Cassie furiously slapped another page around the spiral of her notebook to the back of the stack of black paper and started another drawing of the same thing. Her hand fell to it's task so hard that her little pencil snapped. She reacted physically, pencilless hand swinging in frustration and knocking the glass from her table to the floor.
Nick's head whipped involuntarily towards the sound of a spilled glass in the bar. He recognised Cassie's main of blonde hair ducking down to pick up the mess, jerking back to pull her sketchbook out of the puddle, jerk back to catch the rolling glass and back again to curse at the dripping liquid from her curling pages.
The bar wasn't full but it was full enough for her to get away with drinking alone in a booth to encourage more vivid and helpful visions.
Nick slid into the seat across from her. She put napkins from the table between the pages and avoided looking at him.
"Cassie." He began.
"Nick, you shouldn't keep trying to stop me from unlocking my full potential." She lay one hand over one forearm and attempted to be very civil, and even managed to wrap her lips around each syllable of her sentence, albeit slowly.
"On the contrary," he said and pushed a tray of shots he had brought with him towards her, "I'm taking a new angle at operation Keep Cassie Sober."
Her face was scrunched and her mouth hung open as if to protest but her hand and fingers mirrored his as he took a shot of tequila from the tray and held it up.
"Bottoms up." He grinned and threw it back. She watched him with narrowed eyes to catch him out on any slight of hand but no, he drank the shot and lifted another.
"Well come on then." He encouraged her, tilting the shot glass in her hand with his and hovering his next before his lips. She took the shot this time, eyes on Nick, looking for a trick. It took five shots for her to believe her eyes. He started to take on a sheen, he leaned back into the chair instead of leaning forward and he wasn't looking around so hard he seemed to betray a twitch.
"I like this new attitude, Nick." She raised another shot, "To finding my mother,"
"And taking down division." He responded.
They tossed the liquid down their throats.
Nick thought he was supporting Cassie along the road home, but they were both more or less kept up right by good fortune and counterbalancing each other's staggering walks.
"Oh my God, Nick, Nick I feel terrible, I mean, Nick, my legs…"
They stumbled into the air B & B they had been in for a couple of days. Nick want to the kitchen for water for each of them while Cassie crawled to her travel bag – a medium sized duffel bag – and dragged its contents out to open a new sketchbook and fill it with much of the same as was in the other.
"Cass' just leave it,"
"I just need to,"
"Cassie, come on, you'll remember tomorrow. I hope."
"Its just the same thing!" Cassie shouted. She stabbed the page and broke another pencil. "What does she even have to do with my mom! Nick what is this! What is this!" she started ripping pages from the ruined notebook. "Why am I such a shitty seer! Why can't I just see!"
Nick went to Cassie and kneeled by her so that she was eventually holding on to him, sobbing into the crook of his elbow. He consoled her as best as he could, again. It had been five months since _. There was no word from Kira in all that time, no useful visions, not even anyone following or looking for them. _ was starting to feel like a dream. Nick looked to all of the pictures and saw the same figure, a number of different angles, at a coffee shop with an armed and legged coffee bean paddling a row-boat in the coffee inside a half rendering of a coffee mug.
"It's not just that, Nick, but not seeing my mom… I can't… How she looks… I'm not sure I remember what she looks like." And with that Cassie began to really sob, to bunch his t-shirt in her grip and curl into herself. He just patted her back. Tried to make a promise that wouldn't be too hard to keep. "You'll be okay. You'll be okay, Cassie."
Cassie was up before Nick. She was at the table with coffee and toast. She looked almost fresh compared to him. He dragged his feet passing the door for the small kitchen, and she got up to make him a coffee. When he returned she slid it in front of her. She finished a sketch as he grumbled into the mug and then pushed it towards him. "I know who she is."
"Do you…" he crushed his eyes together at the searing pain in his brain, "know where to find her?"
She tapped her pencil on the little coffee doodle again.
"How are you not suffering?" he asked the mug. She lifted her mug only for it to slip through her fingers and tap the table.
"I think I'm still drunk."
"Who is she?"
"Larabell."
"Lara Bell? We could search the phonebook –"
"Lame. That's what the internet if for Grandpa."
"I mean online."
"I doubt she'll be that easy to find. Larabell is her first name and as clever as it might be for her to make up an alias like that," Cassie sighed deeply both frustrated with how long they'd been searching and how obtuse her visions were being, as well as fighting disorientation she was feeling, "she used to be held by Division. She's hiding too."
