Sylvia Gray who had the winning bid with one point five million dollars.”

“Screw me,” Dakotah said absentmindedly. Makayla looked at the pale goth lady leaning over her shoulder and her gaze glazed over again.

“Okay,” she said, snapping out of it and putting her hand to her mouth. “Did I say that out loud?”

Spiner reached over and took Makayla’s mug away. “No more coffee for Makayla,” he said, taking a sip and making a face.

Anderson straightened, ignoring the nerds. “Why would our city mayor want a one of a kind rock that’s suddenly showing up in everyone’s favourite new drug?”

“And how could she afford it?” Dakotah asked with him.

Anderson looked at her. “Dude,” Spiner said from across the work table. “She lives in a mansion.”

“Okay but like how? None of this makes sense. So what are you going to do?” Dakotah asked. “Just walk in and ask her?”

“Why not?” Anderson said. “My badge gives me permission to do whatever I want.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not how that works,” Dakotah told him.

“So does that mean you would rather stay here with the nerds?” he asked, knowing the three of them wore the nerd handle with pride. “Or you wanna come with me to ask the mayor a few questions.”

“Which means what?” Dakotah asked Anderson. “You want me to taze her too?” The automatic doors opened, and Dakotah stepped through first.

“I wouldn’t do that!” Makayla yelled after Dakotah but she was already gone.

“Wait!” Spiner said to Anderson, getting up off his stool and approaching the detective. “It’s good to have you back. The badge suits you, if you ask me. As does the suit. Real sharp Richards.”

“Thanks,” Anderson said. As he turned to leave Makayla slapped herself in the forehead.

“Damn!” she exclaimed. “I should have asked for her number!” Her two friends looked at her with disbelief. “What?” she asked. “Would that have come off as too desperate?”

* * *

Anderson stepped through the doors of Mississauga’s city hall, a humble office building, and flashed his badge at the security agent by the metal detectors. Spotting a sign placing the mayor’s office on the third floor, he sprinted up the stairs with Dakotah on his heels.

“Couldn’t we have taken the elevator?” she asked after half a flight.

The mayor’s office was even smaller and more humble. The walls of the small office were a putrid greenish yellow, like that of snot, and there was a potted plant in the corner with a seating area and a few magazines. The mayor’s secretary had a desk by the only other door in the waiting room, and behind that desk sat a short plump woman with short reddish brown hair.

Spotting Anderson come in, the secretary got off her seat, and proceeded around her desk with a Microsoft Surface tablet. “I’m afraid Mayor Gray is in a meeting right now,” she tried to tell Anderson but he blew right past her. “Excuse me? Can I get your name.”

He turned around and flashed his badge. “My name is Detective Anderson Richards and the mayor is going to have to reschedule. I need to talk to her regarding an ongoing police investigation.”

He turned back around and opened the door to the Mayor’s private office.

“Wait!” the assistant called after him. “Before talking to the mayor you must sign a waiver!”

“Sorry,” Dakotah said, following behind him. “I don’t sign anything I haven’t read first. And I don’t read anything that doesn’t have pictures.” That made the assistant stop for a moment.

The office was also quite unlike what Anderson was expecting. Small and humble like the waiting room, it was also dark. The windows were covered and all the lights were off except for a number of candles.

“It’s quite alright Jane,” the mayor said, an elderly woman with long silvery grey hair. Her voice was rasp but melodic. “I knew the detective was coming.” The mayor sat in a large chair behind a simple uncluttered desk, adorned like the rest of the office with a number of simple candles. She signalled for them to sit down at the two chairs in front of her desk. “Please Detective Richards. Sit down. You as well Mrs. Slade.” Behind her on the wall hung what Anderson could only describe as a wizards staff right out from Lord of the Rings.

Dakotah looked confused. “You heard of me?” she asked, sitting down. She pointed around the room. “Aren’t all those like a fire hazard or something.”

“I don’t fear fire,” the mayor said, smiling at Anderson who had made a point not to sit. “Detective?”

“I’d rather stand,” Anderson said. “I thought you were in a meeting.”

The mayor nodded. “I was. You came at the perfect time. They just left.”

“How?” Anderson asked. “There’s only one door into this office.”

“They didn’t use the door,” the mayor said with a smile. “Is there something you’d like to ask me about Detective?”

Anderson frowned. “I’m led to understand you’re in possession of a very rare substance.”

The mayor nodded. “I’m in possession of many,” she said, pressing something on the underside of her desk. A hidden safe in the wall beside her staff opened with a click. “I believe you’re referring to this one however.”

She reached behind her, and opened the door of the hidden safe for them to see. Inside was a large amber glowing rock shaped roughly like a basketball sized football. “I think you’ll find the rock to be completely intact, exactly the same weight and size it was when I bought it. Were I to be mixing it into street drugs, you would certainly be able to tell.”

Anderson was done questioning how the mayor knew so much about them and what they’d been up to. “What’s the alternative,” he asked, choosing to just go along with it, “that your one of a kind rock isn’t so one of a kind?”

The mayor smiled, crossing her fingers in her lap. “It is an unimaginably vast universe, Detective Richards.”

Anderson sighed. “Alright,” he said. “Well as the world leading expert on this stuff, what can you tell me about it?”

The mayor looked at both of them and licked her lips. “Jane,” she said after a moment of silence. “Bring me a glass of water.”

“Right away Ma’am,” Jane yelled from the other room.

“I can tell you,” Mayor Gray said, leaning forward against her desk, “that I wasn’t the only collector of unusual items looking to get their hands on this rock.” She smiled grimly at them. “But perhaps it best I start with a story.”

Anderson and Dakotah traded a glance.

“There are those who believe that in the beginning of time another force besides just science ruled the physics of our world. A force much akin to what we call magic.”

Richard looked at his new friend again. “I changed my mind Dakotah,” he told her. “I want you to taze her.”

She didn’t seem to be paying him any mind, suddenly absorbed in the mayor’s crazy fantastical tale. “Magic?” Dakotah asked the mayor with wonder.

The mayor smiled. “They say something happened thousands of years ago that stripped our planet of that encompassing magical force,” she continued to explain, “and now all that remains are bits and pieces of items that contain mere remnants of that old power.”

