Waking the Moon — Elizabeth Hand

LOVE IS ANCIENT BUT EVIL IS ETERNAL

Like all new students, Katherine Sweeney Cassidy moves with caution at Washington, D.C.'s University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine. It is a strange place of brooding shrines and gleaming towers, guarded by androgynous stones angels. For Sweeney, college is a time to experiment with sex, to explore new friendships; a time of freedom and discovery--until she makes the wrong discovery.

One evening Sweeney learns what she was never supposed to know--that the university is controlled by a clandestine order, the Benandanti, which secretly manipulates every government, every country, every church, every institution in the world, and has done so since long before the Fall of Rome. Behind the secret of the Benandanti is one darker and older still--a blood cult never defeated and only barely contained, kept at bay for countless millennia by a terrified army of priests and shamans. And for thousands of years, it has worked. The patriarchy has prevailed. But now the time of the Benandanti is over. The Moon Goddess has returned. And she wants her world back.