The nearest town was Zela. The car ride was warm and quiet, but I couldn’t trust myself to speak. He hadn’t asked about the triangle on my face, and he hadn’t asked anymore about Azazel. He probably trusted that I would eventually open up about her and who she was, but I didn’t know if I was ready to tell him any of that. Instead, I just relished in the silence, in his presence.
Staring dreamily at Vance, he looked exactly like the Azrael in Azazel’s memories, but he wasn’t him. I knew he wasn’t him. He was Vance. He was my Vance. She had said she saw the angel in him like she saw in me, but I didn’t know what that meant. That could have meant that he looked like a demon to her for all I knew. I wanted to keep him away from her, but I didn’t feel totally safe being away from her, either. There was a strange dependency I was quickly growing on to her, and I wasn’t too fond of it.
When we got to the town, it was quiet. Granted, Zela had been quiet the first time we had passed through, but there had been a sort of serenity to that silence. Maybe it was quiet in this unworldly sense because it was small. Zela was already a small town, but it seemed smaller now that the sun was setting. Driving down a small strip, where the convenience store from earlier was nestled, every store was closed. Glancing at the clock inside Vance’s car, it read out 7:45.
“Everything close at 7:30 or something?” Vance murmured, looking around as we drove a little slower.
“Maybe?” I said back. “Could be that it’s old people town?”
“Maybe,” he chuckled warmly. He didn’t seem put off by the silence that hung in the town. Maybe it was me being anxious in lieu of everything that’s happened. We’d finally come across a diner at the very end of the strip that was still open, to my mild surprise. It was old-fashioned and vintage retro. Normally, I would have enjoyed the vibe, but something felt mildly off. Inside, there was a stillness. There wasn’t a single person in there, save for a chef and a waitress. She smiled at us and gestured for us to sit anywhere. The waitress seemed nice enough, and the chef seemed gruff enough, but the diner somehow eerily quiet despite the jukebox singing quietly. The lack of noise was probably putting me more on edge because it was always in silence that my darker thoughts found their voice.
Seated, the waitress automatically poured us a cup of coffee, and walked off with a too-cheery smile. I watched her as she moved behind the main counter. There was something off about her, too. But Vance was here with me, and that’s all that really mattered. With a cup of coffee in our hands, Vance stared intently down into the dark mug. His eyes met mine and he asked in a quiet voice, “Ama, can you please tell me something?”
“Ninety-nine percent of the mass in our solar system comes from the sun,” I answered absently.
He sighed and said, “I thought it might be less, but that’s not what I’m talking about.” A pregnant hush grew waiting for a response. There were words on my tongue, but my throat remained stubbornly shut. He was watching me, waiting, studying, searching, but finally gave up and asked in a forcefully light voice, “Where have you been? What have you been doing these past couple of days? What were you doing up here at an Azelian cult of all places?”
Looking up at him, I said softly, “Don’t use that voice with me.”
He made a face and said in the voice he really wanted to use, the one that was barely containing acrimony and dancing dangerously with hurt and sadness, “Why did you leave me?”
My eyes wandered back down to the cup of coffee, and I responded in a gentle voice, “I really don’t want to tell you any of that, Vance.”
“Why?” he pleaded.
Letting out a breath, I stared at the blackness of my coffee. Three creams, two sugars. That’s how I always took my coffee, or made it, but now it was black. It was calm and plain and black and cold, and I could see myself staring up at me from the reflection of the liquid. “There’s a lot of this stuff that I’m stuck in that I don’t even understand. I don’t get why this is happening, or why it’s happening to me, but it’s . . . not something I could have ever wanted to be part of. If I don’t want that for myself, I certainly don’t want it for you.”
“What is it?” he asked, not missing a beat.
“It’s complicated.”
“Why can’t you tell me?”
“If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you,” I murmured, taking a sip of the bitter coffee. It was cool, and I glanced up at the waitress behind the counter. Her back was turned to us, and she appeared to be talking to the chef, but I couldn’t hear their conversation. I glanced back at Vance, and I asked him, “Is your coffee cold?”
“Yeah,” he answered.
“Huh,” I mused quietly. Silence settled between us. He was trying to figure out how to make the conversation go his way, but if I didn’t want it to, it wouldn’t.
