Over and Run With - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Twelve

If you're reading this, then you probably know everything there is to know about the Circle of Cavan.  You know all about their origin, grown from the ashes of the American Civil War.  You know all about Gillian Gallagher, and her fight against Confederate values.  You know about Matthew Morgan, and how he almost brought them all down.  And if you know about Matthew Morgan, then you must also know about Cameron Morgan and how she finished the job.

The Gathering isn't the Circle.  It's a fact that I've known since the start, but never had it been more apparent than when we first stepped foot into their operational headquarters.

Make no mistake about it: the Gathering started with the Circle.  Children raised under the same values—same belief systems.  It stemmed from people who lost their families, who were burdened with the knowledge of an underground world, now torn to shreds.  But the Gathering's headquarters was not the result of a 150-year-old, multigenerational terrorist empire.  In fact, the Gathering's headquarters looked like it could use a few good rolls of duct tape.

It was a warehouse long abandoned, framed more with broken windows than whole ones.  Light shone from the inside, but it flickered and danced like flame.  I wasn't sure where in the world we had landed, but there was a dusting of snow that twirled in the wind and concealed any path that might have once led to this great, sprawling beast of a building.  The moon was supposed to be out, but the clouds wouldn't let even a peek of light through.  We were fully in the dark—in more ways than one.

Somehow, someway, I found myself once again following Blake Hughes.  Finn, Alice, and Luke were all following me.  I begged the universe that this wouldn't become some sort of domino effect.  I hoped that when I fell, they wouldn't fall with me.

No word from the universe, yet.

Instead, it was just the whistle of the wind blowing behind the five of us as Mr. Hughes stepped up to a door that was three times too tall. It had suffered years of underuse, rusting across the bolts and rotting along the wood.  I wondered, as Hughes rolled up the sleeve of his jacket, just how secure a place like this could really be.

My wonder didn't linger for very long.  If there was a code to his knock, then I couldn't decipher it.  It was three simple raps, without anything special to it whatsoever, but the person on the other side of the door knew who it was.  Or, at the very least, they felt confident enough to unlatch the five, six, seven locks that held strong on the other side. 

It was only a small portion of the door that eventually opened, rather than the entirety of the hulking goliath that surrounded it, but the view on the other side left me feeling like the entire twenty-foot door had swung right into me and knocked out all of my air.

Because William Kasey was standing there, looking like he belonged.

When I last saw Bill, we were both at the bottom of the American embassy to Rome.  He was on one side of the fight, and I was on the other.  There was a time in my life when I never could have imagined the two of us in opposition.  These days, I couldn't imagine us ever going back.  A lot of things changed when Will died and, by far, Bill was the thing that changed the most.

I wanted to be angry with him, but I couldn't be.  Not quite.  When I looked at Bill, all I felt was greif, and sadness, and guilt.  I wondered if he felt the same when he looked at me.

If so, he did a pretty good job of hiding it.  More than anything else, he just looked surprised to see me.  Which was probably pretty fair, considering the fact that, less than 48 hours ago, I was eating waffles with the enemy.  "Maggie?"

His gaze extended beyond my shoulder, toward a handful of faces that probably looked like they were in need of a good nap.  Finn and Luke, teammates throughout his summers.  Alice, his dear friend from Gallagher.  And me, once known to him as Cap.  It must have been a strange sight to see us all on the doorstep of the Gathering, bags in hand.