AMANDA GLAZE’s The Lies of Alma Blackwell is a thrilling supernatural story filled with magic, family drama and romance. Read on for an extract.

ABOUT THE BOOK

For over a century, the Blackwells have protected the town of Hollow Cliff from vengeful spirits.

Seventeen-year-old Nev is ready to take over for her ailing grandmother as the town’s witch protector – unlike her mother, who left when Nev was a child and never looked back.

When a stranger arrives at Blackwell House of Spirits to fill a tour guide opening, Nev reluctantly offers him the job.

Nev doesn’t trust Cal. He knows more than he’s letting on about Blackwell House – and about Nev herself.

But Nev soon learns that she has been lied to her whole life. By following the trail of clues left behind in Blackwell House by her most powerful witch ancestor, Nev uncovers an unspeakable legacy of murder and lies…and realises that a stranger may be the one person she can trust.

EXTRACT

Chapter Three

We’re running through the house. Our shadows are long in the hall as our feet slap against the hardwood floors in the same gal-loping rhythm. The phantoms hover at the edge of my vision, their vaporous forms shifting like smoke.

Always just out of reach.

Always just out of sight.

We race past the Séance Room, cut through the library, and climb two flights of stairs before stopping for a breath in front of a door with a stained-glass panel in the pattern of a spiderweb.

I turn, like I always do, trying to catch a glimpse of the faceless figures that haunt me night after night. But also like always, they disappear before I can, scattering in the air like fog run through by the sun.

Except—

my heart stutters.

—this time, one phantom stays.

It detaches itself from the corner, its hazy, featureless form flickering in the glow of an old-fashioned gas lamp as it drifts, smokelike, toward me.

A hand reaches out.

But these aren’t the twisting wraithlike fingers I some-times glimpse in the corner of my eye. This hand is made of solid pale flesh.

And it’s reaching for my neck.

I open my mouth to scream, but first one fleshy hand and then another clamp down on my throat, cutting off my air. I beat my hands against a chest dense with hard muscle and look with frantic desperation into Robbie Harrison’s face. His eyes are wide, his mouth is twisted, and silent tears are streaming down his cheeks.

And then his face changes. It melts like the wax of a fast-burning candle, and when it re-forms, I open my mouth again to scream, but the hands around my neck won’t let me make a sound. They’re slimmer now. Long, delicate fingers that end with neatly filed nails painted a deep, dark blue. But they’re just as strong, just as capable of not letting go as I gasp and try to break free. And the face staring down at me now – oval with a slightly upturned nose, alabaster skin that glows between wavy curtains of chestnut hair – is equally etched with fury and pain.

Mum.

Her hazel eyes are round and unfocused. Her lips are moving in a soundless, frenzied litany I almost recognise. Her fingers dig into the soft skin of my throat, but when I try to beg her to stop, I can’t suck in enough air to form the words.

Black spots fill my vision as she leans down and presses her lips against my ear. The heat of her breath skips across my skin, but when she speaks, it’s with Robbie’s deep, hoarse voice.

The true history has been hidden.

Pain shoots up my arm, sharp and sudden.

I jerk awake, throw off my covers, and tumble out of bed. My bare knees land with a thud on the hardwood floor as a white shape arcs over my head, a loud, hissing meow filling the air.

Tabitha lands on the floor next to me, back arched, orange and blue eyes narrowed. ‘Oh, God, Tab. I’m so sorry.’ I reach out to soothe her, but she prances out of my grasp, her white tail fluffed and high as she snakes her way through the narrow crack in my bedroom door.

I pull my legs into my chest and press my forehead to my knees, heart racing as Tab silently flees from me. I must have been having one of my dreams if she woke me like that, but when I close my eyes and try to remember images from it, it’s like closing my fingers around wisps of smoke. Familiar frustration tightens my chest, but I’m shaking too much to take out my sketchbook to try to capture what I can of the faceless phantoms this time.

A minute or two later, the ringing chime of the grandfather clock penetrates my groggy mind, and even though my head and throat are both aching, I force myself to get up, shower, cover the bruises on my neck with concealer, and dress in the vaguely Victorian pin-striped blouse and long blue skirt costume Gran picked out to help our tours feel more immersive.