Without saying a word, I reached over and took his hand in mine, and I looked deep into his eyes. His unease and sadness were like cold rivulets against my skin, and his thoughts were a cloudy haze of contradictions and questions and uncertainty. Thoughtlessly, I carefully probed into his thoughts, trying to find the one thing that would change his mind, his line of thinking. Even as I was searching his mind, I felt a sliminess about myself. Obviously this had never been a feat I could perform before just two days ago, but I already knew this wasn’t something I should be using on the people close to me, and especially not Vance, but my desire and need to shield him from all of this overrode my moral compass.
I needed to find what it was he needed to her to stop asking questions about what I was trying to hide. Behind me, my back was aching, right where the wing connected. I’d put on my father’s hoodie to hide the evidence of an almost unconcealable appendage. My mind was still searching for the words, but what I found instead was an image of me. In the center of all that mess, glowing brightly and warmly was an image of me. I blinked in surprise, the impression, leaving a lasting mark on my mind. It was the first time he had met me two years before, when I used to straighten my hair and keep my bangs long and low over my face and when I wore golden colored contacts and I acted outrageously charming because that was the person I wanted to be. This was how he met me, trying to change the person I was by changing my appearance and hoping the idea would permeate in. Behind the image, somehow mirroring it, was the image of me now, where I let my hair curl on its own, and I normally preferred my glasses over brightly colored contacts and showed my face not because I thought it was pretty enough to be shown, but because I spent so much time hiding it away that I forgot what the light looked like. The emotions surrounding these two images were so strong and protective that I was surprised that it was me at the center of that mass.
Love.
That’s what it was. It was love he felt for me, and he’d felt it since he first met me, and it only grew stronger the longer he knew me, the more he learned me. I took my hand away from his and folded them in my lap. He just looked away, reading an expression on my face that made him feel . . . embarrassed? I guess I had caught him in a secret, but he couldn’t have read that from the expression on my face, right?
There was a tap that sounded on the glass beside us, and we both jumped up and turned to see who it was. My blood ran cold instantly. On the other side of the glass was a pale man wearing a dark suit. He was bald, and his face was as close to featureless as a face could get, but his eyes were an unhinging yellow, the whites were black. I couldn’t take my eyes away from him as a sickly smile curled across his face, and he walked around to the door of the diner. His eyes never left mine as he strode in confidently. Slowly approaching us, I became even more aware of the fact that the waitress and the cook hadn’t actually been talking at all. They hadn’t been doing anything before we got in there, and still hadn’t done anything after we came it, just mumbled nonsense back and forth.
The man came around to stand in front of our table, and I glanced nervously at Vance, who was staring, almost horrified at the man. I knew he didn’t know who he was, but some part of him was very aware of the danger we were now in. The likeness to the urban legend was too uncanny.
“Amor, Vance, I’m so glad to see you both,” he said cordially. There was nothing but acid behind those words. His voice was deeper than I expected. It was unnaturally deep, in fact, an there was a sort of biting edge to it. “Do you mind if I join you?”
At a loss for words, I didn’t know what to do except to stare, jaw clenched and hands tightening around the mug. He just continued to smile that disgusting smile, and he said, “I’ll take that as a yes.” He grabbed a chair from one of the tables and sat it at the end of ours. He snapped his fingers in the waitress’ direction. Without taking his eyes from mine, he said, “Doris, can I get some coffee over here? And make it hot.”
“Right away, sir!” she chirped.
He folded his hands on top of crossed legs. He stared deep into my eyes for a moment and I saw . . . nothing. I couldn’t read anything. There was just nothing behind his unnatural eyes, and that chilled me to the core. Frozen in fear and shock, he finally spoke and said in a deceptively polite voice, “We haven’t been formally introduced yet, Amor. I’m–”
“Pythius,” I finished. He cocked what should have been an eyebrow—which was just smooth skin—and said, “Oh? Did Azazel speak of me?”
There wasn’t a hint of surprise in his voice.
“You engraved yourself into my soul,” I whispered, all of the deaths I died flooding back into terrifying clarity. “You killed me every single time I was reborn.”
His face was flat for a second before snapping to a wide, face-splitting smile. Vance jumped against his seat as Pythius’ mouth split in the middle, a small spray of dark, oily blood splashing the table. I snatched my hands back, disgust in my throat. Pythius said nothing as the waitress poured a fresh cup of coffee. She placed it primly in front of him and asked, “Are you guys ready to order or do you need some more time?”
