Over the next two weeks, she's settled into Mal's circle enough for drinks at the pub on Fridays. Or Mondays. Or really, any time that people have a free night and don't need to drive or think too much the next morning.

Currently it's a Monday. The Monday after she met up with Malachy on the very revealing grocery run, in fact; he asks her if she wants to go have drinks with the group on Mag.

"Mag just wants to show off that she owns the fucking place," Aine tells her dismissively on the drive over.

"She knows the bartender?"

"No, her uncle literally owns the Falling Star," Aine replies. "Built it when we were around twelve or so. And worse, he's good at running a pub. Good beer, fast service, friendly--every fucking thing on the list. So we have to go whenever she offers, it's just too bloody good to pass up."

"Why are you so... opposed to it?" Alima asks.

"It was nice the first few times, but three years? Oh, for--" Aine just barely avoids someone merging, jerking Harry and Alima against their seatbelts. "TURN SIGNAL, CUNT."

---
About three rounds in, when everything is nice and buzzed, Alima has decided that she should show them her “vodka into applejack” trick. She only gets chunks of apple for her efforts, so she’s probably mixed up the powdered violets with lavender.

“You need to label your stuff, love,” Mag points out, amused.

“I use the jar standard!” She argues and holds the jars up. “See, lavender has a cork and violet... is... wait, this is the right jar.” She opens it, takes a sniff, and groans. “Rancid. At least I didn’t turn the table into an apple tree or something.”

She takes a sip once the magic settles down; the apples are leaving a bit of a strong flavor, but it tastes almost like sangria. “Huh, this isn’t too bad. I’d rather just cut up some apples, though--”

“Oi! No drinking bad spells!” Malachy lunges for the glass, only for them to jolt off in a swirl of purple.

Aine takes a moment to realize that two of her friends have been teleported off of a drunk spell attempt. “Oh, shit. Did they have their phones?” She digs through Alima’s bag, where her iPhone lies in a pocket. “Sweetie, try Mal,” she orders Harry.

“On it.” He shoots a quick text of ‘Are you okay?’

Ten minutes later comes Mal’s response: Mag Mell Park. Walking home. Nobody’s hurt.

“Boring!” Owen complains. “I turned us into birds on graduation, remem--”

Aine cuffs him. “Ha fucking ha, Owen. That didn’t happen--you must have been really. Fucking. Smashed. Right?”

“Oh. Yes. Yes, I was.” He rubs his face. “Mark, can I get another rum?”

---
Mal decides to leave out the fact that Alima has been stuck in one of the oaks for the past ten minutes when he gets Harry’s text asking if they’re all right.

It would much easier to feel all right if Alima didn’t keep insisting she could jump off. “I swear, Malachy, I did this all the time when I was little--”

“When you were little, you weren’t drunk enough to consume a bad spell that had MORE alcohol!” He argues. “Just find a way to--”

A shape flies down at him, and he panics. “No--fucking shit, Alima!” He dashes over and is sent to the ground. Twigs dig into his elbow, and he realizes that his jacket’s gone. “Did the spell eat my jacket?”

“Right here,” Alima rolls off with a crackle of leaves. “It got my hair-tie, though.” She attempts to take it off so he can get it back, but the zipper gets caught in loose hair. “Ow, ow, ow... no-don’t-touch-it!” She clutches it back when he tries to help.

A few moments later, she's given it back and Mal realizes that this is somewhat odd behavior. “You jumped off a fucking tree because you got sick of waiting, but you spend twenty minutes making sure your hair gets out of a zipper?”

“It hasn’t been twenty minutes,” Alima argues.

“But you need to sort out your priorities.” He puts his jacket back on; it smells like hay and vanilla, or maybe powder. Maybe all three. “Or sober up, whichever comes first.”

“I pick sobering up,” she declares, heaving herself up. “It took me like, eight years to get the first one.”

She starts walking, and Malachy grabs her arm. “My house is five minutes off. Ogma’s place is a fifteen-minute drive.”

“Wait, is Logan at home?”

“I send him to Uncle Greg’s when I don’t know how much I’ll be drinking. If I’m too hungover, I’ll say yes to everything that sounds remotely like a question just to keep things quiet. After Logan blew up the sink, I started asking Uncle Greg to watch him.”

She shudders. “My cousins are like that.”

They walk in the night for a while. “So, what exactly happened to your parents?” Mal coughs. “Sorry.”

"No, it’s fine. They just... vanished one day." She plays with a loose lock. "I was stuck in traffic after work, so I pulled over and called Dad that I’d be late. And he just goes, ‘No problem, honey, stay safe.’ You know?”

“I do.”

“That was the last thing he or Mom said to me,” she says. “They couldn’t have known they were going somewhere.”

“What if they just want you to think it?” Mal blurts out. He flinches, even though she doesn’t get angry. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry. But the car was parked, no break-ins or stolen stuff. Police said the magic traces around their room were really powerful, though. Couldn't be less than a medicine-person or a university mage. No struggling or scuff marks--the personal mark either didn't match any human mage, or they were careful enough to scramble it."

"And?" He stumbles over a crack.

"And." She kicks at a fire hydrant. "Given that a dentist and her carpenter husband had no hostile relationships with anyone who could or wanted to magic them away, didn't know magic to the scope of making an inter-continental portal without being detected, didn't have a history or motive for using said inter-continental portal, and how they're normally the type to tell their co-workers, friends, and daughter if they're going at least a continent away..." She doesn't look at him. "They didn't close the case, but it's not looking very good. That's why I'm leaving offerings now. Just in case."

"I'm sorry." At least he knows what happened to his parents--now he feels bad for asking her, that first night. "How long ago was it?"

"Seventy-seven days." She couldn't talk for two weeks, but she could still mark the time in her notebook. Seventy-eight days once it's 10:48PM, she reminds herself.

She can feel his eyes as she keeps him from blundering into a lamp post. It feels like the first sting of that stupid Moher honey. "Please don't look like that."

"Like what?"

Oh no, he's one of the people who doesn't realize it. Or maybe he’s too drunk to realize it. "Sorry. Some people think I'm in constant emotional torment since I say the exact amount of days, you know?" She stumbles and sits on the rung of a fire escape. "I don't mark the days because I'm aware of every single second since my parents vanished. I mark them because--it... If I don't, I feel..."

"Lost."

“Yes.” Wet strands of hair cling to her face. “It’s stupid. I’m twenty-six, and I’m doing stupid things because my parents have been missing for months, and I’m just stupid. Because I can’t--”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” She wipes at her face in vain.

“Don’t say ‘get over it.’”

“Well, I’m... I graduated college,” she tells him desperately. “I was way better off once I could work full time, so shit, I was set to move back out after another year or so of saving up. They’re not even confirmed dead, so--it’s not like... I don’t need them anymore. Not like a kid would.”

He laughs a bit helplessly. “That doesn’t matter.”

He slings an arm around her shoulders. She's still in the way that a hurt person is, rigid and wary of pain. But the sweet-powder smell drifts around them like a blanket.

Next Chapter: VII: heads