11. Chapter 11

My cozy retreat from reality didn"t last long. I woke to a ghostly chill walking up my arm, leaving tingling and goose bumps in its wake. It took me longer than it should have to realize that the sensation wasn"t just "ghostly" but was an actual ghost trying to get my attention. I sat up with a muffled "umph?"

Ambrose and Hasumi, who were both still tangled around me, woke abruptly at my motion, the pair of them sitting up with much more grace and alertness than I possessed.

Elijah hovered beside the bed, the bright blue orbs of his eyes glowing with lingering traces of his soul magic and the see-through planes of his handsome face drawn into a strange expression somewhere between worry and confusion.

"Say that again," I muttered, willing myself to fully wake up and pay attention this time. "What is it now? The wards feel fine. Is the world collapsing around us?" Honestly, I wouldn"t be the least bit surprised, considering that I had literally created this entire pocket world on a whim and stuck it to the side of the Angelic realm like a barnacle. It was just a matter of time before my unstable spell fell apart or the angels noticed our presence and booted us off. I was kind of expecting it, to be honest.

Elijah did his weird hand wringing thing, ghostly hands fusing together then pulling apart. "We have received… mail," he said, clearly repeating himself now that I was actually awake.

I arched my brows. "Mail?"

He sighed a ghostly sigh. "Yes. An envelope. It"s in the kitchen. Dyre scanned it for magical traps, but no one is sure how it got here, and it was addressed to you."

Sighing out my frustration, I nudged Ambrose aside so I could climb out of bed. I was curious, to say the least. How could we get mail in a pocket world? But I could also feel the tension settling in around my shoulders again. I was pretty sure this was going to be one more problem to add to the constantly growing list of shit we had to deal with.

I tugged on my clothes and reattached my insulin pump to my infusion site. Checking the screen, I confirmed that my blood sugar hadn"t tanked after my recent exertions, then clipped the device to my waistband.

My ongoing levels of stress certainly didn"t help with the diabetes.

Ambrose and Hasumi both dressed, kissed me on the head, then used magic to transport themselves elsewhere. I glanced at Elijah. "This is probably something bad," I said tiredly. "What are the chances this is something good for once?"

He floated closer, trailing a cool, misty almost-touch along my arm. "As my people would say, there is always hope. Perhaps if you pray?"

I snorted at the wry tone in his hollow voice. The dead angel had long ago confided that angels were full of shit and mostly just used the "holy" angle to take advantage of gullible mortals and make themselves feel superior.

But that didn"t mean there wasn"t a higher power of some sort. "Goddess help us all," I muttered as I headed out of the room and toward the sweeping staircase that led to the main level.

The invocation wasn"t as flippant as it sounded. As much as I might want to bitch and complain about my lot in life, it could have been much worse, many times over, so maybe someone was listening out there after all? I mean, I wasn"t dead. I had a roof over my head (even if said roof was currently in a tenuously tethered pocket world). And I had my new family with me. If that wasn"t divine intervention, I didn"t know what was.

I reminded myself of that as I made my way down the stairs and to the kitchen. I found the others all standing around the sturdy kitchen table that had probably belonged to generations of Lovell"s, with its ornately carved legs and dully gleaming wood infused with soft magic. In the center of the table was a fairly mundane-looking envelope with my name scrawled across it in bright green ink.

"So… did it just… appear, or what?" I asked as I moved to stand next to Niamh in the circle of people currently staring at a piece of paper like it might be a bomb.

"I felt it slip through the wards," Zhong said, lifting a big hand to run it over the back of his neck. "It took me a while to find it, though. It was just… here. We haven"t moved it." The gargoyle wasn"t a heavy magic user, but his species could sense magic and he was uniquely dialed-in to the protective magic that guarded the house. It was in his DNA to protect his master"s home.

I should have felt anything attempting to come through the wards, but I had been a bit distracted for the last little while. And also… if it didn"t come with malicious intent, the wards wouldn"t have reacted much. I looked to Dyre, since he was the strongest magic user here when it came to evil spells and such. Hasumi and the others might have more innate magic, but the spellcasting involved in this kind of trickery was different. Plus, Dyre had Sunshine, and the wraith"s deep well of knowledge and experience far outstripped anyone else here.

The necromancer was glaring at the envelope like he wanted to set it on fire, his violet eye narrowed suspiciously. "I can"t sense anything dangerous on it. But it is spelled." His eyes met mine, and I tried not to think about how rare that was these days. Usually, he avoided looking at me at all costs. "Sympathetic magic, I think," he continued. "Probably sent using a link to Lovell magic."

I sighed and reached for the damned envelope. The others tensed, but Dyre didn"t protest, so it was probably fine. Nothing exploded, and I didn"t drop dead, so I opened the stupid thing and pulled out the thick, folded paper inside.

It was a… pamphlet? A flyer of some sort. Like a little old-fashioned newssheet.

Dear Discerning Reader, it was addressed. I glanced at the others, then skimmed through the rest. It was put together to be eye catching and sensational, like a gossip magazine.

What have our magnificent and noble guardians at the Supernatural Alliance been up to?

Under that bold heading was a sarcastic and to-the-point list of the SA"s recent activities, with choice words and passages set apart in a bold font now and then for effect. I paused and re-read a particularly interesting passage out loud.

"It has come to this writer"s attention that the organization sworn to protect us is, in fact, rife with lies and internal strife. In particular, we found it interesting to hear from one of our contacts that the descendant of a well-known witch family was recently falsely accused of sins against our society, when in reality she was merely a convenient scapegoat to cover up the Alliance"s own less-than savory activities. This individual, while powerful, has done much to separate herself from the evil of her family name, and is guilty of nothing more than being a convenient target to distract the public from the Alliance"s true goals."

"The organization that governs the magical world is corrupt. But we do not expect intelligent, discerning citizens who can think for themselves to take our word on this. We will provide evidence. Please be on the lookout for more information to come."

"Holy shit," I said on an exhale, not sure what to feel about this. "Someone just threw down the gauntlet and asked the SA to come murder them." And they seemed to be trying to clear my name….

I glanced at the confused faces around me. "Bella. It"s Bella and Junaid. It has to be. Who else could get this through the wards?"

Bella could use blood magic, a sympathetic spell to send the envelope to the home she grew up in, or something like that. That or she had managed to make some connection to her blood relative currently living here. Maybe. Probably. I was a largely untrained witch, and even if I knew everything the textbooks had to offer, I doubted the lessons covered mail delivery while occupying a self-created pocket world…. so… just a guess.

"That sounds like the most likely explanation," Niamh said, putting a hand on my shoulder.

The others mostly nodded in agreement, though I didn"t think Dyre looked completely convinced.

"She"s going to get herself killed," I said tiredly. Not that I didn"t appreciate her rather amusing attempt to clear my name so we could leave this purgatory, but… yeah, if this was Bella, and she was distributing these things… she had just painted a massive target on her back.