you want so badly to be born again.

     The first person to die had been his date. Empty bucket-to-head, hardly noticed by the laughing crowds. Nour had been a classmate previously observed from afar who had spared a little kindness, guiding him through the jungle that was high school prom — adjusting his tie, suggesting a different colour for the next time, making idle conversation as if it was the easiest thing in the world, speaking of matters       (sinful, like the rest of them) his papa would disapprove of in a way that made him think maybe papa was wrong. She hadn’t had any interest him, not like that — but she’d been kind and she’d danced with him when he’d never danced with another before and she’d laughed at his jokes which meant that she’d listened. She was the first to die.

    The first to die hadn’t been his fault     (oh but it was! i shouldn’t have gone with her, i shouldn’t have exposed her to the things i always come across and if i hadn’t gone she wouldn’t have died) but the ones that followed had been. But first there was the laughter, the realisation that he was covered with it, that blood, the stinking blood and that someone had done this to him. And he had just wanted to run, but there had been the gym teacher, Mr Crow, rushing over with mock-concern on his features as he reached out. Flex, Mateo had thought, and he’d flown away from him, he and that expression of mockery, crumpling on the floor. Alive, still, nose bleeding, heart hurting, but not long now, not long. 

     He had ran and maybe that could have been it, but remember: they had all laughed. All of them, they had all laughed. They had to learn, he had to teach them a lesson. So he went back in, he came back into the school and he trapped them all     (mice in a trap, oh yes, they’re vermin now, vermin and i will kill them, trapped trapped trapped, hurt them hurt them hurt them) in the gym and made it rain. The sprinklers wept and it was like the deluge, one of papa’s favourite stories, but the biblical flood had been just water, had drowned everyone. Mateo didn’t want to drown them, he wanted shock and fire. To bring hell on earth because that’s what life had been for him all those years and they just watched.

    It’s Javi who tries to reach Nour, who screams for help and it’s Javi who first meets the deadly combination of water and electricity. Shaking body, dancing to a non-existent song, a hymn of screams and Mateo watches, wide-eyed, blood-faced, bodily temperature rising. When he laughs, he loses. This pull of power is excruciating in its intoxication and he watches them pound at the doors, pleading and he keeps them closed. Flex. Light fixtures rip and fall, bulbs explode, crepe paper catches fire. 

    Isabele’s dress is disaster-prone. Tulle catches fire and she’s ablaze and Mateo should feel bad, because she had been nice tonight, she had approached him and Nour and complimented the suit he’d stitched together himself and laughed at his jokes. But all he can think of is     (they all laughed at me!) how her face had turned too, at the sight of him covered in blood and he watches the paper descend on her, flames licking fabric, flames licking skin and when she screams it almost sounds like a song. Mateo smiles. He feels like he’s on fire, too. 

    The fire spreads as intended. Rachel, one of Nour’s friends, popular and cruel and kind all at the same time gets hit by a stage light that falls with a flex. Case of bad luck, being in the exact place where she is: standing on a chair, avoiding the water that was growing increasingly dangerous to stand in with the exposed wires making the trap bigger, worse. Her body topples     (sinful ragdoll) just like so many of the others and the electricity makes her shake involuntarily, blood mingling with the water. 

     He is pounding at the door, Kasimir Frei. Outcast, like him, whose father thinks him the Antichrist when it should have been this avenging angel named Mateo he should have feared. Maybe if Jesus had been kinder he would have made them meet and speak of it. But Mateo is starting to understand that there’s no such thing as kindness. So Kasimir is pounding on the doors and he is calling his name, “Mateo, Mateo, Mateo!”, and it sounds like a mockery of the three syllables, not at all like a plea. Now they wanted something of him! Now he had something to offer! Now they saw him! Someone joins the chorus, it’s Delilah — the smartest one from English class, who berates everyone and thus might be the only one who treats Mateo equally. But she’s cruel because she’s cruel to all and he cannot swallow it any more, all the cruelty in the world, handed to him and to others. 

     He can feel the door budge under their determined weight and he turns to look at them through the glass. Blood-streaked, tear-streaked, fearing-eyes and laughing-mouth. It’s them a alone who will see the doubt and the terror and the fatigue, that endless fatigue with it all. They will see it as they die. Flex. Ceiling beam crashes against their backs, pushes them into the door and flex, Mateo keeps them closed. He looks at them, eyes-popping, mouths-pleading and he doesn’t hear them     (they just watched too) he just waits until they stop and then turns around.

