He couldn’t put any weight on it, or it would give way.

  She blinked.

  “Did you touch any of the red mushrooms?” He asked, enunciating each word.

  “No mushrooms. No. Do you need help getting out of there?”

  Was it reasonable that she seemed normal now? Did she not remember what she’d just done? In this moment, Halo almost thought he might be the one who was hallucinating. “I’d really like it, Mary, if you could sit there and get dressed. I think it’s time to head back now.”

  He watched for a moment while she complied. Her face was slack, and her coloring too pale.

  He was thinking through what he might know about this situation from his medic training. Obviously, something very wrong was going on.

  Did she say that she’d tasted his words?

  Until he was out of the water, Mary was going to be in more danger. Out and dressed had to be his objective. He remembered Marilin talking the team through the process. It was one of the things that Halo had wanted to try today while he was out on the bog—how to get him and his dog out of the bog water if the ground beneath them gave way and they found themselves in a pool.

  He speculated that it was something like getting out of the water if you fell through the ice.

  Halo bent his arms and zombie-crawled up onto the moss, arm over arm. It gave way beneath him. Once he had enough moss under his body to act as a type of raft, he kicked his feet. But that didn’t work the way he’d expected.

  With a quick check on Max and Mary, Halo closed his eyes. He went back to the moment when Thorn asked Marilin precisely how to get out if the pool’s edge was too spongy. She specifically said not to take off the bog shoes. So, already, count him one down.

  Marilin had demonstrated a kind of rolling crawl. With her image in his mind, Halo repeated her moves and was gratified to find himself lying in an area solid enough to support him.

  It had been a complicated undertaking, and as he quickly dressed, Halo was glad that he had stripped down to a shirt and shorts. No wonder Marilin had to grab the blogger’s backpack straps to save him. Walking along, and the ground sank away below him? Until Halo experienced having no exit, he didn’t understand the difficulty of the situation.

  As Halo tied his boots and slid his bog shoes back in place, Mary was hugging the tree with its four-inch trunk, petting it and having a little conversation about how the tree had spent its day.

  And Max was looking at Halo with an expression that screamed, “Fix this!”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Halo checked again to see if there was any communication connection.

  And when he found none, he assessed.

  Mary had been cogent enough to follow his instructions and was dressing while she had her conversation with the tree. Her movements were sloth-like and seemed to come from muscle memory. She didn’t seem to be thinking or processing at all.

  Pulling the backpack over her shoulders, Mary snapped the sternal strap in place, then pulled the tiny bouquet of Labrador Tea closer to her nose and sniffed deeply.

  Halo looked down; the Labrador Tea groundcover spread as far as he could see.

  Marilin had pointed out this plant, telling the team that it was relaxing and could make people lose track of time. “I show you,” she’d said with a knowing smile. “Think in your mind a number of minutes you think that you have been in the bog.” She paused. “Everyone has number?”

  She looked at her watch. “Think your number. Okay, we have been here exactly two hours.”

  The men looked startled, and she laughed. “You see? Relaxed. Happy. Time flies.”

  Halo had set his alarm during his morning planning to ensure that he wouldn’t succumb to the power of the Labrador tea, and he and Mary would leave the bog well before nightfall.

  “So like that,” Marilin waved a hand near her head. “It can be, how do you say? Like a hallucination.”

  Hallucination.

  But Marilin had only been talking about losing the perception of time, right?

  Halo grabbed his guidebook and flipped to the right page. Mary had been relaxed on their hike out, he thought. But then, she’d tasted his words, seen him as a guardian angel with wings, fought against some snake-like thing that attacked her in the water, and was now communing with a tree.

  Rhododendron tomentosum, also known as Labrador tea, marsh tea, or wild Rosemary, is a small evergreen shrub with white flowers that bloom throughout the summer months. It is often found in bogs and woods with elevated humidity levels. The citrusy scent comes from ledol-containing volatile oils.

  It is closely related to the genus Rhododendron.

  Halo was developing an absolute aversion to the genus Rhododendron.

  When smelling Labrador tea essential oils, the ledol can cause a sense of relaxation and well-being.

  He looked at Mary again, resting her forehead on the scraggly tree trunk, barely thick enough to hold her weight. Relaxation, check.

  The Labrador tea’s toxicity depends on species and locality. Terpenoid ledol is found in all Labrador tea species. Labrador tea may cause physical symptoms such as dizziness, vomiting, and drowsiness.

  DO NOT camp near Labrador tea. Persons with sensitivity to the volatile oils may be rendered unconscious.

  Halo looked at Mary. Would he call her sluggishness drowsiness?

  Grayantoxins are also found in Labrador tea. While rarely lethal, Grayantoxins can act as a hallucinogenic. In those with an allergy to the plant, this can be followed by hallucinations/delirium, seizures, paralysis, breathing issues, and death.

  Wait – death?

  It could well be the plant.

  Halo had to wait for a moment for the terror that flooded his system to give him enough room to think. He found himself using his combat breathing to keep himself in the fight.

  Halo pulled out his medical kit. Moving slowly so as not to startle Mary, he approached in a crouch.

