27. Jaxson
27
Jaxson
O nce all this is over, whether it ends with me as the Oracle or with me burning the entire Sovereignty to the ground, I’m going to lock Lauressa and me in a room for a week and fuck her until the only thing she remembers is my name. It may take longer, stubborn as she is. I may have to take her down to my private altar and tie her up to a cross while I torment and fuck her, especially if I tell her that’s what I hope to accomplish. Then I’ll take her into the bathroom, run a hot bath, and let her soak in it until the water is almost cold just like she likes and order Chinese food from that spot she’s so fond of.
I’m going to have to find some excuse to get back to Chicago before Vindication Day. Likely, I’ll go back to report my findings about Dr. Cult to my father, if he doesn’t call me back to the city more enraged than he already is considering what we’ve got planned next. I’ll have to make sure to have prepared something that I can deceive him into thinking is progress in the meantime.
But even then, it’ll be at least a month. Just the thought of it agitates me. The problem with that is that I’m always thinking about the next time I can be with Lauressa when we’re separated, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to see her; therefore, I’m agitated all the time.
The only one close enough to me in South Carolina to notice and be bold enough to call it out is J, who gives me an unimpressed look that looks eerily like Lauressa’s and says, “What’s got you in such a bitchy fucking mood?”
I don’t deign to answer the question, though I do end up restricting his evening screen time for the offense later, knowing full well that he’ll know why I’m doing it.
After a week and a half, I’m in a much better mood, my irritation reinvigorating my determination to take my father down, along with his precious Sovereignty if needed. The third Friday of the month comes, and I prepare myself to personally go visit the ports and find out exactly what Josiah Sanford was picking up and taking all the way to Chicago.
It’s nearing nine-thirty PM, and I’m finishing up some work for the day when there’s a knock on my office door. Idly, I tell them to come in, assuming that it’s J. My assumption is immediately proven wrong.
“Swanky little place you got here,” Landon says, leaning in the doorway. “Guess that’s what happens when you choose to become a businessman instead of relying on the charity of the Sovereigns because of your service to the Supreme Force and it's Sovereignty.”
“What are you doing here?” I ask curtly.
“Security let me up.”
“That doesn’t answer my question. ”
“Hello to you too,” Landon says, plopping down in a chair. “Would have been here earlier, but my flight kept getting delayed due to weather. It’s nasty in the Chi right now.”
“Landon.”
“Jaxson,” he parrots my tone. I don’t let up, and he rolls his eyes. “You are such a sourpuss. I’m here because I’ve been looking into Dr. Cult and their podcast. I was talking to my mother about it, and most of it is lies, for sure. But the stuff on there that’s true, you’d only know if you were either close to Raphael or you were close to the previous Oracle and his family.”
“Landon.”
“So I went through all the people that would have been around and that opposed our dad back in the day and found all those who are still alive.”
“Landon.”
“His sisters are all still alive, and two of the six conduits still living never joined our father.”
“Landon,” I snap loudly, causing him to finally shut up. “No.”
“What do you mean no?” Landon snaps.
I get up to leave my office. I have to leave soon. I’d rather be too early than too late to see what exactly happens on the third Friday of the month. Landon, unfortunately, follows.
“Jaxson,” Landon shouts.
“I don’t have time for this,” I say. “I have a meeting to get to.”
“This late at night?”
“You didn’t seem to have a problem with it. Unexpectedly at that. ”
Landon rolls his eyes. “You’re my brother. That’s different.”
“I don’t. Have. Time,” I say.
“You don’t have time to track down and deal with the people slandering the Sovereignty? Slandering our family? Slandering our father? I know you didn’t give a shit about your mother, but I care about mine. And you don’t see what this is doing to her. She can’t sleep. She’s always nervous. She can’t even eat! And you know how much she likes to eat.”
“Landon. I’m handling it,” I say as I grab a dark jacket.
“That’s what your meeting's about, isn’t it?” Landon asks. Then he frowns. “Wait. Didn’t you look into Dr. Cult last year?”
I pause. I’d been hoping that Landon forgot about that little exchange we had at the dinner table last year and the little nod of assurance I gave him that I’d look into it.
“You know something, you bastard,” Landon says. “What do you know? Did you tell the Oracle?”
“I’ll talk to you about it when I get back,” I say, and have hopefully come up with a way to throw Landon off, I don’t add.
