An Apple for the Creature

Spellcaster 2.0 JONATHAN MABERRY

Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestselling author, multiple Bram Stoker Award winner, and Marvel Comics writer. He’s the author of a dozen novels in several genres and many nonfiction books on topics ranging from martial arts to supernatural folklore. Since 1978 he has sold more than twelve hundred magazine feature articles, three thousand columns, two plays, greeting cards, song lyrics, poetry, and textbooks. He founded the Writers Coffeehouse and cofounded the Liars Club, and is a frequent keynote speaker and guest of honor at major writers and genre conferences. Visit him online at jonathanmaberry.com and on Twitter (@jonathanmaberry) and Facebook.

“Username?”

“You’re going to laugh at me.”

Trey LaSalle turned to her but said nothing. He wore very hip, very expensive tortoiseshell glasses and he let them and his two-hundred-dollar haircut do his talking for him. The girl withered.

“It’s . . . obvious?” she said awkwardly, posing it as a question.

“Let me guess. It’s going to be a famous magician, right? Which one, I wonder? Won’t be Merlin because even you’re not that obvious, and it won’t be Nostradamus because I doubt you could spell it.”

“I can spell,” she said, but there was no emphasis to it.

“Hmm. StGermaine? No? Dumbledore? Gandalf?”

“It’s—”

He pursed his lips. “Girl, please don’t tell me it really is Merlin.”

Anthem blushed herself mute.

“Jesus save me.” Trey rubbed his eyes and typed in MERLIN with slow sarcasm, each keystroke separate and very sharp. By the fourth letter Anthem’s eyes were jumping.

Her name was really Anthem. Her parents were right-wing second gens of left-wing Boomers from the Village, a confusion of genetics and ideologies that resulted in a girl who was bait fish for everyone at the University of Pennsylvania with an IQ higher than their belt size. Though barely a palate cleanser for a shark like Trey. He sipped his pumpkin spice latte and sighed.

“Password?” he prompted.

“You’re going to make fun of me again.”

“There’s that chance,” he admitted. “Is it too cute, too personal or too stupid?” He carved off slices of each word and spread them out thin and cold. He was good at that. Back in high school his snarky tone would have earned him a beating—had, in fact, earned him several beatings; but then he conquered the cool crowd. Thereafter they kept him well-protected, well-appeased and well-stocked with a willing audience of masochists who had already begun to learn that anyone with a truly lethal wit was never—ever—to be mocked or harmed. In that environment, Trey LaSalle had flourished into the self-satisfied diva he now enjoyed being. Now, in his junior year at U of P, Trey owned the in-crowd and their hangers-on because he was able to work the sassy gay BFF role as if the trope were built for him. At the same time he could also play the get-it-done team leader when the chips were down.

Those chips were certainly down right now. Trey figured that Jonesy and Bird had gotten Anthem to call Trey for a bailout because she was so thoroughly a Bambi in the brights that even he wouldn’t actually slaughter her.

“Password?” He drew it into a hiss.

Anthem chewed a fingernail. Despite the fact that she painted her nails, they were all nibbled down to nubs. A couple of them even had blood caked along the sides from where she’d cannibalized herself a bit too aggressively, and there were faint chocolate-colored smears of it on the keyboard. Trey made a mental note to bathe in Purell when he got back to his room.

“Come on, girl,” he coaxed.

She blurted it. “Abracadabra.”

Trey stared at the screen and tried very hard not to close the laptop and club her to death with it. He typed it in. The display changed from the bland log-in screen to the landing page for The Spellcaster Project.

The project.

It sounded simple, but wasn’t. Over the course of the last eighteen months the group had collected, organized and committed to computer memory every evocation and conjuring spell known to the various beliefs of human culture, from phonetic interpretations of guttural verbal chants by remote Brazilian tribes to complex rituals in Latin and Greek. On the surface the project was a searchable database so thorough that it would be the go-to resource. A resource for which access could be leased, opening a cash flow for the folklore department. And, people would definitely pay. This database—nicknamed Spellcaster—was a researcher’s dream.

Trey found it all fascinating but considered it immensely silly at the same time. He was a scientist, or becoming one, and yet his field of study involved nothing that he believed in. Doctors at least believed in healing, but folklorists were a notoriously atheistic lot. Demons and gods, spells and sacred rituals. None of it was remotely real. All of it was an attempt to make sense of a world that could not be truly understood or defined, and certainly not controlled. Things just happened. Nobody was at the controls, and nobody was taking calls from the human race.

And yet with all that, it was fascinating, like watching a car wreck. You don’t want to be a part of it but you can’t look away. He even went to church sometimes, just to study the people, to mentally catalog the individual ways in which they interpreted the religion to which they ascribed. There was infinite variation within a species, just as within flowers in a field. And soon he would be making money from it, and that was something he could believe in.

The second aspect of the project was Spellcaster 2.0, which began as Trey’s idea but along the way had somehow become Professor Davidoff’s. In essence, once the thousands of spells were entered, a program would run through all of them to look for common elements. Developmental goals included a determination of how many common themes appeared in spells and what themes appeared in a majority, or at least a significant number of them. The end goal was to create a perfect generic spell. A spell that established that there were some aspects to magical conjuring that linked the disparate tribes and cultures of mankind.

Trey’s hypothesis was that anthropologists would be able to use that information, along with related linguistic models, to more accurately track the spread of humankind from its African origins. It might effectively prove that the spread of religion in all of its many forms stemmed from the same central source. Or—as he privately thought of it—mankind’s first big stupid mistake. In other words, the birth of prayer and organized religion.

Finding that would be a watershed moment in anthropology, folklore, sociology and history. It would be a Nobel Prize no-brainer, and it didn’t matter to Trey if he shared that prize, and all of the fame and—no doubt—fortune that went with it. Spellcaster was going to make them all rich.

“Okay,” Trey said, “why are we here?”

Anthem chewed her lip. She did it prettily, and even though she was the wrong cut of meat for Trey’s personal tastes, he had to admit that she was all that. She was an East Coast blonde with ice-pale skin, luminous green eyes, a figure that could make any kind of clothes look good and Scarlett Johansson lips. Shame that she was dumber than a cruller. He was considering bringing her into his circle; not the circle-jerk of grad students to which they both currently belonged, but the more elite group he went clubbing with. Arm candy like that worked for everyone, straight or gay. It was better than a puppy and it didn’t pee on the carpet. Though, with Anthem there was no real guarantee that she was housebroken.