I down several strong cups of coffee throughout the morning, but the Saturday rush still almost kills me. We’re busier than normal thanks to the publicity surrounding my upcoming Vow ceremony, and when a busload of camp kids shows up without tour reservations, I have no choice but to turn them away and hope Gran doesn’t find out about it.

Without her help, I’m barely managing two tours a day, but after my mum left us high and dry, Gran ran four daily tours in addition to handling the ticket reservations and gift shop solo. I didn’t understand how difficult that was for her when I was a kid, but now I’m not only in awe of it, I truly don’t understand how she did it. But Gran has always been a superwoman, and her passion for upholding the Blackwell legacy knows no bounds. She’s immensely proud of the role our family has played in keeping the lifeblood of this town flowing, since industry in most coastal towns like ours dried up years ago. Our cold, foggy beaches aren’t exactly a compelling reason for tourists to keep driving past San Francisco, but she always says that Hollow Cliff has one thing those other towns don’t.

Hollow Cliff has a ghost story.

I make it through the morning tour without losing my voice but the soreness from Robbie’s bruising fingers hasn’t gone away, so I’m downing a thermos of hot honey-laden tea as I ring up the last of the 10:30 tour guests in the gift shop. But it’s more than the pain in my throat that’s lingered. All morning, I’ve been haunted by flashes of Robbie’s grief-stricken face. The furious movement of his bloodless lips. The panicked fury in his wide, dark eyes as he tried to squeeze the life out of me.

I wish I could talk to Gran about it, but when I went to her room this morning, she was in so much pain that she actually asked me to move the start of her hospital stay up to tonight, and I knew it wasn’t the right time. Gran keeping up her strength for the ceremony next week matters more than anything else right now.

For what feels like the hundredth time today, I wrap butcher paper around a glass jar of the Sweet Dreams Tea from DeLongre Apothecary, pop it into a Blackwell House of Spirits paper bag, and hand it to the – hallelujah – second-to-last customer in line. But when I try to discreetly wipe a sheen of sweat off my brow, my elbow knocks over a basket of anxiety-reducing moonstones, and they scatter on the floor at my feet.

‘Sorry,’ I call out to the next customer as I duck to pick them up. ‘Just one second.’

‘Take your time.’

I freeze, my heart kicking into a gallop at the sound of a voice I shouldn’t recognize but instantly do. Slowly, I rise to my feet.

He’s standing across the counter from me in the same zip-up hoodie he was wearing at the cove last night. His black hair is damp, and there’s an aroma of salt water drifting off his skin as if he came directly from a swim in our freezing cold ocean. The pale freckles across his nose and cheeks are more visible in the light of day, but it’s the piercing blue-grey of his eyes that I can’t look away from.

They remind me of something. The sky, maybe? Yes. His eyes remind me of one of my first oil paintings. I used white and grey and a touch of blue to capture the sky as it looked over Blackwell House right after a storm. I couldn’t get the colour quite right though. I still can’t. I have dozens more pencil drawings of the same landscape in my sketchbook right now.

‘I was wondering,’ he says, ‘if you’re the person I should talk to about the job.’

I blink at him, realise how intensely I was just staring, and take an involuntary step back from the counter. His brows lift, the crescent-shaped scar above his left eye tightening.

‘I’m sorry . . . what?’

Without dropping my gaze, he reaches into the back pocket of his jeans, pulls out a piece of paper, unfolds it, and slides it across the counter toward me. I look down.

It’s a printout from the online edition of the Hollow Cliff Gazette.

The top of the page is a continuation of an article I’ve seen before that ran on the front page about a month ago. It includes a brief history of the first Vow made by Alma Blackwell, and it names me as its next successor. There’s also a grainy black-and-white photo from when Gran took her Vow back in the eighties. She’s kneeling on a stage overlooking the bluffs, her arms outstretched above her head as her mother places a small wooden box etched with carvings of the waxing and waning moon into her hands.

I skip over the information about ticket sales and skim down to the classifieds underneath the article. There’s a used boat listed for sale, an offer for lawn mowing services . . . and at the very bottom, a help-wanted ad for a job with a generous salary and free room and board at the Blackwell House of Spirits.

