TRIUNE is now available

Triune — a novel by Willow Polson

Chapter One

The two men sat across from each other in the booth at the combination Japanese/Chinese restaurant in Reno, Nevada, and couldn’t have been more different. Or alike. One, the older, was in a three-piece suit with a strong features and slightly wavy brown hair. The younger one was much smaller, almost petite, with a more curved jawline and darker brown straight hair, almost black. But their eyes were the same. Soulful hazel eyes that occasionally met over the awkward silence and sushi.

They picked at their food, the television over the bar somewhat distracting, the decor a combination of generically Asian and Starbuck’s modern, neither style fully succeeding but not altogether unpleasant. It did nothing for their mood, however.

Their middle brother, Mike, was missing. Not missing exactly, but... not there, where he was supposed to be. And this had been intended as a celebratory lunch for him.

“Stop looking at me, he’ll call when he can,” muttered Barrett Mason, fiddling with the chopsticks and praying he didn’t drop anything on his new vest. He was never any good at using the things, unlike Brian, who had picked up the skill in elementary school during a week of Chinese-themed activities for the Lunar New Year. Brian was always picking up new skills and had a quick mind and clever hands.

“Yeah, I have a phone too, you know,” the younger man muttered back. He didn’t know why he was more tense than usual, but Barrett had a way of making pointed statements and setting him on edge sometimes. Not all the time, certainly, and less now that they were all grown and had their own lives, but at the moment he found the man’s words particularly grating. Brian chalked it up to being worried about Mike.

He took a calming breath and then smiled up at his oldest brother. “Look... he’s not here, but we are. So why don’t we catch up a little? He’ll be fine. Probably call soon and let us know what’s up.”

Barrett nodded, his bid to get the sushi to his mouth with chopsticks successful, and quickly finished the bite. “All right. You’re right. It’s nice to see you, Bri.”

Brian’s smile brightened and he reached over, touching his older brother’s hand briefly. “Great to see you too. How’s life in the amazing Silicon Valley? Start five more companies yet?”

He snorted a laugh. “No, just trying to keep the one I’ve got running smoothly, and that’s plenty of work right there. Import laws and taxes seem to change every five minutes. What about you? How’s the art glass business?” Barrett looked around for the soy sauce as his brother’s smile slipped a little.

“Three-plus years and you still don’t know what I do? It’s stained glass restoration. Well, mostly. I do new pieces too between the repair jobs.”

“Oh, right. I knew it was something with glass and art.”

Brian shrugged with a little sigh. “Fair enough. It’s not like we see each other that much. You’ve never even been to the studio.”

“Studio?”

A smirk played at the younger man’s lips. “Yeah, you know. Where I do my ‘art glass,’” he said, putting air quotes around the last words.

Barrett’s wry smile was similar. “Right. Hey, how are things with you and your partner?”

Now it was Brian’s turn to snort a little derisive laugh. “Oh him? Hardly my partner. Boyfriend, more like, and I dumped him two months ago. Caught the asshole smoking weed in my studio and it was like... no thanks. I don’t want it around. And I told him that at the start, too. The idiot.” He rolled his eyes and finished up the last of his sushi, then sat back a little to look at his brother. “Divorce go through yet?”

Barrett paused, then nodded. “Yeah, it’s... she got half, of course. So now she can buy as many goddamn purses as she wants. She’s keeping the dog, too. Her little obnoxious yappy dog. And good riddance to the both of them.” He shook his head derisively, but there was a hint of loss in his eyes. It had been a marriage of social status and convenience for the most part, but he still had feelings for the woman, and the new condo seemed so cold and big and empty. She’d gotten the house.

“Sorry,” Brian said.

“No, it’s okay. It’s just been kind of...”

“No seriously... I shouldn’t have...”

“Bri, you’re fine.” Barrett smiled a little sadly. “After all, here I am asking about your private life, it’s only fair.”

Brian merely shrugged and nodded a little, another silence settling over them. Mike should have been there with them, they were both thinking at that moment. He’d come in with some kind of smartass joke and break the uncomfortable silence like he always did when they were kids.

