“Would you like me to carry you?” Valac offered.
Julian snorted. “No, I’d really rather keep at leastsomeof my dignity in front of these guys.”
Valac tilted his head. “They saw me carry you once already when you were unconscious and bleeding.”
Julian gave him a pursed smile. “Yeah. Thanks for that, by the way.” He said it jokingly, but he meant the words themselves very much.
Valac’s eyes crinkled at the corners. The softness there said he understood. “Of course.”
“Come on, let’s go face the music.”
“They haven’t been playing music.”
Julian laughed weakly. “No, I meant—it’s a figure of speech.”
Valac hovered by his side but let him walk on his own. Blood loss after a demonic healing seemed to feel a lot like severe exhaustion mixed with dehydration. His muscles ached, and his head felt floaty. Going from the cot to the door left him breathless, and when he put his hand on the doorknob, he paused to lean against the door, panting.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to carry you?” Valac asked.
“I’m sure,” Julian groaned, even though he was beginning to doubt himself.
Eventually, he shuffled out the door and into the main room. Everyone was there, including the teenagers sitting on the sofa with textbooks open in their laps.
“Welcome back to the land of the living,” Nathan said, drawing everyone’s attention to him. He stood from the chair beside the sofa and strode over, studying Julian with concern. “How are you? I’m glad to see you on your feet, Julian.” He offered his hand, and Julian shook it with a weary smile.
“Thanks. Glad to still be here. I hear I have all of you to thank for that.”
“No, it was all Valac.”
“I don’t just mean tonight,” Julian said. “Valac told me you were all taking time to patrol the area around my house. Thank you, I appreciate it. It didn’t stop them from finding me another way, but… feeling unsafe in my own home was one of the worst feelings in the world. Thank you all for your help.”
“It sounds like they’ve been coming after you for a while now,” Luke said, leaning his hip against the air hockey table and folding his impressive arms. “Can you tell us why?”
Julian sighed. “Yeah. I think I owe you all an explanation.”
“He should sit,” Valac said.
“Of course. Come, sit anywhere,” Nathan said.
When he’d collapsed into a wooden rocking chair and the Sentinels had congregated on the mismatched furniture around him, he began to speak. He told them about the whippings in the courtyard, and the tension in the guild. How people didn’t talk and laugh anymore there. They kept their heads down and worked, everyone too afraid of suffering the same fate if they spoke up. How Julian decided there was no rule against simply turning in his ring and walking away, so that was what he’d done. He told them about his hours-long interrogation with Sloan and the things Maxwell told him during his evaluation about faking the medical examination of a child to suit the guild’s purposes twenty years ago.
Isaac curled in on himself at that, and Shadrach wrapped an arm around his shoulders, whispering softly in his ear and cradling his cheek with his hand.
“After I left, things were fine at first. I found a couple of jobs to make ends meet. But after a while, it was like they couldn’t stand that I was out there on my own. They threw a brick through my window. I woke up one night to a burning cross in my front yard. They’d splashed blood on my porch to attract demons. They set fire to my back deck. I did what I could to reinforce the doors, and that was when Valac asked you guys for some stronger wards, because my current ones were just painted on the windows and doors with holy water.”
Alex hummed. Those were the standard wards for paladins living outside of HQ.
“And then tonight they showed up at the restaurant where I work. They sat in my section so I had to serve them. They taunted me, and they got physical when I stood my ground. One of my coworkers threatened to call the cops, so they left. Or I thought they left. They jumped me in the parking lot after my shift. All eight of them.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Isaac murmured, and Shadrach shot him a gleeful grin at the language.
“They beat me. Stabbed me. Wallace told me I was no better than a monster, because I’d walked away from the cause. If I could walk away, I had to be evil.” He sighed, passing a hand down his face. “I just didn’t want to hurt people. That’s all. I didn’t want to see any more of my friends tied up and tortured in the courtyard for disagreeing with Sloan. And now I don’t even know if some of those friends were involved in this. Like Nic and Danny. Do they know about this? Do they care?” Anger bloomed hot and fast in his chest. “How can they justify this? I wasn’t hurting anyone.”
“They’re zealots,” Talon said softly, his arms folded across his chest. “They always have been, really. You just couldn’t see it before. Nothing had ever pushed them to extremes like this.” He sighed. “Unfortunately, Alex and I set all of this in motion.”
Alex reached for him. “Tal.”
Talon tugged him closer, looping an arm around him. “It’s true. I had to have you, and Sloan couldn’t stand that you were with me. Every person who’s left the guild since then has damaged his pride further. He won’t stop until he has complete control over everyone.”
