Touch of Frost (Mythos Academy #1)(19)
Author: Jennifer Estep

Locked. Shit.

Yeah, I’d expected the door to be locked, but part of me had also been hoping that the Powers That Were might have slipped up and left it open.

I bent down and looked at the door. Like the doors in my dorm, it wasn’t as fancy and sturdy as it could have been and there was a small gap between the door and the frame. So I stuck my hand into one of the side pockets on my bag and fished around until I came up with my driver’s license.

I’d been thrilled when I’d gotten my license last year, and I’d even been saving up money from my odd jobs to buy a car. But I hadn’t driven since I’d been at the academy, mainly because I could walk everywhere I needed to go on campus and the Cypress Mountain bus went down by Grandma Frost’s house every day. And when your mom dies in a car accident it takes the fun out of driving anyway. But my license had other uses, including one that my mom had shown me.

I slid the laminated card in between the door and the frame, gently guiding it down to the lock. It took some wiggling, but I managed to slip my license between the lock and the frame, popping it open.

The door swung inward.

Before I could think too much about what I was doing and how wrong it was, I stepped inside and shut the door behind me. To my surprise, it was light inside, thanks to the soft glow from a stained-glass Tiffany lamp on the desk. I stood there and stared around the room, trying to get a feel for the kind of girl that Jasmine Ashton had been-and who might have wanted to kill her.

It looked pretty much the way that I’d expected it to. Jasmine had the whole space to herself, of course, and it was more like a plush apartment than a dorm room. A bed was tucked away in one corner, covered with a blue Ralph Lauren comforter, a mound of matching pillows, and stuffed animals. Cats mostly, lions, tigers, and panthers, from what I could see.

A large, expensive white vanity table took up the opposite corner. A padded bench sat in front of the glasstopped table, while lights ringed the mirror above it. Makeup, hairbrushes, perfume bottles, and more cluttered the glass, while pictures were stuck in the edges of the gilded gold frame around the mirror. I scanned the pictures, most of which seemed to be of Jasmine, rather than of her friends or family. Somebody had liked looking at herself. I might have, too, if I’d been as pretty as Jasmine had been.

A door in the wall opened up into a walk-in closet full of designer clothes, shoes, and handbags, all carefully organized, while the other door led into the bathroom. I looked in the bathtub and opened the cabinet over the sink, but there was nothing interesting. Just pricey shampoos and lotions. No condoms, no birth control pills.

Maybe the rumors were true about Jasmine still being a virgin and not wanting to cash in her V Card with Samson Sorensen just yet. I wondered how Samson felt about that. He’d certainly looked happy enough rubbing her shoulders on the quad the other day. Jasmine had probably had the Viking wrapped around her little finger, willing to do whatever she wanted-even wait to have sex.

Once my tour of the room was complete, I went over to the heavy wooden desk that squatted next to a large, expensive TV and a couple of bookcases. The desk was almost always where the good stuff was. Books, papers, pens, fashion magazines. All your usual clutter littered the surface, along with Jasmine’s laptop, half-buried underneath a stack of notebooks. Jackpot.

I pulled my hoodie sleeve down so that it covered my hand, grabbed the laptop, and slipped it into my messenger bag. I didn’t want to touch the computer just yet. Not here. I didn’t know what I might see with my psychometry magic, and I didn’t want to do something stupid-like start screaming if there was a bad vibe attached to the computer. I’d do that later, when I got back to my own dorm room. Besides, I’d been in here several minutes now, and every minute longer that I stayed added to the risk of somebody catching me.

When that was done, I rifled through the desk drawers, still careful not to touch anything with my bare hands. But there was nothing in the desk that shouldn’t be there and nothing that I thought I could get a real flash or vibe off of.

So I moved on and examined the bookcases that took up part of one wall. To my surprise, there were a lot of books there-a lot of books. Jasmine hadn’t struck me as the kind of girl who loved to read. The really bizarre thing was that all the books were kind of … boring. Textbooks or encyclopedias with titles like Common Valkyrie Powers and Mastering Your Magic.

Maybe it wasn’t so weird for Jasmine to have these kinds of books. Maybe she’d had a power besides her inherent Valkyrie strength-magic that let her call down lightning bolts from the sky or turn people to ice with her eyeballs. Okay, so most mean girls had that last power anyway, but here at Mythos a few students actually had the ability to deep-freeze whatever or whoever they wanted. I thought back, but I didn’t remember hearing about Jasmine having any kind of special power, and I’d never seen her do any magic, like make storm clouds gather overhead or fog suddenly roll across the quad. Still, none of the books looked like they would be fun to read. Maybe they were just for show and nothing else. I just couldn’t see Jasmine spending her time studying spells, researching magic, or learning about whatever kind of Valkyrie power that she might have had.

I was about to turn away from the books when a title caught my eye-The History of Great Artifacts. A memory clicked in my mind. Wait a minute. Last night in the library, Coach Ajax had called the Bowl of Tears an Artifact with a capital A and one of the Thirteen, whatever that meant.

Curious, I used my hoodie sleeve to pull the book off the shelf. A piece of blue paper was stuck in the top, almost like a bookmark. I put the heavy book down on the desk and flipped it open to that section-and was rewarded with a photo of the Bowl of Tears, along with a couple of pages telling all about its history and supposed magical, mythological powers.

My eyes narrowed. Maybe Jasmine hadn’t been quite the innocent victim in all this that she’d seemed to be. Maybe … maybe she’d actually helped someone steal the Bowl of Tears before she’d been killed. Professor Metis had told me that some Mythos students had worked with Reapers before. Why else would Jasmine have this book with this particular page marked about the Bowl if she wasn’t involved in its theft somehow?

I slid the book into my bag, right next to the laptop.

Then, I walked over to the very last part of the room that I wanted to look at-the trash can under the desk.

My mom had always told me that people left a lot of interesting things in the trash. Things that you just wouldn’t believe folks didn’t bother to hide if you were a detective searching someone’s house and looking for evidence of all the bad things they’d done. My mom had always claimed that people put stuff in the cans and then forgot about it, like throwing it in the trash was the same as it getting taken off to the dump and buried forever.