Their phones went off at the same time, and they looked at each other, then at their phones. A text message from Mike, brief but something, explained that he’d phone as soon as the plane took off from Las Vegas, and that he was going straight on to Sacramento instead of trying to stop in Reno. The brothers looked at each other, relieved but disappointed, each sending a quick text acknowledgment back.

“Well, to us and to Mike’s safe flight, then,” said Brian, raising his soda. Chuckling softly, Barrett did the same, then they both took a final sip as the bill came, the older brother taking it out of his younger brother’s hand.

“On me.”

Brian grinned crookedly and nodded, knowing that it was a pointless argument. Once Barrett set his mind to something, that was the end of it. He did, however, take the opportunity to grab first choice of the fortune cookies.

“You will find that good things come in threes,” he read aloud, then added the requisite in bed in his mind and chuckled a little. “Come by the studio at least? It’s only a few miles from here.”

“Sorry, I have to get back.”

The younger man mostly believed him. But partly didn’t. He let it go with a sigh and they hugged briefly, said their goodbyes, then Brian watched his older brother drive away in his upscale rental car, back to the airport and to San Jose and to his condo and business and life. Brian was alone again. They both were. All three of the Mason brothers, in fact, since Mike had never married anyone other than the Navy, and that had just finished chewing him up and spitting him out.

With a deep sigh, Brian slid into his little hatchback Subaru and just sat there for a while in the parking lot. The day hadn’t gone at all like they’d planned. But then neither had his life, for the most part. Orphaned at the age of one, realizing he was gay at the age of fifteen, somehow stumbling on a stained glass course at the rec center at seventeen near their Sacramento home, studying with a master artisan at eighteen who had died only last year and had left Brian, of all people, the entire contents of his studio there in Reno. A man he’d only known for three years, but who had told him he had a gift. Not just a gift, but “the” gift, whatever that meant.

He felt the studio calling him, an unfinished repair job for a local church on the massive layout table. The space was huge, a small warehouse really, built in 1890 of brick (a dated stone lintel over the door told that tale), the double-height ceiling featuring a huge skylight that made it perfect for doing any kind of art, but even more so for glass because of the quality of light it let in during the day. The old man’s own works still lived around three sides of the building, the ordinary panes in the ridiculously tall double-hung windows long since replaced by elaborate scenes of wildlife, saints, landscapes and angelic visitations. It was like a cathedral dedicated to the art of stained glass. And Brian called it home, a loft making the perfect sleeping space, a small kitchen and bathroom at the back of the workspace all he needed or wanted.

He arrived in his parking space, which was really just a patch of bare dirt next to the studio building on the outskirts of town. Ironically, what was now the outskirts of Reno had been a completely different town during the 1849 gold rush, but had eventually been overtaken by sprawling development until the last remnants had been incorporated as a nameless, half-derelict industrial area, with only a few old buildings still standing — the ones made of brick or stone that had survived previous fires. A few scorch marks darkened the bricks at one corner of Brian’s building to serve as a reminder of the time before electric sprinkler systems and telephones to call the fire department with. The huge metal fire doors that were in vogue at the time had served their purpose in keeping the wooden doors and windows inside from burning, and now rested under the eaves in the alley behind the building, along the one wall without windows.

Brian unlocked the front door just as Barrett opened the door of his rental car at the airport, and just as Mike walked through the door of the plane in Las Vegas. Coincidences happened frequently between the Mason brothers—so frequently that they’d all grown used to them -- although occasionally Brian would call out “Jinx!” as if to point it out, and they’d buy him a soda and laugh about it. But much less lately. They were rarely together since Mike had joined the military and Barrett had his hands full with a wife and corporation. Ex-wife, Brian reminded himself.

And Michael had been gone for what seemed like a lifetime. Basic training, combat training, SEAL training, then seven years in the desert, which had always seemed like such an ironic place for a Navy SEAL to end up.