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 source and target showed definite differences. Small, but there. “I went back as far as the Egyptian burial symbols. Ten separate files, ten languages, which is crazy ’cause none of us can speak all of those languages.”

“What about the Aramaic and Babylonian?”

“I haven’t entered them yet.”

Trey thought about it, then nodded. “Okay, let’s do this. Go in and make the corrections. Before you do, though, I’m going to set you up with a new username and new password.”

“Okay.” She looked relieved.

“How much do you have to do on this?” Trey asked. “Are we going to make the deadline?”

The deadline was critical. Professor Davidoff was planning to make an official announcement in less than a month. He had a big event planned for it, and warned them all every chance he could that departmental grant money was riding on this. Big-time money. He never actually threatened them, but they could all see the vultures circling.

Anthem nibbled as she considered the stacks of folders on her desk. “I can finish in three weeks.”

“That’s cutting it close.”

Anthem’s nibbling increased.

“Look,” he said, “I’ll spot-check you and do all the transfers to the mainframe. Don’t let anyone else touch your laptop for any reason. No one, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, relieved but still dubious. “Will that keep whoever’s doing this out of the system?”

“Sure,” said Trey. “This should be the end of it.”

It wasn’t.

“Tell me exactly what’s been happening,” demanded Professor Davidoff.

Trey and the others sat in uncomfortable metal folding chairs that were arranged in a half circle around the acre of polished hardwood that was the professor’s desk. The walls were heavy with books and framed certificates, each nook and corner filled with oddments. There were juju sticks and human skulls, bottles of ingredients for casting spells—actual eye of newt and bat’s wing—and ornate reliquaries filled with select bits of important dead people.

Behind the desk, sitting like a heathen king among his spoils, was Alexi Davidoff, professor of folklore, professor of anthropology, department chair and master of all he surveyed. Davidoff was a bear of a man with Einstein hair, mad-scientist eyebrows, black-framed glasses and a suit that cost more than Trey’s education.

The others in the team looked at Trey. Anthem and Jonesy on his left—a cabal of girl power; Bird and Kidd on his right, representing two ends of the evolutionary bell curve—evolved human and moneyed Neanderthal.

“Well, sir,” began Trey, “we’re hitting a few little speed bumps.”

The professor arched an eyebrow. “‘Speed bumps’?”

Trey cleared his throat. “There have been a few anomalies in the data and—”

Davidoff raised a finger. It was as sure a command to stop as if he’d raised a scepter. “No,” he said, “don’t take the long way around. Come right out and say it. Own it, Mr. LaSalle.”

Kidd coughed but it sounded suspiciously like, “Nut up.”

Trey pretended not to have heard. To Davidoff, he said, “Someone has hacked into the Spellcaster data files on Anthem’s computer.”

They all watched Davidoff’s complexion undergo a prismatic change from its normal never-go-outside pallor to a shade approximating a boiled lobster.

“Explain,” he said gruffly.

Trey took a breath and plunged in. In the month since Anthem sought his help with the sabotage of the data files her computer had been hacked five times. Each time it was the same kind of problem, with minor changes being made to conjuring spells. With each passing week Trey became more convinced that Kidd was the culprit. Kidd was in charge of research for the team, which meant that he was uniquely positioned to obtain translations of the spells, and to arrange the rewording of them, since he was in direct contact with the various experts who were providing translations in return for footnotes. Only Jonesy had as much contact with the translators, and Trey didn’t for a moment think that she would want to harm Anthem, or the project. However, he dared not risk saying any of this here and now. Not in front of everyone, and not without proof. Davidoff was rarely sympathetic and by no means an ally.

On the other hand, Trey knew that the professor had the typical academic’s fear and loathing of scandal. Research data and drafts of papers were sacrosanct, and until it was published even the slightest blemish or question could ruin years of work and divert grants aimed at Davidoff’s tiny department.

“Has anything been stolen?” Davidoff asked, his voice low and deadly.

“There’s . . . um . . . no way to tell, but if they’ve been into Anthem’s computer then nothing would have prevented them from copying everything.”

“What about the bulk data on the department mainframe?” growled Davidoff.

“No way,” said Bird doubtfully. “Has that been breached?”

Trey dialed some soothing tones into his voice. “No. I check it every day and the security software tracks every log-in. It’s all clean. Whatever’s happening is confined to Anthem’s laptop.”

“Have all the changes been corrected before uploading to the mainframe?” asked Davidoff.

“Absolutely.”

That was a lie. There were two hundred gigabytes of documents that had been copied from Anthem’s computer. It would take anyone months to read through it all, and probably years to compare every line to the photocopies of source data.

“You’re sure?” Davidoff persisted.

“Positive,” lied Trey.

“Are we still on schedule? We’re running this in four days. We have guests coming. We have press coming. I’ve invested a lot of the department’s resources into this.”

He wasn’t joking and Trey knew it. Davidoff had booked the university’s celebrated Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts and hired a professional event coordinator to run things. There was even a bit of “fun” planned for the evening. Davidoff had had a bunch of filmmakers from nearby Drexel University do some slick animation that would be projected as a hologram onto tendrils of smoke rising from vents in the floor around a realistic mock-up of a conjuring circle. The effect would be the sudden “appearance” of a demon. Davidoff would then interact with the demon, following a script that Trey himself had drafted. In their banter, the demon would extol the virtues of Spellcaster and discuss the benefits of the research to the worldwide body of historical and folkloric knowledge, and do everything to praise the project, short of dropping to his knees and giving Davidoff some oral love.

There were so many ways it could go wrong that he almost wished he could pray for divine providence, but not even a potential disaster was going to put Trey on his knees.

“Sir,” Trey said, “while I believe we’re safe and in good shape, we really should run Spellcaster 2.0 ourselves before the actual show.”

“No.”

“But—”

“You do realize, Mr. LaSalle, that the reason the press and the dignitaries will all be there is that we’re running this in real time. They get to share in it. That’s occurred to you, hasn’t it?”

