The Babysitters Coven

by Kate M. Williams

  “I don’t need a ride,” I growled, then turned and started walking away again.

  “I saw what happened in gym,” she called. Her words stopped me in my tracks, but only for a second. I forced myself to keep walking. I wanted to pretend what she had just said was no big deal, because, really, she could have been talking about anything.

  She caught up with me so that we were shoulder to shoulder, and I kept looking straight ahead. “Yeah,” I said. “So, what does that have to do with anything? I suck at dodgeball, just like every other non-sadist on the planet.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that she was smiling, like she was finding our whole exchange funny. “How do you know I’m talking about dodgeball?” she said.

  Crap. I felt like I’d just copped to something, even though I didn’t really know what. I paused, then said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do,” she answered. “You threw a ball without touching it.”

  My hands were shaking like cold Chihuahuas as I folded my arms across my chest. Cassandra had just confirmed what I’d been thinking. What’d I’d been fearing. I shook my head, my mouth feeling like it was full of stale cotton candy, and repeated myself. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You do,” she repeated. “You just haven’t admitted it to yourself.”

  I’d stopped walking, and now when Cassandra took another step toward me, I took a step back. I forced myself to smile and laugh. “So I make one good play in dodgeball and you think…I’m…there’s something…”

  She shook her head. The sun was behind her now, glinting off her hair and illuminating her flyaways like an autumnal aura. “There’s driver’s ed too,” she said. “One of the guys who was in the car swears you didn’t touch anything and suddenly you were mowing down a tree.”

  “They also said I was the one who farted,” I said, “so don’t trust them for a minute.”

  A smile flickered across her face, but I could tell she was serious. Dead serious. “I pay attention to this kind of stuff, and I know it when I see it.”

  She was still walking toward me, and I was still walking backward.

  “Know what when you see it?” I asked.

  “Magic,” she said with a smile. She held her hand out, and a tiny flame sprang from the center of her palm, hovering there like a hummingbird.

  Maybe I tripped, or maybe my legs gave out, because that was the last thing I remembered before my head hit the sidewalk and I blacked out.

  I woke up lying in the back seat of a van—or, more precisely, in the back of a van where a seat should have been—not knowing where I was going, not knowing who I was with. Which could only mean one thing…

  I’d been kidnapped! I panicked, and bolted upright, smashing my forehead into something hard. I fell back down to the floor, seeing stars.

  “Holy crap, she headbutted me!” As my vision came into focus, I saw Cassandra Heaven sitting next to me, and I realized that the concrete block I’d just smashed into was actually her nose. I could tell by the tiny bit of blood trickling out of a nostril and the fact that she was now looking at me like she wanted to headbutt me back.

  I wasn’t sorry.

  I pushed myself up onto my elbows, and the front and back of my head were throbbing.

  I could tell by the motion of the van that we’d just turned a corner. “Where the hell am I?” I asked, feeling equal parts confused, angry, and like I wanted to take a nap.

  “We’re taking you home,” Cassandra said, wincing as she pinched the bridge of her nose and gave it a tiny wiggle.

  “Who is we?” I asked. “And how do you know where I live?”

  “Well, our home. We didn’t know what else to do, and we couldn’t just leave you lying on the sidewalk.”

  “Lying on the sidewalk where?” I was trying to piece together how I’d ended up there, lying in the back of a van, but I was missing major chunks of information. She didn’t totally answer me either, and I still didn’t know who was driving. Kidnapping remained a possibility.

  “In front of the school. Where you tripped and hit your head.”

  I groaned again, only this time the pain was colored with embarrassment. So in one week of school, I had wrecked a car people thought I farted in and blacked out on the front lawn. This was awesome.

  Then I realized she hadn’t actually answered my question.

  “Who’s driving?” I asked hesitantly.

  “My brother.”

  Cassandra was dabbing at her nose with the sleeve of her flannel. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I don’t think it’s broken.”