It seemed Dakotah was eating up every word, but Anderson wasn’t buying it. “What does this have to do with our mystery substance?”

“There’s a group,” Sylvia Gray continued, “known as the Tempus Cult, that believes a time traveller from the past will come to our present day and bring all that magic with him. They hope to use a mineral just like mine in a ritual alongside that time traveller to return magic to everyone on Earth."

“Wow,” Dakotah said. “Can you imagine me with magic?”

Anderson crossed his arms. “But we’re just talking about stories and legends.”

Sylvia Gray nodded. “But if someone who believed in these stories got a hold of some of this substance,” she inhaled dramatically, “who knows what they might try to do with it.”

Jane came into the room, and handed the mayor a glass. Sylvia Gray took it with thanks, and drank deeply. “I believe I’ve told you two enough,” she said with a smile at them. “If I’m not mistaken, you have a suspect back at the precinct you need to question. Perhaps he can help you further.”

“How do you know so much about our investigation?” Dakotah asked Mayor Gray as she was getting up from her chair.

“I’m sure you meant his investigation,” the mayor said with a smile. “It’s my city. I make a habit to know as much about the goings on within it as I can.” She gave Anderson a nod goodbye. “Remember what I’ve told you and look into the Tempus Cult.”

“Oh we will,” Anderson said forebodingly. “And if need be, we will call on you again.”

Dakotah slapped him heavily on the shoulder. “I think she gets it dick,” the goth woman told Richards. “You coming or do I get to drive the cop-mobile this time?”

Once they were gone, Jane returned to the mayor’s side.

“I don’t get something, Ma’am.” She said to punctuate the silence.

“I’ve told you time and again,” Sylvia Gray said to her assistant. “Call me Sylvia.”

Jane gave a quick forced smile. “I can’t figure out why you didn’t just tell them the truth,” she said, not allowing Sylvia Gray to change the topic.

The mayor crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair. “I don’t think he was quite ready to listen,” she told Jane. “At least, not quite yet. It’s just his first day after all. Let’s see how much trouble he can get himself in.”

Next Time on Dakotah Slade Paranormal / Detective at www.patreon.com/99geek
Chapter 2: Detective Anderson Richards goes all in with a gamble that might not just put his own life in danger, but Dakotah’s life as well.

Next Month: The Aldonn Chronicles at www.patreon.com/99geek July 2018
Chapter 6: With Edward and Aldonn still recovering from the events that ended the last act, Frankie decides to take it on herself to warn the Mage Council of Lee’s impending war. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that they aren’t interested in her help.

August 2018: Isabol Tseung Voice News Chapter 1 of 5

September 2018: Adrift Homeless Chapter 6

October 2018: Dakotah Slade Paranormal/Detective Chapter 2

Previously on Dakotah Slade Paranormal/Detective:

Dakotah Slade is a broken love-lorn women who has spent her entire life falling for the wrong kind of men. Men who use her, men who abuse her. Men who dominate her, hurt her, and then leave her when they’ve had their fill. Most recently she fell in love with a very dangerous man named Cale, and it was a love that burned passionately until it was gone. Wallowing in her grief and self-pity, she’s spent months at her favourite bar on an alcoholic bender, spending what little money she had left. It was there she remained, until one day her friend stepped into the bar and spontaneously combusted. Now she’s teamed with similarly “broken” rookie detective Anderson Richards to get to the bottom of a new threat in their city of Missassauga Ontario Canada.

The victim’s girlfriend, Dakotah’s friend Brienne, told the unlikely duo that Alex had ingested some kind of glowing drug before the incident, and she led them to his dealer, a large elephant of a man named Gareth. He resisted, but together they were able to take him down, and unconscious they dragged him back to the precinct to cool off. Finding drug samples in his home, they got their “brain train” to analyze the pills, and the three nerds found them to defy the very laws of physics. Sharing that astounding attribute with a recently auctioned space rock bought by the mayor of the city, they visited the mayor who gave them an unbelievable tale of magic, a once ancient force on the world long gone extinct, and a cult who want to bring it back. They left her office having hit a dead end.

1x02 “Just Doing Recon”

Released on http://www.patreon.com/99geek on November 2018

When you live with someone long enough, they become part of you. When they leave it’s like they’ve taken a part of you with them. Like a hole has been torn in your heart. They leave remnants of themselves behind, reminders of the life you’ve lost. Their cup still on the table. The plushie you gave them last Easter left behind carelessly. Their side of the bed. Each one is a dagger tearing the hole in your heart wider and wider.

And deeper.

“We’re there,” Anderson’s sharp voice cut loudly through Dakotah’s passionate dream. She tried desperately to cling to it, Cale’s naked body thrusting into her as her hands rubbed against his shaven head. She could taste him, she could feel his girth inside her, smell his breath on her skin.

It took a moment for her to remember whose car she was in, and snorting she startled to attention. “I’m here,” she insisted groggily. “I’m okay.” She looked around, trying to take in her surroundings through the windshield. “Where are we?”

It appeared they were in a parking lot, but all the vehicles around them were cop cars.

“We’re at the station,” Anderson told her with a raised eyebrow. “You sure you didn’t want me to drop you off at home?” He asked, and she remembered their conversation prior to her passing out. No, she wasn’t going to be left behind. She was going to see this through.

“I’m awake.” She insisted.

“Well you’re not snoring anymore,” Anderson admitted with a small shrug. “So that’s a plus.”

Dakotah gave him a dark look. “I don’t snore.”

“I need to talk to you about Anderson,” Sara said, stepping into Police Chief Sue Harrington’s office. She’d finally managed to change out of that fancy dinner dress she’d been wearing from her undercover training, trading it in for activewear sweatpants and a T-shirt she had in her locker. At least now all the male officers weren’t harassing her with their eyes every time she passed their desks.

Chief Harrington’s office was wide, with wooden panelling on the walls filled with trophies and awards from the woman’s long career on the force. She also had a large ornate desk, with rounded edges that were easy to circle around. There was a lot of space in the office, and not much clutter. The windows all had electric shutters the chief could control by remote control.

“Detective Richards?” Chief Harrington asked Officer Warley as she glanced up from her paperwork. “Again, Sara?”