Yes, you grandstanding shithead, Trey thought. It occurred to me for all of the reasons that I recommended that we not go that route. He wanted to play it safe, to run the program several times and verify the results rather than go for the insane risk of what might amount to a carnival stunt.

Trey held his tongue and gave a single nod of acquiescence.

“Then we run it on schedule,” the professor declared. “Now—how did this happen? By magic?”

A couple of the others laughed at this, but the laughs were brief and uncertain, because clearly this wasn’t a funny moment. Davidoff glared them into silence.

Trey said, “I don’t know, but we’re doing everything we can to make sure that it doesn’t affect the project.”

The Spellcaster project was vital to all of them, but for different reasons. For personal glory, for a degree, for the opportunities it would offer and the doors it would open. So, Trey could understand why the vein on the professor’s forehead throbbed so mightily.

“I’ve done extensive online searches,” Trey said, using his most businesslike voice, “and there’s nothing. Not a sentence of what we’ve recorded, not a whiff of our thesis, nothing.”

“That doesn’t mean they won’t publish it,” grumbled Jonesy, speaking up for the first time since the meeting began.

“I don’t think so,” said Trey. “The stuff on Anthem’s laptop is just the spell catalog. None of the translations are there and none of the bulk research and annotations are there. At worst they can publish a partial catalog.”

“That would still hurt us,” said Bird. “If we lost control of that, license money would spill all over the place.”

Trey shook his head. “The shine on that candy is its completeness. All of the spells, all of the methods of conjuration and evocation, every single binding spell. There’s no catalog like it anywhere, and what’s on the laptop now is at most fifty percent, and that’s nice, but it’s not the Holy Grail.”

“I think Trey’s right, Professor,” said Jonesy. “We should do a test run. I mean, what if one or more of those rewritten errors made it to the mainframe? If that happened and we run Spellcaster 2.0, how could we trust our findings?”

“No way we could,” said Kidd, intending it to be mean and scoring nicely. The big vein on the professor’s forehead throbbed visibly.

Trey ignored Kidd. “We have some leeway—”

Jonesy shook her head. “The 2.0 software is configured to factor in accidental or missed keystrokes, not sabotage.”

Shut up, you cow, thought Trey, but Jonesy plowed ahead.

“Deliberate alteration of the data will look like what it is. Rewording doesn’t look like bad typing. If it’s there, then all our hacker has to do is let us miss one of the changes he made and wait for us to publish. Then he steps forward and tells everyone that our data management is polluted . . .”

“. . . and he’d be able to point to specific flaws,” finished Bird. “We not only wouldn’t have reliable results, we wouldn’t have the perfect generic spell that would be the signpost we’re looking for. We’d have nothing. Oh, man . . . we’d be so cooked.”

One by one they turned to face Professor Davidoff. His accusing eye shifted away from Trey and landed on Anthem, who withered like an orchid in a cold wind. “So, this is a matter of you being stupid and clumsy, is that what I’m hearing?”

Anthem was totally unable to respond. She went a whiter shade of pale, and she looked like a six-year-old who was caught out of bed. Her pretty lips formed a lot of different words but Trey did not hear her make as much as a squeak. Tiny tears began to wobble in the corners of her eyes. The others kept themselves absolutely still. Kidd chuckled very quietly, and Trey wanted to kill him.

“It’s not Anthem’s fault,” said Trey, coming quickly to her defense. “Her data entry is—”

Davidoff made an ugly, dismissive noise and his eyes were locked on Anthem’s. “There are plenty of good typists in the world,” he said unkindly. “Being one of them does not confer upon you nearly as much importance as you would like to believe.”

Trey quietly cleared his throat. “Sir, since Anthem first alerted me to the problem I’ve been checking her work, and some of the anomalies occurred after I verified the accuracy of her entries. This isn’t Anthem’s fault. I changed her username and password after each event.”

Davidoff considered this, then gave a dismissive snort. It was as close to an apology as his massive personal planet ever orbited.

“Then . . . we’re safe?” ventured Bird hopefully.

Trey licked his lips, then nodded.

Davidoff’s vein was no longer throbbing quite as aggressively. “Then we proceed as planned. Real test, real time.” He raised his finger of doom. “Be warned, Mr. LaSalle, this is your neck on the line. You are the team leader. It’s your responsibility. I don’t want to hear excuses after something else happens. All I ever want to hear is that Spellcaster is secure. I don’t care who you have to kill to protect the integrity of that data, but you keep it safe. Do I make myself clear?”

Trey leaned forward and put his hands on the edge of Davidoff’s desk. “Believe me, Professor, when I find out who’s doing this I swear to God I will rip his goddamn heart out.”

He could feel everyone’s eyes on him.

The professor sat back and pursed his lips, studying Trey with narrowed, calculating eyes. “See that you do,” he said quietly. “Now all of you . . . get out.”

Trey spent the next few hours walking the windy streets of University City. He was deeply depressed and his stomach was a puddle of acid tension. As he walked, he heard car horns and a few shouts, laughter from the open doors of sports bars on the side streets. A few sirens wailed with ghostly insistence in the distance. He heard those things, but he didn’t register any of it.

Trey’s mind churned on it. Not on why this was happening, but who was doing it?

After leaving Davidoff, Trey had gone to see his friend Herschel and the crew of geeks at the computer lab. These were the kinds of uber-nerds who once would have never gotten laid and never moved out of their mothers’ basements—stereotypes all the way down to the Gears of War T-shirts and cheap sneakers. Now, guys like that were rock stars. They got laid. They all had jobs waiting for them after graduation. Most of them wouldn’t bother with school after they had a bachelor’s because the industry wanted them young and raw and they wanted them now. These were the guys who hacked ultra-secret corporate computer systems just because they were bored. Guys who made some quick cash on the side writing viruses that they sold to the companies who sold anti-virus software.

Trey explained the situation to them.

They thought it was funny.

They thought it was cool.

They told him half a dozen ways they could do it.

“Even Word docs on a laptop that’s turned off?” demanded Trey. “I thought that was impossible.”

Herschel laughed. “Impossible isn’t a word, brah, it’s a challenge.”

“What?”

“It’s the Titanic,” said Herschel.

