The Babysitters Coven

by Kate M. Williams

  “So as our Counsel, you’re like our…coach?” I said.

  Brian nodded. “I will be your trainer and guide as you navigate your Sitter duties.”

  Cassandra had now moved over to the other wall, and took down a pair of handcuffs that seemed to be made out of very expensive barbed wire. With a flick of her wrist, they snapped open. I grimaced, waiting for her to cut herself.

  “So basically, we’re like Slayers, and you’re our Watcher,” I said.

  “Excuse me?” Brian said.

  Cassandra put the handcuffs back and tried to open a thing that looked like a high-tech, and very expensive, blow dryer.

  “You know, like Buffy,” I added.

  Brian still seemed like he had no idea what I was talking about as he crossed the room, took the grabber from Cassandra, and put it back in the case.

  “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” I said finally. “The TV show.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen it.”

  I raised an eyebrow. How could someone like him have never seen that show?

  “It’s about a teenage girl who lives on a Hellmouth and kills vampires,” I said, trying to bring him up to speed in as few words as possible. “And she has a Watcher who’s a librarian.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said, nodding. “I have heard of that show. And you’re not wrong for thinking that there are some similarities. But it is the differences that are the most important.”

  “And what are those?” I asked.

  “One: a Sitter’s job is to protect, not to kill. A Sitter only kills as a very, very last resort, and even then there are consequences,” he said. “And two: Buffy was a fictional TV character, and you two are real.”

  As if to illustrate his point, Cassandra was now bleeding, having finally cut herself on what looked like a lethal blender. Brian handed her a tissue, which she wrapped around her finger before using the sole of her shoe to smudge a drop of blood into the floor. With a last glance at the weapons on the wall, she came over and sat back down.

  “And, Cassandra, you are no longer unassigned, as I will be acting as your Counsel as well. So we had better get started on your training. Better late than never.” Brian walked over to his bookshelves and pulled out a large, ancient-looking volume. He carried it back over and dropped it on his desk with a thud. He tapped its cover, then pointed at several more just like it that were still on the shelves. “A Sitter never stops training, and eventually all of the material in these books will be inside your heads.”

  Ouch, I thought. They were really big books.

  “You have already gotten a taste from the notebook that Cassandra’s mother left, but this is volume one of the spells that are available to a Sitter,” Brian said, taking a book off the shelf and opening it to a page in the middle. The pages were yellowed and thin, and the words on them were written in thick, inky script. It was like someone had taken the Bible and an encyclopedia and mashed them together. Intimidating, to say the least.

  Cassandra seemed to have the opposite reaction—not intimidated but empowered. She drew in a breath as she flipped from page to page. “We can learn to do anything we want,” she whispered, in the same kind of voice kids use when they’ve been told that they can pick out some candy.

  “These spells are just like your kinetic powers,” Brian said, snapping the book shut and pulling it away from her. “They are to be used to protect the innocent, and for Returns, not used to get out of tests or defeat a slighted cheerleader.”

  “What’s a Return?” I asked.

  “It is the Sitter’s greatest responsibility,” he said, flipping to a page that was filled with what looked like an illustration of a black hole, or a giant clogged drain. “The Portal is where beings can pass back and forth between this dimension and the Negative. Fortunately, we won’t have to worry about that for a while. The Spring River Portal was sealed by the Synod many years ago, which means that, for our purposes, it does not exist for the time being. This is another reason why I was a bit lax with your training, as we have plenty of time to get you up to speed before anything comes crawling through.”

  I shivered. “Things crawl through?” I asked, and Brian nodded. “Like what?”

  “Demons. Monsters. Nightmares. Evil,” he said. “Anything that wants to wreak havoc on our world. When that happens, it is the Sitter’s job to capture and Return them.”

  “You mean, like, put a stake through their heart?” Cassandra asked, and Brian shook his head.

  “No, I mean send them back to the Negative.” His voice was stern. “Like I said before, Sitters don’t kill. We protect. I’m glad I have plenty of time to drill that into you before you’re actually faced with the task.”

  I jolted forward as if I’d been shocked. “There are demons!” I said. “The seal, it’s broken!”

  “No, it’s not,” Brian said. “We have instruments to measure that, dozens of them. If the Portal opened, we’d know almost immediately.”

  I stood up, my mind racing as I started to pace back and forth. “But the Goblin King and Voldemort.” I looked over at Brian, who was squinting at me, and backtracked. “I was babysitting last week, and someone, or something, dressed as the Goblin King came in and tried to kidnap Kaitlyn,” I said. “I thought it was a nightmare, but then the same thing happened to Janis, with Andrew, just last night! Only this time, they were dressed as Voldemort. It had to be a demon. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it until now, but, uh, a lot has happened in the last twenty-four hours.”

  Brian nodded, urging me to go on. I told him how I had felt, and everything that Janis had said, and how she automatically called me, instead of dialing 911. The look on Brian’s face grew less confused and more worried.

  He sat down at his desk and punched a few keys into a keyboard, and the last slide of his presentation disappeared and was replaced by something that looked like a weather map, with swatches of blue, yellow, and green. “That’s so strange,” he said. “The Portal is most definitely closed.” He clacked a few more keys. “There’s been no sign of Portal activity at all.”

