Living in Threes by Judith Tarr

I could put it back and walk away and avoid stealing it, and keep out of trouble. I could just sit there and let the world spin down the drain, too, taking everybody with it.
    Or I could borrow it. All right, steal it, but I’d put it back when I was done. There were so many in that box, and hundreds more in storage. What difference did it make if one went somewhere else for a while?
    I wrapped it in the napkin I’d brought and shoved it in my pocket. Then I got out of there.

    I’d never done anything like that in my life. I could feel it in there, as if it was literally hot. Any minute I expected alarms to go off and buzzers to buzz and Aunt Jessie to leap out of a cupboard chanting Thief! Thief! Thief!
    The silence was almost worse. Somehow, before it broke and I got busted, I had to figure out how to get to the marketplace, bazaar, whatever they called it.
    People would expect me to want to play tourist, at least I hoped so. I also hoped they wouldn’t ask too many questions about what I wanted to buy.
    Some of it maybe wasn’t legal. Then there was the question I really needed to ask. Does magic work if you don’t believe in it?
    I was afraid I already knew the answer to that.
    Everything’s on the internet somewhere, and normally that’s the first place I would have gone to look. But artifact storage was right above the library, and I was going by the door when the questions started crowding in. Instead of diving for my room and my computer, I went really old school. Ancient. I dived for the books.
    So many of them were in languages I didn’t know. The ones that were in English were all tangled up in their own words. I was ready to give up and head for the beautiful, simple, searchable internet when I found the box at the end of the shelf.
    The label on it was typed, and so old it had gone yellow and started to peel. All it said was, Misc. Notes on Magical Texts .
    Why not? I thought, pulling it out and lugging it to the table I’d staked out at the end of the aisle under the window.
    The box was full of hand-written notes. There were sheets of hieroglyphs, drawn and painted with care that must have taken hours, and then there were the translations. They were scribbled and crossed out and rewritten all over the place, but they surprised me by being easy to read. Whoever wrote them—I couldn’t find a name anywhere—had round, clear handwriting. It was as careful, in its way, as the hieroglyphs.
    Nobody writes like that any more. I was glad this person had, whoever he or she was, because when I started to piece it together, I realized what I was reading. It was Meritre’s book of magic.
    I don’t believe in coincidences, either. My hands shook when I spread the pages across the table.
    There it was, the spell Meritre was going to—had intended to—must have gone ahead and worked.
    This time-traveling thing was making my head ache.
    There it was, anyway. It was a recipe for wiping out evil. It called for a crocodile’s egg, crushed beetles’ wings, a jug of beer, and the dung of a white cow.
    I pulled out my phone and took a picture of the translation. Then I took a picture of the original. And after that I snapped bits of the rest, more or less at random, until I stopped short.
    “This is stupid,” I said.
    I’d been thinking about how to make the spell work. Egypt isn’t ancient any more. Food has changed, though not as much as you might think. Spells might change, too.
    I could get an egg, though it probably wouldn’t be a crocodile’s. Beetles were all over the place. Beer, no problem, though I’d have to sneak it out of the kitchen. The cow…well…
    It was stupid. All the spell did was make the world’s worst plate of scrambled eggs.
    I shuffled the papers together and dropped them back in the box. Just after it slid into its place on the shelf, Aunt Jessie opened the library door and squinted down the aisle. “Meredith, is that you?”
    “Coming,” I said. “Sorry, did you lose me? I