Other links:
Sapphire Angel, Superheroine (Book 1)
Power Play (Book 2)
Deconstruction (Book 3)
Savage Dawn (this book - Book 4)
VIOLENCE WARNING: The two stories in the Savage Gang saga, and especially the second story, involve a gang practicing extreme violence toward everyone — women, the elderly, the protagonist, etc. The stories contain mature sexual content and violence as well. I am placing this warning on all chapters, including those without such violence, so you can choose whether to continue.
CHAPTER 43
After the driver pulled up in front of the Hilton, Beth keyed in the fare and a tip on her phone, and stepped out of the vehicle. She looked around as the driver sped off, and cast nervous glances for anyone she might know.
Seeing no one familiar, she walked to the large glass doors at the front of the building and entered, making her way through the lobby and keeping clear of other people. The elevators loomed across the lobby from her, and she took careful steps toward them, reaching them without incident. The longer she was on her feet, the more steady she became, but she still failed on her first two attempts to press the button to summon an elevator. She stabbed at the button, her frustration growing, until her finger struck its target.
The button lit up, and she shook her head, annoyed with herself. As she waited, a white-haired man and woman came up to the elevators and gave her a polite smile. Beth forced a return smile, ignoring the throbbing that started anew in her head.
The car arrived, and Beth allowed the older couple to step in first, moving in after them.
“What floor?” the man asked her.
“Fourteen, please,” Beth replied. Lockheed was on the fifteenth floor, but Beth wasn’t planning on taking a direct route to her door. That wasn't how Sapphire Angel operated.
The man pressed the buttons for the eighth and fourteenth floors, and the elevator started its ascent. Beth watched the numbers tick past, and grabbed the elevator railing as vertigo kicked in. At the eighth floor, the couple exited, and the elevator resumed its climb. She leaned against the wall to steady herself for the final few floors.
When the elevator reached the fourteenth floor, she eased out into the hallway. She forced herself to stand on her own and not move to the wall for stability. After a few moments she became more steady, and moved down the hall toward the stairwell at the end. With each step, her confidence grew. Her condition had improved since the morning. At this rate, she would be better in another day or two.
Once in the stairwell, she made a slow climb, passing doors to other floors, and stopping at the entrance to the roof. Her climb took her longer than normal, as vertigo came and went at unexpected intervals. At least it was no longer a constant presence.
Beth paused at the door to the roof, gathering herself and thinking through what she needed to do. She didn’t consider that her head injury might be causing her to underestimate the task ahead, and clouding her judgment. She only knew that early in her career as Sapphire Angel, she had used this same route to access a room. This should be trivial.
Beth fished around in her bag and pulled back a hidden compartment in the bottom. Dizziness returned as she gazed down into the bag, forcing her to wait. After her vision steadied, she pulled out one of Stanley’s lock pick gadgets and held it to the door lock. Moments later, the locked clicked, and she pushed the door open.
A cold wind hit her when she opened the door, sending a shiver through her body. She longed to get into Sapphire Angel's costume, and bask in the comfortable warmth the necklace provided. She could have transformed in the stairwell, but there was less of a chance of being discovered up here in the darkness. Beth stepped onto the roof and closed the door behind her.
After looking about and confirming the hotel hadn’t added cameras since her last visit, she stood straight and took a moment to balance herself. She held a hand to her neck and closed her eyes, seeing a tunnel of light in her mind's eye. She sensed herself swaying, but continued her focus until a surge ran through her, like a jolt deep inside, but almost pleasurable. When she opened her eyes, she was Sapphire Angel, with warmth flowing through her, and her shimmering costume clinging to her slender body.
The superheroine surveyed her condition. She still felt woozy, but she was improving. She wished her necklace could quickly cure her symptoms, but she had learned early in her superheroine career, without understanding the reasons, that the necklace didn’t work that way. It protected her and healed damage she suffered while wearing it. Other injuries, incurred when not wearing the necklace, were slower to heal, as best she could determine. It was almost as if the necklace didn’t want her to cheat, and wouldn't help her in her day-to-day life. But she didn’t have much of a track record with injuries suffered as Beth, so she hoped she was wrong.