    The fire destroys the school. It reaches fuel tanks and it’s unable to be kept at bay. A handful of students get out, live to tell the tale, led by Xi Fei who avoids all collapsing objects and stray wires. . Mateo does not look back as he walks through Verum, pig-blood starting to clot. He moves. There’s the gas station, a gorgeous cloud of furious fire left in his wake. The church, where he sinks to his knees and finds no forgiveness, not for himself nor his God. And so the town meets his wrath as he walks from school to home, a route walked a thousand times     (none of you ever stopped to help me and you saw how my papa was and none of you did a thing so now you will have danger in your homes too and now i won’t do a thing, not a thing at all to save you, how do you like that) and now walked for one last time. 

    His papa waits for him at home. A knife glints in his hand.      “Let’s pray.” Convicted. “He’s in you, Satan, let’s pray. Sit, kneel, go, now. We will get rid of Him, I will get rid of him.”     “No, papa.” He doesn’t listen to him. Jesus. He never had.      (i’ve felt never more alone than when the lord looked down on me and called me sinful.) “They all laughed at me.” His father wipes at his son’s face with his free hand, blood streaking his hand. He shakes his head, cups his son’s head at the highest point, the point where God can see him best. “But I made them stop. And I’ll make you stop too.”     The knife glints. Mateo feels it course through the air and dives away and it misses his heart, but it doesn’t miss his flesh. It burrows through sinew and bone and he screams out, fury and pain. “Let’s pray. Genesis 22.” His papa kneels, either through choice or Mateo’s force or both, hands folding together as his son caves and bleeds. “But my version.      “When they reached the place God had told him about,” he begins, but there’s a hesitancy, a hand reaching to his own heart. “Wha—      “If I focus,” Mateo begins, “I can picture your heart. It’s not very big, papa. Just a muscle. Some blood. If I focus, I can slow it.” Jerk. Flex. Thump-thump-thump. “I’m going to teach you a lesson this time.”      “Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood.” Thump-thump. “He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood.” He’s getting out of breath now, hands on the floor, head bowed. “He reached out his hand,” Thump, “and took the knife to slay his son.”      Silence. The heart had slowed and then it had stopped. Mateo’s fingers unflex      (where’s papa) and he lets out a sob.

     Mateo leaves his home and it caves in behind him. It barely takes any thought now, the power that he’s always contained. It just happens. From his shoulder the knife protrudes     (can’t take it out, hurts too much, why did you do this to me papa) and his blood flows steady, mingling with the pig blood, the clots, the dirt. He walks, barefoot, and lets something carry him. To the edges of town, where people only come to exit and enter. He waits.

    A car arrives. Driving too fast, the reckless driver behind the wheel looking nothing but terror-struck but determined once he sees who stands there. Mateo, in the middle of the road, yellows stripes beneath his feet, blood pooling around him. He stares at Warden in that automobile he’d drive up to the high school to impress the girls with and Warden stares back at him. Mateo knows it was his hand that wielded the knife that had slit the throat of the pig, the first real death that no one even began to mourn.     He looks to the passenger’s seat. Erin, wrathful thing, whose fingers had nimbly curled around the rope that had made the buckets topple    (you killed her you killed her you killed her) and started off the chain of events that had followed, who had slipped from the school before Mateo could have crushed either of them with smoke-in-their-lungs or voltage-in-their-bones or     “Hit the fucking gas, Ward! Go!”      And he does. But the car does not answer to him any more and he drives, full force ahead, intending to, “Kill the bitch!”, as he moves towards Mateo. Flex. Not even a raise of the hand required. The steering wheel moves on its own accord, towards the trees, full speed ahead and the Porsche crashes, folds around the wood, and fire rises. 

   Mateo collapses. He does not see their heads slam against the glass, the instant death, he just feels that they are no longer there. Just the fire, the impact, the smell of rubber on asphalt. The car, the crash, the sudden curve of the road. 

It has been three years since they got the Tear. Three years since the pay-out, which really just meant that the others had to pay up. Three years of no Blue Jay, no Caedes Corvi, no birds flocking at windows except for a curious pigeon that’s just a pigeon. Three years of trying to live with the guilt that sleeps in his bed, sits on his couch, takes a beer from his fridge and picks at his dinner. Three years of both their voices in his head, a chorus of condemnation. It should have been you, not us. I would have found a way through. I would have been the right victor.

