“I’ve reached a point in the night when I’m just going to stop asking questions,” Janis said, and she hefted a book off the shelf, carried it back through the closet, and dropped it onto the bed, before returning to get another one. Mom and I did the same, and soon every surface in Brian’s bedroom was covered with books. At any other library, we would have been sneezing and coughing from dust, but these books, like everything else at Brian’s, were spotless.
When we’d moved the last book, I climbed onto the bed—silently apologizing to Brian’s sheets for my shoes, though that was the least of his worries—to position myself in the middle of the room. I held my hands up and let everything else drain from my mind, thinking only, Portal spell, Portal spell, Portal spell, like a scratched record. All around me, the books flopped open and the pages riffled through the air, filling the room with the sound of rustling paper and a slight breeze. Then, just as suddenly, every book except one slapped shut. I held my breath as I jumped off the bed and walked over to the open book. I scanned the pages top to bottom, and my heart sank. There were spells to control blood, manipulate magnetic force, and read emotions through inanimate objects. But nothing about the Portal.
Then I saw it, in the upper left corner: a half line of text running over from the previous spread. I flipped the page.
As my eyes settled on it, the lettering changed from black to red. I’d found what I needed, and was so excited that I squealed out loud. Mom was next to me in an instant, looking at the book over my shoulder.
“Does this seem right?” I asked. She squinted, rubbed her eyes, and looked again.
“I have no idea,” she said. “I don’t think I’d know the difference between a spell and a recipe for beef stew anymore. The spells have to evolve with the times. They have to always involve modern ingredients that are easy enough to obtain. Otherwise, Sitters would spend all their time in the woods, digging for roots with names that no one can pronounce.” She looked at the book again. “What’s a vape cartridge?”
“It’s…Never mind,” I said. “But you wouldn’t put it in a stew. So someone has to update all those books every time the spells change?”
She shook her head. “The books write the spells, so they just update themselves periodically.”
That seemed both totally insane, and totally practical.
We split the spell ingredients three ways and started searching the house. There was a loud clatter, and the sound of falling plastic from the kitchen. Then Janis called out that she’d found cinnamon. It felt weird going through all Brian’s stuff, but if anyone ever asked us, we’d be great character witnesses, because aside from a tube of Preparation H hidden behind some eye cream in the bathroom, we didn’t find a single thing that hinted at the inner life, much less any shadiness, of the man behind the tracksuit. He was clean.
In spite of the orderliness of his house, Brian was a bit of a hoarder, which I was starting to think was a Sitter trait, and we eventually had everything we needed for the Portal spell, which took a lot more ingredients than anything I’d ever done before. I took a shibori-dyed pillowcase from the bedroom and used it as a sack, dumping everything in it and tying off the top. Finally, I whipped out my phone to take a picture of the spell, but as soon as I held the phone over the book, the words scrambled themselves. I put the phone down, and they straightened out. I raised it, and they jumbled. I hefted the book against my stomach to take it with us, and we were as ready as we were going to be.
I let Mom have shotgun, and I sat in the back. I kept the book open on my lap as Janis drove, trying to commit everything to memory and double-check that we had what we needed. Then, at the bottom of the page, I saw something that I’d missed at Coach’s house.
“Crap!” I yelled, the word coming out in a screech. “We’re screwed!”
Janis swerved, and Mom stuck her arm out to brace herself on the dash. “It takes a whole coven,” I said, pointing to a line on the page, even though there was no way Mom could see it in the dark. “A Sitter can’t open or close the Portal on her own. She has to do it with her coven.”
“Do you have a coven?” Mom asked.
“I didn’t even know Sitters had covens! I thought that was just for witches!” I slammed the book closed. Damn Brian and his freaking football team!
Opening the book and looking at it again only increased my despair. “It doesn’t even say how many Sitters are in a coven!” I slammed it closed for the second time.