Mike was always the more aggressive of the three, always trying new things and pushing the limits. He’d lost count of how many bones he’d broken, but he always came up smiling and ready for more. Six years older than Brian and six years younger than Barrett, he always had something to prove. He didn’t remember when he’d latched onto the idea of becoming a fighter pilot, but it carried him through two whole years of training before everyone involved realized that it wasn’t for him. A buddy suggested he try for the SEALs, and something clicked. He’d found his calling, and excelled... then found what war could really do to a man, physically and emotionally. After several years on active duty in the Middle East with the scars to prove it, visible and invisible, he was done. More than done. He was sent home with a Purple Heart after a roadside attack did its dirty work one final time, leaving his entire left side pitted and torn. The day’s lunch had been meant not just to celebrate him coming home, but to celebrate that he was still breathing.

Brian changed out of his button-down lunch shirt and into a more comfortable ringer tee, an old favorite that was now a little stained here and there from soldering flux and car repair grease and paint and who knew what else. He swapped out for his work jeans and favorite Red Wing black work shoes and then made himself some tea.

He preferred having tea with his brothers, of course, a habit they’d all picked up at their last foster home which was run by a proper Brit named Martha Wainwright who was big on tea. Even the littlest ones were taught proper tea time manners, and they practiced with sweetened cups of fruity herbals with lots of cream, the older kids moving on to the hard stuff (Irish Breakfast, and not the decaf kind). The cucumber sandwiches and strict Afternoon Tea customs fell by the wayside as soon as they were out on their own, but they retained a deep love for the beverage in all its varieties.

Barrett had an entire cabinet in his kitchen stuffed with a huge selection of teas from his travels all over the world, and enjoyed going to tastings like a sommelier would at a winery. Of course, the three brothers enjoyed their wine and coffee as well, but tea was special somehow, and it occupied a particularly large section in the wholesale warehouse and catalog of Mason Imports.

Barrett was twelve when their parents died, and Brian had often asked about them as they grew up, having no memory himself of their mother and father. But he learned to stop asking his big brother after he became old enough to see how much the questions bothered him. The self-made man could sometimes be found daydreaming in his office, looking out the window, his back turned to the room as he searched in his own mind for his parents, his childhood. But they weren’t much more than a few hazy vignettes. A moment at Christmas here, a smile in the back yard there. He knew they looked much like himself and his brothers, but that was primarily based on the two existing photos that they had, and it bothered him.

He was the one to take care of his brothers, even when the agency threatened to separate them, but he could not give them the one thing that mattered most — memories about their parents. And it ate him up inside when he let himself think about it, that and all the other things he wanted to do for them but couldn’t. So he buried himself in a sham of a socialite marriage, in his work as CEO of an import company, in his hobbies and classic cars and daily tasks of keeping his home and office spotlessly clean, almost obsessively. His brothers could take care of themselves, after all, so he could focus on keeping himself busy and... if not happy, than at least on an even keel. Even if it meant ignoring the very people he’d wanted so badly to provide for his whole life. At least he’d managed to keep them together until the last baby bird made his own nest.

“Sir...? The key...?”

The woman’s pleasant but firm voice suddenly snapped Barrett out of thoughts he didn’t realize he’d been in, and he smiled a little absently as he handed back the key of the rental car to the clerk. He walked with his planner to the little chartered commuter plane and got in, still pondering a few things, finally clipping the seatbelt and gazing out the window. In another few minutes, the plane skimmed along the runway, finally tilting skyward.

Meanwhile, Mike had stashed his military duffle containing his meager belongings in the overhead bin, and sat down very slowly in the window seat of the passenger jet. One rib was still on the mend and hurt like hell, despite the metal holding it together, his muscles on fire at having to bend into the seat. He popped another painkiller and sat back for a moment, closing his eyes.

Just another roadside attack. The news probably hadn’t even reported it, he thought to himself as he waited for the plane to start moving. He lost two from his unit that day, and wondered how he’d survived at all, considering. They figured a nearby car had been just enough of a shield that he’d been partially protected from the blast and had made it out alive. Scarred, but alive. Better than the alternative. And at least it had just torn up his side and part of his arm and left his face alone. He looked more like Brian than Barrett, a handsome combination of the two, and was relieved that his face hadn’t received more than a couple of surface scratches in the attack. He thanked his helmet for that.

