Chapter 7 #2
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 for help 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 one outside. 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.”
He read it over and over again, stricken. This was a threat.
They weren’t going to let him go.