“It’s four,” Janis said, and I vaulted forward between the seats to look at her. She continued, almost apologetically. “Like in The Craft, there were four of them, because that’s balance. It represents the four elements, and the four directions and all that stuff.” She rolled her eyes. “I guess you never Googled ‘witchcraft’ before….”
“We don’t have four Sitters,” I moaned. “We don’t even have four people.” At that moment, it felt like the only people I even knew were in the car with me right then. Cassandra and MacKenzie were in hell, Brian was in jail, Dion was an idiot and in the trunk, Dad thought his best friend was a perv, and Erebus was goddess-knows-where, plotting something more horrible than anything I could imagine.
Then, in my despair, an idea clicked into place, and I read the spell again. It was a long shot, but it was still a shot.
“Actually, I know someone,” I said. “We just have to pick her up, because she can’t drive either.”
“Who?” asked Janis, who knew better than Mom that I didn’t have any other friends.
“Someone I trust a lot,” I said. “She’s loyal, obedient, and a very good girl.”
* * *
—
The house was totally dark, and Dad’s car wasn’t in the driveway. Janis parked, and I jumped out. I ran down the sidewalk and around to the back of my house and let myself into the kitchen. I let out a low whistle, and could hear Pig jangle herself out of her bed in the living room so she could come to meet me. After a few slobbery kisses, I grabbed her Tupperware of food from the pantry and stepped out onto the back porch. Pig looked confused, glancing at her bowl, which was still empty, and back at me, the ruler of the food, standing outside. It wasn’t much of a contest, though, and she obediently trotted after me and waited while I locked the door.
I hadn’t grabbed her leash, but the dog food rattling under my arm was all I needed to keep her close at my heels. Mom had gotten out of the car and was leaning against it. Pig charged as soon as she saw her.
“Pig, no!” I shouted, but Mom bent down before I could grab Pig’s collar, and Pig was covering her face in kisses, the opposite of the reaction she’d had the first time they met.
“I think she’s glad I’m me again,” Mom said, laughing, before standing up and opening the rear door so that Pig could jump in.
“I thought this might be what you were talking about,” Janis said. “But then I told myself, ‘Nah, Esme couldn’t be talking about her dog.’ But here you are, with your dog.”
“She’s a living, breathing creature,” I said, giving her a shove so she’d move over to the other side of the seat. “She knows how to sit and stay, and she won’t tell anyone what we’re doing, which makes her superior to ninety-nine percent of the humans out there.”
“I’m not arguing,” Janis said. “But I am going to preemptively crack the windows.”
I wasn’t going to argue with that, because from the back seat, I could already tell there was nothing preemptive about it.
Pig nuzzled into me as I buckled my seat belt and cracked my own window. Janis pulled away, taking a corner too sharply, and the Magic 8 Ball rolled out from under the passenger seat. I picked it up and gave it a shake. “We’re coming,” I said to it. “Just hold on.”
“Hurry,” it said back.
* * *
—
When Janis pulled into the mall parking lot, it felt like decades
had passed since we’d first been there. The Mall of Terror was starting to wind down, and the parking lot had fewer people and more piles of trash, though I wasn’t sure there was that much difference between the two.
Janis killed the engine, and Mom rubbed her ears. “I think I’m hearing things,” she said. “Like a pounding and a distant shouting.”
“Oh crap!” I said, suddenly remembering Dion in the trunk. I jumped out and raced around to open it. As much as I hated Dion, I didn’t want to kill him, at least not accidentally by asphyxiation. He sat up as soon as I opened the trunk, and I bit my lip to keep from smiling when he whacked his head on the lid.
“Ouch!” he said, rubbing his forehead. “I thought you forgot about me.” He sounded annoyed, which I figured he had no right to feel. I used my kinesis to push him back down and keep him in place.
“Not so fast,” I said.
Mom had let Pig out of the back seat, and now all four of us stood around the trunk, looking at him.
