CHAPTER I 2007
Sundays were for Chanel.
For Jesus, too, but mostly Chanel.
Camilla Burson sat in the front pew of The Path’s sanctuary, her gaze trained on her father’s place in the pulpit as she tried not to fidget with her hair or skirt. Even though she’d spent over an hour on her hair that morning, making certain that the curls were a blond, shining miracle, she could feel every individual strand that had fallen out of place. Heat rose along her throat, and she willed it away. The pastor’s daughter wasn’t meant to look distressed during the sermon. She was meant to look perfect.
Jesus tap-dancing Christ, she was so sick of perfect. The weight of it. How it tugged at her and kept her locked in place when all she wanted to do was have a little fun. Before she turned into her mother and the other Bible study ladies with their prim smiles and Botoxed foreheads and broods of children. Another wife, dutiful to her husband. Obedient and God-fearing and, above all else, dull as dishwater.
“And so, as the seasons change, so do we change. Husbands to fathers. Women to wives and mothers. It seems only fitting to discuss such things in this season. As we prepare to guide our young ladies toward the correct path. As you prepare to commit yourselves to your future. I know it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of the dress, the hair, the jewelry. I can’t tell you the number of hours such conversations have taken up in my own house. If I had a dollar for every time I heard my daughter utter the phrase ‘who designed her dress?’ I’d be … well, able to afford a second beach house.”
He flashed a smile, and Camilla laughed along with the congregation even as embarrassment threatened a return of the heat she’d tried to banish. She hated when he used her as a point in his sermons. As if she was nothing more than a series of failures held up as an example of how not to serve the Lord. As if she wasn’t trying to be all the things he expected of her.
“But you see, young ladies, beyond the fancy dresses and the glitter and the high heels, there’s the heart of this very special night. The night of your Purity Ball. The night you pledge yourself to your father and your Father God to remain pure until your marriage.”
Beside her in the pew, Camilla’s mother shifted, her mouth turned down in the hidden frown she always wore whenever her father mentioned anything about the Purity Ball. The sunlight filtering through the windows settled about her face in a dazzling corona. Even with the frown, she was beautiful. Camilla often found it hard to look at her. To see her beauty as anything other than devastating. As a sum of everything Camilla was decidedly not.
Throughout her childhood, she spent hours staring into the mirror, wondering when she would finally find her mother’s features in her face. When she would look in the mirror and not see her father’s blond hair and pale eyes, but instead the lush dark of her mother’s hair. The deep golden green of her eyes. When she would be able to carry that darkness with her rather than the light.
“As we approach that day, I want you to listen to what Jesus said. ‘Put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its lusts.’ Romans chapter thirteen, verse fourteen. Just like those pretty dresses, you should wrap the Lord Christ about you. A reminder against the temptation of the world. That you make no provision for the flesh.”
Inwardly, Camilla squirmed. It didn’t matter how many years she’d heard a variation on this sermon—the one her father always gave in the months leading to the Purity Ball—hearing her father talk about lust made her die a little inside. And now, knowing she was finally going to participate in the Purity Ball after years of begging her mother every spring only to be met with a number of excuses, the feeling was somehow worse.
Even more awful that Grant Pemberton was sitting somewhere in the sea of pews behind her. Grant Pemberton, who’d left Hawthorne Springs behind for law school three years ago. She’d been invisible to him then, but she wasn’t fifteen anymore, and her body had made good use of the three years. She couldn’t help but hope he wouldn’t find her so invisible now.
She glimpsed him that morning as they filed inside the sanctuary, her Sunday smile plastered to her face so no one would ever think she was anything but thrilled to be there. The sight of him instantly transported her into the awkward, unformed body of her fifteen-year-old self. Somehow, she’d managed not to trip.
Even now, she found herself dazzled by his easy smile. How it transformed his face from sharp cheekbones and jawline into something softer. Something kinder. He’d been handsome back then, in an urgent, aggressive sort of way, but he’d grown out his hair and let it fall over his eyes. A further tempering that lessened the brutality of his beauty. The raw edges filed away in favor of approachability. But she saw him. Knew him. Despite the groomed five o’clock shadow he wore now, she could still make out his jawline. There’d been nights she fell asleep to the vision of herself running her tongue along it, the salt taste of him filling her mouth.
