Spotlight & Giveaway: A Spell to Wake the Dead by Nicole Lesperance

Today, HJ is pleased to share with you Nicole Lesperance’s new release: A Spell to Wake the Dead

Two teen girls must uncover the dark, occult secrets lurking in their Cape Cod town to solve a series of murders—and save themselves from the same fate—in this twisty, witchy thriller. 

When Mazzy and her best friend Nora sneak down to the beach one moonlit night to cast a spell, they don’t expect to find a dead body. But as the tide rolls in, it carries the remains of a woman who is missing her hands and teeth.

The girls know they should leave the investigation to the police, but they can’t shake the weird, supernatural connection they feel with the dead woman. Using spellwork and divination, they set out to find answers of their own. But after they uncover a rash of local disappearances stretching back years—and both girls start having occult visions and hearing ghostly, whispering voices—Mazzy worries that she and Nora are in danger.

Then, Nora finds a second body. And the whispering voice is telling her where to find more. With everything spiraling, Mazzy needs to figure out who to trust and how to sever this supernatural connection—or she and Nora might be the next bodies to wash up on the beach.

Enjoy an exclusive excerpt from A Spell to Wake the Dead 

Excerpt from Chapter One
…

The road are strangely empty tonight. It’s one of those times where you wonder if everybody else knows something you don’t and is staying inside. Like there’s a tornado coming or a meteor is about to crash into Earth. Or like everyone has suddenly and inexplicably disappeared off the face of the planet, all except for the three of us.
“Okay, so we need four moon snail shells, a sand dollar, a candle, and a rock with living barnacles on it.” Nora holds up her phone to show Elliot the video. “I have everything except the rock.”
“What’s it for?” He leans forward into the space between the front seats, and I swear I can feel the electrons zapping around the edges of him.
“It’s a spell to uncover hidden things, conducted in the shadows of the full moon.” Nora says.
“She found it online,” I say, and Nora huffs in mock annoyance..
“Mazzy doesn’t think I should do spells from the internet,” she says.
“Why not?” asks Elliot.
“You know I don’t have a problem with the internet.” I flick on my blinker, even though there’s nobody to see it. “It’s anonymous people that worry me. That account only had one video, and it was that spell. And they didn’t show their face or talk about where the spell came from or how it worked. How do you know they’re not lying about what it does?”
“Even if they showed their face, how would you know they’re not lying?” says Elliot, who is happy to come along on all of our witchy excursions but is fairly skeptical about everything.
“Thank you.” Nora beams at him, which makes my eyelid twitch. “Plus, not everybody has the luxury of being open about their practice.”
“I know, I know,” I say. “But it still feels like a slightly bad idea.”
This is one of our never-ending disagreements. I like to do things by the book (as in, literal spell books) and Nora believes the best magic comes from intuition, from vibes, from random strangers on the internet. Regardless, it’s weird to do this particular kind of spell under a full moon. Usually you look for hidden things under a dark moon. The whole thing makes me vaguely nervous. But then again, Nora’s always warning me not to confuse my anxiety with my intuition, and she’s not always wrong about that.
“What exactly is this spell supposed to do?” Elliot asks.
“It’s a general revealing of things in our lives that are unclear, obscured, or murky,” says Nora. “We’re looking for clarity. Nothing specific.”
“So, like, you might find some random sock that’s been missing for a year, or you might discover you’re actually adopted and your birth family lives in Detroit?” says Elliot.
Nora laughs. “Something like that.”
That’s another thing that worries me, although she and I have already had this argument too. It’s better to be clear about what you want from a spell. If you leave it too vague, anything could happen. Nora says that isn’t necessarily bad, but I disagree.
As we follow the winding curves of Route 6A, the rambling Victorian houses give way to smaller cottages, and the sleeping woods between them get denser. A streetlight winks out just as we pass under it, and I shiver.
“Did you check the tides?” I ask Nora.
“Yep.” She holds up her phone. “Low tide is at nine fifty-three. We need to do the spell exactly at the moment when the ocean changes direction and starts coming back in.”
“You’ll never find that sock if you miss the tide,” says Elliot, and Nora reaches back through the seat gap and tries to hit him, but misses. Again, my eye twitches.
We pass empty restaurants and dark shops, a liquor store with one car in its parking lot, and then turn down the road that leads to Mayflower Beach. The moon is slowly rising, glinting over the top of a tall tree ahead. Away from the main road, the light is different—silver instead of gold—and even with the windows closed, I can smell the ocean, briny and cold.
Turning again, we wind through a neighborhood of empty cottages, then pull up beside a little wooded lot that will soon get turned into another summer home. The beaches are closed after sunset, and the police patrol the parking lots, kicking out the stargazers, the lovers kissing in their cars, the high school kids with their vapes and cans. But if you know where to park and where to hide, you can sometimes get away with coming here at night.
The moon has cleared the trees now, and everything is soft and silvery as we head down the road. The tide is all the way out, hundreds of yards offshore, so there’s no sound of waves, but the wind is gusting in across the bay, damp and frigid. I button my thrifted velvet coat all the way to my chin, wishing I’d brought a hat. Nora strides ahead, a black tote bag with a pentacle on it flapping off her shoulder.
