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the
aliveness
, for want of a better word, in any other Shifter that she sensed in Seamus.
    Maybe because he didn’t have a Collar? Didn’t have to curb himself to avoid pain as other Shifters did? Or was it something about
him
, Seamus himself?
    All Bree knew was that if he’d led her back inside her bedroom, slid off her shirt, and made swift love to her on her bed, she wouldn’t have stopped him. Would have encouraged him all the way. Still might.
    Nadine snapped on the lights in the attic from the switch in the hall. Seamus had suggested it was the light shorting out up there that had caused the flickering, but nope. The light came on, beaming a small circle down at them.
    Seamus started climbing the ladder, which looked rickety, though Nadine claimed it was perfectly good. As firmly as Seamus held it from above, Bree from below, it rocked around as Nadine scrambled up.
    “Get up here, Bree,” Nadine called down once Seamus had helped her into the attic. “Come and see. Don’t worry; you’ll be fine.”
    Seamus gave Bree a reassuring nod. Bree rolled her eyes and put her foot on the first rung.
    The ladder shook, swayed, creaked, as she ascended. Bree didn’t much like ladders, having fallen off one and broken her ankle when she was six. The ankle in question gave a throb, questioning her sanity.
    Bree held her breath, clung to the ladder, and made it to the top. Seamus caught her hands and steadied her as she stepped from the ladder onto the beams of the attic.
    There was plenty of room to stand up, Bree found as she straightened, the roof peaking high above them. The closely spaced floor beams were the sturdiest things to stand on, though boards had been laid between them.
    Keeping her feet on the beams, Bree carefully made her way to where her mother was picking up papers from beside a box. “This is what he was looking at,” Nadine said. “This is what fell.”
    She thrust the papers at Bree. Bree found herself looking at a copy of Remy’s orders from the army and his paperwork from after he’d been killed. The box held a few books and things he’d saved from high school—his yearbook, a boutonniere his girlfriend had given him at his last Homecoming dance, racing car posters that had hung in his room, complete with buxom females draped over said cars.
    “It was Remy,” Nadine said, beaming. “He was looking for something. These are his things.”
    “You stuffed Remy’s things up here in the attic?” Bree looked at her mother in surprise. After Remy’s death, Nadine and Bree had been very careful with anything he’d ever touched. When they’d moved into this two-bedroom house, Nadine had fitted out the closet between the bedrooms with shelves and neatly placed the things they’d kept in it—photos, T-shirts, letters, Remy’s uniforms, trinkets that had been special to him. Paperwork was in a strongbox.
    “No, I didn’t,” Nadine said, scowling. “Do you think I would? Don’t you see?
He
must have brought them here.”
    “Mom.” Bree folded her arms. She was still swaying from Seamus touching her with the gentlest hands. She’d not been able to resist touching him in return—his side, then his chest, feeling solid muscle dusted with golden hair, his heart beating beneath his bones.
    Her mother insisting that Remy’s ghost was up here, come back to see them for whatever reason, wasn’t helping Bree regain her equilibrium. The fact that Seamus waited quietly as she and her mother played out the drama, silent and upright like a sentinel, didn’t help either.
    “It wasn’t Remy,” Bree said in a hard voice. “He’s gone.”
    Nadine was unfazed. “Who was it then? Of course Remy would want his things.”
    Bree started to answer then broke off. She knew her mother was still grieving, as Bree was. Not long after Remy’s death, Nadine had gone to a psychic near their little town in Louisiana, a woman who’d taken her money to let her receive messages from Remy on the other