I think I should backtrack a little because--the last I told you was of my friends protecting me, was it not? Well, a week or two before that, there was an incident that might be of interest to you. You were not yet involved, but you would be in a short time.

It was a very busy day in the middle of the summer. My company, Suri Architecture, had just been awarded a contract with the City of New Orleans and the Rose Charter School System to design a new campus for high-schoolers. It was an exciting project, to be sure, and it was the first to be taken on under the banner of my new non-profit venture for just that purpose. And, in classic New Orleans routine, I was notified with too little time to actually line things up ahead of the announcement. I was running around like a vampire with my head cut off.

First I went to City Hall to speak with the Council about the project, and then I went to the site, where just the next day the city expected us to break ground. I then called any contractors I could think of that might be able to jump in for the groundbreaking--you know that we New Orleanians are very ritualistic--and once I had some secured, after calling in half a dozen favors, I called around for the equipment we might need. A podium, loudspeakers, fans, handkerchiefs, and then I thought about maybe holding a second line as part of the event, but then I realized I would need a brass band and a permit and police officers and so much more that it could never come together in time. But I cannot help always reaching for that extra credit.

Yes, you know, I thought you were wanting to ask a question, and I noticed that last time as well. Come, we should be able to speak freely with one another. Is that not the point of this exercise?

...You are very observant, but I knew that, of course. Yes, I walk about in the sun all the time, and the only protection I require is that of sunglasses, and even then only on very sunny days. As I say, there are many types of vampires. My type experienced aversion to sunlight only during the first few decades, perhaps a century, of being undead. And even so, we would not fry to a crisp. We only lost our superhuman powers, which made us too vulnerable for walking about during the day to make sense. This was the case for me for many centuries, but I am old enough now that I lose very little in sunlight. My claws and fangs work and I retain my super speed and strength, and those are the things I find most important. I can live without the other things, which I'll get to later.

And before you comment on it, don't even start with me about the sparkling. Everyone asks, and the answer is always no, that is not a thing.

But yes, I was very busy that day. My cell phone even died at some point, and I had no opportunity to recharge it until late in the day, when most of the hurry had faded and many of my contacts were closing up shop. When I got the phone going again, I saw that I had missed several calls and messages from my good friend Blair Winters. You know of Blair, I'm sure. It was his hubris and micromanaging that brought the walls down around us.

When I called him back that afternoon, he said, "There is something I need your help with, but I can only speak with you about it in a private setting."

"Of course," I said. I trust Blair infinitely, without question. He has his faults, and he does not always mean well, and he is not entirely trustworthy, but he has never let me down. "I'm at my office. Stop by anytime."

"I'll be there in a second," he told me. He was being literal. Before I even hung up, a portal opened across the room from me.

That was the first sign that something was amiss. Blair does not travel by portal. Doing so is akin to firing a flare gun into the air, sharing your location and your vulnerabilities with others, albeit briefly and in a more magickal sense. It is best to avoid doing so without a compelling reason, especially when you are a heavyweight in the magick world, as Blair is.

"What's wrong?" I asked, getting to my feet quickly. The expression on my friend's face as he entered the room and the portal closed behind him only supported my concerns.

"There is a group of students that is presenting with an odd array of symptoms." Blair immediately began to pace the floor. It was clear to me that he had been thinking on this for a long while. However long it had taken me to finally respond to his calls, at the least.

Blair has been a doctor at least once over the generations of his life. I, on the other hand, have never been a physician of any sort. I wondered what had inspired him to come to me looking for help with such a problem.

"They have no recollection of what they did last night," Blair continued without giving me a chance to ask him what I was meant to do about it. "They were described to me as seeming 'hungover,' and perhaps deficient in vitamins or dehydrated."

It made sense to me then, why he would go to the trouble of visiting me via portal. "Psychic vampires," I said. "There are a few clans known to reside within the city limits."

"My thoughts exactly," Blair said. "These students visited Bourbon Street last night. That's where this all started."

"I see," I told him. "Bourbon is a likely spot for a vampire hideout. How far up Bourbon did these students go?"

"Far enough, apparently," Blair said. He stopped pacing and sat on the sofa. Unlike most offices, mine has an open floor plan, as you've seen yourself. I prefer not to put a desk between myself and my clients for exactly situations like this one, although Blair was a friend and not a client.