“If this has to do with Dr. Cult, let me come. I want in.”
“I have another mission from our dear father.”
“Something more pressing than this whole Dr. Cult debacle?”
He, unfortunately, has me there.
“I’m coming whether you like it or not. If you leave, I’ll just follow you.”
I momentarily lament that I can’t just slit my brother’s throat and drag his body to deal with later. But, unfortunately, it would possibly draw too much unwanted attention from my father, trying to figure out what was going on, and serve as a “sign” that our enemies are closing in, uniting and reinforcing his rule, and making all the work Lauressa has put into turning the Sovereignty against my father futile. Speaking of Lauressa, she’d be upset if I murdered Landon. She seems to like him a lot, and he seems to adore her. I’d be worried if I didn’t know Landon as well as I do.
In the end, I decide I don’t have time to continue trying to talk Landon down or try knocking him out and restraining him.
“Come on,” I say to him.
Landon grins and follows me to a black, nondescript car that no one will notice or remember if they do notice.
“Where’s your security?” Landon asks.
“Where’s Caleb?” I ask in return as I pull out into the street.
“Covering for the duties I’m not attending to in Chicago—You were really going to go in the middle of the night by yourself to investigate something with Dr. Cult?” he asks. “Jaxson. Do you know how dangerous that is? You’re not just the Oracle’s son. You’re the Oracle’s heir. What if this is a trap to—”
I’m safer alone at night than I am at any given Altar in the Sovereignty. Safer surrounded by sharks with a bleeding wound than I probably am sitting at my father’s dinner table with his most loyal men around.
But Landon doesn’t believe that the people most dangerous to either of us sit in the Sovereignty, starting with our father, so I say instead, “I guess we’ll find out if those self-defense lessons we took are worth anything. ”
Landon is blessedly silent the rest of the way to the port. He’s even silent as we get set up high on top of a building to overlook what will potentially happen, along with a powerful mic that I have set up to pick up voices only and tune out the other sounds of the port.
Once everything is situated, though, he asks, “Jaxson, what the hell is this?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I’m here to find out.”
“Here to find out what?”
I don’t answer.
“This has nothing to do with Dr. Cult, does it?” Landon states more than asks.
“You’re the one who insisted on coming.”
“Jaxs—”
“Be quiet,” I snap as the microphone picks up talking. But not the sound of adults.
“Are those children?” Landon asks as he picks up on the same thing.
“Oh, Supreme Force. Oh, fuck. J, what the hell is this? What is Priest Jaxson really looking into?”
“I don’t know, Rini.”
“Shit,” I say, and then when I see two shadows sprinting across the port, I add, “Fuck.”
“Language,” Landon says as he follows me down from the roof to where the two shadows are running to leave.
“I’m going to murder both of you,” I snap as I round the corner of the container where the two stopped to catch their breath.
Both teens shriek .
“Jaxson!” J says in relief, and then in the light coming off the pier, his face turns white as he says, less relieved, “Jaxson!”
I don’t ask what they’re doing here. It’s clear what they were doing. I should have expected it. But I never thought Serenity would dare lie to her mother and sneak out of the house. She’s stupidly brave, but I didn’t think that stupidly brave.
The memory of my sister, Candace, saying a similar thing to Magdalene, Jessie, and me as teenagers comes to mind after she caught us doing something that probably would have warranted us getting time out of the Sovereignty if she’d been willing to report us for it. This has to be karma. A karma I walked right into all because I saw a beautiful woman, my own personal Delilah, and like Samson, the prophet, I couldn’t resist, and now continue to pay for it. First Landon. Then these two. This night—
“Someone’s coming,” Landon says, drawing my attention to headlights coming directly up the port.
I snatch both Serenity and J behind a stack of crates and hope that Landon has the sense to shut up and follow.
The car passes by, headed in the direction that Serenity and J came from. I need to follow them and figure out where it’s going. But I also can’t leave Tweddle Dee, Dumb, and Dumber.
“They’re going to that shipping container,” J says.
“What shipping container?” I ask.
“Priest Jaxson,” Serenity says, whirling around to face me. “It’s awful. All those girls. The one that’s been there longest has been there for four weeks now. They’re sex workers. They get in the car with a client and then the next thing they know, they’re being drugged and taken here.”
“From overseas?” I ask.
