“The light, the light!” he screamed. “It’s burning my eyes, my eyes, my eyes!”

“Code blue!” Karen bellowed, sprinting toward the fallen man. “Call downstairs. We need a crash cart, stat!”

She was already on her knees beside Lightfoot, trying to secure his head in her hands as his body flailed and he beat at her with his hands.

“Bite stick!” Karen demanded, working to peel open one eyelid, check his vitals.

“Don’t touch me don’t touch me don’t touch. It burns…”

The staff sprang belatedly into action. The nurses, Danielle and Janet, made a beeline for medical supplies. Greg grabbed a phone, while the other MCs pushed back tables, cleared the area. Lightfoot’s neck and back arched, muscles coiling and uncoiling rigidly beneath the tan sheath of his skin. Karen finally got his eyelid open. His eye was not rolled back up in his head, as D.D. had expected. Instead, he peered directly at Karen, quite conscious.

“The light,” he moaned. She released his eyelid. He moaned again, this time in relief.

Danielle and Janet were back with supplies. Karen took a Popsicle stick and jammed it into Lightfoot’s mouth. He immediately tried to spit it out. “Don’t touch me!”

“Towel,” Karen ordered, rolling him onto his side. “Quick, over his eyes. Cecille, kill the overhead lights. We can work by the glow of the hallway bulbs.”

Cecille obeyed, darkening the common area as Ed raced down the hallway to grab a towel. The second the overhead lights winked out, Lightfoot seemed to relax.

“Hurts. Can’t stop,” he muttered. “Inside me. Feel it. Cold, cold, cold. Bitter… burns. Must fight. White light, white light, white light. Tired. So tired… Must find… the light.”

Ed returned with a stack of towels. They folded one and placed it over the top part of Lightfoot’s face, shielding his eyes, D.D. took a second towel and, with effort, managed to pry Lightfoot’s fingers from Karen’s wrist and wrest his hand onto a rolled towel.

“Talk to me, Andrew,” Karen demanded loudly. “Stay with us. Where do you feel the pain?”

“Legs… arms… back… body… muscles, hurt, hurt, hurt.” His body thrashed against the floor. “Too loud. Too bright. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop…”

“The light hurts you?” Karen prodded.

“Burns… my eyes.”

“And noise?” D.D. spoke up.

“Ahhhhahhh,” he moaned, bringing up one hand to block his ears.

The doors burst open. Two medics bustled into the area, led by the security guard. They took one look at Lightfoot’s convulsing form and sprinted over to him.

“Condition?” the first man asked Karen.

“Started three minutes ago. Convulsions, light sensitivity, noise sensitivity,” Karen reported. “But conscious. Aware of his condition.”

“Pulse?”

“Two ten.”

The medic arched a brow. D.D. didn’t blame him. With that pulse rate, Lightfoot should be racing up Mount Everest.

“History of seizures?” the medic asked, trying to check vitals.

“Unknown,” Karen answered, just as Lightfoot said, “No. Not seizures. Spasms. Muscle… spasms…”

The medic glanced at Lightfoot’s towel-draped face, then back at Karen. She shrugged.

“The dark…” Lightfoot groaned. “I’m filled with the dark. So, so cold… it burns…”

“Hallucinating,” the medic muttered. He straightened, nodded to his partner. They grabbed a backboard and looked ready to get to work.

“Wait a minute,” D.D. called out. A case she’d read once. Lightfoot’s uncanny consciousness, even during what appeared to be a grand mal seizure. She strode over to Lightfoot’s table and sniffed his bottle of iced tea. Nothing. She touched her fingertip to the top edge, where a drop of moisture rested. She brought it cautiously to her mouth and, with a bolstering grimace, stuck out her tongue. It tasted…

Teaish. Grassy. Lemony. Then, beneath it all, a slightly bitter aftertaste.

“You need to get this tested immediately,” she informed the medic. “But I’m guessing strychnine.”

“Rat poison?” Greg spoke up from the hallway.

“In his drink?” Karen echoed, frowning. The staff looked at one another, then down at Lightfoot’s churning body.

“Symptoms fit.” She looked at the medic. “Hypersensitivity, muscle spasms, initial consciousness…”

“Yeah.” The medic nodded. “Now that you mention it… Well, we gotta motor, then, ’cause next on that list is respiratory failure. Come on, buddy. Hang in there with us. If you’re ever going to get poisoned, a hospital is the place to do it.”

With help from the MCs, they got Lightfoot’s body onto the gurney. Then they raced out of the unit for the elevator banks.

The elevator arrived with a ding. The doors opened, and Alex strode out, bearing a steaming tower of boxed pizzas. He looked at the medics, Lightfoot’s strapped-down body, and the shell-shocked staff, all staring at him.

“What happened to the healer?” he asked.

“That,” D.D. replied, “is an excellent question.”

Karen and her crew might be crack medics, but there was still a reason they paid D.D. the big bucks.

“Where did Lightfoot get the tea?” she demanded, the second the medics disappeared into the elevator.

“I don’t know. I think… I assume he brought it with him.” Karen looked at her staff. They milled about the half-lit common area, kicking at towels, staring at hastily rearranged furniture. Several were rubbing their arms, as if fighting a chill.

“Sure there’s no iced tea in the kitchenette?”

“No. We don’t stock it here.”

“Downstairs cafeteria?”

Karen shook her head uncertainly. Danielle piped up, “Andrew’s tea, the Koala brand, is one of those all-natural, all-organic, keep-the-planet-green products. I don’t think you can buy it around here.”

“Thank heavens for small favors,” D.D. muttered, as shutting down a hospital cafeteria and calling poison control was not high on her list of things she wanted to do right now. “Lightfoot arrive with any stuff, maybe a lunchbox, briefcase?” D.D. had a fleeting image of a brown leather strap over Lightfoot’s shoulder when she and Alex had first spotted him by the elevators. “Maybe a manbag,” she mused. “I want it.”

Karen dutifully led D.D. into the Admin area, where Lightfoot had stowed a brown leather satchel. D.D. flipped it open to find a container of Greek yogurt and a bag of sunflower seeds. She took the food for testing, then returned to the common area, where she could see the staff eyeing one another nervously for imminent medical collapse.

“Anyone else have iced tea?” D.D. asked.

One by one, they shook their heads.

“Who’s eaten here tonight?”

Four staff members slowly raised their arms. D.D. noted that Greg and Danielle were not among them.

“What time?”

The MCs had started at seven p.m., taking a snack break between nine and nine-thirty.

“Good news,” D.D. informed them. “Strychnine is one of the fastest-acting poisons, with symptoms emerging within five minutes of ingestion, so if you’re vertical now, you’re probably going to be vertical later. Timeline fits what we saw tonight: Lightfoot opened his drink, took a few sips, started the meditation, drank a bit more, and I’d say about eight minutes into it…”

“Collapsed in full convulsion,” Karen filled in, her voice subdued. Everyone stared at the table that Lightfoot had been sitting on.

“Strychnine is odorless,” D.D. informed the anxious staff members, “but has a bitter taste. So if you run across anything that tastes funky, set it aside immediately. I’ll phone the lab, have them send someone over to test the water, as well as everything in the kitchen, but that’ll take some time. When are the kids due to eat again?”

“Not until breakfast,” Karen supplied, “though some of the kids need a middle-of-the-night snack.”

D.D. thought about it. “Stick to food or drink items that come from sealed packages. Snack-sized cereals, that sort of thing. As long as the seal hasn’t been broken, they should be okay. Make sense?”