Page 3 of The White Stag
That was when Alastair found me. He gave me a bottle of tea and convinced me that my monsters weren’t real. So I left with him, he got my pills, and then I forgot everything.
“What did he do to me?” I demanded.
“We’ll explain all that, but not here,” Cyrus said. “We need to get out of here. We’re taking you home. Yourrealhome. It’s time.”
“Lead the way. Just let me grab my pills.”
“No,” Finnan said. “You don’t need them. You never did. They are iron and herbs that are toxic to people like us. They’ve been slowly poisoning you to repress who you are. You aren’t getting sick when you don’t take it. You’re detoxing and getting better.”
“We can taper her down,” Cyrus said.
“Whatever we do, we need to do itnow.”
I was still processing that the monsters under my bed were real and someone had been poisoning me since I was a child. Alastair had been doingsomethingto me for years. I looked around my bedroom. I wanted to leave.
“Let’s grab it and get out of here.”
Finnan
Icouldn’t believe we’d finally found Reagan. The last time we saw her, she was this eleven-year-old street urchin. She didn’t know that whenever Oisin showed up to carry her away from a foster home, she wasn’t running from her foster parents. Some of them were pretty terrible, and we literally had to keep them away from her. No, we’d been trying to stop Alastair Rex from getting his hands on her from the start.
Yeah, we’d made some mistakes with Reagan. She was a changeling, which wouldn’t have been evident until she hit puberty. When that happened, we would whisk her away to a safe house, guide her through it, and teach her to use her magic.
I guess we all thought if she absolutely had to grow up in the mortal realm with humans, it should be as normal as possible. At least, as normal as it could be with Alastair Rex after her and the three of us in her life. Children believed anything, even about monsters lurking under her bed. Keeping that secret until she was much older was a different story. We thought we had more time.
Reagan looked so different. She’d grown up. She was beautiful, but she’d look much less human once we detoxed her off of the poison she’d been taking for years. Her hair was a reddish gold. That would change. She could pass for an ethereally beautiful human with enormous eyes and a full mouth. That would eventually be her glamor if she ever came back, and we’d have to teach her that.
Her personality was still the same, no matter what Alastair tried to do to keep her complacent. Sin Eating tea had been a concept thought up ages ago by some well-meaning revolutionary. The theory was that if a criminal drank it, while they slept, someone could whisper in their ear to make them forget their crimes and try to suggest they be good.
It was universally a disaster. No one liked criminals, but taking away free will was something no one wanted. It stayed legal until people realized someone needed to drink it frequently or it wore off. Bad people got murderous when they found out they’d been drugged and their minds messed with. It led to a massive spike in murders, and the tea had long been banned.
But our Reagan had always beensostrong. Most people felt the effects of Sin Eater’s tea for several days before they needed it again. Reagan was back and sassy by dinner. If we had told her the truth about what she was and who was after her, we never would have lost her. Reagan was street smart. She wouldn’t have accepted a drink from a stranger unless it was in a bottle with the seal unbroken. Alastair had the means to pull that off. Shewould neverhave left with someone she had just met unless someone had drugged her.
We all knew what he had given her. I brought the remedy when we found her and tried to break her out. Alastair tried to keep her meek, but that was never Reagan. She was furious, and she didn’t even have the whole story. We led her out of the house to Oisin to get her far away from here.
“Did you kill Ballard? I hate him. Alastair hired him to babysit me. More like keep me prisoner here. If you did, I hope you made it hurt.”
That was my girl. We had enough trouble figuring out how to get inside this house. We didn’t know the employees or what went on inside. We only made a mess here if we had to. Our primary goal was getting Reagan out.
“Was that the human we caught outside your bedroom? We just knocked him out. Did he wrong you, Reagan?” Cyrus said. “We have enough time before Alastair gets home for you to take your vengeance if you want. We’ll all hold him down.”
We didn’t kill him because we didn’t make it a point to kill mortals, but if he hurt her in any way, I’d happily rip his head off. Reagan had this glint in her eyes that I recognized. She was up to something.
“Alastair went to all kinds of lengths to keep me here. Ballard was one of them. I want them both to pay. If Alastair gets home and I’m missing, and Ballard can’t remember a damned thing because we forced that tea down his throat,thatis what I want. Alastair will punish Ballard for losing me, and he’s going to get a headache trying to figure out how I figured out the secret with the tea.”
That was beautiful. We didn’t have enough time to drag this out, but Alastair would. He didn’t just build this compound to keep Reagan in. It was meant to keepusout. We got in without a trace and could get out the same way. Alastair Rex was a megalomaniac who justified every vile thing he did, and if something went wrong, it was. He was going to go utterly insane trying to figure out how the girl he’d been drugging, grooming, and manipulating got the best of him.
“I like this idea. Welcome back, Reagan. Want to do the honors of forcing the tea down his throat?”
“Yes. Then I want to get out of here so you can explain all of this to me.”
Reagan
Ifelt like I was waking up from a coma where my sleep had been endless torment. I could remember everything now. Alastair forced me into being something I wasn’t. If my monsters hadn’t gotten here, I would havemarriedhim, and all it took was tea I liked the taste of to make me think I was happy about that and let him do anything to me.
I needed him to pay for that. He never laid a finger on me, but I felt violated. I needed the whole story. Alastair wasn’t a kind man. He wasn’t the type of man to take a kid off the street just because he found them there. Now that I remembered every detail he tried to make me forget, he wouldn’t have been caught dead under a bridge where homeless kids were sleeping. If he saw one on the street, he’d spit on them.
I hadn’t decided what I wanted to do to him yet, but I needed to knowexactlywhy all this had happened. But first, I needed to deliver a little payback to Ballard. I didn’t know who did it, but Ballard was slumped against the wall with a growing lump on his forehead. Good. If he hadn’t played an active role in keeping me prisoner here and drugging me into thinking I was happy, I would have knocked him out myself right before I ran away.