“Well, now, we can’t order without menus,” Pythius said affably. I balked inwardly. The tone sounded painfully forced, but the waitress said, “Oh, I’m so sorry about that! Let me go ahead and grab those for you folks,” and she plucked three menus from the table behind her.
“Thank you, Doris,” he said in the same tone.
“You’re welcome, and whenever you guys are ready to order, just give me a holler,” she said with that same too-cheery smile. She resumed her position in front of the frozen chef and I wondered if she was actually there in her head. Pythius took his eyes off of me then and opened the laminated menu.
“Have you tried the food here? It’s actually really good,” he said absently as he scanned the menu. “I always get the steak and eggs. I want to try something different but you can’t go wrong with what you already know.”
There was nothing I could say to him. Inside, my rage and betrayal began to mount as the memories slowed. He had betrayed me in every single life, and he savored it every single time. I just kept staring at him, feeling blood pouring into my eyes as I clenched my hands tighter and tighter and tighter still, the rage threatening to boil over in the shaking of my arms.
Without warning, Vance’s foot came to nudge mine, and I dared glance at him while Pythius scanned the menu. Across from me, Vance’s expression had changed. He was still tense, on edge and terrified, but he was reading the fury mounting in my eyes, and I could feel the question in his mind: What should we do?
Clamping my teeth shut, I inhaled slowly and released my clenched hands. As angry as I was—and somewhere at the bottom of all of that, pain– there was nothing I could do to protect either myself or Vance in this situation. I’d seen what he could do, and though he looked somewhat normal now, it was safe to assume he could change his appearance at any moment. Those razor sharp tendrils could be stabbing through Vance like they had Jo and Bond. A renewed fury washed through me, but I focused on my breathing and shook my head at Vance. There was nothing we could do but play his stupid game right now. Pythius’ yellow eyes met mine the moment I turned my head back, and his face broke into that smile again, oily blood oozing down his chin.
“You’re seething,” he stated proudly. I said nothing, but kept my jaw clamped firmly shut, lest I say something smart and risk Vance’s life.
Pythius looked down at the menu again, scanning it absently before he said, “Relax, I’m not going to do anything to you. Your angel made sure of that.” Without another word, he loosened the tie around his neck and opened the top few buttons. He pulled it down to reveal a pale, black-veined chest. In the center, where his sternum should have been, was a pulsing, purple black wound that was oozing a dark liquid. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the wound before buttoning his shirt back up.
“And would you look at how she mangled my pretty face?” he said, looking up and swiping a hand over the right side of his face. I flinched back in my seat as I saw the right side of his face was suddenly throbbing and red. The fire had burned him badly, but once he wiped at his face again, the mark seemed to disappear.
Finally, I cleared my throat and straightened my back. Pursing my lips, I asked in as level of a tone as I could manage, “What do you want?”
Pythius raised a hand and closed the menu before him. He looked up at me and offered, “You should really get something here. The food is to die for.” The next moment, the waitress was beside us, pen and pad ready.
“What can I get you folks tonight?”
“I’ll have a rare steak with eggs over easy and a side of mashed potatoes,” Pythius answered, not looking away from me.
“Alright, steak and eggs with mashed potatoes, steak rare. Anything else?” she asked, jotting down the order. She looked at me earnestly. For a moment, I thought I saw the flicker of someone in those eyes, the real Doris. I glanced at Vance, having lost my appetite as soon as we’d seen Pythius. In a voice that was barely hiding a razor sharp edge, Pythius said, “Order something. It’s on me.”
Swallowing the lump in my throat, I opened the menu quickly and ordered the first thing I laid my eyes on.
“Southwest skillet, eggs scrambled, please,” I said quickly, my voice trembling.
“Do you want toast or pancakes, hon?”
“Um, no, toast is fine.”
“Wheat, white, rye?”
“Wheat.”
“Alright, and for you, hon?” she asked, turning to Vance.
“Go ahead, Vance. Dinner’s on me,” Pythius said, not turning from my direction.
“Sausage and eggs is fine,” he answered gruffly. “Scrambled, please.”
“Gotcha, I’ll go ahead and put that right in for you folks,” she said happily as she collected the menus and went back to the counter.
