Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
SANORA
Three seconds. That was all I could manage before a laughter ripped out of me.
It started as a sharp bark, a very abrupt one, and then I doubled forward, slamming my hand against the counter hard enough to send a jolt of pain up my wrist. The sound that tore out of me was too loud, too raw, echoing around the house.
I managed a glance at him through watery eyes. He was just standing there, arms folded across his chest, watching me.
That only made it worse.
A fresh wave of laughter hit me, and this time I completely lost it. I dropped to the floor, my legs giving out beneath me as I clutched my stomach. My muscles cramped with the force of it. It hurt. It physically hurt. But I couldn’t stop laughing.
“What? Fall? In l—love?” I didn’t even know what was funny. Maybe it was the delivery or the conviction in his voice, like he was asking me to pass the salt, not to hand over my heart.
Thanks to that, one thing was clear now. He wasn’t human.
Because no human in their right mind would say something like that. Not like that. Not with that confident and terrifyingly sure tone.
I wiped my tears with the back of my hand, staggered to my feet with my other still pressed to my aching belly, and wordlessly dragged myself towards the stairs. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t even if I tried. Because I knew the moment I opened my mouth, I’d only choke on laughter.
He said nothing either.
Just stood there, still as stone, arms folded, watching me silently as I disappeared up the stairs like a madwoman on the verge of collapse.
I wiped the steam off the mirror with the side of my hand, smearing a half-moon across the glass. A white towel wrapped around my chest, another cradling my wet hair. My eyes met mine in the mirror, and I realised I wore the kind of look that told on me before I could speak.
I leaned closer, fingers braced on the sink’s cold edge. “No wonder he could tell that I didn’t sleep. My eyes are so puffy.” I sighed.
My gaze dropped from my swollen eyes to the faint bump of my nose, to my lips, to the curve of my collarbone, until it landed on the scar that lived just above my shoulder.
It was a pale, jagged line, like a faded bolt of lightning.
One side of it was slightly raised, as if the knife had paused there before dragging down in a cruel, curved stroke.
Although the pain was gone, the memory still remained, crashing through me every time I saw the scar.
I was seven.
We’d been playing outside when one of the boys ran past, screaming that Lent’s uncle was drunk again and was chasing him with a knife. We ran, stupid and brave, the lot of us, thinking we could save Lent.
While we actually helped him escape and distracted his uncle, I was the only one who got caught. He was so fast that I didn’t even see the blade until it pierced my skin, and then there was blood. I must have blacked out because I woke up in the hospital, my mother raging at me through her tears.
She grounded me for a month when we got home.
Slapping my cheeks lightly, I exhaled and picked up the pocket knife from the sink.
Cracking the bathroom door open, I listened to his footsteps. It was not too close, and it was coming just faintly from his room. Cautiously, I slipped into my bedroom like a thief, locking the door behind me hastily, my heart racing.
How much longer would I live like this?
I dressed quickly and threw myself onto the bed, towel clinging to my head as I stared out the window, mentally scanning my brain for any creature in human form that had no shadow. I had probably read a book about it and forgotten.
Dropping the damp towel from my head, I picked up my laptop from the floor and curled my legs beneath me. There had to be something somewhere. I just needed to find the right thread to pull.
I opened my laptop and logged onto the only site I trusted for historical anomalies—one that didn’t sugar-coat legends into bedtime tales or water down theories with scepticism. If there was anything close to the truth, it would be there.
I stared at the blinking cursor in the search bar for a moment before typing: The Shadowless Man.
Dozens of results flooded the screen, from folklore forums to articles written by dead scholars.
My eyes skimmed one particular story about a town where no one cast a shadow.
According to the article, the townspeople had been slaughtered in what was described as a mass possession, then mysteriously revived ten years later, carrying on as if nothing had happened.
But none of them had shadows.
My stomach turned slightly. Could he be one of them?
A thread of hope lit up in me, and I searched the text again, this time for anything that hinted at immortality. That would explain the unnatural stillness in his eyes and how he was alive. Not only him, maybe his townspeople were still alive, too.
But then I read the next line: “...they all died five years later. At once.”
A cold sigh escaped my lips. No immortality then.
I returned to the search bar, fingers flying across the keys: Creature in Human Form with No Shadow + The Crater.
The results that came up were older. There were several scans of academic papers and forum posts with barely any comments. Most of them focused on The Crater itself, dissecting its depth and geological inconsistencies.
There were mentions of beings that could take on a human form but they were said to only last a few hours.
Only temporarily. They couldn’t stay long in a stolen skin before returning to their real form.
No mention of a shadowless man who could maintain it indefinitely.
No links between him and The Crater. No connections.
No creature in human form with no shadow. No Crater guardian. No...him.
