Jasmine yanked the bloody end of the crown out of Morgan's face and drew her arm back, getting ready for another strike.
"Stop!" I called out. "Stop hurting her! She's your friend! Your best friend!"
Jasmine turned and stared at me, as if she'd forgotten that I was even standing in the library with the two of them. "Correction: She was my best friend before she started screwing my boyfriend behind my back six months ago."
Jasmine threw the end of the bloody crown down and stalked around Morgan, her face as dark as a storm cloud. I didn't know what the Valkyrie would do next, but I had to do my best to distract her. I didn't want her hurting Morgan again. Or worse, killing the other girl in front of me.
"Is that why you're doing all this?" I asked in a shaky voice. "Just because your boyfriend cheated on you?"
"He didn't just cheat on me," Jasmine snapped. "He did it with her. My supposed best friend. For months. And they both lied to my face about it the whole time. I was getting suspicious, you know? Samson was acting strange, kind of distracted. He cut a couple of our dates short, wouldn't answer his phone in front of me, that sort of thing. I thought that he might be cheating on me, that he might be seeing someone else on the side, so I told Morgan about it. Actually confided in her about it. And do you know what she said?"
I shook my head.
"That I shouldn't worry. That Samson was crazy about me and had told her so himself. That he was cutting our dates short because he loved me so much and it was hard for him to control himself around me when we were together. I can't believe I fell for her bullshit." Jasmine let out a bitter laugh.
She paced around Morgan again, muttering something under her breath. I reached my hand behind me, my fingers curling around the edge of the book. The prowler circled around a table and paced back this way, stalking away then toward me, its bloodred eyes fixed on my face the whole time.
"Do you know what the worst part is?" Jasmine asked. "The reason Samson slept with her in the first place. Do you know why he slept with her?"
I shrugged. The ripped photo of the couple had shown me a lot of things, but that hadn't been one of them.
"Because I wouldn't," she muttered. "I wanted to wait, and Samson said he did, too. That we weren't ready yet. That it was better to take things slow and wait for the right moment. That it would be more romantic that way. And the whole time, the two of them were screwing like rabbits behind my back."
"I found that picture of Morgan and Samson. The one that you tore up and dumped in your trash can. How did you even find out about them?" I asked in a calm voice, even as my eyes scanned the library, trying to figure a way out of this mess. But nothing came to mind, no way that I could get myself or Morgan out of here. Not alive, anyway.
Jasmine shrugged. "Morgan lied to me about where she went on summer break. She said that she and her family were going to their house in the Bahamas for a month. But a week later my brother texted me that he'd seen Morgan up in the Hamptons. Why would Morgan lie? It made me suspicious, especially since Samson's parents have a summer home there. So I borrowed my daddy's jet and flew up there. I snuck out to Samson's house, and I saw them together on the beach. They were all over each other. It was disgusting."
"But that was in the summer," I said. "That was months ago."
Jasmine gave me a cold, satisfied smile. "I know. The two of them never suspected a thing. They never even had a clue that I knew about them."
"So what?" I asked. "You've spent the last few months planning how to fake your own death to get back at your best friend for sleeping with your boyfriend? Don't you think that's a little extreme?"
Jasmine's blue eyes narrowed in her face, and she opened her mouth, probably to bark out some command to the prowler to come over and kill me, but I cut her off.
"I mean, yeah, it completely sucks, and I can totally understand why you would want revenge. The two of them hurt you real bad. They deserved to be punished."
Jasmine nodded. "Exactly. I loved Samson; I really did. But he's a guy, after all, and he's always thinking with his dick. I expected this sort of thing from him. But Morgan and I grew up together. She's almost like a sister to me, which made her betrayal all the worse. That's why she's going to pay for screwing my boyfriend."
I guess that explained why Samson wasn't standing next to Morgan, all zombied out the way that she was. Kind of sexist of Jasmine if you asked me, only blaming the other girl and not her precious boyfriend, too. From what I'd seen, Samson had been a very willing participant. In his own way, he was just as big a slut as Morgan was.
"So why not do something a little more ... reasonable to them?" I asked. "Why fake your own death? What was the point?"
"Because I wanted them to miss me," she snapped in an angry voice. "I wanted to hurt them. I wanted them to feel guilty about what they'd done. I wanted the guilt to eat them alive until they couldn't stand to even look at each other. Only ... it didn't."
No, it didn't. I thought of how the whole school, how all the other students, had just gone on with their lives after Jasmine's supposed death like it had never even happened. Morgan and Samson had been happy that she'd died so they could finally be together out in the open. Everyone else had just been relieved that Jasmine wasn't around to terrorize them anymore. Everyone but me. The Gypsy girl who saw things and decided to stick her nose into someone else's business yet again, to try to learn all of Jasmine's secrets. And look how well that was working out for me.
"How did you do it?" I asked. "And why here in the library?"
Jasmine shrugged. "Illusion powers run in my family. My mom's really good at creating them, and she taught me tons of them over the summer when my magic finally quickened. It was easy to make one of my own body just lying there with my throat cut open. My mom used to create dozens of dead body and zombie illusions every year for Halloween when I was a kid and we'd have a haunted house."
So I was right. I hadn't gotten a vibe off Jasmine's body or blood that night because there hadn't been anything there to start with. Nothing real, anyway.
"But if it was all an illusion, how did your blood wind up all over my clothes?" I asked.
I still had the purple hoodie and jeans crumpled up in the bottom of my laundry basket. The last time that I'd looked, the bloodstains had still been on them.
"Because once a person believes in an illusion, it's real to them. Once you believe in something, you give it life and form and substance. You thought you saw my blood, so it ended up all over your clothes. Just like Metis, Ajax, and Nickamedes thought they saw my body, so they packed it up and put it in cold storage in the basement of the math-science building. That's where they keep all the bodies, you know."