“Is this a bad time?” Sara asked, standing at attention in front of her commanding officer’s desk.

“It’s always a bad time.” Harrington said with a frown, leaning back in her chair. “If this is about why he got the detective badge over you, I don’t want to hear it.” Harrington shook her head, and crossed her arms. Her black peppered hair fell loose from its usual tight bun. “If you want your promotion, convince him to take you as his partner.”

“This isn’t about that,” Sara insisted. The chief looked at her darkly, and Sara buckled. “This isn’t JUST about that. You’re going to get him killed. Or his new friend.”

Chief Harrington sighed, rubbing her hands over her face. She looked tired. Worn down. “Detective Richards is a special case,” she told Sara.

Sara frowned. “I’ve been hearing that a lot lately,” she said, not wanting to let up. “Shouldn’t a detective solve cases, not be one?”

“Funny play on words,” Harrington shot back, “but as usual the truth is many swathes more complicated.”

Sara slammed her hands on the desk, leaning over it so her face was closer to the Chief’s. “There’s always a hundred excuses for why a woman gets passed on a promotion for a man.” She raised one of her hands and balled it into a fist. “I have worked SO hard. You don’t know how much I’ve had to compensate, and sacrifice, and compromise.” It always felt like she was handicapped somehow, just because she was a woman.

Harrington wheeled her chair back from the desk, so Sara could glimpse her useless paralyzed legs. “Don’t lecture me about compensating or compromise,” she said in a stern angry tone. “You couldn’t possibly fathom the depths of MY sacrifices.”

Sara finally backed down. “I’m sorry Ma’am,” Sara said, feeling guilty. She knew how little her boss liked to bring attention to her injury. “I didn’t think.”

Harrington rolled back under her desk, and leaned against it. “Do you know what happened with Anderson and his last partner?”

“Maybe,” Sara admitted. “I mean there’s rumours and whispers around the precinct. Even precinct 2 was talking about it.”

Harrington nodded over Sara’s shoulder. “Close the door.” As Sara straightened to do as she was told, the blinds on the windows began to turn shut, bathing the office in darkness.

“I can show you the bodycam footage if you like,” Anderson smiled smugly as Dakotah followed him into the precinct. He could see that he was getting under her skin. “It records audio and everything.”

“You don’t have a body cam on you,” Dakotah insisted, and Anderson pointed to a pin on his tie.

“Plain clothed detectives get a more subtle one when they’re in the field,” he explained. He could tell she wasn’t amused.

“Isn’t that an invasion of privacy?” Dakotah insisted. Anderson pointed to cameras around the precinct. As he did, he noticed Harrington’s door was closed. She was probably in a meeting. Good, best she not bug him anymore about trading off his case.

“We’re being watched at all times,” he explained to Dakotah. “And not just here, all over the city.”

“So the dystopian future is here,” Dakotah reasoned. “We’re already fucked.”

“The thing you have to remember,” Anderson said as he flashed Stan his badge and stepped through into the back of the precinct from the visitor lobby. He held the swinging divide open for her to step through after him. “it’s not like we have the money or resources to pay the number of personnel it would take to watch everyone one to one. No one has that kind of resources, you’d need billions to watch the other billions, and who would watch those billions. And what would be the point?”

“So that’s supposed to comfort me,” Dakotah argued. “No one is gonna watch me in the shower, because everyone’s probably too busy.”

“Even if someone was trying to follow the comings and goings of individual people, what would be the point?” Anderson argued back. “Unless you did something wrong, what reason would someone have to abuse the system in such a way as to track random citizens. Could the system be abused by authorities trying to solve a crime, or by political leaders spying on the activities of each other. But I really don’t think someone out there is wasting their time tracking the comings and goings of a twenty something alcoholic bar rat. Again I ask, what would be the point?”

“I can think of a few,” Dakotah said as they stepped through the glass doors into the Brain Train lab.

“As far as these bodycams are concerned, the footage is stored on a server and no one even sees it, unless someone has a need to look it up,” he explained to Dakotah. “It’s not like we have an overwatch keepings tabs on us twenty four hours a day.”

“But then there’s also an overwatch keeping tabs on us twenty four / seven,” Makayla said from across the small narrow lab where she seemed to be observing some red liquid in a beaker. It looked like blood. “And they don’t need bodycams to do it. But every camera helps.” She pointed to her laptop, where a piece of tape was covering her webcam.

“I’m trying to get her off conspiracy theories,” Anderson warned the young geek. “Don’t encourage her.”

“I think ‘encourage her’ is the only thing you can rely on Makayla to do,” Spiner said from behind a computer. Spiner could have been Makayla’s older brother, with similar wild hair, black rimmed glasses, and dark skin. But there was no relation. And the one person who had asked them once if there was, got a long ten minute lecture about how even suggesting so was very racist.

“Is our prisoner awake?” Anderson asked Spiner.

“Who knows,” replied the third member of the brain train, Albert.

“They don’t tell us anything,” Spiner explained, slouching over his computer. “We just run their numbers and tap on our keyboards like this.” He blindly started slapping his keyboard.

“Did you guys get yelled at from the boss?” Dakotah asked, with a giggle.

“Not exactly,” Albert said. “Apparently vee ask too many questions.”

“They’re just in a bit of a slump,” Makayla said. “Problem with authority or something. They’ll be back to normal by tomorrow.”

“You don’t have a problem with authority?” Dakotah asked her with a raise of an eyebrow.

Makayla shrugged, pouring the blood red substance from one beaker into another, and setting it to boil on a bunsen burner. “Naw,” she said. “I’ve had people asserting their authority on me my entire life. It just sorta rolls right off now. I smile, say, uhuh, and then go back to what I was doing like nothing happened.”

“So what are you doing?” Anderson asked her. “Testing a sample for a case?”

“Naw,” Makayla said as she slid a mirror over the beaker to catch the condensation. “It’s actually the red wine I bought last night. It’s really good, and was only fourteen dollars a bottle.” She slid the mirror out as she captured a couple droplets, and quickly slid the droplets under a microscope. “If I can figure out its composition, Bert is confident he can recreate the brew.”

“I was gonna say,” Dakotah nodded her head. “I thought he was the chemist.” She pointed to Albert.

