When Jack woke the next morning, he could hear Dean snoring above him. Jack had been perfectly happy to bunk on the floor with a bedroll, and Sam had offered to do the same. What it appeared Sam had actually done was pass out on top of his laptop and he was still there, getting keyboard print on one side of his face and likely drooling in to the components.
He didn't see Cas anywhere around, and while he'd been a little freaked out to meet an actual angel, the little fella had really grown on Jack in the short time since they'd met. If he hadn't already liked him, Jack figured he would have gotten there when Cas helped Mac remember most of what had happened and then healed the headache the remembering caused. He hadn't been able to help with how wrecked it had left Mac, but Jack figured the kid had to sleep sometime anyway, and Cas's magic seemed to induce that state pretty handily.
Jack pushed himself up to sitting and looked around. It took him a minute to process what was wrong with the picture. Once he did, he snapped, "Son of a bitch," loudly enough to rouse Sam from his computer-adjacent slumber.
Sam's head snapped up and Dean stirred, getting himself upright fairly quickly while Jack groaned getting to his feet from the floor. "What's up, 'cuz?" Dean asked, rubbing sleep out of his eyes.
"Where the hell is Mac?" he growled, indicating the neatly made bed.
Sam got up, stretching and rubbing at the keyboard impressions on his cheek. He looked around. Mac's duffel bag was missing, and the bathroom door was closed. He gave Jack a long-suffering look. Mac was right, Jack was overprotective. Freaking out because a guy was in the bathroom was next level. Worse than Dean by far.
"Relax, Jack. He's probably in the shower."
Sam pointed toward the bench where Mac's bag had been sitting last night and the closed bathroom door. Jack relaxed fractionally. Sam always said he disliked pointing out the obvious. But then again, he did that with Dean a fair amount of the time, so it's not like it was out of his way. And it was very satisfying to see another person's shoulders lower just because you told them something you could easily deduce.
Sam was amused to note, as Jack strode across the room to bang on the bathroom door, that, like Dean, Jack slept in his boots. Sam wondered if that was a military thing Jack was trained into and that Dean had picked up from their dad, or if Jack had picked it up from John or Dean at some point in their history.
Dean and Sam shared a look, and Dean rolled his eyes. He didn't see his own over-protectiveness, but, man, did it ever drive him nuts in other people. It got in the way of the mission. Besides, even Sam had to admit, Dean had gotten a lot better the last couple of years, and even more so since … coming back.
Jack paid them no mind as he wrapped his knuckles on the door again, trying to hear if the water was running or anything. Having a run of the kid just passing out in shock, then having to let Castiel rummage around in that ginormous brain, made Jack more than average levels of twitchy.
"Mac, hey, Mac, buddy! You conked out on us last night! How you feelin' this morning, man? "
The only answer was a low, muffled groan. Jack widened his eyes at the Winchesters and both were by the door a moment later. "Hey, Mac!" Sam called out. "You alright?"
Nothing.
Dean tried, "Look, kid, I need to get in there. Like in an emergency sort of way. You almost finished?"
Jack glared at him.
Dean gave a little head shake. "Don't make it about you being worried and crowd the kid, Jack. He's had a rough day or so, right? If he feels like hell on top of it, he'll probably be a little edgy because of it. And we both know he looked a little green around the gills last night. Who wouldn't? An angel crawling through your brain, especially if you really don't want them there, ain't exactly all beer and skittles, you know?"
Jack nodded. Mac would probably be very 'walls up' this morning. In fact, less walls up and more buried in an underground end-of-the-world-proof bunker. When Mac didn't answer this time, Jack just shrugged at his cousins and said, a little louder than he probably needed to, "Mac, I'm comin' in!"
They found the door unlocked. Also, strange for Mac in a motel room, and even more than that, one where he was surrounded by people he didn't know in less than ideal circumstances.
