August
Lucy's Age: 5
Two developments have come to pass which I did not anticipate in the slightest. Lucy has warmed back up to me, but the cause was odd to say the least. Last Tuesday I spent the night out doing surveillance on a target for Imastious. The target was active until midmorning on Wed, so I ended up sleeping later than normal which meant that I was running late for my weekly trip to the library with Lucy.
I'd been spending most of my time at my apartment, so the trip over to Lucy and Mrs. Agosti's apartment ate up additional time as well. By the time we made it to the library, we had less than an hour before closing time.
It was already dark when we left the library and headed back to Lucy's home. It has been so long since someone attempted to mug me that for a second I couldn't believe it was happening. Apparently having a child with me makes me look like an easier target.
My personal training sessions since Imastious tortured me have been largely focused on aikido, so when the mugger came at me with a knife I simply used a knee-drop throw to put him into the building that until a second previously had been at my back.
Lucy has been so fragile lately that I expected her to break into tears due to the sheer violence of my response, but she simply looked at the unconscious mugger for several seconds before asking if I could teach her how to do that.
To be honest, I'd been reconsidering the advisability of my past decision to try and turn Lucy into a weapon. When looking at the chain of events with the cool dispassion granted to me by having so much of the emotional overtones ripped away from my memories, it had become very hard to justify continuing to spend both time and money keeping her alive and trying to bond with her.
I'm beginning to change my appraisal of the situation. I've found a very exclusive health club that is only a short walk from her apartment and booked an exercise room for Lucy and me four times a week. The training is progressing well. Lucy is younger and smaller than Venice, but there is a ferocity to her that tells me she will eventually be quite dangerous, for a human, if she continues her training.
Lucy continues to ask for additional training times, which is inconvenient considering how much distance there is between her apartment and my apartment, so I've once again started spending more time there than at my own apartment.
I started today's entry by stating that there were two unexpected developments. The second development was that Venice tried to run away. When I say it was unexpected I don't mean that I didn't anticipate that she would run away, I mean that I'd expected it to happen sooner than it did. We'd unlocked her cage and moved her to a new apartment weeks ago, so when she didn't make a break for it, I'd assumed that she'd made her peace with her situation.
Apparently she is both smarter and stupider than I thought she was.
The conditioning worked just as expected. Imastious isn't strong enough to make her love him, or even like him, but he's created a subconscious tendency to trust authority figures, and then topped it off with an incredible level of paranoia that kicked in once she tried to leave. She was gone for less than thirty-six hours before Imastious went and collected her. She wasn't in any condition to be able to tell me where she'd gone, but given how quickly he found her, she must have gone directly where he programmed her to go.
Imastious sent me a text ordering me to go take care of her shortly after he got her back to her apartment, which was inconvenient on several levels. Firstly, it meant that I missed one of my training sessions with Lucy. Secondly, based on the fact that Imastious had surely tortured Venice, it meant that I needed to bring her a blood source.
It would have been easiest to simply pick up one of the homeless outside of her building, there's a reason we picked such a terrible neighborhood to base her out of, but instead I detoured all of the way back to my apartment to grab one of the blood bags that I'd managed to stockpile since the last time that Imastious had bled me out.
By all rational measures I should make her drink from the vein. She's continued to resist that aspect of her new nature and the sooner I can break her of her squeamishness the better off she'll be. I justified the decision by telling myself that it would further bond her to me and undercut Imastious' loyalty conditioning, but I can't escape the feeling that it was simply a rationalization.