  Max had curled up against her, and he turned to focus on what Halo was doing. “Just going to check her out, buddy.” If Max decided to guard her, things could turn bad very quickly.

  “Turn bad?” he asked out loud as he pulled out a pressure cuff and stethoscope.

  He culled through all the other things that Miriam had said. There was a viper in the bog. Though she’d also said in the twelve years of her professional life as a naturalist she had never seen it. A gray snake with a thick black zigzag down its back. Halo began to check Mary head to toe, removing clothes and putting them back on, checking for any sign that she’d been bitten.

  Nothing. Halo documented her vitals in his notebook as he worked.

  He checked her pulse; it was weak and thready.

  Her breathing was shallow.

  Her skin clammy.

  Her eyes were unfocused.

  There had been nothing in the book about what to do if someone had an adverse reaction. But now he remembered Titus asking that question. Marilin said to get the person out of the area and let them breathe fresh air. An hour or so should have them feeling well again. But that was the headaches caused by sensitivity to the plant. Would that extend to a full-on toxic load?

  So far, Marilin’s instructions had been dead on.

  “Mary, baby. Come, on, sweetheart, we’re going to get out of here.” He tugged her arm, and she fell loosely back against him. “Max, I’m going to leave you off lead. The last thing I need is for you to take off running and pull me over into a pool.” Halo couldn’t imagine Max doing that, especially while wearing a work vest, but Halo couldn’t take any chances.

  “I know what to do,” Mary slurred, flapping her hand in the air. “When I went down the slope in Switzerland, I just sat on the back of my skis. Sit back and go. Scary. But down to the bottom.” As she said that, she pushed into a squat on the back of her bog shoes. Her weight shifted to the back, forcing the back edge downward instead of flat, digging into the moss, creating a hole exposing the water beneath.

  As she went in, her arms flailed wide.

  Halo jerked Mary to the side to redistribute the weight over a larger area. And as he did, he realized that carrying Mary would put over three hundred pounds of combined weight into a concentrated area.

  Could he find a solid enough path to get them out of there?

  As he processed strategies, he was startled by the abrupt sound of his phone alarm going off.

  That was his Labrador tea timer. Bog time was over.

  Halo tapped it off. “Mary, I don’t want to hang you upside down over my shoulders unless I have to. It’s quite a ways to the wood line, even farther to the car and away from these plants. If you can hear me and understand what I’m saying, I need your help. I’m going to wear my backpack on my chest, and I’m going to carry you on my back. We’re going to try it anyway.” He maneuvered the pack forward and cinched the straps across his back. “I swear to you, love, that I’m going to get you safe. I just need you to help a little. I need you to wrap your legs around me like when we came down the wall from the fire. Okay? And I need you to keep breathing for me.”

  What he didn’t say aloud was, Please, please, please don’t die.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Halo struggled in ways he had never experienced before.

  When he was a Commando, he’d often been in bad situations. There were times when he was fighting for the survival of his brothers, times when he was on a solo mission when his life was in his own hands. But here he was in a surreal landscape, navigating an ecosystem that he hadn’t trained in, desperately afraid for the life of the woman he loved.

  Loved.

  From the point when she hung upside down, and their eyes met on the side of the burning building, Halo had been playing around with the sensation, testing it out, wondering about it.

  But now, it was solid in his chest.

  And it was coated with absolute fear that his skills wouldn’t be enough to meet this moment.

  As they moved forward, Mary had grown heavier as she sank into her stupor. Halo had trapped her arms under his front-facing backpack and laced his fingers under her bottom to keep her up on his hips, her head lolling on his shoulder.

  Each step pressed his bog shoes deep into the moss. In his mind, he pictured Miriam fishing out the hiker. It sounded straightforward in the telling of the story. Having just tried to get out of a pool—without clothes, shoes, or another person attached to him—Halo now understood how heroic Miriam had been. How frightened. How brave.

  Halo wasn’t sure if the ground truly gave way beneath them either would survive. If he was going down, he planned to tip Mary backward, shove her away from him, and hope that Max could figure something out.

  It was a harrowing thought.

  But as the strategy came clearly to mind, he looked down at Max. And Max seemed to get the picture and understand his duty. Guard Mary.

  Halo was following the pulses of his shirt. He had to veer this way and that to stay on the driest, highest ground. And he was glad that he had tested the navigation system before it became crucial, but also that the grandfather evergreen was up ahead, guiding him in.

  His nostrils filled with the smell of ozone again.

  And then the sky was slashed with the crackle of lightning.

  “Holy hell. Come on now!” he called up to the sky.

  Marilin said that this was a desperate circumstance, that if they were on the bog when they saw lightning, they were to get to the tree line as fast as they could.

  He was already doing that.

  The idea that he’d lose his line of sight, that the water would rise—all the ramifications of the situation sizzled along his nerves.

  The air shuddered with the boom of thunder.

  Stopping as briefly as possible, Halo wrangled each of them into the rain ponchos he’d yanked from the side pockets of his field pack as he yelled, “Go, Max! Go! Find the car! Go, Max! Fast track! Go!”

  Halo couldn’t divide his attention. He had to trust that, before the rain flushed away their scent trail, with the command to move at full speed, Max would be waiting for Halo at the vehicle. Safe.

