Julian woke with a start,reaching overhead to grab his phone off the accent table by the couch and turning it off.
He stared up at the slowly twirling ceiling fan in shock. His first instinct was to disregard the dream as exactly that: a dream. But he knew his own mind better than that, and nothing about their conversation or that weird gray place—Purgatory—had felt conjured by his imagination. Valac could actually enter his dreams. His dreams had started out normal, drifting from image to image, sensation to sensation. Everything that happened after Valac appeared was… different.
What was Valac’s interest in him, anyway? He said the guild couldn’t stop them… fromwhat? What did Valac want?
It didn’t matter. It was too dangerous to let himself get close to the demon. Just because the guild couldn’t find out about what happened in his dreams didn’t mean that made it okay.He’d sworn, both to them and to himself, that he wouldn’t get involved with the Sentinels or demons when he left the guild, and he intended to keep his word. If Valac appeared again, he would tell him as much and demand that he leave.
But for now, he had job interviews to focus on. One in the morning, and one in the afternoon. He’d never been on a real job interview before, but he had a suit and tie, and he knew how to be personable. His resume left something to be desired, since he had no marketable skills and no previous job history. He’d lied and said he graduated from one of the public schools nearby, and he didn’t think the local grocery stores and gas stations he’d applied for would bother checking into it. Hundreds of people graduated from those schools every year. Why not him?
The day was one gut punch after another, though. The bus was late, and even though he’d left with plenty of time to get there early, he wound up being a few minutes late for his first interview. The middle-aged assistant manager of the grocery store gave him an arch look as he came running breathlessly into the store, and the barrage of questions that followed about his lack of experience in a store setting left him feeling unqualified and belittled. He fought to keep a smile on his face when it was over, shaking the man’s hand with his head held high.
He went home feeling defeated, ate some ramen, and… fretted. About whether he’d find a job. About how he’d pay his bills. About the friends he’d left behind at the guild, and whether he’d made a mistake after all by walking away from it all. He missed having a purpose with them, feeling like he was doing something good for the world. He missed the companionship of being on a squad, too, but he’d already been mourning that before he quit. Going back wouldn’t actually make anything better. All he could do was keep moving forward.
And hope he didn’t see Valac again when he laid his head down to sleep.
He tossed and turned on the sofa after night fell, waking fitfully each time he drifted off. Maybe if he didn’t sleep too deeply, Valac wouldn’t appear. But that wasn’t sustainable. Peopleneededsleep.
He gave up as the sun rose, shuffling to the kitchen for coffee. He didn’t see Valac. Maybe he took Julian’s command to heart and wouldn’t return.
He tried not to think about the twinge of disappointment he felt at the idea. Just because Valac was interesting didn’t mean they could actually befriends. He couldn’t be friends with a demon.
After that, the days passed like leaves on the wind. Job interviews were exhausting, but he put on a brave face for each one and carried on. Each day, he watched the sun fall with an increasing sense of despair. He had no qualifications that employers looked for. He couldn’t very well put the Paladin Guild down as a reference or previous work experience. His dwindling nest egg reinforced his desperate need for a job, and soon he wouldn’t be able to pay his bills on time.
Valac didn’t appear in his dreams for the next couple of weeks. He’d gone to sleep every night worrying that he’d see him and woken with a strange knot in his stomach that he swore was relief and nothing else. He still saw the dream version of Valac sometimes, saw his glowing eyes and heard that deep voice, but it wasn’t the real one. It was surprisingly easy to tell the difference—mostly because the fake Valac dreams usually had him waking up hard and aching. Julian had no idea what was going on with himself, but he chalked it up to loneliness. The only time he heard himself speak these days was in job interviews. Sometimes, when he had nowhere to go, he’d go whole days without hearing the sound of his own voice.
Finally, when he was beginning to seriously stress about how he’d pay his bills, he found a restaurant desperate enough forhelp to hire him as a waiter. It took another few weeks to realize his checks from that job weren’t anywhere close to what he made with the guild. He searched for a second job after that and found one as the nighttime security guard at a shopping center, where he mostly sat in an office and kept an eye on the camera feeds.
All the while, he heard nothing from the guild. Even Nicolas and Daniel were radio silent. Sloan might have taken his phone, but they knew where he lived. If they wanted to reach out, they knew where to find him. He didn’t really expect them to visit, but he couldn’t deny that a small part of him had… hoped. Had they been warned to stay away from him? Maybe he was radioactive now, and they couldn’t afford to be associated with him.
He missed them. Their phone numbers were some of the only ones programmed into his prepaid phone—he’d memorized them in case of emergency a long time ago—but he didn’t dare to reach out. It could be dangerous, either for them or for him. If they couldn’t contact him without fear of punishment, he wouldn’t put them in that position. They could reach out if they were allowed to.
The more time Julian spent outside of the guild, the more he realized that Sloan hadn’t been entirely wrong. A part of him did regret leaving. Even if he didn’t like it near the end, he still believed in what the guild used to be. At one time, they’d done real good. Protected the innocent.
Growing up in the guild, he’d admired the paladins. Like Sloan said, he’d given a speech at his graduation. Bright-eyed and filled with self-righteousness, he’d announced to everyone in attendance that all he wanted in the whole world was to be a paladin, to protect the innocent, and be a force for good. Now he served people steak with a fake smile for pennies in tips and went home to eat cup noodles on his ripped sofa that he couldn’t afford to replace.
He no longer had a purpose. Adrift in a sea of blank-faced people just going about their lives, he couldn’t deny that there was a part of him that feared he’d made a grave mistake. That he had screwed everything up. Maybe he should have stayed and tried to take a stand from within. Someone had to be the catalyst for change, but instead of trying, Julian had thought walking away was the answer. If he was wrong about that, he’d never know. Sloan’s final words and the break-in had made it clear he couldn’t go back there, and he wouldn’t want to even if it was still an option. But without them, he had nothing and no one. Was any of this really better, or just a different kind of misery?
On a rare day off from both his jobs, he stood at the microwave watching his bowl of canned ravioli go round and round, his mind utterly blank. He hadn’t been sleeping well, both because of the dreams and because his couch left something to be desired. His bed was still ruined, but that would have to be a problem for another day. Mattresses weren’t cheap, and he was barely scraping by right now.
Life was pelting him with lemons, and he couldn’t afford the cups for lemonade.
A crash in the living room shook him from his daze. Rushing toward the sound, he stopped in the doorway.
Glass littered the couch, coffee table, and floor. The window was broken, and an unfamiliar lump laid on the floor in front of the coffee table. He stepped closer carefully, mindful of the glass on the floor and the fact that he was barefoot. He turned the lump over, and his stomach twisted with anxiety.
It was a brick with a piece of paper wrapped around it with a rubber band.
‘Deuteronomy 32:35,’it said in messily scrawled handwriting.
Julian dropped the brick and darted to the front door, yanking it open while his heart pounded. But there was no oneoutside. Whoever had thrown the brick was gone. The street light at the edge of his lawn made it clear enough to see that there was no one on his property.
Still, just in case, he called out, “I’m not afraid of you! I just want to be left alone!”
The only answer was the wind, whispering through the air.
Julian closed and locked the door, then stepped around the glass to pull a Bible off the bookcase across the room. He’d studied the Bible plenty in school, sure, but he didn’t have it memorized.
Deuteronomy 32:35 said, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay. In due time their foot will slip; their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them.”