I read the ad through, even though I’m the one who wrote it six weeks ago. When I look up, I notice for the first time that the mystery guy has a backpack slung over one shoulder. Is he not just here for the job, but for the promised room and board, too? In hindsight, that was a truly insane thing to offer, but I was feeling desperate when I wrote the ad, and we do have an abundance of rooms to spare. I thought it might help attract someone from out of town, but I never actually considered what I’d do if someone took me up on it.

I meet his eyes and ask the only question I can think of. ‘Why?’

He tilts his head. ‘Why what?’

‘Why do you want to work here?’

‘Is this part of the job interview?’

‘Yes,’ I say, even though I’ve never conducted a job interview before and have no idea how they’re supposed to go. His mouth quirks, as if my lack of HR experience is painfully obvious.

‘All right.’ He crosses his arms. ‘I want to work here because I need a summer job and this one pays well.’

I expect him to keep going. But he doesn’t. ‘That’s it?’

He shrugs. ‘I’m also good at memorisation, which I assume will be useful for the tour guide part.’

I arch a brow at him, waiting for him to say something else. Maybe something about how he came here with his family as a kid. Or how he’s planning to be a history major. I’d even take a confession about an unhealthy obsession with ghosts. Anything at all that will help his appearance here make some degree of sense because I can’t afford to turn him away. The desperation that led me to place that ad in the first place has only grown.

‘What’s your name?’ I ask.

‘Cal.’

‘Cal what?’

His eyes flick away before he answers. ‘The ad said you pay in cash.’

Both of my brows lift. ‘What does that—’

He looks back at me, his face an unreadable mask. ‘If you pay in cash, you don’t need my full name for a bank account deposit.’

Well, that’s not a good sign. ‘Are you a criminal, Cal?’

Blue-grey eyes bore into mine. ‘Is that what you think I am, Nevinia?’

I jerk back. ‘Don’t—’

I cut myself off, surprised by the force of my reaction to that name on his lips. His eyes narrow in interest, and I drop my gaze to the Gazette article he placed on the counter.

No one but my mum has ever called me Nevinia. She claimed the name came to her in a dream and that it was too musical to be shortened. But I’m fully aware that most of the articles written about my Vow ceremony – including this one – refer to me by my full legal name, which is obviously where this Cal guy got it from. Hearing it shouldn’t send my heart pounding. It shouldn’t be a shock.

I look back up and lift one shoulder in a shrug. ‘Most people call me Nev.’

He holds my gaze, but instead of commenting on the weirdly extreme reaction I just had to hearing my own name, he leans forward and places both forearms on the counter so our faces are level. ‘Okay, Nev. Here’s the way I see it. I need a job for the summer. And you . . .’

His eyes travel over the disorganised mess that is the space behind the counter. I discreetly shove a box of open but still unstocked magnets out of sight with my foot. ‘Well, it seems pretty obvious that you need the help.’ His lips twitch, but when he looks back at me, his face sobers. ‘And no, I’m not a criminal. And no, you will never be in any danger from me. But I think you already know that.’

A prism of light from the stained-glass window dances across his face, illuminating the shadow of the bruise Robbie’s fist left on his cheek. I think about the relief that washed through me when he materialised out of the darkness last night, and about his fist halting in midair the second I called out for him to stop. As I do, something my mum used to say floats through my head. Words I haven’t thought about in years.

When your blood whispers, darling, listen.

Is that what’s happening right now? Is that the source of this possibly irresponsible impulse to hire the stranger who saved my life last night and offer him a key to the front door? Is my gut telling me I can trust him?

‘Oh,’ Cal adds like an afterthought, his lips curving in a crooked smile. ‘I should also mention, I’m available to start right away.’

This an edited extract from The Lies of Alma Blackwell by Amanda Glaze, published by Union Square & Co releasing on the 1 December

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amanda Glaze is the bestselling author of The Second Death of Edie and Violet Bond, a B&N Book Club pick, and a Rise Booklist Honoree. She grew up in Northern California where she spent most of her time with her nose in a book or putting on plays with friends. Since then, she’s lived many lives: as a bookseller, a theater director, and an Emmy award-winning film and television producer. When she’s not running off to the mountains, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their two cat familiars.

Visit Amanda Glaze’s website