March
Lucy's Age: 6
Once again, much has happened. Starting with the trivial, Mrs. Agosti made quite the fuss last fall about the fact that Lucy needed to enroll in kindergarten. Back then I told her that I wanted to wait, to give Lucy the benefit of one more year at home before sending her off into an unfamiliar environment.
At the time I assumed that Mrs. Agosti was just looking to reduce her workload by several hours each day, but I'm starting to think that she's genuinely concerned about Lucy's lack of social interaction. Lucy has had another birthday and Mrs. Agosti has begun talking about kindergarten again. Each time the issue is brought up I counter with the fact that Lucy gets quite a lot of interaction with Mrs. Agosti and me, but in typical fashion Mrs. Agosti has refused to let the matter drop.
I've tried creating some additional constructs inside of Mrs. Agosti's mind, but so far it hasn't alleviated her infernal stubbornness. I've offered to bring in a maid service to lighten Mrs. Agosti's load, but that hasn't swayed her. All I can assume is that there is something other than the reduced amount of work represented by kindergarten that is serving as Mrs. Agosti's motivation.
I have no good reason, nothing concrete tells me that it would be a bad idea to let Lucy go to a public or even a private school, but so far my instincts have been correct with regards to Lucy and something is telling me that it would be better to keep her sequestered away from the rest of the world. Only here in the apartment am I able to control, to a large degree, the influences to which she is exposed.
Based on the same gut feelings that caused me to bring Lucy home in the first place, I've decided that her education will be carried out by a series of private tutors. To say that Mrs. Agosti is unhappy would be a severe understatement, but ultimately Mrs. Agosti continues to believe that I am Lucy's legal guardian, which means that there isn't anything she can do to contest my decision now that I've made it.
The other major development, this one much less trivial, is that Venice tried to kill Imastious again last week. Predictably, she failed despite the fact that she was armed and he wasn't. On the one hand, I initially figured that this was a good sign inasmuch as it indicated that she'd decided that Imastious really was the one responsible for everything that has happened to her. Given the amount of interaction the two of us have, it would have been much easier for Venice to have tried to kill me. The fact that she didn't probably means that she considers me at least a nominal ally.
The bad thing is that Imastious very nearly killed her. This wasn't a normal beating designed merely to break down her mental defenses, this was a rage-fueled punishment aimed at ensuring that Venice never repeats her assassination attempt.
It was only chance that I arrived at Venice's apartment less than an hour after Imastious left, but it is the only thing that saved her from bleeding to death.
Even having arrived so soon after the beating, I still wasn't sure I would be able to keep her alive. Imastious had bled her out as well as breaking several ribs and both arms and leaving her with a severe concussion.
As nearly as I've been able to piece together, it appears that Imastious took Venice's sword away from her, probably using his telekinetic abilities, and then sliced her open along the left side of her chest, collapsing a lung and narrowly missing her heart. The rest of the injuries, broken bones and more superficial cuts, were simply to drive the point home that she'd made a very big mistake.
Venice was already hallucinating by the time I arrived, which meant that I didn't have much time. I got most of the bleeding stopped and then was faced with a more difficult decision. Venice had no bagged blood because she doesn't have the ability to obtain any on her own yet, and I've purposefully not been providing her with any because I wanted to force her to continue to drink from the vein.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I should have told her to bag blood from one or more of her victims for a time like this when she needed blood in a hurry.
I debated for several seconds and then decided that I wouldn't be able to go out, find someone who wouldn't be missed and make it back before she deteriorated too far to be saved. If I wanted to keep her alive then I only had one course open to me.
I rolled up my sleeve, opened one of the smaller veins on my arm, and then put it in her mouth. There is always a degree of risk anytime a vampire feeds from anyone. An older vampire is likely to have more control over their hunger, but they are correspondingly stronger so if they do lose control then you're in for a much bigger fight when you try and get them to disengage.
Venice was injured, which worked in my favor because I knew she was almost guaranteed to lose control. Even as I was doing it, I knew that my actions weren't rational, that this wasn't like me, but I did it regardless and just took the only action I could think of at the time to increase my chances of survival.
Her mental shields were in ruins, so it was a small matter to insert my probes inside her mind and connect with her. I expected that; what I didn't expect was the way that she welcomed me inside. Even more surprising was the fact that as she fed, as she got some of her strength back, she still didn't push me out.
Venice has been invaded so many times by Imastious that I'm sure she knows when someone is inside her mind, but even so she left her defenses down, let me continue to see what she was thinking as she sucked greedily on my arm.
