The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (29 page)

“Or you could just go see them, boss. They
left the coordinates to their hunting lodge with me in case you
ever wanted a change of scenery—it’s outside Fort Carson. You were
too busy making eyes at Fiona to notice, but they seemed really
interested in having you work for them.”

“That’s something like 800 miles away,” Gieo
said, “across a bunch of free city state territory. It’d take weeks
to get there on horseback if I got there at all.”

“You could take your motorcycle and fuel up
in Albuquerque. Word around the Ravens’ camp is they’ve already
tamed that city state.”

“If I found already-trained pilots, there
wouldn’t be any reason to press Juarez…”

Cowboy boots thumping up to the roof snapped
Gieo’s head around. Fiona emerged from the roof access door looking
dusty and a little bashful.

“If you don’t need me anymore, I’m going to
power down now, boss,” Ramen said, powering down immediately after
without waiting to see if Gieo did in fact need something else from
him.

“I’m really sorry about being so distant
earlier,” Fiona said. “You’ve kept your personal stuff and work
stuff separate so well and I should try to follow your
example.”

“Really, that’s not…”

“No, let me finish,” Fiona said. “You were
right. I do need to treat you better and I’m planning on starting
right now. Let’s head downstairs and I promise my whole world will
be about you until sunrise.”

A wickedly barbed sea-serpent wound its way
through Gieo’s intestines and stomach threatening to turn her
inside-out with anxiety. If she were a slightly more terrible
person, she thought she might have taken the offer and then hopped
on her bike the next day to drive to Colorado with or without
telling Fiona before she left. Of course, if she were that kind of
person, she assumed she might just be able to go her whole life
without ever telling Fiona the truth. Veronica was right about her
though; she was too nice.

“I did, or, rather, had done to me, what I’m
fairly certain will be considered cheating in your eyes,” Gieo
blurted out.

Fiona’s face went from blushingly excited to
stricken. The transition sent a hot poker right through the center
of Gieo’s chest.

“Explain,” Fiona croaked.

“Veronica came up here being weird and
insulting, I kissed her, but in a really gross way to make her
leave me alone, and then she flipped the switch to flattering,”
Gieo rattled off quickly in a single breath, hoping to get the
entire explanation out before Fiona could respond. “She kind of
spun me into a really vulnerable position and started rubbing me,
but only through my clothes, and I kind of came.”

“She asked you to ask her to keep going…”
Fiona said. It should have sounded like a question, but nothing
about the way she’d said it could make it anything other than a
statement of unadulterated fact.

“Yes.”

“And you did.”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Because that’s what she does.” Fiona didn’t
sound angry or look like she had any intention of shooting anyone
or anything. Gieo desperately wished she would yell, threaten
Veronica, or pistol whip the both of them while calling them every
name in the book. But she didn’t. She simply stood there with that
stricken look on her face, twisting the fireplace poker rammed
through the center of Gieo’s heart. “The only question was going to
be how you were going to respond.”

“I think I know why I did it if you’ll just
let me explain…” Gieo took several steps toward Fiona, tears
welling up at the corners of her eyes, blurring her vision.

“I don’t suppose that matters now.” Fiona
held out her hand, keeping Gieo at arm’s length. “You should
probably go ahead and sleep up here; I see you’ve still got your
tent set up.”

“I might have to go to Colorado tomorrow,”
Gieo said, trying to throw everything she could at Fiona to keep
her from going downstairs without her. “I’ll have to leave really
early, so we should talk about this now, before I have to go, since
I might not come back.”

“I suspect you’ll make it there and back just
fine if that’s what you want,” Fiona said. “If I don’t see you
before you leave tomorrow, have a safe journey.”

Tears rolled down Gieo’s cheeks. The cold,
hollow way Fiona was speaking cut her more deeply than any
explosive, violent reaction could have. There was a
weary-resignation hanging off Fiona like a wet blanket and it made
Gieo ache to her very core to know she was the one who put it
there.

“I love you so much,” Gieo said between
sobs.

“I know you do,” Fiona said. “It was never a
question of that.” She turned and walked back downstairs, closing
the door behind her with a soft click that made Gieo flinch.

Chapter 19:
Uncomfortable memories and
departures.

Fiona spent
much of the night failing at sleeping. As the sky began to gray,
she abandoned the project of rest, and dressed for the day. In the
wee-predawn hours, Tombstone was as quiet and empty as a church.
The sun would bring birds, buzzing insects, and the clamor of
preparation for war, but in those small hours when the sky was only
gray, not yet bringing the golden light of early morning, Fiona
found a moment of peace. The livery, a new instillation within the
city appropriately housed in the fabled O.K. corral as was its
original intended purpose, was a short walk from the saloon. She
picked up Tyra, brushed her, saddled her, and rode out for the
stables.

The warmth and light of dawn hadn’t fully
settled over the desert by the time she trotted up to the old high
school, but activity was brewing nevertheless. Cork and his riders
were already saddled for their patrol. Fiona tipped her hat to the
four hunters turned horsemen, who saluted her military style in
return on their way out toward the rising sun.

Fiona veered her mare away from the main
stables to where her car still sat, a month after its fateful drive
across the open desert to lure the Slark away from the city. A
thick layer of dust clung to it, leaving her to wonder if it would
ever drive again. Nobody had even bothered pulling the tumbleweeds
or brambles from the intakes. With a single finger, someone had
drawn a heart on the driver side door in the dust. The heart’s
lines weren’t completely clean, indicating it had probably been a
week or more since its etching, but Fiona suspected she knew who
had drawn it. It was the sort of thing Gieo would do.