Sapphire Angel spied a thick pipe near the center of the roof. She eased into a crouch and retrieved her cylinder device from her boot, before stepping to the pipe. With the cylinder in both hands, she released enough cable to wrap around the pipe, making sure it was secure. She moved to the edge of the roof, two floors above Olivia Lockheed's room, and looked down. The blonde beauty felt unsteady, but not as bad as even a few minutes earlier. All she had to do was lower herself down. The distance was well within the range of the cable in her cylinder, and less than other descents she had made. Once on the patio below, it would be easy from there, because the only thing left would be to talk. Or so she assumed.
Excitement tingled through Olivia Lockheed’s body. Sapphire Angel would come. She must. Lockheed had thought Sapphire Angel might present herself the previous night, so the FBI woman had prepared for it. The heroine’s failure to appear had tried Lockheed’s patience, and sent her anticipation for tonight shooting through the stratosphere.
This encounter could be risky — she couldn’t be certain the incense would affect the superheroine — but the risk was well worth it. After meeting Sapphire Angel, and standing just a few feet from her, she knew any risk would be worth it. The costumed woman was perfection personified, and Lockheed had to have her.
As Lockheed ran her hands up the side of her leather corset, memories of the explosion at the gun shop intruded upon her daydreams. She growled, wondering if tangling with the Savage Gang was worth it. She wasn’t doing this job out of any sense of righteousness, but to prove to the world, and to her father, she could succeed. The pay in this job certainly didn’t merit the danger she now faced.
It was too late to run from the danger now, though. That wasn’t her style. But she would be cautious. She wouldn’t put herself in a position to get killed or hurt. Like Harper. She remembered the petite woman’s crumpled body laying against the wall of the vault. Olivia Lockheed wouldn’t end up that way.
At least some good had come from the catastrophe at the gun shop. A representative from the FBI forensics lab had called her a few hours ago, to tell her they might be able to salvage some information from the hard drives of the gun shop’s computer. Although the machine had been damaged in the explosion, the storage drives were partially intact. Those drives might prove helpful, if the tech nerds could access them.
Those thoughts would wait for tomorrow, though. Tonight, it was all about Sapphire Angel. A rush ran through Lockheed, just daydreaming about the costumed woman, with her luscious hair, long legs, and tight costume. Tonight could be epic.
In normal conditions, Sapphire Angel could descend the side of a building, using the cable in her cylinder, as fast as someone else might cover the same distance on the ground. Tonight, though, she took it slower. And instead of holding the cylinder with both hands, and trusting her superhuman agility to keep her safe, she took the added precaution of wrapping the cable around her waist before starting her descent.
The first hurdle was getting over the edge of the building. When the costumed heroine glanced over the side, a fierce wave of dizziness hit her, forcing her to grab the lip of the building and close her eyes. She eased them open, took a deep breath, and swung her legs out into the open air.
Stanley had calibrated the mechanics in her cylinder to her weight, so it would lower her at one of three speeds, depending on which button she pressed. A fourth button would halt her descent. She pressed the button for the slowest speed, and within seconds she was hurtling down the side of the building at a breakneck speed. She let out a yelp and pressed the button to stop herself, but a moment later glanced down and realized she hadn’t been plummeting down the building at all. In fact, she hadn’t been falling any faster than normal. Her vertigo had kicked in at an inopportune time, playing tricks on her brain.
Sapphire Angel looked up and saw the lip of the roof, only ten feet above her. She looked down and saw the street far below her. The heroine gulped as her vision blurred, and she gripped the cable tighter.
She needed to keep moving. In the darkness it would be difficult for anyone to spot her so far off of the ground, but she didn’t want to take any chances. She pressed the button again, and clenched her teeth as the world swirled around her. Through sheer determination, she kept descending.
After several seconds, Sapphire Angel felt as if she were swaying left and right high above the city, so she tried to rearrange her grip on the cable to steady herself. A mistake. In doing so, she missed the cable as she repositioned her hand, and her body twisted, with her feet flipping up and her head turning down. She lashed out with her free hand, lunging for the cable. This only loosened her grip with her other hand, and before she knew it, she was free falling.
