Commitment - Predatory Ethics: Book II

by Athanasios

  “That was brilliant,” Lucifer finally squeezed out. “If only you hadn’t gone completely insane you would’ve indeed taken over the world.”

  “Danke, sir, danke. I owe you everything. Whatever you wish, just ask it,” he humbly replied.

  “You’ve already accomplished more and faster than I would’ve hoped.” The Fallen Angel generously added. “Mold whatever remains of the Luciferians and Templars to what you wish. A gift to you as a gesture of my gratitude for putting the upstart in his place.”

  They both looked up past the colonnaded portico of Lucifer’s stately manor to the inventive torture going on in the middle of the colossal banquet table. It was the former Grand Master Templar and Supreme Tribunal of the Luciferians continually burning at the stake. The searing flesh anyone within thirty feet could smell was constant, the meat never burning off but regenerating at an equal measure as it burned. He was the centerpiece to the banquet of the highest-ranking demons who drank and feasted on his misery. The physical inflictions were horrific yet paled to the special Hell Lucifer created for his treacherous lieutenant. Through eyes filled with eternal physical pain, there was also added the psychic anguish Bernhardt put himself through when he had ventured to Hell the first time. He relived this premier betrayal and unspeakable crime to his daughter Seraphina. His sacrifice of her trust and innocence had been the first payment he had made to his ambition and killing her with his own hands was the final betrayal that put him where he had fallen from.

  “My Reichians are as loyal as sheep to the slaughter,” Hitler declared. “They will follow me anywhere I lead, just as in the Third Reich.”

  “They do not know any of the Final Plan?” Lucifer asked, making sure nothing was left unsaid.

  “We are the only ones discussing it.”

  “And everyone who has just heard it.” He indicated all assembled at the Hapsburg feast. There was no way to tell how many of the satiating demons at the table were following or had even heard what they discussed.

  “What is the bother if anybody did?” Hitler asked. They were part of the Plan. The Plan to take over the world was for them, for everybody in Hell. They would not be content to stay in the provinces of the rings any longer.

  “There is still someone who needs to be brought here to answer for her actions,” Lucifer pronounced. “Mother Rothschild is a popular noblewoman, and she has to be tested. Her loyalties are in question after one of her star nephews proved to be so disappointing.”

  “Melusine Rothschild?” Hitler said a bit too loudly, drawing looks of intrigue from some of the guests. The least of those was an urbane and martial demon who was dressed in Napoleonic splendor, his horns coming out and forward from under a desperado cowboy hat made of human skin. Beneath the brim were the eyes of a beast, his face covered in scales and whiskers, recalling Remi Kilmister of Mötorhead. Foregoing all decorum, he openly listened to the conversation, yet none minded.

  “Melusine Rothschild was the one who brought me to your Grace,” Hitler stated.

  “Now don’t belittle your accomplishments, Adolf. Your work on earth alone brought you to my attention. Mother Rothschild only showed me how much more deserving of it you were.”

  The overtly inquisitive demon got up and from his seat five chairs away and swaggered to a stop directly behind Hitler. He stood there watching and listening to the conversation waiting for permission to join in. This was the obedience Lucifer exacted from lessers in His kingdom. He expected no less on earth. Melusine had to be dealt with before she turned into another Bernhardt Hapsburg.

  Lucifer spoke a few more calculated platitudes to calm His new lieutenant’s misguided loyalty to Melusine Rothschild before turning to their new rapt audience member. “Lord Asmodeus, you may speak. What, if anything, do you have to add to this discussion?”

  A reverent nod to the Lord of the Pits was followed by a barely disguised contemptuous sneer to the newest raised member of the infernal gentry. “Would a word from Melusine’s father add any weight to your plans?”

  Adolf’s dark gaze echoed Lucifer’s deep timbre. “What possible reason would you aid us in this? What are you expecting?”

  “You have been unbelievably merciful in allowing me to continue existing since my misguided attempt at overthrowing your reign. I but seek to show you my gratitude.”

  “Would you want any of your past powers or influence returned as a gesture of gratitude?” The barter continued.

  “That would be entirely up to your Grace.”

  “What do you propose to say to your errant spawn?” Hitler spoke with venom dripping from his words.

