Claimed

by Sarah Fine

  BY SARAH FINE

  SERVANTS OF FATE

  Marked

  Claimed

  GUARDS OF THE SHADOWLANDS

  Sanctum

  Fractured

  Chaos

  Captive: A Guard’s Tale from Malachi’s Perspective

  Vigilante: A Guard’s Tale from Ana’s Perspective

  Stories from the Shadowlands

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 Sarah Fine

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477849590

  ISBN-10: 1477849599

  Cover design by Cliff Nielsen

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014953643

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  EXCERPT: FATED

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  Memories are nothing but a collection of electrical pulses and chemicals. Neurotransmitters sliding into receptors like hands into gloves. Acetylcholine. Serotonin. Galena closed her eyes and turned her face up to the spray of lukewarm water. She ran the washcloth over her breasts and down to where the scars lay in raised welts just below her belly button. This was always the toughest part. My body is a complex machine. A conglomeration of cells, each one with a designated purpose.

  Breaking it down systematically helped her ward off the images and sounds that always hovered at the edges of her consciousness, ready to flood in the moment she let down her guard.

  “No,” she whispered. “Memories are merely synaptic connections forged through covalent alteration of proteins and—” A knock on the door made her heart pound.

  “G? The car is here for you,” Eli called.

  Galena laid her hand over her chest. “Okay,” she said, trying to sound steady.

  It didn’t work. “Hey, you all right?” he asked, his deep voice muffled by the door between them.

  “Sure.” She turned the water off and grabbed a towel, her hands shaking.

  When she opened the bathroom door, her brother was leaning against the wall. His green eyes met hers. “You’re not okay.”

  She looked away, clutching the towel around her body. “I will be as soon as I get to the lab.”

  “Have you eaten yet today?”

  “I’m a grown-up, little brother.”

  He poked her shoulder, gentle but insistent. “A grown-up who hasn’t been eating much. Seriously, don’t you need to feed that genius brain of yours?” He was trying to sound playful, but Galena could hear the concern.

  “I’ll grab something on my way to work.”

  He bowed his head. “When I came in this morning from my shift, I heard you having a nightmare. You were reliving what happened, and I can tell it’s on your mind.”

  “But it’s at the bottom of a very long list,” Galena said quickly. “Two of my volunteers were scheduled to check in today. I’ll be too busy searching for side effects of the vaccine to think about anything else.” Like the fact that she’d nearly been killed last week and that there were a lot of people—wait, were they people? Galena wasn’t terribly clear about that—who still wanted her dead.

  Eli nudged her chin up. “I know the past week has been horrible. Tell me what I can do to make things better for you. I’ll do anything.”

  She sidestepped him. “Get back to living your life and stop worrying so much.”

  “Um, you know I’m technically dead, right?”

  Yes, she knew. She just couldn’t wrap her head around it. A week ago she’d watched him get shot repeatedly and heal in a matter of minutes. And that wasn’t even the strangest thing she’d witnessed that day. Eli was something called a Ker now, an immortal servant of death who Marked people fated to die and decided how those people would perish. The leader of the Kere was Jason Moros, who had masqueraded as a plain old Harvard administrator and lured her to Boston, but who, evidently, was actually thousands of years old and the living personification of doom. And then there was Cacy Ferry, Eli’s paramedic partner and girlfriend, who was a member of the wealthiest family in Boston . . . a family that was apparently responsible for ferrying deceased souls to Heaven or Hell.

  Galena’s long dark-blonde hair dripped water down her back as she stood there trying to separate all the craziness into components she could comprehend. That strategy usually worked—it was how she’d survived the past two years—but in this case, said components defied common sense, not to mention the known laws of physics and chemistry. She was at a loss.

  “Yes. Technically dead.” She reached out and took Eli’s hand. His skin was hot, like he had a fever, even though she knew he would never get sick again. Eli had told her it was simply part of being a Ker, but like so many other things, it would take some getting used to. “I guess I should be glad that ‘technically’ doesn’t really encompass what’s going on, then. But all I meant was that you should go to work. Spend time with Cacy. And stop hovering. Same goes for all those creepy lurkers in the Veil.”

  The Veil. Eli had described this supposed in-between world that Kere and Ferrys could enter, and had told her that Mr. Moros had posted some of his guards there, close to her, in order to ensure her safety. And though she wasn’t keen on the idea of unseen beings peeking in on her, she knew she needed them.

  A week ago, the former leader of the Ferry family had nearly taken her out.

  Galena pressed her fingers to her temple, remembering the sensation of unforgiving steel against her skin, picturing Rylan Ferry’s finger closing over the trigger as he threatened to destroy her brain. She suppressed a sudden shiver and forced a smile. “I need to get dressed.” She let go of Eli’s hand and ducked past him, relieved to put a door between them.

