That sounds like an exaggeration, you say? I can see why you might think so, and indeed, I wish it were so. But we seldom think of the broader ramifications our actions have.

And yes, this is still a story about me. I know you are here to record my personal perspective and my thoughts and my past. I'm glad you've devoted a span of time to it, because we can't possibly fit it all into one interview. This is our second session, and we've still barely scratched the surface.

But I thought it would be helpful to mention New Orleans Supernatural Weekly early on, because you can relate to it, and so can your readers. I have NOSPN to blame and to thank for my recent troubles, and in some ways, you have me to blame for yours.

And to thank? You're too kind. I don't know that what has happened to me has been of any benefit to anyone, but it is nice of you to suggest it. You've always been very pleasant. And even though you are a human, you seem to understand us, not unlike my friend René.

Where did we leave off? Oh, what about the Madness? The event itself isn't connected to me, but what happened after, of course that is. And perhaps I should briefly explain the Madness just as a refresher, or as a crash course for any new readers you may have.

We saw that Blair kept true to his word of helping Sayeva Reardon set up her New Orleans Supernatural Weekly--and of using his supposed help to interfere with her work. A month or two passed without her noticing anything amiss. The weekly--a misonmer, since they published new editions only every two weeks at the time--flourished, and its readership around town grew, especially among humans. Yet in these days it was largely dismissed as a tabloid, or more fittingly due to what most people regarded as its absurd content, a white paper... no, not a white paper, that's something else. Ah yes, a yellow paper. I see you remember it. You were hired around this time, were you not?

Unfortunately, NOSPN's very first issue contained a massive error. Its lead story reported on events surrounding a series of murdered or missing men, mostly male tourists in prime health and excellent shape. But because the police arrested Adrien and Dianne Lefévre in connection with the crimes, the weekly ran with a story about how Dianne was a siren, the mythological Greek creature that sings beautiful songs to lure men to their deaths. The article was correct in some ways, but that assertion about Dianne was completely false. Dianne is a normal human. Adrien, on the other hand, not so much, but that's a story for later.

The mistake had nothing to do with Blair, but he used it to spin NOSPN as being unreliable and faulty at best, and he helped the Lefévres sue the police department and the weekly for slander and libel. The case was ultimately settled out of court, but it took months for the weekly to earn a decent reputation after that.

Here is where Blair made his fatal error. He got too cocky. He tugged the tail of the beast--apologies for the pun--which led to Miss Reardon's interest in knocking him down. His friends, including myself, warned him to stop his psychological attacks on her, but he's very stubborn. And once she figured out that John Rearden and Blair Winters were the same person, he was doomed to do something profoundly stupid.

...Wasn't who also involved? Me? Yes, I was, and so were our other friends. We discouraged him from going after Sayeva, but when he did anyway, we helped him, because that's what friends do. If Blair was going to Hell, we weren't very well going to let him go alone, were we?

Anyway, Sayeva figured things out, and she and the detectives on New Orleans' Gifted police unit unearthed proof of his control over the police and the city government and such. They arrested Blair just before Thanksgiving weekend, and he spent four days in jail. This was intentional on the part of Samuel Athos, the lead detective and probably still Sayeva's love interest at the time. He guessed that Blair would hate being in jail and opt to save himself, and he was utterly correct. Blair used his influence to get himself out of jail and have the charges against him dropped, proving in real time that he was guilty of everything he'd been accused of. Even though he was not tried for his crimes in the justice system, he was tried in the court of public opinion thanks to Miss Reardon and NOSPN, and he was found very, very guilty. Miss Reardon gave him the opportunity to defend his actions in an interview, much as you and I are doing now, I suppose. Really, given that you are now the head of NOSPN, the symmetry is remarkable.

The interview did not go well. I'm no more privy to the details regarding it than you are. Blair spoke very little of it. I do know that Miss Reardon accused him of many things, and that none of it went over well.

There is no good or bad in this world, Miss Isabella. Nothing is so starkly black or white, so easily explained as being one extreme over another. Should I defend Blair's actions, or claim that he was right to have exercised such control over the city's systems in such controversial ways? Perhaps not. It will mean little coming from me, a vampire, a serial murderer... even if I was called the "best man in the world" in the past.

And yet... there is so much to consider. Even then, it should have been clear to everyone that Blair does not do anything without a firm and justifiable reason. He is not the sort of man who abuses or punishes people for laughs. So is it wrong of me to suggest that perhaps Miss Reardon and Mr. Athos should have looked into why Blair had done those things before they accused him of them?

In 1985, when Blair and I met, few humans had any idea that nonhuman creatures truly existed in the world. Even the Gifteds had not been exposed yet. But the people who knew of us, largely in the public sector, tended to be against us, and they were already determined to stifle our advancement as more of us crossed into the mortal realms.

For myself, I have always lived among humans. I was born in South America, long before the conquistadores arrived. Over the centuries I made my way up through Central America and Mexico and eventually arrived in America. By 1985, I was living in California and studying architecture. That year, I paid a visit to New Orleans for Jazz Fest and to see what the South was like.

Blair likes to tell a very broad story about how we met, something to do with a mutual interest in music and business and philosophy. He is too kind. I met Blair Winters because I tried to eat him.