  “A father knows how to reach his children.”

  “This isn’t one of the saccharinely infused soap operas the cows love so much and you are not a human being with feelings and emotions, sir,” Asmodeus’s lord and master finished. “I want to know what you are going to do to bring Melusine before me without incident. I don’t trust your motives for this and I most certainly won’t trust your methods. So lay out your plan and we’ll tell you where you’ve gone wrong.”

  The self-gratified smugness on Hitler’s face nearly drove Asmodeus to fury. An upstart like him being shown favor by their Liege was past insulting, it was degrading. There were demons in their midst that had served Him since their Fall From Heaven and were passed over when He raised this evil cow to a lord of Hell, barely a generation after his punishment in the pits. He had hardly suffered for the crimes he committed as the architect of near global annihilation. It was unseemly.

  Lucifer’s eyes burned coal red, and his voice dropped to a low rumble when He spoke. “I am second only to God and I answer to nobody, not even God. You wrongly presume to critique my decisions, former Lord Asmodeus. You are correct that I’ve been unbelievably forgiving of your treachery and treason but that ceases now. You will be Lord Hitler’s direct lieutenant here while his own men do his bidding on earth. Is that understood?”

  “Your Grace, you can’t be serious.” Asmodeus was surprised he could speak at all from the embarrassment and public humiliation he was enduring at being thrust under the smug little corporal.

  “I don’t recall giving you leave to respond. You will answer only to him. Herr Hitler you will answer to me. Now take your new servant and work out the details of bringing his upstart daughter to heel. Our youth is being entirely too obstinate in their opinions and actions. They need to be brought in line and shown their proper place.”

  Time: April 14th, 1975, Danvers State Hospital, Danvers, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

  Nurse Boomgardner, Boomer to her friends, read through an earlier People magazine. Warren Beatty was on the cover with Goldie Hawn and Halley Mills. The magazine was spotlighting Shampoo, a new movie Boomer and her friends already saw twice. It was so friggin hot to see Warren Beatty onscreen being, well, Warren Beatty. He had everybody in the movie convinced he was gay because he was a hairdresser, but oh my God, Boomer got moist just thinking about him. Her wonderful daydream was put into shadow when their newest orderly blocked her light and stood there, saying nothing until she put down the People magazine beside a Time magazine with Jimmy Connors on the cover, the one with the painting not a picture. He was another hottie, Boomer thought, forgetting the orderly.

  A discreet clearing of his throat brought Boomer back to her new pestering reason to do her job. “Yes, Quentin. What do you need?”

  “Mr. Jacobs in 4G is asking for an extra blanket, where can I get one?”

  “You’ve been here two weeks, and no one has shown you the linen closet?” Boomer asked suggestively. Mr. Quentin Brown was boring but looked chiseled. She couldn’t believe nobody had bagged him yet. She looked up from her seat and stared at him with all the carnal promise of a cat in heat only to be buffeted down by complete disinterest. “The third door past 4G, the one marked linens,” she answered, spurned and chaffing.

  “It’s locked,” he proffered blandly, not caring about her wounded pride, if he had noticed at all. “May I ha
ve the key?”

  Her answer was a smack of the key hitting the desk beneath her hand before she lifted it quickly and went back to Warren Beatty in People. Quentin picked it up and wordlessly walked to the disputed door, opened it, and a few minutes later returned it the same way it was received, snapping Boomer out of another magazine article. He turned away noting the loathing behind her plastic smile, and walked, starting his rounds that would take him the better part of an hour.

  It was barely two weeks since Tino Quentin had taken this job as Quentin Brown. It was also only a month since he was freed of his imprisonment and had seen the light of day. Many would’ve taken some time to appreciate their freedom and not run headlong into their duty, but Quentin was not just anyone. He was unique in his devotion to duty. This devotion solidified after he saw the corruption and decay his beloved Templars endured. He was adamant about giving back the Good Brothers of the Temple their ideals and holding them to their oaths to God and Church.

