The Babysitters Coven

by Kate M. Williams

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Katharine Williams

  Cover art copyright © 2019 by Rik Lee

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Williams, Kate, author.

  Title: The babysitters coven / Kate Williams.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Delacorte Press, [2019] | Summary: After new student Cassandra Heaven joins seventeen-year-old Esme Pearl’s babysitters club, the girls learn that being a babysitter really means a heroic lineage of superpowers, magic rituals, and saving the innocent from evil.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018059287 (print) | LCCN 2019003475 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-525-70739-4 (el) | ISBN 978-0-525-70737-0 (hc) | ISBN 978-0-525-70738-7 (glb) | ISBN 978-0-593-12380-5 (intl. tr. pbk.)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Babysitters—Fiction. | Clubs—Fiction. | Witchcraft—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.W5465 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.1.W5465 Bab 2019 (print) | DDC [Fic] — dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9780525707394

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To all the badass babysitters—past, present, and future

  The devil was an artist. Her medium varied, from crayons to Magic Markers to finger paints, and she had coloring books, construction paper, giant pads of newsprint on a tiny plastic easel. But today she’d ignored it all, in favor of the hallway and a marker. Previously pristine white, the wall was now permanently adorned with black squiggles, dots, shapes, and lines, all drawn at eye level. Well, her eye level—a little less than three feet off the ground.

  How did I know this art was permanent and not the water-soluble kind? Because Baby Satan—known by some as Kaitlyn—was still holding the Sharpie in her hand. As I surveyed her work—which was impressive in its own way, because she’d done all of this damage in only the time it had taken me to pee—she smiled sweetly up at me, topless underneath a pair of very dirty OshKosh overalls. She held the Sharpie up to her nose and inhaled deeply, a look of intense contentment on her face. “Give me that,” I said, grabbing it from her. Two years old, and already into graffiti and huffing.

  She was on one tonight. It had started with dinner, which was dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets and bunny-shaped mac-n-cheese. She wouldn’t eat any of it, not even when I insisted that the nuggets were actually made from real triceratops. When I got up to go get a paper towel, she managed to transfer most of the mac-n-cheese to her seat and sit on it.

  She thought this was hilarious and wiggled around, etching orange cheese stains that would probably never come out into the butt of her overalls. “Squishy!” she squealed with delight, and I was sorry that I’d taught her that word last week. After dinner, we played with blocks, which mainly consisted of me building the tallest stack I could and then cheering as she ran at them, full speed, from across the room to knock them down. It was right after this that I made that fateful decision to use the bathroom. I should have known better.

  Now I placed the cap back on the Sharpie and put it on the kitchen counter, far back against the wall and safely out of her reach. “All right!” I said. “It’s bedtime.”

  Bedtime started with a bath, complete with fizzy dye pods—two blue and one yellow—to make turquoise “mermaid water.” She drank some of it. Teeth were brushed, sorta, and pajamas were donned. I usually allotted the devil three bedtime stories, which was enough to have her nodding off, her chin coming down to her chest, but tonight her blue eyes were still wide open and alert. Each time I’d finish a story, she’d climb out of bed, run across the room, and come back with a new stack. “More!” she’d scream, slamming them into my lap with a surprising, and almost impressive, violence.

  In this moment, I saw my future stretching out before me.

  Kaitlyn never goes to sleep.

  Her mom never comes home.

  I read bedtime stories until the world ends.

  It was times like these that I wished I could tap out and have another babysitter come in and take over. Baby Satan had a million stuffed animals, and my eyes settled on a floppy dog that was nearly life-sized. Couldn’t he read a story for once?

  His ears twitched, as if he were responding to my mental plea.

  I blinked and rubbed my eyes.

  Babysitting was making me hallucinate.

  I sighed. Kaitlyn was still wide-awake. Not a hint of sleepiness anywhere on her admittedly cute face.

  I picked up another book. “Okay,” I said. “This one’s about a bunny who runs away. It’s called The Runaway Bunny.” She smiled, all cherub cheeks and dimples, and something in me softened. “See what they did with the title there?” I said. “The people who wrote this book must be pretty clever, huh? I bet they were geniuses.”

  “Smart bunny,” she said.

  I nodded, reaching over to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. “A very smart bunny. You ready?”

  It took seven stories before she finally fell asleep, her blankie pressed against her cheek. I gave the wall a few half-hearted scrubs, but the thing about permanent markers is that they’re permanent, so I admitted defeat and went into the kitchen. After everything I’d had to endure tonight, I deserved a snack. I mean, the number one perk of babysitting is OPP—other people’s pantries.

