“You can come down now,” Maximus said, his back to her as he wiped the sweat off his face. “It’s not going to come back here anytime soon. Pigs shouldn’t screw with a big, bad wolf.”
Selena carefully made her way down the branches, half-convinced she was asleep and dreaming. What she had seen wasn’t impossible, but it was unlikely. She dropped the last yard to the ground, watching the man carefully.
Maximus turned around and smiled. “I don’t think I could have pulled that move off on a polar bear. I would have needed a headlock. Grizzly in a submission hold?”
Selena stared at him. His eyes had been brown before, but now one was brown and the other amber. Understanding struck her like a lightning bolt.
She slapped a hand to her forehead. “I’m so stupid.”
Maximus shook his head. “You did the right thing. You stayed out of the way. I wouldn’t have been able to pull off what I did if you hadn’t.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.” She pointed at his face. “I think one of your contacts fell out during the fight with Mr. Future Bacon.”
His smile faded and he reached toward his eye. “Damn it.”
Selena laughed, the relief of understanding flooding her. “All this time I’ve been trying to figure you out. So many things didn’t make sense, but now it’s so obvious. You’re not a hot mobster. You’re a hot hybrid.” She slapped her hands over her mouth and let the silence tick along before lowering them. “You’re a hot hybrid from Luna Lodge.”
Maximus sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. He reached to his face and removed the other contact and stared at Selena with his beautiful amber eyes.
“Yes, I’m a hybrid, but I’m not from Luna Lodge. They helped my brothers, but you can think of us as a different branch of the family.”
Selena strolled toward him, drawn in by the eyes. She’d been so sure his eye color was wrong before, but now she didn’t. The amber was perfect.
“There are other hybrids besides the ones from Luna Lodge?” Selena asked. “Nobody ever talks about that.”
“There’s a lot most people don’t know about my kind.” Maximus shrugged.
“Why are you here? I’m assuming you were lying about that security job.”
“What? Hybrids can’t be security contractors?”
Selena scoffed. “The opposite. I think if there was a company filled with hybrids, you’d be running ads all over the place yelling about it. Everybody would want a hybrid guard. You could charge whatever you wanted.”
Maximus stared at her for a moment, uncertainty playing across his face. She hoped she hadn’t offended him, but the last thing she expected when looking into everything was to run into a hybrid. He might be able to help her with whatever was going on.
“No, I’m not a security contractor,” he said quietly. “I’m here because I’m investigating some dangerous people that have targeted my hybrid brothers in the past.”
“I don’t understand. Shouldn’t you get the government involved? If this is about the Horatius Group, isn’t everyone out to get them? You could get the FBI and police to help, right?”
Maximus smiled wearily. “We hybrids learned a long time ago the only people we can rely on are ourselves. There’s still a lot we don’t know about the different groups involved in creating hybrids, and if we want to make sure we don’t end up prisoners again, we need to mostly look into it using our own resources. Sometimes the authorities still want to blame hybrids when trouble happens.”
“Okay. Fine. Let’s go check it out.” Selena gestured to the forest. “We can skip the waterfall and check out those blank spots, and they’re closer anyway. If these are bad guys like you’re saying, I doubt they’ll be at the waterfall.”
Maximus frowned. “I don’t think that’s a great idea.”
Selena stuck her hands on her hips. “If this is about dangerous people hunting hybrids, you’ll want another witness in case the cops or the Feds become involved. I can be a neutral third party.”
“This isn’t a game, Selena.”
“I didn’t say it was, and these people may have all but cost me my job.” Selena returned his pleading look with a steely stare. “Besides, you want me to walk back to my car so I can get attacked by these guys? Ruthless people who wouldn’t think twice about killing me? If not them, then what about that boar looking for revenge? Nothing’s changed from before except I know the truth.”
“I was planning to find a convenient excuse to send you back to the car and have you hand over the more detailed version of the map.” Maximus shrugged.
“Not going to happen.”
Maximus groaned. “Fine. But you do what I say. There might not be anything at all, or it could be a whole army of hidden monsters, things that are barely human anymore.”
“I heard about those on the news. Glycons, right?”
“Yes.” Maximus let out a low growl.
Selena nodded slowly. There was something in his eyes and his voice, something that told her he was still holding back. Pressing him for more information was pointless. He’d already admitted to being a hybrid and investigating dangerous people, and it wasn’t like he had any reason to trust her with more.
She’d spent all this time thinking he might be a hot mobster, but he might have thought she was some sort of evil anti-hybrid spy. A lot of how he behaved now made perfect sense.
Selena took a deep breath and slapped her cheeks. “Let’s go investigate our map mystery!”
Chapter Thirteen
Selena was brave. Maximus had to give her that. She didn’t even seem that rattled by the boar attack, but bravery didn’t mean she wasn’t being an idiot coming with him and that he wasn’t being one by letting her. He knew how dangerous the Corps could be.
What he didn’t understand is why she’d first agreed to come with him. She was already convinced something shady was