  “I wasn’t worried,” I answered. I sat up so that I was no longer lying on the floor, and I put one hand on the side of the van to steady myself against the rocking. As soon as I felt like I wasn’t going to fall over, I looked up toward the front of the car and locked eyes with someone in the rearview mirror.

  “Hey,” a voice said. “Sorry we had to meet like this, but man, you scared us.”

  We stopped at an intersection, and the driver turned around and smiled at me. I blinked several times, taking in the entirety of his face. This was the most gorgeous guy I had ever seen IRL.

  Then I leaned over and threw up on the floor.

  * * *

  —

  I’d puked right as we were turning into their driveway, and before I knew it, they were on either side of me, pulling me out of the back of the van and then basically dragging me up onto their porch and into their house like I was a dead body. I was still too woozy from the fall and nauseous with humiliation to protest much, though.

  I could swear that there was something in the water in Spring River that turned teenage guys into potatoes—lumpy-looking, with a mashed personality to match. It was immediately clear that Cassandra’s brother had not grown up drinking out of the Spring River taps. Rather, it looked like celestial beings had spoon-fed him ambrosia and he’d received a pheromone IV. He was hot. He had a face that made you want to read poetry and get a stick-n-poke of his initials in a place no one else could see.

  He was tall and thin, but not skinny in a bobblehead sort of way. Wiry. That was the word for it—like he didn’t hit the gym but spent a lot of time working on motorcycles or moving concrete blocks. He had the same black hair and tawny skin as Cassandra, and wore the same kind of beat-up clothes. Dusty boots, a faded black T-shirt that stretched over his chest and arms, and jeans that dissolved into a dirty fray at the hem. Looking at him, I had the kind of thoughts that had previously only been inspired by guys on album sleeves or in the nineties movies Janis and I watched every weekend. I didn’t know guys like him actually existed.

  I had time to think about all this, because Cassandra and her brother were dragging me into their house and talking about me like I wasn’t there.

  “If she barfed, she might have a concussion,” Cassandra was saying, “so we should keep her awake.”

  “Well, she doesn’t look sleepy to me,” her brother said as they dumped me onto a couch. Her brother disappeared through a doorway, and Cassandra stood there looking at me for a second before she reached out like she was going to touch me. I swatted her hand away and growled like an injured dog. The male model returned and passed me a ziplock bag of ice cubes wrapped in a dish towel.

  I thanked him and held the bundle against the rapidly growing bump on my head. “I don’t have a concussion,” I said. “I just have a nervous stomach. Other than that, I’m fine.” At least, as fine as I could be.

  He was staring at me with concern in his gorgeous eyes. “Do you know where you are?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” I said. I pulled my ice pack away and touched the back of my skull gently, then winced—it felt soft and squishy. “Because you haven’t told me.”

  “How many fingers am I holding up?
” he asked, holding his hand in front of my face.

  “Four,” I said, and his forehead creased with concern. “And one thumb.” The crease relaxed.

  I looked around. The couch I was sitting on was ripped, the stuffing spilling out of the cushions. The curtains were stained brown and yellow to match the faded carpet. Now that I was no longer worried that I’d been snatched by a human trafficker, I was starting to find all this ridiculous.

  “Listen, I’m fine. I just have no freaking clue what is going on here. You guys basically kidnapped me and brought me to this dump. What do you want?”

  He grinned in a tight way that was more of a grimace. “Maybe we should start over,” he said. “I’m Dionysus, but everyone calls me Dion. And this is my house.”

  Before I could stutter out an apology, the Greek god offered me his hand, and I took it. He was smiling at me with these perfect teeth and these eyes like melted chocolate, and the feeling of his fingers wrapped around mine stopped all words from forming in my mouth and made me forget I should probably be trying to escape.

