He pushed a button on the phone and set it on the coffee table.”
“I feel like I’ve become the Oracle,” Jill complained.
I gave Zack a puzzled look as he burst out laughing. “It’s from the Batman comics,” he explained to me. “Barbara Gordon—the first Batgirl—was shot by The Joker and paralyzed, and so she became The Oracle, a computer expert and information hacker who provided intelligence to other superheroes.”
“There was more than one Batgirl?” I asked weakly.
Zack heaved a sigh. “You have so much to learn.”
I snorted. “No, I think I’m perfectly fine not knowing how many Batgirls there were.”
“No results for any of those names,” Jill’s voice piped up. “What next?”
“Okay, so who owns this house?” I said. I waited impatiently as the sound of clicking keys came through the speaker.
“Company named Imperium LLC,” she said after a few seconds. “And before you ask, yes, I’m searching the Secretary of State records to see who’s behind that.” A few more seconds. “Oh, good grief,” she muttered. “Corporate name, Posterula Inc. Searching on that now.” A pause. “Crap, it may take a while to dig through all these layers.”
I stopped my semblance of pacing. “Don’t worry about that right now. Are there any other properties in this area owned by Imperium?”
“Hang on. Yeah, two others. A residence in Clearwater Estates and a strip mall on the east end of town on Oakwood Street. I’ll text you the addresses.”
“Any chance either of those are in our ‘hot zone?’?” I asked.
“Nope. Sorry.”
Nothing about this was going to be easy, obviously. “Okay, thanks a million, Jill. We’re going to go check those two spots out. If you find out anything else, give us a shout.”
“Will do!” came the cheery reply, then she clicked off.
“Okay, kiddos,” I said, “We don’t have much time. I can’t sense wards as long as I have this on, so I’m going to be relying on y’all to point them out to me.”
“You mean Ryan,” Zack said with an easy smile, but there was a glint in his eye. “I can’t see wards.”
“Oh, right,” I said with a laugh. “My mistake.” I held his gaze for another heartbeat. Find a way to warn me if you see something dangerous, I thought, hoping it would come through somehow. I knew perfectly well Zack was capable of seeing and manipulating wards, and with far more skill than Ryan seemed to currently possess. Ryan would hopefully be able to tell if any protections were in place, but I had no way of knowing just how far his demonic lord powers had been throttled back. With the loss of Eilahn, I was relying on Zack’s skill more than ever.
He broke the gaze, but not before giving me an infinitesimal nod. He understood.
“Let’s ditch this joint,” I said, “and hope to hell that we find something useful in one of the other places.”
Chapter 22
Traffic was a fucking bitch, adding to the mounting frustration already plaguing us. Tracy’s threat about finding a way to motivate me haunted me, and I knew I needed to be prepared. I knew without a doubt that he needed me alive only because he intended for me to end up dead or drained or something worse. Personally, I wanted to avoid that sort of fate.