***

SIXTEEN HOURS EARLIER

**

Sam was just closing his cell as Dean wandered back to the car. The rest stop just outside of Louisville, Kentucky was a pit, but there was no way that Dean could have made it all the way to Honset, Ohio without a bathroom break.

"Who was on the phone," Dean asked idly, leaning against Sam's door and turning his face up to the sun for a moment. They'd been in the car for days, and it felt good to stretch for just a minute.

Sam's phone didn't ring often anymore; most of his college friends had slipped out of contact. So when Sam's phone did ring, it was usually about a hunt.

"Bobby. He has an errand for us." Sam sounded half amused, half skeptical.

It was the skeptical tone that caught Dean's attention. People in their line of work didn't indulge in that often, and Sam had never really sounded that way about anything that Bobby said.

"An errand, huh," Dean asked. "What errand?"

Sam grinned. "He wants us to make a quick stop in Kentucky. He needs us to pick up a book for him."

"A book?"

Sam's grin got bigger. "Yeah. A copy of the Veneficium Trunca."

Dean blinked, his eyebrows shooting up. "The Veneficium Trunca? One of the most dangerous spell books ever written? The one that even most hunters think is only a myth. That Veneficium Trunca?"

"Yep." Sam's face was going to split if he kept grinning like that.

Dean was floored. "No shit?"

"No shit."

"Well…. Wow."

"Yeah."

Dean shook his head. "But…where did he find it? Some estate sale? Some little occult book shop?"

"E-bay."

"E-bay?" Dean scoffed. "Okay, now I know you're having on me."

"No, dude. Seriously," Sam laughed. "I looked it up. The guy has it listed as a text book from the eighteen hundreds. He has absolutely no idea what it is. He's asking fifty bucks for it."

Fifty bucks for the Veneficium Trunca: the "poisonous magic of the maimed". Everyone who lived in their circle, everyone who knew the truth of what was really in the dark, knew the story… ridiculous as it was.

Lore stated that the Veneficium Trunca had originally been written in the twelfth century by a Germanic monk. He'd been involved with a group of witches – supposedly not bad people, just rural folks who had chosen to keep the old ways rather than convert to Christianity. The witches had invited the monk into their coven, to prove that they were not evil… but he turned on them, selling them out to the Abbot. It had been a death-sentence for the coven. The witches has suffered long weeks of horrible torture and forced confessions, then execution by burning.

The coven had been locked up together in the basement of the church while they were 'interrogated' by the good church-men. They had been too weak to escape… but not to cast. According to the story, the witches had pulled out all the darkest magic and cursed the monk with it, pushing it into his head, forcing him to compulsively write it out in an attempt to purge the demonic knowledge. When the other monks found him, he had filled page after page with the writings and was down to scribbling on his cell walls. His fellow monks had sentenced him to the same pyre that he had condemned the coven to.

According to the story, the monks had burned the book along with its author; not knowing that the cursed monk had already produced four other copies.

The copies of the book had floated in and out of history for awhile. One was reputed to be lost in the holy-land during the crusades. One was supposedly owned by Josef Mengele. And there were rumors that a copy had been possessed by Anthony Fish, the serial killer who ate children in the 1930's.

They were only stories, though. Most hunters were agreed that the Veneficium Trunca was just a legend. A ghost-story for the people who hunted ghosts. Even if the book existed at all, consensus was that it was probably just a simple spell book that leaned toward the evil side of magic.

And now Bobby had found it.

Dean felt an odd mix of excitement and loathing. "Dude, it's like finding the holy-grail. Only not holy, and more cursed. The anti-grail."

Sam gave him an amused look. "The anti-grail?" He shook his head. "Whatever. Bobby wants us to check it out; and snag it, if the book's legit. We need to go get it before someone else takes it, and gets themselves in trouble."

"We have an address?"

Sam held a piece of paper through his open window.

"Awesome. Let's go catch us a legend."

***