Camilla felt it then. The flush she’d tried to hold at bay creeping up her neck and cheeks. If Noah and Brianna knew she was thinking about Grant Pemberton in the most lustful way possible in the middle of her father’s sermon on feminine purity, they would piss their pants laughing at the irony. She pressed a hand to her throat, hoping no one would see.
“That you make no provision for the flesh,” her father repeated. “Young ladies, when you make allowances for sin, expose yourselves to temptation, wrap yourselves in immodesty rather than purity, you cannot exist in God’s light. There is simply no room for it. Those who do so find themselves cast away from the warmth He provides. It’s in that dark where the abominable dwell. Satan. Demons. Disembodied spirits. The Dark Sisters.”
He paused, letting the hush of the sanctuary fill the space he’d created. Camilla felt it in her chest. All that space. How she waited with the rest of them, her breath aching in her tightened lungs, for him to fill it. She hated him for it. That he held this power over not just the congregation, but her as well. Because she knew what was coming. The appearance of the Dark Sisters in her father’s sermon meant someone was sick.
She scanned the congregation, but there was an unending sea of faces. Even if she knew all the members of her father’s massive following, she wouldn’t be able to know who was absent from their pew and why.
And even though she knew the Dark Sisters were a load of shit, a scary story her father trotted out as a reminder to keep on the straight and narrow, there was a dim part of her that still feared them. That felt a faint lick of hellfire at her feet. She couldn’t help but lean forward and wait for her father to begin.
“But we all know this story, don’t we? Every few years, we hear it. Whispers about what somebody’s daughter or sister saw in the woods. It passes from house to house.” Her father swept a hand through the air, and she kept herself from rolling her eyes at his theatrics. “Like an illness. An infection.
“Sin is a lot like that, isn’t it? It starts as something so small. A whisper about something you saw in the woods. A pale hand reaching from a tree with ropes of hair instead of leaves. Two sets of eyes, pale as milk, looking out from the dark. Two women creeping along the ground, their hair intertwined in a single braid. Forever bound to whatever hell they created for themselves. Forced to wander the earth as ghosts or demons or the smeared remainders of a sinful heart. Because make no mistake, these creatures, the ones our girls call the Dark Sisters, are exactly that.”
She’d heard her father talk about them in his sermons when she was younger, but she hadn’t paid any more attention than she did to his stories of David or Moses or Job. But then Tricia Allman threw a slumber party for her ninth birthday. Fifteen tiny girls crowded into their family pool house as the sun set over the discarded toys and suits still dripping on their designated hooks.
Outside, Darren and Catherine Allman chatted over bourbon cocktails, comfortable in the knowledge the girls were tucked safely away inside. Proud they’d given their daughter the theater of privacy and freedom without truly granting it. They were good parents. Careful and strict when it was needed, but still young and carefree and cool. They poured more bourbon. Smiled. They were good parents.
Inside the pool house, full dark fell over those tiny, girlish bodies. The walls seemed to drop away, and shadows opened great, heaving mouths on all sides. They were no longer girls. They were bits of meat meant for a saliva-slick tongue.
They huddled together, shivering against the chill of their still-wet hair. Tricia Allman held court among them, her cherry popsicle–stained mouth the only color in that bled-out room as she leaned in, her voice dropped to a whisper.
“My cousin saw them once. She was mad at her mom and said she was leaving and never coming back. She’d been crying and stopped under a tree. Said she felt something touch her shoulder, and when she looked up, they were up there. In the tree. Reaching for her,” Tricia said.
“That’s not true,” Brittany Johnson said.
