Warped

by Maurissa Guibord

  “I have seen this creature.” Will spoke in a grim, bitter tone. “A frightful thing, but not lethal. Are you all right?”

  “Yes. I—I jumped on it. And whacked it with a tennis racket. Yay for sporting equipment,” Tessa answered weakly. She glanced around the studio. He hadn’t turned the lights on; only moonlight illuminated the room. But it felt safe here. She turned back to Will, who was looking at her as if she’d just grown another head. And not a very attractive one.

  “You jumped on it,” he repeated. He pushed his long fingers through his hair. “Are you mad?”

  “I’ll say. My room is trashed.”

  Will narrowed his eyes to regard her and then shook his head, exasperated. “Did the thought of running away never strike you?”

  “Oh, it struck,” Tessa replied. “But see, there was this snake in the way.” She did her best to drip the sarcasm.

  “Oh,” he said grudgingly.

  “Anyway, the snake went back into the tapestry,” Tessa said. She stepped away from Will and nudged the gym bag on the floor with her foot. “I brought the tapestry here. And the book. I wasn’t sure what else to do.” She folded her arms, staring at the lumpy bag, almost expecting to see it move. “Do you think we should destroy it?” she asked. “We could burn it, maybe.”

  “No!” Will’s reply burst from him. “We can’t do that.”

  In answer to her puzzled expression he said, “There are all manner of creatures in the wood from which you released me. They live inside that tapestry. Suppose they are people, transformed as I was? Into beast or bird or flower. I cannot destroy the tapestry, Mistress Tessa. Not even to save myself.”

  “Oh,” said Tessa. She frowned and rubbed the back of her neck. It was unbelievable, and yet she believed it. “I understand,” she said. “But then what about the snake? Was that a person?”

  Will shook his head. “I do not know. But you said it returned to the tapestry.”

  “Yes. But in a different place.” Tessa shivered, wondering what other surprises the tapestry held. “So what do we do now? We have the book,” she said slowly. “The Texo Vita. We’ll go through it again. Maybe there’s something we missed. Something that will tell us how to get them out, or return them to wherever it is they’re supposed to be, or …”

  Will tilted his head, and an amused smile played at the corner of his mouth. “Do you never stop?”

  “Stop what?”

  “Trying to fix things,” he murmured.

  “Well, it seems like a good idea,” Tessa argued. “What do you suggest? I’m not going to just sit around waiting for Creepy Crawly to come back out for a midnight snack.”

  “I don’t think it will return. I believe it was meant to frighten you.”

  “Well, it nailed the audition,” Tessa huffed. “I’m frightened. But also really pissed off.”

  Will stared at her.

  “Angry,” Tessa explained.

  “Ah,” he said. “Pissed off,” he repeated, seeming to consider it. “A colorful expression. I like it.” Shadows played over his features as he asked, “Why did you leave me so abruptly?”

  The question took her by surprise. Tessa dropped her gaze from Will de Chaucy’s stern, tense look. “I—I’m sorry about that. I haven’t been up here in a while. It was my mother’s space.” Tessa’s hands searched for something to do. She bounced her fingertips together. “Being here brought back memories. I had to get out.”

  “I didn’t know if you would return.”

  The hint of regret in Will’s tone made something turn over in Tessa’s chest. But she ignored it.

  “Well, that’s normal,” she said. “This is a strange place and I’m someone familiar.” That’s good, she told herself. Go with that. “Did you know a baby chick will get attached to the first thing it sees when it cracks out of its shell? It thinks that whatever it sees is its mother. A dog, a lizard, whatever. It’s called imprinting.” Now she was chattering about psychology. Perfect. Next she’d drool on him like one of Pavlov’s dogs.

  Will frowned, something unreadable in his eyes. “Must you have a reason for everything?”

  Tessa shrugged. “It helps.”

  After a moment Will said, “Leave the tapestry and the book here. You need sleep. Tomorrow you shall repair the world.”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “Not at all. We will apply logic to the problems at hand, find a solution and plan a course of action. If that fails, you shall jump on our attackers, possibly brandishing a statuette or some bit of sporting equipment. Your arsenal seems formidable.”

