Make no mistake, we suffered just as much as everyone else. Our pain was a bit different. You have probably guessed based on the stories I've told you that my friends and I can each hold our own in a fight. The demons stopped messing with us after a while, and also when the city was shut down and none of us had much reason to venture out anyway, we just holed up in René's mansion, which has plenty of everything.

Of course, that meant that we had to deal with an utterly miserable Blair Winters. To top that off, he brought his family with him. Ruairidh, his youngest son, is usually a pleasant sort, but under stress, he can grate on one's patience. And Roscoe, Blair's girlfriend, was irritated at him for having caused the Madness in the first place. We all were, but Roscoe makes no attempt to temper her words, so we were all on edge the entire time.

Also residing with us were René's chef, René's maid, two of René's security guards, and the Kitanovskis. This may sound full, but René's house is big enough that everyone had a room to his- or herself, and there were still a couple to spare. Originally we picked random rooms for ourselves, but after a couple of days of catfighting, René moved all of his staff and the Kitanovskis to the east wing and his friends to the west wing. He told me privately that he could not risk his staff quitting because of Roscoe's caustic remarks.

You know the Kitanovskis--they are the Lefévre siblings, Adrien and Dianne. Their real names are Adrijan and Dijana. They are refugees, and they eventually gained asylum in France before moving here to the States. Most people call them by their French names, and that is what is on their American identification documents, but I prefer to use their birth names, as do they.

Both Adrijan and Dijana are human, but humanity is a relative concept. It's a spectrum. Dijana is a normal human, but Adrijan has a malevolence attached to him.

There's no easy way to describe a malevolence. I could compare it to a demon, in that it corrupts and influences human souls, but a malevolence is not a demon. If anything, it's like a fallen angel, or rather, an angel whose optimism and faith have been poisoned and turned rancid. The malevolence gives Adrijan superhuman strength and durability, but it also requires him to sate its voracious appetite by killing regularly.

While I can get away with draining the blood of an elderly or dying person, Adrijan's malevolence spurs him to hunt and kill someone who is able-bodied and can put up a fight. Otherwise, the malevolence will kill Adrijan himself.

As for those men who went missing and who Adrijan and Dijana were arrested for killing, those charges were dropped and Sergeant Athos closed the book on them himself. It's a terrible thing for the men's families, to be sure.

Sometimes, Adrijan and I go out hunting together. We had been doing this more often in light of the Slabs of Meat who kept trying to kill me and Jaime. But the attacks never happened while Adrijan or anyone else was around me, only when it was Jaime. And Jaime was never attacked if he was with anyone else but me. It was a strange and confusing time, and for once, René and the HellKat came up with few answers.

It should have been a fun time. We don't usually all occupy the same space. In fact, sometimes weeks go by without us seeing or hearing from each other. This is especially true of Jaime, who gets so focused on his work that he forgets about everything else, including eating and sleeping; and Christian, whose responsibilities as a CEO of a young company can take up days in a row of his time; but the one who takes the cake is Rowan Bloodworth, the infamous shipping tycoon. No one has heard directly from him since late 2014, and that includes all of us.

When we were all living together in one wing of a house, though, we learned how petty each of us can truly be. Roscoe's attitude made things worsen faster than they should have, but I still cannot place all of the blame at her feet. We are, each of us, deeply flawed, and not always in compatible ways.

Observing quickly how bad things were getting in the city beyond his home, René asked his staff to stay onsite on Day One of the Madness. He also asked me on Day One, citing worries that someone might use the chaos and destruction of the Madness as a cover to kill me, but I did not accept until Day Three, when his fears on that account almost did come to pass. I had been attacked by demons several times already, but in those cases, I defended myself well, as you've seen.

Yet again, I was walking home with Jaime, and we were set upon by a pair of humans. They were not big, beefy men, but rather ordinary-looking tourists. I say that because any New Orleanian has an implicit idea of what locals and tourists look like, and this pair just did not fit in.

On that day, Day Three, Louisiana's National Guard had been mobilized and were closing in on the city. It would take a few days of action for the military to realize that throwing more bodies into the fray was only exacerbating the problem. Demons don't care about machine guns, or even bombs. But at the moment, everyone was talking about how the Guardsmen would save them.

"I think our neighbors are in for a real surprise," Jaime noted to me as we walked along Poydras Street.

"Yes, but do you want to be the one to tell them?" I replied.

"Hell no. I'll pass," Jaime said, and we dodged a demon that was swinging from a telephone line. Fortunately, it left us alone.

That was when the human couple came around a corner at top speed and nearly crashed into us. "Help us!" the woman shrieked as she tripped over Jaime's foot, which was extended as he was taking a step.

"Sorry," the man muttered. He had run into me head-on, and since he was taller than me, as most people are, he had also nearly trampled me.

Hot on the couple's heels was a tall, thin something with inky black skin. It leapt at me, brandishing a knife. I sidestepped it and glanced at Jaime.

This was not a demon. I'm not sure how to explain how I know that. It's just something I can sense. There is some intuition that spots things outside of my conscious awareness... perhaps. Most of the time, I can discern humans from vampires from demons from werewolves at a glance. And the inky thing was not a demon. It seemed... human.