“Beg pardon?”

“The Titanic. The unsinkable ship. You got to understand the mindset.” Herschel was an emaciated runt with nine-inch hips and glasses you could fry ants with. At nineteen he already held three patents and his girlfriend was a spokesmodel at gaming shows. “Computers—hardware and software—are incredibly sophisticated idiots, feel me? They can only do what they’re programmed to do. Even A.I. isn’t really independent thinking. It’s not intuitive.”

“Okay,” conceded Trey. “So?”

“So, what man can invent, man can fuck up. Look at home security systems. As soon as the latest unbreakable, unshakeable, untouchable system goes on the market someone has to take it down. Not wants to . . . has to.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s there, brah. Because it’s all about toppling the arrogant assholes in corporate America who make those kinds of claims. Can’t be opened, can’t be hacked, can’t be sunk. Titanic, man.”

“Man didn’t throw an iceberg at the ship, Hersch.”

“No, the universe did that because it’s a universal imperative to kick arrogant ass.”

“Booyah,” agreed the other hackers, bumping fists.

“So,” said Trey slowly, “you think someone’s hacking our research because he can?”

Herschel shrugged. “Why else?”

“Not to try to sell it?”

Some of the computer geeks laughed. Herschel said, “Sell that magic hocus-pocus shit and you’re going to make—what? A few grand? Maybe a few hundred grand in the long run after ten years busting your ass?”

“At least that much,” Trey said defensively.

“Get a clue, dude. You got someone hacking a closed system on a laptop and changing unopened files in multiple languages. That’s real magic. A guy like that wouldn’t wipe his ass with a hundred grand. All he has to do is file a patent on how he did it and everyone in corporate R and D will be lining up to blow him. Guy like that wouldn’t answer the phone for any offer lower than the middle seven figures.”

“Booyah!” agreed the geek chorus.

“Sorry, brah,” said Herschel, clapping Trey on the shoulder, “but this might not even be about your magic spell bullshit. You could just be a friggin’ test drive.”

Trey left, depressed and without a clue of where to go next. The profile of his unknown enemy did not seem to fit anyone on the project. Bird and Jonesy were as good with computers as serious students and researchers could be, but at the end of the day they were really only Internet savvy. They would never have fit in with Herschel’s crowd. Anthem knew everything about word processing software but beyond that she was in unknown territory. Kidd was no computer geek, either. Although, Trey mused, Kidd could afford to hire a geek. Maybe even a really good geek, one of Herschel’s crowd. Someone who could work the kind of sorcery required to break into Anthem’s computer.

But . . . how to prove it?

God, he wished he really could go and rip Kidd’s heart out. If the little snot even had one.

The sirens were getting louder and the noise annoyed him. Every night it was the same. Football jocks and the frat boys with their perpetual parties, as if belly shots and beer pong genuinely mattered in the cosmic scheme of things. Neanderthals.

Without even meaning to do it, Trey’s feet made a left instead of a right and carried him down Sansom Street toward Kidd’s apartment.

He suddenly stopped walking and instantly knew that no confrontation with Kidd was going to happen that night.

The entire street was clogged with people who stood in bunches and vehicles parked at odd angles.

Police vehicles. And an ambulance.

“Oh . . . shit,” he said.

Tearing out Kidd’s heart was no longer an option.

According to every reporter on the scene, someone had already beaten him to it.

The following afternoon they all met in Trey’s room. The girls perched on the side of his bed; Bird sprawled in a papasan chair with his knees up and his arms wrapped around them. Trey stood with his back to the door.

All eyes were on him.

“Cops talk to you?” asked Bird.

“No. You?”

Bird nodded. He looked as scared as Trey felt. “They asked me a few questions.”

“Really? Why?”

Bird didn’t answer.

“They came around here, too,” said Jonesy. “This morning and again this afternoon.”

“Why’d they want to see you guys?” asked Trey.

Jonesy gave him a strange look.

“What?” Trey asked.

“They wanted to see you,” said Anthem.

“Me? Why would they want to see me?”

Nobody said a word. Nobody looked at him.

Trey said, “Oh, come on. You guys have to be frigging kidding me here.”

No one said a word.

“You sons of bitches,” said Trey. “You think I did it, don’t you? You think I could actually kill someone and tear out their frigging heart? Are you all on crack?”

“Cops said that whoever killed him must have gone apeshit on him,” murmured Bird.

“So, out of seven billion people suddenly I’m America’s Most Wanted?”

“They’re calling it a rage crime,” said Jonesy.

“Rage,” echoed Anthem.

“And you actually think that I could do that?”

“Somebody did,” said Bird again. “Whoever did it must have hated Kidd because they beat him to a pulp and tore him open. Cops asked us if we knew anyone who hated Kidd that much.”

“And you gave them my name?”

“We didn’t have to,” said Anthem. “Everyone on campus knows what you thought of Kidd.”

And there was nowhere to go with that except out, so Trey left them all sitting in the desolation of his room.

The cops picked him up at ten the next morning. They said he didn’t need a lawyer, they just wanted to ask questions. Trey didn’t have a lawyer anyway, so he answered every single question they asked. Even when they asked the same questions six and seven times.

They let him go at eight thirty that night. They didn’t seem happy about it.

Neither was Trey.

The funeral was the following day. They all went. It didn’t rain because it only rains at funerals in the movies. They stood under an impossibly blue sky that was littered with cotton candy clouds. Trey stood apart from the others and listened with contempt to the ritual bullshit the priest read out of his book. Kidd had been as much of an atheist as Trey was, and this was a mockery. He’d have skipped it if that wouldn’t have made him look even more suspicious.

After the service, Trey took the bus home alone.

He tried several times to call Davidoff, but the professor didn’t return calls or emails.

The day ground on.

The Spellcaster premiere was tomorrow. Trey spent the whole day double- and triple-checking the data. He found nothing in any of the files he opened, but in the time he had he was only able to view about 1 percent of the data.

Trey sent twenty emails recommending that the premiere be postponed. He got no answers from the professor. Bird, Jonesy and Anthem said as little to him as possible, but they all kept at it, going about their jobs like worker bees as the premiere drew closer.

Professor Davidoff finally called him.