“Chemistry and Biology, my dear,” Albert said from his slump beside Spiner.

“But we all dabble in each other’s fields,” Makayla told Dakotah. “Here and there.”

“I’m sorry I asked,” Anderson admitted. “What about the pills Albert? Do you have a composite report for the glowing rock yet?”

“It vas actually quite hard,” Albert said, lazily lifting a file beside him as if to hand it to Anderson, but they never got close to connecting before his arm dropped. “I had to separate the chemical components of the rock from all the trash it was mixed with.” Albert tapped his hand on the file. “You really shouldn’t take one of zese. Anyvay, I finally managed to collect a big enough sample to test. Based on every initial veading,” Albert explained dully the contents of the file, “both composite und spectral analysis, it’s a rock.”

Anderson dropped his outstretched hand. “Just a rock?”

“Und normal everyday rock,” he insisted. “A lot of silicon dioxide. Nothing spectacular to note at all.”

“Cool,” Dakotah said with a shrug. “So why does it glow?”

“Put in ze plainest English,” Albert told her, “it doesn’t.” He crossed his arms. “Based on my findings, ze thing is unexceptional at best.”

Anderson lifted one of the pills from their table. It still had the small amber glow, almost like a translucent NY-Quill had sex with the amber from Jurassic Park. He showed the pill to Albert. “Um…”

“Yes,” Albert nodded. “Vell, obviously my findings veren’t completely accurate.”

“Obviously,” Anderson muttered under his breath, dropping the pill on the table. “What about the Tempus Cult. Has anyone heard that name before?”

“Tempus is the Latin word for time,” Spiner piped in from his side of the desk, where he was resting his chin in his hands.

“That’s something,” Anderson said with a snap. “What else?”

“That’s all I’ve got,” Spiner said with a shrug, “It’s Latin for time.”

“It’s not bad,” Detective Anderson Richards heard Dakotah whisper to his side. He turned to see she was tasting Makayla’s wine, “but you can barely taste the alcohol.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing…” Makayla whispered back, though Anderson could hear them both.

Detective Richards crossed his arms. “For a team called the Brain Train, you’re not exactly holding up to your reputation.”

Spiner just shrugged, demoralizingly. “What did you get out of the mayor?” he asked with little interest.

“Her rock was intact,” Anderson said, pacing. He seemed to be the only one motivated and focused on the task at hand. “Which only goes to mean there’s more than one in play.”

“Also she fed me some bunk tale about a legendary source of energy that’s been extinct for thousands of years. I can’t ‘member the rest, It was really a kind of boring story, and it doesn’t help us with our case.”

“There vas something,” Albert argued. “The carbon dating came back putting ze collected rock particles to be about four thousand years old. Not necessarily exceptional for a rock. Vather young in fact. I vasn’t even going to mention it, but then your story.” He gestured to Anderson.

“For the record, it’s just a damned story,” he told the Brain Train, all three of them looking at him expectantly now, “and it wasn’t even mine. It was from that bedtime-story-reading-grandma of a mayor we have.”

“I voted for her!” Spiner voiced his complaint. “I take offense to that.”

“She believes in magic,” Anderson told Spiner.

Spiner crossed his arms. “Some people say love is the strongest magic of all.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Makayla said from the other side of the lab, looking longingly at Dakotah, but quickly averting her gaze to her beaker as Dakotah looked up.

“Trust me,” Dakotah told her. “That magic comes with a price.”

“Alright,” Anderson said, stepping back from them so far that the automatic glass doors behind him opened. “You muse on that for a while,” he told Spiner, “while Albert can run more tests on the rock fragments he collected. Makayla can do some research on the Tempus Cult…” she looked up at him as if she didn’t want to.

“That means tap tap tap,” he said, miming a keyboard.

“Yeah, fine,” she muttered with irritation. “After this.”

“Meeeeeanwhile,” Anderson said, dragging the vowel as he eyed her. “Dakotah and I are going to pay a visit to Popeye the Sailor Man in interrogation room three and see if he wants to tell us where he gets his spinach.”

“We are?” Dakotah asked, looking up from Makayla’s wine experiments.

“Richards!” a woman’s voice yelled through the open door behind him. Anderson turned around and stepped into the open precinct. Across their entire workspace, Sara had noticed his back and called to get his attention. “I need to have a word with you!”

Anderson crossed his arms again. “Does that word have to be across the entire precinct?”

“I know everything, Richards,” Sara yelled back impatiently. Everyone’s heads turned to face her, everyone in the precinct listening in on their conversation with transparent interest. “I’m sorry about your partner, I really am,” she outstretched her arms, “but I’m not like him.”

Why was Sara suddenly trying negotiate some kind of peace with him? Something had changed. “You,” he said, trying to read her face. Where had she just been coming from? Based on the angle of her body she had probably just been coming from the very place he was headed to. “You!” he repeated angrily. “You already talked to my suspect didn’t you?”

“Don’t be mad,” Sara said, lifting up her key. She stepped between the cubicles. “The chief gave me five minutes.”

“You bitch,” Anderson swore, everyone’s heads turning in his direction. Someone in the room audibly gasped. “You’re trying to take my first case out from under me.” He snatched the key card from her outstretched hand.

“Stop being a stubborn ass and listen to me,” Sara insisted. “We can share our information. You can trust me, God dammit.”

Anderson raised an eyebrow, giving her a disbelieving look. He started towards the interrogation rooms, happy to see Dakotah had his back.

“You’re in over your head Anderson!” Sara yelled after him. “And SHE doesn’t even have police training! You’re gonna get yourself killed! And your skank too!”

“Excuse me?” Dakotah said, stopping in her tracks.

“Fuck,” Sara swore. “I didn’t… I say the wrong things when I get upset…” She pinched the bridge of her nose, massaging a possible headache. “I’m trying to treat you with sympathy and restraint here.” She yelled past Dakotah at Anderson. He turned around too, the same disbelieving look on his face.

“Really?” Dakotah said. “This is sympathy and restraint?”

“Fucking stay out of this,” Sara said sharply at her, desperation in her tone. Dakotah shrugged, and caught up with Anderson.

“I think I can conduct my own interview with the suspect, Officer Warley.” Anderson waved for Dakotah to follow him. “Come along Dakotah.”