  A few months before he was sure he was going to die for his convictions. He did not do it out of misguided zeal for martyrdom but out of dogged determination to do what was right, what was just. Then the day he was sure was his last, everything changed, and he was freed. His freedom also meant the near annihilation of his order. It had taken less than a week, however, to bring all the remaining parts of both Templars and Freemasons under their new banner of the Brotherhood of the Temple.

  The group that attacked them was a resurgence of an older order they thought was as gone as the Templars. As it turned out there was a silver lining to their attacks. The Teutons removed much of the cancer that rotted them from the inside and what was left was still good, still clean. Their attacks had cut out the rot and some good but what was left was clean, good, Godly and Christian. Gone was any association with Baphomet, Ba-al or any Nephilim, Luciferians or disgraced former Grand Masters with flexible morals. The future of their order was uncertain, but it was unsullied and pristine.

  One of the first orders of business was the removal of what came to be known as The One, the Redeemer. To older brothers he was the Antichrist pure and simple, the Beast of Revelation, and he had to be stopped from ever reaching adulthood to claim the powers he was destined to wield in Satan’s, his father’s, name.

  Yet nobody bothered with him. Even his own order did not believe Quentin’s assertions otherwise. They politely declined his call to arms, his call for execution of the little Satan. They just didn’t believe anything about AntiXos, or Satan’s Son or Jesus’s Opposite.

  Many agreed he was a dangerous man in the devotion and reverence he inspired in so many. There were even some laicized Freemasons and Templars who worshiped him as the Hermes Tres Majestus, the perfect and final evolution of Man. Who could say for certain?

  Quentin, however, never took no for an answer when he expected yes. He left the Order to the capable hands of Arthur Lange and through well-placed Brothers of the Temple he began working in the same hospital as The One himself. It was a few weeks later that he worked himself to be transferred to the same ward. In the past week he even spoke to him and found nothing remarkable about him.

  Absolutely nothing.

  He was the least remarkable man he ever met, yet he had to remind himself he was also only thirteen-years old but looked to be an adult. His file showed him to be in his early twenties yet Quentin knew better. He just didn’t know what he was going to do about it. He was being released in days, and Quentin didn’t know how he was going to kill him. He had no illusions of having to do it but didn’t know how. Every time he had tried something went wrong and he either came close to killing himself or somebody else.

  He thought back to some of the volumes that spoke of the AntiXos and remembered it was only through a specific procedure that one could kill the Beast. He was nigh impossible to kill in any conventional sense. He was human after all, and physical harm could be inflicted on him, but it just wouldn’t stick. Quentin had seen that for himself.

  The next night he had decided, come what may, to put a gun to the AntiXos’s head and blow it off. What’s the worst that could happen? The bullet would miss at a centimeter’s range?

  Impossible.

  Come what may, tomorrow night would be Adam Paleologos’s final day on earth. He would be returned to his father in Hell.

  Time: April 14th, 1975, Danvers State Hospital, Danvers, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

  Adam walked out the front doors of the main administrative building of Danvers State Asylum and squinted into the sun. It wasn’t a particularly bright day, yet Adam mischievously smiled just the same, feeling like McMurphy would’ve felt if he had made it out of the Oregon State Mental facility on the Combine. He promised himself that one of the first things he would do when he got out was watch Cuckoo’s Nest. He read Kesey’s book but was excited to see it every time Dr. Gallagher had mentioned Jack Nicholson as McMurphy. Adam planned so many things to do that he felt giddy with what he wanted to do first.

  He looked to his right and his left on Hawthorne Hill and saw a lumbering, shinny limousine taking the first part of the turn in the driveway toward him. Adam stood at the top of the stairs and waited until the polished Cadillac Seville rolled to a halt directly below the stone stairs. Out of the rear came an elegant and tall, slim blonde woman with short, straight hair and a commanding presence. From the front exited its driver, an imposing little man no more than five and a half feet tall yet ruggedly built and topped by the most orange hair Adam had ever seen. This guy is Pippi Longstocking in drag, he thought, and almost laughed out loud. He controlled the impulse, mentally chiding himself for thinking of him as a bodybuilding leprechaun. A beefy, ginger midget was another description that almost turned Adam’s pleasant smile into hysterical laughter. He knew he wouldn’t be able to stop if he let it start.

