The Gathering Dark Read Online Free PDF

of sorcery and a sect of dark magicians in her ranks had brought the church down. While it had been only in the last few years that Rome had begun to reorganize with new leaders and a new focus, things had happened much more quickly in America. The Church of the Resurrection—the Americans had very quickly abandoned the use of the word Catholic —had branched off almost immediately when Rome collapsed.
    It had suffered its own tribulations in the meantime, perhaps the greatest of which had been the witch hunt for pedophiles among the priesthood. But without the archaic secrecy Rome had always insisted upon, the Church of the Resurrection had flushed that element from its ranks in a style nearly as brutal and unrelenting as the notorious Inquisition had been. The net result, however, was that the United States now had a far larger and more organized Catholic Church than anywhere else in the world.
    Yet here they were, this very moment, repeating the sins of their fathers. For nearly two thousand years the Roman Church had held the reins on demons and other supernatural creatures—or most of them at least—with the sorcery found in a book called The Gospel of Shadows . A sect within the church had been trained in the book’s secrets. But now every member of the sect was dead, and the book had disappeared during the horrific vampire jihad that had exposed the truth to the world ten years earlier. They had been tainted by power and dark magick, the men and women of that sect. They had been evil.
    But without them, without the secrets of that book, the shadows were rising again. The demons and the beasts of the darkness, the shades of the dead, all were returning to the world, testing the boundaries and finding them shattered.
    In order to stop them, the Church of the Resurrection was now forced to attempt to recreate The Gospel of Shadows , or at least to build a new one, spell by spell, secret by secret, curse by curse.
    But Father Jack couldn’t figure out a spell to kill vermin like the Cythraul. How was he supposed to recreate the accumulated occult knowledge of thousands of years of infernal combat? And meanwhile he had to worry about the politics of present-day religion, and a former Roman Catholic priest who had become a Bishop in the Church of the Resurrection sometimes forgot that it was dangerous to forget the difference between the two.
    “Jack?” the Bishop prodded.
    The priest looked up at him and for a moment he saw himself as he knew Bishop Gagnon must see him: rumpled clothes, white collar hanging loose, in need of a shave, eyes red behind his glasses from poring over the scorched manuscript pages.
    “I guess I just need a break,” Father Jack said. “Maybe I’ll take a walk.”
    The reed-thin old man glared at him suddenly, a glint in his eyes that felt to Father Jack like the wrath of God.
    “You’ll do no such thing,” Bishop Gagnon commanded sharply. “You can stroll around Greenwich Village another night, Father. Right now, every hour that passes costs us more souls in Hidalgo.”
    Father Jack stared at him, mouth open slightly in astonishment. The Bishop had never spoken to him like this before. Granted, they were both under incredible stress. Hidalgo was a tiny town in Texas a stone’s throw from the Mexican border. In the previous seventy-two hours it had been the site of a demonic manifestation, creatures called Okulam that had blown in with a particularly fierce spring thunderstorm. The church just called them soul-leeches, for the disgusting things fastened themselves to the backs of their victims’ necks and infiltrated the minds and spirits of human beings. They took control, these vicious demons, and left only when they had cored the soul right out of their host.
    God help him, Father Jack didn’t know what to do about it. The manuscript he was studying had been written by early French settlers in North America, what would become the American Colonies, and it referred very