dust in the wind―n.mikaelson

dorien moreau.

"Relax, Cassie." He gestured at her arm and said, "The Strix wanted to kill you but after a long and heavy argument they agreed to leave you alone―so long as Dorien could watch you to make sure you 'behaved'." She rolled her eyes, darkly muttering about Dorien watching her butcher Tristan de Martel to very tiny pieces and feeding those pieces to his rat brethren. "Come and have a chat with me and Elijah," he persuaded. "It's about Tristan." 

Cassandre eyed Dorien as she went to join the Original. The Strix member was perusing a selection of weights on a rack but she knew he would be listening in. 

The one upside to having once dated a witch and knowing Rowena MacLeod―who actually liked her―was having an abundance of magical items on hand. She whipped out three small spheres and handed the others two of them. "Privacy spells in a pill," she explained, "so no one can overhear our conversation. Don't actually swallow unless you don't want to be heard till the next time you take a shit. Do vampires even go to the bathroom?" 

Elijah glanced at Marcel who gave him a firm nod in return and they all took the spell pills, planting them on the insides of their cheeks or under their tongues. Then Elijah began a concise explanation of why he was at the gym and his suspicions about Tristan. As he finished Marcel said, "Is that all you got? A hunch?" 

"Sometimes gut instinct and hunches are more important than cold hard facts," Cassandre put in. 

"That is very true," Elijah said, "but I don't do hunches. I've known Tristan a thousand years, he's not easily shaken. Yet I heard that little weasel's heart pound when I accused him of working with someone." Marcel leaned against the fighting cage, observing the sparring partners' fight intensify. "And strangely nothing when I mentioned Aurora. Might be telling the truth about them." 

Dorien wandered over, giving Elijah a respectful nod and Cassandre a wink, barely glancing at Marcel. He wasn't even attempting to disguise his eavesdropping anymore, he was just blatantly trying to tell what they were talking about. 

"But he could be hiding something. And now you need my help finding out what," said Marcel, smug and self-satisfied. 

"That would be splendid, Marcellus, as you do have that fabulous new Strix membership." Cassandre sighed loudly, fingers tapping impatiently on the handle of her gun.

"I'm only with those people 'cause I wanna know why they're in my city and I'm not blowing my cover just 'cause you heard a guy's heart skip." The sparring partners crashed into the ground and the woman wrestled for control to pin her friend to the ground. "But lucky for you, I got this city wired in ways you don't even know about. I'll have my people trail your boy. Let's see what they find out."

"If you two are quite done comparing measurements," Cassandre sniped, "then I'll offer to trail Tristan too. If I can manage to shake my own leech." She spat her spell pill out and left the converted church to try and get rid of her Strix groupie, turning down twists of alleys and streets and disappearing into crowds.

Unfortunately, Dorien was harder to shake than he looked. He was eight hundred years old and an expert spy trained since his work for George Washington during the Revolutionary War―things she learned from Elijah. He kept popping up just when she thought he was gone. 

Cassandre whipped around and grabbed Dorien by the throat, pinning him to the wall. 

"My, my, darling," he choked out, "moving a little fast before the first date, aren't we?" She squeezed harder. 

"I have things to do," she told him coldly. "You can stalk me tomorrow and you can stalk me until I die, but for today, just leave me the hell alone." Cassandre jolted her hand to the side and snapped Dorien's neck, sprinting out in a random direction before he woke up.