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“Kill him. Or I’ll kill you both.”
Annie raised her hands. Beside her, Homelander’s breathing bottomed out, turned shallow and sharp. Almost like he was turned on. She could have gagged. But that was so far away. Her mind narrowed. All she saw was Hughie’s face, resigned and soaked in whale blood and slime. All she heard was his own breathing, sharp and afraid. But even in this state he was stubborn enough not to let it show.
She felt the heat pour up out of her heart and roll through her veins and warm her flesh. Her fingertips hummed and crackled. The room glowed like the heart of the sun. Hughie’s face vanished in the brilliant, burning, beautiful, pure light.
Starlight.
And then the glow faded, and the darkness rushed back in, and Hughie wasn’t moving anymore. He slumped against the wall. His eyes slid shut. His chest stilled. His mouth hung open, slack. A wave of horror crashed down on her.
Homelander laughed, and out of the corner of her eye she could see his stupid, crisp, all-American smile firm over the hard lantern jaw. He clapped a rough hand on her shoulder.
“Atta girl!”
The air rippled beside her, and he was gone.
She was alone, with Hughie Campbell’s corpse.
The worst part was he would have wanted her to do it. Because he was a brave man. A good man. He wasn’t a coward, like her.
Annie spent the rest of the day in a daze.
The rest of the fugitives got away.
Except the terrorist. Stormfront razed a tenement to the ground and then broke Miyashiro’s neck with her bare hands atop the rubble.
Homelander was pissed.
Annie took some warped comfort in that.
The ticker on CNN read, WANTED FUGITIVES KILLED RESISTING ARREST!
Annie wanted to reach into her own chest and pluck out her cowardice and crush it under her boot. But she couldn’t. That cowardice wasn’t some alien evil nesting inside of her. It was her. She was a coward. She’d killed him—the first soul to show her real human kindness in so long. She’d killed him to save her own worthless life. She’d hardly even hesitated. She wasn’t a superhero. She wasn’t a hero of any kind. She was the lowest kind of fucking dirt.
Coward.
“Were you frightened? Chasing the terrorists?” the painted talk show hosts asked.
Coward. Coward. Coward.
"Yes. Of course,” came the canned plastic answer. “But I just had to remind myself what was at stake.”
Coward.
A-Train passed her by in the tower. He didn’t stop moving. He spoke quickly. His hand brushed hers. His whisper was hard and bent. “It hurts, doesn’t it?”
It sounded like an honest question.
Two weeks after she murdered Hughie Campbell, Annie January stood perched on the top floor of Seven Tower, toes scraping the perilous ledge. A thousand feet of thin air beckoned below. The wind bit at her nose and lips. It seized her hair in icy fists and knotted it into wild tangles. New York glowed beneath her. A rush of vertigo. She wondered how long the fall would take once she jumped. She tossed her mind back to AP Physics. Freshman year. Velocity equals—
“Careful, buttercup. I don’t wanna have to scrape your pretty ass off the pavement.”
Annie very nearly went tumbling over the side in shock. But she regained her balance and wobbled down from the literal brink. Stormfront had come up in total silence. The dark-eyed brunette leaned against the rail, hip cocked, smiling that tight, knowing little smile of hers.
“I was just—I like to come up here, sometimes,” Annie squeaked, suddenly ashamed of her suicidal ideation. She wasn’t sure she really deserved the release.
“Right. Sure. We all like our alone time.”
Annie suddenly felt very naked in her Vought-approved hero suit.
You can practically see up Starlight’s uterus.
The little joke was pushed back to the forefront of her memory and a burst of heat blazed beneath Annie’s skin. She sat back on the ledge. Stormfront watched her, eyes dusky and secret beneath curling lashes.
“I gotta say,” Stormfront lifted her hand and the tips of her gloved fingers crackled with blue lightning and wisps of fog. “I’m kinda impressed that you…you know…fried your boyfriend.”
Annie’s throat tightened. Bile gurgled up from the bottom of her stomach. How Stormfront knew about her and Hughie—maybe she’d wrung it out of someone in the Seven. A-Train or Maeve or even Homelander.
