Triune

by Willow Polson

  “Goes on about demons, and how the place is possessed. Something about angels, too. It’s some kind of weird little exorcism manifesto rant thing.”

  Had their wings been out, the brothers’ feathers would have all stood on edge. As it was, goosebumps had to suffice.

  “Like a prayer, or charm, or what?” asked Brian, sliding the paper over to Mike next, who grumbled at having to participate in the pointless handwriting exercise.

  “She’s already said plenty,” The large policeman sat down precariously on the edge of the flimsy dining table, making it creak threateningly.

  Wonder if that Javier kid knows anything, Mike said. Or if he could find out for us.

  Good idea, said Barrett. The paper and pen made its way over to him, and he did as he was instructed, writing a few sample sentences to compare against the note. Eventually contact information was collected, along with the usual “don’t skip town” speech, and the onerous presence of the police was finally gone.

  “I’m gonna see if I can track down that kid. I’ll try the nearest school, see if I can feel out where he is,” Mike said. “It’ll be like sensing somebody trapped in the rubble, right? Only I’ve already met Javier, so it seems like it should be easier.”

  Barrett nodded. “I’ll stay here and help clean things up.”

  Mike unfurled his wings, his brothers’ breath catching just a little. It was a sight and feeling none of them ever grew tired of in the least, and a little awe always remained. He pushed off and slid up gracefully through the ceiling, invisible, moving high enough into the sky that he could see the layout of the whole neighborhood, such as it was. He spotted what seemed to be a school and drew closer, then closed his eyes.

  There were several hundred kids in the buildings and on the grounds, he could tell that much. How he was going to find just one of them amid all the chaos, he had no clue. He landed silently on the roof and just concentrated for a while, thinking about what the boy looked like, how he sounded, his age, his name, every detail he could muster from that night next to the studio. It was like trying to pick one ant out of a nest, but less organized.

  Javier... Mike said aloud in his mind, hoping that somehow it would help summon him or otherwise pick him out of the crowd somehow. To Mike’s surprise, a little point of awareness spiked back. He’d been heard.

  A few minutes later a bell rang, and a fresh crop of students streamed into the yard, including the little point of awareness. Mike slipped down between some buildings, stayed invisible, and tried again.

  Javier. It’s Mike. Michael. I’m between the brown buildings at the side of the playground. I need to talk to you, it’s important.

  Slipping away from the others, the boy made his way over to where the voice had instructed him to go, but looked confused.

  “Where are you?” he whispered tentatively. Mike carefully dissolved into view, looking around to be sure they couldn’t be seen. Javier started crossing himself, eyes enormous, skin growing pale as if he might faint.

  “Hey. It’s okay. We met before, remember?” Mike tried to put a reassuring hand on his shoulder, but the boy stepped back. “I’m not gonna bite. Listen, my brother’s glass studio got vandalized last night. I was hoping you could find out who might have done such a thing.”

  “Me...? Why me?” he said in a hoarse whisper, never taking his eyes off Mike’s wings.

  “You seem like a smart kid, and you found out about me pretty quickly after the incident in the alley. I thought maybe you could ask around and something would filter through the grapevine. You get me?”

  Javier nodded a little. “I hear things. My family knows people, I can ask.”

  “Thanks. All the windows were totally broken out, and a note about demons or something was left on the front door. The police think maybe we did it.”

  “The police! They can see you? Why would they think...”

  Mike waved his hand. “Long story. But we want to know who really did it and why. Those windows meant everything to my brother, and they were important to all three of us. They were kind of like a map.”

  “A map...” The boy’s mind started working now. This was a fascinating revelation, and he definitely wanted to help Michael in any way he could.

  “Yeah. Hard to explain, and you’d better get back before you’re missed. Come by later if you hear anything, okay? You know where to find us.”

  Javier nodded solemnly and looked up into Mike’s face for a few more seconds, gaze darting between him and the living, moving black wings behind him. Mike smiled just a little.