Tricia frowned. “Is so. She said their hair was braided together. One of them looking forward and the other backward. And that they didn’t have eyes really. It was just all white. And then they made this sound.” She closed her eyes and opened her mouth as the girls went silent. Waiting. Listening. Until a small whine crept from Tricia’s lips, her eyes fluttering slightly open as it pitched lower into a throaty rattle. “I can’t do it as good as she can. Makes my throat hurt. Anyway, she ran before they could grab her and eat her. Because that’s what they do if they catch you. Pull their mouths apart with their hands until their jaws break and then slurp you up whole.”
Camilla had been the first to fall asleep. It was her first sleepover. She was an only child. No one had ever told her not to be the first one to fall asleep.
She woke to a pressure on her abdomen. A faint tickle over her face that smelled of synthetic strawberries. The dark bloomed around her, stretched out and out until she wondered if she’d tumbled into the sky, but there was no air in it. She gasped and pushed against the thing on her abdomen. It did not move, and beneath its weight, her body went cold with panic.
And that sound. A slow rattle. So much like the impossible beginning of a death. Air as it fled the failing lungs for some other, unknowable vessel. Across her face, she felt that same delicate tickle as the sleep-hidden world around her came into sharper focus. A pale form crouched on top of her, its face bending to study hers, its hair falling over Camilla’s face as it opened its mouth wider, the hands creeping up its face so it could break its teeth and jaw before swallowing her.
She screamed. Clawed at the shape that still pressed against her until she felt the soft tear of flesh. The quick warmth of blood under her fingernails. Again and again, she lashed out, until the shape squealed and tumbled away. Her chest freed of its weight, Camilla pulled breath into her in great heaves. The air that rushed back into her lungs was sharp, and she panted as light flooded the room.
Tricia Allman lay curled beside Camilla, her hands covering her face. But they could all see. All the girls. The blood weeping from Tricia’s right eye like some misplaced stigmata. As if the nail that pierced Christ’s palms had somehow found its way into Tricia Allman’s right eye. That was how they would all describe it after. Like a horror show. Even if it was only a scratch. In their girlish minds, it was a bloodbath.
“She scratched me! She scratched my eye out!” Tricia howled as the other girls crowded around her in confusion. They ignored Camilla, who sat in the quickly cooling urine-damp of her sleeping bag trying to understand what was happening.
At some point, amid the chaos of Tricia screaming and Camilla sobbing, someone hit the intercom button, and Tricia’s parents came rushing in. And that was the end of Tricia Allman’s ninth birthday party.
Camilla’s mother came to pick her up, her mouth pressed in a thin line as Tricia’s mother explained what had happened.
“A silly prank. You know how girls are. Telling scary stories and whatnot. We’re just thankful Tricia wasn’t more hurt. I can’t imagine what could have possibly possessed Camilla to react that way.”
“Maybe your daughter sitting on her chest and scaring her half to death had something to do with it.”
“Ada, please—”
“It’s a shame, really. That Henry and I trusted you with our daughter. He’ll be so disappointed when he hears about this.” She took a step forward and then another, forcing Tricia’s mother to stumble backward. “More of a shame that I wasn’t here when it happened. Because if I had been here when your daughter decided to play her blasphemous little prank, you’d be dealing with much more than a scratch.”
Whirling on her heel, she grasped Camilla’s hand and marched her to the car. The drive home was quiet, but her mother held her hand the entire time. She carried Camilla inside as if she were four years old again and then ran a bath and helped her inside the warm water. Passed a washcloth over her face again and again until her tears finally slowed.
“Hush, now.” Her mother hugged Camilla to her, not caring that her daughter was going to ruin her Derek Lam blouse. “It’s just a story. And little girls exaggerate. The Dark Sisters have never eaten anyone. At least not as far as I know.” Her mother winked at her. It didn’t make Camilla feel any better.
Later, Camilla would be embarrassed by what had happened at the sleepover. How she’d reacted. No one held it against her. No one made fun of her or reminded her how she’d sliced Tricia’s face open with her fingernails. But in that moment, as her mother wrapped her in a towel and rubbed at her arms, she felt only fear. Fear that the Sisters would find her. Wrap their hair around her like a cocoon. Squeeze her body until it burst like ripe fruit, their mouths stained with the juice of her as they ate her body and drank her blood like some profane Communion.
