Touch of Frost (Mythos Academy #1)(17)
Author: Jennifer Estep

And, in that moment, I made my decision.

Maybe it was crazy. Maybe it was this nagging feeling I had that there was something more to all this than just stealing a magical bowl. Maybe it was stupid or silly or just plain wrong.

But I wanted to know more about Jasmine. Specifically why she’d been in the library so late last night. What had really happened to her and who was responsible for it.

Maybe … maybe I needed to do it for myself, to know why it had happened, to know why whoever had stolen the Bowl of Tears had killed Jasmine but had left me alive. Maybe it was some kind of weird survivor’s guilt or something.

But somehow, someway, I was going to find out the answers to my questions. After all, I was Gwen Frost, that Gypsy girl who saw things. The girl you hired to find whatever was lost. I was good at figuring things out. Uncovering the truth about Jasmine’s murder shouldn’t be too difficult.

Besides, this was one secret that I was determined to discover-no matter what.

Chapter 7

I couldn’t concentrate where I was sitting on the main library floor with all the other students who’d come to gawk, so I moved over to a table tucked into one of the corners in the stacks-the same corner that had the case with the strange sword in it.

I threw my messenger bag onto the table, then went over and stared down at the sword. The weapon looked the same as it had last night. Silver metal, long blade with faint writing on it, a man’s face carved into the hilt.

I waited a minute, but the eye on the hilt didn’t suddenly pop open and stare at me again. Good. Maybe I wasn’t going crazy after all.

I sat down at the table, dragged a notebook out of my bag, and got to work, writing down everything that I knew about Jasmine Ashton. The more I knew about her, the easier it would be to figure out why she’d been in the library last night-and who might have killed her.

I didn’t know much.

Jasmine was pretty, popular, and a total mean girl. A Valkyrie who loved designer clothes and whose family had deep, deep pockets. And … and … and that was it. That was all that I knew about her. That was the complete sum total of her existence to me. I didn’t even know what her other power was, besides her inherent Valkyrie strength.

For a moment, I was depressed. This was stupid. It wasn’t like I was Veronica Mars or Batman or somebody, able to figure out complex mysteries with just a few clues. Maybe it had been some random bad guy who’d killed Jasmine after all, some Reaper of Chaos who’d just been after the Bowl of Tears so he could do Bad, Bad Things with it.

But then, I thought about my mom. Something about this felt wrong to me, and she’d always told me to trust my feelings, to trust my Gypsy gift. Besides, Grace Frost wouldn’t give up so easily if she was investigating Jasmine’s murder, and neither would I.

Okay, so I needed more information on Jasmine, and I knew of at least one place to get it-the Internet.

I pulled my laptop out of my bag and fired it up. Mythos Academy had the very best of everything, including free, campuswide Wi-Fi, so I was able to access the school Web site with just a few clicks of my wireless mouse. Every Mythos student was supposed to have his or her own personal school Web page to share interests, photos, and more with fellow students. Kind of like a Facebook account that was only accessible to the other kids at school. But some of the kids, including me, just didn’t bother with it. I didn’t have any friends at Mythos to start with, so who here would want to read my ramblings?

But, of course, Jasmine had a blog and more than two hundred friends, according to her campus profile. I scrolled down the page, scanning her blog, but there was nothing there. Just catty comments about who was wearing what, along with several dreamy posts about what a great guy Samson Sorensen was. Your typical high school popular rich girl angst. Or what passed for it. There were also several photos of Samson in his ittybitty swim briefs at various meets. Dude totally had six-pack abs. Yeah, I looked at those pictures a little longer and a little more closely than the other ones.

But Jasmine hadn’t posted anything on her page that told me anything really deep and meaningful about her, much less why she was at the library last night, which meant that I was going to have to go to another source.

Like her laptop. That’s where the good stuff would be anyway. It always was. Even at my old school, kids had always been frantic when they’d lost their laptops, thinking about all the incriminating stuff that someone might find on them. Like e-mails about how drunk the kids had gotten with their friends the weekend their parents thought they went to band camp. Papers they’d downloaded and plagiarized for AP English. Porn.

I tapped my fingers on the table, thinking back to last night, calling up my memories of the scene of the crime, and sorting through them the way that I was able to do. In some ways, my psychometry magic was better than watching a movie, because I had perfect color, picture, and sound every single time.

I hadn’t seen a computer or any kind of bag lying on the floor next to Jasmine, just that blood-free dagger with the ruby set into the hilt. So Jasmine probably hadn’t had her laptop with her. I knew that she had one, though, because I’d seen her with it yesterday on the quad. The most likely place to look for it would be in her dorm room.

I glanced back at the Web page in front of me. According to her campus profile, Jasmine lived in Valhalla Hall. I snorted. Of course she did. That’s where all the Valkyrie princesses lived, since it was the plushest, poshest dorm at Mythos.

According to the whispered rumors that I’d heard today, Jasmine’s room had been locked up until her parents could come and pick up her things. I wasn’t a great detective like my mom had been, but the rumors told me two things. One, that Jasmine’s dorm room should be empty. And two, that if I was going to break in and try to snatch her laptop I needed to do it now-like right now. Before her parents flew back from wherever they’d been vacationing in Greece or magically teleported in or whatever.

And most especially before I lost my nerve.

I sat there a minute, wondering if this was crazy. I was actually thinking about breaking into a dead girl’s dorm room to steal her computer just so I could see what kind of info was on it. Just so I could find out why she’d been in the library last night. Just so I could discover all of her secrets.

I sighed. Here I was again, thinking about another girl’s secrets and how I could find out all about them. I was so totally dark and twisted sometimes. Despite everything that had happened, I still liked my Gypsy gift and how it let me know things about people, how it let me see into them and get a sense of their true feelings, the ones that they worked so hard to hide. Like Daphne’s massive crush on Carson. My psychometry was the only kind of power that I had at Mythos, small though it was.