He glowered. “I cannot.” His chin jerked toward a fat black beeswax candle cushioned between sections of chiseled rock. Its black flame flickered macabrely across the shiny surface of the silver veined stone walls.
“The candle is blocking you?” Lilith tried so hard to keep the tone of her voice down. Now that Giles had warned her she could indeed hear the murmurings of dwarves just outside the door.
Their voices held a gruff, rumbly tone to them, which clearly came from mining in the dark bowels of the earth and constantly inhaling dusty fumes.
Lilith gripped the edge of her pot, fingers curling around the lip of it as she tried in vain to not think about the fact that all they needed to do was light a fire and she’d be wolf stew.
“My necklace,” she gasped, realizing there could be no better time to use fairy magic than right now. But when she patted her neck it was gone, in its place a little brown sachet tied with a string of leather.
He shook his head, “I already looked. They stripped our possessions while we’d been out.”
Gripping the sachet, she attempted to open it to see what was inside. It was squishy and full of something, but she had no clue what. There were no visible openings, so she lifted it to her nose and sniffed.
There was a pleasant but slightly earthy smell inside. She’d never smelled the scent before. A hideous thought came to her then. “Is this a pouch of cooking herbs?”
His eyes were hollow. The red in them almost a dull, lackluster yellow. She did not like that look, she would not accept that look.
“Stop it,” she snapped at him and dropped the sachet. “You will not get sad about this.”
“It’s my fault, Lilith. I should have guarded you better. I should have been more alert.”
She waved her hand. “No, you couldn’t have known. I have better hearing than you and I did not hear them. I heard you in the bushes, though.” She arched a brow at him, completely disgusted with herself. She’d been all too aware of Giles’s hot gaze on her while she’d bathed, and maybe it had been her focus on him that had prevented her from hearing the sneaky bastards coming up, but she didn’t quite believe so.
Stone dwarves were said to possess almost preternatural powers when in the vicinity of their particular cave system.
“Think.” She looked at him. “Can’t you get out of the ropes? Maybe you can’t shift, but—”
He slapped his hand across the water. She noticed that, unlike her, his wrists were bound.
The room was very dark, but thanks to the flickering of the candle she was able to see faint scratch marks across her wrists.
“I couldn’t undo mine. They seem to spelled. But I was able to get yours off. I had hoped that with your hands free you could undo yourself at the very least and slip away.”
Even in the face of death he still continued to try and save her.
Nodding, knowing if she did manage to undo her knots she wouldn’t leave him. She went to work on the rope around her waist. Though it was lax enough to let her move, it still gripped tight enough to her that she knew they had no intention of her slipping free so easily.
Her human fingers were clumsy on the sodden fiber ropes. “Ugh,” she growled. “I can’t even find where the knot begins.”
Outside the voices grew and one of them rumbled loud enough for them to hear, “I do believe the meat has woken. Send for Heapy.”
Giles’s gaze snapped back to hers and in them she read his fear. Though if she knew him, she sensed that fear was not for himself.
“Maybe if you shift, Lilith, use your claws. You have to get away from here.”
And go where? It was on the tip of her tongue to argue it, but she did want out of her bonds if for no other reason than to blow out that infernal candle and help him to shift to shadow.
If she’d been thinking straight from the beginning she would have known to do that first. Rolling her eyes at her stupidity, she quieted her mind and called to her light and then paused when she sensed its absence punch through her like a fist. Black ice skated down her spine.
“My wolf,” she whimpered. “They’ve done something to my wolf.”
Squeezing her eyes shut, she called the light again. And still nothing, just a vast emptiness that made hot tears gather at the corners of her eyes. She wasn’t sure how, or what they’d done, but just as with Giles they’d prevented her from calling their means of salvation.
Reluctant to give up—even though she heard several pairs of shuffling feet just outside the door—she attacked the rope around her again.
Slicing her fingers open on the coarse material, she wouldn’t stop. Even as the door handle began to jangle and the cackling laughter of devilish glee slipped through the room.
Lilith would not have stopped trying at it if it hadn’t been for Giles’s soft voice.
“I’m so sorry, Lilith.”
Swiping at her tears, she shook her head. She wasn’t sure for what, or if she were trying to convey a meaning to him by it, but it was all she could do for a minute. Just shake her head sadly.