  I opened the pantry to what could have stocked a vending machine: potato chips, Chex Mix, Cheez-Its (Kaitlyn’s mom, Sharon, had even started buying the white cheddar ones, just for me), pretzels, Doritos, jumbo-sized bags of M&M’s, Twizzlers, gummy bears, you name it. None of this had anything to do with the fact that it was almost Halloween—this was just what Sharon ate all year round.

  I grabbed what I wanted, found a big bowl, and poured in a layer of Frosted Flakes. I smashed up a few pretzels and added them, then a handful of Corn Chex, some potato chips, and a generous layer of M&M’s. Then I sprinkled the whole thing with sugar, poured some milk on it, and stood back to admire my specialty: Baby
sitter’s Crunch, the perfect mixture of salty and sweet. Kellogg’s should market this stuff.

  It looked so pretty and delicious that I thought for a second about posting it, then remembered that would just announce to the world (or at least my 67 followers) that I was spending yet another night with Tony the Tiger and a human who thought “potty” was a dirty word. I’m not ashamed of babysitting, but I know it’s not what most people think of as a “cool job.”

  I took my crunch and sank into the couch in front of the TV. OPTVs are also serious babysitting perkage, and Sharon had every channel and subscription imaginable. I finally settled on a reality show where a girl with breast implants, hair extensions, acrylic nails, and a spray tan cried to the camera about how she couldn’t stand fake people.

  A loud thunk sounded from the second floor of the condo, and I bolted up off the couch, my bowl tumbling from my lap and spilling the last of its sugar milk out onto the rug. Nervous reaction aside, I was sure it was nothing—a book falling onto its side or closet junk settling—but it is my babysitterly duty to investigate things that go thunk in the nightish. I inched a few steps up the stairs and called Kaitlyn’s name, not wanting to wake her if she wasn’t already up. I waited a few seconds but didn’t get a response, so I tiptoed the rest of the way up to her room. I figured I’d peek in just to make sure she was okay. I mean, I was sure she’d be heard halfway to Egypt if she wasn’t, but better safe than sorry.

  I grabbed the door handle and turned, but nothing. It wouldn’t budge. WTF? How did her door get locked? I turned again, harder this time, but it still didn’t move. This wasn’t Kaitlyn’s MO at all—she loved an audience. If she was going to lock the door from the inside, she would have made sure I was standing right outside, begging her not to do it.

  I got down on my knees and peered under the door into the room. I could see the soft cast of Kaitlyn’s night-light change from red to purple, but that was it, and the room was silent. As I stood back up, blue and green bathed the toes of my Chelsea boots.

  “Kaitlyn,” I said quietly. “Open the door, okay, munchkin?” I tried the handle again. I was starting to get that feeling a babysitter never wants to experience: Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap. Aka panic.

  “Kaitlyn?”

  I was full-on yelling now, and still getting nothing, not even a peep, from the bedroom. I grabbed the door handle with both hands and jiggled it frantically. Then I was falling into the room, the door swinging open and slamming into the wall. The window was wide open, screen and all; the curtains billowed gently. And the room was empty.

  The blood rushing to my head sounded like a freeway in my ears, and the floor tilted under my feet. It was like everything was spinning. I stumbled to the window and stuck my head outside, and froze when I saw Kaitlyn standing on the roof of the porch. At the edge. One story up over the paved driveway.

  She was clutching her blankie, tears running down her face.

  “Mesme! Mesme!” she yelled when she saw me, and my heart stopped as she started to take a step forward, and wobbled.

  “Kaitlyn, don’t move!” I yelled as calmly as I could. “It’s okay. I’m coming to get you! Just stay right there.” I hated heights. I couldn’t even stand on a chair without getting dizzy, but I hauled myself through the window and out onto the roof. Carefully, on my hands and knees, I crawled toward her, telling myself not to look down. The rough shingles scraped my palms and the tops of my boots, and I could feel the sweat dripping from my pits and rolling down the inside of my arms. I crawled until I was right next to her, then shifted onto my butt and pulled her into my lap. She had snot streaking her face, and she buried it into my neck with a sob.

  “The man, Mesme,” she burbled. “He not nice. He not nice at all.” It made me shiver. A man? What was she talking about?

  “It’s okay, honey. Don’t be scared, booger,” I said, rubbing the back of her head and using every nickname I’d ever called her. “Pumpkin, you just had a nightmare, that’s all. It’s over now, turtle.” I scooted us back toward the window, straining to see or hear any sign of someone else.

  All I heard was the rustling of dry leaves as a gust of wind swept by.

  Kaitlyn wouldn’t let me put her down, so I climbed back in through the window with her in my arms, then held her as I peered out again and looked up and down the street. It was empty. I slammed the window shut and locked it, then steeled myself to look in the closet. Nothing but broken toys and dirty laundry. Kaitlyn blubbered into my shoulder, and I rubbed her back and softly rocked side to side, hoping she couldn’t feel how badly I was shaking. The night-light had faded into a warm orange, and I walked over and sat down on her bed.

