He smiled, wandering toward a massive cannon display. “Both sides of the war had vampires. They couldn’t fight or march during the day, but at night they served as excellent scouts, spies, and assassins. We had to be very careful about recruiting, though. Creating too many hungry vampires too quickly might lead to men turning on their own companies for food. It happened a few times.”
“There was one woman who posed as a nurse. She would visit hospitals at night to feed. Plenty of blood for the taking, and no one was exactly conducting autopsies.” He paused, his eyes distant. “She also looked for dying soldiers who had particular promise.”
“And she chose you.”
He finally met my gaze, inclining his head. “I’m not sure why, but yes. She turned me, but instead of serving her, I was born with power. I used it to turn four of my men without permission. We wound up having to disappear for a bit until the transgression was forgotten.”
I looked at him. “You didn’t finish the war?”
“No, and that is the thing for which I am most grateful.” He took in my look of surprise. “You thought I would lament the loss of the Confederacy?” He shook his head. “Ours was not a just cause, Miss Lex.”
I didn’t consider the question. It just came out. “If you knew that, why did you join?”
“I didn’t know then. I fell for all the Southern propaganda.” He gave a little headshake. “I’d never even met a slave—I had a job working for the railroads, just like my father did. But we were told it was the second Revolutionary War, and we needed to protect the Southern way of life.” He stared morosely into the display. “We were so full of manufactured patriotism and self-righteousness that we never questioned if the Southern way of life was an honorable one.”
I felt a swell of compassion then. I’d misjudged Beau, assuming all this time that his obsession with the Civil War was the result of nostalgia. But I knew what it felt like to realize you might have been on the wrong side of a war—or at least, that the reasons you’d been given had been lies. How much worse to truly understand and internalize that you’d been fighting for actual slavery. How could anyone keep going after that, much less for centuries?
By doing whatever you could to make sure the warning wasn’t forgotten, I realized. I had to blink back tears. For the first time I really understood why Beau cared so much about the Unsettled.
Beau sensed the change in my emotions and straightened up from the display he’d been perusing. He met my eyes and held them for a long moment before bowing his head. “I do hope you’re not feeling sorry for me, Miss Lex. I am not the wronged party here.”
“No, I just . . .” I cleared my throat and glanced around. God help me, I was not going to cry. “All these items,” I said. “Do any of them still have happy memories for you? Any favorites?”
Beau thought for a second, then smiled. “Come back this way.”
We retraced our steps to a room with two mannequins, one dressed as a Union soldier and one as a Confederate soldier, with a canvas tent in between them. “Does he look familiar?” Beau asked, gesturing to the Confederate mannequin.
I squinted. “Is that . . . Hempstead? Without the beard?”
Beau grinned widely. “When they were putting this exhibit together, I’d recently given them some old group photographs. I don’t know if they commissioned the mannequin to look like this or if they found a close match by happenstance, but it is a source of great amusement for the five of us.”
“Did he grow the beard so he wouldn’t look so much like the mannequin?” Vampire hair does grow, though not as quickly as human hair.
“He’d already started on the beard, but . . . yes.” Beau chuckled, but then his face creased into a frown and he leaned over the railing. “That’s odd.”
“What is?” I glanced at the display, but I didn’t see anything strange.
“They must have added to the exhibit.” He pointed at the floor of the tent. “That whiskey bottle wasn’t there last time I visited.”
I looked closely at the container. It was green-brown, with a smooth neck and an aged-looking cork, though I didn’t see any liquid inside. It appeared just like the bottles in some of the other displays,