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CASSANDRE WAS A FIRM BELIEVER IN THE RELIGION OF 'DRINK AND SHOOT THINGS FIRST, ASK QUESTIONS LATER'. Except in a vampire's line of thinking there were no questions to be asked. It was just drink first. And then keep drinking. They were a living―or rather, unliving―violation of the human body. 

Still, she could never blame the Originals for what they were. Their cruelty was born of fear and pain and prejudice and nothing that was their choice. They had never wanted what happened to them. They had barely been aware of it. 

This? What Marcel was doing, seeing if people were worthy? She didn't know if she could approve of it, although he certainly didn't need any sort of opinion from her and it was the people's choice if they wanted to turn into immortal bloodsucking parasites. He seemed to be doing just fine on his own. 

Cassandre leaned one shoulder against the wall of the church, observing the goings-on of his fighting gym silently. He had made it very clear to both the vampires and humans present that she was welcome there and most of them were steering clear of her anyways, but she was still sticking to the shadows.

"Hello, love. Like to fight?" 

A voice sounded from behind her and she jumped, turning with her hand instinctively going to her gun. A young man in a carelessly worn black suit held up his hands in immediate surrender. 

"Who are you?" Her suspicion, she thought, was well-warranted, especially with how he'd snuck up on her. 

"Dorien Moreau. I suppose that's a no on the fighting, then?" Cassandre peered around at what everyone else was doing―one of Marcel's vampire lackeys was watching her and Dorien in what he thought was a subtle manner. Two people were sparring in the cage, a bulky man and his friends were lifting weights, and a fragile woman was busting the balls of the punching bag. 

"Fighting cage is taken," she said shortly. Instead of leaving, Dorien just stood next to her. His mouth was shut for less than ten seconds before he opened it again. 

"People like you and me, we do better outside of cages, don't we?" He gestured at the sparring partners. "Humans with a little training. I've had eight hundred years to learn martial arts and you, well, aren't you special?" 

"Your point?" said Cassandre gruffly. 

"You're a Winchester befriended by Marcel Gerard and bearing two very special Marks on her skin. You're immune to nearly all kinds of magic and you have the strong urge to kill every living thing in your sight as well as the enhanced abilities lent to you by those same Marks." The huntress turned to Dorien, eyebrow raised. He shrugged. "I do my research, love. And the Strix likes to keep track of your sort of person." 

Cassandre tensed up further. She cast a heavy look at Marcel, who had just come in with Elijah Mikaelson, and he came over. "Dorien, give us a second, would you?" The vampire shrugged and walked away, twirling a very old knife over his ringed fingers. "You joined the new kids' club and now I have a stalker?" 

"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. 

The huntress tracked Tristan down relatively easily, since Marcel's men texted her where they were and she joined up with them. Tristan himself had a boring day schedule. He barely moved spots. 

"He's an ancient vampire," she muttered, "you'd at least think he's been getting some action. Although to be fair, I don't personally know many people who'd want to get with a rat." Marcel's guy, Eddie, chuckled in an unnaturally deep voice. "Oh, he's moving again." They had spent a few hours sitting outside the Strix headquarters waiting for their target to 'get off work', so to speak. 

Cassandre started up her blue Chevy Chevelle again and followed Tristan at a distance. "I don't see why you insisted we take your car," said Eddie. He was leaning out of the passenger side window to keep an eye out. "It would've been more convenient to walk." 

"My Treasure is a gorgeous specimen of the automobile race," Cass sniffed. "I also would have preferred to walk but poor Tristan clearly needs to be driven everywhere and because of that, so do we. Now what do we have here?" Tristan de Martel's car had pulled up alongside a dilapidated old building with a creaky sign calling it the Candide Royale.

"This doesn't feel like the type of place aristocracy would frequent," Eddie said. "At least, not without a reason." Tristan stepped out of his car, saying something to the driver on the way out, and entered the Candide Royale alone. 

Several hours later Eddie and Cassandre were still sitting there, the box balanced between them holding a few beignets and flanked by cups of coffee. Tristan hadn't come out yet and his driver had left already. 

"I'm beginning to think he'll never come out," Eddie was saying. 

"A business meeting can't possibly be taking this long," said Cassandre. She frowned angrily at the building like she was trying to intimidate it into revealing its secrets. "Give me a second, I'm going to ask my friend Charlie if she can tell us what the hell is up with this place." 

The email from Charlie came just a few minutes after Cass messaged her, tagged with Why would you want to know this? Here you go anyways as the subject line. "Call Marcel," she said. "We know why he hasn't come out." Their mutual friend picked up almost instantly and they chattered over each other, voices rising in mixed pitch as they gave a hasty but complete explanation. 

"Okay, I'm going to meet Elijah. Give me a second, let me put you on speaker." 

"Marcellus, talk to me." That was Elijah's voice over Eddie's phone; Cass and the vampire were leaning over it, having just finished explaining the most recent developments. 

"Yep, we got a problem," Marcel said. "Cass and Eddie stayed on Tristan's tail all day. Wanna tell him what you guys told me?" 

"We followed him to a place called the Candide Royale," Eddie said excitedly. Cass got the feeling he hadn't done something quite this black-suit-and-tie before. She made a lowering gesture, mouthing, Calm down. "He was coming from the Strix headquarters; went in and never came out." 

"I hate to say it," said Cassandre, "but we realized a while after that he had to be using it as a way to get somewhere else."

"How and where?" Elijah mused. 

"I was getting there. I emailed my friend who's good with computers and she pulled up some records for me." Cass took a deep breath. "The building itself is abandoned but it has hidden passageways leading out the back. Bootleggers used them during Prohibition to smuggle alcohol to a secret storehouse of theirs on Dauphine." 

"You'll never guess who just bought that storehouse," Eddie interrupted, practically bouncing with excitement. "Kingmaker Land Development." Marcel finished off for them. 

"Owned by one Lucien Castle. Now that can't be a coincidence. Either they're brokering some kind of truce―" Elijah sighed and Cassandre could envision the disdain on his face. 

"Or they have been working together the whole time." 

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( a/n: surprise!)