Mac came around slowly. The first thing he registered was his pounding head.

It felt like someone had hit him.

Hard.

Maybe with a brick.

He knew he was lying on the ground, could feel odd stones poking into his back and legs, dirt working its way up under the rumpled edge of his shirt and into the waistband of his jeans. And it was cold. Cold and damp, despite nearby flickering fire light that he could see from behind his closed lids, and smell the wood and smoke, hear the crackle. None of its warmth reached him.

His hands were freezing, and he realized as he tried to shift position that something icy had an iron grip on both his wrists. The experience of being Murdoc's captive forced its way into his consciousness all at once and he had the overwhelming urge to just roll onto his side and be sick. Since that wasn't an option, he took a steadying breath.

If he could get away from Murdoc, he could get himself out of … whatever this was.

Except he had no memories that gave him any clue as to where he was or why he was there at all. The last thing he could recall through the thundering haze of the headache he had was getting off the plane in Brownsville and Jack bitching about the nondescript beige sedan Matty had rented them.

Wait … No … He remembered … Everything up to the bar. Then he remembered standing in the loud smoky room, listening to Jack and Dean reveal the depth of their previous subterfuge of pretending to be tone deaf and an absolutely stunning woman brushing his arm with long red nails. He remembered talking to her, being drawn in by her. Then she'd suggested they leave together and he'd said no, he couldn't, that he was with people. Her face changed, melted, distorted; he saw underneath her beautiful mask. His last memory before waking was that she'd unhinged her jaw and swallowed him whole.

He knew that couldn't have been real, that it was something his brain was doing to make meaning out of something he couldn't comprehend, but it didn't alter the memory of the feelings it caused. The urge to be sick returned and this time he tried to move a little. The pressure on his wrists increased and he realized something was pressing his elbows into the ground, too. And that was cold, too. Someone had taken his leather jacket. Maybe that's why he was almost shivering.

He breathed carefully for a few minutes until the nausea passed.

Then he forced his eyes open.

Despite the pain the minimal light caused and his immediate urge to squeeze them shut again, Mac felt his eyes go very wide. He wasn't tied up or restrained with cuffs as he'd thought. He was surrounded by four small children, each one gripping one of his limbs with both hands, pinning him almost painfully to the floor. They were all staring intently into his face.

Not one of them could have been more than six or seven, since the oldest looked to be almost exactly Annabelle Pena's age, and the youngest was a little boy with white blond hair that appeared as young as four. Their apparent ages would have made the strength with which they held him down horrifying enough in its own right. But their eyes …

Mac squeezed his shut as soon as he regained voluntary control over them. He felt himself panting in panic and didn't seem able to stop. One of them spoke, her voice as icy as the grip she had on his wrist and elbow. "Mother, it's awake. But it's going to make itself pass out again."

Again? Again? Had he been conscious before and just blacked it out?

The answer floated through whatever space they were in, and Mac's experience told him it was a cave of some sort and the sound of it made his heart hammer harder in his chest, his breathing pick up even further until he started to feel lightheaded.

"Yo estaré allí, cariño. Deseo beber de él otra vez."

Mac translated in his head. "I will be right there, my darling. I wish to drink from him again."

Again.

He shivered.

It was the voice of a corpse, reanimated in a nightmare, of bones rattling in a box. It was the sound of all the menace that demon they'd summoned implied. The sound … Of Hell. No, worse, it was the sound of something the King of Hell didn't want anything to do with.

There was no way he was going to get out of this mess if he didn't get his shit together, Mac thought. And maybe he was just disoriented, had overreacted to the light playing oddly on those kids' faces. Only one way to find out, he supposed, and opened his eyes again. The children all leaned toward him with hungry expressions on their otherwise weirdly blank faces.

It hadn't been a trick of the light. Their eyes were only whites, and were glowing faintly blue in the dimness. His brain helpfully supplied that La Llorona was often associated with possessed children. That actually made it easier to focus. If he could get to his jacket, wherever that was, he had a couple of containers of holy water, some salt, and a few odds and ends. He forced himself to look around to see if he could put eyes on it.

He swallowed hard, despite an uncomfortably dry mouth and throat when he saw things that were just shadows moving around the cave, they had the shapes of men, but no substance. Dark things made of smoke. But they were moving things, stacking rocks … building cages. Cages. Jesus.

He wasn't really conscious of doing it, but he started struggling against the cold hands holding him down. "Mother," the little blond boy called in an achingly young voice. "He's fighting again."

A woman approached from behind Mac's head; he could just make out the shape of her in his peripheral vision. "Not for long, dear one," she said, this time in English. Almost like it was for his benefit, like she wanted him to know. "He will be too weak to fight soon. Then we might just have some of his friends over for the party, my loves."

Mac remembered vaguely what the face that went with the true voice of this creature had looked like. She's been the color of a week-old corpse, with large black eyes, deep furrows in her features, not wrinkles, but like a jack-o-lantern left too long on someone's porch. And her teeth, were perfect sharp shark's teeth, endless rows of them.