The sickening force of takeoff pressed him back into his seat, ribs aching, and he knew he’d be ordering whatever tiny bottles of alcohol they offered on this leg of the trip. It was how he’d made it this far from DC, after all. While waiting, he entertained himself by looking out the window as the landscape grew smaller and smaller below. Then he noticed the logo of the airline in front of him, and squinted at it.

A winged heart. Isn’t that... Sufi or something...? Funny I never noticed that before.

Once at altitude, the seatbelt light turned off and Mike ordered a Jack Daniel’s since they didn’t offer Southern Comfort, perversely enjoying the burn of it going down his throat. He checked for the airline's promised internet signal for his phone, then hit speed dial, first trying his older brother. It clicked straight over to voicemail, so he left a message and tried for Brian, his leg jiggling a little with nerves and excitement despite the pill and the whiskey.

“Mike!”

“Hey, Bri. I’m sorry about earlier but they screwed up my flight, and I figured as long as it was FUBAR anyway and I was going to miss lunch, I may as well just go on to Sacto.”

“No, it’s okay. But are you coming to see me soon? I guess I can put off this project a couple days and drive to...”

“No, no... let me get home and then I’ll come up to see you, all right? I want to check out this place of yours, it sounds amazing.”

“Oh, god, it really is. Y... ha.... n............”

“Shit... Brian...? Goddamn...” The phone beeped weirdly and then the signal was lost completely. With a little growl of frustration, he shoved it back in his pocket and looked out the window at the mountains below, the plane heading up over the east edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Not too long now, and he’d finally be in his own bed. Or at least a bed. Barrett had rented him a little place in Sacramento, walking distance from his new desk job writing SOPs, and he knew it’d be slick and upscale and modern based on his older brother’s tastes. Fully furnished, too. Smiling at the thought of sleeping between soft, clean, white sheets in a safe, quiet place all to himself, he relaxed into the seat and hummed along to the music in his head, “Real Life” by Evermore. It had been stuck there for three days, not that he minded.

Wincing, he sat up straighter and idly looked around, wondering how much of a pain it would be to try and dig his MP3 player out of his bag. That was when a man caught his eye. He looked like any other person on the plane, but with one important difference — he looked afraid, yet calm. And not just a weird mix of the two opposing emotions, but like a man who had made peace with the fact that he was about to die, an odd glint in his eyes. He’d seen that look far too many times in the Middle East, in the eyes of men willing to die for their cause. Wild. Fanatical. Terrified. But with a fatal glory as they focused on their reward in the next life to give them the strength to push a button or pull a trigger. And the guy had something clutched in his hand.

Mike started to stand up at the same time as the man did, and they both knew the jig was up. As if in slow motion the scene unfolded, a man in a dark business suit at the back of the plane reaching for his Sky Marshal service revolver, the woman in the seat next to Mike looking up at him and then over at the other man, a flight attendant’s eyes widening in horror. He took a step toward the unknown terrorist, not even sure why he was doing it or what he was going to do to stop him, but he had to do something. Their eyes met one last time, the moment nearly frozen in time, and the button was pressed.

The blast from underneath the stranger’s seat knocked Mike back and sideways, his head hitting the luggage rack, blackening his vision for a moment and making his ears ring. Flames and blood and screaming and smoke gradually filled what remained of his senses as they returned. These were sadly familiar, having been his stock-in-trade for years, so recovery was quicker for him than for most.

At some point he realized that the torn shell of the plane was turning as it fell, and the people around him began to slip away, out into the open air. The undulating mountains below gave no sense of scale, making it impossible for him to estimate altitude. And it wasn’t like there were any parachutes.

With a stomach-churning twist, his frantic and half-dazed grip on the seat was wrenched away, and he found himself dropping into nothing. Light, beautiful, sickening nothing. He’d jumped before, of course, but with a chute and a mission. Now it was just about avoiding debris and body parts. But to what end? He was about to meet his maker, the grim reaper coming in the form of a patch of dirt in the middle of nowhere. If it was high enough in the mountains, they might not even find his body. A bullet would have at least gotten his brothers some kind of medal to send home with the coffin, as opposed to the lost, crumpled mess he was about to become.