If only I knew his name. Maybe that could unlock a reference I didn’t know I’d read before. I’d consumed so many books over the years, listened to so many lectures, but my brain offered me nothing useful now.
But I kept going through different sites nonstop, not even when my legs started to ache from sitting too long. My hair had air-dried completely, and my back was beginning to throb from the way I hunched over the screen.
Frustrated, I shut the laptop and crouched by the corner of the room where I’d shoved the box that held all the books I’d brought with me—textbooks, myth anthologies, collections, borrowed books, and even all the journals I’d filled during classes from my first year.
Grabbing the handle, I dragged the box to the middle of the room and sank to the floor in front of it, my fingers fumbling with the zip until it gave way.
Then, one by one, I began pulling the books out, setting them aside in piles, flipping open each one, even the ones I knew had nothing to do with what I was looking for. Just in case. The scent of old paper filled the room, musty and faintly sweet, and I let myself drown in it
My fingers protested after a while, cramped from flipping, pressing and jotting.
I tossed one book aside, then another, until the floor was a graveyard of open pages and paper dust. My legs had gone stiff beneath me after being folded too long in the same position.
I shifted to my knees, leaned forward, and pulled another book from the box.
My vision was beginning to blur, my eyes raw and aching from overuse. I barely noticed the ache crawling up my spine until I tried to sit straighter and a sharp jolt of pain cut through my back.
I hissed and collapsed onto the floor, sprawled out amidst the books. Staring up at the ceiling, I let my arms fall to my sides, breathing in slowly, then out, like that might slow the fast-beating panic in my chest.
“There’s nothing,” I whispered to no one. “There’s absolutely no tale about a man without a shadow.”
Maybe he wasn’t written about because no one lived long enough to write about him?
That thought coiled in my stomach like a knot of cold, tightening.
Was this like some horror film? Where creatures pretended to be men, lured their prey into an enclosed space, and waited, fantasising about how they’d kill them?
I swallowed hard and sat up, brushing hair out of my face. My heart was ticking faster, and my hands were starting to tremble in that way they did when my brain had too many thoughts and no place to put them.
What if he had been stalking me just to make sure he got to kill me first? What if this house wasn’t random? What if it was his…his slaughterhouse?
He warned me not to go near The Crater. Then he saved me like some psycho villain who didn’t want anyone else to kill their prey.
Was that it?
I rose to my feet, mind racing, and stared around at the books scattered like debris from a storm.
This could be the house where he often killed them. Maybe he needed to kill them so he could wear their skin? Maybe that was why the landlord wasn’t answering anymore. He knew I wouldn’t last.
I turned to look at the door...just as a knock shook it.
“Ahh!” I screeched, instinct jerking my body backwards. I stumbled and crashed into the edge of the bed frame, arms thrown out in defence as if I expected the door to burst open.
He’s there.
The knock came again. And again.
“Open the door,” came his voice. “Is something wrong?”
Yes. Everything was wrong.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
LEAVE, I screamed in my head, but my mouth wouldn’t cooperate. My breath caught in my throat like it was stuck on barbed wire. My lungs wouldn’t expand.
Knock. Knock. Bang.
My chest heaved in shallow gasps. What was this? I wasn’t someone who panicked. Why couldn’t I breathe?
It was then I felt that horrible, soul-wrenching tug.
It was as though my heart was being dragged across the floor by an invisible thread, tearing muscle as it went. That horrible sensation I always felt when he was in a close distance from me. It twisted me from the inside out.
I clutched my chest, tears pouring from my eyes as I folded over, groaning. It hurt so much. My ribs screamed. My body trembled. My knees buckled, and I dropped.
It hurt. Gods.
I curled in on myself and clutched my chest. I was shaking—no, shuddering—as that awful ache intensified. It was like every part of me was being called to him against my will.
“Sanora!”
My brain froze.
He knew my name?
My thoughts scrambled, clawing through questions, but before I could piece anything together, he spoke again, voice urgent now. “I’m coming in.”
How? How will you come in when the door is locked?
The words didn’t come out. I couldn’t say them. I couldn’t even open my eyes.
I could only feel. Could only feel the pain as it tore me apart, could only feel the tears sliding down my face, could only feel as my body begged for mercy.
But suddenly, I could feel the shift in the air.
Then arms, strong and solid, slid under me, lifting me and pulling me into the searing heat of his body.
My mind screamed to fight.
But by some mysterious miracle, the pain started to vanish. It dissolved the moment he held me, like he’d sucked it right out of me and into his body. I felt it recede, leaving behind a dull ache that was no longer unbearable.
My face pressed into his chest that radiated heat like a hearth in the dead of winter, too weak to protest. And the last thing I felt, before my mind was swallowed by sleep, was the rhythm of his heartbeat against my cheek—heavy, strong, and far too rapid for a man whose plan was to kill me.