“This conversation went a lot different in my head!” Sara called after him. “Can’t we just start over?”

“Good night Sara,” he yelled back to her.

As they turned into the corridor they could still hear her screaming. She really couldn’t control herself.

“You can’t turn the fucking page and forget about me, Anderson!” There was a pause. “Detective Richards! DON’T WALK AWAY FROM ME!”

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU ALL STARING AT!”

“Maybe psycho Barbie has a point,” Dakotah said, as Anderson unlocked interrogation room three.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Anderson told her, choosing to forget Sara existed, much as she’d suggested.

They sat down side by side at the table. “She probably already told your captain about the drug connection,” Dakotah reasoned to him in a whisper. “Which means this is no longer your juris-thingy.

“Chief Harrington isn’t going to just take this case away from me,” Anderson insisted. “Not yet. She promised me till Monday. And out of respect, she’ll give me that.”

“Right,” Dakotah nodded deliriously. “Lets just end the drug trade on a weekend. What do you want to tackle next week, world peace?” She frowned. “You know who might be able to help you actually succeed at your goal? Officer Jennifer Aniston back there. I mean, am I even allowed in here? Or is this just another thing you’re gonna get in trouble for on my behalf?”

“You may not be a cop,” Anderson hissed at her. “But at least I can trust you. Or at least I can trust your current motivations.” He crossed his arms in stubborn finality. “And civilians sit in on interrogations all the time.”

“What is it with you and trust?” Dakotah threw a thumb over her shoulder. “Why not take Serious Sam out there as your partner? A goody two shoes like you, she’d be just what you need.” Dakotah frowned. “What the hell happened with your partner to make you distrust cops so much? Protect and Serve, remember. They’ve all given the hypocritical oath.” Dakotah stopped for a moment. “Or was that just doctors?”

Her eyebrows furrowed with thought. “But why would a doctor need to protect and serve?”

“Do you two love birds need a minute?”

They both turned in their seats, acknowledging the suspect handcuffed to the other side of the table for the first time since they’d come in.

The large incredibly muscular man named Gareth flexed against his tight handcuffs. “I told the other woman everything I know,” he explained. “In return she said I was gunna git a full pardon. Is that not happening?” He looked from Anderson to Dakotah and then back again. “Cause if it ain’t I’m gonna break out of my handcuffs here an’ make you two lovers kiss until your skulls cave in.” His handcuffs creaked noisily as he pulled against them as if to make his point.

Anderson leaned close to Dakotah, his eyes not moving from Gareth. “He’s bluffing.”

The detective leaned forward on his seat. “Mister Gareth Delco, I’m afraid my associate did not have the proper clearance to grant you your request.”

“This is bullsh—“ Gareth started to say, stretching his restraints to their limits.

“However,” Anderson said quickly, hoping the man wouldn’t do something they’d all regret. “I’d be happy to consider your full pardon if you tell me everything you told her.”

“Ya want me ta tell ya where ta find my distributor?” Gareth asked them, a smirk forming on his lips.

“Your drug killed my friend,” Dakotah said darkly. “Burned him alive from the inside out. It’s the least you could do.”

Gareth’s smirk dropped to a frown. “What do you mean it burned him alive?”

“Oh my god,” Dakotah said, reading something in his expression. “You’ve had some.”

“And you didn’t know what was in it,” Anderson reasoned with her.

“What it do to your friend?” Gareth asked Dakotah with concern.

“We haven’t been able to figure out, yet,” Anderson explained, sharing a look with Dakotah, “exactly what… caused the reaction that… killed Alex.”

“This is why you never ingest anything ya don’t know what it is,” Dakotah warned Gareth too late. “Never.”

“Look we can talk to the people who concocted this stuff,” Anderson tried to reason with the man. “Maybe they have some kind of cure. But we’re not going to get anywhere until you tell us where to find your supplier.”

“Distributor,” Dakotah corrected him quickly.

“Whatever the next level up is,” Anderson said with exasperation.

Dakotah raised her hand. “It’s like you’re here,” she told Gareth, raising her other hand just a little higher. “And they’re here.”

“I think he gets it.”

“Would you both stop?” Gareth insisted with frustration. “If I tell you the address will you leave me alone?”

“Yeah,” Dakotah said with a friendly nod. “That about covers it.”

Gareth tapped the baber in front of Anderson. “It’s a little off Mississauga road. A Thirteen forty two Sunflower Avenue.” Anderson quickly wrote down the address.

“Bingo,” the detective said, grabbing the paper from the table. “Let’s go.”

“Yeah!” Gareth yelled at him as they got out of their seats. “Get a room you two lovebirds! Come on back when you gotsa cure for old Gareth Delco.”

“Hey,” Dakotah said, shoving a finger into Gareth’s face. “I don’t love. I have two modes. I hate, and I tolerate.”

“Your modes rhyme,” Anderson muttered.

Sara watched them leave the room through a one-way glass mirror. “Dammit.”

“They got more out of the witness than you,” Chief Harrington said from her wheelchair beside Sara, though it was already obvious.

“They had more time,” Sara argued, fully aware she was just making excuses for herself.

“It was easy for him,” the chief explained, “because he had a partner he could work off of.”

“She can’t be his partner,” Sara insisted. “She’s not even a police officer.”

Chief Harrington looked at her watch. “For now I’m going to indulge his hunches,” she made her decision. “And when he puts this all in his report on Monday, I’ll assign him to work with you at clearing this mess up once and for all. I trust you can all find a way to work together.”

“How do you know he’s going to wait for Monday?” Sara asked.

“He’d be crazy to tackle this address on his own,” the Chief said, clearly tired. “The sun has gone down, Officer Warley. Give it a rest. I’m going home for the weekend. I’ll see you on Monday, Detective Richards’ report in my hands.”

The door closed behind the Chief’s wheelchair, and Sara was alone. Something the chief said rang in her ears. “He’d be crazy to tackle that address on his own.”

“What if he IS crazy?” Sara asked out loud, but no one heard her.

* * *

“I know this is going to sound crazy,” Dakotah whispered to Detective Richards as they abandoned his car, and she followed him along the dark sidewalk to the dark suburban home. “And I know I’m clueless when it comes to police procedurals,” she wondered if she meant procedure, but she kept going, “but shouldn’t we call for back up or something?”