  “Tell you what. You crack the case, and I’ll take you flying.”

  The boy’s eyes bugged out and he looked like he might take off flying on his own. Mike chuckled, ruffled Javier’s hair, and sent him on his way. Mission accomplished, he slipped into invisibility again and pushed off, heading back to the studio.

  The cleanup was going slowly. Brian wanted to keep everything that was hand-painted, no matter how small the piece was. Some of it made sense, but when the fragments of glass feathers were below about an inch, Barrett started to veto it.

  “Can you really piece all that together? I suppose you could figure out where everything went, given enough time, but... can’t you just recreate those?”

  “I...” Brian sat on the floor, momentarily halting his efforts to pick through every tiny piece. Mike came in then and told them what had happened with Javier. Barrett nodded approvingly.

  “He seems trustworthy. I hope he can come up with something. Are you really taking him flying?”

  “Oh, hell yeah. It’ll be like a hundred Christmasses for the kid. You remember your first flight, right?”

  Barrett grunted. He mostly remembered it, but between the stress of finally making himself succumb to the urges inside and exhausting himself by flying all the way to Reno without any experience or preparation, it had been less than Christmassy.

  Brian sighed heavily. Because every window was gone and they’d been too focused on picking through the debris to hang anything up, he couldn’t even have his wings out or they’d be easily seen from the street. The vandals had even robbed him of that simple pleasure, making him deny and hide his nature for a while. Still sitting on the floor, he flipped the tiny piece of white wing he was holding back into the huge pile of shards.

  “You’re right, Bear. Even if I could figure out where the pieces went, I couldn’t restore it all. Not really. I guess if it was something historic it would be worth trying to epoxy the small pieces onto other clear glass or something like that, but I couldn’t use lead... but I want to try to reconstruct some of it.” He nodded to himself, an idea already forming.

  Mike sat down and hugged him. “I’m so sorry, Brian. This place can’t seem to catch a break, between me and whoever did all this.” He glanced up at the dark hole in the ceiling still boarded over with plywood and sighed a little.

  Brian hugged him back, then showed him what he’d been able to find so far. Two of the three faces were somehow intact, but Michael’s remained missing under the debris. Two hands and a lot of different feathers had been set aside, including a large section of white wing and two medium-sized sections of gray and black where the leading had held everything together in the fall. Other areas had clearly seen the worst of the rocks and bricks that had been thrown through the windows, another wing punched out with a circular hole near the top.

  “You know...” said Mike slowly, in thought, “how did nobody hear all this? Somebody must have heard, even out here on the edge of town.” The assortment of missile weapons still littered the floor, a couple of them on the work table, now fortunately empty since the Saint Joseph window had been completed and shipped back two days before.

  “Maybe it was a lot of someones,” Barrett said, rubbing his chin. “Somebody got other people to help, and it happened fast enough that they did it, ran, and even if someone came later to see what happened, it was all over.” Mike nodded. It made sense.

  “Hey
, I’m gonna stay here and help finish this with Brian. Why don’t you get back to the office, Bear? I’m needed here more than there.”

  Agreeing, Barrett hugged them warmly and then disappeared. Mike quickly looked out the windows to see if anyone was there who could have seen, but gratefully the street was empty at that moment. The inside of the building was darker than the bright sun outside, but Mike didn’t want to take any chances and started hanging bedsheets in the lower parts of the empty window frames to at least give them some privacy, even if it did cut the light down.

  By the end of the afternoon they had finished sorting through the colorful apocalypse and finally found Michael’s face, the hand-painted piece cracked in two, but the halves still held firmly together by the lead came surrounding them. Worn out, both physically and emotionally, Brian slumped onto the car seat bench with a bottle of tamarind Jarritos. Even his wings were a little limp and seemed to need to sit down as much as he did.

  “We gotta... plywood I guess,” he said weakly, taking a swig of soda. He waved a slack hand at the windows behind him, not looking up, his gaze idly falling on the scattered remains on the floor as if numbly observing a corpse. Mike sat down and put an arm and a wing around him.