The man and woman vanished somewhere behind us, and Jaime stepped forward to deal with the inky thing before I could. I snapped a photo of it with my phone while Jaime met it with a couple of punches. His strength always seemed to increase tenfold whenever he got that fearless look in his eyes.

Just as Jaime gave the thing an uppercut that put it down for good, someone grabbed me from behind, wrapping their arms around my waist and lifting me like a package. I kicked and struggled, but the person's grip did not budge. "Jaime!" I shouted, trying to get his attention.

Jaime spun around and loudly complained, "Dude, what the fuck?!" before charging me and whoever had me. A gunshot rang out from my right, and Jaime staggered back, clutching his left shoulder. The person kept dragging me along, but then a woman shouted, there was another gunshot, and the person dropped me and spun around.

I got to my feet and ran for Jaime, but Jaime was staring at the scene behind me. I turned around to watch as well, but it was almost over by the time I looked. I only know what was going on thanks to Jaime's account of it.

The woman and man were running from a shadowy figure, and there was a gun on the sidewalk. The inky thing was staring at the shadow. Unlike the inky thing, which looked like a really lanky human wearing black paint and dark clothing, the shadow was exactly that--a humanoid figure cast in dark shadows, except that there wasn't enough light for shadows to be covering it. To me, it felt definitely nonhuman.

The inky thing went at the shadow with a fist raised, and the shadow slipped out of its path just before the fist made contact. They engaged each other like this a few times, and then the shadow raised an arm and caught the inky one's throat, and, with the faintest of motions, snapped the inky thing's neck.

It fell to the ground in a heap. Then the shadow looked at us. We stared back at it. The shadow raised its fingers to the brim of what might have been a hat. And then it disappeared.

Jaime and I just kind of sat there for a while, gawking at the gun and the inky body and everything that had just happened. Then Jaime asked, "Is this what doing drugs feels like?"

"No. It feels less surreal," I told him from experience. "You've been shot."

"Yeah, but I don't really feel it." Jaime winced. "Okay. I feel it now."

"We need to get you to a hospital," I said. I helped him get to his feet.

My phone rang. It was René. "Are you okay?" he demanded.

I explained that Jaime had been shot.

"Blair is coming to get you," he said. A minute later, Blair showed up a hundred feet ahead of us. He said nothing, just ran up to us and tapped me on the shoulder, teleporting all three of us into René's living room.

Blair did not wait around. He was gone from the room even before we had all materialized there.

"Jaime. Sit down." René helped Jaime settle into a chair. The young man was clearly fighting away shock now that he could feel the pain of the gunshot.

"I don't know what just happened," I said to no one and everyone in the room.

"We're going to talk about it," René said. "Are you hurt?"

I shook my head. Blair reappeared with Roscoe, who immediately went over to Jaime and started healing his shoulder. Thankfully, she didn't throw a fit over having to do it.

Meanwhile, René and Blair asked me questions, and I tried to explain things to the best of my ability. Jaime joined in once the pain and shock had subsided. Our narratives agreed on everything, but Jaime had something to add.

"The person who grabbed you," he told me. "It was the man from before. The one who ran into you. And the woman shot me."

"Really? I had no idea," I said. "What does that mean?"

"It means everything was a setup," Jaime said. "Whoever's been after you just used the Madness to attack you again. Just like René said."

"I really hate that name," Blair said.

"You mean whoever was after both of us," I said.

"No," Jaime replied, almost curtly. "Like I've been saying, they're after you. Maybe they want to kill me, but you have something they want."

I couldn't argue much with that theory anymore. This was the second time that someone had tried to kidnap me and leave Jaime to die.

"But what's their motive?" Roscoe wondered.

"We still don't know," René said. "But, again, I want you to stay here until this blows over. All of you."

"And Ruairidh?" Roscoe asked.

"And Ruairidh."

"I'm game," Jaime said. I shrugged.

"René," Blair said. "What made you call Rey at that moment? Blind luck?"

For perhaps the first time in our acquaintanceship, I saw René grow uncomfortable. He was usually sure of himself and of everything around him. "A text message," he said. He showed his cell phone to Blair.

"That reminds me," I said, and I took out my phone and pulled up my photo of the inky thing.

"'Call Reynardo,'" Blair read. He peered at René's phone, probably trying to make sense of the phone number. "Who is that?"

"I don't know. I've never seen that number before. It's only five digits long, so clearly it's from some sort of service," René said.

"This is the inky thing," I said, handing my own phone to Blair.

Blair looked at the image and scoffed. "That's a human. Why is he painted like a minstrel show reject?"

"Someone was trying to pass him off as a demon?" Roscoe suggested.

"Clearly," René agreed. "Did the shadow look like this as well?"

"Not at all. He looked like a three-dimensional shadow," I answered.

"Of a cowboy," Jaime added.

"I suppose." I had not thought of that, perhaps because the shadow hadn't had a gun holster or a dust jacket and all the other cowboy trappings, but it had been wearing a hat of some sort. "It definitely wasn't human."

"I agree," Jaime said.

"So we have another attack on Rey and possibly Jaime," René mused, "plus a mysterious savior and an equally mysterious text."

"Occam's razor," Blair said.

"Then we assume both mysterious things are the same," René said. "I'll look into it."

Eventually he found even less on our shadowy benefactor than he had on our attackers.