  It also made me self-conscious. When was the last time I’d shaken someone’s hand? Was I doing it right? How hard do you grip? How fast do you pump up and down? How long do you hold on? I worried that my hand felt as slimy and limp as an uncooked chicken breast. I was wearing a white collarless shirt, not from Fred Segal, with suspenders and a short plaid skirt, and I hoped he hadn’t been able to see the holes in the crotch of my tights when I was sprawled in the back of his van.

  “I’m excited to meet you,” he said, and if I hadn’t already been knocked unconscious once, I probably would have fainted right there. What on earth could Cassandra have told him that would make him excited to meet me?

  All she knew about me was that I babysat, and unless this guy was a single teenage dad, I doubted that was what he was talking about. My eyes flickered back to Cassandra, who hadn’t taken her gaze off me the whole time I’d been sitting there.

  “So,” she asked, sitting down beside me, “how long have you known you were telekinetic?”

  * * *

  —

  That was the word for it, the one that had been locked away in a corner of my brain. The one that I’d never planned to think, much less say out loud.

  I still couldn’t seem to form words. I sat there, trying to process what Cassandra had just said, and she pressed on. She held out her hand, fingers splayed, and a flame appeared at the tip of her index finger, just like a candle. Then it moved to her middle finger, ring finger, and pinky, then back again.

  “Cass, don’t burn the couch,” Dion said, as blithely as if he were telling her not to get ice cream on his shirt. She rolled her eyes and pressed her hand flat against the cushion, right by my thigh. The smell of burned polyester threaded through the air, and I watched, stunned, as a scorch mark spread between her fingers. I felt torn. One half of me wanted to get up and run out the door. The other half wanted to ask her to do it again.

  “Esme’s right,” she said. “This place is a dump. Setting it on fire would be an improvement.”

  I glanced at Dion, whose face hardened for a second. “Well, it’s the only place you’ve got,” he said. “So if I were you, I would resist turning it to a pile of ash.”

  Cassandra rolled her eyes at him again and turned to me. “I can create fire out of nothing,” she said. “I’m a pyrokinetic. Pretty cool, huh?”

  I looked down at the burned handprint she’d left behind on the couch. It looked like someone was trapped inside the cushion and was trying to push their way out. It was creepy. Cassandra and her brother were creepy. This whole thing was creepy. So why wasn’t I more creeped out? Instead of being overwhelmed, I felt almost relieved.

  I sat there for a second, all my unacknowledged thoughts from the past couple of days coalescing into words. It felt like I’d been sitting in the dark and now the lights were slowly coming on.

  “That thing in gym, with the ball,” I said, “and in driver’s ed, with the car—it’s not like I meant to do it, you know? It just happened. Stuff has been happening because of me, but I don’t think I control it.” From the other end of the couch, Dion wasn’t taking his eyes off me, and it made me too self-conscious to look up. I traced Cassandra’s handprint with a finger.

  “Yeah. It took me a couple of weeks of things going up in flames around me before I realized I was doing it,” Cassandra said. She kept talking, telling me about piles of leaves that started smoking, and a pickup that caught fire after it almost ran over her foot, and as she talked, her words peeled back the layers on the last several weeks of my life.

  “You can control your”—I wasn’t sure what to call it—“powers now?” I asked.

  Cassandra nodded.

  “So it only happens when you want it to?”

  She nodded again.

  “When did it start?” I asked her.

  “I turned seventeen in June,” she said, “and it was pretty much right after that.”

  I nodded slowly. “It was the same for me,” I said. I told them about rushing to get ready for school and dropping a perfume bottle in the bathroom and somehow managing to catch it before it hit the tile floor, because it seemed to just hang there for a second. Also about the very realistic dream, which I now knew probably wasn’t a dream at all, that my globe lamp was floating in the middle of my room in the middle of the night.

  I looked over at Dion and knew that my hormones were raging, because even though this was the weirdest afternoon of my entire life, I couldn’t help but notice the way the muscles in his forearm undulated as he took a sip from a bottle of red Gatorade.