  “Yeah. We’ll all help. You have pictures, though, right? So you can remake some of them if you want.”

  “Nope.”

  Mike blinked at him for a second. “Is that nope you don’t want to remake them, or nope you don’t have pictures?”

  “Both. Didn’t think of taking pictures. I mean, I saw them every day, so why bother? I know, seems stupid now. For insurance, if nothing else. And I bet they won’t pay for this, either. They were bad enough about the skylight.”

  “But remaking them...?”

  Brian shook his head, gaze still on the heap of glass at his feet. “No point, right? They were for us, and here we are, and... so much work...”

  Mike pulled him a little closer. “It was the previous guy’s work, right? So that must be hard, too.”

  “Yeah,” he said softly with a little nod. “I feel like he’s really gone now. Mr. Jefferson. Like I’m really on my own with all this.”

  They sat in silence for a minute, both in thought but going in two different directions – Brian in mourning, Mike starting to wonder about something.

  “It’s almost like...” Mike started, then got up and paced a little. “It’s almost like the universe is making us take off the training wheels, you know? All these windows were about us, or so we figured. So what if we’re being told that we’re on our own to figure things out? We have the main part, the map, in our phones. So that’s preserved. But maybe we need to discover the other stuff as we go.”

  Brian had looked up at his brother as he spoke, and cocked his head a little, thinking. “The window... the idea I had to fix what I could find... I was going to put all three of us in one window. I thought it’d be nice.”

  Mike grinned at him. “I really like that idea a lot. That’s our lives now. We were separate before, and now...”

  “Yeah.” Brian smiled just a little, the first time he’d managed it since arriving at the studio that morning. “But the others... You’re right. I don’t want to try and do anything with those. It’s like we’re done with them. Time to move forward.”

  “Maybe you could make a new set. Something’s got to fill these empty frames, right? And I don’t mean plywood.”

  The rest of the afternoon was spent cleaning up what was unsalvageable and trying to find enough trash cans and boxes to put it all in. Barrett took the end of the day off and helped put plywood up over the open window frames, mentally grumbling about having to use an extension ladder like a regular person. But attaching it outside was better than inside, both in case a late spring shower came through, and to avoid further damage to the antique woodwork of the building’s interior. The wood over the skylight had to be repurposed for the windows, and they decided to have a few more sheets delivered for that, plus a couple of extras just in case they were needed.

  They finally finished in the late afternoon, right when the dying sunlight should have shone beautifully through the windows. Instead, the studio was a dark, depressing cavern. Brian wanted to cry.

  They were about to bring out their wings again and go home when a timid knock on the open door made them stop and turn. Javier was there, panting.

  “Hey, did you find out anything?” Mike asked the boy, who nodded.

  “Yeah. There’s a guy in Sparks who heard about you, he’s kind of crazy,” Javier gasped, still catching his breath. “Has some kind of church that talks about the end of the world.”

  Barrett grunted and crossed his arms. “Don’t like the sound of that.”

  “The crazy part, or the end of the world part?” asked Mike with a smirk.

  “The all of it part. The thought that there’s a bunch of nutjobs running around trashing places... we need to tell the police so they can’t do this to someone else.”

  Brian already had his laptop open and was researching who the guy could be. After just a couple of minutes, he tapped on the screen.

  “I think I got it. Reverend Marcus Charles, founder of the Revelation Fellowship. He’s even been on the Coast to Coast radio show a couple of times. Looks like his church is on Vista Boulevard. Might also be his house, I can’t tell.”

  Mike paced, debating something. He looked at Javier appraisingly, then nodded to himself, deciding that the kid would probably be fine with what he was about to do.

  “Javier. Time for that flight I promised you. We’re going to Sparks.”

  Javier gasped and looked a little unsteady, but then he nodded just a tiny bit. Mike smiled at him kindly and brought his wings out, then motioned for him to come closer. The boy did as he was told, and was lifted up into Mike’s arms.