At first glance, the bathroom appeared empty. The shower curtain was closed though, and Jack heard a sound from behind it. He pulled it back and instead of Mac, he found Castiel, asleep and mumbling to himself, propped up in the tub, still fully dressed down to his shoes and trench coat. His bright eyes opened, and he smiled.
"Good morning, Winchester Relative. How are you?"
Jack forced himself to speak evenly. Pissing off an angel before morning coffee seemed like a real bad idea. "I'd be better if I knew where my partner was."
"Ah," Cas replied, getting out of the tub with eerie agility. "You are looking for Angus MacGyver. He is gone," Cas replied simply.
"Gone?" Jack asked, his voice already rising. "What do you mean 'gone'?!"
Cas tilted his head, like he was listening. "He is approximately three blocks from here. He is running very fast."
All Jack heard was 'running very fast' and his brain went straight for demon women with long pretty hair trying to eat his heart or his brain or something. Asking no more questions, Jack just bolted for the door, followed closely by the Winchesters. They were out beside Dean's car when a cheerful, but clearly out-of-breath voice called, "Hey, guys!"
The three looked up and Mac was jogging across the parking lot, in his running clothes, breath sending up plumes of steam in the cool morning air. He was sweaty, grinning, and carrying a large stack of newspapers. His grin faded when he saw the full helicopter parent look he was getting from Jack and the only slightly less intense one he was getting from Dean.
When he approached them, he moved to set the papers down on the hood of the car, wanting to catch his breath so he could explain.
"Hey!" Dean said sharply, annoyed because for a second he'd been worried about the kid, too. "We don't stack things on Baby. She ain't a shelf, kid."
Mac raised an eyebrow and tried, not terribly successfully not to smirk. "You call your car Baby?"
"What's wrong with that?" he asked indignantly.
Mac's smirk bled through more completely. "Nothing, man. Just wondering if it runs in the family. Jack calls his dad's old car 'My Baby' all the time."
Jack and Dean shared a look. "You still have your old man's GTO?"
"Damn right I do, kid."
Fist bumps were exchanged and for a minute Mac thought maybe he was off the hook. Then Jack turned back to him.
No such luck.
"What the hell were you thinking, taking off for a run on your own this morning?"
"I needed to blow off some steam. Besides, when I got up, I went online and found out I could get back issues of the local paper from the librar …"
"After what happened last night? Are you kidding me right now?" Jack and Dean said together, and Sam snorted a little laugh.
Both older men turned their attention away from Mac to glare at Sam.
"It's pretty obvious Mac's got a lot going on in his head at this point. Of course he wanted to go for a run. It's like when you want to go out and wax Baby or go drink too much and sing karaoke," he said, tipping his head toward Dean. "Or when I need to do a thousand sit ups after a bad night or …"
Mac had slid behind them and into the motel room, the door clicking shut behind him.
"God damn it," Jack growled. He gave Dean and Sam both a look. Then he followed Mac inside, expecting the Winchesters to be right behind him.
They both hesitated, looking at each other with raised eyebrows. "You ever think you'd see Jack Dalton look …"
"Like you when you used to get all weird about me being involved in this stuff, if it wasn't stuff you chose for me to be involved in?"
Dean smirked. "Yeah, like that." He punched his brother in the arm. "Bitch." Then he started following Jack inside.
"Jerk," Sam mumbled and stuffed his hands in his pockets as he headed inside behind his brother.
Sam felt an involuntary smile curve his lips when he walked in and heard the strident tone coming from his cousin. It was enough to remind him of Dean in the very early days of this strange winding road he and his brother were on.
"Whatever possessed you to …"
"Jack," Mac's smirk was a defensive one. "I don't think you should say possessed around these guys so casually."
This time Dean couldn't help but laugh. "For somebody who turned whiter than an actual ghost when you found out all this shit is real, less than a whole day ago, you've adapted pretty fast there, Mac."
"I value adaptability. And, I don't know how successfully I'm doing it yet, but I'm trying."
"So what's with the newspapers?" Sam asked, before Jack could start another attempt at lecturing his partner and giving him the third degree, when Mac was obviously okay, and not interested in being lined out in front of people who were essentially strangers.