Sapphire Angel gasped as she fell through the night air, flailing about to save herself, before the cable snapped taut where it was fastened around her waist. The force spun her sideways like a top as the cable started to unravel from her waist. As her hair whipped about her face and her skirt twirled around her waist, she waved her arms in a panic, trying to get another grip, but it was to no avail.
The heroine fell again. She didn’t have time to scream, as the remaining descent lasted five feet, before she smacked into the concrete patio off of Olivia Lockheed's hotel room, landing with a grunt.
The dazed woman brushed her hair out of her face and breathed a sigh of relief. She had been fortunate she had almost completed her journey before she fell. Perhaps this hadn’t been such a good plan after all. She rose, rubbed her shoulder, and said a silent prayer of thanks. But that pesky headache was back again.
Olivia Lockheed heard a noise on her patio. She smiled. It had to be Sapphire Angel. Her entire body trembling with anticipation, she moved into place. And waited.
Other links:
Sapphire Angel, Superheroine (Book 1)
Power Play (Book 2)
Deconstruction (Book 3)
Savage Dawn (this book - Book 4)
Okay.....I get that this chapter was supposed to be a tense buildup to whatever the heck Lockheed is planning on doing, but just imagining Beth (and later Sapphire) stumbling about and trying to recover from the gun shop injuries painted a somewhat-tragic and somewhat-amusing picture at the same time. The feeling of migraines and vertigo isn’t something that hits a lot of people too often, but when it does, it’s utterly unbearable. And here Beth/Sapphire is, needing to handle her superheroics on top of that. Just goes to show how much she’ll go through to ensure others’ future safety. But, like......I can’t help but go back to all the warnings and lectures from several of Beth’s friends regarding her activities as Sapphire Angel. At the end of the day, is it selflessness, heroism, and bravery? Or is it just short-sighted recklessness and obliviousness towards knowing when to quit?
I don’t know if it was meant to be slightly more dramatic, but the part where Beth struggles to hit the elevator button and the whole sequence with the cylinder wire reminded me of old-time slapstick cartoons where the characters take nasty falls---or just generally get injured or inconvenienced---in the most comical of ways just to get laughs out of the viewers. Also lightening the whole scene was the fact that she was already in the Sapphire Angel costume, so any “injuries” she’d receive would gradually get healed, anyways. So everything she suffered while actually getting to Olivia Lockheed’s area wouldn’t compound with her headache......at least not for too long, anyways.
Looks like things aren’t going to be so smooth from here on out, though. If we get a long, drawn-out, multiple-chapter sequence of Lockheed subjecting Sapphire to all the same torture devices as all the other past women.....goodness. I don’t think I’m going to be ready for that. I still have PTSD from Raven Tristan and Roy Valik. I still think some of our past adventures would’ve been so much easier with Raven and her skillset by our side; WarTech would’ve crumbled in less than half a day like a house of soggy cards, the Savage Gang would’ve had a much harder time communicating with their agents, allies, and associates with her running the lines, and Olivia Lockheed would’ve been completely isolated---and possibly condemned as a pariah---from the rest of the FBI if her sick leather-based obsessions were to get leaked to the public. Heck.....with Raven as the intellect and Sapphire as the fighter (not that Sapphire isn’t smart, too; she definitely is, by all means), they might’ve even dismantled Majid Azari, the silver-eyed man, and the ILA itself from the inside out. Communication is a big part of any army or entity’s strength; take that out, and they’ll be ripe for the picking.
(gasp) Or maybe Raven could’ve hacked into WarTech, recovered Roy Valik’s research notes on Sapphire Angel, and get them to someone who could continue his work, if not herself! ......Oh, well. This series still has at least two more novels left to go, so there’s plenty of time to see these characters again.
Are we about to get some “leather whip”, “glass shards”, “cat ‘o nine tails”-type stuff going on here? Like, BDSM? I don’t know about the long-term effects of this, but it looks like short-term, it’s going to HURT. And that’s not even getting into the “mental” aspect of all this.....just the “physical” aspect.
Time to find out on Monday!