And Parmin did have purple eyes.

Agh! Ignore it. Ignore it!

The Blue Ridge Mountain Boys are picking up a fast number beneath the spots, in a swirling haze of tobacco smoke. I imagine the smoke contains other things, as well, but it’s hard to tell as my sense of smell isn’t what it was. In fact, for reasons I’d rather not go into, it’s pretty well nonexistent. I do a quick scan around the room to make sure no one’s passing around a J too obviously. I’m no party pooper. Like I said, I have this thing about being busted.

I’ll give the Boys credit. They sure do give that hillbilly music a shitkicking beat. The dancers on the floor are capering and screaming “Eeee-Haw!”… that city-boy version of the mountain yell.

Chuck likes this band. He’s gotten drunk with them a few times and he fixes their bikes for less than he usually charges.

Once, though, when he’d had a bit too much brew, Chuck let them persuade him to join them with a borrowed harmonica. He’d intended just to clown around, but got carried away. He bent over that mouth organ and played.

By the time I came to my senses the crowd was whooping it up, the Boys thumping me on the back, and I was blinking in the spotlight, wondering what I had let happen.

I almost left town then and there, but that’s when Elise had just broken her arm dirt-biking with Chuck for the first time. I guess he felt guilty, so I stayed.

Strange purple eyes, hooded and cat-slitted… a smile as subtle as any man’s… A look of ages. You don’t hide from eyes like those.

“You are a Protector,” he said. “A certain fraction of your species cannot help themselves in this respect. Without something or someone to protect, they wither and die.”

“Parmin, you are full of it.”

Again that smile. A voice like a reed organ.

“Do you think I don’t know what you are, Brad? Why were you, after all, among the first I chose for my Cabal…?”