An Apple for the Creature

The lip-chewing had no real effect on him, and Trey studied her to see how long it would take her to realize it. Seven Mississippis.

“I’ve been hacked,” she said.

“Get right out of town.”

“And they’ve been in my laptop messing with my stuff.”

“The spells?”

“Some of them, yes.”

Trey felt the first little flutter of panic.

“I’ve been inputting the evocation spells for the last couple of weeks,” Anthem explained. “One group at a time. Last week it was Gypsy stuff from Serbia, before that it was the preindustrial Celtic stuff. It’s hard to do. None of it was translated and Professor Davidoff didn’t want us to use Babelfish or any of the other online translators because they don’t give cultural or—What’s the word?”

“Contextual?”

“Right. They don’t give cultural or contextual translations, and that’s supposed to be important for spells.”

“Crucial is a better word,” Trey murmured, “but I take your point.”

“I had to compare what I typed with photocopies from old spell books. After I finish this stuff Kidd will add the binding spells, then Jonesy will do the English translations. Bird’s doing the footnotes, and I guess you’ll be working on the annotations.”

“Uh-huh.”

“At first Jonesy dictated the spells while I typed, but that only really worked with Latin and the Romance languages because we kind of knew the spellings. More and more, though, I had to look at it myself to make sure it was exact. Everything had to match or the professor would freak. And there are all those weird little symbol thingies on some of the letters.”

“Diacritical marks.”

“Yeah, those.” She began nibbling at her thumbnail, talking around it as she chewed. “Without everything just so, the spells won’t work.”

Trey smiled a tolerant smile. “Sweetie, the spells won’t work because they’re spells. None of this crap works, you know that.”

She stared at him for a moment, still working on the thumb. “They used to work, though, didn’t they?”

“This is science, honey. The only magic here is the way you’re working that sweater and the supernatural way I’m working these jeans.”

She said, “Okay.” But she didn’t sound convinced, and it occurred to Trey that he didn’t know where Anthem landed on the question of faith. If she was a believer, then that was a tick against her becoming part of his circle.

“You were saying about the data entry?” he prompted, steering her back to safer ground.

Anthem blinked. “Oh, sure. It’s hard. It’s all brain work.”

Trey said nothing to that. It would be too easy; it would be like kicking a sleepy kitten. Instead he asked, “So what happened?”

Anthem suddenly stopped biting her thumb and they both looked at the bead of blood that welled from where she’d bitten too deeply. Without saying a word, Anthem tore a piece of Scotch tape from a dispenser and wrapped it around the wound.

“Every day I start by checking the previous day’s entries to make sure they’re all good.”

“And—?”

“The stuff I entered last night was different.”

“Different how?”

“Let me show you.” Anthem leaned past him and her fingers began flying over the keys. Whatever else she was or wasn’t, she could type like a demon. Very fast and very accurate. The world lost a great typist when she decided to pursue higher education, mused Trey.

Anthem pulled up a file marked 18CenFraEvoc, scrolled down to one of the spells, then tapped the screen with a bright green fingernail. “There, see? I found the first changes in the ritual the professor is going to use for the debut thingy.”

Trey’s French was passable and he bent closer and studied the lines, frowning as he did so. Anthem was correct in that this ritual—the faux summoning of Azeziz, demon of knowledge and faith —was a key element in Professor Davidoff’s plans to announce their project to the academic world. Even a slight error would embarrass the professor, and he was not a forgiving man. Less so than, say, Hitler.

Anthem opened a file folder that held a thick sheaf of high-res scans of pages from a variety of sources. She selected a page and held it up next to the screen. “This is how it should read.”

Trey clicked his eyes back and forth between the source and target materials and then he did see it. In one of the spells the wording had been changed. The second sentence read: With the Power of the Eternal I Conjure Thee to My Service.

It should have read: With the Power of My Faith in the Eternal I Conjure and Bind Thee to My Service.

“You see?” Anthem asked again. “It’s different. There’s nothing about the conjurer believing. That throws it all off, right?”

“In theory,” he said dryly. “This could have been a mistype.”

“No way,” she said. “I always check my previous day’s stuff before I start anything new. I don’t make those kinds of mistakes.”

The pride in her voice was palpable, and in truth Trey could not recall ever making a correction in any of her work before. The team had been hammering away at the project for eighteen months. They’d created hundreds of pages of original work, and entered thousands of pages of collected data. After a few mishaps with other team members handling data entry, the bulk of it had been shifted to Anthem.

“It’s weird, right?” she asked.

He sat back and folded his arms. “It’s weird. And, yes, you’ve been hacked.”

“By who? I mean, it has to be one of the team, right? But Jonesy doesn’t know French. I don’t think Bird does, either.”

Jonesy was a harmless mouse of a kid. Bird was sharper, but he was an idealist and adventurer. Bird wanted to chew peyote with the Native American Church and go on spirit walks. He wanted to whirl with the Dervishes and trance out with the Charismatics. Unlike Trey and every other anthropologist Trey knew, Bird was in the field for the actual beliefs. Bird apparently believed that everyone was right, that every religion, no matter how batty, had a clue to the Great Big Picture as he called it. Trey liked him, but except for the project they had nothing in common.

Would Bird do this, though? Trey doubted it, partly because it was mean—and Bird didn’t have fangs at all— and mostly because it was disrespectful to the belief systems. As if anyone would really care. Except the thesis committee.

“What about Kidd?” asked Anthem. “It would be like him to do something mean like this.”

That much was true. Michael Kidd was a snotty, self-important little snob from Philly’s Main Line. Good- looking in a verminous sort of way. Kidd was cruising through college on family money and never pretended otherwise. Even Davidoff walked softly around him.

But, would Kidd sabotage the project? Yeah, he really might. Just for shits and giggles.

“The slimy little rat-sucking weasel,” said Trey.

“So it is Kidd?”

Trey did not commit. He would have bet twenty bucks on it, but that wasn’t the same as saying it out loud. Especially to someone like Anthem. He cut a covert look at her and for a moment his inner bitch softened. She was really a sweet kid. Clueless in a way that did no one any harm, not even herself. Anthem wasn’t actually stupid, just not sharp and would probably never be sharp. Not unless something broke her and left jagged edges; and wouldn’t that be sad?

“Is this only with the French evocation spell?” he asked.

“No.” She pulled up the Serbian Gypsy spells. Neither of them could read the language, but a comparison of