Don't Speak

Harmony Willow Quinn was everyone's sweetheart. Straight A student, varsity cheerleader, and loyal volunteer at the retirement home. Sweet and charismatic, she was the girl everybody wanted to be...the girl everybody wanted to date.

But she was different now.

The summer before her junior year in high school, she stopped speaking, chopped off her long strawberry blonde hair, dyeing it a dark, muddy brown, and dropped away from her perfect life. Her new wardrobe, urban camouflage, helped her fade from the limelight and at the urging of her therapist, she was starting her junior year at a new school, hundreds of miles away from the trauma that robbed her of her innocence and her voice.

******

Connor Flynn was an outcast by choice. After the death of his parents and twin sister three years prior, he just couldn't find it in himself to care about the trivialities of mundane high school drama. As a newly emancipated adult, his only goal was to get through his senior year and earn a scholarship to Northwestern University, where his parents met. At sixteen, he should have been a junior, but with single-minded determination, he'd earned all but the last four credits needed to graduate. His evenings were spent doing maintenance for old Ms. McKinnon's sprawling estate in exchange for the apartment over the defunct carriage house, but his peaceful solitude bursts when Ms. McKinnon's silent great-niece comes to stay, re-introducing him to The Craft whether he wants it or not when her power bursts out mere hours after her arrival. It's erratic, uncontrollable, and damaging, and in a split second decision that alters the course of everything, he douses her magick with his own.