“No! They all speak English. They’re from here. Well, not just South Carolina, but all over the South. One of the girls told us she overheard men talking about money and payment. And she got a glimpse of the man, and we showed her a picture of Priest Maines. I can’t believe this. I knew he was an asshole and knew he was probably stealing money somehow. But this? We’re supposed to be helping the downtrodden and forgotten, not—”
“Rini,” J says, cutting off the girl’s indignant rant of Sovereignty indoctrination about our mission before I can now that I’ve got the information I need. He turns to me and says, raising his phone, “I recorded the whole thing.”
“Good job,” I admit as I take his phone. J beams, only for him to groan when I say, “You’re still grounded.”
“Grounded! For how long?”
“The rest of your life,” I say. If I believed people went to heaven and looked down on us, I’m sure Candace would be laughing at me right now.
“But we helped!”
“By happenstance. You could have gotten yourself shipped right off to Chicago along with those girls,” I say, guiding both children away to where we hid the car.
“Chicago?” Landon says.
“We can’t leave! We have to help those girls,” Serenity exclaims.
“We will,” I assure .
“But we’re leaving,” she says, trying to dig her feet into the ground, but I simply drag her along, my physical strength, thankfully, stronger than a teenage girl’s stubbornness.
“Only for now,” my brother assures, and I’d honestly forgotten he was there. “The Oracle won’t stand for this. But right now, we don’t know what kind of danger we’d be walking into if we confront Priest Maines now.”
That seems to calm Serenity down, and she starts walking on her own again. Thus, I wait until we’re in the car, the child safety locks on the back doors flipped on, and well away from the docks before I break the silence of the ride and say, “We’re not telling the Oracle.”
“You bastard!” Serenity yells.
“Are you fucking kidding me right now?” Landon says just as loud.
The two start talking over each other at once to yell at me. I look at J in the rearview mirror, who is lying back with his hands over his face, looking exactly how I feel right now.
Once Serenity and Landon are done yelling, because I was never getting a word in edgewise over the two, Landon says, “You may not be telling the Oracle, but I’m going to.”
“You’re not.”
“And why not?”
“Because the Oracle is behind this.”
It’s as if I’ve physically punched Landon and Serenity, the way the wind goes out of them.
“You’re lying,” Serenity says.
“You’ve been corrupted,” Landon adds .
“I’m not.”
“Then how the hell could you blame the Oracle for this? Next thing you’re going to tell me is that those things Dr. Cult and Raphael’s followers are accusing him of are true,” Landon snaps.
I let my silence to his accusation do the talking on that one. Truthfully, there’s no way to know, even if I did care that it was true or not. It’s a bunch of people’s words and what they think they witnessed against one man. But it’s not about whether or not my father really did kill Raphael. It’s the perception of the possibility that he could have. That he had all the right motivations and all the opportunity to do it. That he was the last one to see the man before he mysteriously died of natural causes. It all makes sense if a person allows themselves to truly think about it. And the one good thing about the fact that Landon seems to think the world of me, even though after we finally met when he was just seven and I was seventeen, I never tried to particularly foster a relationship with him, is that if I prompt him to actually think about it, he will.
“You do think it’s true,” Landon says quietly.
“I investigated. The evidence is compelling, even more so after what I investigated tonight.”
It’s not a lie, but not the complete truth. And Landon isn’t like Lauressa. Lauressa would have noticed that I never said when I investigated. Would notice that I never said I followed the Oracle’s orders. Landon doesn’t, even though it was at the family dinner table that we both exchanged a look that said he knew I was going to look into what our father thought was not a threat anyway .
“You’ve just misunderstood, is all,” Landon finally says after a long moment of silence. “You’re more dedicated to our father and the Sovereignty than any of us. If we just ask him, I’m sure he’ll explain everything.”
“I’m dedicated to the Supreme Force, the Sovereignty, and the Oracle that the Supreme Force anoints for us,” I lie, but it’s what I’m expected to say. It’s what I have to say to someone like Landon, who actually buys into this.
“Our father is the Oracle,” Landon says.
“But was he supposed to be?”