“What do you want?” I asked again in a low voice, my legs trembling beneath the table.
“I want to make a deal with you,” he said slyly, folding his hands on top of the table.
“I don’t make deals with the devil,” I shot back immediately. He let out a chuckle and said, “Ah, there she is. There’s that quick wit.”
“Shut up,” I snapped.
“Ah, ah, ah, I’d watch your tone if I were you,” he said evenly. In an instant, those dark, oily tendrils emerged from behind Pythius then, and Vance pushed himself back into his chair again, eyes glued on to the unnatural appendages. Not one of them were aimed at me.
“We are all sitting at the same table, having the same conversation, about to enjoy a nice meal together like normal people,” he said in that same, even tone.
“We aren’t normal people,” I said, staring at the tendrils. All of the heat had gone from my voice then, and the words came out more like a dying whisper. Pythius looked up then, thought about the words vaguely, and said, “You’re right. It only makes sense that this wouldn’t be a normal deal then.”
“What do you want?” I asked, exasperated, my eyes flickering between him and his tendrils and Vance.
“Ask nicely,” he said, narrowing his eyes slightly. Clenching my jaw again, I took a deep breath and said in forced cheer, “What would you like?”
“That’s better,” he said, a smug, condescending smile on his face. “What’s the rush? Why don’t we just have a little chat?”
“I don’t want to have a chat,” I said coldly, my tone betraying me. “I want you to leave.”
“Manners,” he said in a chastising voice, the tendrils flinching closer to Vance. He pushed himself as far away from them as he could, but there was a window blocking his escape. I squeezed my hands tightly together beneath the table in my lap and said, “Fine, let’s have a chat.”
“Wonderful,” he said with a snide smile. “This is my time with you, and you will respect it.”
“Here we are,” the waitress said suddenly, appearing with several plates of food. I flinched at her sudden appearance. She set the plates down quickly and neatly before us. The food actually smelled good. Involuntarily, my mouth watered, but I had no appetite. My stomach just felt tense and knotted up, especially knowing he was holding me hostage in this conversation using Vance. Once she had set everything down, she stood at the table for a moment. Her eyes glazed over and she folded her hands in front of her, as if waiting for instructions.
Pythius studied me then, his eyes slightly squinted, as if trying to discern one word from another, find the best route to get the closest to the result he wanted. I glanced at Vance, who was staring intently at both of us. He seemed to mentally abandon the gravity of the situation by outright staring, and I could tell he was trying to put together the picture with only the words we’d exchanged as the puzzle pieces. There was so much he wouldn’t understand if I didn’t explain, and now that Pythius was here, I feared there was no turning back for him. Maybe there never was when he had decided to come all the way out here. Maybe it ended for him even before that.
Pythius’ face suddenly broke into a sneering smile and he said, “Thank you, Doris.”
“Enjoy,” she chirped, resuming her position in front of the chef. Pythius unfolded a napkin and tucked it into the collar of his shirt and began cutting into the steak, which somehow looked just barely cooked. There was a pool of greasy blood underneath the slab of meat, and I felt mildly nauseous. He purposefully scraped his utensils on the plate, the sounds scratching against my ear drums and sending uncomfortable shivers down my spine. My plate looked appetizing; Vance’s plate looked appetizing; Pythius’ plate looked like what you might feed a dog, and I gagged looking at it. Steam rolled off of my dish and Vance’s, but not Pythius’.
“Go ahead and eat,” he said, gesturing to our plates.
“I lost my appetite,” I muttered, staring at the bloody steak.
“Shame. Take it back with you to that shack then,” he said around a mouthful of food.
“You knew where we were hiding?” I asked, incredulously.
He snorted, looking up at me through cruel, laughing eyes.
“Come on, Amor, did you really think I wouldn’t?” he chortled, spraying small chunks of food on the table. I gagged in the back of my throat, and he went on, “You know she’s just using you, right? She isn’t as good as you think or as she wants to believe.”
“Yeah, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out,” I shot.
I thought for a second about his words, and I decided to humor him. I asked, “How do you know she’s using me?”
“Use your head. I knew where the cabin was, I know where the Ninth Branch is. I know where you are at almost all points of time, so I knew when she found you and when you realized you actually had her damnable wing.”
“Okay, and? That doesn’t answer my question,” I snapped.
