Dean pushed McKenna into their hotel room, shoving her inside a little harder than he'd meant to. She lost her balance for a moment and fell forward. Sam caught her arm and helped her straighten up again. She shot a hot, warning glare back at Dean, but he didn't apologize.

Sam sat on one of the beds, while Dean hooked his finger through the back of a nearby chair, and wrenched it forward.

"Sit," he commanded.

Simply to pacify him, McKenna did as she was told.

"So you wanna tell us how the hell you know Cas?" Dean demanded, his tone harsh and even lower than usual.

"Cas?" McKenna questioned, looking to Sam for help.

"Castiel. The angel you just met" Sam offered, correcting his brother's nickname for him. His tone suddenly dropped an octave, now sounding accusatory. "Though it looks like this wasn't the first time you two have crossed paths."

McKenna closed her eyes for a moment, and almost smiled. When she opened them again, Dean was still standing over her, staring her down with his thick arms crossed over his chest. She pursed her lips together and stared back, silently demanding that he back down first.

After a few more minutes of their heated glare, he finally did. Dean's anger dissolved away, as he uncrossed his arms, relaxed his body a bit, and joined Sam on the bed.

"I didn't know he was an angel," McKenna finally said. "And he didn't look like that when I first saw him."

"He was in a different vessel?" Sam asked, but clarified further when he saw the look of question on McKenna's face. "A different body?"

McKenna chuckled, completely unable to comprehend the conversation they were having. It was almost too strange, to funny, even, to be real. But they were hunters. They dealt with demons every day. Why would angels be too strange to suddenly throw into the mix?

"He was definitely in a different body," McKenna, continued. "But his eyes were the same."

"And how exactly do you know him?" Dean asked again. His voice was finally gentler.

McKenna closed her eyes again, her mind's eye taking her back to where she never liked to go. Though, each time she spoke about it to Sam and Dean, it seemed to get a little easier.

"I've told you that when I was getting the girls out of the Compound, I had to shove them up through the vent shafts in the ceiling," McKenna began, and waited to see the boys nod in recollection before she continued. "Well, there were huge pipes beyond them. We had to crawl through them until we finally found a vent that would take us out of the cellar."

The cellar.

Dean felt a wave of nausea overcome his whole body at the very sound of the word. McKenna seemed to be able to say it as though it was nothing, just another word, but to him it had become something different. It was cold, and hard, full of repulsion and terror. It was almost as bad as when he heard the words: hell and torture.

They sent an icy ripple of disgust up his spine every time.

And now he had new words that did the same: cellar and the Compound.

"We reached a point where the vent shafts veered straight up, and we couldn't go any further," McKenna continued, her tone morphing into something softer, something lower. "I could see sunlight filter in through the vent cover at the top of the shaft, but it was too high to reach. And I was too weak to even lift the girls up to let them out."

Too weak.

Dean shuttered. McKenna had been too weak. Whether it had been from sleep deprivation, starvation, or from the beatings the demon that had possessed her, proved she'd sustained, he didn't want to know. All he knew was that McKenna had been too weak to even lift a few twenty to thirty pound little girls.

The more he heard, the more he had trouble understanding how she was still alive.

Dean closed his eyes on a somber thought: If it had been me, I probably would've killed myself a long time ago…

"But someone else showed up, didn't they?" Sam asked, instantly pulling Dean from his horrific reverie.

"Yeah," McKenna answered. "The vent opened, and a pair of hands reached down and pulled the girls up, one by one. Then after that, they pulled me up, too."

Sam and Dean leaned forward, each of them hoping that she would describe what Castiel had once looked like.

"He was a tall man in blue jeans and a white t-shirt," she explained. "He was young, blonde, and tan, but he had the exact same blue eyes. He got us out, picked up and carried the youngest girl, and led us out to where all the cops and hunters were waiting."

"Did he talk to you?" Dean asked, though he wasn't quite sure why he did.

"No," McKenna answered. "He just looked at me, touched my cheek, and kind of smiled. Not with his mouth, really, but with his eyes. Somehow I knew that everything was going to be all right."

"You never told anyone about him, did you?" Sam asked.

"No," McKenna said, shaking her head. "Not even Bobby. And no one else saw him. I had looked away from him for two seconds, and when I turned around, he was gone. I think a part of me thought that, maybe he'd never even been there in the first place. So, I never told anybody."

Sam looked down at his hands, and almost chuckled before glancing up at Dean. He spoke to McKenna, but kept his eyes on his brother. "It's almost like he pulled you out of hell, Kenna."

Dean glanced over at his brother and frowned, unable to understand what Sam was getting at.

"Yeah," McKenna agreed, unable to understand the growing correlations between herself and Dean. "I guess he did."

-I'm so sorry it took me so long to get a new chapter out! My conference was good, but I'm glad to be back to work on this. More to come soon. Lots of reviews to me = Lots of love to you! :-) Thanks a lot!