Or maybe it was just that obvious.
“I—I didn’t—I—what?” Her eyes might have been glowing, she couldn’t tell. Or maybe they were just hot with tears.
“Didn’t think you had it in you, but…” Stormfront reached out and tugged at a strand of Annie’s teased out, product-soaked blonde hair. “I suppose appearances deceive. Don’t they, cutie?”
Annie slapped her hand away. She wanted to throw herself off of the tower more than ever. She wanted—God, she’d craved this woman’s approval for months and she barely knew her.
She’d just dared to dream someone would—could—see past the mask Vought had tailor-made for her. She wasn’t some creature of the PR department and it drove her crazy to think anyone would perceive her as such.
And now after weeks of sneering dismissal she’d won a compliment from Stormfront. All it took to impress the new girl was a cold-blooded execution.
She felt like the vilest creature that had ever walked the earth. And viler still because that compliment did do something to lift her downed spirits.
“You should come back downstairs. It’s freezing up here. Especially in what you’re wearing. Or…aren’t wearing” Stormfront’s eyes flicked down Annie’s bare legs, and back up to her chest, and she felt as if she’d been stripped even of the sheer leotard.
Stormfront poured them both glasses of scotch in the lounge, Annie still shivering. And yet—“we’re not supposed to drink that stuff! It’s for conventions an—” she caught her own ridiculous force of habit goody-two-shoes reluctance before Stormfront did.
“Really?”
Annie swallowed. “No. You’re right.” She even managed to laugh, awkwardly. The first time she’d laughed since -
By midnight, she was blackout drunk. And it was the first time in weeks she didn’t hate herself so much it made her sick.
She poured her heart out to Stormfront and told her a thousand things she shouldn’t have. About her mother. About Capes for Christ. About the Deep. About Hughie. Stormfront sat in quiet repose, and nobody how much she drank, failed to betray the smallest sign of intoxication. Her eyes stayed sharp and her lips stayed tight.
But God did it feel good to talk.
And when she was drunk enough Stormfront knocked her knee against Annie’s thigh, and she asked, “how did it feel?”
“What?” Annie’s voice sounded far away from herself, and her tongue was heavy and thick.
Stormfront leaned in. Her warm breath pricked at Annie’s earlobe. The fine little hairs on the back of her neck stood erect, like static shock. “When you killed him?”
Annie was wasted enough she didn’t recoil or strike her conversation partner in the face. Her jaw dropped and she let out a pathetic little squeak. Stormfront’s hot, black eyes burned her skin.
“It hurt,” she finally managed.
Stormfront reached out and stroked Annie’s chin with a cool, gloved hand. “Poor thing. The first time’s always tough.” She went in for another whisper, and this time her bottom lip brushed Annie’s for the briefest moment and Annie’s flushed cheek touched to hers. “It’s an acquired taste.”
Annie woke up in her bed the next morning, with a pounding headache and a chilling realization last night had actually happened. The taste of vomit and scotch in her mouth was proof enough of that.
She couldn’t look at Stormfront for the next week, as little as she could look at herself.
Butcher and his people went underground. The next time the Seven were called out had nothing to do with anything. It was nothing. A fucking bank robbery. Superhero as superhero gets.
The wall of the building imploded in a shower of brick and mortar, as Homelander swept into the bank, brilliant and terrible. The ecstatic cheers of the hostages hammered at Annie’s eardrums and she bit her tongue to keep from crying, “shut up!” She examined the faces of the robbers—their dilated pupils, their pale skin slick with sweet, their flared nostrils. She usually felt bad. Even for guys like this. Going up against the Seven was no mean feat.
Today she felt only a cold contempt.
Homelander lasered a man’s arm off. It hit the ground with a wet slap, still clutching a TEC-9. Maeve hurled another guy through the nearest wall, and Annie heard a crunch that was probably crippling, if not fatal.
One tried to get away. Leapt over the counter and, dashed towards the vault. Dead end. Idiot.
Annie cornered him. He dropped his weapon. Fell to his knees, put up his hands. Annie raised her own hands and felt the hot, intoxicating pulse of golden power and—
“Wait, I surrender—I—”
Her heart stopped. For a moment, the man begging before her was Hughie. She froze.
