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  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 Cupertino 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.

  TWO

  Something nagged at the back of Barrett’s mind. Something wasn’t right, and he’d learned not to question his intuition. He turned his cell phone back on to check his messages, when it suddenly rang. The number was Brian’s.

  “Hey, what’s... Brian? Brian. BRI... Hey, take a breath, I can’t... wait... what happened? Start over.”

  Brian took a deep breath, coughed in the remainder of the dust, and turned back toward the apparition that also appeared to be his older brother Mike. Then he felt dead silent. The wings were gone. Only his brother remained, a soft groan coming from that corner of the room.

  “Mike crashed through the ceiling, and he’s hurt, get back here!” He cut off
the call, dialed 911, explained there was an injured man at his address, then snapped the phone shut. He moved over to try and help, but didn’t even know where to start.

  “Christ.” A labored grunt found its way out of Mike as he struggled to pull himself out of the mess. Then he spotted his little brother and blinked at him a few times. “B... Brian...? What are you... where the hell am I? And help me up, dammit.”

  Eyes wide, as if Dracula himself had asked for assistance, Brian edged over and offered his hand, Mike taking it firmly and hauling himself out of the debris, wincing. A few glass shards dropped from his body, and Brian watched, in fascinated horror, as the cuts immediately began to close and heal themselves. Mike was in too much pain to notice, head swimming, but then caught Brian staring at him in a very disturbing way.

  “What the hell’s going on?” The older man looked around, and realized he was in a stained glass studio. Pieces started to fall into place, his head clearing a bit. Then he saw the ruins of the skylight above and he stared at it, head cocked a little. Brian could only continue to watch, mute.

  “Did I just... there was an attack on the plane. A guy. And there was this woman with me, and we...” Mike kept staring at the skylight, everything that had just happened rushing through his brain in rapid snapshots as he continued to try and get his bearings. He knew Brian had a stained glass studio, and he knew he’d been drifting over what was probably Reno before he hit, so that must be where he was, but...

  Suddenly he realized there was a length of metal penetrating completely through his shoulder, front to back, the beveled corner of an old iron window frame making a perfect spear point. He knew he should probably leave it for the paramedics, but something told him he needed to get rid of it before they arrived. Grasping it with his opposite hand, he shuddered as the rough metal slid and ground against his muscle and bone. It hurt, but nothing like it should have. He chalked it up to most likely being in shock, and looked at the wound in fascination. Then it started to close. He felt faint and sank to the floor, Brian sinking to his knees next to him, both of them watching the flesh repair itself until not a mark remained.

  Pale and shaken, they looked at each other, not comprehending what was happening in the least. Michael found himself more afraid than he’d been in months. More than on the plane, more than falling to meet his maker below. This was something beyond his experience and training. Beyond anyone’s.

  Wordlessly he pulled more glass from his body, then removed his torn and bloody shirt. Sirens started to approach in the distance, and he looked toward the door, almost in a panic, the wounds either gone or still in the process of disappearing.

  “Brian... keep them out of here.” He wasn’t even sure why he was compelled to keep the paramedics away from him, his primary thought being that he wouldn’t be able to explain his lack of injuries considering what had just happened. He should be dead. They both knew it.

  Nodding silently, still in a daze, Brian took a few deep breaths, collected himself the best he could, and met them at the door, explaining that his brother had, in fact, fallen through the skylight as he’d said on the phone, but that he seemed to be just fine now. To the brothers’ amazement, the paramedics merely said a few pleasant phrases and left with a wave. It almost looked like someone had used the Jedi mind trick on them, the Masons thought to themselves at the same time, Brian closing the door and then leaning up against it for support.

  Mike picked a few more small slivers of glass out of his leg, watching the wounds heal themselves almost instantly, fascinated. Then he thought of the woman.

  “Brian, turn on the news. Do you have a TV?”

  “TV and a police scanner,” he said breathlessly, the first words he’d uttered to his brother since the whole thing began. The scanner was right next to the work table, serving as a distraction on lonely nights when he didn’t feel like listening to music. Fumbling, he pushed the buttons to turn on the radio and set it to scan, the voices and codes and static springing to life, seeming almost intrusive in the formerly quiet space. They listened for a minute, Mike moving over to the unit, wincing at some surface pain in his back.

  “Must still be some glass in there, can you...?” He looked to his younger brother for help, sitting down shirtless with almost the look of a lost puppy. Brian nervously licked his lips, nodded, then pulled up a chair and sat behind Mike, carefully pulling bits of glass out of his back, watching the wounds close as they listened to the scanner together. His brother’s shoulder blades looked like anybody else’s, not a trace of anything unusual.