“It should. You obviously remember when she wanted to get it back from you. She wanted it so bad that she was going to kill you, a human, and you have to remember when she said that your death really means nothing to her as long as she gets her wing back. Am I right?”
Pressing my lips together, I glanced just over his shoulder. Azazel wasn’t a good person. She wasn’t a perfect angel. Not to me, at least, and she certainly felt that within herself as well. A truth like that– that I wasn’t much more than a commodity of high value not for the talents I possessed and gathered of my own will and volition, but for something out my control that could leave just as easily as it came– wasn’t one I could just take straight to the face like that. But I already knew that. She had made that blatantly clear when we first met, and though she showed me brief instances of real compassion, true empathy, at the end of the day, she had no idea who I was. The only thing connecting me to her was this wing of hers that somehow got on my back.
“Is this the part where you try to convince me she’s evil and you’re the good guys?” I asked indignantly, bringing my eyes defiantly back to his.
Pythius let out a chuckle and said, “Ha, no, no. What we’re doing—let me put it this way: if the world knew about us, the textbook definition of ‘sinister’ would be my face. You’re not a simple girl, Amor. You’re not even a simple human–”
“Okay, thanks, didn’t know there was a difference between humans and females but okay–”
“So I know that anything I could say at this point wouldn’t change your mind. I always admired and loathed that about you. You’re as straight as an arrow. No one can change your mind if you don’t want it changed,” he went on, plucking the last few words like guitar strings.
“But no, I’m not going to try to convince you we’re the good guys. I’m just here to tell you the truth about your angel over there.”
“Yeah, well, what about her?” I asked defensively. “That my only value to her is the stupid wing? I already know that so no need to waste your breath.”
He held up his hands then in mock defense, and he said, “Whoa, settle down there. Yes, that wing is your only value to her–”
“And?” I asked, gratingly. “What are you trying to tell me?”
He took a slow and deliberate bite of the steak, savoring the flavor on his tongue. He chewed painfully slow, and looked down at his plate. I clenched my hands tighter, feeling m nails digging into my palms. My patience was wearing down thinner and thinner, and finally, after some time, Pythius said, “Let’s cut to the chase, then. I want you dead.”
Whatever tactic he’d been planning to use on me, he now found useless. He was right; you couldn’t convince me of something that I had already convinced myself on, and if I engraved in my mind that my only value to Azazel was the wing on my back, then you couldn’t convince me that my value to her was more or less than that. If I engraved in my mind that Azazel wasn’t the textbook angel, you couldn’t tell me that she was evil. I knew her without having to know her, and even if she proved differently, I knew that at least she wouldn’t outright betray me, not as Pythius had tried as Evelyn.
My heart ached mildly at the betrayal, but I didn’t let it show on my face. I had already seared into my head that no matter what this creature said, no matter what face he chose to wear, I would always see the sleuthing skin of Evelyn’s face falling away to reveal the monster beneath. I would never trust a word this monster said, and he knew there was no convincing me of anything he wanted.
“What is your issue?” I asked in a low and barely contained tone. “Why do you hate me so much? Why do you kill me in every single life I live? Why do you always betray me? Even when you were pretending to be Evelyn, I knew there was something wrong with you, so what the hell is your issue?”
Pythius stared at me with wide, blank yellow eyes. His expression was perfectly flat and still, but something about how he looked at me made me sit back in my seat and gather my bearings once again. The look on his face had shook me, and he repeated in an acrid, distorted voice, “I want you dead.”
Vance’s expression shifted to a blank then, and I stated, clearing my throat, “Yes, obviously.”
“But now I can’t kill you. Puts me in a dilemma.”
“And why’s that?”
“If I kill you, I kill Azazel, and as much as I’d love to see that bitch dead, she can’t die yet.”
I narrowed my eyes and asked, “Why?”
“I can’t answer those kinds of questions.” I just stared, and he went on, “There is a way for me to get what I want, though.”
“Why would I want to help you?”
“Because when you help me, you help yourself.”
“Sure,” I spat snidely.
“No, it’s true,” he said, cutting into the eggs. The yolk spilled over the meat, and it just made me feel more nauseous. I hated the yolks on eggs. I refused to eat them raw like that. It was just too slimy to me. The yolk mixed with the oily blood still on the plate, and I felt my mouth water as my stomach threatened to spill.