“Mom,” I said, “this is Dion, who let the spirit of his evil undead father possess him so that he could kidnap a kid and use her as part of a ritual that also got his sister flushed up into the Negative.” I paused. “And I’m also pretty sure he accused our Counsel of having inappropriate relationships with underage students.” Dion looked just as confused as ever, but I figured that couldn’t be taken as a denial or an admission. “What do we do with him?”
Janis walked over and slammed the trunk shut. “It’s past his bedtime,” she said, and that seemed to be the end of that.
* * *
—
The haunted house was still going, and no one bothered to stop two teen girls, a grown woman, and a dog from slipping through the barricades into the empty part of the mall.
We paused for a second to let our eyes adjust to the darkness. Pig was interested in the smells in a way that made my stomach turn.
“God,” Mom said. “What happened to this place?”
“Amazon,” I said.
“What? Like the river?”
“Never mind,” I said, and added online shopping to my list of things I was going to have to explain as soon as we had the time.
Mom was having trouble keeping up with us, and after looking more closely, I could see that her pants weren’t just baggy. They were about five sizes too big.
“Oh God, Mom, those pants.”
“I know,” she said, grabbing a handful of the waistband to keep them up. “You tried, and I appreciate that.”
I was stunned. “You know I tried to get them to dress you in outfits?”
She nodded. “Esme, I knew everything. I was always there. I just couldn’t do or say anything to let you know.”
Hearing that made my eyes grow hot, and I wished I could climb into her lap and have a good long cry. But there was no time for that. A low, lingering growl from Pig announced that we were back at the food court, and we had a ritual to do.
I cleared away the Red Magic circle Dion had set up. I scuffed the chalk lines into the ground, their power gone now, and kicked the objects off into the dark. The wilting smiley-face balloon was tied to a ribbon, and when I kicked at it, it wrapped around my foot and then floated right into my face. I punched the balloon in the nose, then used my teeth to tear a hole in it. The helium hissed out, and it crumpled up like a plastic bag.
After I had destroyed everything from the Red Magic ritual, I started to set up the one for Sitter Magic. Unlike the other spells Cassandra and I had done, which had just required that the objects be there, for this one, everything had to be performed precisely, and in a certain order. I took out a piece of rainbow sidewalk chalk and started drawing. First a five-pointed star, and then a circle around it. My lines were wobbly, and I hoped it wouldn’t matter that it was drawn in three different colors. Then, in each section made by the points of the star, I drew in a different symbol, circles and lines with crosses and diamonds and stars. Finally I arranged the objects in a circle in the middle of the star: a Do Not Disturb sign, a dried-up wrist corsage, seven hot-pink plastic army men, a rose quartz crystal, a bottle of vanilla body spray, a stained glass candle, a playbill from Wicked, cinnamon sticks, cloves, a clementine, and a mango vape cartridge.
Mom had come over and was standing next to me as I put the last item into play. She reached out, grabbed my hand, and gave my fingers a squeeze. “I do remember this,” she said. “I don’t remember how to do it, but I definitely remember doing it.”
In a weird way, I wasn’t worried about MacKenzie having spent time in the Negative. There were spells for this, and as much as I hated the idea, I knew I could just erase her mind and she’d have no memory of her Halloween hellscape. But Cassandra—she wouldn’t be able to forget. “Do you think Cassandra will be okay?” I asked Mom.
Mom was wearing socks and the generic slide sandals that were de rigueur, and she toed a tile with one of them. “She’s going to need you when she comes back. Especially since it doesn’t seem like she has anyone else.”
“So if her horrible father is out there running around right now,” I said, “then that whole thing about her parents dying in a car wreck is just made-up?”
Mom nodded. “I do remember some of that,” she said. “Trash like Erebus is hard to forget. Circe looked the other way when he started dabbling in Red Magic. I knew about it too, but we didn’t think he’d be able to do much. We were wrong. I know he got very powerful, very fast, and Circe called in the Synod.” She paused and swallowed. I could tell it was hard for her, but she went on. “Everything is fuzzy after that.”