“Sir,” said Trey, “I’ve been trying to—”

“We’re going ahead with the premiere.”

Trey sighed. “Sir, I don’t think that’s—”

“It’s for Michael.”

Michael. Not Mr. Kidd. The professor had never called Kidd by his first name. Ever. Trey waited for the other shoe.

“It’ll be a tribute to him,” continued Davidoff, his pomposity modulated to a funereal hush. “He devoted the last months of his life to this project. He deserves it.”

Great, thought Trey, everyone thinks I’m a psycho killer, and he’s practicing sound bites.

“Professor, we have to stop for a minute to consider the possibility that the sabotage of the project is connected to what happened to Kidd.”

“Yes,” Davidoff said heavily, “we do.”

Silence washed back and forth across the cellular ocean.

“I cannot imagine why anyone would do such a thing,” said the professor. “Can you, Mr. LaSalle?”

“Professor, you don’t think I—”

“I expect everything to go by the numbers tomorrow, Mr. LaSalle.”

Before Trey could organize a reply, Professor Davidoff disconnected.

And it all went by the numbers.

More or less.

Drawn by the gruesome news story and the maudlin PR spin Davidoff gave it, the Annenberg was filling to capacity, with lines wrapped halfway around the block. Three times the expected number of reporters were there. There was even a picket by a right-wing religious group who wanted the Spellcaster project stopped before it started because it was “ungodly,” “blasphemous,” “satanic” and a bunch of other words that Trey felt ranged between absurd and silly. The picketers drew media attention and that put even more people in line for the dwindling supply of tickets.

Bird, Jonesy and Anthem showed up in very nice clothes. Bird wore a tie for the first time since Trey had known him. The girls both wore dresses. Jonesy transformed from mouse to wow in a black strapless number that Trey would have never bet she could pull off. Anthem was in green silk that matched her eyes and she looked like a movie star. She even had nail tips over the gnarled nubs of her fingers. Trey was in a black turtleneck and pants. It was as close to being invisible as he could manage.

Davidoff was the ringmaster of the circus. He wore an outrageously gorgeous Glen Urquhart plaid three-piece and even with his ursine bulk he looked like God’s richer cousin.

Even the university dons were nodding in approval, happy with the positive media attention following so closely on the heels of the murder.

The as yet unsolved murder, mused Trey. The cops were nowhere with it. Trey was pretty sure he was being followed now. He was a person of interest.

God.

When the audience was packed in, Davidoff walked onto center stage amid thunderous applause. He even contrived to look surprised at the adoration before eventually waving everyone into an expectant silence.

“Before we begin, ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “I would like us all to share in a moment of silence. Earlier this week, one of my best and brightest students was killed in a savage and senseless act that still has authorities baffled. No one can make sense of the death of so wonderful a young man as Michael Kidd, Jr. He was on the very verge of a brilliant career, he was about to step into the company of such legendary folklorists as Stetson Kennedy, Archie Green and John Francis Campbell.”

Trey very nearly burst out laughing. He cut a look at Bird, who gave him a weary head shake and a half smile, momentarily stunned out of all consideration by the absurdity of that claim.

“I would like to dedicate this evening to Mr. Kidd,” continued Davidoff. “He will be remembered, he will be missed.”

“Christ,” muttered Trey. The stage manager scowled at him.

The whole place dropped into a weird, reverential silence that lasted a full by-the-clock minute. Davidoff raised his arms and a spotlight bathed him in a white glow as the houselights dimmed.

“Magic!” he said ominously in a voice that was filtered through a soundboard that gave it a mysterious-sounding reverb. The crowd ooohed and aaahed. “We have always believed in a larger world. Call it religion, call it superstition, call it the eternal mystery . . . we all believe in something. Even those of us who claim to believe in nothing—we will still knock on wood and pick up a penny only if it is heads up. Somewhere, past the conscious will and the civilized mind, the primitive in us remembers cowering in caves or crouching in the tall grass, or perching apelike on the limb of a tree as the wheel of night turned above and darkness covered the world.”

Trey mouthed the words along with the professor. Having written them he knew the whole speech by heart.

“But what is magic? Is magic the belief that we live in a universe of infinite possibilities? Yes, but it’s also more than that. It’s the belief that we can control the forces of that universe. That we are not flotsam in the stream of cosmic events, but rather that we are creators ourselves. Cocreators with the infinite. Our sentience—the beautiful, impossible fact of human self-awareness and intelligence—lifts us above all other creatures in our natural world and connects us to the boundless powers of what we call the supernatural.”

From there Davidoff segued into an explanation of the Spellcaster project. Trey had to admit that his script sounded pretty good. He’d taken what could have been dry material and given it richness by an infusion of some pop-culture phrasing and a few juicy superlatives. The audience loved it, and they were carried along by a multimedia show that flashed images on a dozen screens. Pictures from illuminated texts. Great works of sacred art. Churches and temples, tombs and crypts, along with hundreds of photos of everything from Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice to Gandalf the Grey. And there were images of holy people from around the world: Maori with their tattooed faces, Navajo shamans singing over complex sand paintings, medicine men from tiny tribes deep in the heart of the Amazon, and singers of sacred songs from among the Bushmen of Africa. It was deliberate sensory overload, accompanied by a remix mash-up of musical pieces ranging from Ozzy Osbourne to Mozart to Loreena McKennitt.

Then the floor opened and a gleaming computer rose into the light. It wasn’t the department mainframe, of course, but a prop with lots of polished metal fixtures that did nothing except look cool. A laptop was positioned inside, out of sight of the audience. Smoke began rising with it, setting the stage for the evocation to come.

Suddenly four figures, two men and two women in black robes lined with red satin swirling around them, stepped onto the stage. Juniors from the dance department. They did a few seconds of complex choreography that was, somehow, supposed to symbolize a ritual, and then they produced items from within their cloaks and began drawing a conjuring circle on the floor. Other dancers came out and lit candles, placing them at key points. The floor was discreetly marked so the dancers could do everything just so. Even though this was all for show, it had to be done right. This was still college.

The conjurer’s circle was six feet across, and this was surrounded by three smaller circles. Davidoff explained that the center circle represented Earth, the smaller circle at the apex of the design represented the unknown, the circle to his right was the safe haven of the conjurer; and the circle to the left represented the realm of the demon who was to be conjured.