Back then, the story of the Dark Sisters felt so much bigger. There’d been nothing allegorical in it. It had been visceral. Real. She carried her fear like a second skin, slipping it on and off from year to year until she was old enough to understand.
The Dark Sisters were not a story. They were a lesson. One Camilla had been learning her entire life. Be good. Be pure and modest and chaste. Because the temptations of the world wore many faces. Some of them lovely. Even Satan was beautiful when he fell, after all. She imagined the Sisters had been the same.
Still, down in the sleeping parts of her she tried to ignore, there was a fear. The Dark Sisters might not have been real, but the illness was. And it had come among them again.
Again, she scanned the crowd and darted a glance at the Whitten pew. Noah sat beside his father, his gaze on the pulpit but soft with boredom. She craned her neck further, a pretense at stretching, and found Brianna in her family pew at the back of the church. Brianna rarely talked about it, but even this simple push to the outer circles of visibility within the church spoke of an otherness Camilla knew she resented. A bitterness born of her darker skin. Even after four years of membership in The Path, Brianna’s family was often left off invites. Dinner parties and galas and prayer circles came and went without their names included on the guest list. Their money didn’t matter in the face of such dimly veiled prejudice.
Camilla had brought it up with her father only once, and he’d frowned and told her she was mistaken. He didn’t want to hear about such ridiculousness again. That moment counted among the first cracks in her girlish belief her father could do no wrong.
Brianna caught Camilla’s eye. Who’s sick? she mouthed.
Camilla shrugged. Outside. Later.
Brianna gave a brief nod, her dark eyes going even darker with concern.
Camilla ground her teeth together and caught at a loose bit of skin at her cuticle and tugged, the release a delicious sting. She both hoped and did not hope for blood.
She wanted the blood for what it meant. Cleansing. Penance. A release of all the sinful thoughts and feelings contained within her treacherous skin. But to bleed so publicly would invite questions she did not want to answer. There were no ways to mold the complexity of those thoughts and feelings into anything resembling cogent speech. She thrust her hand beneath her thigh and looked back at the altar.
The last bit of her father’s sermon washed over her, and soon enough, every head in the congregation bowed in prayer for the benediction. The band took their places—some quiet approximation of Christian pop—and the service was over. Her mother stood, her willowy body lovely in its divine, silken armor, and drifted to her husband’s side. From this spot, they would greet the congregation and exchange blessings for the stolen minutes Camilla needed with Brianna and Noah away from prying eyes.
Camilla moved through the throngs of women comparing dresses and jewelry, all chattering about the upcoming Purity Ball or the sermon. The Dark Sisters and the possibility of more sickness had taken root despite any distractions the Purity Ball offered. Her father had warned them, and they all felt the edge of it. Finally, she burst through the vestibule doors and drew the first clean breath she felt she’d taken all morning.
She hurried through the parking lot with its gleaming collection of Maseratis and Mercedes, hoping no one—particularly Grant Pemberton—was watching as the pastor’s only daughter darted past the immaculate landscaping.
Noah and Brianna were already there, a wall of unmanageable kudzu at their backs. Brianna’s face was screwed into a frown, the burgundy lipstick she wore immaculate somehow despite the contortion, as she whispered furiously at a rather amused-looking Noah.
In her black Tom Ford crepe, Brianna was a fierce vision of elegance. A warrior goddess disguised in her Sunday best. The twist outs she wore fell to her collarbone and emphasized the grace of her neck and shoulders. That same grace inhabited every breath. Every movement. So much so that Camilla often wondered if Brianna had been set on this ugly, wasted earth by mistake. If every day God cursed Himself for not keeping her among the angels where she belonged.
“Ask Camilla. She’ll tell you,” Brianna said.
“Ask me what?”
Noah loosened his tie as he turned to face her. It made him, as always, look younger than his eighteen years and more like the boy she’d known all her life. The freckled, dark-haired kid with darker eyes who’d been the only other one to laugh when, in the first grade, Mrs. Stewart had seriously intoned “Dear Lloyd” instead of “Dear Lord” at the start of morning prayer. Camilla’s best friend until Brianna moved to Hawthorne Springs in the ninth grade, and their trio was made complete.