Mac had started to head toward the bathroom, as much in an effort to evade Jack yelling at him as to get cleaned up, but he turned back. "I woke up early and …"
"He means he didn't really sleep," Jack supplied, and Sam and Mac shared a look that was almost amused and was definitely a little exasperated.
"I slept, just … not … you know … all night." He shrugged. "Anyway, the local paper has a website. It's pretty crappy, not unlike the motel WiFi, but you can scroll through the last fifteen or so issues …"
"And you found something," Dean said, a real smile, not just a slightly amused or teasing one, crinkling his eyes at the edges.
Mac nodded. "I found a couple of somethings."
Jack had stopped looking pissed off and just sat down on the rumpled bed where Dean had been sleeping not too long ago. He realized it was still warm, although he felt like the time from when he'd realized Mac was gone until now felt like half a day at least.
He realized that maybe since the Murdoc incident he'd gotten a tiny bit overprotective. Okay, to be fair, he'd always taken the kid's safety awfully seriously, but that day … he'd been so sure he was going to lose the kid, and that it would have been because he'd selfishly stalked off in a huff even though he'd known Mac wasn't in a good place when they spoke …
Well, he'd promised himself that he would never leave Mac vulnerable like that again. Bodyguard meant all the time. All of it. But he'd also promised the kid to try to respect his boundaries, to not go overboard. Mac had made it very clear that he appreciated Jack's efforts, but he needed to know Jack realized he could take care of himself.
"What did you find, bud?" Jack asked as something of a peace offering for going from zero to helicopter parent in less time that it took for someone else to pull on a pair of boots.
Mac picked up the newspapers of the nearby table and set them down on the bed next to Jack, glancing at the Winchesters as he did so. "I bookmarked the site on the tablet … There were some traffic cam pictures and one really blurry photo from someone in a car … People have seen the woman we saw a few times lately."
"At that intersection?" Sam asked, coming over and sitting on the other side of the stack of newspapers, picking one up, almost as if he already knew what Mac was thinking.
"Twice," Mac nodded. "But two other times were at other locations. All near here though." He shifted slightly, pulling absently at his sweaty running shirt. "But the site is garbage, like I said. I saw they keep back issues at their offices and I figured it couldn't hurt to go grab some."
"So we could sift through them for other sightings and see if we see some kind of pattern," Sam said.
Mac immediately nodded. "Yeah. I mean, that thing wasn't human, but that's no reason not to apply the same investigative techniques we'd use if we were gathering information on suspicious human activity. Intel is intel."
Jack was nodding thoughtfully, rubbing the backs of his knuckles along the stubble on his jaw like he did when he was trying to make a leap based on intel they didn't even have yet. It used to drive Mac crazy. The hell of it was, Jack was often right when he got like that. Jack looked to Dean, hoping the experienced Hunter would either agree or offer another plan before Mac decided to wander off on his own again.
"But if it's just a … whadayacallit … A woman in white? Then why do all this research? We could just hit up the police files for a likely candidate and go find her and do whatever it is you guys do to get rid of a ... one of those," Jack said, just trying to get his head in the game.
Dean was about to answer, when Mac jumped in. "You'd burn her bones. But I don't think this is a woman in white. The MO is wrong."
All three cousins looked surprised, especially Sam and Dean. Less than a day ago, this guy didn't know any of this stuff even existed, passed out when he realized it was true, and now he was talking like a seasoned Hunter. As the least shocked by Mac's newly demonstrated knowledge (he was used to Mac picking things up quickly), Jack was the one to ask, "What makes you say that, Mac?"
Mac sat down on the neatly made bed where he'd slept and Dean sat down next to him so the four of them were more or less facing each other to talk this out. "First of all, the victims … They haven't disappeared without a trace, right? Some of them have turned up dead. Exsanguinated, correct?"
Sam nodded. "Yeah, that's true."