Then the voice, right behind her, close enough she felt her hair rustle with Stormfront’s breath.
“Ooh la, la! Kentucky Fried Criminal?”
It was the first time she’d talked to Annie since that night. Annie’s heart sank. The first time anyone had really talked to her since. They all thought she was a coward or a traitor. And she was. Though to whom she was not even sure anymore.
But she lowered her hands. The thief breathed a sigh of relief.
Stormfront sucked her teeth. “Too bad, Star-girl,” she sighed, mock-pouting. “I wanted to see what you could do firsthand.”
Annie’s eyes got hot. She felt tears like boiling water on her cheeks. She looked over her shoulder. It was only the three of them. No one was here. No one would see. No one could see. The robber’s hands trembled. His face was twisted up in fear and pathetic suppliance, lip quivering like a child.
Stormfront hovered at her back, dark and imploring. “Come on, Starlight,” she urged. “Let me see you send him to hell.”
Annie didn’t know why that got to her like it did. Maybe she just wanted to hear her name in someone’s mouth, and to hear it on lips free of contempt. She just wanted someone to fucking like her again. Even if she didn’t deserve it.
Hughie was dead. She’d done that. If she could do that, well…who was this guy? Who gave a fuck? This stupid asshole came out here today with a gun, what the fuck did he expect? And now he wanted mercy? She hadn’t shown Hughie mercy, who the fuck was this bastard to beg for it?
She raised her hands again. The robber’s eyes blew wide. The overhead bulbs sputtered and sparked. “Wait, n—”
The blast was so bright Stormfront threw up her cape to shield her eyes. And when the light cleared Annie’s target was a curled, shrunken black husk, smelling faintly of barbecue. She gagged.
Stormfront laughed, and Annie hated that it was, in fact, a nice, pretty laugh.
“It really is nice to see you come out of your shell, blondie,” Stormfront placed a gloved hand on Annie’s bare arm and ran a finger down the length of her bicep. Annie’s skin tingled and her breath shortened. “Now, come on, we’ll be late for the media circus.”
That night they all got drunk, except for Homelander who retreated to his quarters with a dour frown on his face, as he was wont to do. The rest of them were fucking blitzed. And thank God—Annie was grateful for any escape from herself, no matter how artificial, no matter how fleeting.
A little past midnight, when it was only them and a passed-out Queen Maeve left in the lodge, Stormfront crooked her finger in command, and Annie, who could barely stand, obediently tottered over to join her on the couch. She put up little resistance as Stormfront slid an arm around her waist. The thick leather of her suit was starkly cold against the bare skin of Annie’s thighs and arms.
“Hey, I think I owe you an apology.”
“Hmm?” Annie struggled to keep her eyes open. Her mouth felt hot and sticky, her head like it was full of wet cotton balls.
“The way you fried that fucker today was beautiful, sweetheart. And I told you—gets easier, doesn’t it?”
Again, Annie was too drunk to protest the hideous compliment, or to do much of anything but enjoy the base flutter in her chest because someone thought she did something beautiful.
“How many?” Annie slurred.
“You’re gonna need to speak up blondie, the tequila’s gotten your pretty brains all mixed up.” She touched the back of her hand (still gloved, of course) to Annie’s cheek, and said, “oh my, my, you’re burning up!”
“How many?” Annie repeated, eager for answer. “Have you—”
Stormfront caught the question at last. “Oh!” She laughed and chucked Annie under the chin. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Then she waited a minute and said; “more than you.”
Annie laughed, and if she’d been sober, she would have hated herself for it.
She fell asleep with her head on Stormfront’s shoulder, and one of her legs tucked between Stormfront’s thighs.
“How is everything going, sweetheart?” Donna January’s voice oozed through the line—the voice, Annie thought, of a woman deeply concerned for her greatest investment. “God, that thing with the bank robbers—everyone’s alright aren’t they?”