  I waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t. “So?” I asked. The weather map disappeared from the wall and the screen went blank again. “What do we do about it?”

  “I will bring it up to the Synod when I speak to them next,” he said. “And we will proceed with caution. Needless to say, we’ll start your training sooner than I planned, just to be on the safe side.”

  Brian’s tracksuit pocket started to buzz. Apparently cell phones worked in the closet, even if our kinesis didn’t. He glanced at his phone, then slammed the book shut and put it back on the shelf. “I hate to cut our getting-to-know-you session short,” he said, “but practice starts in twenty minutes, and I have a defensive coordinator who can’t even lead stretches without my direction.” He let out the most FML-ish sigh I’d ever heard a grown man make, and it took me a second to realize that he was staring at us because he was waiting for us to leave.

  I started to gather up my stuff, but Cassandra stood motionless. “I have so many questions,” she said.

  “I’m sure you do,” Brian said, putting a hand on her shoulder and turning her around toward the door. “I will answer them. Six p.m. tomorrow in the gym. We’ll start practicing for Returns. Until then, if either of you is babysitting, I suggest you don’t do it alone, and don’t let Janis do it alone either.”

  “That won’t be a problem,” I said, “Janis doesn’t want to babysit ever again. She quit the club this morning.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Esme,” he said. “I know how much the babysitting club meant to you.” I realized he was speaking as Brian, Dad’s best friend, not as Brian, whatever the hell he was to me now. I looked at my shoes and mumbled thanks. Obviously, I had plenty to worry about—I’d gotten into a fight, used supernatural powers to get o
ut of it, and was now sitting in a high-tech closet with my dad’s best friend, who wasn’t at all what he’d seemed. But still, the demise of the babysitting club hurt. It had been over for less than a day, but I already felt a best-friend-sized hole where the club used to be.

  Cassandra still didn’t move, but when Brian gave her a little shove, she reluctantly started walking.

  The closet door noiselessly slid shut behind us, and before we knew it, we were outside, standing on his front porch as he locked the door and then hurried to his car. He climbed in and started the engine, and it took me a second to realize he wasn’t going to offer us a ride. I walked over and knocked on the window, and he rolled it down a crack.

  “So, wait, what are Sitters responsible for again?” I asked.

  “Protecting the world,” he said, then threw the car in reverse and zoomed out of the driveway.

  “Huh,” Cassandra said. “Not as important as football, I guess.”

  “Not in this town, at least,” I said.

  “So,” I said, looking at Cassandra, not knowing where to start. “We’re Sitters.”

  “Hell yeah.” She grinned, opened her flannel, and pulled out an ornate dagger that looked like it had been carved out of a single piece of jade.

  I gasped. “You stole that? There’s no way Brian won’t notice that it’s gone!”

  “Relax,” she said. “I’m only borrowing it. And if he hadn’t wanted me to take it, he would have kept it out of my reach.” She slid the dagger through one of the belt loops in her jeans and closed her shirt back over it. “Besides, there’s no way he’s going to rat us out to the Synod. We can do whatever we want.”

  “How are you so sure?” I asked. She had started walking down the street, and I had to practically run to keep up with her. “We don’t even know what the Synod is.”

  “Yeah, but we know it’s his boss, and old Coach here has been too busy with a stupid ball to pay much attention to us.”

  “It’s not his fault,” I said. “Football is a big deal in Spring River, and like he said…” I caught myself. Why was I defending him? Cassandra was right. I loved Brian as much as any interior designer pretending to be a football coach and my dad’s best friend, but he had been neglecting his duties.

  Besides, football was dumb. “So if we can do whatever we want,” I asked, “what do we want to do?”

  “Everything,” she said. “But for now, let’s start with shopping.” Cassandra screwed up her nose when I suggested we hit the Salvation Army, and was equally displeased when I offered up my favorite secondhand store. “I don’t want someone else’s sweaty clothes,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Well, if you want new clothes, you can get them at Costco, like everyone else in this town, or Norman’s.”

  “What’s Norman’s?”

  “It’s like a department store that has expensive jeans.”

  “Good,” she said. “Let’s go there.”

  * * *

  —

  Norman’s had been a Spring River institution since the sixties, and I was pretty sure we were the only people in the history of the store to have ever taken the bus there. When it squealed to a stop in front of the main entrance, Cassandra got off and stared at the window displays with a look of satisfaction on her face.

  “This place is perfect,” she said.

  “This is bougie boring-people clothing,” I said. “I could spend all my babysitting money here and buy, like, one gray T-shirt.” Cassandra was marching toward the door, and something about the look of determination on her face made my stomach turn. “Cass, there’s no way we can afford to buy anything here.”

  “Good,” she said, giving the heavy glass revolving door a shove, “because we’re not buying anything.”

  “But you said we were going shopping.” In my confusion, I jumped in the door right after her, causing both of us to take awkwardly tiny steps as she pushed it around.

  “When I said ‘shopping,’ I meant ‘shoplifting,’ ” she clarified.