"Aw, Sammy, you two must've taken the same annoying English class at some point. He likes the big words, too."
"I've been telling you to stop calling me Sammy for years now, Dean. How hard am I gonna have to hit you for you to finally knock it off."
"You don't need to hit me, Sammy. Just start lookin' like a grown up."
Sam looked to Mac for a sympathetic ear. "You believe the crap I have to put up with?"
Mac shook his head. "My first name is Angus, and Jack uses it whenever I've pissed him off. Actually, it's usually whenever I've done something he thinks is risky and he wants me to hear how disapproving he is." Mac raised his hands in an 'I get you' gesture. "I'm not saying Sammy is any better than Angus if you don't like it, just that I doubt either of them will stop.
Sam chuckled. "They won't. I'm sure of it. What else makes you think it's something else, other than the victims being drained of blood?" he asked.
Mac knew Sam phrased it that way in case either Dean or Jack weren't actually aware of the term exsanguinate. Sam figured Dean should be by now, but he had the most stubborn refusal to acknowledge new vocabulary … or new … well, a lot of things. Seemed like Jack maybe had a little streak of that, too.
"I'm not exactly someone they'd zero in on … I mean … I haven't ever … You know … cheated on someone." He shrugged, almost blushing.
Sam shook his head. "That's not necessarily a hard and fast rule though. I was attacked by one once, and I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time … By which I mean hunting her so I could burn her bones. I hadn't ever been unfaithful or seriously broken trust with anyone at the time either."
Mac didn't comment on the phrase at the time. He didn't want to know if Sam had cheated on a girlfriend or broken any kind of vow in the time since then, especially because he saw the shadow pass over Dean's face that said he thought maybe his little brother had broken trust with him at some point.
"See, now, Sammy, I've been thinkin' about that," Dean commented.
Oh, boy, here we go, Mac thought.
"What about Rebecca Winters and Mya Todd when you were in third grade? Like maybe our Ms. Welch had a legitimate beef with you."
"Jerk," Sam grumbled. "It's not cheating if you're a little kid and you just want to hold hands with two different pretty girls who don't think being as tall as your big brother makes you a mutant. Or if it does, it's the comic book hero kind."
Mac was nodding thoughtfully, looking from Dean back to Sam again. "That might have been enough," he agreed. "But even in that case, wouldn't this one have gone after Sam again, too?" He shifted a little uncomfortably again. "I just don't think I'm the target demographic for a woman in white."
"You really that much of a Boy Scout?" Dean asked with a smirk.
"He got kicked out of the Scouts," Jack replied before Mac could say anything.
"See Dean, it is possible to get kicked out without telling your troupe that your father is a demon hunter. I never said anything about the family business!"
Sam was vaguely indignant, but Mac smiled. Nice to know he wasn't the only one.
Before a family feud broke out, Jack decided he should intervene in the conversation and redirect it.
"You find all this on the internet, kid?" Jack asked.
Mac shrugged again. Riley and Boze were known on the team to be better at online research, but he spent a good amount of his free time poking around the web for cool stuff, so he wasn't a novice himself.
"But I ran out of good search results, so I figured we'd go old-school and see what we could turn up that way."
"Good thinkin', kid," Dean said, slapping him on the shoulder. "Let's sift through these and see what we find."
Mac stood, thinking he was both sweaty from the exertion of his run, but also chilled by the ambient temperature outside. "If it's all the same to you guys, I'm gonna go grab a shower before I start."
The other three men nodded distractedly and began divvying up the stack of newspapers. Mac had just closed the bathroom door, when Sam asked, "Hey, where the hell did Cas go?"
A shout of surprise cut through any reply Dean or Jack might have formulated. Dean just smirked, "From the sounds of it? I'm guessing back to nap in the bathtub."
A not exactly whispered curse was heard through the door. Then the door opened, and Mac stood there holding it open, obviously extremely glad he'd only gotten into his morning shower and shave routine as far as peeling off his shirt.
