Maybe ... maybe I should just forget about my whole crazy plan and let Professor Metis do whatever she and the other teachers were doing to find Jasmine’s killer.
But then, another memory flashed through my mind, and I remembered Jasmine lying on the library floor, staring up at the ceiling with her sightless eyes, blood all around her. Looking so still and absolutely dead.
I thought about all the mean things that I’d heard the other students say about her today. Maybe they were true, but somebody should care that Jasmine was dead. And it looked like that somebody was me. Now, it was time to actually do something about all of this, whether or not I even knew for sure if it was the right or wrong thing to do in the first place.
But it was a place to start at least, and it was way better than sitting around in the musty stacks brooding about my Gypsy gift, my mom’s death, and staring at a strange sword out of the corner of my eye, wondering if it was going to stare back at me. Yeah, digging into Jasmine’s death, however misguided it might be, had a lot more appeal than all that.
I packed up my things and left the library.
I’d been inside the Library of Antiquities longer than I’d thought, because twilight was starting to fall when I stepped outside. I checked my watch. After six already. Classes were over for the day, and except for a few kids going to and from the library, the grassy lawn was deserted. At this hour, most of the students were busy with club meetings, sports practice, or getting some dinner in the dining hall before they went back to their dorm rooms to finish their homework. But I didn’t mind the gray twilight or the empty quad. The darkening quiet made for better skulking.
I hurried past the five main academy buildings, winding my way down one of the cobblestone paths until I reached Valhalla Hall. The girls’ dorm was a three-story gray stone structure, covered with thick ivy vines just like all the other buildings. According to her Web profile, Jasmine’s room was on the second floor, which meant that I couldn’t just crawl in through an open window or something. Naturally, things just couldn’t be that easy for me.
I didn’t bother going around to the back of the dorm and trying to get in that way. I knew from living in Styx Hall that’s where all the smokers liked to hang out, puffing on cigarettes and occasionally some pot. At Styx, you had to wade through clouds of smoke to get inside and then you reeked of tobacco until you could take a shower. So not worth it.
But all the doors on all the dorms had a machine that you had to swipe your student ID through to get inside. For security reasons and to try to keep the guys, the girls, and their various hookups to a minimum, your ID card only let you into your assigned dorm, which meant that my ID only worked at Styx Hall and not here at Valhalla. Frustration filled me. I’d forgotten about that pertinent detail in my hurry to get over here. Kids could buzz other kids into the dorm through an intercom system outside, but of course I didn’t have any friends who roomed in this dorm who would let me in. I didn’t have any friends at all.
But I wasn’t ready to give up just yet. My eyes scanned the paths that wound by the dorms. After about ten seconds, I spotted a familiar face—a petite Valkyrie girl who was in my English lit class. A girl who’d probably never noticed me before and had absolutely no idea who I was—and, more important, that I didn’t exactly belong here. It was worth a shot.
I walked up the steps to the front door of the dorm and started rummaging through my messenger bag, like I was looking for my ID card. A few seconds later, the Valkyrie climbed up the steps. I turned to face her and moved off to one side.
“Forgot my ID card again,” I said in a bright voice, and smiled. “Can you scan yours for me, please?”
The other girl gave me a strange look, but she slid her card through the machine, opened the door, and stepped inside. So much for that stellar security Professor Metis had been talking about last night. I followed the Valkyrie inside.
The inside of Valhalla Hall looked pretty much like my dorm. The first floor was a series of common areas linked together, including the living room that I was standing in right now, although it was a lot nicer than the one at Styx Hall, with upscale, expensive-looking furniture. Several couches and recliners ringed three huge TVs. One of them was tuned to some cheesy reality program, although the girl sitting in front of it was more interested in texting on her phone than watching the show.
I didn’t waste time gawking but instead hurried up the stairs to the second floor. My luck held, and I didn’t run into any more Valkyries. Just about everyone was still out on campus doing their own thing, and the dorm was still and quiet.
I quickly made my way to 21V, which was Jasmine’s room, according to her online profile. The door was closed, but other than that, there was no indication that this was the room of a girl who’d been murdered. There was no yellow crime scene tape strung up or anything. Not that I was complaining, but it was just kind of weird, like everything else at Mythos.
I stood there a moment, looking at the door, wondering if this was really the right thing to do. But I’d come too far to back out now. And yeah, I was a little curious about what Jasmine’s room looked like. Everyone had been talking about how great it was. Sue me for wondering. Besides, I’d already done most of the breaking—I might as well do the entering and stealing, too. So I drew in a breath, reached for the doorknob, and rattled it.
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.
So I pulled the can out from under the desk and sifted through the contents, still using my hoodie sleeve to keep from actually touching anything. Most of it was your normal, boring trash. A half-used tube of lip gloss. Some crumpled tissues. An empty bag of potato chips. But there was one thing that was interesting—a photo in the very bottom.