Grief demands rituals. Mateo tends to return to the coast, because that’s where his grief has always felt best. For the others he lost, he has made other rituals: strumming guitars for Pasi and the recording of one of Isa’s performances playing quietly every now and then, Anezka’s books sitting on a shelf and the lighter Fei once stole off only used to light candles. He’s not sure how to mourn Lawrence or most of the others, but he tries.

But for them, he drives to the coast. 

He’s always mourned family there, a childlike belief that his mother lives within the waves having stuck to him. If there’s no ashes, no bones, no bodily remains: then there is this. From all the metaphors about grief, he’s always liked the one about the sea most. That it ebbs and flows, takes and gives, reaches and subtracts. That no matter how calm the ocean might be one moment, it will always be ruthless the next. Grief, endless and cyclical, repetitive and systemic.

He parks his car and sits in it until the song finishes. It’s another little ritual: these mix tapes he’s made, continues to make. Music released into the world in the years they no longer breathe, reminding him of them — as if that, too, is just proof that there really is no free will. That things are created to remind him of his suffering and that he’s not alone in that. This is not a comforting thought. It never has been. 

Eyes closed, hands on steering wheel. He’s loitering. Delilah would berate him for it, Kasimir would sit with him in it. If he wasn’t here, neither of them would sit here, accepting his grief and building rituals around it — Kasimir would undo the structures that had made this so. Delilah would look away from it and hold her head high. Mateo lets himself be swallowed. Wades into the salty waters of loss and considers floating away on it. Carried to whatever is behind the horizon.

Sometimes, he tries to do what they might have done. Rage pushes him to investigate the Faceless, to hunt this thing that cannot be hunted, to think of vengeance as a higher cause followed in their name. Other days, he tries to move as if grief hasn’t created a hole in his being and it really is easier to breathe that way, ignoring emotions. Until his lungs constrict, that is.

The song ends. He unbuckles his seatbelt, opens the door, is greeted by the air of salty sand and smiles faintly.

Two years ago, he was sitting by himself at a bar, nursing a drink and considering future paths and divergences. A conversation was struck, with a stranger — the type that can only live in the liminal space of a bar fifteen minutes before closing, continued once it does while walking cobbled roads and chain-smoking cheap cigarettes. She spoke of her brother, the freshly turned earth of his grave, the fucking headache that finding a headstone was in this economy, how ugly most of them are, how every day since the funeral had felt heavier than the one before somehow, when grief is supposed to become lighter.

Mateo listened, as he always does, and speaks then: “I had a brother and sister. I lost them, too.” Cigarette raised to lips, embers glowing. He’d switched to Kas’ favoured brand of smokes by then. “Never had a funeral. No grave.”

“Cremated?”

“No. It’s a long story, but nothing.”

She’s quiet. 

“I wish there was a grave. Even if it was with an ugly headstone. Or a place, where we scattered ashes. You know, anything.” 

A snort. “Yeah. I get that.” She lights up another cigarette, sways lightly. “Make your own place, then. It’s not the body you mourn, right? Not the dead one, I mean. So it could be anywhere. A grave, or a place.”

He’s taken off his shoes by now, socks balled up in his sneakers. Sand between his toes. Mateo feels weighed down by the weight of his body moving through the sand, but soon enough he’s standing with his feet in water. 

This is their place, this small strip of beach. An hour long walk from the parking lot, often abandoned. Sometimes he spots a seal. Most of the times, it’s just the seagulls wondering if he’s brought a snack he can share. There’s people that walk past, but not many that put down their towel. It’s — quiet, yet loud. It’s infinite.

Sometimes, it feels forced to come here. He’s stopped planning it, though: has started giving into the unpredictable beats of grief. Gets in his car and drives. Every time he gets here, where the dunes are a familiar shape and the water finally reaches his toes, he considers himself and his right to grieve them. Considers the shape of his grief. The kitchen knives that remind him of Kas, the whistling kettle that reminds him of Lila. The cruelty that got him here — his own, as well as that of the Faceless. 

What makes a sibling? It takes a pair of people putting more than one child together and undeniably tethering these children together. Red thread, binding organs and minds together. Shared experience, shared weight, shared root, shared rot. It seems dramatic, sometimes, to consider Rook and Magpie his late siblings — but hadn’t it been like that? Put together, sharing burden and stature, ordered in a natural order, tied together with red thread. 