It was all done correctly.

Then to spook things up, Davidoff explained how this could all go horribly, horribly wrong.

“A careless magician summons his own death,” he said in his stentorian voice. “All of the materials need to be pure. Vital essences—blood, sweat or tears—must never be allowed within the demon’s circle, for these form a bridge between the worlds of spirit and flesh.”

The crowd gasped in horror as images from The Exorcist flashed onto the screens.

“A good magician is a scholar of surpassing skill. He does not make errors . . . or, rather, he makes only one error.”

He paused for laughter and got it.

“A learned magician is a quiet and solitary person. All of his learning, all of his preparation for this ritual, must be played out in his head. He cannot practice his invocations because magical words each have its special power. To casually speak a spell is to open a doorway that might never be shut.”

More images from horror movies emphasized his point. The dancer-magicians took up positions at key points around the circle.

“If everything is done just right,” continued Davidoff, “the evocation can begin. This is the moment for which a magician prepares his entire life. This is the end result of thousands of hours of study, of sacrifice, of purification and preparation. The magician hopes to draw into this world—into the confined and contained protection of a magic circle—a demon of immeasurable wisdom and terrible power. Contained within the circle, the demon must obey the sorcerer. Cosmic laws decree that this is so!”

The audience was spellbound, which Trey thought very appropriate. He found himself caught up in the magic that Davidoff was weaving. It was all going wonderfully so far. He cut looks at the others and they were all smiling, the horrors of their real world momentarily forgotten.

Davidoff stepped into the Earth circle. “Tonight we will conjure Azeziz—the demon of spells and magic. The demon of belief in the larger world! It is he who holds all knowledge of the ways of sorcery that the dark forces lent to mankind in the dawn of our reign on Earth. Azeziz will share with us the secrets of magic, and will then guide us toward the discovery of the perfect spell. The spell that may well be the core magical ritual from which all of our world’s religions have sprung.”

He paused to let that sink in. Trey replayed the spell in his head, verifying that it was the correct wording and not any version of the mistakes that kept showing up in Anthem’s computer. It all seemed correct, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

“Azeziz will first appear to us as a sphere of pure energy and will then coalesce into a more familiar form. A form that all of us here will recognize, and one in which we will take comfort.” He smiled. “Join me now as we open the doorway to knowledge that belongs jointly to all of mankind—the knowledge that we do, in truth, live in a larger world.”

As he began the spell, Davidoff’s voice was greatly amplified so that it echoed off the walls. “Come forth, Azeziz! O great demon, hear my plea. I call thee up by the power of this circle! By thine own glyph inscribed with thy name I summon thee.”

Suddenly a ball of light burst into being inside the demon’s circle. Trey blinked and gasped along with the audience. It was so bright, much brighter than what he had expected. The lighting guys were really into the moment. The ball hung in the midst of the rising smoke, pulsing with energy, changing colors like a tumbling prism, filling the air with the smell of ozone and sulfur.

Trey frowned.

Sulfur?

He shot a look at the others. Which one of those idiots added that to the special effects menu? But they were frowning, too. Bird turned to him and they studied one another for a moment. Then Bird sniffed almost comically and mouthed: Kidd?

Shit, thought Trey. If that vermin had worked some surprises into the show, then he swore he would dig him up and kick his dead ass.

Onstage, Davidoff’s smile flickered as he smelled it, too. He blasted a withering and accusatory look at the darkness offstage. Right where he knew Trey would be standing.

Davidoff reclaimed his game face. “Come forth, Azeziz! Appear now that I may have counsel with thee. I conjure thee, ancient demon, without fear and trembling. I am not afraid as I stand within the Circle of the Earth. Come forth and manifest thyself in the circle of protection that is prepared for thee.”

The globe of light pulsed and pulsed. Then there was a white-hot flash of light and suddenly a figure stood in the center of the conjuring circle.

The crowd stared goggle-eyed at the tall, portly figure with the wisps of hair drifting down from a bald pate. Laser lights sparkled from the tiny glasses perched on the bulbous nose.

Benjamin Franklin. Founder of the University of Pennsylvania.

The demon smiled.

The audience gaped and then they got the joke and burst out laughing. The hall echoed with thunderous applause as Benjamin Franklin took a bow.

Trey frowned again. He didn’t remember there being a bow. Not until the end.

“Speak, O demon!” cried Davidoff as the applause drifted down to an expectant and jovial silence. “Teach us wisdom.”

“Wisdom, is it?” asked Franklin. There was something a little off with the prerecorded sound. The voice was oddly rough, gravelly. “What wisdom would a mortal ask of a demon?”

Davidoff was right on cue. “We seek the truth of magic,” he said. “We seek to understand the mystery of faith. We seek to understand why man believes.”

“Ah, but wisdom is costly,” said Franklin, and Trey could see Davidoff’s half smirk. That comment was a little hook for when the fees to access Spellcaster were presented. Wisdom is costly. Cute.

“We are willing to pay whatever fee you ask, O mighty demon.”

“Are you indeed?” asked Franklin, and once more that was something off-script. “How much would you truly pay to understand belief?”

None of that was in the script.

Goddamn you, Kidd, thought Trey darkly, and he wondered what other surprises were laid like land mines into the program. Anthem, Bird and Jonesy moved toward him, the four of them reconnecting, however briefly, in what they all now thought was going to be a frigging disaster. If Davidoff was made a fool of, then they were cooked. They were done.

Davidoff soldiered on, fighting to stay ahead of these new twists. “Um, yes, O demon. What is the cost of the knowledge we seek?”

“Oh, I believe you have already paid me my fee,” said the demon Ben Franklin, and he smiled. “My fee was offered up by vow if not by deed.”

He rummaged inside his coat for something.

“What’s he doing?” whispered Jonesy.

Bird leaned close. “Please, God, do not let him bring out a doobie or a copy of Hustler.”

But that’s not what Franklin pulled out from under his coat flaps. He extended his arm and turned his hand palm upward to show Davidoff and everyone what he held.

Davidoff’s face went slack, his eyes flaring wide.

A few people, the ones who were closest, gasped.

