Touch of Sibyl

Chapter Ten

I couldn't concentrate where I was sitting on the main library floor with all the other students who'd come to gawk, so I moved over to a table tucked into one of the corners in the stacks-the same corner that had the case with the strange sword in it.

I threw my messenger bag onto the table, then went over and stared down at the sword. The weapon looked the same as it had last night. Silver metal, long blade with faint writing on it, a man's face carved into the hilt.

I waited a minute, but the eye on the hilt didn't suddenly pop open and stare at me again. Good. Maybe I wasn't going crazy after all.

I sat down at the table, dragged a notebook out of my bag, and got to work, writing down everything that I knew about Jessy Ashton. The more I knew about her, the easier it would be to figure out why she'd been in the library last night-and who might have killed her.

I didn't know much.

Jessy was pretty, popular, and a total mean girl. A Valkyrie who loved designer clothes and whose family had deep, deep pockets. And ... and ... and that was it. That was all that I knew about her. That was the complete sum total of her existence to me. I didn't even know what her other power was, besides her inherent Valkyrie strength.

For a moment, I was depressed. This was stupid. It wasn't like I was Veronica Mars or Batman or somebody, able to figure out complex mysteries with just a few clues. Maybe it had been some random bad guy who'd killed Jessy after all, some Chitauri of Chaos who'd just been after the Bowl of Death so he could do Bad, Bad Things with it.

But then, I thought about my mom. Something about this felt wrong to me, and she'd always told me to trust my feelings, to trust my Sibyl gift. Besides, mom wouldn't give up so easily if she was investigating Jessy's murder, and neither would I.

Okay, so I needed more information on Jessy, and I knew of at least one place to get it-the Internet.

I pulled my laptop out of my bag and fired it up. Mythical Academy had the very best of everything, including free, campuswide Wi-Fi, so I was able to access the school Web site with just a few clicks of my wireless mouse. Every Mythics student was supposed to have his or her own personal school Web page to share interests, photos, and more with fellow students. Kind of like a Facebook account that was only accessible to the other kids at school. But some of the kids, including me, just didn't bother with it. I didn't have any friends at Mythics to start with, so who here would want to read my ramblings?

But, of course, Jessy had a blog and more than two hundred friends, according to her campus profile. I scrolled down the page, scanning her blog, but there was nothing there. Just catty comments about who was wearing what, along with several dreamy posts about what a great guy Samson Siren was. Your typical high school popular rich girl angst. Or what passed for it. There were also several photos of Samson in his ittybitty swim briefs at various meets. Dude totally had six-pack abs. Yeah, I looked at those pictures a little longer and a little more closely than the other ones.

But Jessy hadn't posted anything on her page that told me anything really deep and meaningful about her, much less why she was at the library last night, which meant that I was going to have to go to another source.

Like her laptop. That's where the good stuff would be anyway. It always was. Even at my old school, kids had always been frantic when they'd lost their laptops, thinking about all the incriminating stuff that someone might find on them. Like e-mails about how drunk the kids had gotten with their friends the weekend their parents thought they went to band camp. Papers they'd downloaded and plagiarized for AP English. Porn.

I tapped my fingers on the table, thinking back to last night, calling up my memories of the scene of the crime, and sorting through them the way that I was able to do. In some ways, my psychometry magic was better than watching a movie, because I had perfect color, picture, and sound every single time.