  Tessa smiled. “Ha-ha.” But she couldn’t suppress the wonderful feeling of having him near, sixteenth-century sarcasm or no. “Can I bring you back something?”

  “There was a book in your chamber that intrigued me. The language seemed not as foreign as some of the other writings. If you would bring me A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I should be grateful.”

  “Shakespeare? I guess that makes sense,” Tessa said. Had Shakespeare even been born yet when Will was … alive? Close enough, probably. Will would be perfectly at home with all the thees and thous. Though she couldn’t help but wonder if he would like To Kill a Mockingbird or Around the World in Eighty Days, and there was Sherlock Holmes. And Winnie-the-Pooh! “I’ll bring a bunch,” she said, warming up to the idea of exposing him to all the great books he had never even heard of.

  “Tomorrow. Go and rest now,” he said with a smile. “You will be safe.”

  “Yeah? How do you know?” she asked. She meant it to be teasing, but his smile drifted away.

  “Because I will make sure of it,” he answered.

  So much for sharing, being a team. Cryptic Boy was back with a vengeance.

  “Tessa,” he said in a low voice as she walked to the door. She turned. Will’s features were set into a thoughtful frown as he stared at a place directly in front of him. “Do not run from me again. I do not like it.”

  Chapter 24

  Tessa took a long, scaldingly hot shower, letting the water and the heat pummel her, as if it could drive all the tension and worry away. And maybe even magically make her understand what was going on. It didn’t work.

  Thinking about him was so confusing. Will de Chaucy had stepped out of a tapestry and taken over her life. Nothing was ever going to be the same. Well, to be honest, he hadn’t exactly stepped out. He had been yanked. By her. And somehow, it seemed right that he was here. Even if he was annoyingly secretive at times. And bossy. And a little stuck-up.

  But she had to admit, he had good qualities. When he’d spoken about the other lives inside the tapestry, lives that he wouldn’t sacrifice to save his own, she’d seen something else. He was selfless. He was brave, maybe stupidly so.

  Braver than she was, that was for sure. She didn’t think she could have gotten to sleep with the tapestry in her bedroom. Who knew what could come out of the thing next? Maybe it wasn’t the smartest move to have left it with Will either, but her choices seemed pretty limited.

  Tessa dried off and slipped into her soft pink bathrobe. As she toweled her hair, she turned to the bathroom door, where she’d hung her clothes. She frowned. Strange. The frayed hole in the knee of her jeans was gone. Tessa stepped closer. No patch, no seam. Almost as if the fabric had been …

  She froze when she saw the words in the denim. They stood out in tufts of white cotton thread:

  Go to a dark glass.

  Oh God. Not again. “Cut it out,” said Tessa in a shaking voice. She whirled around and cried out, “Gray Lily! Lila Gerome? Whoever you are! Can you hear me? Stop it. Leave me alone!” But nothing happened. And the tiny message woven into her jeans stayed put. With a swat she knocked the clothes from the hook.

  She stepped back, sat down on the edge of the bathtub and hugged her robe closer, feeling vulnerable and exposed.

  “Go to a dark glass,” Tessa said softly. What did that mean? A piece of glass? Sunglasses? She looked over at the steamy reflection of
herself in the full-length mirror on the door and shivered, despite the warm, humid air.

  She remembered her sleepover in fifth grade when Heather Landrigan convinced everybody to play Bloody Mary. Each girl was supposed to go into the bathroom by herself, turn out the lights and stare into the mirror. You were supposed to see the face of your future husband, or Bloody Mary, whoever she was. Tessa had been too scared to do it. She had gone in and sat on the closed toilet seat for a little while, and then gone out again.

  But the memory did remind her of something else. Go to a dark glass.

  “The glass,” she said slowly, “is a mirror.”

  Tentatively she got up, stepped over to the wall and flipped off the light switch.

  The sudden plunge into darkness was complete. There was a small, high window next to the shower, but that didn’t matter; the sky outside was dark. The bathroom was as black as a cave. Slowly Tessa’s eyes began to adjust until she was able to make out the pale gleam of the white sink and stainless fixtures.