Then someone screamed.

The thing Franklin held was a human heart.

Davidoff said, “W-what—?”

Bird gagged.

Jonesy screamed.

Anthem said, “No . . .”

Trey felt as if he were falling.

The demon laughed.

It was not the polite, cultured laughter of an eighteenth-century scientist and statesman. It was not anything they had recorded for the event.

The laughter was so loud that the dancers staggered backward, blood erupting from nostrils and ears. It buffeted the audience and the sheer force of it knocked Davidoff to his knees, cupping his hands to his ears.

The audience screamed.

Then the lights went out, plunging the whole place into shrieking darkness.

And came back on a moment later with a brilliance so shocking that everyone froze in place.

The demon turned his palm and let the heart fall to the floor with a wet plop.

No one moved.

The demon adjusted his glasses and smiled.

Trey whirled and ran to the tech boards. “Shut it down,” he yelled. “Shut it all down. Kill the projectors. Come on—do it!”

The techs hit rows of switches and turned dials.

Absolutely nothing changed onstage.

“Stop that, Trey,” said Ben Franklin. His voice echoed everywhere.

Trey whirled.

“W-what?” he stammered.

“I said, stop it.” The demon smiled. “In fact, come out here. All of you. I want everyone to see you. The four bright lights. My helpers. My facilitators.”

Trey tried to laugh. Tried to curse. Tried to say something witty.

But his legs were moving without his control, carrying him out onto the stage. Jonesy and Anthem came with him, all in a terrified row. They came to the very edge of the circle in which the demon stood.

Bird alone remained where he was.

The audience cried out in fear.

“Hush,” said the demon, and every voice was stilled. Their mouths moved but there was no sound. People tried to get out of their seats, to flee, to storm the doors; but no one could rise.

Ben Franklin chuckled mildly. He cocked an eye at Trey. “This performance is for you. All for you.”

Trey stared at him, his mind teetering on the edge of a precipice. Davidoff, as silent as the crowd, stood nearby.

“At the risk of being glib,” said the demon, “I think it’s fair to say that class is in session. You called me to provide knowledge, and I am ever delighted, as all of my kind are delighted, to bow and scrape before man and give away under duress those secrets we have spent ten million years discovering. It’s what we live for. It makes us so . . . happy.”

When he said the word happy lights exploded overhead and showered the audience with smoking fragments that they were entirely unable to avoid. Trey and the others stood helpless at the edge of the circle.

Trey tried to speak, tried to force a single word out. With a flick of a finger the demon freed his lips and the word, “How?” burst out.

Ben Franklin nodded. “You get a gold star for asking the right question, young Trey. Perhaps I will burn it into your skull.” He winked. “Later.”

Trey’s heart hammered with trapped frenzy.

“You wrote the script for tonight, did you not?” asked the demon. “Then you should understand. This is your show-and-tell. I am here for you. So . . . you tell me.”

Suddenly Trey’s mouth was moving, forming words, his tongue rebelled and shaped them, his throat gave them sound.

“A careless magician summons his own death,” Trey said, but it was Davidoff’s voice that issued from his throat. “All of the materials need to be pure. Vital essences—blood, sweat or tears—must never be allowed within the demon’s circle for these form a bridge between the worlds of spirit and flesh.”

The big screens suddenly flashed with new images. Anthem. Typing, her fingers blurring. The image tightened until the focus was entirely on her fingernails. Nibbled and bitten to the quick, caked with . . .

“Blood,” said Anthem, her voice a monotone.

Then Jonesy spoke but it was Davidoff’s bass voice that rumbled from her throat. “A learned magician is a quiet and solitary person. All of his learning, all of his preparation for this ritual must be played out in his head. He cannot practice his invocations because magical words each have their special power. To casually speak a spell is to open a doorway that might never be shut.”

And now the screens showed Jonesy reading the spells aloud as Anthem typed.

Trey closed his eyes. He didn’t need to see any more.

“Arrogance is such a strange thing,” said the demon. “You expect it from the powerful because they believe that they are gods. But you . . . Trey, Anthem, Jonesy . . . you should have known better. You did know better. You just didn’t care enough to believe that any of it mattered. Pity.”

The demon stepped toward them, crossing the line of the protective circle as if it held no power. And Trey suddenly realized that it did not. Somewhere, the ritual was flawed beyond fixing. Was it Kidd’s sabotage or something deeper? From the corner of his eye Trey could see the glistening lines of tears slipping down Anthem’s cheeks.

The demon paused and looked at her. “Your sin is worse. You do believe but you fight so hard not to. You fight to be numb to the larger world so that you will be accepted as a true academic like these others. You are almost beyond saving. Teetering on the brink. If you had the chance, I wonder in which direction you would place your next step.”

A sob, silent and terrible, broke in Anthem’s chest. Trey tried to say something to her, but then the demon moved to stand directly in front of him.

“You owe me thanks, my young student,” said the demon. “When the late and unlamented Mr. Kidd tried to spoil the results of your project by altering the protection spells, he caused all of this to happen. He made it happen, but not out of reverence for the forces of the universe and certainly not out of any belief in the larger world. He did it simply out of spite. He wanted no profit from your failure except the knowledge that you would be ruined. That was as unwise as it was heartless . . . and I paid him in kind.”

The demon nudged the heart on the floor. It quivered and tendrils of smoke drifted up from it. Trey tried to imagine the terror Kidd must have felt as this monster attacked him and brutalized him, and he found that he felt a splinter of compassion for Kidd.

“You pretend to be scholars,” breathed the demon, “so then here is a lesson to ponder. You think that all of religion, all of faith, all of spirit, is a cultural oddity, an accident of confusion by uneducated minds. An infection of misinformation that spread like a disease, just as man spread like a disease. You, in your arrogance, believe that because you do not believe, there is nothing to believe in. You dismiss all other possibilities because they do not fit into your hypothesis. Like the scientists who say that because evolution is a truth—and it is a truth—there is nothing divine or intelligent in the universe. Or the astronomers who say that the universe is only as large as the stones thrown by the Big Bang.” He touched his lips to Trey’s ear. “Arrogance. It has always been the weakness of man. It’s the thing that keeps you bound to the prison of flesh. Oh yes, bound, and it is a prison that does not need to have locked doors.”