Landon doesn’t say anything for the rest of the ride back to the penthouse. I send J and Serenity to J’s room to wait until I’ve had a chance to talk to Serenity about shutting up about what she heard. But she’s easy enough to deal with. She’s already in trouble for sneaking out at night with J, and by the time her mother and father hear about that, no one is going to believe her when she says that the Oracle’s son believes his father is capable of heinous crimes. My brother is the most pressing matter, and that’s proven when I turn to him, holding his phone in his hand.
“I’m going back to Chicago tomorrow, and I’m going to talk to the Oracle,” Landon says.
“You’re going to ask the man who might be responsible for killing the actual real Oracle and is running a sex trafficking scheme?”
“You don’t know that it’s a sex trafficking scheme. It could be… I don’t know… maybe he needs help on the farm.”
“Because labor trafficking is so much better.”
Landon opens and closes his mouth, and then, as people tend to when slapped with a truth they don’t want to face, a truth that threatens everything they’ve ever known, he resorts to anger.
“You’re wrong,” he finally says with a level of rage I’ve never heard from my usually personable and jovial brother. “And I’m reporting you to the Oracle.”
I find myself wishing for the second time tonight that Landon was someone whose throat I could just slit and become yet another body I have to bury.
“Go ahead,” I say, forced to resort to less brutal methods. “Report me to the Oracle. But then, I’ll out you.”
Landon never has been good at hiding his emotions, having always been the type to wear his heart on his sleeve. So I catch a glimpse of the absolute naked terror that crosses his expression before he tries to hide it behind an ineffective mask.
“What are you talking about?”
I shrug and say, “I know you’re gay. I know Caleb isn’t just your best friend, bodyguard, and roommate. It would be a shame if I were to report you to the Oracle for that.”
Landon’s mouth forms a thin line in anger. “Lauressa told you.”
Of course, Lauressa figured that out.
“No. I’ve known for years. You don’t do a good job of hiding it.”
“You have no proof. It’s slander.”
“Don’t I?” I ask, raising an eyebrow.
“You don’t. ”
I smirk and say, “The men’s retreat. Three years ago. One of my men got a very incriminating video of you and your boyfriend together late at night after taking a swim in the lake naked.”
Landon looks like he might faint.
“It wasn’t what it looked like.”
“So you were wrestling naked?”
“You spied on me,” he accuses, giving up on denying it.
“You were fucking your boyfriend out in the open next to a lake. There was no spying needed.”
It wasn’t the only time my men caught Landon and Caleb together either. Like I said, Landon and Caleb have done a terrible job hiding their relationship, and have had close calls since they were teens. But even though I think the Sovereignty’s blatant homophobia and its stance against homosexuality and queerness is wrong, it doesn’t mean I’m above using it as blackmail against my brother if he doesn't back off. At worst, there will be a scandal that only matters to the Sovereignty. He’ll have to take some time away; he’ll come back saying that it’s just his personal struggle that he knows is a sin and has to resist, and that he just gave in to a moment of weakness. Then, he'll find a woman willing to marry him for show while having an open relationship behind the scenes, and all will be forgotten. And because Landon will eventually figure that out, I change tactics to something that will work more long-term.
“I don’t care about your relationship. I don't think it's wrong, and I don't want to out you,” I say truthfully. “But I will if it’s for the Sovereignty’s sake. Just like I know you might decide that going to the Oracle is more important than being outed. I just ask that before you do, you look over the evidence yourself. If you still truly believe our father isn’t capable of this, that there’s no way any of this could be plausible, then report me.”
Landon silently debates. Because while his indoctrination tells him that he shouldn’t even consider my offer, that he should immediately go to our father, his indoctrination also tells him that he has to hear me out. His indoctrination makes him pause at a buzz phrase like “for the Sovereignty’s sake.” I’m ostensibly doing this for the same reason he is: for the love of the Supreme Force and the Sovereignty. Because above all, the Sovereignty is above everything, even the man calling himself the Oracle if he endangers it.
“And if I believe your evidence ,” he says as though the word is dirty, “has some merit?”
The fact that he’s considering there’s a possibility that this whole thing has merit shows that Landon already has doubts. He just needs to be pushed over the edge. And there’s nothing more coercive in getting someone to do exactly what you want them to do than making them think that it’s their choice.
“You’ll call me,” I say.
“Fine,” Landon says. “Where’s this evidence?”
I lead him to my office and grab the tablet I was working on earlier. I log into the encrypted cloud server and hand it to him. He takes it and silently allows me to lead him to where he can stay for the night.