“If you try and use some clever metaphor to suggest Officer Warley again,” Anderson muttered under his breath, “I’m going to leave you in the car.”

“You mean Wonder Woman on PMS?” Dakotah asked him.

He looked at her.

“I don’t even know what a ‘She-Ra’ is, but in my mind under ‘She-Ra’ I just picture her.” She liked getting under his skin, and watching him squirm.

“We don’t need back-up,” Anderson told her, leading them off the sidewalk into the darker front lawns, “because we’re just doing recon.” Dakotah lit a cigarette as she followed behind him. “This is it up here.” She took a puff, and tried to hide the glow of the cherry in their chosen shadows.

“We’ll scope out the area and put it all in the report,” Anderson explained, And Dakotah was impressed they were still keeping it to the book. Some kind of book. Somewhere. Maybe.

“Come on,” Anderson said, motioning for her to stay close. They creeped up the front lawn of what Dakotah hoped was the right building, she’d already forgotten what number Gareth had said. He brought them along the side of the building, and dropped to a crouch below a window. Dakotah leaned over him, trying to stay as low as she could without trying too hard.

“I’m just saying,” Dakotah continued. “Like her or not, I’d feel safer with pink ranger covering our back.”

“Quiet,” Anderson warned. “There’s people inside. I only agreed to bring you with me because you said you could be like a ninja.”

Dakotah took a puff of her cigarette as Anderson tried to peer inside.

“Are you smoking?” Anderson whispered harshly as he crouched back down. “How is that stealthy?”

“Calm your tits Solid Snake,” she argued quietly. “I didn’t exactly realize we were going all Metal Gear Solid when I lit this thing. I’ve got like five more puffs.”

“I don’t even get your reference.”

Dakotah took another puff, not wanting to waste her smoke. Sure she didn’t pay for it, having stolen them from Gareth’s apartment, but they were still valuable to her. They were good quality smokes. Belmonts.

“Well I don’t get where it’s written you can’t smoke while being stealthy.”

Anderson shrugged sarcastically. “I dunno,” he said. “They’ll smell it?”

Dakotah looked at her smoke. “I didn’t think of that.” As a smoker she often forgot how much her smokes smelled to people who didn’t smoke.

Anderson tried again to peer through the window, and this time Dakotah tried with him, pressing her cheek against his. His skin was warm against hers. She always felt cold.

They seemed to be packing everything they could into boxes, not just the product, but the equipment too. One skinny middle aged man in a brown robe was just finishing packing a telescope away in a box. A taller woman also in a brown robe that didn’t even cover her ankles grabbed a pile of files from the nearest table to their window, and she ran the papers through a paper shredder.

Anderson and Dakotah lowered from the window.

“I’m pretty sure that’s not how you make drugs,” Dakotah told Anderson. She took another puff of her smoke.

“They must know they’ve been compromised,” Anderson told her. “By Monday this place will be empty and they’ll be all set up in their new headquarters.”

Dakotah was about to ask what he wanted to do about it when a car pulled up on the driveway. Anderson glared at Dakotah’s cigarette, and with one last puff she stomped it on the ground. A large woman got out, as they pressed against the side of the building, and from what Dakotah could see this woman was even more built than the blonde inside. They were all wearing the same brown robes but this massive newcomer also carried an equally massive sword on her back.

“These people don’t dress like any gang I’ve ever seen,” Dakotah muttered under her breath to Anderson. There was a knocking around front, and the woman was let inside. Anderson put his finger to his lips, again cautioning Dakotah to be quiet. Ever so slowly he lifted up the window just a crack so they could hear what the three strangers were saying inside.

“Patricia?” a female voice said through the window. “What in the hells happened to you?”

“Hells?” Dakotah mouthed to Anderson. He put a finger to his lips again and she shot him a glare.

“Oakville didn’t go quite the way we planned Esther,” the woman with the sword spoke. “What’s going on here? What happened to our Mississauga operation?”

“We’re moving,” the male in the room spoke at last.

“Progress is hours behind,” Esther told the woman, “but we’ll be long gone before authorities show up.”

“How do you know you were compromised?” Patricia asked them.

“Our liaison in this region,” the man said. “He didn’t say when they would raid. He just said he was sure they’d be coming.”

“Which means they could still be days away,” Dakotah heard Esther’s voice interrupt.

“Or they could be right on top of us,” the man insisted.

“You know Davion,” Esther muttered. “Always the optimist.”

“We can’t have our Mississauga operation mess up Dalish’s primary agenda,” Davion insisted to them. “Not when everything is so close.”

“Trust me,” Patricia’s voice could be heard saying. “He’s doing a fantastic job messing that up all on his own. I hear he’s got quite a mess at the headquarters. I thought I’d wait it out till things were cleaned up.”

Anderson backed away from the window just in time to catch Dakotah about to light up another smoke.

“Seriously?” he hissed at her.

“I’m like a ninja,” she insisted. “Just with cravings.”

Anderson unfastened his holster, and pulled out his pistol, shifting off the safety.

“Oh, getting serious now, are we?” Dakotah asked as she followed him sneakily around the side of the building. “You know, I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I got one of those.”

“Not a chance in hell,” Anderson hissed.

“I think you mean hells.”

“Besides,” he continued like she hadn’t interrupted him, “I only came with the one. Lock up is very careful how much firepower they allow solo officers to rent out.”

They came to the back of the house, where a sliding glass door opened to a white kitchen. A smaller window was already open, and Dakotah could swear she could hear Beyonce. As they moved closer to the kitchen entrance, Dakotah spotted a young latino, with a thin moustache and dressed in the same brown robes. He seemed to be listening to headphones, but damn were they loud.

“There’s only one of them in the kitchen,” Anderson muttered under his breath. “I say we breach here.”

“Breach?” Dakotah repeated. “How? We don’t have back up, remember? Cause we were just supposed to be on recon.”

Detective Anderson Richards shook his head. “The mission isn’t recon anymore. We have to move in now.” He quietly opened the kitchen entrance. “Just cover my back.”

“With what?” Dakotah hissed after him. “My tazer?” she pulled it out of her bag anyway, holding it at the ready as if it were a gun too.