“Yep.” Annie tensed the muscles in her jaw. And the thought churned at the base of her mind that she’d in fact preferred ‘sweetheart’ on Stormfront’s lips to her mother’s. “Fine.” She closed her eyes and saw Hughie’s face, cracking a dumb joke about Billy Joel. “Fine. We’re all fine.”
“I’m so glad.”
She spent the next hour bent over in a stall, crying into a wad of tissue paper, wishing she still believed in God so she could pray for death here and now. A thunderbolt would be merciful. A thunderbolt like—
Hers.
A few weeks later, Annie January took her third human life. It was a routine mugging. She and Stormfront only caught the crime by happenstance. In ten seconds, the two pistols lay useless on the ground, and the two criminals crumpled beside them, howling in pain, clutching shattered hands. Their intended victim had fled with her purse and without so much as a ‘thank you.’
Stormfront grabbed the first thief at the nape of the neck and put a few hundred volts of electric power through his skull. His screams broke down into a low gurgle, and then a dry crackling, and then he was silent, and a thick sludge of charred brain and blood leaked through his smoldering ears.
Annie held the second mugger in the air by the throat. He kicked and grasped uselessly at her hands. She felt his stubble scrape her glove. There was a comedy to it—a slight girl like her hoisting this heavy-set 200 pound ex-con up with one hand. She smiled. He was an ugly bastard, droopy eyes, squat face. She could feel his carotid artery throb hard against her palm. She could feel the sweat on his neck. She could smell it, iron, and salty. She could see his eyes big and deep with fear. His tongue was fat and swollen behind his lips. She smelled his breath, too, and heard his pathetic whimpers of fright. She hated him in that moment. She hated them all. Hated herself. Hated—
“There you go,” Stormfront said. Almost cooed. “Just slip your thumb under his jaw. And then snap up. One, swift move and you break his neck. Easy as pie, honey.”
The pet names were piling on, lately. Honey. Sweetheart. Blondie. Cutie. And more than anything, Annie hated the warm, soft fluttering they roused in her stomach. Hated Stormfront for inducing it, hated herself for such weakness, hated Hughie for not being here, hated herself again for being the reason that—
“Please—” the thief was begging. “Please don’t kill me. Please, just take me to the police. Please, I swear to God I—”
“Why?” Annie sneered. The varied strands of hatred winding through her heart coiled together and directed themselves against the helpless wretch in her hands. “So you’ll be out again in ten years? So that you can waste another decade’s worth of time, money, oxygen, and space? Is that why I should take you to the police?”
Annie heard Stormfront chuckle, behind her. It was heartening.
"Please!”
Annie didn’t snap his neck. She threw him back to the ground with such force the bones in his legs snapped. He howled in agony. She grabbed him by the chin and forced his face skywards. “Look at me!” The power flared through her eyes and she looked straight into his. And he screamed again, in pain, and then terror, and then both, as the heat and the light of the sun tore through his retinas, scorched away at the bone of his skull, burrowed into the ganglia of his brain and cooked every nerve ending, every quivering muscle between his ears. She’d never heard anyone scream that loud, until she blazed into ash the neural ties that bound the cerebrum and the throat, and the flames ate his face from the inside out, and his screams stopped. And when she let him fall back a corpse, there was only a warped husk of a skull where his head had been.
“Now that is how girls get it done!” Stormfront cackled.
Annie felt sick. She wanted to hurl. She felt elated. She wanted to sing. She inhaled the aroma of smoldering human meat. She struggled to identify the twisting, evil little sensation in her stomach.
Stormfront did it for her, when she shoved her up against the filthy fucking wall, with these two mangled corpses piled up at their feet and captured her soft lips in a vicious kiss. Annie squealed into her partner’s mouth, and then fell silent again as Stormfront’s deft fingers slipped between her skin and her white and gold leotard.
She cupped Annie’s cunt in her hand and purred, “oh, you’re wet? You little fucking psycho.”
Annie shivered and gasped, and instinctively closed her thighs around Stormfront’s hand.
The brunette ran one cold, gloved finger along her pussy. Annie bit her lip. Her eyes rolled wildly from side to side.
“Don’t worry, cutie—no one’s watching. And if they were—what the fuck are they going to do about it? Stop me?”