It’s just Elliot and me now, in our own little space as we walk down the silent, sandy road. I still don’t know if the magnetism between us is something I’m imagining, so I say nothing, and neither does he. But there’s no time to dwell on it because Nora breaks into a run, and then we’re running too, across the empty parking lot and down the path of deep sand that cuts through the dunes.
Tonight, this bare, black-and-white beach could almost be the surface of the moon. Sandbars stretch in all directions, with shallow tidepools gleaming between them like mirrors. Elliot stops to pull his hair back in a ponytail, and I struggle not to stare at the cut-stone lines of his cheekbones, the sharp angle of his jaw. He’s been described as beautiful by more than one girl at our school, and even though I always agreed with them on a purely objective level, it’s hitting me in a different way lately.
But how am I feeling this way about Elliot, of all people? This is the boy who threw up on the bus after the eighth grade field trip to Six Flags. The kid who had to go home early from school once because he couldn’t stop crying about his pet turtle dying. The person who’s been infatuated with my best friend for years.
“Come on!” Nora leaps across a channel of silver water. “The tide’s turning in four minutes!”
We follow her farther out onto the wide, windswept flats, where she crouches and pulls something out of a tidepool. Then she heads for the center of a sandbar and drags a circle in the damp sand with the heel of her boot.
“Here,” she says, handing me a fist-sized rock crusted with barnacles. “Careful, it’s sharp.”
“I guess we’re doing this,” I mutter as I set the rock in the center of the circle. Nora lays out four moon snail shells in a diamond shape around it, then places a dried sand dollar beside the rock. The white disc looks like the full moon’s twin lying in the sand.
Nora rummages in her bag and pulls out a candle in a mason jar. I still don’t love the idea of this spell, but as she and I work together, setting up our makeshift altar in the sand, I start to feel the gentle, calming hum inside my body that always comes with spellwork. In the gusting wind, Nora struggles to light the candle, but eventually the flame takes and she sets the jar down in a shallow hole to shield it.
Elliot sits on a boulder outside the circle, and Nora and I begin. Together, we speak our consecration, the words we’ve been writing and honing for years, borrowed from spells and lore I’ve read about, plus various elements that Nora has intuited on her own.
Nora and I have been practicing witchcraft for years, but the results have only ever been modest at best. I’ve got a notebook full of our spells and sigils and incantations, along with notes on whether they’ve been successful (protection charms, herb oils for banishing nightmares, a cord-cutting ritual after the first girl I ever had a serious crush on broke my heart) and unsuccessful (a glamor to get rid of acne, a spell to ace tests we didn’t study for, a numerology prediction to help my dad win the lottery).
Some of the spells have been inconclusive. In tenth grade, Nora cast a love spell—despite my warning her it was a terrible idea—on Chloe Martins, and then Chloe invited her out for coffee the next day. They broke up after a few months, and I suspect Chloe already liked Nora long before she started messing with rose quartz and strands of people’s hair. Lots of people fall in love with Nora without the need for witchcraft. Most of the time, that doesn’t bother me.
“Focus,” she whispers, and I drag my concentration back to our ritual, to the circle on the sandbar, the sand dollar twin of the moon. As Nora speaks the words of her new-found spell, I let my eyes go blurry, let it all flood through me. The wind burning my cheeks and pulling tears from my eyes. The salt scent of the ocean. The gentle hush of the waves, the constant drag of the tide. And the moon, high overhead, illuminating some things with its beaming silver light and shrouding others in shadows. It’s impossible not to feel the magic building.
The wind gusts again, and the candle winks out. Nora sits back on her heels with a grunt.
“Do you want to start again?” I say.
“No,” she says. “I think that’s a sign that it’s over.”
“Already?” I say. “That felt really short.” It might be my anxiety, not my intuition, but something about this whole ritual is just … off.
“Not everything needs to take a long time to work, you know.” Nora’s tone is slightly sour as she starts gathering up the shells.
I glance over at Elliot, who shrugs.
“Looked fine to me?” he says, but of course he’d say that. He doesn’t believe in our spells. Nora’s the one who planned this spell and collected the ingredients, so who am I to question her? But everything about the ritual has been strange, and now it’s unfinished, and it’s weird that she’s okay with that. She fumbles and drops the mason jar lid, and when I hand it to her, she won’t meet my eye.
She picks up the barnacle-covered rock. “I’m going to put this back in the ocean.”
“You could just put it in the tidepool where you found it,” I say, but already she’s hurrying off.
Elliot stands and stretches out his lanky frame.
“What’s wrong with her?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “That was weird.”
He starts to speak, then pauses. He’s so close I can feel the electricity of him again. In the silvery moonlight, he looks like a silent film star, shadowed and striking with his gray eyes fixed on me.
“I …” He clears his throat. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.” My pulse is thundering. The wind roars, whipping my coat, throwing my long, black hair around my face, shoving me toward him.
“Is it —” Elliot stops short, his eyes cutting to something over my shoulder.
Down at the ocean’s edge, Nora screams.

Excerpt. ©Nicole Lesperance. Posted by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
 
 

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Meet the Author:

Nicole Lesperance grew up on Cape Cod and graduated from Wesleyan University. She spent a few years in London and now lives near Boston with her family and two rambunctious black cats. She writes YA and middle grade books. Follow her on Instagram @nicolesperance or visit her online at NicoleLesperance.com.

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