Stunned as we were, the message was clear: whatever we were about to face, whatever shit was going to keep coming at us, we were going to take it on together.
The woman tucked the tablet under her arm and frowned. “I see Magnum has had his usual effect on you. I’ll have to have a word with him about that.”
Moments before, I would have thought nothing else had the potential to surprise me this afternoon. But my eyebrows arched of their own will, and she chuffed.
“I’ve known Magnum since he was younger than you all,” she offered by way of explanation. “I’m Frances Leeman, but don’t you dare call me that, or worse”—she shuddered—“ma’am. You can call me Fanny.” She smiled, and the sincerity of it lightened a weight that had been pressing on my chest without my awareness. I pulled in a deep breath, and Griffin tugged me even closer against his side.
“I’m Magnum’s executive assistant. I realize this is likely an unsettling time for you, and I’m here to help and guide you. Whatever you need, whenever you need it, you come to me. I’ll make sure you’re taken care of. Think of me as your cool, fun aunt, the one you trust to hear you out without judgment. Believe me, not even Magnum Chase himself has always been this put-together. We’re all allowed a few bumps in the road.”
She studied us. “From the look of you all, I’m thinking this is more than a bump. More like a huge pothole.”
“You can say that again,” Layla muttered.
“Well, don’t you worry yourselves any more than you need to. Everything’s going to get better from here on out.”
I chortled softly, resigned to the fact that our resistance wouldn’t do much to help us now. “Are you aware that your bosskilledus all?”
Again, Fanny frowned. “I am, yes. Very regrettable, that. Distasteful business.”
As one, we all chuffed or snorted. Shaking his head, Griffin grumbled, “Distasteful business …”
“Yes, Griffin,distasteful. If it were up to me, none of that would have happened. But I don’t get to make the decisions around here, Magnum does. My job right now is to make things better for you, now that Magnum has set us on the course he’s chosen.”
Oh-kay. So Fanny wasn’t the enemy. Maybe she could even be an ally to a certain degree whenMagnumwas calling all the shots of any significance.
Fanny’s astute attention zeroed in on Hunt. “I hear you’re carrying. Do I need to be concerned about my safety or that of my team?”
Unblinking, Hunt stared back at her. “Not unless any of you plan on hurting my friends or me. In which case, I won’t hesitate to shoot to kill.”
Shetsked. “Dear me, no. Think of me as your fairy godmother, one who hasn’t yet sprouted wings, and not for lack of trying, let me tell you.” She chuckled to herself, alone in her joke. The driver pretended not to hear a thing she said, his gaze pinned ahead down the winding road that appeared to lead farther onto the campus.
Oh-kay. So Fanny was a weird one. It only made me like her. Even my reaction to this disarming woman was probably part of Chase’s plan. I had to remember: we were in the alpha wolf’s den now. This campus, whatever it actually was, was Chase’s territory.
Fanny hopped onto the open bench seat directly behind the driver and patted the empty spot beside her. “Come. I’ll show you around. I think you’ll begin to relax once you see the lovely campus Magnum has built for you all. And then, when you’re ready, I’ll take you to your new home, where you can get cleaned up and into fresh clothes, then eat and rest.”
New home. The phrase knelled like a bell in my mind, its pitch not quite right. The Periwinkle Hill neighborhood still felt like home even though one fact had already become abundantly clear: neither I nor any of my crew had a true home to return to.
Whatever future we were going to have, and wherever we were going to have it, we’d be building it together.
The “school” consisted of seven buildings connected by a network of sidewalks. It was edged by dense forest on all sides. Manicured foliage accentuated every walkway, flowerbed, and hundreds of planters, though not even Chase’s seemingly limitless funds could urge the plants to grow any faster than the starters most of them still were. The cluster of structures squatted in a shallow valley, the typical hills and mountains of Ridgemore hiding it from view. Unless someone was positioned just right—doing a fly-by or atop the peak of a neighboring mountain—I doubted anyone would know the institute existed. I suspected that was part of the location’s appeal.
The three largest buildings were situated in the center. In the middle was the academic building, which put Ridgemore High to shame with its gleaming surfaces, elegant minimalist design, and state-of-the-art tech with half a dozen classrooms, two student labs, and an auditorium. A physical training center that had me all but drooling stood to one side of the academic building. It had enough exercise equipment to accommodate an entire football, soccer, and baseball team at the same time during peak training season. It boasted a pool that was half-Olympic-sized (which made it far larger than any other swimming pool in Ridgemore), and hot tubs and saunas in both the women’s and men’s locker rooms. Best of all, it had a vast open space with high ceilings, climbing ropes hanging from them, and vertical obstacle courses. The floors were lined with sparring mats, and one entire wall was adorned with weapons of all sorts, from practice wooden swords and staffs to actual lethal katanas and nunchucks, plus a bunch of tools the lot of us, as obsessed with “ninja” training as we were, had never seen. Once our bodies finished recovering from being shot and killed, I guessed we’d be spending most of our free time here. If Chase was planning to offer us true ninja training, complete with competent instructors, then we might just be getting cozy with the damn devil. He’d killed us all, but at a facility like this we could train to never be prey to his ilk again. We could actually learn to master whatever power immortality granted us.
On the other side of the academic building sat a co-ed dormitory with an amazing recreation center that took up most of the ground floor. There were nooks with cushy couches; pool, foosball, and ping-pong tables; giant TVs and game consoles. I had to keep my jaw from dropping yet again when I spotted a three-lane bowling alley along the back length of the rec center. It was a co-ed’s dream—assuming whoever was intended to use this room didn’t have to die to get here like we did. When we’d asked Fanny if we were going to be living in the dorms, she’d assured us thatMagnumhad built something special just for us.
I was all for being special, fuck yes. But despite all this luxury, I wasn’t sure I enjoyed being special to someone like Chase.
The laboratory facility for his scientists was almost as large as the training center, and I couldn’t help but note how Fanny’s tour of the structure was more superficial than any other campus building before it. Individual labs of all kinds and sizes lined multiple hallways, and when Fanny led us into the elevator, a sensor in the keypad required her key-pass to access any level beyond the ground floor. Above ground, the building appeared to have three levels. Of course, I couldn’t be sure, but my love of books and movies told me a baddy like Chase would totally have a few levels of underground secret labs. That’d be where all the really bad shit happened. If he’d had no problem openly gunning down a bunch of teenagers, at a busy high school no less, I didn’t want to begin to ponder what kind of activities he might deem worth hiding. I really didn’t.
Rounding out the campus was a dormitory for the scientists and other employees, who apparently wouldn’t be leaving the campus either (there was a dining hall and a store for snacks and small, miscellaneous items—no payment required for any of it), and an administration building. Chase’s office comprised the entire top floor of the three-story admin building, but Fanny didn’t take us up there.
Across all of it, the branding that was ubiquitous in every other educational or corporate building I’d ever been in was glaringly absent. If Chase hadn’t announced this was an institute for the advancement of immortals, we wouldn’t have known it. Evidently, huge amounts of money did succeed in buying quite a lot of secrecy, even in a town like Ridgemore, which was as fond of its gossip as any other standard small town.
Fanny had informed us that our tour was over and we were heading to our new “home” when her tablet pinged. Her mouth pinched when she glanced at it. Given that so far she was the closest thing to an ally we had here, I didn’t like her reaction.
While replying to the message, she told the driver, “Don, change of plans. One final stop before we head to the house: the office.”
Don, who was a middle-aged man with a military haircut and bearing, swerved into an immediate U-turn and then sped up, driving us back in the direction we’d come from.
