Touch of Frost (Mythos Academy #1)(26)
Author: Jennifer Estep

"Well then," I said, moving to stand behind Daphne. "Let’s see what’s on it."

For the next ten minutes Daphne surfed through all the files on the laptop. Most of them were totally boring. History reports, essays, and all the other homework that Mythos students had to do. Lots of music and high-end shopping sites in Jasmine’s Web-browsing history. She even had a database that was solely dedicated to cataloging and organizing all of her designer clothes, shoes, and handbags. Apparently, the Valkyrie liked to keep track of how many times she wore each one of her outfits-never more than once a month. Must be nice. All I had was a different-colored hoodie for every day of the week.

Then, Daphne pulled up Jasmine’s personal, private e-mails-the ones that weren’t posted on her Mythos Academy Web page for everyone to see. Now, those? They were way more interesting than anything else on the computer.

Jasmine might have been the prettiest, richest, most popular girl in our second-year class, but like Carson Callahan had said, she certainly hadn’t been the nicest. There were catty, mean-girl comments about practically everyone at Mythos in her e-mails, especially Morgan McDougall, her supposed best friend-and Daphne, too.

"She told Morgan that I looked like a heifer in those pink skinny jeans? She’s the one who told me to buy them in the first place! Bitch," Daphne muttered. "Let’s see what else Jasmine wrote about me."

"Actually, I’m more interested in what she had to say about Morgan and Samson Sorensen," I said.

Daphne looked over her shoulder at me. "Why?"

I showed her the picture that I’d found of Morgan and Samson, the one that had been torn in two and shoved in the bottom of Jasmine’s trash can. "I haven’t touched it yet, but it’s got to mean something."

"What do you mean you haven’t touched it yet?" Daphne asked in a suspicious voice.

I sighed. "I mean I haven’t touched-it touched it yet. That’s how my Gypsy gift works. I have to touch something before I get a vibe off of it. Before I can see anything about the object or the person it belonged to."

"So why don’t you do that now?" Daphne said in a cross voice. Reading Jasmine’s comments had really pissed her off. "Because I don’t plan on coming back here to help you again."

"Fine," I muttered.

I plopped down on my bed, picked up the two pieces of the photo, and held them up side by side, like I was trying to put the picture back together. For several long seconds I didn’t feel anything, and I wondered if my psychometry was even going to work. If it had somehow gone on the fritz. I hadn’t gotten any big flashes off Jasmine’s laptop, and I hadn’t gotten any vibes at all off her body or blood in the library. Maybe there was something wrong with me, something wrong with my Gypsy gift.

I was just about to put the photo down when I felt the faintest stirrings of something-a niggling worm of worry, wriggling deeper and deeper into my heart. As I held on to the photo, the worry intensified, ballooning up into a large ball of suspicion that felt like a lead weight pressing down on my stomach. The ball turned icy as cold knowledge sank into me. I recognized the feelings and what they meant. Wriggling worry, then heavy suspicion, and finally cold confirmation. Whatever Jasmine had thought was going on between Morgan and Samson, between her best friend and her boyfriend, she’d seen or heard something that made her think it was true, that it was really happening.

But the feelings didn’t stop there.

The cold knowledge began to burn like acid in my stomach, growing hotter and hotter, as though I’d somehow swallowed a ball of fire. The burning spread through the rest of my body, making me sweat, my hands shake, and my heart hurt, like a giant fist was squeezing it tighter and tighter until it wanted to pop from the strain. I knew what this emotion was, too-rage.

An image of Jasmine filled my mind, one of her sitting and staring at the photo, tucked into the frame with the others in the mirror on her vanity table. Day after day Jasmine had looked at it, before she finally reached up, yanked the photo out of the frame, and ripped it in two, her face white with anger.

By this point, I could hear myself babbling, my voice getting sharper and louder with every word: "Bitch. I’m going to kill that bitch for doing this to me, for betraying me like this. Pay, pay, pay, she’s going to pay-"

Daphne slapped me across the face, pink sparks of magic flicking off the ends of her fingers. The blow knocked me back onto the bed, but the Valkyrie wasn’t done. She reached forward and ripped the two pieces of the photo out of my fisted hands.

It was like a switch had been shut off deep inside me. Slowly, the hate, rage, and jealousy that I’d felt faded, the pain in my heart eased, and I was in control of myself once more. I let out a long breath. That had been intense, even for me.

When I felt like it, I sat back up. Daphne stood over me, a worried look on her pretty face. She held the two pieces of the photo with the edges of her fingernails, as though they were something evil. Maybe they were, given the emotions that were attached to them and the awful things that Jasmine had been feeling whenever she looked at the picture of her best friend and her boyfriend.

"Geez," Daphne muttered. "Does that happen every time you touch something? Because that’s some freaky stuff, Gwen."

I rubbed my aching head. "Tell me about it."

"So what did you see?"

I told Daphne about all the emotions that I’d felt, about seeing Jasmine staring at the photo over and over again and growing a little angrier every single time until she’d finally ripped it up in a fit of rage.

"So Jasmine thought there was something going on with Morgan and Samson?" Daphne asked in a doubtful tone. "You must be wrong. Because if Jasmine even thought that Morgan was putting the moves on Samson, she would have cut Morgan’s throat-not ended up like that herself in the library."

I shrugged. I hadn’t known Jasmine well enough to speculate on what she would or wouldn’t do. All that I’d wanted was to learn what had really happened to her, why she’d come back to the library, and why no one seemed to care that she’d been murdered. Maybe it was my Gypsy gift, but I had a feeling that this was what I was supposed to do. That I was supposed to figure this out. That I needed to. That maybe I might even discover some secret about myself along the way.

I shook my head to chase away the strange feeling. "What else is on her computer? Anything about the Bowl of Tears?"

Daphne sat back down at my desk and turned her attention to the screen once more. "Nothing that I see that jumps out at me-Wait a second. Here’s something. Looks like Jasmine wrote her first myth-history report of the semester on the Bowl of Tears. Take a look."