The Bronzed Beasts

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For my friends, who didn’t stop me when I said I wanted to write something like National Treasure meets Faust with a dash of existential crises … but make it sexy.

Y’all owe me drinks. And therapy.

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?

—BOOK OF JOB

PROLOGUE

Kahina sang to the boy as he slept.

She sat at the edge of his bed, smoothing away the nightmares that crinkled his brow. Séverin sighed a little, turning against her hand, and Kahina felt her heart tighten. It was only here, thieved from the moments when night slowly melted into day and all the world lay sleeping, that she could call him her son.

“Ya omri,” she said softly.

My life.

“Habib albi,” she said, a little louder this time.

Love of my heart.

Séverin blinked, then gazed up at her. He smiled sleepily and held out his arms. “Ummi.”

Kahina folded him to her, holding still as he fell back asleep. She touched his hair, dark as a crow’s wing and curled just at the ends. She smelled the faint menthol on his skin from the branches of eucalyptus she insisted on putting into his evening baths. Sometimes, she hated how little of her showed up on her son’s features. With his eyes closed, he was a miniature of his father, and already Kahina could see how it would mold his future. Her son’s smiling mouth would soon hold the shape of a smirk too well. His rosy, full cheeks would sharpen like a blade. Even his demeanor would change. For now, he was shy and observant, but Kahina had noticed him copying his father’s elegant cruelty. It frightened her sometimes, but perhaps that was merely her son’s instinct for survival. There was power in knowing not just how to move through the world, but how to make the world move around you.

Kahina ran her fingers over his eyelashes, weighing whether she should wake him. It was selfish, she knew, but she could not help herself. Only in her son’s eyes did Kahina find the one part of herself that had not been erased. Séverin’s eyes were the color of secrets—a shade of dusk shot through with silver. They were the same color as her own eyes, and her mother’s eyes, and her grandfather’s eyes before them.