Twenty minutes later, Sylvia Dallas came swooping into the coffee shop with the force of a mini tornado. Walking with purpose, body practically vibrating in her anticipation, she moved straight to Claudia's table and sat down.
"Can I see it?" she asked with no preamble.
"Hello," Claudia said, lifting her mug slowly to her mouth. "Glad to see you again. How've you been?"
"Yeah, yeah," Sylvia waved the niceties away. "Show me what you've got. If we want this on the show this evening, we need to get it started now."
Claudia lifted the screen on her laptop, the first of the three photos centered on the screen, and turned the screen to face Sylvia.
Sylvia leaned forward, squinting at the image. "Oookay," she said, looking from the seemingly normal photo to Claudia. "Do you have more than this one picture? I'm not seeing anything here."
"I grabbed three," Claudia mentioned. "This is the first one. The last two are a little blurry, but after they saw me take the first one, they were hurrying to get the girl out of my camera's range."
Sylvia looked back at the first picture and studied it. "We'll have to blur out the Xanatos boys' faces. No one wants that wrath coming down on us. This boy," she pointed to the one that Claudia hadn't been able to identify, "Might be that boy that Detective Maza adopted a few years ago. It looks like him, anyway. The detective is really good at keeping him out of the press. I wonder," Sylvia said softly, "why he's there and helping the Xanatos family hide this girl?" Sylvia clicked on to the middle picture. "And it looks like it's the Xanatos boy that's hustling her out of there." She tapped the photo where Christopher had grabbed the girl's arm, in the act of trying to get her moving.
"I was curious about that as well," Claudia admitted. "And believe me when I tell you that they were mad. Two boys ran straight at me, while the third got her out of sight."
"Hmmm," Sylvia hummed, studying the picture. "So, what was this all important picture of a gargoyle in the daytime that you were so adamant that I had to see?"
"It's the third picture," Claudia said, pointing to the computer.
Sylvia clicked, and the third picture came up. She leaned forward, squinting at the action shot. "You know, someday they're going to be able to make digital cameras with high enough shutter speed that you don't get all the blur…"
"They do, but the camera they gave me was ancient," Claudia said irritated.
"The girl… something about her seems familiar…" As Sylvia trailed off, Claudia saw that moment she'd spotted the girl's wings. Sylvia's eyes shot up to meet hers. "This was taken today?"
Claudia nodded, smiling a little smugly. "Only about an hour and a half ago."
Sylvia looked out at the still bright and clear day, before turning to Claudia. "My boss is going to love this."
"Enough to get me a job on City Watch Nightly?" Claudia asked, trying to keep the hope out of her voice.
"Possibly," Sylvia hedged. "Let's get this to the studio, and we can talk to the reporters and writers together. We don't have a lot of time. We need to write the story, get some people on to talk about it. Margot Yale is always willing to come on and badmouth the gargoyles," she said, already trying to put the segment together. "I wonder if we could get that professor MacDuff again. Those two were entertaining, sniping at each other."
Claudia jumped to her feet and hurriedly packed up the laptop.