Jazz Fest was full of people enjoying themselves as they wandered from stage to stage and tent to tent, checking out everything that was on offer. I was in excellent health, because it was extremely easy to find someone in the crowd or wandering along the fringes, draw them away, and feed on them, even in the middle of the day. I had already pulled this off twice, and when I spotted a scrawny, pale man meandering behind one of the stages, I figured I would pull off a triple. The man was paying no attention to his surroundings and was instead engrossed by something he was writing on a pad of paper.

My earlier victims had forced me to lure them away, which was an extra step in an already long process, so with this distracted and easily defeatable man I figured most of the work was already done. I waited for him to turn his back to me fully, and then I jumped, knocking him to the ground while biting into his neck.

His blood had a slightly different taste to it, but I was more interested in draining him quickly and leaving the scene, just to ensure I was not caught. Instead, I felt a heaviness growing around me as I drank, and I had barely been on him for half a minute when I blacked out.

I awoke in a dark and sparsely decorated room, more of a warehouse's broom closet than anything else. There was only the chair I was sitting on and a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Not unlike rooms in many action movies from that era.

A door opened across from me, and the same man entered. He was still tall and pale, but he looked less frail than he had at the festival. I started to get out of the chair, since I was not tied to it. Before I could stand, some invisible force pushed me back, and the chair wobbled a little as I fell into it.

"Welcome back," the man said, closing the door behind him. "Who are you?" He leaned against the far wall casually. My first impression of him then was that he was a cocky bastard. As you can see, I'm pretty good at reading people.

Instead of answering, I bared my fangs and hissed at him.

"A vampire, yes," he said. "I knew that already, but go on."

He spoke with the same sort of generic British accent that actors use. Received Pronunciation, I think it's called. It only made him seem more pretentious and snooty. I realized then that I had been fooled. His blood had been poisonous or sedating to me in some way, a trick to aid him in capturing me. I should have known that such easy prey was too good to be true!

I tried fighting against the invisible bonds, but the struggle I put up ended with the chair toppling over. My left side hit the cold concrete floor, and I gave up at that point.

He sighed and shook his head. "If you're the sort of vampire that isn't intelligent enough to put words together in a sentence, then there is very little I can do for you." He crossed the room and righted the chair, with me still on it. Naturally, I used the opportunity to try and bite him, but he pulled his arm away with an inhumanly quick gesture.

That was when I made the mistake that everyone makes at some point: I thought he was a vampire. Specifically, given our situation, I thought he was some sort of vampire slayer in the vein of Blade. I don't apologize for that pun.

"Well? If you have anything to say, now's the time," he said, stepping back a bit. Finally I decided to speak, and I retracted my fangs so that I could.

"I'm not an imbecile," I snarled.

"Oh, good, you do speak." He folded his arms. "Now, why don't you tell me where you came from?"

I took that comment in entirely the wrong fashion. "Are you implying that someone like me can't be an American? Do you want me to go back to my country too?"

His face fell at that, and all of his cocky confidence drained away too. "I didn't mean it that way."

"Then how did you mean it?" I snapped.

He sighed. "I meant that in New Orleans, I'm privy to every supernatural circumstance, and I know every single one of the city's vampires. I've never seen you before."

"Oh," I said. "The I was out of line. I apologize for that."

"No, no, I should have thought about phrasing. You were correct to respond that way."

"Absolutely not. I'm much too sensitive toward those sorts of things. I overreacted."

"No, I should have known better. I've worked to make myself conscious of these things. The fault is mine."

This was likely the worst interrogation in the history of interrogations.

Eventually, Blair explained that he had worked as an advocate for civil rights for decades. He leveraged his appearance as a white man to get into spaces people of color still could not reach--namely, political races. He also had a penchant for getting white politicians already in office to do his bidding. He used blackmail, bribery, and other morally reprehensible tools to advance laws and policies that would bring about equality across the board. He had moved to New Orleans specifically so that he could qualify for office in the state of Louisiana. For here was where a particularly troublesome organization had set up shop: the Human Restoration League. These were people who were against giving rights to anyone who did not fit their very specific ideals. This included people of color, the LGBTQ community, and also nonhumans, of whose existence they had long been aware. They were less like the Ku Klux Klan, who operated in sort of an open-secret status, but note quite like the White League, which engaged in open warfare in the streets. They were everywhere--in politics and law enforcement, in churches and schools, in restaurants and countless other open spaces where they could subject people unlike them to an inferior quality of living. Blair was among the small group of pro-civil rights activists who chose to take the fight to them.

I'm surprised that Sayeva Reardon did not realize this herself, because when she met Blair in 1961, it was via the Freedom Riders, when the Riders were attacked upon arriving in Birmingham. Blair was with the Riders, and Sayeva, still a journalist, was on hand to take photographs.

Yet it was Sayeva who forced Blair's hand in December of 2016. After the failed interview, Blair withdrew himself from political involvement in New Orleans and beyond. Now, today, we know that the void he left was quickly filled by HRL, and that led to disaster for nonhumans everywhere, and especially for me.

The same shove that made Blair retract his protection of us from these hostile elements also made him remove a more physical shield he'd put around us as well after the Angelic-Demonic War of 2015, and that resulted in a flood of demons and other vicious nonhumans returning to the city and wreaking havoc upon it. For twelve days, human and nonhuman residents of this city lived in terror and darkness. Newspapers reported on it, and photos and videos of demonic feats and attacks were posted to the Internet, proving once and for all to everyone that nonhumans did exist. Those twelve days in December 2016 quickly came to be known as the Madness.