Blair is an oddity. As I say, he is now openly known to be a Fae--the creatures that you would know best as faeries and trolls and the like. The Fair Folk, or if you prefer, the "little people," but Blair, being high sidhe, is actually over six feet tall. He was born in Faerie but considers himself a son of Ireland, but he speaks with an English accent, having lived in England for about as long as I lived in Mexico. In addition to being tall, he is thin, he has small bones, and his skin is so pale that he never tans, which, paired with his jet-black hair, gets him mistaken for a vampire on a regular basis. He is also rather quiet when he isn't being a busybody. He never seems meek, but all the same, no one ever gets a true sense of his full power until he's slinging a devastating spell at them.

"Does this mean the students are in a trance?" Blair asked. "How do we go about rescuing them?"

It was strange to me that Blair should talk about rescue. Usually, he is the reason why people need rescuing. There was something that he was not telling me, to be sure. But if he wanted me to know about it, then he would tell me; and if I tried to needle him about it, then he would curse me.

"Well, it depends on what sort of psychic vampire has taken hold of them and how they pulled it off," I said. "Since you've said that the students were on Bourbon Street, I think we should assume that it was the Shadow Clan. They are the cleverest and most powerful clan, psychically speaking, so if I am wrong, then at least you will have overprepared."

"It had better not be the Shadow Clan," Blair said tersely. "I dealt with them last year. They should not be feeding on humans at all."

"Then what do you expect them to feed on, Blair?" I asked. "They may need to source energies rather than blood, but feed they must, and the energies of animals will not sate them. In time they will grow so hungry that they turn sickly and violent. In the long run, that is worse."

"That's true," Blair murmured. He has lived for millennia, but he has never had to survive via a counterculture that most humans consider evil.

"So let's assume it was the Shadow Clan," I said. "First, if there are sick students among the well ones, then the sick ones should be quarantined. The Shadow Clan's psychic sickness is contagious among humans; the web can spread from the ones that they personally infected if the infected ones are sharing space and personal energy."

"All right," Blair said. "And then?"

"They'll need to eat and drink regularly, perhaps once every half hour," I said. "In fact, if the students were infected last night, it might be better to put the patients zero on IV drips. Take them to Doctor Jason Dunst at the Tulane Medical Center and explain what I have said to him. He'll know what to do."

"Is there anything else? That seems deceptively simple," Blair said.

"That is all, but it is important that you keep the first set of students away from the others. Also, you have very little time. You must make sure that this is done now."

"I will," Blair said. "Thanks."

He opened a portal an disappeared through it, and I spent the next few minutes considering the things I had told him, hoping I had not forgotten anything about the Shadow Clan. The situation Blair was in sounded dire. Remember, I have known him for decades. I can tell when he is hiding things. Including anxieties over possible harms.

Then I finished up my day's work and went home. Just the night before I had located a willing victim and drained him--you must remind me to explain how I do that later--so I had no particular need to hunt or feed. I still remember how exhausted that day's preparations made me. It came together in the end, we had a wonderful groundbreaking ceremony the next day, but that evening, I only wanted to get lost in a book or a deep sleep. I am not terribly social.

But I had not forgotten about Blair, so I left my phone on in case he called. He sent me a message not long after I settled in. The message was vague, "Are you busy?" or something to that effect. I told him I was not, and my doorbell rang a few minutes later.

Now, I know you are aware of how Blair's excursion ended. At this point, everyone in the city, and also everyone in your readership, surely is. But please allow me to explain our side of things. We so rarely have the chance.

He came in and dropped himself on the sofa with such carelessness that I knew right away he had failed. Blair never does anything without at least a modicum of grace and snobbishness. He can't help it. He's royalty.

I sat on the chair opposite him and waited. He would speak more clearly and truthfully if he took his own time getting to it.

"The bastards killed twelve of the kids," he said after a while, without looking up at me. "Needless to say, they no longer exist."

