Amethyst Tears (YA Paranormal Romance) (Luminescence Trilogy) (21 page)

I knew that I loved Gavin. Then Lukas had come along and blurred that line. Finding what my
heart truly wanted had been an unexpected struggle.

Lukas’s
lips spread into a crooked grin as he looked me over. “Wow. I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you in a dress. Wow.”

I wanted to morph under the
family room rug. He looked at me like I was the only girl in the room, like Gavin wasn’t sitting beside me.

Tori utterly
clueless to the sudden strain, she was glued to Lukas’s side. Not that he seemed to mind, he liked the attention. She laid a hand on his arm oblivious to my panic. “I take full credit. Our Brianna lacks fashion sense.”

My mouth fell open.
Oh no she didn’t
. True clothes weren’t high on my priorities, but did she really need to throw me under the bus like that. What I wouldn’t give for a shawl at this moment.

No introductions were necessary. From the glint in their eyes, they both knew who the other was, and I wasn’t about to make an awkward situation any more awkward.
The room suddenly got smaller, and the air crackled with thick tension like a radioactive experiment gone horribly wrong. I was suffocating from it. Or it could be because I stopped breathing.

Lukas’s dimples twinkled.
“But she makes them look good.”

I choked on my own shock.

“I need a drink,” Gavin grumbled in a foreign voice devoid of any emotion. He promptly stood up, and I watched him walk away. I’d been doing that a lot lately.

Austin
, coming from out of nowhere plopped on the couch, putting his arm around me. The cushions sunk under his weight. “What crawled up his gorgeous butt?” Then his eyes roamed over Lukas like a mouthwatering piece of candy. “Oh I see. You must be the other guy.”

I elbowed
Austin in the gut. He was totally not helping.

He grunted. “
I’ll pretend like that didn’t happen.” Looking up at Tori and the dreamboat, Austin said, “You must be Lukas. I’ve heard all about you.” His words rolled off his tongue. Austin was in seventh heaven.

“Any friend of Brianna’s is a friend of mine,” Lukas stated filled with charisma.

Austin raised a brow, already under Lukas’s enchanting spell.

What this party needed was time for things to simmer down before it started to boil. After what I hoped was adequate downtime, I went on the hunt for Gavin. Somehow we all needed to co-exist. The only place I had left to search
in this massive house was the kitchen, which I’d been avoiding. It was jammed packed with bodies.

Sure enough t
here in the corner of the kitchen was Rianne with
my
Gavin. Somewhere over the last few months he became mine, and I wasn’t a sharing type. She was pressed up against him, his back to the counter, attached like a leech. There really were no nice words to describe the way she was throwing herself at him. Her leopard skirt was shorter and tighter than mine. I don’t even know how that was possible and still be covering anything at all.

It was like a punch in the gut
seeing them so close. She whispered in his ear, and all I saw was…Red. Hot. Jealousy. It stole through my veins. Her sickening sweet smile made me gag. I was surely going to embarrass myself and heave right there on Tori’s polished floors. Her skintight dress outlined every slutty curve (I was one to talk, but that was beside the point).

Right then
I wanted to throttle her.

I stopped dead in my tracks. Neither one of them noticed
me. A million voices talked at once, but for me, the room went silent with nothing but their voices. Power swam inside my veins, and it was very hard to rein it in, but I knew now and here wasn’t the place to let my secret loose.

“
Where’s your girlfriend tonight?” Rianne asked, walking a blood red nail up Gavin’s shirt. “I didn’t think I would get you alone.”

I was going to break her
bloody finger. Totally eavesdropping, I waited at the tipped of the doorway holding my breath.

His eyes hardened to stone.
“What girlfriend.”

Those
words stung my heart worse than a thousand jellyfish. I couldn’t be in that stuffy room another second, not with the storm that started to brew inside me. So I ran as far from the kitchen as possible. I was feeling hot and cold all at once. Needing air and distance, I turned on my heels and headed outside to the porch. There was a sea of people blocking me from my escape, and in my haste I twisted my ankle.

Damn shoes.

God what are all these people doing out here? I was about to have a magical mental breakdown and they were laughing, having fun. Hobbling on one foot, I seethed as I pushed people out of my way.

As unreasonable as i
t sounded, I couldn’t help but be infuriated by their glee.

The crisp rush of the night air washed over me like a blanket. Millions of stars sprayed the sky above
, but my mind was too bogged down to appreciate their beauty. The brisk air burned my lungs as I dragged in a ragged breath. I needed to calm down. The swirling of magic vibrated my fingertips.

I was so caught up in my rage, I never heard
Lukas come up behind her. He whispered in my ear, “Careful, your eyes are starting to glow. And we know where that leads.”

Whipping around, I glared at him.
“Shut up,” I mumbled low in no mood for anyone’s grief.

His lips twitched
, holding up his hands. “Hey. I’m not the enemy here, but I pity whoever pissed you off.”

My control snapped.
I just could hold it in anymore.

Thunder
snarled in the air behind me. Lightning split across the massive yard striking a nearby tree. The sound was deafening as the wood split in half. Dry lightning set the sky aglow over and over again. The ground under my feet shook with violence. And there I stood in the middle of it all, shell-shocked.

Oops.

Lukas put a tentative hand on my shoulder examining the destruction I caused. “Let’s get you something to drink. Plus I could really use one. Your friend has been smothering me all night.”

Like a dead zombie,
I just nodded.

One drink turned into two
, two into three, and so forth. It wasn’t until my fifth drink that I really started to feel numb.

And drunk as a skunk.

Like every great teenage party, someone had spiked the punch. The only difference this time was that bad girl Brianna didn’t give a rat’s ass. Bad girl Brianna told good girl Brianna to take the night off and go to hell.

