I Don't Want To Kill You Read Free

leave,’ I said quickly. Too quickly. Mom stared at me a second, then pointed at me angrily.
     
    ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘No no no no no. You are not going to chase after this one like you did with Bill Crowley. You are not going to play Superhero and risk your life like an idiot.’
     
    ‘I’m not an idiot, Mom.’
     
    ‘Well, you do some awfully stupid stuff for a genius,’ she said. ‘Crowley tried to kill you. Forman almost succeeded, and he almost got Brooke too. And Curt. This is not a game.’
     
    ‘I didn’t realise you were so worried about Curt’s life.
     
    ‘I don’t want him dead,’ she shouted. ‘I just want him out of our lives! He’s an arrogant jerk, yes, but you can’t just kill him.’
     
    ‘Then it’s a good thing I didn’t,’ I said, growing angry myself.
     
    ‘No, but because of your obsession with these . . . whatever they are . . . somebody else almost did. How many people have to die before you back down?’
     
    ‘How many more people will die if I do back down?’ I countered.
     
    ‘That’s what police are for.’
     
    ‘The Handyman’s been killing for five years at least – probably centuries more, now that we know he’s a demon. If the police are so awesome why haven’t they stopped him yet?’
     
    ‘You are not going after him,’ Mom repeated.
     
    ‘The police have no idea how to fight a demon,’ I said, struggling to keep my voice calm. ‘They have no idea what they’re up against. I do. I’ve already stopped two of them, and if I can stop this one, I can save . . . I don’t know, maybe hundreds of lives. Maybe thousands. Do you think it’s just going to kill a couple of people and then go away forever? This is how these things live, Mom. It’s going to kill and kill and kill until it doesn’t have any victims left.’
     
    ‘He,’ said Mom firmly, locking my eyes with her gaze.
     
    ‘What?’
     
    ‘You called him “it”,’ she said, exerting all her authority. ‘You know that you are not allowed to say “it”. Say “he”.’
     
    I closed my eyes and took a breath. One of the hallmarks of a sociopath, particularly a serial killer, is that they stop thinking about people as people, and see them only as objects. When I wasn’t thinking, or when I got excited, I started calling people ‘it’. This was against my rules.
     
    But the rules were designed for humans.
     
    ‘It’s a demon,’ I said. ‘It’s not a person, it’s not human. I can’t dehumanise it if it’s not human.’
     
    ‘ He is a living, thinking creature,’ said Mom, ‘human or demon or whatever. You don’t know what he is, but you know who you are, and you will follow your rules.’
     
    My rules. She was right. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, calmer now. ‘He – or she,’ I added quickly. ‘This might turn out to be a woman.’
     
    ‘What makes you say that?’
     
    Because the voice on the phone was female , I thought.
     
    ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’m just saying that we don’t know.’ I put on a face of mock indignation. ‘Are you implying that all psychopaths are men? Or that all men are psychopaths?’
     
    ‘I’m not in the mood for jokes,’ Mom said, turning off the TV. ‘I’m going to bed. No more news, no more killers; we’ll talk about this in the morning.’
     
    I walked sullenly back to the kitchen and poured a bowl of cereal while Mom got ready for bed; I rarely went to sleep before 2 a.m., so there was still plenty of time to study the situation.
     
    I’d read about the Handyman before. He was an unorthodox killer from Macon, Georgia – or at least, that’s where his first and third known victims were found. He travelled all over Georgia killing every nine months or so, and every crime scene matched our new situation: the victims were killed inside, usually in their place of business or alone at home, and there the body’s hands and tongue were removed. Then the body was carried outside, the poles were stuck into its