He twisted away from what he thought was debris, only to discover it was a half-conscious woman, face and clothes charred from the blast. Her eyes were glazed, and she looked around, stunned, then at him. He angled himself carefully until he was able to wrap his arms around her.

Maybe my body will cushion her fall. Maybe she’ll make it that way.

Together, they started drifting over the outskirts of Reno. Mike prayed that they wouldn’t crash into an occupied house or a car on the road and kill someone else. The traumatic sight of his body, and possibly hers too, would be bad enough. Just then, a piece of the plane’s debris found his skull, momentarily knocking him senseless. Everything spun and went dark, the woman slipping from his arms, as the ground rushed up faster and closer. They were over a golf course now, it was the last thing he’d recognized before the heavy metal had connected with him, and he prayed that somehow she’d find a soft landing there.

Delirious, he reached out as if to help guide her, feeling himself tumbling over and over in the darkness in his head, his body feeling strange — heavy yet light at the same time. His last conscious thought was that of crashing through glass and then the final, sudden, awkward moment of impact.

* * *

The computer fed an energetic stream of music through the speakers in Brian’s studio. Nothing too angsty, nothing too perky, just a good solid mix of interesting songs to make the time go faster. Not that he minded his work — quite the opposite — but a large repair job on a hundred-year-old window could be pretty tedious, especially when trying to match colors that didn’t exist any more in the glass trade. This time it was St. Joseph of Copertino who had paid the price of the rock-throwing, and the exact color of his robe was not finding its mate in the vast selection of glass sheets, antique and modern, neatly stored in the back of the studio in their padded racks.

Time to call the glassblower in San Francisco again, he figured, and stepped away from the table to go after his cell phone that he’d set down on the office desk next to the front door.

“Wellllcooooome tooooo.... real liiiiiife....” he sang along with the song that had randomly shuffled onto the playlist. He’d always had a beautiful voice, and had considered joining a choir to fill the lonely evenings, not that most churches would have him. They tolerated him fixing their windows, because he was particularly gifted at it, but not joining their congregations.

That was when the ceiling came in. With a roar of breaking glass, banging metal and grinding masonry, some unidentified and massive shape plowed through the skylight and smashed into the back of the studio, a hail of debris mixing with the supplies stored there, creating a chaotic tangle of ruin.

Brian had instinctively crouched into a ball, arms over his head, and was miraculously unharmed. The trajectory of the object was somewhat diagonal, carrying it well away from where he was, a few small pieces of cement occasionally falling from the ceiling where the skylight had been, creating the only sound in the room as it slowly rained down upon Saint Joseph, piece by piece.

The youngest Mason coughed in the dust filling the air, shafts of colored light making it that much more visible and perversely beautiful. As the air began to clear, he slowly uncurled and could make out a dark shape in the rubble and mess of lead came and colored glass shards. He blinked, then blinked again, his brain unable or unwilling to make sense of what he was seeing. With slow, shuffling footsteps, he inched around the work table that stood between himself and the destruction and moved closer. He knew what he thought it was, but it simply didn’t make any sense. It had to be a trick of the light or some debris at an odd angle. But no, there they were.

Huge dark gray feathers, almost black, stuck out from the heap. The closer he got, the more he could see that they formed wings, battered and torn from the impact with his skylight, but not broken. But what did they belong to? The primary flight feathers were as long as his arm, and he couldn’t think of any birds that big that existed anywhere in the world.

He inched closer still, trying to get a look at what was in the middle of it all, afraid that whatever kind of huge bird it was would suddenly wake and attack him. He gasped, then coughed on more dust as he realized what it was.

A man. A man in some kind of military clothing, bloody and scarred. But still alive somehow, his shallow breathing just visible, glass shards and pieces of metal penetrating and impaling his body. One massive wing twitched and Brian jumped back in alarm. He stood there for the longest time, frozen, trying to understand, then grabbed a flashlight. He shined it first on the whole scene, then on the man’s face. A cold chill dropped into his stomach and his vision turned gray for a moment, the flashlight starting to shake in his hands.

“...M...Mike...?” he breathed into the silence and the dust.