“So Cassandra and Dion were just tossed aside and the Synod let your brain rot?”
“I don’t think it was that simple, Esme,” she said, “Circe said Cassandra didn’t have the Sitter gene, so the Synod must have assumed it would be safer for her and her brother to be raised by normies. Bringing those without power into the fold is never safe.” Her eyes flickered to Janis, who was standing just out of earshot with Pig. “For them,” Mom added.
I had a trillion more things I wanted to know and learn, but the clock was ticking and Cassandra couldn’t keep up her positive mental attitude forever. Still, there was one question I had to ask, even though I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer to it. “Why didn’t someone just call Erebus back and then, like, exterminate him?” I asked. “It doesn’t seem like it would have been that much of a loss, and it would have lifted your curse.”
She squeezed my fingers again. “It’s not that easy, Esme. Sitters don’t kill. We have a code,” she said. “And you had better be ready to follow it.”
I nodded, even though 20 percent of me was saying no.
* * *
—
Brian had talked about instinct and intuition, but the words hadn’t meant that much to me. Second-guessing myself was kind of my thing; I had doubts about everything from the efficacy of my deodorant to the way I said the word “magazine.” But now, for Cassandra’s and MacKenzie’s sakes, I had to trust myself. Even more than that, I had to be the leader. I felt like a camp counselor when I clapped my hands to call everyone together to get them into position. We stood spaced evenly, ninety degrees apart, around the edge of the circle, to represent the four directions. Pig was south. She gave me a pleading look, surely in relation to the dog food, but stayed put.
The last thing I told everyone to do was think of Cassandra. With everyone thinking of her, it would be like an interdimensional group text—insistent and impossible to ignore. We would pull her out, and something told me that her Sitter instinct meant that she would bring MacKenzie with her. I extended my hands, palms facing the center, fingers spread, and Mom and Janis followed my lead. Pig licked her nose and grunted. Janis looked nervous. I locked eyes with Mom, and she gave me a nod that was barely noticeable. “Diastasikinesis,” I said, softly at first, then more loudly, and finally, a third time,
shouting. My voice echoed in the big, empty building, and then it died into silence. We were about to save a kid and a Sitter, or destroy the world. Either was a likely possibility.
All the spells I had done before had felt like chugging a Red Bull first thing in the morning. A jolt, but nothing that would knock me off my feet. This time I felt like I’d dropped a hair dryer into the bathtub and was holding on for dear life. I could feel the spell run through me, in my veins, in my brain, in my heart, down to the tips of my eyelashes. It was every caffeinated beverage I’d ever drunk, every ride I’d ever been on at the fair, every first kiss I’d ever imagined, all rolled into one.
My vision blurred, and when the world came back into focus, I expected things to look different, but it was just the same as it had been thirty seconds before—dust and dirt and decay. I gnashed my teeth, and the electrified feeling faded from my gums. My mom cracked her neck. Janis’s eyes were wide, but she didn’t move. Pig scratched an itch. I spun in a complete circle, looking for the Portal, and when I didn’t see it anywhere, the panic bubbled up like barf. I ran over to where it had been before, and still, nothing. A wave of weakness washed over me. We had no Plan B. I’d have to find other Sitters, and without Brian, I had no idea how long that would take. My head swam with possibilities, all of which carried the price tag of Cassandra and MacKenzie staying right where they were.
Then I saw it, finally, looming right above PandaSub.
After what Dion/Erebus had opened earlier, the Portal that hovered above us now was hardly impressive. It was barely the size of a hot tub, and the whole outer half trembled, like a mirage that could vanish any minute. Mom walked up and stood next to me.
“You did it,” she said.
“Barely. It’s piddly. It’s for baby demons only. How can Cassandra and MacKenzie even come through that?” I gasped as something that definitely did look like a baby demon started to crawl through. I gave it a sharp shove back in with my mind, and had to strain to hear the flush.
The Babysitters Coven Page 26