Touch of Frost

Page 13

Metis turned back to the papers on her podium, and I realized that she wasn't going to give me any more of an answer than that. At least, not today.
So I slung my messenger bag over my shoulder and left the classroom, once again with far more questions than answers about who I was, what I could do, and why I was stuck here at Mythos Academy-a place where I so obviously didn't belong.
Chapter 10
After class, I walked over to Styx Hall to wait for Daphne Cruz to show up and help me crack Jasmine Ashton's password like she'd promised. To my surprise, the blond Valkyrie was already sitting on the front steps of the dorm when I got there.
"You actually came," I said, walking up to where she was sitting.
She shrugged. "You didn't exactly give me a choice, did you, Gwen? So let's get this over with."
I swiped my ID card through the scanner, opened the door, and gestured for Daphne to follow me inside. "Come on in. My room's on the third floor."
I led Daphne up the stairs to my room in the turret. I went inside, threw my bag on the bed, and sat down on my desk chair, right underneath my framed Wonder Woman poster.
Daphne stood in the doorway, her black eyes scanning over everything just the way that I'd done in Jasmine's room last night. For a moment, I looked at my things, seeing them with a new eye. My bed with its purple and gray comforter and plump pillows. The crystal snowflake ornaments in the windows throwing out tiny rainbows of color. The bookcases crammed full of fantasy titles. The stacks and stacks of comic books and graphic novels on my desk. The superhero posters plastered on the walls. The half-eaten pack of gummi bears on my nightstand that I'd noshed on last night before going to bed.
I cringed. Shit. I'd forgotten what a total geek nest my room was. Daphne was the only other person who'd been in here besides me and Grandma Frost, when she'd helped me move in two months ago. The Valkyrie was going to think that I was even more of a loser than she did already. Great.
After a minute of staring, Daphne stepped into the room and closed the door behind her.
"Where's Jasmine's computer?" she asked.
I showed her where I'd set it up on my desk. "Right here."
I got up so Daphne could sit in my chair and have easier access to the laptop. I perched on the bed while she opened up the computer and turned it on. When the system had booted up, the Valkyrie looked at the password screen for a few seconds before starting to type.
"All right, baby," Daphne crooned. "Talk to Mama and tell me all your secrets... ."
Okay, that was a little weird. I didn't want to break her concentration, so I didn't point out the fact that the Valkyrie was talking to a machine. Instead, I leaned back on the bed, grabbed the bag of gummi bears, and prepared myself for a long wait.
Three minutes later, Daphne hit a final key and pumped her fist. "Hah! Gotcha!"
I sat up. "You cracked it already?"
"Of course I cracked it already," she said in a smug voice. "It was just a simple password protection screen. It wasn't like Jasmine had any kind of real security on her computer."
"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."
I peered over Daphne's shoulder at the screen. Sure enough, Jasmine had written an essay about the Bowl and the fact that Nickamedes was taking it out of storage and putting it on display at the Library of Antiquities. I scanned through the report, but it didn't tell me anything that Professor Metis hadn't earlier. Maybe I'd been wrong. Maybe Jasmine had just had the Great Artifacts book in her room so she could do her report.
But that still didn't tell me why she was at the library that night. Had she just wanted another look at the Bowl? If so, why? Why then? So late at night when nobody else was around?
"Hey," I asked Daphne, "do you know what Jasmine was doing in the library that night? Why she was there? I remember seeing the four of you in there earlier-you, Jasmine, Morgan, and Samson. Why did she come back?"
Daphne shrugged. "We went back to our dorm and hung out awhile, watching TV and texting. Jasmine said she thought that maybe she'd left her sweater at the library and she was going to go back to look for it before the library closed. That was the last time that I saw her."
A shadow fell over Daphne's face, and she drummed her fingers on the laptop, causing pink sparks to flash and flicker around the room like tiny fireflies. I plopped back down on the bed, still trying to recover from having touched the photo and feeling all of Jasmine's pent-up anger, jealousy, and rage.
I tried to think what my mom, the detective, would do in a situation like this, where she would go from this dead end that I'd come up against. But nothing came to mind.
"Well, thanks for your help," I said. "I, uh, appreciate it."
Daphne took that as her cue to leave. She stood, picked up her designer purse from where she had set it down on the floor, and slung the oversize bag on her shoulder. Then, the Valkyrie looked at me.
"What are you going to do now?" she asked. "Because all you have is a myth-history report, a torn-up photo, and some feelings. It doesn't exactly tell you what's going on. Face it, Gwen. Some Reaper broke into the library to steal the Bowl of Tears, and Jasmine had the bad luck to get in his way. That's why she got killed. There's no big mystery, conspiracy, or whatever you think. These things just happen at Mythos."
I wanted to ask her why bad things like that happened here, why all the students were expected to grow up and take part in some stupid ancient war between the gods. Why didn't the gods and goddesses just fight it out among themselves and leave the rest of us alone? But Daphne would probably just give me the same answer that Carson had. The two of them had grown up with all this talk of magic. It was natural to them, even if it wasn't to me.
So I just shrugged. "I don't know."
She nodded. "Well, good luck with it, I suppose."
I nodded back at her, and she headed for my bedroom door.
"Daphne."
She turned to look at me.
"You really should give Carson a chance. Because he happens to be crazy about you." I didn't know why I was telling her this. Maybe because Daphne had actually been kind of cool about this whole thing, even if I had blackmailed her into helping me.
She frowned. "How do you know that?"
"Because when I touched that rose charm, the one that fell behind the desk when you picked up the bracelet?"
She nodded.
"Well, I didn't just feel your emotions. I felt Carson's, too. He really bought that bracelet for you, Daphne. He just told you that story about Leta Gaston to see what you'd say, to see if you actually liked the bracelet or not. He wanted to give it to you and ask you to the homecoming dance that night, but he chickened out."
Daphne's mouth fell open in surprise, and hope and wonder flashed in her black eyes. "Carson-Carson likes me? Really? He really likes me? You're not just making it all up?"
I shook my head. "He really likes you; I promise. I see things, remember? Trust me, I know."