Free Samael by Heather Killough-Walden

something else, and it mattered too, a little. Sometimes, when you couldn’t breathe, the reason was because you were in the process of being murdered and your killer hand his hand wrapped around your throat and had crushed your windpipe.
    Crushed it. She would never have imagined, not in a million years, what that felt like. It was indescribable, really. There were no words for that pain.
    Everything was blacking out. The thunder, which was as indescribably loud as the pain was indescribably bad, was becoming softer. It was turning indistinct and unimportant, and she had that bizarre numb feeling that lightning couldn’t hurt her anymore, so it didn’t matter how loud or close it all was.
    Az .
    She tried to call out, one last time. But the white stars in her vision had even gone away. Night was falling, the clouds were coming in, and the Cosmos was winking out one white dot after another. When she hit the ground, she heard it more than felt it. A distant banging kind of thing, hollow as her elbows and knees collided. She expected it to be the last thing she felt or heard.
    But with excruciating slowness, the pain in her throat grew worse. She tried to scream in pain, and heard herself make a terrible, low sound, like a banshee’s moan. There was movement around her – boots in the mud, and more lightning. There were screams and shouts that sounded far off.
    She knew she needed to heal herself, but her arms and legs wouldn’t respond. It was like they weren’t even there. There was nothing for her to do but lay sprawled in the dirt and hurt.
    *****
    There was nothing – not a thing in the universe – but the knowledge that Sophie was in pain. He’d felt it in Angel’s tunneled-out path beneath the ground. He honed in on it with singular vision and intent, driven into a blur that became mist in the crowd and sped through every shadow of night.
    Until he was rematerializing, and everything bad in the world was there before his eyes: his mate, being killed. A man with his hand around her throat, his Sophie against the fence, bleeding.
    Dying .
    What happened next would never properly be pieced together in his mind. It was pure chaos, pure, visceral destruction. It was everything he had thought he’d left behind. In that moment, that desperate, horrible moment, he was the Angel of Death.
    And when that moment had passed, he was kneeling and lifting his archess into his arms and sending a mental call to his brothers with everything he had.
    He threatened the Earth not to absorb her blood, not to take her life force, not to rob him of the only thing he gave a fucking shit about on its surface. If it did, he would destroy it. He would systematically rip it apart, being by being, city by city, outer layer, mantle, core. Until nothing was left but chunks of empty rock floating aimlessly through space.
    Up on the stage, the concert stopped. The image of Azrael suddenly disappeared. Confusion rippled through the crowd like waves on a disturbed pond. The cheering faltered. Where was he? The band members glanced at one another. Vampires began to communicate in a web of telepathy that crisscrossed through the audience.
    But Az was oblivious to the disruption and the signals that went up afterward. His entire existence consisted of one thing. Distantly, he realized how fragile happiness was. “Sophie.”
    “Az, put her down.”
    It was Juliette. She and Gabriel were suddenly there. In his peripheral awareness, he noticed Max there as well. And others. They had heard him. More impossible moments passed, and somehow, he’d managed to lower Sophie once more to the undeserving ground. He’d managed to force himself to step back.
    There was light; he saw it beneath spread fingers – an archess, laying her healing hands upon her sister. There was more moving, and there were things happening around him. Some of it seemed distantly important, maybe even desperate.
    Also distantly, he realized he was in agony.
    And then there was a