Page 59 of Valkyrie Unknown

Where did that thought come from?

“Ezekiel,” he said. “That’s my real name. But everyone calls me Zeke.”

“Azrael.” I never gave people my full name. What was I doing? “Azzie for short.”

Zeke trailed his fingers lightly along my shoulder. “Angel of death?”

“Prophet of god?” I suppressed the shivers of contentment racing through me at his soft touch.

“Mhm.” The guttural sound rumbled from his chest and through my cheek. “My mom was… interesting.”

“I know that feeling.”

“Are you here to fight me to the death?” His question was as calm and quiet as those that came before it.

Tension coiled through me. Why would he ask me that?

I already knew, and I’d been willfully ignoring the answer. I wanted to continue to do so. “I’m here to get an elven knife repaired.”

“The knife that was a gift, because you have a destiny.” He made this sound like any other conversation.

It wasn’t too strange that he and I shared some things in common. We were the same age, some of our experiences would be similar. The pull I felt to him was unusual, but sometimes another person was just that attractive.

Butso manydetails from our pasts overlapped. Given we’d both been holding things back—almost everything—it was a big fucking coincidence that the pieces we’d shared were so similar.

Davyn insisted there were no coincidences, and I tended to agree with him.

“A destiny to meet someone just like me,” I said.

“Except in the ways that they’re completely different.”

This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. But?—

I rolled and reached for my knives at the same time he pushed away from me to grab his gun.

We faced each other again, both of us naked, weapons pointed at each other. The mood in the room shifted in an instant, and tension coiled through my every muscle. I was fast, but not faster than a bullet. Could I disarm him before he pulled the trigger?

“I might not be your counterpart.” I’d keep him talking while I thought through my options.

Zeke’s gaze never left me. “Do a lot of prophecies feature pairs of people like us? Does this happen often enough that you might be fated to kill adifferentsame-but-different individual?”

Not as far as I knew. “Maybe. This could all be a coincidence.”

“Do you believe in coincidences?” His question mingled with my own thoughts.

I didn’t know anything about guns. Was his loaded? Why hadn’t I learned about them? Because guns weren’t useful against immortals.

They could still hurt very-mortal me.

His finger wasn’t on the trigger—I could tell that much. On TV they always knew when the other guy’s gun was loaded. Should I be able to tell that? Did he have to pull the top back like they did in the movies?

When it came to the screen, people also wore their swords on their backs, which was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. I probably shouldn’t be basing my decisions on anything I’d seen.

He wasn’t moving beyond watching me. We were both frozen. What now?

Slaying draugar and killing the shadows that came after me was one thing. Executing another person? One who was only a threat to me because I sought him out? I didn’t care if this was my destiny—the idea of killing Zeke made me want to curl up in a ball and hide.

“I really am just here to get my blade repaired,” I repeated.

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