“I forgot you had that,” the detective said, patting her on the shoulder. “See,” Anderson said with a smile. “this is all going to work out great.”

“I found love in a hopeless place!” the latino sang out as they snuck into the kitchen. It seemed the song on his iPod had changed. It also seemed that he had finished packing the box he was working on. He turned to place it on a pile, and Anderson grabbed Dakotah, pulling her under the kitchen table.

They were so close, Dakotah could feel Anderson’s face nustle into her hair.

“You smell nice,” he told her, his hands seemingly extra careful not to wander from her shoulder.

“I haven’t showered in two days,” she whispered back coyly. Above them, the man in robes turned to pack a new box.

They silently crept along the tiles, harder for Dakotah in her large black clunking boots, and swung around the kitchen island to straighten up beside him on either side. The Latino man looked first at Dakotah, and then turned to Anderson who raised his gun at the man’s face. Dakotah reached up and pulled the earbuds from the man’s ears.

“Tell us where you’re taking the merchandise,” Anderson whispered at the robed man. “or I’ll shoot you in the head.”

“And then I’ll taze your balls,” Dakotah hissed from behind the man.

Anderson dropped his pistol to his side. “Actually just the balls thing,” he said with a grin.

“I can take you there,” the man told them, his voice hushed as Dakotah pointed her tazer at his groin. “to the holding facility.”

“What, through your army of goons?” Dakotah asked with a shake of her head. “That sounds like a bad idea.”

The man reached his hand into his pocket. Dakotah put her tazer closer to his crouch but he pulled out a simple set of keys. “You don’t understand,” he told them as he fumbled with the key chain. It seemed to have a hundred keys on it, at least. Filled to almost bursting. “It’s just right through here.” He stepped away from them towards what looked like the pantry.

“You sure about that?” Anderson said confused.

The man reached the pantry, sliding a key into the lock that didn’t look at all suited for a pantry. When the door opened, however, there seemed to be a large cave inside, much larger than that side of the building would allow. And the cave was filled with guns.

“What is this place?” Anderosn asked, looking through the door as the man they’d captured stepped through and turned around. “Do you have licenses for all of these?”

“It’s not for you,” the man said with a wave. “Goodbye.”

He closed the door with a click.

“Hey!” Anderson yelled angrily, opening the door after him only to find a completely ordinary pantry, filled with cereals and fruit by the foot. “What the hell?” The detective asked, stepping into the pantry confused. He placed his hand against one of the walls. “Where did the kid go?”

There was a click behind Dakotah and she turned in time to see the robed kid they were just threatening step through the kitchen entrance carrying a shotgun.

“Shit!” Dakotah yelled at Anderson. “He’s over here and he’s got a gun!”

Anderson raised his pistol and fired multiple rounds into the robed man, and he dropped heavily without getting a shot off.

“How the hell did he do that?” Anderson asked as they both came around the kitchen island, and he approached the body. The man’s shotgun was strewn to the side.

“You sure he’s dead?” Dakotah warned.

“They can teleport,” Anderson told her. “Not survive three shots to the chest.” He nodded down the hallway where he was pretty sure he heard noise. “Now they know we’re here.”

Dakotah stepped carefully around the body and grabbed the man’s shotgun as someone stepped into the hallway, a gun pointed at them in the kitchen. Anderson was ready for him, however, and shot him twice, the man thumping into the doorway and sliding down.

“We should go back,” Dakotah said as they slid to either side of the hallway entrance.

The woman Esther peered around into the hallway from a distant room, and fired shots across the hallway at the kitchen.

“What,” Anderson yelled at Dakotah, “like out the window?”

Dakotah shrugged. “Sure,” she said. “Call for help!”

“Fine,” Anderson seemed to relent to her. “You go do that,” he said, firing shots back as others joined Esther in the hallway. “Sara even, if you must. I have to stay and figure out what’s going on here.” He fired another shot, and his gun pinged empty. He pulled back to reload as the pantry door opened, and a man in brown robes stepped through carrying a machine gun.

Dakotah turned her shotgun on him, and pelted him with a blast, knocking him onto the counter. The force of the recoil was enough to launch Dakotah back into the fridge, bouncing off and leaving a dent. Her hair fell in front of her face, and she grinned despite the pain. “That felt good.”

Anderson finished reloading his gun, cocking the chamber back into place. “Seriously Dakotah,” he insisted. “Go back.”

He creeped down the hallway, and she followed behind him with her shotgun at the ready. “God dammit,” she swore, desperately wishing she could do as she was told. “You really need a fucking partner. So I don’t have to be risking my life like this.”

They came upon the room they’d been spying on earlier, and both Esther and Davion stepped out.

“Freeze!” Anderson yelled at them, pointing his pistol in their direction.

Dakotah tried to peer into the room, but there was no one else there. “Where’s the woman with the sword?” Dakotah asked them, and the two cultists seemed to glance to each other.

“She left when she heard trouble,” Davion told them sternly. “Left us to clean up the rest of this mess ourselves.” He turned towards the basement stairs.

“I said FREEZE!” Anderson screamed at the top of his lungs, loud enough to make Dakotah wince.

“Take care of them,” Davion muttered uncaring as he trudged down the stairs away from Anderson’s outstretched gun.

The detective eyed the cultist woman who seemed to be giving Dakotah a similar look. Dakotah frowned.

“You got this?” Anderson asked her.

“Sure,” Dakotah muttered, very unconvincingly. “I got Officer Sara Warley’s larger cultist twin, you go for that other robed fuck.”

Anderson rushed down the stairs after the seeming cult leader, while Dakotah stood her ground.

“You got me?” Esther asked, smaller than the third woman who had been there, but still a good bit more intimidating than Dakotah. She began to take off her robe, baring her large muscular arms bulging out from a tight sports bra.

“Uh,” Dakotah muttered with a gulp. “Isn’t it against your oath to take that thing off?” She gulped again. “Or something.”

“The only oath I made was to kick your ass,” Esther muttered, pounding her fists together.

“Oh shit,” Dakotah said, raising her shotgun. “That was a good line. Too bad I have all the delivery.”

