vampire.
Then again, it must be frustrating to be the only one who could see something you were so passionate about. And I couldn’t exactly fault him for getting worked up over ghosts. An image of the tunnels popped up in my thoughts again, and I had to clench my fists and will it away.
Beau frowned, and I realized he’d probably caught a spike in my pulse. Goddamned vampires. “To answer your question,” Beau said, in a let’s move on tone, “the Unsettled are not just noticeable to you and me. Because they collect in certain places, in dense concentrations, they reach a sort of”—his eyes jumped back and forth, searching for the words—“a critical mass. They affect auras. They provoke moods and thoughtfulness. They weigh on people, even humans. That is as it should be.”
I blinked, trying to keep my total surprise off my face. He was right; I’d never heard of ghosts behaving like that. “You . . . want them to keep haunting people?”
He huffed. “I want the same thing I have wanted for more than a hundred and fifty years. For their deaths to have meaning.”
“Even though you fought for the South?” I said without thinking.
Several expressions crossed over Beau’s face very quickly: anger, grief, irritation. “That is not a conversation I wish to have,” he said tightly. “The point is that I am the guardian of the Unsettled, and someone is interfering with me.” He took a breath and added, in the tone of a man admitting his greatest fear, “And possibly with Odessa.”
I had been about to dismiss him as an actual crazy person, but at the mention of Odessa, I frowned. What could she have to do with this? “Okay, wait. Start at the beginning.”
“The Unsettled first disappeared from my property a week ago,” he said, gesturing around the room. “I stopped at Oakland the following evening and found them missing there too. Since then, I have been making the rounds of my city, checking on their usual domains. They have also vanished from Utoy Cemetery and the Atlanta History Center. Two cemeteries and two locations containing artifacts from the war.”
“Artifacts?” I automatically glanced around the orderly study as though Beau might be using a bayonet as a paperweight or something.
“Not in here,” he said impatiently. “I don’t advertise it, but I have the largest private collection of war relics in the world. I simply choose not to display them.”
“Just a minute, please.” I pulled the mahogany obsidian out of my shirt and over my head, setting it on the floor next to me. Then I dropped into my boundary mindset. I saw the red glow of Warton near the front of the house, and another bright red from Beau, but that was it. Not even the slightest hint of remnants. I kicked myself for not noticing earlier. I’d been so relieved to get a break from Atlanta’s ghosts, it hadn’t occurred to me that there should have been at least a few in a house this old.
“You’re right,” I told Beau.
“Of course I am,” he said, angry again. “Understand, Lex, that I spend most of my time here, on the grounds, or at Oakland. The Unsettled vanished from Azalea Manor while I was at Promenade, and from Oakland while I was here. Someone knew I would be gone, and took them away from me.”
His eyes flashed at me, and for a moment I got a visceral sense of his strength, the amount of power and anger he was trying to contain. It wasn’t like being near Maven, who practically had her own gravitational pull, but it was . . . something.
I broke eye contact and told myself to focus on the problem. “Promenade” must be the name for those weekly parties at Oakland. The ghosts had been there, and now they were gone. Very carefully, I asked, “How is your relationship with the local witch clans?”
In theory, any witch could lay ghosts. But trades witches—those without a magical specialty—would require a number of people and a small amount of mandragora, one of the magic herbs outlawed in the United States.
Beau shook his head vehemently. “Not to be indelicate, but the local witches are in my pocket. I pay Tallulah Finch, the leader of the largest clan in Atlanta, a ridiculous amount of money for my wards. She would be foolish to do something like this without permission, and she is not foolish. It’s not the local witches.” He folded his arms over his