  Of course. I should have known. As soon as we were inside, Cassandra looked around, a grin on her face, and across the store a rack of scarves went up in flames, nearly scorching the shellacked bouffant of the sales associate standing next to it.

  “Oh my God, a fire!” Cassandra screamed, sending everyone in the store into a panic. Before they knew it, several yards away a table display of Uggs was aflame, and while it was a gratifying sight, this was making me super nervous.

  “Cass,” I hissed, “cut it out. Somebody could get hurt.”

  “Chill,” she said, making a beeline for the juniors section. “I won’t let that happen. I’m keeping the fires small on purpose. If they get out of control, I’ll put them out.” She stopped and looked around, and then focused her gaze on the ceiling. A security camera started to smoke, filling the air with the smell of melting plastic as Cassandra made her way through the racks, pulling out jeans, sweaters, and T-shirts. The fire alarm started shrieking, an earsplitting pulse punctuated with a blinding flash. Cassandra strolled behind the register, grabbed a large shopping bag, and stuffed it full of everything she had in her arms.

  I was sweating rivers, and could feel that my pits were soaked. Cassandra started toward the door, all the security cameras in her path crackling and smoking as their lenses shattered from the heat. Most of the other shoppers had fled the scene, and the only people left in the store were employees and a few voyeurs recording everything on their cell phones. Outside, a screaming siren was getting closer and closer, and behind us, flames started to crawl down the Clinique counter.

  “So you’ve destroyed a store,” I said to Cassandra, “but all that stuff has security tags, so it’s not like you can get it out of here anyway.”

  The words were barely out of my mouth when the alarm panels flanking the door caught fire. Cassandra smiled at me, then strode between them and right out the door.

  * * *

  —

  At home, I shampooed twice and still felt like I couldn’t get the smell of burning Coach bags out of my hair. The next morning, the “electrical fire” at Norman’s had made the front page of the paper. I read every word, and fortunately there was no mention of two teenage girls who remained suspiciously calm while everyone else freaked out.

  Cassandra was wearing some of her new clothes at school and there was a frayed slit in the back of her new denim jacket where she’d had to rip the security tag out. I was on edge through all my classes. My breath caught every time a classroom door opened, as I expected it to be someone coming in to call me to the principal’s office, where the cops were surely waiting to arrest me for being an accessory to looting. But nothing happened, and no one ever came calling. It appeared we’d gotten away with it.

  I wondered if Brian would take one look at us and know, like we were some sort of magical bank robbers and the improper use of our powers had marked us with invisible ink, but when we ran into him after lunch, he seemed preoccupied, as usual, and reminded us of our meeting that night.

  As if we could somehow forget.

  The day dragged on, and, as I was starting to do almost every day now, I got a bathroom pass to kill some time during history. As I redrew my eyeliner, I realized that my subconscious must have played a role in my choice of outfit today, which was Coco Chanel at her country house. My Breton shirt could definitely have doubled as convict stripes.

  Behind me, the door to one of the bathroom stalls flew open with a clang, and my breath caught when I saw that it was Stephani Riggs, her split ends cemented into a bun on the top of her head.

  I wasn’t ready for another confrontation already. I wasn’t ready for another confrontation ever, and I was straightening up, bracing myself, when our eyes met in the mirror. But she looked straight through me, like she’d never seen me before in her life, and walked right out the door, w
ithout washing her hands. My eyeliner wings were still slightly uneven, but I grabbed my stuff and booked it back to class as quickly as I could. The whole non-interaction made me cold.

  After school, I went home and hung out with Pig, then took the bus back to campus to meet Brian. The sun was setting earlier and earlier now, and the sky was already dark as I walked up to the building. Floodlights illuminated a few strands of toilet paper still flapping in the tops of the trees, but the campus was empty as I headed into the gym, and my footsteps echoed down the hall. Cassandra was already waiting on the bleachers when I walked in, and neither of us said anything as I sat down next to her.

  A few minutes later, the double doors at the opposite end of the gym opened, and Brian walked in, pushing a dolly with two very large, very old-looking boxes on top of it. The rubber wheels squeaked on the wood floor, but as he got closer, I noticed that Cassandra sat up straighter, and without meaning to, I followed suit.

  He stopped in front of us, then held out his arm, palm out, like he was telling someone to talk to the hand, and then spun in a slow clockwise circle, mumbling something I couldn’t understand. I felt a slight cool breeze as his eyes moved over us. When he was done, he sighed.

  “Are you, like, praying or something?” Cassandra asked.

  “No,” he said. “I’m sealing the space so no one else can get in.”

  “So you’re locking the doors.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” he said, sounding slightly annoyed. “The doors will be unlocked, but if anyone looks in the windows, the gym will appear empty. Even if they came here to enter the gym, they will lose all interest as soon as they touch the door. No matter what happens in this room, no one on the outside will see or hear anything.”

  Then Brian bent down, popped the latch on the biggest box, and lifted the lid. He reached into the box and pulled out something that looked like a barbell, with a smooth rod in the center and spiked spheres on the end. Without saying anything, he turned and threw it at me.