Fiona dismounted, tied Tyra off on the
spoiler at the rear of the car, and took a slow walk around her
former vehicle, inspecting the sorry state it had come to. Though
her original intent had been to survey damage, she continually
returned to the heart to question its existence as though somehow
she would be able to tell for sure if Gieo had drawn it or what it
might have meant if someone else was the heart artist. She heard
Veronica ride up long before her thoroughbred bay came into view.
Peppermint, Veronica’s horse, was a colossal gray stallion of
racing stock with an antsy stance and form-perfect gallop. The
horse had a havoc personality and Veronica only encouraged her
mount’s aggressive proclivities. Tyra, who was not in season but
recognized Peppermint’s virility, strained against her tie-off when
Veronica trotted up to where Fiona was standing.

“You’re antagonizing my horse,” Fiona
muttered.

“There’s a lot of sexual tension going around
these days,” Veronica said brazenly.

“Gieo told me what you did.”

“I assumed she would,” Veronica said, “but
that’s not why I’m here.”

“I don’t care why you’re here,” Fiona
growled. “That’s what we’re talking about.”

“Fine, what do you want to say?” Veronica
turned Peppermint in a few slow pirouettes to take down some of his
energy. She snapped her head around with each slow rotation to keep
her eyes on Fiona. “Because I’ve got nothing to say on that
topic.”

“You couldn’t leave it alone?”

Veronica shrugged.

Fiona saw red. “Do you even want her or are
you just trying to spoil her for me?”

“What was good enough for you isn’t good
enough for her?” Veronica snarled. “Maybe you’re forgetting what
made me drop Carolyn in a hot minute to sew myself to your side?
Are you mad at her because she’s following in my footsteps or are
you mad at me because you wish you hadn’t blazed the trail in the
first place?”

The anger drained out of Fiona like a rain
barrel punctured at the base. She’d forgotten, somehow she’d
forgotten. The trick she’d always blamed on Veronica was the one
she’d invented. Before Veronica had done it with Gieo, before she’d
done it with Beth, before she’d done it with Suzy, Jessica, Dylan,
and half a dozen other girls, Fiona had done it to her. The
collars, the dominance, the asking to be asked, it was all Fiona’s
creation. Veronica had used it to make certain points both to Fiona
and Carolyn, but it originated with Veronica over Fiona’s knee,
betraying Carolyn and setting their whirlwind romance in motion
with cheating as the norm.

“Both,” Fiona whispered, “but mostly the
latter.”

“You’re a racehorse with blinders on,”
Veronica said, her demeanor visibly softening. “You’re going too
fast to see and unable to look back at the chaos you’re leaving in
your wake. I won’t deny the damage I’ve done or my part in the
betrayal, but this little trick of seduction was yours.”

“I know, I know. Let’s say I owe you this
chance, let’s say I owe her the chance to choose, what are we
supposed to do now?”

“We give her time to think,” Veronica said.
“If she was to do it on a knee-jerk, no pun intended, she’d pick
you without hesitation, but that’s not what you want, is it?”

Fiona shook her head. She’d laid the choice
out for Veronica all those years ago, made it a hard choice to
refuse, and put a short fuse on the powder-keg of a situation, but
she’d still respected the choosing process. Ultimately, Veronica
had picked her, had thrown Carolyn away without a second thought,
and Fiona always had a doubt about Veronica’s loyalty because of
it. She didn’t want the same specter haunting her relationship with
Gieo, but at the same time she desperately wanted to have a
relationship with the pilot and letting her choose might mean
giving that up.

“She’ll be gone for almost a week,” Veronica
said. “Give her that time and we’ll ask her when she comes
back.”

Fiona nodded her agreement, but couldn’t hold
her tongue. “What do you really want from this? I don’t believe
you’re after Gieo to have her for your own and I don’t believe
you’re doing this just to fuck me over.”

Veronica gave a tug on her reins bringing
Peppermint into a stock-still stance that Fiona hadn’t thought
possible for the tightly-wound stallion. “I want everything,”
Veronica said in such an even and earnest tone that Fiona didn’t
doubt it for a moment. “I want her, I want you, part of me even
still wants Carolyn. Even now, even when I’m reshaping the world as
I want it, I know I can’t have everything. Still, I want you to
know, my preference would be to have both of you. She’s not that
kind of girl and you’re not one to share either of us, so I guess
we’ll just have to let it sort itself out.”

From everything Fiona knew about Veronica,
and she knew her very well, it was the truest thing she’d ever
admitted. It was an impossible dream, but Fiona knew it was an
honest one the moment she heard Veronica say the words. “What did
you come out here to talk about?” Fiona asked, wanting to put
conversational distance between herself and the hard truths brought
down on her by their exchange thus far.

“Carolyn is coming in on the train today with
two thousand infantry,” Veronica said. “You need to find her a hard
target within a day’s march. We’re resuming open hostilities with
the Slark.”

“With Los Angeles as the ultimate goal?”
Fiona asked, knowing full well what the answer would be.

“With eradication of the invaders as the
ultimate goal.”

“I’ve been thinking about something Gieo told
me and studying the maps she pieced together during her years of
attempted flights,” Fiona said, “and I think I have a target bigger
than anything taken down since the cataclysm.”

Veronica’s eyes lit up like the desert sun.
“Show me.”