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it. The vampires had tried; they’d paid witches, glamoured witches, turned witches into vampires in the hope that their witchy powers would withstand the turning. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t, but that didn’t matter: The result was the same. The spell still stood. No witch, whether coerced, paid, or turned, had been able to break it.
    Luca didn’t have the mundane worries many lesser vampires did. Because people forgot him as soon as he passed by, he didn’t have to worry about changing his residence before neighbors became suspicious when he didn’t age. He didn’t have to wrestle with a new world where everyone and everything was on the Internet. He’d gotten all the modern means of identification: Social Security number, driver’s license, credit cards, simply because having them made things easier for himself, but he didn’t
have
to have them. He liked the convenience so much, though, that he’d procured severalextra sets in different names, for those times when he didn’t want anyone to know where he was. If necessary, he could glamour airline employees into letting him on a plane, but by trial and error he’d learned doing that could cause problems if he took a seat that had been assigned to some late-arriving passenger. Actually buying a seat was a simple solution.
    Damn computers. He liked using them, but without a doubt they had complicated the lives of vampires, some more than others. For him they were a minor irritant; no one remembered him, so no one checked up on him. For almost all other vampires, they were a major pain in the ass.
    He found a parking spot in Georgetown, a couple of blocks from the Council building, and walked the rest of the way. There might have been a parking space directly in front of the Council building, but he preferred parking where they couldn’t see him coming; he even took the precaution of circling the block so he approached from a different direction. He was the Council’s executioner, but there were some on the Council he preferred to catch off guard. It was a game he played; he liked making them guess, making them wary of him. Most of them were wary of him anyway, and he played on that, making them think he was more powerful than he was. When it came to vampire politics, his reputation was his greatest asset. He didn’t mind being the boogeyman, the one they were all afraid of, because that bought him his freedom from a lot of hassle and interference.
    Walking also gave him the opportunity to see if anything unusual was going on around him. He wasn’t comfortable, with the sun high overheard, but the looming trees provided enough shade that he could ignore the irritation. The thick, heavy air was laden with the lunchtime smell from a small tavern across thestreet; the sidewalk tables were mostly occupied, and his acute hearing picked up the laughter and buzz of conversation.
    Nothing caught his attention, so he tuned them out, but drew in deep, appreciative breaths as he continued down the street. He’d long since become old enough to not only tolerate the smell of human food, but to enjoy it—some of it, anyway. He couldn’t live on it, but he could eat a few bites of, say, ice cream or some non-spicy food. He’d grown to love the taste of a good wine, despite the fact that alcohol had no effect on him. Same with coffee: good taste, no effect. Sometimes he was really pissed about that, but for the most part he was simply glad he could enjoy the taste even if he didn’t get any of the side benefits.
    Leaving the wonderful smells behind him, he turned the corner and the Council building came into view on the right, third from the end of the block. It was a three-story red brick, prosperous-looking without being ostentatious, ordinary in that it blended in with all the other buildings in the neighborhood. The interior, however, was opulent; not only did vampires in general love their creature comforts, but the nine Council members had every