Indeed, I was not surprised at all that he had wound up taking out the Shadow Clan. Psychic vampires are pricks, every last one of them. They don't care to be controlled, and when Blair informed them that they were to cease all activities interfering with the non-vampiric population of New Orleans, they did not take it well.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the city belongs to Blair. You know, of course, all about how Blair controlled the city council and the police force and most of the local utilities through blackmail or bribery. He did it all for himself, naturally, because he has to be the master of whatever his domain may be; but he also did it for the good of the city and its humans and nonhumans alike. Shortly we will observe how the combined and opposing good intentions of Blair and your former boss doomed us all.

"But Blair," I said after he fell into another long silence, "who are these 'kids' and why do they suddenly matter to you?"

"Oh," Blair said, sitting up and reclining casually, as he would for a normal conversation. "Do you remember a woman named Blanche?"

I thought about it. My memories are so numerous that I lose track of them easily. "I don't. Who is she?"

"She's a journalist I met back in 1961, with the Freedom Riders. Although her name now is Sayeva Reardon."

"I know of her," I said. "Her articles appear in all of the local papers."

"Precisely," Blair said. "I met her after the Brotherhood meeting today. She told me about the students. They are touring with a marching band, or something of that nature. Twelve of them had a run-in with something on Bourbon Street, which I asked you about earlier. We ran out of time. The vampires exercised their control over the entire band--perhaps a hundred young people--just as I got in touch with Sayeva. There was an altercation. We saved most of the students, but the original twelve we lost. Well, eleven of them. One was a nonhuman, and I believe she escaped. But, nonetheless."

"I see. That's terrible," I said, wondering how I could have helped more. Perhaps I should have gone with Blair. But at the time, no one knew that I am not human, so it would have been odd, would it not? And I might have had to defend myself in the altercation, and that would have been a mess. "I'm very sorry to hear it."

"That isn't the worst of it," Blair said. "Sayeva plans to make a show of it all. She's going to start some sort of paranormal newsletter because she thinks that informing humans about us is the best way to keep such things from happening again."

Personally, I didn't think a newsletter was worse than eleven young people dying, but I kept that to myself. And also, knowing what you and I know now, Blair might actually have had the right of it.

"A newsletter? Like a lifestyle magazine, but with paranormal facts rather than sex tips?" I asked, solely for the purpose of making Blair laugh, and in that I succeeded.

"I assume so, yes. Something of that nature. It won't end well for us." He stretched out on the sofa again, but this time with his head on an armrest, as if he was talking to a TV shrink.

"Does she not know the harm that she could do by exposing paranormal beings? Could you perhaps explain it to her?" I asked.

"I tried. And she should know, because she is one of us," Blair said, sounding frustrated. "She's a shapeshifter, she says."

"Ah," I said. "But does she know what you are?"

"I told her that I am a mage," Blair said. Calling a Fae prince a mage is one extreme example of an understatement. And then, after a long pause, he added, "And she thinks I'm still using the name John Rearden-Black."

"That strikes me as deceptive," I said, and that, too, was an understatement.

"Perhaps," Blair said. "But you know I have a sense for these things. If she doesn't connect me, John Black, with the work I do as Blair Winters, then she'll continue to trust me, and play right into my hand."

"Blair, that makes no sense," I said flatly. "What do you mean, 'play into'? And are you sure this isn't just an attempt to keep her from hating you?"

"No, Rey! Christ." Blair shook his head and grumbled to himself. I knew the answer, but I had asked him anyway just to be certain that there was no funny business going on. I know Blair's girlfriend, and I know she would tear the city in half if Blair cheated on her. Fortunately, if there's one thing Blair does well, it's monogamy.

"Good," I said. "But please do clear up your point about playing into your hand."

"If she creates the newsletter, I'll take over control of it," Blair said simply. "Without her knowing it, of course. John Rearden-Black is an old friend of hers--she's even using his last name for her new pseudonym. If he helps her out from time to time, she won't think anything of it."

And that was exactly what Blair did. When Sayeva Reardon created her news magazine, New Orleans Supernatural Weekly, Blair, as John Black, helped her get an office and find a printer, even sent her leads--and when, inevitably, Sayeva discovered the truth, her reaction and Blair's reaction brought the first blocks tumbling down around us. And yet, if it wasn't for their mistakes, I, and Blair and Sayeva and every nonhuman in the city and maybe the world, very well could have been dead by now.