He wanted to close his eyes against seeing that again as the figure crouched down next to him, but found, once again, that he was unable to make his body obey even the simplest commands. He was cold into his bones, but slicked with sweat now, like he'd been struggling much harder than he'd realized. His breath came in rapid, irregular hitches, and his mouth was so dry he thought he might sell his soul for a sip of water.

He realized all at once that the children had moved back, and the woman-creature was sitting next to him on the floor, cross legged, a conversational expression on her totally normal looking face. No, not normal; beautiful, gorgeous even. She reached out a delicate graceful hand and trailed long red fingernails down his cheek.

He could feel calm returning, and warmth.

He couldn't move, even though no one was holding him down now, but that didn't seem to matter.

"That's better," she crooned, running her fingernails back through his hair and brushing his damp bangs off his face. "It's no good if you're upset, you see. Be calm and quiet, little one," she encouraged with the same tone that she's used on the children before.

Only now the voice didn't sound frightening, it sounded lovely, soothing. He didn't even mind that she called him little one, as though he was a child. The thought that even being called kid usually pissed him off tried to take root in his brain, but it couldn't seem to find a place to hang onto, so it trailed away.

Mac felt his eyes wanting to close, but he wasn't able to let them.

She spoke again, holding out the hand she wasn't running through his hair. "Give me your hand, child."

He couldn't feel his own hand, didn't believe he could move it, but nevertheless he saw it lifting off the floor and placing itself in hers. She grasped it by the wrist, looking at his arm with an expression that made him shiver again; he felt the cold of the floor and tried to shift away from it.

She frowned at him.

"I said be calm."

This time there was a sharpness in her voice that made him want to pull away. Her eyes bored into his.

"You cannot get away, child. You belong to me now. I am in every little crevice of your mind. But it keeps fighting. So silly. If you would just be calm, this fear your mind wants you to feel would fall away."

As he was forced to look in her eyes, the warmth started to spread through him again.

No! This was what Sam had told him about. This was a thrall. And he could fight it, break free. He'd already done it once.

He began focusing intently on feeling the cold and hard stone around him, smelling the fire, seeing this terrifying creature's true face. The beautiful features stuttered, switched back and forth between the face she wanted him to see, and the one that really belonged to her. He was able to twitch and almost begin to roll over. Her talons dug into his wrist, eliciting a pained gasp.

"You don't have to suffer you know. Suffering is for your friend. But if you fight with me, if you do not let me into your mind completely, the pain you will feel will know no limits."

She squeezed his wrist again and he was almost certain he felt something break, but the shout of pain was arrested in his throat, since he had no control over his own voice at the moment. She stopped running her hand through his hair and reached inside her white robes, drawing out a small silver knife. It glittered wickedly in the firelight.

He intensified his mental efforts to free himself.

She smiled down at him then, and the face no longer wavered or held any trace of a human woman. Mac was alone with a fairytale monster. "Such a stubborn boy," she whispered. "I suppose I'll have to feast on your suffering as well."

Finally, he managed some semblance of control and managed to jerk his arm, testing her grip. "No!"

She smiled a terrifying smile, revealing her monstrous sharp teeth. "Oh yes. And I promise you … This is going to hurt."

She drew the blade across the inside of Mac's arm and whatever it was made of, or treated with, burned like fire. Her horrible, gaping mouth was the only thing he could see then, as a lolling purple tongue stretched out and licked her colorless lips. She lowered her face to his arm and started pulling his blood from him in long draughts that sent agony through every blood vessel.

She had enough control over him again that he could no longer even attempt to pull away from the pain, from the certain death he knew she meant. And he was out of ideas.

He started to feel a dreamy sort of placidity come over him that he knew, in a distant disinterested way, was probably a symptom of blood loss, but which just sort of made him remember once when he'd been really little, being sick with a fever. He remembered his parents being downright frantic about it, but he felt the same sort of sleepy disinterest he did now. A cool hand started carding through his hair again.

He could almost hear his mother's voice then. "Oh Angus, wake up. We're all so worried about you. Angus, please, baby."

Angus.

Angus.

Nobody ever called him that anymore. And he was glad. It made him miss her too much. Just like Cas said. He should have asked Cas if she was in heaven, he thought groggily. Cas would have told him. Cas liked him. He could tell.

Cas!

Cas could help him. Cas could find him. And Cas could bring Jack and the Winchesters who definitely knew how to bind this thing. He knew he'd asked him to stay out of his head, but as he moaned softly through another wave of pain as La Llorona drank deeply from his arm again, he hopped maybe Cas hadn't totally listened.

With the last little bit of strength he had left, he shouted with his thoughts.

Mac was not a religious guy.

But as he called out to Cas with his mind, it was definitely a prayer.

And something told Mac that the angel heard his plea, even as he slipped once again into unconsciousness.