Part Two – Musings on the Iron Covenant
"Travelling cattle-class in a tuxedo does not make the cow a bull." – R. Lovejoy
"Travelling cattle-class in a tuxedo does not make the cow a bull." – R. Lovejoy
Raoul Lovejoy reclined in his business-class seat as the Airbus levelled off over the Atlantic. The cabin lighting was a sickly approximation of moonlight, and the air smelled faintly of reheated chicken and human anxiety.
He had refused the meal with a smile — a faint curl of the lip that said you have no idea what I eat. The stewardess, all pastel uniform and strained cheer, moved on without protest.
Instead, Lovejoy sipped bottled water and surveyed the other passengers.
“Absolutely poor quality today,” he murmured to himself. “It gets worse and worse. What are humans coming to? Gaunt from gym obsession, bloated from corn syrup, or slouched over their screens like pre-slaughter livestock. Not a decent pulse in sight.”
He allowed himself a small sigh. “Ah well. I’m not here for the cuisine.”
The reason sat, uninvited, in the back of his mind: Driscilla.
Still in thralldom, still tangled in the skein of the Iron Covenant — that charmingly pragmatic fraternity of bruisers and goose-steppers. Their military-grade mind control was no accident. Someone wanted her quiet, pliant, and… unremembering.
Her late husband had been a master of it. A Pentecostal from the cradle — The Radiant Way Ministries — and a misogynist from before that. Lovejoy suspected the man’s religious zeal had always been a mask for his true creed: control.
And then there was 1987.
Driscilla’s brother — twenty-three — murdered in the pine woods near a town in Georgia. Wrapped in barbed wire, stabbed, left like an offering. Her brother had fallen in with bikers, the kind who cross-pollinated with Nazi gangs. It had been a message. Lovejoy could read it even now: We can get to you.
Had the husband done it? Lovejoy thought so. Clever, dominating, steeped in cruelty — and perhaps already circling Driscilla even then. By 1991 he had taken her to Mississippi, close to his family and their Radiant Way flock — Pentecostal in name, cult in practice, and with one boot in the camp of the Iron Covenant.
Now, in 2025, the Covenant had reared its head again. They’d stepped in to keep Driscilla captive the instant the husband’s body cooled — still convinced she might, in some flash of psychic vision, remember too much.
The question was: too much about what? Her nature as Nosferatu? The murder in ’87? Or something bigger?
Lovejoy swirled the water in his glass. “Perhaps all three,” he murmured.
The seatbelt sign chimed. The captain announced their descent into Atlanta.
Lovejoy smiled faintly. “Not quite home of the brave,” he thought. “More home of the goosesteppers. How quaint.”
Somewhere in Mississippi, the game awaited.
"Some men announce themselves with trumpets; others prefer barbed wire and silence." – R. Lovejoy
The Delta concourse was a blur of fluorescent light, tired faces, and overzealous air-conditioning. Lovejoy stepped through it like a wolf through a sheep pen — unnoticed, but in complete command of his space.
He’d travelled light: a slim leather carry-on, a charcoal jacket cut to Savile Row lines, and the air of a man who could buy the airline if he felt so inclined.
At passport control, the officer glanced at the documents, at Lovejoy, and back again. The faintest crease of uncertainty touched his brow. Lovejoy’s smile didn’t shift, but his eyes held the man’s just long enough to murmur something unspoken.
The stamp came down. Thud.
He drifted through Hartsfield-Jackson without hurry, observing the species. Business travellers snapping orders into phones, families herding overtired children, the odd would-be influencer taking selfies against the world’s most uninspiring backdrops.
It wasn’t until the car service door slid open and humid Georgia air slapped him in the face that he caught the first scent.
A whiff of cheap cologne, tobacco, and something more primal — the aura of men who mistake violence for charisma.
Iron Covenant.
Watching already.
The driver was silent, which was wise. They headed for a midtown hotel Lovejoy favoured for its discretion and its bar’s adequate bourbon selection. The skyline bristled against the night, glass and steel catching the sodium glow.
He thought of Driscilla. Even from here, even across state lines, the threads of thralldom tugged faintly at his senses — a low hum of compulsion that wasn’t hers.
They’d be tightening the net in Mississippi.
He leaned back, tracing possibilities. The husband’s death had been… expedited. Immediate, deliberate. That should have ended her captivity. Instead, the Covenant moved in with military precision. Which meant they’d been waiting. Which meant this wasn’t about grief, sentiment, or even revenge.
It was about control. Of her. Of whatever she knew — or could be made to know.
The car slid into the hotel forecourt. Lovejoy stepped out, tipped generously, and took the revolving door in stride.
Tomorrow, he would fly on to Jackson. From there, the road into the Covenant’s hunting ground.
He caught his reflection in the lift mirror: flat cap at a precise angle, eyes glinting under the brim.
“Patience,” he told the man in the glass. “A little reconnaissance… then the feeding begins.”
The lift doors closed.
YouTube Shorts: Raoul Lovejoy — gentleman, predator, Nosferatu — delivers more razor-edged aphorisms from the roads of rural Suffolk.
👉 Click Here To Watch.