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She licked her lips. “Yes, your words taste like cinnamon chocolate.” Her face crinkled with concentration. “Halo,” she whispered. “Didn’t you tell me there were no animals in the pools?”
“Yes, too acidic.”
“There …” She paused. “There’s …” Her face froze in horror. “Something wrapping around my legs.”
“Our guide, Marilin, said that there were plants. Let me look it up.” He reached for his bag and flipped to the book they’d been provided about the various things one might encounter on the bog. “Yes, just plants, Mary. But how about you come out?”
“Oh, wow. Look at you!” Mary called, her words filled with awe. “Look! I see why they call you Halo.” She lifted a hand in the air to circle her head and slid down deeper into the black water. “The halo. The wings. You are my guardian angel.”
Max stood up and was leaning in toward her. “Mary, come back over here now, please.”
Her eyes opened wide, her brows to her hairline. She started screaming. “Snakes!”
Max bunched up his muscles and, on what little surface he had, was able to extend his leap out, arriving beside Mary.
The sound of horror rose through her throat and echoed across the landscape.
Halo, too, was in the water. Three powerful strokes brought him next to her.
Max had already caught hold of her messy bun and was swimming toward the edge, but that was the most he could do.
There was no land. There were no sides to press into and climb out. There was only water-saturated moss. It wasn’t like a swimming pool rescue or a shore like a lake. Here, the water was deep, and there was nothing solid.
Halo commanded Max to release Mary’s hair. The moment Max complied, Halo stuck his palm under his dog’s bottom—kicking powerfully, a hand under Mary’s head—he heaved Max toward a drier mound.
There was a scramble and splash, a bicycling of hind paws, but Max, with the momentum of Halo’s push, was able to scramble himself up under the tree where things were a little drier and, therefore, a little more solid. There, he gave himself a shake.
Mary was thrashing and fighting something that terrified her. In her fright, she was pushing Halo under, drowning him.
Bobbing in the water, sucking in a breath every time he rose over the surface, Halo worked to straitjacket Mary with his arms. As he nudged her onto the moss, her weight forced the little floating island down below the water. It was inch by difficult inch that he moved her closer to the tree, up to Max, who whined and stomped and seemed frustrated that he wasn’t helping.
Suddenly, the screaming stopped, and Mary reached for the tree trunk and pulled herself up. She sat there, dazed.
“Mary, it’s Halo.”
She looked into the pool where he was treading water.
She said nothing to him. She looked high as shit.
“Mary, when we were walking in here, did you eat a mushroom?” Halo patted over the moss as he asked, testing out a place to work on his own exit. Everything here had been agitated by Max and Mary, and now the edge was loose and pulled away like cotton candy.
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.