He cannot wield a scissor to cut that thread. He couldn’t when they were in the depths of it, hunting after the Tear while hunting after each other and he still cannot now. He feels it, those tethers, pulling at his hands as waves lap at his ankles. They beckon him forward, to a place where they can once again be together. Rope around his heart, constricting. Stuck in his lungs, cramping. Tied around his stomach, removing appetite.

He stands in the sea and he always says the same: “I miss you. And I’m sorry.” 

Risk assessment is a thing that is done best with a cool head. Let one thing be clear: Mateo’s head is not cool. There’s something cold to him, like the cold sweats one gets when sick with a fever, shivering while the rest of him burns hot. His mind is clouded with fear and rage, with postponed grief and years of denial — there isn’t any shape for rational risk assessment and he’s done it all the same.

There’s a risk. He will eliminate it. 

The street is empty and dark in this neighbourhood, blocks removed from the house the two had met. There’s a risk: if it’s to be eliminated, he has to do it as fast as possible. No time for doubt. No time to sit with the impending crime — that’s a lesson taught by his father. Act fast. Don’t get stuck in that head of yours Ryan, it doesn’t serve either of us. I make the decisions. Come, trust me. You trust me, don’t you?

There’s a gun in his coat pocket, a slim model previously hidden in his car for extreme situations. Silencer screwed on. Mateo hasn’t used it in quite some time, had to use object talent to reacquaint himself with the thing so he knows how to use it well enough. If the Vulture wants him to meet his past, he’ll do it. If he wants to meet Ryan, he can.

So, he moves fast, forward, approaches when the moment is there. A hit against the head, gun handle against skull, knee shoved between shoulder blades until the other is eating pavement. It could be a fair fight, maybe, but Mateo has fury and Roje doesn’t fight back as hard and it ends with Mateo on top of him, gun against temple. There’s blood on his face, some of it his. He hardly minds it.

There are an infinite amount of ways to kill someone and he chooses this: simple, classic. Blow brains out, splatter them on the street. A silenced gun shot. Effective enough. Anonymous enough. But we’re not there yet.

The Vulture demands he looks the past in the face and he does. The past is just ugly. The boy he was is ugly. The boy he was kills and ruins, coats himself in blood and doesn’t care if it’s his or another’s. The boy he was still lives, like cancerous cells spreading through his body, unable to be kept at bay no matter the treatments he tries.

“I can’t permit this,” he says, offering explanation where he just wants to offer mindless violence. His free hand presses against shoulder, muscles taut underneath his grip. The Vulture, in this story, is an enemy. Threat. Villain. Unraveler. He needs to be undone. Snarling, “You will not undo me. Will not go to him. And I don’t care what you say, if you promise me you won’t, I won’t believe you.”

The corpse-eating-bird just looks at him, calm in a way Mateo does not recognise, speaking in terms of assessment, “You’re justifying what you’re about to do rather than doing it.” 

That never ending itch, in his fingers, hand letting go of shoulder and slinks around the bottom of his jaw, holding bone between thumb and ring finger, pressing on the other’s throat.

He continues, though, “This won’t solve the problem you’re imagining yourself to be in.” Lifts his head, looking Mateo right in the eye. “He’d be glad to see you again, we could go together. He misses you. It’s not —”

“Shut. Up.” Mateo presses down harder, leans in. He wants direct contact? Fine. He’s looked people he’s murdered in the eye before. “You don’t know him. You don’t know me. And you won’t know either of us any more than you think you do.” 

The Vulture remains calm, even with his esophagus half-closed. Croaked voice, “If you’ve made up your mind, then stop talking. Do it.” 

Goading, but not quite. It’s — unbecoming, this acceptance. Mateo releases his hand, continues to look at the other. “Have it your way.” The weapon in his hand is familiar through magic, but he doesn’t need object talent to know what to do: finger on the trigger, pressure added, squeeze. Muscle memory. Like riding a bike.

No, really, like riding a bike: his father, pushing his bike away as he pedaled like mad and smiling wide; his father, handing him a gun and wanting to see his magic and smiling wide. Mateo squeezes and the gun goes off. Kickback, familiar. Sound, familiar. Smell, familiar. Blood pooling, familiar. He raises so it won’t stick to his clothing, his shoes, stumbling back. Adrenaline, familiar. Grin, familiar. Fear, familiar. Heart in his ears, blood muffling his hearing, familiar. Familiarity, horrifying.