carefully, edging around a velvet rope protecting flags, “but why are we here, Beau?”
The cardinal vampire glanced at me and then his bodyguard. “Warton?” he said. “The hallway, if you please.”
Warton retreated back to the exhibit entrance, still looking disgruntled. At least he didn’t talk much; I had to give him that. “Should I go stand in the hall too?” Tobias asked me.
I smiled at him. “Maybe just for a few minutes.”
Beau watched the two of them retreat and then turned to me. “After last night, I wanted you to see what was taken,” Beau said gravely. “You’ve met Odessa, but to truly understand the stakes, you should see this too.”
That annoyed me a little—did he think I didn’t understand what was lost during a war? But I took a breath and told myself to give him the benefit of the doubt. At least for a while. “All right.”
We wound our way past clothing and gear, mannequins dressed like soldiers from the North and South, and weapons—lots of weapons. “Only a few weeks ago, this whole room was packed with the Unsettled,” Beau explained. He’d finally stopped in front of an arrangement of objects made from metal and leather. He rested his fingertips lightly on the edges of the glass, like a blessing. I stepped closer so I could read the heading on the display: CAVALRY RIDING AND HORSE EQUIPMENT. Only then did I recognize the pieces of old metal as a bridle and spurs. You could hardly distinguish one from the other.
“Were these your things?” I asked Beau.
“Most of them.” His eyes were fixed on the display with a look of longing. “The strangest thing about soldiering is that no matter how terrible the war, there are things I miss. Odessa says I have selective amnesia.”
I had to swallow a couple of times before I could speak. My thoughts had flown to a hot desert sky and my friend Cisco insisting on showing us his hacky-sack skills. He’d been just terrible at it. The rest of the squad had laughed so hard we’d had to hold each other up.
“It’s not amnesia,” I said to Beau. “There were good parts.”
He gave me a wan smile. “I was a Spiritualist, you know, before the war. Many people were back then. We believed that after death our souls would go on to a better place, but also that we would have ways of communicating with our loved ones who were still alive.” His eyes became distant. “It made it ever so much easier for us to die by the hundreds.”
“A lot of the books in your study are about Spiritualism,” I said, just to pull his attention away from whatever had put that expression on his face.
Beau sighed and started walking through the exhibit again, winding past racks of rifles and ordnance. “Yes, well. I studied everything I could, both before and after my death. It was my idea that death magic and Spiritualism were nearly one and the same. What is a boundary witch, after all, but a medium who can speak to the dead?”
Huh. I had actually met a boundary witch who made her living doing that kind of magic—speaking to the dead—but I’d never connected it with the concept of the fake psychics who did cold readings on television.
Then I remembered Tobias’s question. “Yet none of the Calhouns chose to become witches . . . right?”
“Not that I am aware of,” Beau replied. “At least, not since my grandmother’s time, when the family moved from Savannah to Atlanta. No one wanted to take the risk with their children.”
So much for finding the ghost of one of the Calhoun ancestors.
Beau was quiet after that, and I found myself wandering through the exhibit, reading plaques and trying not to shudder. Being overseas had been hard, but I’d had so many small comforts compared to soldiers a hundred and fifty years ago. I stopped at a display about medicine and disease, looking with horror at the rudimentary saws used for amputation.
“We didn’t know about germs then,” Beau said quietly, appearing at my shoulder. “Doctors would cut off a leg or an arm, move on to the next soldier, and do it again. No sterilization. Did you know that for every man who died on the battlefield, two more died of disease?”
“No, I didn’t.” I glanced at him, eyebrows raised in invitation.
Beau nodded. “I received a relatively minor injury from a ricochet, but I died in an Atlanta hospital. Typhoid.”