Stormfront fucked her right there against the cold, mold-ridden brick, while cars swept by a few meters away, and the corpses of their victims smoldered in their nostrils. Annie came hard, eyes wet, half-sobbing, thighs clenched around Stormfront’s masterful hand, her costume drenched through and through. Stormfront slid an arm around the girl’s narrow waist and let her ride out the orgasm. Annie pressed her face into her lover’s shoulder and whimpered. “There’s my good girl,” Stormfront giggled, smoothing down her soft blonde hair. Annie squeezed her eyes shut and cried.
They went on Mary Menuounos two nights after that. Stormfront bitched and moaned about it for three hours ahead of time. But she went on, nevertheless. “The viewers are getting bored with Homelander and Maeve,” Ashley explained (safely out of earshot of the two in question). “And Stormfront’s who everyone wants to see, right now.”
“So, you ladies have been working together a lot, haven’t you? There was…that bank robbery in Boston, the drug ring right here in Manhattan…not to mention Mosul!”
“Oh, Starlight and I, as it turns out, are quite the team!” She placed a hand on Annie’s shoulder for emphasis, and she tensed a little. “You know, her goody two shoes act aside, she’s quite the little devil when it comes down to the wire.” Stormfront cracked a smile.
Maria smiled too, a dumb, oblivious showman’s smile. “Is that so?” she turned her gaze to Annie.
“I guess…you could put it that way,” Annie said. “I do what I have to do.”
“And more,” Stormfront added.
Annie blushed, and dropped her eyes to her knees.
“You’re so cute in public,” Stormfront hissed into Annie’s ear that night, while she fucked her into the mattress at Seven Tower. “I honestly think even you bought your own little girl next door façade for a while.”
“Fuck—” Annie gasped.
“But you liked cooking that lowlife to death the other night, didn’t you?”
“No,” Annie lied, to herself and to her lover. “I didn’ fuckin—”
Stormfront curled two of her finger’s inside Annie’s cunt, pulling a sharp gasp and a mewl of heightened pleasure from her lips.
“Don’t lie to me, Starlight,” she growled, dangerous. The superhero name rolled off of her tongue with warm, scornful amusement. “You looked into his eyes and broiled his brains in his skull, and you were fucking wet when it over. Weren’t you?”
“Yes!” Annie admitted, as Stormfront traced narrow circles over her clit with her thumb. “Goddammit! I—”
She didn’t know why she’d liked it. She wasn’t a monster. She wasn’t like Homelander. She wasn’t like—maybe she liked it, because the more lowlifes she cooked, the more lives she destroyed, the less special Hughie was. The less singularly awful was the reality that she’d murdered him. He was just one more.
Or maybe, she thought, with crushing shame, as another orgasm bubbled up out of her belly, it was just because it made Stormfront like her.
Stormfront kissed her throat as she came, and then pressed her nose into her hair, inhaling the sweet scents of perfume and sweat. “God…have I ever told you how much I love blondes?” Stormfront laughed.
Annie fell asleep in Stormfront’s arms
A week later, Shockwave officially filled A-Train’s former position.
He reminded Annie a lot of herself. In those first few days of ignorant bliss.
“It’s…wow. It’s an honor to be here. I can’t even—”
Annie could actually watch his eyes sparkle when Homelander shook his hand.
“It’s good to have you on board, son.”
“Thank you, sir. I can’t even—”
“Right. Yes. Welcome aboard.”
Annie put on her best face when she greeted him.
“Hi. I’m Starlight.”
“I know,” he smiled. “Good to meet you.”
They shook hands.
Stormfront was sprawled over the couch in the common area, scrolling through twitter. She spared Shockwave a two second glance, a half-assed wave, and returned to her phone. “Hey.”
The next month saw Shockwave’s first deployment in the field.
The dismal Yemeni city of Dhamar was a Houthi stronghold. So here NATO command launched the Seven in a spectacular propaganda action, in conjunction with those champions of liberty at the House of Saud.
Raving jihadis with rusting Cold War Kalashnikovs were little threat to ‘Earth’s Most Mighty.’
