February
Lucy's Age: 5
I saw this coming, but unfortunately there was little I could do about it. Imastious took several runs at Venice before managing to bypass her defenses. Venice didn't know exactly what was going on, but there was plenty of evidence that he'd visited her, and she was worse for the wear after each time he went to her apartment.
As always, the anticipation was almost worse than the actual torture. In the weeks leading up to Imastious breaking Venice I considered running more than once, but I abandoned the idea each time for the same reasons that I've always abandoned it in the past.
I'm fairly certain that I've rooted out all of the hooks that Imastious placed in my mind when I was a child, but I can't be positive, in fact I may never know for sure. That means that there is always the possibility of some kind of involuntary reaction that will be triggered by any attempt to run. Imastious views controllable pawns as the best route to further power and therefore has specialized in inserting hidden constructs inside of his subordinates' minds.
It is entirely possible that the first time I stepped on a bus, a train or an airplane my heart would cease to function, but that's not the sole reason that I'm reluctant to leave the city. The truth of the matter is that leaving the city would mean leaving the beginnings of a power base that I've spent many years crafting. That power is the only thing that has the possibility of really freeing me.
If I were to relocate somewhere else, even assuming that I could keep from starting some programmed behavior that would allow Imastious to find me, it would still only be a matter of time before I was pulled into the web of some other vampire elder.
The only thing that can protect one of my kind is to be at the top of the food chain. Vampires don't just prey on humans, they prey on weaker vampires as well and I'd be just as dead killed in some low-level power struggle in Atlanta as I would be if Imastious killed me here in New York.
Given that it was only a matter of time before Imastious came for me, I returned to spending most of my time in my apartment, rather than in the second apartment with Lucy and Mrs. Agosti. It was the most prudent course if I were to avoid accidentally leading Imastious back there, and with any luck the easier it was to find me, the better mood Imastious would be in when he started in on me.
Spending so much time by myself was oddly different than I remembered it being. It wasn't exactly that I missed Lucy or her minder, but it was as though there was something missing from my environment that I'd become accustomed to having around.
The furnishings were the same hand-stitched leather and dark wood that I picked out years ago, but somehow I took less comfort in the black granite surfaces than I had previously. I've always prized my peace and quiet, but my apartment felt too quiet now.
Things have been strained between Lucy and I for the last several months, for no reason that I've been able to detect, but as I sat in the comfortably furnished set of rooms that had been home to me a short time ago, I realized that for better or worse I'd started thinking of Lucy's apartment as home instead.
It smacks of the beginnings of weakness, which wasn't a fact designed to reassure me as I waited for Imastious, but I've always believed that self-delusion is the first step on the pathway to failure.
I was actually thinking of Lucy when Imastious opened the door to my apartment and walked in. I'd left it unlocked because I didn't want to deal with the hassle of replacing the door. As always, Imastious cloaked his torture in platitudes that vaguely echo whatever religion he grew up in, but for someone who's known him as long as I have, it was obvious that he'd succeeded in ransacking Venice's mind and he was here because of what he'd seen there.
My sword was within easy reach, and for the briefest of seconds I considered grabbing it and trying to kill Imastious, but I knew the effort would be futile. Imastious is still, and may always be, a stronger mentalist than I am, and he's started to develop the beginnings of a telekinetic gift as well over the last few decades.
I'm a much better swordsman than I used to be; but even if I got lucky and somehow killed him, it wouldn't change the fundamental problem that I didn't have enough power yet to be anything other than someone else's pawn.
The actual torture was almost a ritual between Imastious and me. We'd been in the exact same situation so many times before that we almost didn't need to talk. He shackled me to my bedframe and then used the same set of batteries and wires on me that I used on Venice such a short time ago.
A large pot from the kitchen served to collect the blood from the shallow wounds that he used to bleed me out, wounds that took a process that otherwise would have required days down into something that was only a few hours.
Once I was weakened by blood loss and torture, then the true battle of wills began. For all of his power and ruthlessness, Imastious was used to dealing with young vampires, and I'd developed several tricks over the years that went a long ways towards addressing the imbalance he'd created by bleeding me out.
The first was the old analogue clock on the wall. I'd figured out a long time ago that Imastious tracked how long it took to break me. It was an effective, if blunt, measure of my strength. It was very easy to lose track of time while being tortured, but with the clock just barely in visual range, I was able to make sure that I let my defenses start to crumble at the right time. Too soon and Imastious would know that I was trying to play him, too late and I'd be tipping my hand and letting him know that I was actually much stronger than he realized.
Years ago, before I'd realized the reason behind much of what Imastious does, I'd given him a very good view of my baseline power. Since then I'd been successful in maintaining the illusion that my powers were growing much more slowly than they actually were.
Given the glacial slowness with which vampire powers increased, the difference between my actual level of power and the level of power that Imastious thought I possessed was very, very slight, but it was a real advantage, and one that should continue to grow by the tiniest of bits each year.
The clock let me start displaying the signs of imminent physical failure before my body would have started showing them on its own. Again, the margin of difference was very small, generally less than half an hour, but it represented another tiny reservoir of strength that Imastious didn't know about.
The most potent tool at my disposal is a level of control over my memories that has only a little to do with my mentalist abilities. I spent nearly a decade shortly after I was turned looking for a way to increase my mentalist powers to the point where I could beat Imastious at his own game.
