Samael by Heather Killough-Walden Read Free Book Online

showed mercy on the incubus, allowing him to live, but banished him from the Nightmare Kingdom. Jason went to work for Samael. He’d been loyal and trustworthy ever since. Always there.
    Until now.
    Something was wrong. But Sam didn’t have time to ponder the implications, nor did he have the time to search for the incubus. Angel was somewhere in this crowd, and he’d be damned if he was going to let her out of his web even one more time.
    “She’s here,” he told the other men. The two he was speaking with at the moment were dragons. They, too, were outcasts from their kingdom, each for their own reasons. Sam was good at taking in the “fallen.” He just had a way of finding them, and them of finding him. No one but Lilith was aware of just how many he had accumulated over the years. There were a fair share. There was little more useful to a man with an agenda than a supernatural being who’d been scorned.
    “You know what to do. Fan out and alert the others. I want everyone here and at the ready.”
    The men left at once, and Sam could feel his orders being carried out. One by one, more of his people transported to the concert. He sensed their signatures, and knew they were fanning out as instructed. A veritable web of a barrier was being created, and as long as it was created fast enough, then like a fly on a filament, Angel wouldn’t be able to leave the crowd without detection.
    Up on stage, Azrael, the “Masked One,” was putting on quite a show. Sam had to give him credit. There was no entertainer on Earth like him. A black leather mask hid the more prominent features of his face from his fans, but his eyes burned like double suns, and the cameras that had been set up for the concert caught them from all angles. It drove the crowd wild, the way he seemed to peer at each and every one of them individually, the way he literally appeared to “burn” for them and them alone.
    Sam was well familiar with the technique. The media went crazy for it – and he owned the media – so he knew what sold and how to do it. But with the veritable king of the vampires, it was more than simple technique and “selling the crowd.” What Azrael did worked because he did what he felt , and he meant what he said. He was the soul behind the words that drove the hearts in his audience. He was ancient, and he had been lonely and in pain for a very long time. It had taken two thousand years of lost agony before he’d found his soul mate and that suffering had, at long last, come to an end. There was no greater empathy than that kind of pain.
    Sam would know.
    The cameras turned, fire exploded on the stage, and the crowd wailed. Uro played his axe as if it were a lover, wringing sounds from its strings that should have been impossible, and striking nerves that made the women in the audience hold their breaths. The drums beat out a rhythm that hypnotized, forcing hearts to pound to the same mesmerizing cadence.
    And Azrael crooned, his voice snaking out amongst the sweating, undulating horde to wrap around his fans like steel coils….
    A stranger among us in cloak and scythe
    Walks in the valley of shadow and lies
    Run little fallen, he’s gaining behind,
    I’ll be your shelter; look into my eyes.
    As if he were obeying, compelled to do exactly what Azrael instructed, Sam glanced at the nearest oversized screen. A fire flickered in the depths of Az’s compelling gaze, an actual, volatile flame that was both a temptation – and a threat. Sam saw it clear as day.
    Az was communicating with his vampires. His words were a warning to them, alerting them to the fact that Samael and his men were in the crowd.
    Sam’s only hope was that the vampires, and the angels, for that matter, were smart enough to realize Sam wasn’t the only predator moving through the writhing, worshipping prey that night. Abraxos and his Adarians were somewhere in that mess too.
    Mere seconds after he’d first appeared on the scene, Sam was moving