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Fenn tipped his head up to the sky, brow furrowed. How well did he even know Cassian? What were the chances the grumpy Roman immortal had taken a liking to that woman, so much so that he’d lie about associating with her?
There was only one other person he could ask. Though his thumb did hesitate over the name in his contacts.It’s important.
He put the phone to his ear and listened to half a ring before the line connected. “What do you need, baby brother?”
Fenn fought the urge to roll his eyes, despite that he was alone. “Your insight, if you have a minute. And for you to stop calling me that.”
There was a grin in the Celtic warrior’s voice when he said, “Someday you’ll understand, Fenn. There’s more than one kind of blood brotherhood.” The heavy sound of something shutting, like a swinging door, thudded in the background. “I was just about to kick my feet up, ‘cause I’m bored out of my mind. Give me somethin’ to think about, or better yet, tell me you need someone broken in a survivable kind of way.”
“You really are bored if you’re offering to help with my work.” Not that he didn’t generally get along with most of his colleagues.Hewas the anti-social one. “Sorry to disappoint you, Sulien, but I’m calling about Cassian.”
A beat of silence followed and Sulien blew out a heavy breath. Though the worst of it was long past, Fenn had heard there had been some rather thick tension and unpleasant blow-ups between Famine and War in Sulien’s earlier years. Understandably so, considering the tumultuous history between their respective peoples and the role Sulien himself had once played—the role that had earned him his enduring title.
“What’d that stringent asshole do now?” Sulien finally asked, his tone harsher than before.
Fenn moved a couple of steps and put his back to a wall, letting himself lean against it. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” he said. And then he hesitated. He trusted Sulien more than Cassian, especially in light of Sienna’s vision, but was he comfortable divulging the secret of her? He ground his teeth for a moment. If he gave nothing, he would never get the answer he needed. “I’ve met a woman who—”
Sulien barked out a laugh that surely shook the room surrounding him. “What was that? I must have mud in my ears. I would’ve sworn our lonely baby Death just said he’d met a woman!”
This time it was Fenn who let out a breath of agitation. “Are you spending this commercialized Christian holiday with Rajan?”
“Of course not. Now tell me about her.”
“Then who are you talking to when you say that nonsense?”
Sulien laughed as if he’d been told a good joke. “Fine, fine, you caught me off-guard. Glad it was just over the phone!”
Fenn let his head fall back into the wall. He should definitely have found a different lead-in. “Can you focus, please?” He would hang up and spare himself his more exuberant colleague’s overwhelming personality, but he needed information no one else was likely to have.
“Yes, fine, tell me what this woman you’ve met has to do with the Roman.”
Fenn felt himself tense, for a moment, over Sulien’s phrasing. He fought the irrational reaction down and said, “She’s clairvoyant. She has no means of controlling what she sees, but to the best of her knowledge her visions have always been accurate.”
Sulien was calmer when he spoke again. “Thatisinteresting.”
“She recently had a vision of Florence Dossit commiserating with a man who fits Cassian’s description,” Fenn said evenly. “I called Cassian and asked about his association with Florence, but all I managed to do was piss him off.”
Sulien chuckled. “Did you tell him about this vision?”
“No.” Fenn debated elaborating on what Cassian thought he knew about the woman who’d had the vision, but he was still hesitant to share that information with his colleagues.
“And when you say commiserating, did your little clairvoyant give you any details? What they were doing, where they were, specific words?” Sulien’s tone was thoughtful, curious, but otherwise unreadable.
Fenn reiterated Sienna’s description of the vision. The bar, the one-sided whining—all of it, as well as he could recall.
When he finished, Sulien chuckled low and said, “Well now I’m also gonna need to know what you did to tick off your long-running stalker.” He took a breath and composed himself. “But we’ll get to that. I take it Cas didn’t approve of whatever speculation you threw at him?”
“I provoked him.” In hindsight, it had been a very Sulien-inspired tactic. “He’s either distracting by tossing insults at her or genuinely not the guy, but I can’t read him enough to know.”
“Not used to having to strategize, are you?”
Fenn glared at the motionless street ahead. “No. That’s your job, and Rajan’s. I’m just supposed to kill things.”
That earned him another brief chuckle, but instead of falling into more distracted banter, Sulien said, “The thing about Cas is that he’s grumpy. But he’s a straightforward asshole most of the time. If he is involved with that crazy woman, and not copping to it, then we definitely have a problem.”
Fenn mulled that over. Was he reading too much into something? Overreacting? An old question whispered through his mind and he couldn’t stop himself from asking it once more. “Do you know how my predecessor died?”
Sienna found Fenn on the far end of the front deck, leaning against the wall beneath the eave with his arms crossed and frowning out at the world. There was no phone attached to his ear so she figured it was safe to approach. “Hey, lover,” she said with a small grin as she bounced into his personal space.
