Warped (Maurissa Guibord)

to Will's questioning glance, she went on, "I read about it. The unicorn symbolizes eternal life." She nodded. "Maybe that's how she's able to live so long. She used your life thread to make this magical creature, then she got the legendary power of the unicorn when she trapped you inside the tapestry."
    "So what did it feel like?" Opal asked Will. "You know, when you were a unicorn?"
    She sounded, thought Tessa, like a daytime talk-show host.
    Will didn't answer right away. "I remember," he began slowly, "at first, the warmth of sun on my back. The hunger for sweetgrasses. The joy of galloping." He laughed, and for a second his lean face lost every trace of anger or fear. He looked like a little boy. "To be free was my happiness. But after I was trapped--" Here he stopped. The open, boyish expression vanished and his eyes met Tessa's with an impenetrable stare. "I was imprisoned in the tapestry. It was a living death."
    Tessa said in a soft voice, "I'm sorry."
    Will's eyes narrowed. "For what, mistress?"
    The question took her by surprise. "That this happened to you," Tessa answered, with a bewildered expression. "That she did this to you." What else would I be sorry for?
    "So what do we do now?" Opal asked.
    Tessa shook her head. "I have absolutely no idea." She looked at Will, who had sat on the floor, back propped against the wall. One long leg was bent, and his elbow rested on his knee, forearm dangling. He leaned his head back. He looked lazy but elegant. There were shadows beneath his golden brown eyes, but he was watching her with a brooding intensity.
    "I'll take the tapestry, as well as the book, and go," Will said suddenly. He spoke as if they had been having a silent argument about it and he had come up with the obvious and only solution.
    Tessa reacted at once. "No. What do you think happens to me , and my father, if you take them?" she demanded. "The lawyer is coming tomorrow. He knows the tapestry and the book are here. He's offered my father ten thousand dollars for them. And if he doesn't get them--" She paused. "What will Gray Lily do?"
    Will's eyes narrowed. "So. Ten thousand dollars." He turned to Opal. "It is a goodly sum in this realm?"
    Opal nodded. "Pretty goodly. Not badly."
    He turned back to Tessa, regarded her for a moment and then said, "Perhaps you think you could get more."
    "What?" she sputtered.
    "If it's money you desire"--Will de Chaucy spoke slowly, coldly--"I will pay you, once I return to my estate."
    "I don't give a damn about the stupid money," Tessa said, angry that he could really think that about her. Why did he distrust her so much? Sometimes the way he looked at her, it almost seemed as if he felt nothing but coldness and contempt for her.
    "I'm thinking about my father and me," she told him. "Gray Lily already proved what she's capable of doing, without even being present." As she spoke, Tessa remembered the eerie message woven before her eyes in the kitchen. "Who knows what she'll do if she gets really angry?"
    "You could say I overpowered you and escaped. That I disappeared," he reasoned. "I shall take one of those flying machines you described. A 'plane,' was it not? I will go to Cornwall and find my home as well as my family. Or my descendants, as I suppose they would be now," he mused.
    "I hate to tell you this, Will." Opal frowned, peering at the screen of the desktop computer. "I searched everywhere. I can't find a current Earl of Umbric or a Hartescross listed anywhere in the UK. And it looks like the last member of the de Chaucy family"--she paused, scrolling through one of the many genealogy sites they had checked--"was Gervais de Chaucy."
    "That is my father," said Will.
    Tessa peered over Opal's shoulder at the glowing screen. "He died in 1512," she said softly. "One year after the disappearance of his younger son. Who, according to local legend, was killed by a unicorn."
    Will bent his head. He whispered something Tessa couldn't hear, but seeing the devastated look on his face was enough. She turned away.
    "What about his brother, Hugh?" she prompted Opal.
    Opal tapped the keys, then shook her head and sat back. "Sorry. There's nothing." She yawned. "I am so fried."
    So was Tessa. She didn't want to think about witches or unicorns or anything else. And especially not about the boy sitting a few feet away from her, who was charming one minute and sneering the next. Totally cut off from his whole world and yet no part of hers. She was exhausted. The weirdness