Chapter I. 2007
CHAPTER I
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.