I studied with several master yogis and half a dozen different martial arts masters before I finally gave up and acknowledged the fact that nothing I did was going to cause my powers to grow any faster than they were already growing. While I didn't buy into all of the mystical nonsense that my teachers had tried to instill in me, I did find that semi-regular meditation helped keep my mind clear and focused on my goals. I thought that rather tiny tool was all I had to show from so many years of effort until I unlocked the ability to destroy my own memories.
When I first started using my powers, I got little more than vague impressions regarding my own mind, but somehow the meditation allowed me to visualize my mental landscape with much more vividness than I ever would have believed possible.
From bits and pieces that Imastious has let drop over the years, I think that his perceptions are stronger than mine were when I was first turned, but that they are less developed than mine are now. As I spent more and more time meditating and exploring the incredibly detailed world inside of my mind, I brushed up against one of my memories with more force than I meant to. To my surprise I found that the memory shifted position slightly. It was as though it unanchored and then re-anchored again in a new spot in the pool of my mind.
The memory lost a certain vibrancy, but it was all still there. I knew at the time that I'd just discovered something significant, but it took me several months to come up with a way to capitalize on it.
By shifting a group of memories over to one edge of my mind, I was then able to create the illusion that my mind ended before it got to those memories. To follow a visual analogy, if my memories all float in an irregularly-shaped pond of water, I simply move one section of the banks inward such that it conceals part of the water.
I stumbled onto an equally useful ability, that of erasing specific memories at will, by accident. I was moving a memory regarding where I'd secreted a stash of valuables and I used too much force in the process.
Between one instant and the next I ceased to have any knowledge of where the jewels were located. I knew they were out there, I knew that I'd stolen them and then hidden them, but the memory of actually hiding them was gone.
Those three skills, the ability to move memories, destroy memories, and secrete a cache of memories off on the very edge of my mind, are the foundation I use to keep Imastious from knowing just how actively I'm working against him.
The fact that the most important memories, the ones that I'm saving by hiding them from Imastious, lose some of their solidity is an unfortunate byproduct, but the real complication is that I'm only able to store so much in the way of information inside the blind that I create on the edge of my mind. That means that I have to be very selective regarding what I keep versus what I choose to simply destroy.
Given that I'd known this was coming, I'd already mostly sanitized my mind, which means that I was left only with the choice of what to destroy this time around. Interactions with Mrs. Agosti were an easy decision. My daily journal entries mean that I've got a summarized list of my key interactions with her. It will likely mean that things will be a bit awkward between us for the next few months, but that is a price that I'm willing to pay.
I'm always very careful to keep my business holdings relatively concentrated as a way of decreasing the amount of information that will need to be stored there, but that has always been the largest block of information requiring hiding. Memories of my key contacts inside the White Tears and other places generally round out the rest of the available space.
My memories of time spent with Lucy were what gave me such a pause this time as I went about the task of preparing for Imastious' visit. It is ultimately hard to say whether Lucy or my business activities will prove to be most valuable, but the business information consists of relatively dry facts combined with the lessons I've learned over many decades of negotiation and analysis.
The memories of Lucy, however, are of a nature that won't store well on paper and ultimately I decided that it was more important to keep as much of my time with Lucy as possible, even with the insubstantiality that will result from the move, than it would be to eke out a few extra percentage points where my return on capital is concerned.
Venice was much less of a quandary. Most of my interactions with her are sanctioned by way of Imastious having ordered me to see to her transformation from a helpless co-ed to a useful tool. I did however decide to keep those bits of memories that related to the interactions with Venice that Imastious wouldn't have approved of.
The logic is simple once you realize that the situation with Venice is much like the situation with Lucy—she's just a weaker tool which should pay off after correspondingly less investment.
I made careful records of all of the business information that I was destroying, and then removed the memories in question. I remember the act of making the list, through an emotionless veil, but will still need to study the entries in detail before I can hope to make substantial use out of it.
Things went much as I expected them to as far as the actual invasion of my mind by Imastious. He drove me right up to the edge of my physical limits and then entered my mind, ransacking nearly every bit of it. Although I don't believe that he processes everything that he touches, in the past he's always been able to understand enough of what he sees to be able to track down and examine anything traitorous in very fine detail indeed.
The small margin of strength that I bought myself through all of my efforts at concealing my true strength was sufficient once again. I managed to maintain the hiding place around my block of ghostly memories long enough to satisfy Imastious that I hadn't actively been trying to get Venice to kill him.
Once Imastious was gone, I pulled myself over to the fridge and consumed all of the small supply of bagged blood that I keep for exactly these kinds of emergencies, and then I began the task of reviewing the journal entries that have been marked as containing something I lost.
I'll need to go see to Venice soon, but that will have to wait until tomorrow when I've regained enough strength to walk.
All in all, I would have to say that the encounter was a success. I've continued to hide the extent of my strength from Imastious, but I have to wonder why I chose to put myself in such a situation.
It had been a long time since I'd been faced with one of Imastious' torture sessions, so maybe I'd just forgotten the sheer disorientation resulting from destroying so many memories. I've lost the emotional overtones for much of what was moved, so possibly there were non-rational reasons for what I did, that or maybe I believed there was a greater chance that Venice could actually kill Imastious.
There is a chance that I will find something in my journals that will shed more light on my decision, but I don't believe the likelihood of that is very great. To use the old expression, I've made my bed and now must lie in it. The things that I lost over the last few days will not be coming back to me, and while I need to learn from the experience to the extent that I made a mistake, I know from times before that a certain amount of self-doubt is natural when one loses so much information so quickly.