“If you help me, you get the assurance of knowing your family, your friends, and especially lover boy here, stay safe and out of the way.”
The words hung in the air like a white elephant. Not a single bit of my existence believed anything he said, but there was a strange sort of honesty I was detecting in his statement. I stared at Pythius for a long moment, trying to pick out any sort of vulnerability in his face, in his demeanor, that might be telling of what he was really trying to get at. His face, however, remained perfectly flat and indiscernible. I glanced at Vance again. He was still and staring intently at me, then. Fear drummed within him and knocked against me like frantic fingers. Fear for me. Fear of the decision I would make.
I looked back at Pythius and said in a stony voice, “What do you need me to do?”
“Ah, I knew that one would get you. You’re too selfless for you own good,” he said. He seemed to release himself from tension as he folded his hands behind his head and leaned back in the chair. I had the ball in my court, and I couldn’t help but feel like I’d completely missed my mark.
“Don’t butter me up with your bullshit. What do you need from me?” I spat, feeling something dark and regretful simmer at the base of my throat.
“It’s not bullshit, Amor,” he said, leaning forward and sopping up the last of the meat.
“All I need you to do is give me Aggy.”
“Agatha,” I snapped, feeling instantly defensive at how casually he tried to use her name. “Why do you want Agatha?”
“Sorry, can’t answer those kinds of questions,” he said, dabbing at his mouth. “But it seems simple enough, right? You give me the Grand Moderator of the Ninth Branch of Azazel, you can rest easy knowing everyone your love will be safe. That’s a fair trade, right? More than fair, actually. You’re getting a deal.”
Agatha. Why Agatha? Did it matter why they wanted Agatha? My mind raced with a thousand different possibilities, each wilder than the last. At this point, anything could happen and I’d just have to roll with it. Pythius’ literally demonic tendrils were perfectly still in the hair, poised to attack. I had a wing on my back, which was now cramping behind me. Azazel the angel literally exists, and so do demons. Anything could have happened, but I’d be damned if we were bartering with people. I by no means was religious, but I already knew any deal with the devil wasn’t a deal you’d want to make.
I glanced back at Vance. Nothing about his demeanor let on to anything he was thinking. He was stoic and unmoving, but I could tell what was in his mind. He didn’t want me to do that, because he knew I didn’t want to do it, but I looked at Pythius and said, “When.”
“Whenever you want, baby girl,” he purred. He winked at me and said, taking on a completely different persona, “I’ll let you be on your merry way, then. Just give me a holler when you’re ready,” he said, his voice sounding exactly like the waitress’. My face was blank as I watched him, and slowly, I stood up. Vance mirrored me, and we moved from the booth silently.
I turned to go, but before I could take a step, Pythius’ hand shot out and grabbed my wrist.
I turned to look at him, and for a second, his face looked exactly as it had at the cabin. His skin was melting and sliding off of his bones, and his eyes looked about ready to burst. Half of his face was still angrily red, and where ears should have been were barely visible holes.
He said, “Not just yet. We didn’t shake on it yet.” He stuck out his long, bony hand. I stared at it for a second, feeling the weight of the deal pushing heavily upon my shoulders.
There was a deep and dark foggy feeling in my head as I stared at his hand. I was familiar with it, and I knew if I shook his hand, it would explode to suffocating life, but somewhere deep within and past that fog, something told me to do it anyway. Taking a deep breath, I shook his hand, and immediately yanked it back. A small red bead welled in the palm of my hand, and I looked at him incredulously. He licked his finger maliciously and said, “See you soon, angel.”
Quickly, I pushed Vance out of the door, and we got into the car and pulled out as fast as possible. We rode in silence until we got to the highway, and then Vance yelled, “What was that all about? Who was that?”
I cursed under my breath and muttered, “I guess this was never my choice to begin with.”
“What are you talking about?”
Sighing, I responded in a dry tone, “Keeping you safe.” A pause. “Can I explain it to you once we get back to the Ninth Branch?”
“The what?”
“That place we were at before is called the Ninth Branch,” I explained.
“That’s fine.” he sighed. He didn’t seem very thrilled at the concept of going back there, or maybe it was just this situation all together. My heart plummeted in an instant. Had I run him away?
Worst of all, could I blame him?