“The Sisters,” he began.
Camilla rolled her eyes. “What a crock of shit. A made-up story to scare little girls and keep the rest of us on the straight and narrow. Be good or you’ll end up like the Dark Sisters.”
“Exactly,” Noah said. “We used to dare each other to go out in the woods at night and find the tree they’re supposed to haunt. See how long we could sit there before pissing our pants. No one ever saw anything.”
Brianna stiffened. “What about all those girls who say they saw them? Every year, there’s at least a few.”
“Kids’ stuff. They’re little girls. They think they see something one night, and that story’s already in their head, and so they fill in the blanks with whatever’s easy. Everybody gets excited for a few days and that’s it,” Noah said.
Brianna turned to face Camilla. “And what about the ones who get sick?”
“Correlation doesn’t imply causation. Come on, Brianna. You took Statistics with the both of us.” Noah rolled his eyes at Brianna, but she kept her gaze solely on Camilla.
Because Camilla knew. Knew that for every story someone’s daughter brought home, her fear a terrible, heaving thing that closed her throat and numbed her tongue as she tried to find a way to retell what she’d seen in the woods, there was a woman in Hawthorne Springs who fell ill.
Fundamentally, Noah was right. Logic implied that something nonexistent could not impact the living world. But it happened regardless.
Camilla shook her head. Silly to get caught up in a fear she’d put aside the moment she turned fourteen. “It’s environmental. Like the flu or something.”
“Except some of them fucking die, Camilla,” Brianna snapped.
Noah stepped away. This wasn’t his fight. Never had been. Because it was never the men who got sick. Only the girls. The women. The unbaptized coven of the Dark Sisters brought like lambs to the slaughter. The illness always began in the same way. A sore throat. A cough that wouldn’t go away. Until, eventually, their teeth and gums went gray. Boils in the inner cheeks and mouth that would not heal. In the end, their teeth and tongue and gums rotted and fell away in small, painful bits.
“We all die, hon. That’s part of it. And the ones who died were already old,” Camilla said.
“That’s not— Forget it.” Brianna lifted a hand to her face, but remembered her makeup and lowered it. “It doesn’t matter.”
Camilla pulled her hair off her neck. The late spring heat had only just begun to bloom. Soon enough, the air would carry a damp weight, and every breath would feel like drowning. Even still, a shiver ran through her belly, and she swayed for a moment, willing the sudden nauseating, oily sensation in her mouth away.
People got sick. It was just how it was. Countless doctors came to Hawthorne Springs to draw blood and run tests. No one could explain why the women got sick. What caused it or how to stop it. They threw the weight of their collective wealth behind it, and still, they were no closer to an answer.
Every year, her father preached on the will of God. How there was no point in worrying over what was in His control. It felt better to give it all over. To close her eyes and pretend that because it was in God’s hands, she had no need to worry. Because she was her father’s daughter, that particular cup would pass from her lips. That poison averted because of her last name. Her blood.
She needed a distraction. They all did. Something that didn’t carry any of the responsibility of the Purity Ball or the vague uneasiness of disease meant for people older than them.
“You know what?” Camilla clapped her hands together. “We need something fun. Something that’s not doom and gloom and modesty and virginity until your wedding night.”
“Thank you. Exactly,” Noah said.
“Let’s throw a party.”
“It’s like you’re asking to be sent on Retreat,” Brianna said.
“Not this little baby angel birthed from the loins of our divine leader. Not the preacher’s own daughter. He wouldn’t dare!” Noah reached to ruffle Camilla’s hair.
“Mess up the hair and die, Whitten.”
He chuckled and dropped his hand.
“We’ll call it a vigil then. For whoever’s sick.” She clasped her hands together and fluttered her eyelashes.
“Shameless,” Noah muttered.