  “Look down for this part,” he said, nodding at his brothers. “If you look up, it might be scary when we get close to the ceiling.”

  “What are you going to do?” asked Barrett, brow furrowing with suspicion.

  Mike smirked as much as grinned. “Put the fear of God into somebody.” Before his older brother could protest, he pushed off and disappeared through the ceiling, Javier in his arms.

  The boy clung tightly to his neck, pressing up against Mike’s chest in fear as the room suddenly disappeared and they were above the roof of the studio, and rising higher by the second.

  “¡Carajo!” he yelped, practically strangling the angel who merely chuckled.

  “I’ve got you. I won’t let you fall. Enjoy the view, all right? You should get quite a show in a minute.” Mike soared high over the outskirts of Reno toward Sparks, the twin cities no longer having any distinct boundary, instead blurring into each other like amoebas mating. He focused on the name of the man, the address, and the picture the website had shown of the building, which did look like a large Victorian house. Could be anything inside.

  Javier started to cautiously look down a bit, arms trembling. Mike held him a little tighter. He’d seen on the map where the street was located, a large north/south artery, and started following it.

  “Got it,” Mike said suddenly, and landed across the street from the Victorian. Javier looked around in alarm.

  “We still can’t be seen, but I’m going to put you down and you’ll become visible once I let go of you. I don’t know if you’ll be able to see me or not, but I’m still here. I’ll make sure you get home safe. Okay? You trust me?”

  “Of... of course... yes...” came the soft reply, the boy’s arms still shaking a little. Mike gently put him down, gave him a little nod, then let go.

  “You know I’m here, so can you...”

  “Yes!” Javier said in a hushed tone. “I can still see you! But you look kind of like a ghost... I can see through you.”

  Mike looked down at himself. To his eyes, he looked the same as he always did, and the discovery of what someone else saw was interesting and momentarily distracting.

  “Pro
bably because you know I’m here. I wonder if... well, we can play with it when we get back. First, Reverend Charles needs a lesson on who you don’t screw with.” He flew up and over the traffic, landing on the other side of the street. Javier sat down on a planter and wondered what was going to happen. Mike put his wings away and was immediately more solid, looking exactly like any normal man. He knocked on the door and waited. Soon enough, there were footsteps, then a mousy, tired-looking woman answered the door.

  “Hi, uh... services aren’t for another couple of hours.”

  “I need to talk to him.” Mike looked at her, steely but mild, arms crossed. It was clear what he wanted, and that he wasn’t leaving until he spoke to the good Reverend.

  “In a couple of hours.” She started to close the door, but he wedged his foot in the way. Her eyes widened.

  “Tell him I’m here about what he did to my brother’s studio last night.”

  The woman started backing up, calling for her husband without even looking over her shoulder, eyes on the military man in her doorway. Soon enough the doughy, pale Reverend Charles came in to see what the problem was, concern turning to anger as he saw Mike’s foot still holding the door ajar.

  “What is all this? I’m calling the police,” the man said, his face turning red.

  “I wouldn’t do that. They’ve already been to the studio your people smashed up, and we know it was you.” Mike stepped inside, waved quickly at Javier, still watching from across the street, and closed the door behind himself. Holding Reverend Charles’ gaze in his deep hazel eyes, arms still crossed, he let out his wings.

  The preacher let out a shout, his wife turning deathly white. Mike didn’t move, still drilling holes into the man’s soul with his eyes. The late afternoon sun shone horizontally in through the entry windows, making his muscles and scars that much more apparent, a reddish iridescence on his midnight-black feathers.

  “DEMON!” Reverend Charles screamed, catching his half-conscious wife.

  “No,” he said slowly. “Quite the opposite, actually. My name... is Michael.” Still he didn’t move, letting the other man connect the dots himself. Technically, he hadn’t said he was the archangel in question, but neither did he clarify who he was. Or wasn’t. It had the desired effect, and he hoped his namesake wouldn’t mind. It was for a good cause, after all.