Touch of Frost (Mythos Academy #1)(21)
Author: Jennifer Estep

My dorm room was the only one on the third floor, stuck in a separate little round turret that had been added onto the building for whatever reason. The walls were straight, although the roof rose up like a pyramid above my head. A couple of large picture windows were set into the turret, including one with a padded window seat that had an awesome view of the campus and the Appalachian Mountains that towered above it.

My room had the same stuff in it as Jasmine’s did-a bed, a desk, some bookcases, a tiny TV-although mine were nowhere near as nice or expensive as hers. Still, I liked it. Grandma Frost had helped me decorate it with all my stuff from home, like my posters of Wonder Woman, Karma Girl, and The Killers. My superthick, purple and gray plaid comforter covered my bed, along with the big, fluffy pillows that I liked, while several Swarovski crystal ornaments shaped like snowflakes dangled in the windows.

The snowflakes were an inside joke between us. With a last name like Frost, it was kind of inevitable. I couldn’t even remember when it had started, but every year for Christmas, Grandma gave me something with a snowflake on it and I did the same for her. Last year, I’d bought her a snowflake-patterned scarf, and she’d given me the snowflake ornaments in return.

They were my favorite things in the room, along with the picture of my mom that sat on my desk, right next to the latest comic books that I was reading.

I opened the small fridge tucked in at the foot of my bed and grabbed a carton of milk and some pieces of the pumpkin roll that Grandma Frost had sent me back to the academy with. Then, I fished Jasmine’s laptop out of my bag, along with the book and the photo that I’d taken from her room, and put everything on my scarred wooden desk. While I scarfed down the milk and the pumpkin treat with its sweet cream cheese filling, I plugged the laptop into the wall and waited for it to boot up.

It took forever, or maybe it just seemed that way because I was in such a hurry to start surfing through Jasmine’s files. Finally, the welcome screen popped up-and asked me for a password.

I finished off my milk and cracked my knuckles. Then, I flexed my fingers and put my hands down onto the keyboard, waiting for the vibes and flashes to hit me, to fill my mind the way they always did.

Nothing happened.

I frowned. No, that wasn’t quite true. Stuff happened. A couple of images of Jasmine sitting at her desk downloading music and shopping online flashed before my eyes. And I felt … satisfaction-the kind of smug satisfaction that came from getting exactly what you wanted no matter how expensive it was. Jasmine must have really been lusting after those cute black stiletto boots that she’d bought last week.

The problem was that I didn’t get the big whammy that I usually did when I touched someone’s stuff. Maybe I should have expected it. Computers were one of the everyday items that I could touch without getting much of a vibe off of, especially the ones in the library that were used by tons of kids. Maybe Jasmine just hadn’t used her laptop enough to leave much of an impression of herself behind. Maybe there wasn’t anything interesting on here. Maybe she didn’t have any deep, dark secrets.

Maybe I’d just broken into a dead girl’s dorm room for nothing.

I closed my eyes, reaching for my Gypsy gift once more, straining to see something, to feel something, anything that might give me a clue as to who had murdered Jasmine. Or at least what her password was so I could unlock her stupid computer.

I got a couple more images of Jasmine ordering stuff online-something that looked like a fancy knife or letter opener, along with a scarlet robe crusted with jewels. I got that same smug feeling of satisfaction, but that was it. Nothing else.

There wasn’t anything in the images that would tell me her password, which was what I really needed right now. I might be savvy enough to slip open a loose door lock, but I wasn’t computer literate enough to know how to break into someone’s system. I’d need help with that, which was a major, major problem. It wasn’t like I had a friend here at Mythos I could just call up and ask for a favor.

It wasn’t like I had any friends here at all.

But I’d come this far. I wasn’t going to let some stupid password stop me. So I fired up my own laptop and used it to log on to the academy Web site, clicking through the various pages and links until I found what I wanted-a list of all the kids in the Tech Club.

Mythos might be a place of magic, but it also happened to be inhabited by teenagers, some of whose parents owned computer companies and some of whom happened to be budding hackers themselves. For all the old-fashioned magic mumbo jumbo, the Powers That Were at the academy had realized that technology wasn’t going away and had gotten with the times. Hence the establishment of the Tech Club.

So all I had to do was find someone willing to help me crack Jasmine’s computer and keep quiet about it after the fact-

My eyes spied a name near the top of the alphabetical list. I blinked, making sure that I was seeing it right. She was in the Tech Club? Yes, she was, which meant that this whole thing might actually be easier than I’d thought. I looked at the name and sat there a minute, thinking about it.

Then, I smiled. Oh yeah. This part was actually going to be fun.

I stood in the back of the dining hall the next day at lunch, looking for her. Like everything else at the academy, the dining hall was totally pretentious. Instead of the long orange plastic tables at my old school, the Mythos cafeteria featured round tables covered with creamy white linens, fine china, and crystal vases full of fresh narcissus flowers. The tables were arranged around a large circular open-air garden that featured twisting grapevines, along with orange, olive, and almond trees. Marble statues of gods and goddesses like Dionysus and Demeter peeped through the greenery, watching the students eat. Suits of polished armor lined the walls, along with more oil paintings showing various mythological feasts. Somebody really cared about the ambiance in here, although I didn’t know why. It was like eating lunch in a museum.

And the food? It was just as fancy and froufrou as everything else. We’re talking veal and liver and escargot and other stuff that I didn’t even recognize. Who wanted to scarf down slimy snails for lunch? Yucko. The salads were just about the only thing on the menu that I would even eat, and only because it was really hard to screw up raw vegetables. Still, the chefs at Mythos tried, always carving the carrots into elaborate curlicued shapes and fashioning the tomatoes into rosettes.

But the fanciest things were the desserts. Almost every one of them came in its own special serving bowl, was ridiculously small, and was served flambe. Seriously. A chef would come over and set your thumbnailsize chocolate-cherry souffle on fire, if that’s how he thought it should be served. Whatever. I’d rather have a tin of Grandma Frost’s fresh-baked oatmeal raisin cookies any day. At least then I didn’t have to worry about getting my eyebrows singed off because I needed a sugar fix.