First Frost - (The Mythos Academy #0.5) Page 0,1

not wanting to work at some greasy fast-food dive like other kids did.

Thanks to my psychometry magic, it was easy for me to find stuff. Usually, all I had to do was run my fingers over a girl's desk or look through her purse to get a good idea of where she might have left her cell phone or dropped her favorite bracelet. And if I didn't immediately see where the lost object was, then I kept touching stuff until I did. Kind of like Nancy Drew fol owing a trail of psychic bread crumbs to wherever they led her.

People left psychic vibes everywhere, on everything they touched, and those vibes revealed everything from what they'd had for lunch to what they really thought of their best friend's new boyfriend. Most of the time, the girl either secretly thought the guy was a total jerk or she wanted him for herself. All I had to do to tap into those vibes, to see people's actions, to feel their true emotions, to discover their secrets, was stretch my fingers out and touch all the objects around me, big and small.

In Paige's case, she'd promised me twenty bucks if I could find her phone before her mom bucks if I could find her phone before her mom realized it was missing. So two weeks ago, after school, I went over to Paige's house, walked around her room, and ran my fingers over her desk, bookcases, and nightstand. Mostly, images of Paige fil ed my mind-sitting at her desk doing homework, looking at the col ections of fairy tales she loved to read, stashing some Oreos in the back of her nightstand, even though she wasn't supposed to have sweets. All the things she did in her room on a regular basis and all the emotions that went along with them-dul boredom over the homework, bright happiness looking at the books, sly satisfaction at sneaking her favorite treat right under her mom's nose.

Paige had thought I was a little strange, pacing back and forth across her room and poking into all her stuff, but eventually, another image had popped into my head, one of Paige's little sister swiping the phone off the nightstand so she could snoop through Paige's text messages. I'd told Paige what I'd seen, and sure enough, we'd gone down the hall to her sister's room and found her using the stolen phone.l

Paige blinked, finally shaking off the rest of her daze.

"Gwen Frost," she murmured again, her voice a little stronger this time.

She turned away from the mirror, and her eyes dropped to the wooden bench I was sitting on. Paige had already fixed her hair, which looked sleek and perfect as always, and she'd put her brush down on the end of the bench, less than a foot away from my hand. Paige stared and stared at the hairbrush, her green eyes bright and glittering, and she had that weird, twisted look on her face again.

What was wrong with her? Was Paige high or something? It wasn't unheard of for kids to get totally wasted on pot or something worse, even in our rather tame North Carolina high school. But Paige had seemed fine in gym class, shooting layup after layup, since she was one of the stars of the girls' basketball team. I hadn't been so lucky, because I was a total train wreck when it came to basketball. Today, I'd managed to bang myself in the head with the ball when I'd tried to shoot a freaking free throw-with the whole class watching, of course. Even the coaches had snickered and rolled their eyes at me. Yeah, I was just that kind of loser, a book-smart Gypsy girl who sucked at pretty much every sport you could think of and probably a couple that hadn't even been invented yet.

"So can I use your hairbrush or not?" I asked, getting a little impatient.

I'd already swapped my gym clothes for my usual sneakers and jeans. I'd also unzipped my purple hoodie and put it on over my T-shirt of Karma Girl, one of my favorite superheroines. Maybe I wasn't a budding fashionista like some of the other girls were, but I didn't want to go back to class with my hair frizzed out to epic proportions.

Paige hesitated, and a strange emotion flashed in her eyes, almost like a warning. "Sure."

"It's okay, Gwen," my friend Bethany Royal piped up from her spot on the far end of the bench. "You