Page 121 of Valkyrie Unknown

Zeke chuckled and nudged me back, while Azzie rolled her eyes.

The opinions of two beings who had lived less than three decades each held little weight when it came to my maturity levels. Once Zeke had a century or five behind him, he’d start to understand immortality was far more tolerable if one learned to appreciate the ridiculous, the ludicrous, and the bizarre.

With a palm to my chest, Zeke nudged me back playfully as he set his drink on the counter and grabbed the donut from the bag.

“Cream filled?” He shot me a look of disbelief.

I jerked my head at Azzie. “She made the choices.”

“I know what you like.” She smiled sweetly.

The sigh Davyn let out should have shaken the room with how heavily it landed.

Yup. Another afternoon at headquarters—AKA, the kitchen.

“How’d it go?” Zeke asked between bites.

I leaned against a nearby counter. “We learned a lot.”Ilearned a lot. Not sure the others had the same appreciation for the raw information. “None of it, however, was about sirens.”

“We met oldfriendsof Davyn’s and Finn’s.” The innocent lilt was still in Azzie’s reply, most notably in the heavy emphasis on one word.

“Really.” Zeke set the rest of his food down next to his coffee. “Good week for that. Who this time?”

“A Valkyrie.” Azzie said before I could answer. “Apparently there’s one out there now. A wolf Berserker.”

A shadow crossed Zeke’s face. “Not like Ulf.” We’d both heard the story of how Azzie and Davyn met.

“No.” Davyn made the short word sound even more terse. “Starkad is driven by the fight, but he bows to Kirby.”

“The Valkyrie.” Azzie offered at Zeke’s questioning look. “And there was a god.”

“One who hates Finn,” Davyn said.

Had he been waiting to deliver that line since we parted ways from the other group? If he was hoping to draw a negative reaction, he failed.

Zeke’s posture loosened. “A lot of my clients don’t like Finn. I don’t put any stock in their opinions, because no one forced him to save me.”

His defense of me warmed me from the inside out.

Even Davyn almost looked moved by the words. “I’d still like to know why.”Almost.

When Zeke gave me a questioning look, I said, “Go get dressed first.”

When he returned, we had moved to the kitchen table, and he joined us. Three people watched me with expectation.

Well, fuck. I probably had to do this. “This is about the seer who was mentioned in the book the other day.” I didn’t need the story in front of me to remember it in vivid detail. “One of the visions she had was of a Valkyrie who was already dead, because she’d been cursed by Odin. When she had the vision, she didn’t know about the curse, she only knew the death she saw was horrific, and happening in the future, not the past.”

I looked at Davyn. “Do you need a full description of what she saw? All the gore? All the violence?” I didn’t mean to let the bitterness slip through.

“No,” Azzie said before Davyn could reply.

I pursed my lips. “Gwydion did. He wanted the details. The moment he found out I had information about one of Kirby’s deaths, he wanted to know everything, to try to stop it.”

Azzie’s hand sat on the table, and she clenched her fist so tightly it shook and her knuckles paled. Did she go through things like this with her mother’s visions? “Why didn’t you tell him?”

Clever girl, realizing I hadn’t. “Because Sadhbh had made me promise not to. Because acting against her visions only ever caused more pain. Because Kirby’s lives belonged to fate, and telling Gwydion would have only driven him mad when he couldn’t stop events from happening anyway.”

“You don’t know that,” Davyn said.

---