The photo had been torn in two, and I picked up both pieces, turned them over, and fit them together.
To my surprise, the photo wasn’t of Jasmine. Instead, Morgan McDougall and Samson Sorensen smiled up at me. They had their arms around each other and were grinning for the camera. The photo looked like it had been taken sometime in the spring on the quad, because the tree behind them was green with new leaves.
I frowned. Why would Jasmine tear this particular photo in two? Was there something going on between Morgan and Samson? According to the rumors that I’d heard, Morgan had her eye on Samson now that Jasmine was dead. But this photo had to have been ripped up before last night, when Jasmine had been murdered.
Nothing made sense. Right now, I had more questions than answers—and a whole lot of trouble I could get into if someone found me snooping in here.
I put the torn photo in my bag with the rest of the stuff that I’d collected. Then, I crept over to the door, listening for voices or footsteps outside. I didn’t hear anything, so I opened the door and slipped out into the hallway.
I went out the same way that I’d come in, hurrying down the stairs and walking through the main common room. A few more girls had come into the dorm by now, but none of them glanced at me as I went by. Luckily, I didn’t have to swipe an ID card to get out of the dorm, so I was able to push through the front door and scurry down the stairs and back out onto the cobblestone walkway.
I glanced around to make sure no one was watching me, then headed around the side of the stone building so I could cut across one of the smaller quads and walk back to my own dorm.
I was almost clear of Valhalla Hall when a window on the second floor opened and a backpack sailed outside and plummeted to the ground in front of me. Somehow, I stifled the surprised scream in my throat. Especially since the backpack was followed a second later by a guy who landed in a low, perfect crouch. He got to his feet with ease, like the twenty-foot fall was nothing to him, and I saw who he was.
Logan freaking Quinn.
It was more dark than light now, and the Spartan looked even more dangerous in the blackening shadows. The pale, milky moon brought out the blue highlights in his thick, wavy black hair. Logan dusted a few leaves off his designer jeans, then glanced up to find me staring at him. His eyes narrowed in his chiseled face.
“Well, well, if it isn’t the Gypsy girl out here in the dark all by herself.” Logan’s voice sounded deep and ominous. “What are you doing?”
I clutched my bag to my chest, as if that would somehow protect me from the Spartan and the fact that he could kill me with his pinkie finger. “Not sneaking out of some poor girl’s dorm room like you so obviously are.”
He moved closer to me, but I held my ground and didn’t step back. Logan’s lips quirked up into that amused smile again. He must have realized that I was scared of him, despite my acidic words.
But I was only a little scared of him, I told myself. And only because Jasmine had been murdered and I was the one who’d found her body. And, well, maybe because I’d just broken into and searched her dorm room and had her laptop in my bag. Okay, so maybe I had several good reasons to be jumpy, in addition to the fact that I was standing here alone in the dark with Logan Quinn. The very sexy, very dangerous Logan Quinn.
“You’re right,” he said. “I had a date. And you? What are you doing out here?”
I clutched my bag with the stolen computer a little tighter. “Nothing. I was just on my way back to my dorm. Nothing, really.”
&nb
sp; We stared at each other. Logan’s eyes were as pale as the moonlight on his face, more silver than blue now, while his skin resembled the marble statues that could be found on all the academy buildings. Cold. Remote. Hard. Perfect.
“Well, I think I’m going to go do nothing somewhere else,” Logan drawled. “Maybe back in my dorm room. Care to join me?”
I couldn’t stop my mouth from falling open. Had the infamous Logan Quinn just asked me to go back to his room with him? I rewound the last few seconds in my mind. Yes, yes, he had—a whole two minutes after he’d just jumped out of some other girl’s window.
Disgust filled me. Egotistical pig. Did he think that I was that easy? That I’d sleep with him just because he asked? That I was that lonely and that desperate? That he was so sexy that no girl could resist him? My eyes drifted over his muscled body again. Well, maybe he had the right to be pretty confident there.
But even if I had been a raging slut like Morgan McDougall who gave it up just for fun, there was still the little problem of my Gypsy gift. Just touching a hairbrush had made me scream so loud and so long that I’d wound up in the hospital. Sex with somebody like Logan Quinn would probably fry my brain for good. I hadn’t even kissed a guy in months now, ever since I’d broken up with Drew Squires, my first, and only, shortlived boyfriend. The last time we’d kissed, I’d felt him pretending that I was Paige Forrest. I’d dumped him right then and there.
“So what do you say, Gypsy girl?” Logan asked in a soft voice. “Want to go back to my room and do nothing together?”
“Sorry,” I snapped. “I think I’m going to go call my grandma.”
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