“Not shameless. Bored.” Camilla took a step toward Brianna. Who cared if her father threatened her with Retreat. It wouldn’t be the first time, and it surely wouldn’t be the last either. “Come on, Brianna. Whoever’s sick will be fine. And we’ll pray for them. That’s what Communion is anyway, right? A little prayer. A little wine. I’ll ask my dad if we can use the pavilion.” She bumped her hip against Brianna’s and waited for the smirk she knew was coming.
“You two are going to hell,” Brianna said, but her mouth quirked upward.
“Only if you’re there to keep me company.” Pursing her lips, Camilla blew a kiss toward Brianna. “I should get back before they start looking for me. I’ll call you later. We’ll plan.” She let out a diabolical laugh.
Brianna swatted at her ass, and Camilla danced away, waving over her shoulder as she went. She skirted the edge of the parking lot, ducking behind cars until she was close enough for it to look as if she’d been there all along. By the time she straightened, her heart felt as if it was lodged in her throat, and she forced herself to breathe slowly, glad to be able to blame the heat for the flush in her cheeks.
Her mouth stretched into a smile as she nodded at a group of women clustered near the door.
“A lovely sermon today,” one of them said as she passed.
“Thank you,” Camilla said, and angled herself to maneuver past them, but the woman shot out a hand, Cartier bracelets glinting in the sun, and gripped Camilla’s forearm with ballet-slipper-pink fingernails.
“Your father,” she began as the other women averted their eyes, their chatter gone quiet. “Would you tell him I said so? About the sermon?”
“Of course,” she replied as she tried to place the woman’s face. To remember her name.
“You’ll tell him?” she repeated, those pastel fingernails pressing indentations into Camilla’s flesh as she drew closer, her tone a confidential hum.
Camilla pulled her arm out of the woman’s grip, keeping her smile fixed in place as she realized how she knew her. Tania Fullerton. Back in Hawthorne Springs after two months at Retreat for sleeping with the contractor who installed her new kitchen cabinets. Her husband had caught them. Closed his practice early that day to get a head start on packing for the fishing trip he’d planned for the weekend only to find his wife spread-eagled on the marble countertops she’d had shipped from Italy.
Camilla studied her. How she stood just outside the circle of women. Desperate to be seen. Included. Allowed entrance back into the life she had before her indiscretion. The one before the two months of immersive workshops and prayer sessions and counseling all mandated as part of Retreat. No phones. No outside contact. A Biblical boot camp for those who dared give in to their base desires.
And now, all those judgmental eyes were locked on Camilla. Waiting to see how she would respond. If, after her father’s sermon, she would make provision and give even the slightest allowance. The smallest bit of grace.
She let her smile drop. “I should find my father. If you’ll excuse me.”
She heard the approval in the women’s voices as she walked away, but it was a small comfort. Answering according to expectations didn’t negate that Tania Fullerton’s husband was a supercilious prick. One who made a habit of publicly teasing his wife about her weight problem, pinching and squeezing her sides as he chuckle-yucked his way through yet another tired joke.
Camilla’s heels echoed through the emptied vestibule as she wound her way through the central hallway that led to the offices. Her father’s was the last, the large double oak doors standing open to reveal him seated behind his desk, his suit jacket thrown over the back of the leather chair, and his Bible open before him. Trent Glover, the youth pastor, stood off to the side, his hands in his pockets as he let his gaze travel the length of Camilla’s body only to pause at the hemline of her skirt before cocking a disapproving eyebrow.
“Well, well. Look what the cat dragged in.”
She forced into her voice a brightness she didn’t feel. “Hi, Pastor Trent.” She leaned against the edge of the desk, slid off her heels, and let her feet sink into the plush rug her father had imported from Iran. A shiver of pleasure ran up her back.
Her father glanced up, and then resumed his reading. “Isaiah. We were discussing the next Youth Meeting.”
“Judgment and restoration of the virtuous. Seems fitting with the Purity Ball happening so soon,” Pastor Trent said.
Camilla ignored him and focused on her father. “Daddy, I was thinking—”
“Mmm … that can’t be good. Usually means it’s going to cost me money.” Her father flipped a page, his finger tracing the thin paper.
Copyright © 2025 by Kristi DeMeester
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