Sonny Mao had been drunk for three days.

Nobody in Bluestar or GAC cared much if he hurt mutants or drug dealers on patrol, but last week he killed one, and that meant Sonny got to hear his three favorite words: Mandatory Administrative Leave.

It was supposed to be a punishment, but it basically meant Sonny got to hang out alone at his beach house and drink himself unconscious for a week, and no one was allowed to bother him.

Those mandatory “punishment” weeks were the only time he was allowed to turn his phone off, and the only time he didn’t have to watch for Bluestar alerts, free to work through thousands of hours of recorded 20c football games and watch his old wrestling matches while he annihilated entire bottles of bourbon on his couch.

There were only two downsides. First, he had to wear this giant reinforced ankle monitor some DMA asshole had made for him, strong enough to dig into his skin and give him an electric shock if he tried to leave his property, and they put tubes on all his cars so he had to blow clean before they would let him drive anywhere.

It was always a little sad to stay at the beach house, thinking back to when he bought it for Shelly and her kids. Shelly turned out to be pretty mean, but Sonny figured he was pretty mean, too, and bad memories don’t really cancel good memories, if the good ones are good enough.

He wasn’t supposed to have kids, with his powers, so it was nice to have somebody call him Dad for a while. He had tried so hard to be worthy of that. Harder than he had ever tried at anything, but it wasn’t enough.

The money wasn’t enough, the house wasn’t enough, the jewelry wasn’t enough, and then he wasn’t enough, when Shelly said she couldn’t handle the long days and nights without him and had Sonny’s own manager come to get her stuff.

The kids weren’t allowed to talk to him anymore, but he was still holding out hope one of them might call him when they turned eighteen. He wouldn’t let Nikki get in the movie business, but maybe he could help her do something else, and it would be nice to go to the movies with Shawn again - a good movie, not one of his.

It took a lot of football and a lot of bourbon to keep him from thinking about Shelly and the kids, so Sonny was pretty far gone when his TV switched channels by itself. He tried not to watch the news when he was on leave, but the old Bears game had switched to a live feed of Boston Common, looking down on the scattered remains of Bluestar 7.

Jade was obviously dead, still in a way she had never been. He remembered her being in constant motion every time he met her, pacing and fidgeting, eyes wandering everywhere whenever somebody tried to make her sit still. To see her like this, lying perfectly still with her eyes open, wasn’t just sad, it was offensive. Like killing her was less of a crime than making her lay still.

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There were two demon dogs playing with Randy, trying to pull his gloves and boots off, so they could get to the hands and feet underneath. Sonny couldn’t immediately see what had killed him, but the front of his breastplate was soaked in blood.

He couldn’t see Phil or the Chinese guy, but there was another guy in a Bluestar jacket laying still on the ground, surrounded by a perfect circle of eight demons.

Sonny leaned in closer to try and look at him, and the boy’s vitals came up, showing his pulse and heart rate, proving that whoever this was, he was still alive.

Sonny hit the zoom button on his remote and realized it was Kovak, that sweet kid he met at Pink Sensation, that kid who was too innocent for the basement and too smart for Donna.

Sonny couldn’t imagine what the demons were saving him for, but it looked like there was still time for somebody to do something, and he couldn’t just sit there and let demons chew on Randy and Jade.

Sonny staggered to his feet and got a shock as he lurched too fast, making the monitor think he was about to try and run. The ankle monitor was just hitting him with little ones right now, but he knew the shocks would get worse as he limped across his driveway, buzzing hard enough to stun him if he tried to get in a car.

Sonny was about to reach down and rip the monitor off when it made a friendly beep. The light on the side changed from red to green, and it opened and fell off, all by itself.

He started to run for his door and remembered these were demons, and he had something special for fighting demons, if he could just remember where the hell he put it.

He’d be shit out of luck if it was still in the GAC compound, but Sonny thought it might still be in the beach house, from that time he showed it to Shawn.

It was a perfect copy of the broadsword he used in the first Angel of Death movie; a sharp one, not a prop, presented as a gift from his swordmaster after the film, meant to remind him that the techniques he learned were real, even if he had to mix in a bunch of Hollywood bullshit when he was on camera.

That sword was special for a lot of reasons, including one he could never tell anyone, from the time he brought it to a Bluestar convention and let a bunch of the young guys hold it.

Most of the young heroes were just casually fucking around, but one guy hung back and waited until everybody else had cleared out. He asked if he could hold the sword for a moment and busted out a routine that made Sonny’s jaw drop; so fast, so precise he could have taught Sonny’s instructor a thing or two.

Obviously, a sword-based superhero, but Sonny had never seen him before. Sonny asked him what team he was on and the guy said, “I serve the Angel Gabriel, but please do not tell anyone I like your movies. My brothers would not approve.”

Sonny Mao was not a religious man, but something about this guy, with his perfect hair and white teeth. The way he carried himself, and the strange note of shame in his voice when he asked Sonny to keep his secret.

Sonny said, “If you’re a real angel, can you bless it for me?”

And the angel said yes.

* * *

Now Sonny was frantically emptying closets in his beach house, plowing through a decade of clothes that didn’t fit anymore, searching for a demon-killing blade that had been blessed by an angel.

He found it in Shawn’s room, still safely in its sheath, and almost choked up a second as he realized what that meant. Shawn had been sleeping with it and had hidden it under his bed.

Sonny strapped the blade to his back and charged across the driveway to his hoverbike, only to be stopped by the dreaded breathalyzer tube. But he didn’t even have to blow in it. It just pinged and fell off like his leave was over, two days early.

Sad, groggy, and only weaving a little bit, Sonny Mao slammed the throttle on his flying motorcycle and pointed it toward Boston.