“I’m such a light-weight,
” I proclaimed, flipping off Tori’s boots. My feet were killing me. Lukas and I were sitting in Tori’s backyard with a jug of the
good stuff
. Well I was having a hard time staying upright. Giggling, I fell on my back, staring at the millions of stars as they came into focus.

“
That’s not such a bad thing,” he assured, resting beside me on the grass.

I waved my hand in the air, playing connect the dots with the stars.
“I think the world is spinning.”

“I th
ink you have reached your limit.” There was amusement in his tone. “Come on. I’ll drive you home.”

Home. That sounded nice.

Chapter 22

LUKAS OFFERED ME A HAND up like a gentleman. Before I could even take it, a voice broke through the darkness. It was sinister and filled with promising threat.

Gavin
.

“Don’t touch her
,” he growled.

I shivered
from just his tone. And maybe a little from his presence, I couldn’t help it. That did not mean I forgave him. The pain was too fresh and too deep, though the
special punch
had helped to alleviate some those feelings.

Lukas glared
over my shoulder at Gavin’s overshadowing form. “Someone needs to help her. She can barely walk.” He wasn’t the least bit put off by his foreboding behavior. That was more than I could say for myself. It might also have to do with that I have seen Gavin in full-pissed off mode. He was not someone I would take lightly.

A muscle in Gavin’s jaw ticked. “And I am sure
you had nothing to do with that,” he baited.

Lukas sneered. “Sorry. That was all you.”

Gavin looked to me, questions radiating from those explosive sapphire eyes. So much was going on behind the scene of those eyes. Confusion. Anger. Hurt. Pain. They were all emotions reflecting inside me.

And in my current mood, I was all too glad to enlighten him. “I saw you with Rianne,” I belted out.
My voice sprang through the night.

He looked out in the distance and sighed. “Then I am guessing you didn’t wait around to hear me tell her she didn’t have a chance in hell with me, and she should put her efforts elsewhere.”

No I hadn’t.

I opened my mouth to s
peak, but Lukas beat me to it, probably not the smartest move. “That’s neither here or there,” he said with a tight smile.

Like a switch being flipped,
Gavin’s eyes gleamed like laser-beams. Luckily the yard was empty, and my eyes bounced between them. This was going to turn into a royal rumble, the golden witch against the dark witch. I squeezed my eyes shut, praying that when I opened them, this would all disappear, a horrible, bad dream that my wild imagination was so well known for.

Yeah, that didn’t happen.

Before I knew it Lukas was gone from beside me, his body slammed up against the side of the brick house, secured by an invisible ribbon of force. Gavin. His cool eyes were tight with determined concentration. Lukas’s body gave an unsettling thumped as it hit hard enough to knock the daylights out of him. I winced.

All hell broke loose.

Hanging suspended, he raised his head, emerald eyes radiated like an alien. I was no expert in defensive or fighting magic, but I suspected things were about to get sticky and very messy. In my current condition, I wasn’t certain that there was anything I could do to stop it.

With a flick of his wrist, Lukas sent a bolt of
neon green light sailing straight to the heart of Gavin. My reflexes were slow and dulled by my present state, and I barely realized that I was also in the line of being struck by the nasty beam of energy. I stumbled into the line of fire, not away. Gavin lunged like a predator, tackling us both to the ground. Two heartbeats later, he pivoted in the air making sure he took the brunt of the fall. My breath expended in a whoosh as he hit the grass with me on his chest. It was jarring to say the least, but we had dodged a lethal bullet.

He rolled me off him, and I
fell on my ass – hard, blackness momentarily blinding me. Snarling, he was on his feet again, pairing up against Lukas who had been able to break free from his stunned bond. “Are you trying to kill her?” Gavin roared.

The golden witch looked offended.
“It wouldn’t have touched her. My aim is accurate, you can be sure.”

Gavin jeered. Launching himself at
Lukas, the dark witch let a warrior cry bellowing through the twilight. Their bodies crashed to the solid ground in an array of tangled limbs, fist and swirling colored magic. I couldn’t tell who was beating who. Fists connected with flesh, groans mixed with moans, all intermixed with the occasional shards of bold, bright magic. I sat in disbelief waiting for a fire-breathing dragon to appear and roast us all, or sweep me away, because surely this was stuff that only happened in fairytales.

So
the battle ensued, and I was helpless to do anything about it
except hope that no one else noticed. That seemed pretty far-fetched, though I was too buzzed to care. Sitting in the blades of magic sprinkled grass, I scrambled back up as they rolled in the glades toward me.

Finally I’d had enough. “Knock it off!
” I yelled jumping to my feet, my head seriously unhappy with me. The ground did this whole wavy thing and I stumbled once. My sheer lack of grace lessened the threat I was trying to deliver.

They ignored me like a pesky fly.
Of course that only infuriated me. Lately I felt like a ticking bomb just waiting to go boom. Right now I was at the end of my fuse.

Forgoing magic, Gavin used the time tested approved fist
-to-the-face, followed by one to the stomach. They were on the grass plummeting each other in a blink. I couldn’t tell if the punches were being packed with magic. I wouldn’t put it past them.

All I knew was I had to end this before any
more bloodshed.

It started with a crackle
and a flash of light. A strange and foreign feeling spread down the lengths of my arms, traveling all throughout me. At full strength, I gathered the whole potency of my power. It almost felt like my feet weren’t touching the ground. The earth trembled my name, answering an unconscious call. Then I screamed, “Stop!” And threw everything I had behind that one singular word. Everything just stopped.

The world stopped moving around me. Trees didn’t sway with the wind, the music and laughter insi
de ceased. Everything was so silent you could hear a pin drop. Frozen in time, I looked at the two hotheaded idiots. Neither of them made a single move.