  So far, Max’s training sessions had translated beautifully into real-world missions.

  As the words left Halo’s mouth, Max dashed in the correct direction. His light frame leaped across the expanse of bog, and he disappeared into the tree line.

  The next crack of lightning split the clouds open, and the rain fell in a torrent.

  Halo sent up a thank you to the engineers who had figured out this shirt because, just like on the Virginia mountainside, Halo could only see three feet ahead of him.

  The tree line was gone.

  The bog water was rising alarmingly fast.

  Mary hung limp over his back. Flailing would make this impossible. “Just a little further, love, almost there,” he called to her. And though his staggering movements kicked her bog shoes into his knees, he didn’t want to take them off lest he need to set her down for some reason. Without the shoes, she’d sink out of sight, lost to the bog.

  Keeping his focus on the three feet around him, the only space he could control, Halo made his way forward. When his foot landed on solid ground, it felt like a bleeding miracle.

  Three more steps and the trunk of a tree let him know they’d made it out of the bog and into the forest.

  The bog shoes came off and were left behind.

  Marilin had said that the winds would be high enough that they could topple trees, but Halo had not imagined the sheer power that engulfed them.

  The lightning intensified, giving him brief moments of clarity.

  The tree limbs only somewhat softened the onslaught of rain.

  But around him, Halo heard the crack of severed limbs and the thud of falling trees.

  There was no safety in the woods.

  He powered up the hill.

  Was Mary starting to rouse? Since the rain began, Halo had felt like she was putting more energy into holding on to him. He was back in his childhood living room for a moment, watching the Wizard of Oz on the telly with his family. Dorothy lay in a stupor amongst the poppies. The good witch sent some kind of precipitation down to awaken her. Snow? Rain? And Dorothy had come back to her senses. Maybe this rain was cleaning the air of the volatile oils.

  Moments later, Mary lifted her head from his shoulder.

  “I’ve got you, love. Are you with me?” he called over the sounds of the storm.

  “What’s happening?” Her voice warbled in his ear.

  “Just hang on a bit longer.” Halo was putting all his energy into following the shirt, dodging the hazards, and getting them closer to the car. “I’ll explain everything.”

  She wiggled in his arms. “Can you let me down?”

  Halo didn’t answer. If he set her down, he was afraid they would slow, and this situation was just too dire.

  He’d felt fear on the battlefield, but that was completely different. He had a team, tactics, and a sense of the necessary steps to take for survival. But now, all he could think was that Mary needed medical assistance, needed help that he couldn’t give. And his terror was that he wouldn’t be able to keep her safe.

  Her rousing enough to speak didn’t abate that in his system.

  The rain was less intense, and Halo tried to take advantage of the reprieve by moving as fast as he could. Another fear was that, just like in Virginia, being sopping wet in dropping temperatures put them at risk for hypothermia.

  If I can just reach the car.

  Halo turned his head to the left when he heard Max. It was his “Come here!” bark.

  Should he trust Max or the shirt?

  When Halo whistled for Max, the wind snatched the notes from his lips. He waited for a fleeting lull and sent the whistle out again.

  A moment later, Max streaked into view.

  Max sat in Halo’s path, barked, and then bolted away again.

  Halo kept moving toward the car, following the shirt. Mary was his priority. Max was skilled and strong; Halo needed to trust his dog.

  Leaning forward to keep his balance on a sudden slope, Max darted back into view. Max had been lying on the bed of Labrador tea alongside Mary. Did it have toxic effects on dogs, too? Was Max hallucinating?

  Max sat in Halo’s path and dropped something from his mouth to the ground.

  In the dim light and falling rain, Halo couldn’t make it out.

  Max picked it up and dropped it again.

  Halo squinted down. “Max, hand it to me.” Halo momentarily took his hand away from Mary’s leg, and Max put a child’s shoe in his hand.

  Max had never brought him a random object, even when they trained for search and rescue. If an object was found with the missing person’s scent, it was vital that it not be moved. Max had been trained to leave the object, find Halo, and signal a find. So, this behavior wasn’t something that Halo understood. He lowered Mary to the ground, steadying her as she caught her balance and watched. She seemed okay to stand. He put his hand inside the shoe. And while wet through and through, it was still warm.

  It was a tiny girl’s shoe.

  “What is it?” Mary asked as she dragged the shoe into her own hand. “Oh. Why is there a child’s shoe in the woods?” Her words were still slurred.

  There was a flash where the stakes came clear at once. He needed Mary to be safe and safe was not here. If this shoe meant a child was alone in the woods, Mary would not leave the woods without the child. Halo had no idea how Max had arrived in front of him with the shoe.

  Max’s bark was sharp and insistent. He started off in the direction he’d come from, traced back and repeated.

  “We’re going after him,” Mary said, spreading her arms wide for balance. “Oh, I feel so strange.”

  “I bet you do.” Halo caught her under the arm to keep her from sinking to the ground.

  Rain dripping from the brim of his visored cap, Halo ran the scenarios.

  “I’m going after him,” Mary insisted, twisting toward Max and taking a wobbly step.