She tried to pull her trigger, but Esther grabbed the barrel of the gun, and pointed it into the ceiling. Before Dakotah could do anything else to defend herself, Esther had planted a heavy hit into her gut. Dakotah reeled back gasping for breath, but Esther didn’t let up. Another punch hit her like a brick to the face. Another cannon of a fist blasted Dakotah across her jaw and she was pretty sure she felt a tooth loosen.

There was also blood. She definitely tasted blood. And on the third hit she was sure she heard a crack.

She was down, crawling on the floor and trying desperately to get away from Esther. “Jesus,” Dakotah muttered, spitting blood. “You win.”

Esther picked her up by her shirt and threw her into the hallway wall, smashing her through a wine cabinet and then tossing her effortlessly back into the kitchen.

“I give up,” Dakotah muttered, desperately grasping at the kitchen island to get to her feet. “I surrender, you bitch.”

Esther clicked on the stove, and laughed at Dakotah. Dakotah tried to raise her fists in defense, but Esther just reach past to grab Dakotah by the throat and bring her to the glowing stove.

Dakotah was on her knees at Esther’s side, bleeding on the tiles beneath her, her broken glasses eskewed on her face. She spit blood onto the kitchen tile and grinned up at the much stronger woman. “Fuck you bitch,” she goaded gleefully. “No matter what you do to me, it won’t be any less than I deserve.”

Esther slammed her head into the side of the oven, cracking her skull and ringing her ears. Her vision blurred and shifted like she were under water, and she almost didn’t even feel her cheek get pressed against the stove element. But she felt the searing pain as her skin melted. And she heard herself scream.

Detective Anderson Richards stepped out from the stairs into a cold dark dingy stone hallway that seemed to run under the building. As he stepped underneath overhanging cobwebs he noticed a faint glow, but as he turned the glow faded away. Then it returned.

“Explosive charges,” Anderson muttered to himself. “The OPP aren’t going to find an abandoned house here on Monday. They’re gunna find no house here at all.”

“That’s right, Detective Richards,” Davion’s voice came from the end of the hallway. “You might as well come out here. You’re outgunned.”

Anderson continued down the hallway, and stepped through the opening into a small room filled with dusty bookcases that lined the walls. The only light came from candles on a small desk, and on the walls between the shelves. Davion was standing behind the desk, two armed men behind him, and a heavy cast iron door behind them.

“As is usual from you, Detective Richards,” Davion gloated, “You’re far too late finding the corruption right under your nose to do anything but fail.”

“How do you know so much about me?” Anderson asked him, surprised the man even knew his name, let alone so much of his past.

“The Tempus Cult has people everywhere,” Davion explained gleefully. “Now really, detective, I don’t have time to tell you ALL our plans. Come on Esther.”

Anderson turned in time to see the large cultist Ester step into the opening behind him and drop Dakotah’s mangled form on the ground at her feet. The pale black haired woman looked dead.

“Your forgot this upstairs,” Esther said, sneering at Anderson.

“Dakotah!” Anderson yelled at her.

“I’m just gonna lie here in a bloody mess for a while,” she muttered, and Anderson’s heart started beating again.

Esther stepped around the desk to join Davion and the other robed men stepped through the metal door to places unknown.

“Goodbye Detective Richards,” Davion said, as Esther stepped through the iron cast door and he moved to follow her. “I trust we won’t meet again.”

Anderson charged for Davion as fast as he could, diving over the desk as the door shut closed with a loud boom. Anderson grabbed the door and ripped it open, but what he found on the other side was less than helpful.

“Stone,” he said out loud so Dakotah could know. Just a flat stone wall on the other side of the door. “Dakotah—” he called her name.

Cale watched the house from his SUV, waiting for her to escape.

“Come on,” he muttered, waiting and waiting. This wasn’t going to be the end of her. Not his Dakotah.

The house exploded, debris soaring out in all directions as the walls buckled and the second floor caved in on itself. The whole building collapsed, crushing down on the concealed basement, forever destroying any evidence of the operation in a fiery inferno.

Next Time on Dakotah Slade Paranormal/Detective at www.patreon.com/99geek in 2019
1x03: We’ll finally learn what happened in Anderson’s past with his ex-partner. And we’ll delve more into Dakotah’s past with Cale. And you can look for Makayla to cross over in January’s episode of Urban Fantasy setting off a three part crossover event that will include episode 3 of Dakotah Slade. After Makayla and maybe Sara show up on Urban Fantasy, Andrew and Mike will crossover onto Dakotah Slade, and then Makayla will crossover again in the next episode of Urban Fantasy. Will they be sharing vital information about the Tempus Cult, and working together to take them down? Stay tuned to find out.

Next Month on Adrift:Homeless at www.patreon.com/99geek in December 2018
1x07: There’s a lot more to Project Rebirth than just finding a crew. A lot of hard choices will have to be made. Kat and her team finally get inside the ancient ship to salvage. Sara gets to lead her first briefing. Jack and Tameka still have to prove themselves. And will Alec manage to escape his father, and his father’s scary friends?

January 2019: Urban Fantasy 1x07 *Start of Crossover 1/3

February 2019: Aldonn Chronicles 1x07

March 2019: Isabol Tsueng 1x02

April 2019: Dakotah Slade 1x03 *Crossover 2/3

May 2019: Adrift Homeless 1x08

June 2019: Urban Fantasy 1x08 *End of Crossover 3/3

July 2019: Aldonn Chronicles 1x08

August 2019: Isabol Tseung 1x03

If you made it through all that, be proud of yourself. That was 56 pages of content right there. Post below in victory of your achievement.

99% Geek

Sunday, November 25, 2018

Dakotah Slade Paranormal / Detective 1x02 "Just Doing Recon" Released! Free for Thanksgiving! Full 3 chapters!

Act One
“Dakotah’s Coda”

1x00 “Ashes”

1x01 “Directly into the Fire”

1x02 “Just Doing Recon”

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Sunday, November 25, 2018

Dakotah Slade Paranormal / Detective 1x02 "Just Doing Recon" Released! Free for Thanksgiving! Full 3 chapters!

Act One “Dakotah’s Coda”

1x00 “Ashes”

1x01 “Directly into the Fire”

1x02 “Just Doing Recon”

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Post a Comment

Act One
“Dakotah’s Coda”