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“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.
The strip mall ended up being a complete bust, but luckily not one that took too much time to check out. It helped that it stood completely empty, and through all the window fronts we could easily see that there was nothing nefarious going on there. Moreover, Zack gave me the slight shake of his head that told me he couldn’t detect arcane residue of any kind—which would surely be there if Tracy had been summoning anywhere around there.
But the residence was a different matter. It was a small single-story house in the middle of the block in a neighborhood that had probably been decently middle-class a couple of decades ago. Now shriveled grass pushed up between cracks in the sidewalk. Several of the mailboxes had dents in them, testimony to someone’s game of mailbox baseball. Few of the yards were maintained beyond a sporadic mowing, and there were several driveways with cars in them that looked like they hadn’t been moved in a while, to judge from the amount of leaves and pine needles caught in piles against tires. A house further down the street looked like it had been broken into and vandalized a number of times—probably a foreclosure. Several windows were smashed and the door had been tagged with spray paint and other unknown substances. The house we were looking at had no cars in the driveway, and a dried brown lawn that probably hadn’t been cut in six months, but even though it looked and felt like an empty house, it remained untouched by any vandalism.
“This is it,” Ryan murmured. “There are definitely protections around this place.” I flicked my eyes to Zack, and he dipped his head in the barest of nods.
Elation surged through me, quickly followed by frustration. We were on the right track, but now what were we supposed to do? “I can’t do anything about the wards with the cuff on,” I said. Not that I was sure I’d be able to do anything even if I didn’t have it on. There was a reason I called demons to do my heavy ward work. I flicked a glance to Zack. He answered with a faint grimace and shrug, then tapped his watch. In other words, Sure, he could probably get through them, but it would take time. And he would need to do it where Ryan couldn’t see what was going on.
I could get Ryan out of the way, but I didn’t think we had much time.
Ryan scowled. “Do you think he’s in there?”
I considered this. “No,” I finally said. “I think he’s wherever he wants me to go. He said he was going to provide incentive for me.” I rubbed my arms through the coat, then I pushed my sleeve back and narrowed my eyes at the cuff.
“When that arcane grenade-thing went off,” I asked, “what did it feel like? What did it do?”
“Hurt like hell,” Ryan admitted. “And left me super-dizzy for a couple of minutes. Could barely focus my eyes.”