"I am sorry, Angus MacGyver. I didn't not mean to startle you. I only meant to rest while everyone was looking for you."
Mac's expression softened a little. Maybe it would be nice to have someone who understood people even less than he usually did. "Don't worry about it. But no more appearing in the bathroom … And please, call me Mac."
Without waiting for a reply, Mac closed the door and everyone heard the shower turn on a moment later.
"I am glad you found your friend and that he returned from his morning exercise safely."
"You knew he was just out for a run?" Jack's voice held a hard, dangerous note.
Cas didn't seem to pick up on the warning. "Yes, I believe I told you he was running quite rapidly."
Dean flicked his eyes to Jack's and gave a spare shake of his head. Jack wanted to blow his top, but Cas had just been being literal, and maybe a little careless about speaking in complete thoughts and counting on everyone to just catch up on their own. Jeez, that was a familiar experience. How could he be mad at that?
"It's fine, Cas."
"I am relieved. I was afraid you might do something rash."
"I am never rash," Jack huffed.
"You forget, Jack Dalton, that I can read your mind." Cas smiled then, just a bit. "Also, you and Dean are very much alike. He is never not rash."
"Fair enough, Cas." Dean and Jack traded smirks.
Dean asked, "Are you hanging around because you need something from us, or are you hanging around because there's some Big Bad you don't want to tell us about, but you want to protect us from?"
Cas looked confused. "You called to me, Dean."
"Oh, damn. Yeah, I did. I just needed you to help us make Mac believe. You can go do whatever you need to."
Cas blinked out of the room in less than no time.
Jack blinked rapidly and shook his head. "You ever get used to the guy just comin' and goin' like that."
Sam shrugged. "I don't even think about it now." He started leafing through a paper. "Let's get to work on these. The sooner we know what we're dealing with, the faster you guys get back to your normal lives."
There was something unmistakably bitter when Sam said the words 'normal lives' but Jack let it pass and got to work himself. When Mac came out of the bathroom after a long shower, in which he'd managed to get prune fingers because he was staring off into space, Jack and the Winchesters were gathered around the little table, looking at pictures they'd taken out of the papers.
Mac wedged himself between Jack and Dean, who were crowding the table, so he could see. "Noticed anything yet?"
Sam glanced at him. "Other than these are all taken late at night or during the early morning hours, not much."
Mac just nodded and leaned forward, moving pictures around and frowning. Jack and Dean backed off. Dean, because he knew the look on Mac's face all too well. It was the one Sammy got when he was researching, and Jack because he knew just getting out of the way of what his partner was trying to do was the quickest way of getting home and getting Mac out of danger from whatever this thing was.
"Hmmm," Mac said. It was a 'I've got a conclusion' sound rather than a questioning one.
"What is it, Mac?" Sam asked. After looking at the arrangement of pictures Mac had shifted around, he thought he had half an idea. Or half of a half anyway.
"They're all at … Hang on." He leaned closer to the grainiest of the pictures. "Yeah, they're all at intersections of some kind. Look …"
Mac quickly and methodically pointed out where all of these sightings had taken place at various types of intersections.
Dean sighed. "I wish I thought this was worth our time, kid, but look … This one doesn't follow that pattern." He pulled one of the pictures toward them.
Mac squinted at the picture.
"Sure it does. All this overgrowth hides an old road of some kind ... Here."
They were looking at him like he was hallucinating. He pointed then, putting his finger right on what he was talking out.
"You see here? The trees are different … Younger. This spot doesn't look it anymore, but at some point, it must have been a crossroad."
"Son of a bitch!" Dean growled.
Sam's mouth twitched his agreement.
"What is it?" Jack asked. Mac stayed quiet, studying to faces of the other two men.
"We're gonna need to go get some things for a summoning … That rat bastard," Dean cursed a few more times under his breath just for good measure.
"If this thing is a crossroads demon of some kind, our … what's a good word for this, Dean?" Sam asked.
Dean just swore again. "Son of a bitch."