The sense of connection between us was…profound. I wish I had a better way to describe it, but I don't, and the fact that it is almost certainly manufactured doesn't change how real the experience felt.
The constructs I put in her mind months ago as a way of strengthening her natural physical attraction for me and expanding it to include an appreciation of some of my other attributes have grown beyond my wildest dreams. Venice is in love with me, and while I didn't ransack her thoughts the way that I could have, it was obvious to me that it's a surprisingly mature, pragmatic kind of feeling on her part. She understands, at least a little bit, what a relationship between us would mean, but apparently her feelings have grown to the point where she wanted to share them.
I started to get lightheaded after only a couple of minutes, but when I tried to pull away from Venice, rather than fighting me, she let me go, albeit with a visible shudder.
If I'd had any doubts about the strength of her feelings toward me that experience would have washed the doubt away. All of my original thoughts about what the attack meant were suddenly revealed as being so completely off base that I was almost ashamed to have thought them.
Venice didn't attack Imastious because she hates him, or at least not just because she hates him. She attacked him because she was trying to get both of us out of his clutches. I suspect she didn't involve me simply because she wanted to shelter me from Imastious' wrath if she failed.
I bandaged my arm, double-checked Venice to confirm that the bleeding was under control, and then stumbled back towards my apartment to get the bags of blood that I'd cached there. It wasn't until I made it back to my apartment that I realized my mistake.
Imastious was waiting inside of my apartment and I realized in a sudden rush that I had an incredible amount of information inside of my mind that hadn't been moved off to the safe corner where I could hide it from Imastious.
My mind whirled, frantically looking for a solution as Imastious stood and approached me. I figured that I could probably destroy large chunks of the most important information during the early stages of the torture, but it would still be a risk.
Maintaining the carefully controlled charade during the actual torture was going to be next to impossible if I was busy trying to catch up on the housecleaning inside my mind. I would be risking Imastious realizing that I'd been concealing the true extent of my physical endurance as well as my real level of power. That, or he might even realize that I was busy doing something inside my own mind and decide to launch his attack earlier than normal.
Given that I was already weak from donating blood to Venice, it wouldn't take long for him to break me if he had a reason to bring all of his superior power to bear.
All of the progress I'd made over the last several decades was at stake, along with my very life and a future that was literally incalculable when it came to what might be accomplished in the long years ahead of me.
The longest two minutes of my existence slowly stretched out as Imastious looked at me with cold eyes that I knew almost better than my own and then began speaking. When Imastious finally left a couple of hours later I hadn't been tortured, but Imastious had told me in no uncertain terms that he knew of Venice's feelings for me, that he didn't think I'd had anything to do with putting her up to her attempt to try and kill him, but that if he ever came across any information that said otherwise that he'd simply kill me and start over with a new disciple.
As soon as he was gone I tossed back a bag of blood to try and get my shakes under control, and then took my last two bags over to Venice.
There is no denying that I dodged a bullet, but it leaves me with a number of questions that will need to be answered. What do I do about Venice? It seems obvious that I should capitalize on her feelings, on the weakness that they represent, but once again my gut is telling me otherwise and I can only think of one reason it would be doing so.
Eventually Venice will break through the conditioning, eventually she'll come to see me with an unbiased eye, and if I've been using her between now and then, she'll turn on me so fast that I'll never even realize what hit me. She failed against Imastious because she was still young and inexperienced. If she decides to kill me, then I'll stand almost no chance of surviving.
The second question seems like it should be a non-issue, but it is likewise causing me to second-guess myself. I've become lazy and overconfident in my own way. I've gone for so many years able to predict when Imastious would choose to try and break into my mind that I've forgotten the terror of those first few decades.
The logical answer is to spend a short time each day moving any incriminating memories off to the blind at the edge of my psyche. With the business side of things, that is of lesser concern. Among all of the changes I made in preparation for my last session with Imastious was to create a central repository on an encrypted drive on my laptop where all of my relevant business information is stored. Account numbers, passwords, holdings, it's all there.
It's Lucy who is holding me back from doing what I know I need to do. With our frequent training sessions we've become quite close and I'm reluctant to do anything that will reproduce the emotional distance from the last time I was forced to move memories around. It's a small thing, but I'm starting to realize that it's the small things that matter in a relationship, at least over the long term.
I risk losing Lucy and the investment that I've made into her either way I proceed—it's just a question of which risk seems to be the lesser evil.