Trey opened his eyes. His mouth was still free and he said, “What?”

The demon smiled. “Arrogance often comes with blindness. Proof of magic surrounds you all the time. Proof that man is far more than a creature of flesh, proof that he can travel through doorways to other worlds, other states of existence. It’s all around you.”

“Where?”

The screens once more filled with the images of Maori with their painted faces, and Navajo shamans and their sand paintings; medicine men in the remote Amazon, singers from among the Bushmen of Africa. As Trey watched, the images shifted and tightened so that the dominant feature in each was the eyes of these people.

These believers.

Then ten thousand other sets of eyes flashed across the screens. People of all races, all cultures, all times. Cavemen and saints, simple farmers and scholars endlessly searching the stars for a glimpse of something larger. Something there. Never giving up, never failing to believe in the possibility of the larger world. The larger universe.

Even Bird’s eyes were there. Just for a moment.

“Can you, in your arrogance,” asked the demon, “look into these eyes and tell me with the immutable certainty of your scientific disbelief that every one of these people is deluded? That they are wrong? That they see nothing? That nothing is there to be seen? Can you stand here and look down the millennia of man’s experience on Earth and say that since science cannot measure what they see, then they see nothing at all? Can you tell me that magic does not exist? That it has never existed? Can you, my little student, tell me that? Can you say it with total and unshakeable conviction? Can you, with your scientific certitude, dismiss me into nonexistence, and with me all of the demons and angels, gods and monsters, spirits and shades who walk the infinite worlds of all of time and space?”

Trey’s heart hammered and hammered and wanted to break.

“No,” he said. His voice was a ghost of a whisper.

“No,” agreed the demon. “You can’t. And how much has that one word cost you, my fractured disbeliever? What, I wonder, do you believe now?”

Tears rolled down Trey’s face.

“Answer this, then,” said the demon, “why am I not bound to the circle of protection? You think that it was because Mr. Kidd played pranks with the wording? No. You found every error. In that you were diligent. And the circles and patterns were drawn with precision. So . . . why am I not bound? What element was missing from this ritual? What single thing was missing that would have given you and these other false conjurers the power to bind me?”

Trey wanted to scream. Instead he said, “Belief.”

“Belief,” agreed the demon softly.

“I’m sorry,” whispered Trey. “God . . . I’m sorry . . .”

The demon leaned in and his breath was scalding on Trey’s cheek. “Tell me one thing more, my little sorcerer,” whispered the monster, “should I believe that you truly are sorry?”

“Y-yes.”

“Should I have faith in the regrets of the faithless?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I . . . didn’t know.”

The demon chuckled. “Have you ever considered that atheism as strong as yours is itself a belief?”

“I—”

“We all believe in something. That is what brought your kind down from the trees. That is what made you human. After all this time, how can you not understand that?”

Trey blinked and turned to look at him.

The demon said, “You think that science is the enemy of faith. That what cannot be measured cannot be real. Can you measure what is happening now? What meter would you use? What scale?”

Trey said nothing.

“Your project, your collection of spells. What is it to you? What is it in itself? Words? Meaningless and silly? Without worth?”

Trey dared not reply.

“Who are you to disrespect the shaman and the magus, the witch and the priest? Who are you to say that the child on his knees is a fool; or the crone on the respirator? How vast and cold is your arrogance that you despise the vow and the promise and the prayer of everyone who has ever spoken such words with a true heart?”

The demon touched Trey’s chest.

“In the absence of proof you disbelieve. In the absence of proof a child will believe, and belief can change worlds. That’s the power you spit upon, and in doing so you deny yourself the chance to shape the universe according to your will. You become a victim of your own close-mindedness.”

Tears burned on Trey’s flesh.

“Here is a secret,” said the demon. “Believe it or not, as you will. But when we whispered the secrets of evocation to your ancestors, when we taught them to make circles of protection—it was not to protect them from us. No. It was us who wanted protection from you. We swim in the waters of belief. You, and those like you, spit pollution into those waters with doubt and cynicism. With your arrogant disinterest in the ways the universe actually works. When you conjure us, we shudder.” He leaned closer. “Tell me, little Trey, now that your faithless faith is shattered . . . if you had the power to banish me, would you?”

Trey had to force the word out. “Yes.”

“Even though that would require faith to open the doors between the worlds?”

Trey squeezed his eyes shut. “Y-yes.”

“Hypocrite,” said the demon, but he was laughing as he said it. “Here endeth the lesson.”

Trey opened his eyes.

Trey felt his mouth move again. His lips formed a word.

“Username?” he asked.

Anthem looked sheepishly at him and nibbled the stub of a green fingernail. “You’re going to laugh at me.”

Trey stared at her. Gaped at her.

“What—?” she said, suddenly touching her face, her nose, to make sure that she didn’t have anything on her. “What?”

Trey sniffed. He could taste tears in his mouth, in the back of his throat. And there was a smell in the air. Ozone and sulfur. He shook his head, trying to capture the thought that was just there, just on the edge. But . . . no, it was gone.

Weird. It felt important. It felt big.

But it was gone, whatever it was.

He took Anthem’s hand and studied her fingers. There was blood caked in the edges. He glanced at the keyboard and saw the chocolate-colored stains. Faint, but there.

“You got blood on the keys,” he said. “You have to be careful.”

“Why?”

“Because this is magic and you’re supposed to be careful.”

Anthem gave him a sideways look. “Oh, very funny.”

“No,” he said, “not really.”

“What’s it matter? I’ll clean the keyboard.”

“It matters,” he said, and then for reasons he could not quite understand, at least not at the moment, he said, “We have to do it right is all.”

“Do what right?”

“All of it,” said Trey. “The spells. Entering them, everything. We need to get them right. Everything has to be right.”

“I know, I know . . . or the program won’t collate the right way and—”

“No,” he said softly. “Because this stuff is important. To . . . um . . . people.”

Anthem studied his face for a long moment, then she nodded.

“Okay,” she said and got up to get some computer wipes.

Trey sat there, staring at the hazy outline of his reflection. He could see his features, but somehow, in some indefinable way, he looked different.

Or, at least he believed he did.