  “What happened, sweetie?” I asked, barely able to get the words out. My brain was screaming at me to call the cops, but my body wasn’t reaching for my phone. My hands kept stroking Kaitlyn’s hair, and my butt was staying right where it was planted.

  “Not nice,” she said again, still talking about the man.

  “What’d he look like?” I pressed.

  “He got fountain hair and marker eyes.”

  Great. What the hell did that mean?

  “What color was his fountain hair?” I asked.

  “Sunshine.”

  “Okay,” I said, rocking her back and forth. “What kind of clothes did he have on?”

  She sniffed. “Ruffles. Pretty and sparkly.”

  Okay, so a man with sunshine fountain hair and marker eyes, in pretty sparkly clothes with ruffles…Oh my God, she was describing David Bowie. From Labyrinth. I was so relieved, I almost laughed.

  “Did he have a pretty bubble too?” I asked. She nodded again. My heart slowed. “Does mama let you watch movies?”

  “I like movies,” she said.

  “I know you do, kitten.” My knees seemed like they could hold weight again, so I stood up and turned to put Kaitlyn back to bed. It sounded just like Sharon to let Kaitlyn watch movies that were way too old for her. But hey, I was only seventeen. Who was I to neg on someone’s parenting?

  “How did you get out on the roof, tiny girl?” I asked.

  “I didn’t do it, Mesme,” she said, and I sighed. I’d heard those exact words just a few hours earlier, when I’d confronted her about her hallway art.

  “Okay,” I said. “Just don’t ever not do it again, all right? That was very dangerous.”

  I pulled the covers up to her chin and pulled out Goodnight Moon again. This was going to be a long night.

  It took two more stories after Goodnight Moon to get Kaitlyn calmed down, but she finally drifted off to sleep, a stuffed pig tucked under one arm and a sloth under the other. It was just another hiccup in a normal night of babysitting, so as I sopped the remnants of my crunch up off the rug downstairs, I was surprised to see that my hands were trembling.

  She’d seen a movie. She’d had a nightmare. Maybe she’d started sleepwalking. That had to be it, right? Except…

  In all the times I’d babysat for Kaitlyn, she’d never gotten out of bed, no matter how much time it had taken for her to go to sleep. Forget climbing out the window—how had she even done that? The whole thing was freaky, and despite a handful of yogurt-covered pretzels I consumed in one swallow, I was still jittery when Sharon got home. Being a babysitter meant that you were supposed to keep your cool in tough situations, no matter what kind of torture your charges dreamed up for you. What you were not supposed to do was immediately panic and forget how to open a door.

  I’d been debating how much to tell Sharon, and the second she came in, I decided as little as possible. She seemed upset and distracted, and kept writing and then deleting a text from her phone.

  I tried to act casual as I gathered up my stuff. “Has Kaitlyn ever sleepwalked before?” I asked.

  Without looking up from her phone, she grabbed a Diet Coke from the fridge and opened it one-handed. “
No,” she said, frowning at her screen. “Why?”

  “I think she had a bad dream tonight,” I said, feeling out how much I should reveal. “And she got out of bed and seemed really upset and she kept talking about a man who opened the window.”

  Sharon looked up and set the phone down on the counter. “Oh dear,” she said, her face equal parts worry and annoyance. “It’s my fault. I’m going to have to stop letting her watch all those movies. It’s the only way to get her to sit still, but she has such an imagination that it’d be no surprise if they’re giving her nightmares. She went back to sleep, though?”

  The cobra in my stomach uncoiled—I’d been right. It was the movies, and it had just been a nightmare.

  Sharon opened her wallet and thrust some bills into my hand. “Thanks again, Esme,” she said. “You’re a lifesaver. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  I’d worked my ass off, as I always did with Kaitlyn, but I felt weird taking Sharon’s money. Maybe it had been just a nightmare, but maybe it had been…I don’t know. There was something tugging at the edge of my mind that wouldn’t let go, something that didn’t respond to reasonable explanations. I couldn’t stop thinking, what if I hadn’t gotten to Kaitlyn in time? I knew I should tell Sharon everything, but I couldn’t get the words to my tongue.

  “Esme?”

  Sharon’s voice snapped me back to where I was, and she was still standing there, her arm out with several bills in her hand.

  I took the money. “Thanks a lot,” I said, “She’s a great kid.” I shoved the bills into my pocket. “Oh, uh, the wall,” I said, suddenly remembering. “She got a marker and, in the hallway…” I looked up, and Sharon had her phone again, the blue light reflecting off her face as her thumbs furiously typed away. Oh well. She’d figure it out as soon as she saw it. And maybe she’d even be proud—after all, it looked like Kaitlyn was halfway to figuring out how to spell her own name.