  Tessa walked to where she knew the mirror hung on the door. She couldn’t see it but stood in the darkness, watching the place where she knew it was. She waited.

  Gradually she was able to see the outline of the mirror. There was nothing there.

  “This is insane,” she murmured, and reached toward the light switch.

  Just then, Tessa saw a faint flash in one corner of the mirror. She turned to look behind her at the high window to make sure there was nothing reflecting in from outside. A headlight from a passing car, maybe. When she looked back at the mirror, she jumped.

  The mirror glowed with a luminous, neon blue light. Three hooded figures stood before her. They were huddled together, and though Tessa couldn’t see their faces, she had the distinct impression that they were staring at her.

  “Definitely a mortal,” said one of them from the shadowy depths beneath its black hood. Long white fingers stuck out from the ends of its sleeves and made strange little twitching movements.

  “Just a girl,” said the second, whose dark-skinned hands were calmly folded together.

  “Who are you?” Tessa whispered to the faceless shapes. “Did Gray Lily send you? Is one of you Gray Lily?”

  “You see?” hissed the first to the other two. “Nothing but senseless questions. We are the three sisters of Fate.”

  There were several moments of eerie silence during which the three figures regarded her, tilting their hooded heads slightly. Tessa tensed. She had the creepiest sensation they were … measuring her.

  “Return the threads,” said one of them in a horrible deep voice. It sounded like something heavy rolling in the bottom of an oil drum. Tessa thought it was the ghostly shroud on the end who spoke, who stood taller than the other two.

  “What?” she said faintly.

  “Did you not receive our first message?” the resonant voice demanded. “Return the threads.”

  “Message?” Tessa repeated. “That was you?”

  The voice boomed again, “Return the threads!” and the mirror rattled against the bathroom door with the reverberations.

  “I—I don’t have any thread,” Tessa managed to stammer. “Not anymore, I mean.”

  “Treachery!” screeched the first cloaked figure. She raised a long, trembling finger and pointed it at Tessa. “Who has taught you the weaving of Wyrd?”

  Tessa cringed as the skinny digit appeared to come out of the mirror to jab at her. “I don’t know anything about weaving,” Tessa squeaked. She clutched her robe tighter. “Or weird,” she added, repeating the word the creature had used. “I mean, this is weird. Of course. But I don’t weave. I can barely make a braid. Ask anybody. I pulled on one of the threads from the tapestry and Will came out and—”

  “Silence!”

  Okay, stop babbling to the angry ladies. Though it was hard to imagine the spectral forms as female, they’d called themselves sisters.

  “Alive?” said the deep-voiced one. She raised an enormous pair of scissors in her large, corpse-white hand.

  An unpleasant tickle went down Tessa’s spine as she stared at the blades. “Huh?” She just couldn’t seem to keep up with the conversation.

  “The boy. The thread,” the dark form in the mirror said tersely. “You said he came out of a tapestry. He came out alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Liar!” The huge cloaked figure somehow made the word sound like a curse. “That’s impossible.”

  “Well, you might want to check on that,” said Tessa. Her throat felt dry as chalk, but a little nip of anger strengthened her voice. She wasn’t a liar. “I was there. It happened.”

  Gravel Voice, who, Tessa thought, seemed to be the leader, turned to the others. “I told you. The loss of the threads has created a hole in the Wyrd. She’s fashioned a portal, or perhaps another dimension, with this tapestry, as she calls it. Who is to say he couldn’t pass through?” The others nodded.

  “Who are you?” Tessa asked again. She pushed back her damp hair. The air in the bathroom had cooled and the strands felt like cold, wet fingers against her neck.

  “We are the Norn, as you know very well, mortal,” said Gravel Voice, “since you have been meddling in our realm.” She pointed to the smallest of the three, the one with the twitchy fingers. “This is Spyn,” she said. “And this is Weavyr.” She indicated the hooded figure with the dark hands that stood quietly in the middle. “And I am called Scytha.” With this she raised the long-bladed scissors. A sharp white light shot from the blades and lanced out of the mirror like a laser beam. Tessa jerked her eyes away and raised an arm to shield herself. For a moment the bathroom was lit up like a stage with the white-hot glow. “You know the power we hold,” thundered Scytha. “Give back the life threads you have stolen or we will wield that power. Your world will be torn apart.”