  It didn’t keep her from hearing his sigh. “I’ll never stop worrying about you,” he called out. “That’s the way family works.”

  “I know,” she called through the door. She sat down on her bed and focused on slowing her breathing. “Believe me, I know.” She’d experienced the stark, merciless certainty that she’d lost him on more than one occasion. “And I do appreciate
the protection. As long as they don’t watch me in the shower.”

  Eli chuckled. “If they tried, they’d have to deal with me. Love you, G. I need to get going or I’m going to be late for work.”

  “Be safe.”

  “You too,” he said quietly. She heard his footsteps carrying him away from her, then the front door opening and closing a moment later.

  Galena sagged on the bed. “Move,” she whispered to herself. “Keep moving. Motor cortex engagement is incompatible with rumination.”

  She got up, pulled on drawstring pants and a T-shirt, and yanked her damp hair into a ponytail. It didn’t really matter how she looked. Her only companions at work were her computer, which she’d named Danny, and her lab assistants, Ankita and Jian, who were as focused on the research as she was.

  Still mumbling to herself about neurotransmitters and electrical pulses, she put on her shoes, grabbed her bag, and stepped out of her apartment to see the sleek black amphibious limousine parked at the curb. As always, the thickly humid air required a breath or two to get used to. When she’d first arrived in Boston, she had felt like she was drowning, and even now, with the late afternoon sun starting to sink, it was sweltering. Galena flapped her ponytail in an effort to create a breeze against the back of her neck, already prickling with beads of sweat. She didn’t miss much about Pittsburgh, the violent, desolate town where she’d grown up, but its desert heat was better than this.

  The limousine driver, who had reddish hair cut short like Eli’s had been when he was an Army Ranger, stood square-shouldered and alert next to the open back door. He’d driven her to work for the last few days, good-natured about accommodating her strange schedule. “Dr. Margolis,” he said, giving her a curt nod.

  “Hey, Mike,” she said, peeking in the front to see who was sitting in the passenger seat. An armed guard was there, scanning the streets and buildings around them. He was new. She eyed him carefully as she slid onto the supple leather backseat, and she flinched as Mike slammed the door.

  It was only a five-minute ride to her lab, along the streets of Cambridge just north of the Charles River canal zone, but Galena used the time to work, looking over initial results from the first human trials of the vaccine. Her vaccine. The one she’d been researching and developing for years. It was perhaps the world’s only hope of conquering the mutating plagues that had claimed a billion lives since a series of earthquakes and tsunamis had decimated dozens of major cities, and rising temperatures and ocean levels had changed the face of the world. Those environmental catastrophes, as well as shifting climates that had turned half of the US into a desert wasteland and the other half into a swamp, had set technological development back a century at least. That was way back in the 2050s, though, and now, decades later, there was a chance to stem the soaring death rate caused by viruses and bacteria resistant to conventional vaccines and antibiotics. Because if it worked, her vaccine would enable the human body to produce antibodies that mutated right along with the diseases they were made to fight.

  But it had also made her a target. Apparently, some of the Kere and the Ferrys, who both made money off death, were not big on delayed gratification—and her vaccine could prolong millions, if not billions, of lives.

  “. . . said that transit is the most vulnerable time,” Mike was saying.

  Galena snapped out of her own thoughts, listening.

  “Yeah,” said the guard. “I’m glad we’ve got backup.”

  Galena looked out the rear window to see another black car trailing them. When she turned back around, the guard was looking at her. “That’s us, Dr. Margolis. Nothing to worry about.”

  He smiled. She looked away. It had been her habit for two years now. Returning a stranger’s smile could be dangerous. Especially if that person was a man. Especially if—

  She stuffed the memories down. “When you say transit is a vulnerable time . . .”

  “The Kere who are guarding you can be anywhere in a fraction of a second, but it’s not like they can run through the Veil and keep up with a moving vehicle,” said the guard. “They’ll be waiting at your lab when we arrive. Not that you’ll see them.”

  “What if I want to see them?”

  “Can’t help you there. They work for Moros, and we work for the Ferrys. They’ve got their own protocol. But Aislin Ferry wants to make sure you’re as safe as possible, so she’s doubled the personnel on your transport.”

  Aislin Ferry was Cacy’s older sister and the new CEO of Psychopomps Inc. She was also, apparently, the new Charon, the leader of all the Ferrys in the world. She was the second new Charon in the last month. Her oldest brother, Rylan, had taken over for their father the day he was murdered—and Aislin had seized power when they discovered that Rylan was the one responsible.