  “What can you do?” I asked him.

  “You’re looking at it,” he said, and flashed me a smile that faded just as quickly as it had appeared. In my book, looking that hot did count as a superpower, but I didn’t think that was what he was talking about.

  “Dion doesn’t have powers,” Cassandra said. “We’ve tried, but he can’t do anything.” Dion gave her a look, and she corrected herself. “I mean, nothing extraordinary. Dion can do plenty of normal stuff, like change a tire or make spaghetti….”

  I wondered if maybe it was a touchy subject for them, but Dion just looked at me and shrugged.

  “So, if you’re pyrokinetic, and I’m telekinetic…” My mind was trying really hard to string this stuff together and make it all fit, but it felt like trying to squeeze into a too-small skirt. It just wasn’t going to work. “Well…I mean…” I gave up and fell backward into the couch cushions. “Why?”

  Cassandra snapped her gum. “Beats me. I was hoping you knew.”

  As I sat, staring at Cassandra, Dion got up and poured me a glass of lukewarm Coke. “Sorry there’s no ice,” he said. “It’s, uh, all being used.” I took the soda with my free hand, still holding the bag of ice to the back of my head with the other. It was melting, and the cold drips ran down my neck.

  “Wait,” I said. “Let’s start over. You guys just moved here? With your parents?”

  “Yes and no,” Cassandra said. “It’s complicated.” And it was. I had a hard time following as she explained that their parents had died in a car wreck when they were young, and after bouncing around to a few different relatives, they’d ended up in foster care and didn’t have much contact with family.

  “Dion and I grew up knowing nothing about who we were or where we came from. It’s like people thought ‘they’re dead’ was all we needed to know about our parents,” she said, untying her Converse and then kicking them off so that they landed across the room with a thud. “Then, all of a sudden, Dion turned eighteen, and we found out that our mom had deeded him this house. Which is super strange, because he was barely four when she died. But oh well. We figured we’d take it, you know? I got the state to let Dion be my legal guardian, and here we are.”

  “How’d you do that?”
I asked, thinking it was pretty odd that Dion was her guardian, since they were basically the same age.

  “I threw the biggest fit the state of Kansas has ever seen,” she said. Something about the set of her shoulders and the grin on her face told me that she probably wasn’t exaggerating.

  She paused dramatically, and I realized she was waiting for me to urge her on.

  “So, you moved to Spring River…?”

  She nodded. “And once we got here, guess what we found in the house?”

  “Um…squirrels?”

  She sighed. “No. A note.”

  “Okay.”

  “Guess who wrote it?”

  “I don’t know. A neighbor?” I wished she’d just tell me what she wanted to tell me instead of trying to make me guess everything.

  “No,” she said. “It was tucked into a book, and it was from my mom!” She jumped up from the couch and headed down the hallway to what I assumed was her room. Dion and I sat in silence, and I could hear the fizzing of my drink. The hall was lined with black plastic trash bags, and Dion must have seen me looking at them.

  “We’re cleaning it up,” he explained. “No one’s lived here since our parents died, apparently, so it was full of junk, dust, and actually, a couple of squirrels….” He was smiling slightly at me, in a way that made my ears get hot, and I wondered if he could hear my heart flopping around in my chest.

  “Sorry I called it a dump earlier,” I said.

  “It’s okay.” He shrugged. “It is a dump.”

  “But it’s your dump,” I said, then realized that had sounded like I was making fun of him. “I mean, you own a house, and you’re only…”

  “Eighteen,” he finished for me, and I still couldn’t believe it. I went to school with guys who were eighteen, and none of them, not a one, looked anything like Dion.

  Cassandra came back into the room and thrust a ziplock baggie at me. There was a note in it, sealed up like it was evidence from a crime scene. The paper was yellowed, with an illustration of roses in the corner, and a few lone words were written in a feminine script. “Dear Cassandra, Find the babysitters. Love, Mom.”