  Slowly the painful sensations of light and heat faded. Tessa took a deep breath and lowered her arm.

  “Look,” Tessa said, her voice shaking, “Norn ladies. I didn’t steal anything. I swear.”

  “Return what was stolen, mortal,” said Scytha. “You have meddled in works that you cannot comprehend. Seven threads. Seven lives. The loss of them has caused a rift in the Wyrd. For five hundred years we have searched for what was stolen. Now you have revealed yourself to us. You will not escape.”

  “I don’t know how this happened, but—” Tessa broke off. She swallowed and straightened. “I didn’t steal anything,” she repeated. “And Will’s not a thread. He’s a person. He’s not going back.”

  There was silence as the dark, cloaked beings in the mirror seemed to take this in.

  “This is your decision?” Scytha asked. “To defy us?”

  “Y-yes,” Tessa stammered, lifting her chin and stepping back from the mirror.

  “It is a foolish one.”

  The Norn wavered, and disappeared.

  Chapter 25

  You know your life is completely screwed up when you have to look up the mythological figures who talk to you in the bathroom mirror.

  “These women,” Tessa told Opal as they sat on the front stoop of the bookstore the next morning. “They called themselves the Norn. They’re the Fates who spin and weave and cut the threads of life.”

  “No way.”

  “Yeah. Way.” Tessa bent her legs, resting her arms and her head on her knees. “I Googled them.

  “When Gray Lily stole threads of life, it kind of messed up the scheme of things. The Norn have been looking for the stolen threads ever since. They think I’m her. I mean, the one who stole the threads.”

  After her confrontation with the Norn, Tessa had hardly slept, remembering the three ghostly figures in the mirror. She had stayed awake, expecting an eerie blue glow to creep into her bedroom mirror somehow, even though she’d kept the lights on. She’d also plugged in her old butterfly night-light as well as a Lava lamp, just in case.

  “The Fates. The real Fates,” Opal repeated. She poked Tessa in the arm to get her atte
ntion. “So they could basically …” She paused and made a quick slashing motion across her neck with one finger.

  “Um. I guess so.” Tessa frowned, remembering the scissors and the searing light. “Thanks for the visual.”

  “Well, don’t worry,” Opal said. “I mean, I’m sure they wouldn’t do anything hasty. I mean, maybe they’d have to okay it with somebody first before they …” She glanced skyward. “Maybe fill out a form or something?”

  “It’s kind of strange,” Tessa said thoughtfully. “All these so-called myths and fables. Everyone seems to have the same ones. They cross cultures and continents. Everyone has their own versions of unicorns, witches, even the Fates. Now we know why. Because they’re real.”

  Opal nodded. “Makes sense, I guess. Maybe in the olden days people even told those creepy fairy tales to kids for a reason. Maybe there really were trolls under all the bridges.

  Yikes.”

  They were both silent. Tessa took a deep breath. “I am so scared,” she said finally. “What am I going to do?”

  Opal’s small face pinched up as she concentrated. She tapped one high-heeled boot on the pavement in a staccato rhythm. “What about getting someone to do an exorcism or calling one of those ghost hunter teams from television?” she offered.

  Tessa shook her head. “I think this is bigger than anything they could handle. These things aren’t ghosts. Somehow they exist right now—just not in a place we can see.”

  Opal nodded. “Maybe you just have to play along. Give the Norn ladies what they want.”

  “I can’t,” Tessa said. “That’s the problem. They want the thread. And by that they mean Will. I wouldn’t give him to those creepy women even if I knew how.”

  Opal smiled and said something under her breath.

  “What did you say?” Tessa asked, narrowing her eyes.

  “I said you’re smitten.”

  “Oh, come on,” Tessa said with a roll of her eyes, then glanced back and said hesitantly, “Really obvious, huh?”