"Well if we find this coffee place, we find her."
"If it even is a coffee place. This could be a manufacturing logo or an obscure piece of art in some post-modern museum on the other side of the world."
"We'll start with the most obvious assumption." He flicked through her sketches. Some were just of her mom in Division, curled up on a bed, facing away. The rest were this Larabell and the coffee sketch. "That looks a lot like something you'd see next to a coffee place's name.
"I haven't seen a name."
"We have to start somewhere."
For two weeks they followed a coffee crawl. There was still a week's worth of coffee shops to go, but Cassie had started drawing a Henry Fuseli, 'Titania and Bottom', or something akin it enough for a coffee shop google search. In Steam Boat Coffee Nick nudged Cassie on their approach, as someone wearing a bomber jacket with 'Titania and Bottom' printed on the back entered the coffee place. Upon entry she nudged him into noticing the mural on the wall of the half rendered teacup and the little animated coffee-bean paddling across it on a boat on the far wall. This was the place. As they waited in the queue, Cassie indicated one of the servers, or baristas. It, was Larabell. Nick compared Larabell to his memory of Cassie's drawings. Her hair was red and choppy, just like Cassie's frantic pencil scores. Her eyes were brown, framed in more brown eye-shadow and glasses, not like in the picture. She wore a tight cream t-shirt over grey longsleeves and a black apron. Suddenly her fluid coffee making and order taking slowed and her smile collapsed. Someone was whispering into her ear and she didn't appear to like the news. She clapped the speaker on the shoulder, pointed at a few coffee mugs, paper cups and customers, and then disappeared to the back. She was gone long enough for Nick and Cassie to get to the front of the queue, order teas (now that they had consumed more coffee than anyone might want to in a month), and standby the finished coffee unit. Cassie saw someone rise from a seat and went for it, Nick waited with a pimply, gangly teenager listening to slipknot too loud in his ears and an off-orange skirt-suited woman with a tight bun at the crown of her head shouting into the little microphone dangling from the wire attached to her left ear. Above the cacophony of teaspoons tapping ceramic, steam being pressured into milk, and mid-volume conversation, a struggle was beginning to make itself known from the back. The voices gradually lowered and the teaspoons stilled but the steam kept screaming. Larabell burst from behind the counter and ran past Nick to the doors. Someone from behind the counter shouted her name. Most people just stilled to watch, except for two men with gym bags in high ankle socks and pristine new trainers. They stood to catch Larabell who punched one, pressed her palm to the head of the other and then placed her palm on the forehead of the second as he reorientated himself. Nick and Cassie looked to each other, Nick not knowing what she was doing, and Cassie answering by tapping on her temple and miming 'memory'. Sure enough the two men now looked dazed and confused with no desire to imped Larabell. Nick was pushed out of the way though, presumably by the people who had been waiting in the back for her. They were in black suits with white shirts and Nick and Cassie were both willing to bet they were Division. Three more black suits entered the coffee shop and the two from the back grabbed Larabell's shoulders. Nick grabbed the freshest coffee and tossed it at one of their back's. Larabell felt the scolding plashes that reached her back but twisted her free arm to push the one still holding her against the display cabinet. Nick pushed the coffee-stained suit into the others and Cassie was suddenly by his side bringing a tall glass of something pale brown down on the one Suit who hadn't been hindered by Nick's shove. She brought it down bottom first and it made a hollow sound on the skull of its target.
Larabell's hand wrapped around Cassie's wrist and pulled her towards the back. They sprinted through the cramped storage/break space and Lara grabbed a locked blue box from the counter as she went. Nick was hot on their heels, but so was Division. Lara didn't stop but kept looking out for more of Division. She saw them and dived into the next shop's back door. It was a car outlet. She made her way out of the back room, through a waiting area straight to the car floor. Division operatives were running past the window for the entrance. She got into a Bugatti Veyron and when Nick and Cassie were in the back she locked the doors and started fiddling beneath the wheel housing.
Division and the carsales(wo)men were all at the door, patting the windows and shouting at her. She sang to herself. Cassie and Nick could only watch and pray. The engine roared and she ran over two Division operatives and through the glass window onto the street. She obeyed no traffic law and refused to stop for two hours.