Sapphire Angel - Superheroine

Chapter 19 - Rage and Planning

Veins bulged in the neck of Demarco Dominick, and his face flushed red. Two men sat across from him, squirming in their seats. Dominick pointed the remote at the television in the corner of the room, and turned it off.

"Damnit! What the hell was that? You got your asses kicked by a girl!"

Dominick was overreacting, but he had to get his frustrations out of his system now. His next meeting was the one that worried him. He'd be talking to the man with the silver eyes, and he needed to keep a level head. The strange man could, at the very least, influence the people who were funding Fizzure's current project. And those funds couldn't dry up now. His daughter's life depended on it.

The whole project would have seemed crazy if the man with silver eyes hadn't shown him evidence of its possibilities. Perhaps the evidence wouldn't convince anyone else of the project's full possibilities, but it was enough to convince the Fizzure CEO. Enough to convince him he could save his daughter.

The stocky man on the right, Rick Malone, wore a black skullcap on his head. He looked like someone had clubbed him in the face with a baseball bat. His nose was flattened and blood caked his face. Malone gazed down at the ground, not meeting the eyes of his boss. This enraged Dominick even more.

"Look at me when I'm talking to you!" he shouted as he pounded a fist down on his desk. Malone looked up, making his injuries even more apparent. Dominick took a deep breath, but his voice still quivered as he continued. "You were fucked up by a woman. You should have been able to break her in half."

"You've seen what she can do, Mr. Dominick," the other man said, pulling at his beard with trembling hands as he spoke, before jerking his hands back as if even his own touch caused him pain. And it probably did, as his face looked only marginally better than Malone's face. At least he met Dominick's eyes. "Nobody would have stood a chance against her."

Dominick glared at the bearded man, but did not respond. Instead he turned back to Malone.

"Perhaps it is too much to expect you to handle this woman. This Sapphire Angel. But you came close to showing your faces on video, and you barely got away before the police arrived. You were lucky it was dark out."

"We didn't know Gruden would meet a TV reporter," Malone said.

"You should have found out, first. After the botched attack at the hospital, I figured you would have learned to cover your ass before acting."

"The plan at the hospital should have worked," Malone said, his voice shaking. "It was just bad luck. Some girl showed up, and caught me in the act. I got the stuff injected, but she must've gotten the doctors to him in time. What more could I have done?"

He had a point, but Dominick would not concede it to him.

"You don't know who she was?" Dominick asked, gritting his teeth.

"No. But she really freaked when she saw me, so I'm guessing she knew the guy. Girlfriend, maybe?"

Dominick pondered this information for a moment. Girlfriend. Or perhaps family, or just a close friend of the Devor kid.

"How old was she? His age?"

Malone shrugged. "Maybe. She looked younger, but kind of deceptively so. Like she was probably older than she looked, if that makes sense. And she was a tiny little thing. Blond hair. Pretty."

Dominick tilted his chair back, and steepled his thick fingers under his chin. Between Gruden, Sapphire Angel, the Devor kid, and this girl, there were too many loose ends. Loose ends that needed to be handled.

"Gruden is our first problem," Dominick began. "He knows everything, and now he's shown he wants to talk."

"We can find him easy," Malone said. "He still hasn't discovered the tracker on his car, or the bugs in his house."