  “Monsieur Paleologos? Adam Paleologos?” the pretty blonde asked.

  “Yes,” Adam answered suspiciously. “Who might you be?” The voice wasn’t Melusine. It was not the woman in his dreams.

  A radiant smile creased her mouth and covered her whole face even to her blue-green eyes. “I am Anicée DuMonde. It is a great honor to meet you monsieur, truly a great honor. Would you be so kind and come with us? We’ll take you wherever you wish to go.”

  “Really? Anywhere?” Adam didn’t see too much of a problem with that. “Wasn’t Melusine supposed to be here? She promised to meet me when I was released.”

  “Desolée, I’m sorry monsieur, I don’t know where Melusine is, but I, we, are here. You will come with us please?”

  “Can we go to the movies?”

  “Bien sûr, of course whatever you like.” Anicée stepped aside to let Adam into the open limo door. “Have you seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest yet?” The car door closing behind them cut out Anicée or Didier’s answer. The asylum Adam had called home for the past two years receded into the distance getting smaller until it was gone behind them.

  Time: April 15th, 1975, Hotel Beau-Rivage, Geneva, Switzerland

  Melusine sat at her desk and fumed. All about her were littered, in various forms of dead, the remains of her entire security force: disemboweled, dismembered, eviscerated, and a bewildering variety of butchery. She felt groggy despite herself, stuffed beyond capacity to focus keenly. The pain, anguish, and terror that was unleashed left her and two other predators woozy, drunk from over consumption and barely conscious.

  She endured it the worst of the three because she hadn’t partaken of her natural diet for centuries and wasn’t used to its narcoleptic effects. The two males were familiar, one she hadn’t seen for decades and the other for millennia. To her surprise the smaller of the two was clearly in charge and the taller towered over the smaller man’s near corpulent frame of scarlet and black. She knew the opulent dress of the tall figure because at one time she had adored it and called it father. She was always besotted with the tassels and gilded lace he wore.

  “So you understand, my sweet, you’ll have to come w
ith us. There will be no arguments to the contrary, please no.” Her father’s voice still held an impossible compelling quality she was powerless over, yet she still managed to object.

  “Why, what does He want with me? I already gave him Bernhardt, what more proof does he need of my obedience?”

  “You did nothing, Fräulein Rothschild,” Hitler countered. “Her Hapsburg was put in his place as will you.”

  “Melusine, please.” She graciously offered her first name, belittling the Fuhrer’s formality. “How do you think Lucifer knew about anything Bernhardt was planning?”

  “How did you?” Asmodeus was quick to ask, propping up the floundering Hitler’s argument. “You knew nothing, that much is obvious.”

  “That’s not true.” She fought on. “The moment I found out his plans I sent word to my Dark Lord.”

  “The Templars have been planning to cheat the Leviathan out of his prize since they splintered into the Freemasons centuries ago. If you knew anything you would have, should have sent word then. It didn’t start with Bernhardt, he but continued a plot begun before Weishaupt was in short pants.” Asmodeus made ribbons of Melusine’s assertions, tied her up with them and left her with nothing further to say while Hitler grinned in satisfaction.

  “Why do you meet with the Redeemer?” Hitler asked barely above a whisper.

  “I but saw a need in the boy. A need for direction, guidance back to the Family he turned his back on.” She stopped at an upturned hand for silence.

  “That is not your place. It is not for you to interfere, to come between a father and His son.” With a smile he concluded. “That bond is sacred.”

  Melusine struggled to gather her wits, but it was nearly impossible to even form a sentence. Her father was surprised she was still conscious let alone talking. There were near two hundred dead all about them, their deaths, blood, and tortured souls had over saturated the three of them.

  Asmodeus began murmuring and tracing damned patterns, sigils through the air. Normally they would have to come closer for his incantation to cover the physical space each inhabited but with the gluttony of released energy and stored power the massacre had generated he saw no need for frugality. They had accumulated enough energy to have gone to Hell and back dozens of times, yet he chose to squander the power needed, to use more than was necessary to bring them to their Lord. After all there would be plenty of it to go around when they returned to claim the world from the cattle who peopled it and to make their Prince, their Redeemer follow his destiny and bend the knee to Fate.