  Galena wondered if there was some new threat that had prompted this increase in security, but then she decided she didn’t want to know. She needed to stay on track—no more distractions. She put her tablet phone back in her bag as Mike pulled up in front of the brick building that housed her lab.

  The guard, a looming presence by her side, escorted her to the door. He held his automatic weapon in what Eli had once described as the “low ready position,” the muzzle angled toward the ground and a finger straight along the barrel. Galena hated guns.

  But she hated knives even more.

  She shuddered, and her heart kicked against her ribs. To increase the likelihood of survival, a body under stress increases production of epinephrine and norepinephrine, which elevates heart rate and blood pressure . . .

  The guard opened the door for her, and she darted inside. “I’ll be fine from here. And I’ll call when I’m ready for a ride home. Thanks!” she said, her voice hitching as she scooted through the entryway, never once looking back. She was almost running as she reached the stairwell that led to the basement.

  Her footsteps were still rapid as she made her way down the tiled hallway, but when the white doors of her lab came into view, her taut muscles relaxed and her skittering thoughts fell into place. She leaned forward for a retinal scan, and then the lab doors slid aside and she strode into her own personal paradise. The chair of Immunology, Dr. Elaine Cassidy, had made sure Galena had exactly what she needed, from equipment to carefully controlled room temperature. She smiled—the department chair had been her rock for the last month, checking in nearly every day to ask if Galena needed anything else. As a prominent researcher herself, Dr. Cassidy understood the implications of Galena’s work and seemed determined to help her succeed.

  A row of nanopore DNA sequencers took up most of one side of the lab. In the middle of the room was Danny. Behind the computer sat the temperature-controlled cases that held the samples of her meticulously tailored antigens. To create each, she holographically manipulated the antigen macromolecules, and then Danny punched out information on stability, synthesis, and other immunologic biometrics for each configuration, which enabled her to test them in culture and tissue samples. She loved working with the holographic projections the most. It was like dancing with atoms. Waltzing with cells. Wrestling with lethal single-celled organisms that she was determined to defeat. She couldn’t believe how lucky she was, that this was her job.

  Jian came out of the supply room, carrying a metal box of wires and data chips. His black hair was neatly parted but sticking up in the back, and under his lab coat, his button-down was sloppily tucked in to his khakis. He jerked back in surprise when he saw her. “I didn’t expect you until later.”

  “I wanted to get an early start tonight. What are you up to?”

  His brow furrowed. “You know what I’m up to.” He inclined his head toward the sequencers.

  “Oh no—is one of them acting up?” Damn. She hoped it didn’t interfere with her analyses.

  “Yeah,” he said slowly. “One’s acting up. I’m on it, though.” He turned and disappeared behind the machines.

  Curious, Galena followed and saw Jian sit cross-legged on the floor in fr
ont of the third sequencer from the left. He peered up at her. “Do you need something?” he asked.

  “Is that the machine we used to sequence V3?” They didn’t refer to the human volunteers by name, though Galena knew each one of them. She knew their DNA, too. She’d used their profiles to customize their vaccines.

  Jian shrugged. “You’d have to ask Ankita. She headed home about an hour ago, though.”

  “Did V1 and V2 come in today for their lab tests?”

  “We sent you the usual updates, like you requested.” Every word was tinged with annoyance, and Jian looked at the floor as he spoke.

  Galena watched his fingers clamp tightly over the closed box. “Are you okay?”

  “Just trying to get this done,” he snapped. “That’s what you want, right?” He squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m sorry. It’s just been . . . a lot lately.”

  “I know it has. But we’ve been making such rapid progress. I think that’s something to be proud of.”

  Jian opened his eyes and looked up at her. For a moment, confusion clouded his face, but when he blinked, it was gone. “It’s definitely something,” he said, nodding. “I never thought I’d get to work on something this important.”

  She grinned. “We’re going to make history, Jian. I promise.” She turned and walked back to Danny, eager to look up the new lab results from her first two human volunteers. Sure, the vaccine had already been tested on rats, but a human Phase I trial was more complex. The work was so urgent that her team at the University of Pittsburgh had pushed through the preclinical trials in half the time. Here at Harvard, the Institutional Review Board had expedited her application, approving her next series of clinical trials dizzyingly fast. There had been constant oversight, but Galena sometimes wondered if, in their rush to create the vaccine, they’d been careful enough. If they hadn’t, her volunteers would suffer the consequences. She wanted to make sure they were healthy.

  She swiped her fingertips across Danny’s wide screen and opened the daily update she asked her assistants to write up, since she usually came in late and worked through the night. In the well-lit windowless lab, she could hide from the darkness; somehow her nightmares were a little easier to handle in the daylight.