Annie blazed away at half-trained militants. She sent three men through a wall with a thunder of crumbling stone and cracked bones. Another man she melted to his weapon, and he sank to his knees and she split his skull with the heel of her boot.
Stormfront raised a silent hand to heaven. The cloud-tossed grey sky opened. A cold, corded thunderbolt fell to earth with a titanic crash, tracing turbulent whorls of air its wake. The finger of celestial wrath fell upon an old hotel packed with rifle-toting Houthis. It collapsed in a blaze of cinder and blue fire.
Annie watched, awed. Her heart beat faster in her chest. The thrill of the moment swallowed up what moral direction and inhibition was left to her. She flicked her eyes sideways, saw the cruel little smile on Stormfront’s lips, could practically taste her heady delight—and found she had the same twisted pleasure running in her veins.
She burned out whoever remained alive in the ruins of the hotel. She blinded and scorched, and hardly noticed when her foes threw up their hands in surrender, or in fact had no weapons at all. They simply needed to die. Annie drowned her rage and the pitiful faces of her enemies—her victims—in those godly flashes of golden light. She would stop burning when they stopped screaming.
And when they had finally stopped screaming, and the hot Arabian air was thick with burnt meat and smoldering hair, Annie stood tall, eyes bright, and she felt the best she had in weeks.
Stormfront knelt and plucked a man from the rubble. His right arm was shattered, a mess of blood and bone. He sucked in labored breath, like a landed fish. His face and beard and torn fatigues were splashed with dust.
Defiant and cool as death thundered for him, the dying militant licked his bloodied lips and barked, “Allahu Akb—”
“’God is great’?” Stormfront snorted. “We used to say the same thing. Well, ‘God with us,’ actually. But the same principle. If it makes you feel any better, God left us in the lurch, too."
And then she cracked his skull in one powerful hand.
Stormfront and Starlight turned to look on each other, beautiful in the wake of uninhibited carnage.
And then Shockwave arrived.
“Oh my God.” He sped into the wreckage, pulling aside massive slabs of concrete and hauling dead or half-dead shapes into the crisp air. His two comrades stood by, watching, cold and distant. “Jesus,” Shockwave breathed. “Half these people are civilians.” His eyes lighted on Stormfront, thick with emotions mingling fear and disgust. “What the hell did you do? Starlight – “
“They shot at us,” Annie answered, flatly, hardly believing she was resorting to such a lame excuse. “So we shot back.”
“Oh, don’t get your panties in a twist.” Stormfront pretended like she was examining her fingernails through her gloves. “We sent them to their virgins.”
“Hey,” Shockwave spoke to a young man shirtless, bleeding from an ugly burn across the chest. “Hey, hang in there. We’re gonna get you help.”
Stormfront rolled her eyes.
She took Annie by the hand and dragged her off into an abandoned, hollowed out little pharmacy across the road. They fucked against the counter, Annie savoring the sweat and the blood on her lover’s skin.
“God, I love watching you butcher these fucking worms,” Stormfront hissed, as Annie’s trembling but dexterous fingers moved against her. “My pretty little psycho.”
Annie sparkled at the compliment, and her eyes glowed like lanterns when she came, as her victims died a few meters away.
Homelander was amused by the destruction when he arrived. “Wow. You ladies sure cleaned up here, eh?” It was the first time in a while Annie had heard him address her with anything less than spite or scorn.
“Just doing our job,” Stormfront smiled.
Annie tried to ignore the looks Maeve gave her.
Ashley scolded her at the next sit-down with marketing. “Starlight, your collateral damage stats are way up. What the hell’s going on, huh? Perpetrator fatality rates of 80%+ are unacceptable. This isn’t your brand. You…”
Annie tuned her out as Stormfront’s fingers trailed along her bare thigh beneath the table. It was true. She’d long by now lost track of her victims. And she really didn’t care. Every life she tore away added a hint of luster to her own, and the more corpses she put between herself and Hughie, the less it hurt.
That night, with her long legs wrapped tight around Stormfront’s waist, she resolved she was done sacrificing. She was done being a good daughter, a good friend, a good hero.
If she had to burn the world for a day of peace, so be it.