June
Lucy's Age: 7
I confess that I'm not sure whether or not I've made a mistake with Venice. While I've been peripherally involved with the training of two young vampires in the past, this is the first time that I've more or less had a free hand when it comes to nearly every aspect of the training.
Imastious has continued to turn up the pressure on the two of us over the last several months to the point where I hardly even have time to keep on top of my business holdings. There have been instances in the past where I've been forced to run missions on back-to-back days before, but never for such a long period of time.
I suspected something out of the ordinary was happening, but I didn't realize the root cause until Imastious ordered Venice and me to capture another vampire. Given the fact that our target, a male named Horace, is a known flunky for a vampire elder named Perdition, it was a safe bet that Imastious was gearing up for a covert war with Perdition.
Horace was easy to find and once I'd located him it was only a slightly more difficult task to capture him. Venice happily participated in the capture. She waded into the fight without any hesitation despite the fact that Horace easily outmatched her. Venice trusted that I would stop him from overpowering her, just as the plan said.
It made for a quick, painless fight, which made me uneasy. Vampires rarely work together because there is too much chance that your 'partner' will seize upon any given fight as a chance to turn on you. There have been attempts in the past, some of which I remember, where multiple vampires banded together in an effort to bring down a more powerful adversary, but they'd met with only limited success. Younger vampires are more trustworthy but even when working together in a group of two or three they usually still aren't strong enough to bring down a vampire who is several hundred or more years old.
That means that the group needs one or more older vampires, which introduces a whole new level of risk. Older vampires invariably have an extensive list of grievances and they play a very long game. The last time that a group tried to take down a seven-hundred-year-old vampire, it turned out that the group's target had been working with the second most powerful member of the group all along. The two of them easily killed everyone else in the group and the rumors that the city was heading into a new age where younger vampires would finally be able to throw off the chains of the vampire elders stopped overnight.
If Venice and I could continue to work together, to trust each other, then we'd wield power far and away greater than our mere numbers and age would otherwise indicate, but that is the problem. I can't trust her, not really, not as long as she is bound to me by nothing more than a construct-created infatuation.
I've known for months now that I need to change our relationship to one of mutual self-interest, but I haven't been able to make it happen. She's still too naive and I continue to make the wrong decisions around her.
Events immediately after we captured Horace were a perfect example of everything I'm doing wrong. We took him back to Imastious' safe house, the one where Venice spent so many months, and strapped him to the bedframe, at which point Venice started protesting.
It's standard procedure really. Imastious would never risk his own mind inside of an unknown vampire, one who could turn out to be much stronger than anyone realizes. It's rare, but occasionally one or another of the older mentalist vampire elders, one of the ones whom nobody has seen face to face in centuries, masquerades as a low-level grunt in someone else's organization and then proceeds to manufacture an incident that causes their real target, a younger mentalist, to capture them and try to question them.
The last time that happened wasn't pretty. The older vampire hollowed out the mind of the younger mentalist and used him as a puppet to destroy the younger vampire's entire organization. I didn't particularly like the fact that I was the sacrificial lamb designed to trigger any mental traps, but the way that Venice reacted was almost worse than that.
First she protested because she didn't want to be party to torture, and then when I explained the situation more fully she didn't want to proceed because she didn't want me to endanger myself.
I tried everything I could think of. I explained that Horace had doubtlessly tortured dozens of other people. When that didn't work, I pointed out that Imastious would torture and eventually kill her if she didn't proceed, but even that had less impact than I'd been expecting for it to have.
I'd been handling things more or less correctly up to that point, but then I made another big mistake. I grabbed her arm, pulled her into the other room and told her that if she didn't go through with the torture that I'd be forced to do it myself which would greatly increase my risk when it came time for me to jump inside of Horace's mind.
It wasn't the rational appeal to her own selfishness that I should have used, that would have worked with any other vampire who'd been alive for more than four or five months, but it worked. She squared her shoulders and then went back out into the main room and started torturing Horace.
The rest of the evening went fine. We bled him to the point where he fainted and then we bound his wounds back up and I sent tendrils inside of his mind while Venice stood at the ready, prepared to cut off his head if I started evidencing any of the signs of the kind of prolonged fight that would be required for even an extremely powerful elder vampire to take over my mind.
Our mission was a success. We got the information we needed, the location of some obscure contact that Perdition was using to move military-grade weapons, as well as everything else I could find inside his mind about Perdition's operations. But even that was wrong.
Before Venice's arrival I never would have trusted another vampire to stand with a bare blade less than three feet from me while I delved so deeply into someone else's mind that I completely lost track of my surroundings. It wasn't right, it wasn't natural, but it was the only way that I could get Venice to work with me.
More and more I'm convinced that I need to break her of her infatuation even if it means alienating her for a period of time. I have to strip her of some of her illusions if I'm ever going to be able to make this partnership work.
She's got so many things ahead of her that she's not going to want to do. Torture and murder are useful tools in most instances, but eventually Imastious is going to put her in a position where she has to use something other than brute force and I can't see any way in which simple love for me can cause her to seduce some target so that Imastious can fatten his financial holdings by a few million dollars.
She needs to do it for the same reason that I do it. Because it's the best way for her to get ahead and end her servitude to that monster. I can't work with her if she's going to continue to be some kind of knight-errant fairy godmother idealist.
It seems as though everywhere I look lately that I'm dealing with one frustration or another. Renworst has taken my order to 'have fun' with Lucy to heart, but while I reiterated the prohibition against establishing a routine involving friends who could be used to track Lucy down, I neglected to establish boundaries with regards to what is appropriate fun for a child.
Renworst took Lucy to some kind of slasher movie and then was stupid enough to complain to me when she woke up in the middle of the night screaming. Every time I turn around I'm forced to deal with incompetents.
It took nearly all of the willpower I had to stop myself from going up to Yonkers and cutting Renworst's throat. I've gone to incredible lengths to try and avoid exposing Lucy to the worst parts of my life. Given the fact that her biological parents left her to freeze to death in some filthy New York alley, she's bound to have some very severe residual traumas, and unlike Imastious, I've always believed that a sound tool is better than a flawed tool that I can 'control' completely.
Lucy needs to be sheltered from the worst parts of life. I didn't think I'd have to spell that out quite so bluntly to Renworst, but apparently he's not capable of thinking for himself at all.