  “There! Theretherethere... how do I go back to that channel?” Mike reached for the unit but realized he didn’t know what to do, and didn’t want to mess up anything.

  “Which?” Brian moved over next to him, studying the numbers as they scrolled by.

  “There was something about a woman at a golf course. That one. I had her in my arms...”

  Brian nodded and listened, pushing the button for the channel when it came back around. The report seemed to be saying that she was injured, but had miraculously survived a fall from a high altitude by landing in the golf course’s lake, where she’d been immediately pulled out by some golfers that just happened to be nearby. A few broken bones and bruises, but she’d recover. Mike ran his hand over his face and scrubbed at his short military haircut, then told the entire tale of what had happened on the plane. He turned the scanner off, and they sat in silence for a while, Brian picking the last of the glass from his brother’s back.

  “Mike...” Brian began at last, but didn’t know how to continue. His older brother turned and suddenly held him tight, and the two embraced wordlessly, another silence falling over the room.

  “I missed you,” said Mike, his voice rough with emotion. Tears sprang to Brian’s eyes as well. No matter what had just happened, or what was going on with all this, they still had each other, and Mike was alive.

  “Missed you too.” They let go and Brian got him a box of tissues, then surveyed the damage to the studio with a deep sigh. “Wow.”

  Mike winced a bit, but from empathy at the destruction to his brother’s place, not from pain. “I’ll make it right. Whatever you need, I’ll fix it, okay?” He stood up and realized that his ribs no longer hurt either. The old scars were still there, covering his left side, but any unhealed damage from before the crash was now gone. He stepped forward and his foot kicked something, and he picked up the small piece of metal. He recognized it as the plate and pin that had been holding his shattered rib together up until that point. Not only was the bone repaired, but his body had somehow rejected the plate as well. Brian turned and caught him looking at the thing in his hand, but he merely shrugged and shoved it into his pocket.

  “I called Barrett,” Brian said hesitantly, and Mike nodded his approval with a little smile.

  “You have any coffee or tea or anything?”

  Brian blinked at him for a minute, then suddenly the request clicked. “Oh! Yeah... I’ve got... I’ve got both. Which do you want? And leaded or unleaded?”

  Mike chuckled a bit. “Unleaded tea would be amazing, if you have any.” He twisted his back and cracked it a bit, feeling better than he had in weeks. In months. Maybe ever. It was a little eerie. Nothing hurt any more.

  Brian skirted the wreckage and disappeared into the little kitchenette at the back, leaving his older brother alone to study the mess. Hands on his hips, Mike walked back over to the corner where he’d crashed and nudged at some glass with the toe of his boot. Then he looked up at the skylight, back to the crater of stuff, and shook his head. Nobody could have survived that. He should have been nothing but a bloody splatter all over the floor. Yet there he was, looking at the spot, feeling better than perfect.

  He realized his arms were still covered with blood and dirt, and looked around for a sink. After a quick wash up in the utility sink, he went back over to the debris field and stared at it some more. Brian came back in with two mugs, decaf English breakfast for his br
other, chamomile for himself.

  “Thanks,” said Mike with a nod, and sipped it. Plenty of sugar and real cream, made perfectly. Compared to the powdered creamer junk in Afghanistan, this was manna from heaven.

  He cocked his head at an idea, handed his mug back to Brian, and picked up a shard of glass. Brows furrowed in concentration, he pressed it against his arm and sliced.

  “What the hell are you...!” exclaimed Brian in a near shout, spilling a little of the tea, but then gasped as the wound neatly closed itself up. Mike wiped at the blood. There was no trace that anything had ever happened.

  “Didn’t hurt that much, either,” the older man murmured, still staring at the little smear of blood on his arm where the cut should have been. He looked into the wreckage again, then stepped in and picked something up. It was a dark gray feather, almost black, twelve inches from base to tip. Brian’s eyes widened, and he quickly put down the mugs before he dropped them. Mike blinked at him and offered for him to take it, but Brian shook his head.

  “No, it’s yours.”

  “Mine?”

  Brian touched it tentatively, amazed by its softness, like an owl feather but even softer. He took it then, and turned it in the slanting light, a thin iridescence shimmering across the surface. His eyes looked up into his brother’s.

  “When you first... crashed there... you had...” He shook his head, knowing that anything else he could say would sound crazy or stupid or both. Mike cocked his head, not understanding.