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Barney wasn’t entirely sure that he hadn’t dreamed what Albert had done to his neck until he went to wash up, at which point he saw the scar, clear as anything in the small speckled mirror on top of his dresser.
It had already healed over. The skin was an odd reddish-purple, but it no longer hurt like the devil. Mostly, it itched. He healed more quickly now, as did Isaacs—they’d have to, or they would never survive multiple manifestations. It hadn’t always been that way, but once Victoria and Albert had become resigned to Barney and Isaacs, it was part of the understanding they’d come to. Quicker healing in return for repeated and reliable infliction of pain whenever they emerged. A fair enough bargain, if anything about the war and what it had wrought could be characterized as fair.
Barney washed, shaved, and dressed, setting his collar as high as he could. It covered the scar, but just barely, and the starch made the itch well-nigh unbearable. Inside him, Victoria stirred and burbled with pleasure. It wasn’t as good as killing or maiming, but his mundane suffering was its own delight.
His stomach tight with nerves, Barney headed down to the kitchen. He jammed his hands into his pockets to fight the urge to scratch his neck. It called to mind how Nurse would stuff him into his stiffly-starched Sunday best back when he was still a sprout. “Stop fidgeting, Master Hugh,” she’d say, and he’d stick his hands into his pockets and hop up and down to distract himself from the itching.
Poor Nursey. He’d been a handful, and she’d been so awfully patient. He wondered sometimes how she was, but it was safest for all concerned that he never, ever found out. Never a good sign when he showed up on the scene with Isaacs. They were regular whatsits of doom. Herons? No, those were birds. Hangers? No. Harkers? That wasn’t even a real word.
Isaacs was up already, naturally, tending to the bacon in the pan. A teapot on the table sent a merry little streamer of steam from its spout. Barney’s mouth puckered a little in anticipation of the tannic bitterness that awaited. Sam and Randolph were still away in Wales, and Saul was not up yet. Barney and Isaacs, alone in the kitchen. Two abominations, both alike in inhumanity—that had a familiar ring to it. Did he have that from the Bible?
He wondered if Isaacs remembered the dream. He’d certainly never forget the bit where Isaacs had kissed him within an inch of his life—at least, until Albert woke up and tried to pull his head off. That had put rather a damper on the whole kissing enterprise.
Barney considered bringing it up, and then decided he would, in fact, rather have Albert treat his head like a champagne cork.
“Morning, Captain,” Isaacs said without turning around as Barney took a seat. He resisted pulling at his collar; the itching had worsened the moment he’d caught sight of Isaacs.
“Morning, Isaacs! Lovely day,” Barney boomed out, for all the world like a bluff country squire. He winced, and covered his embarrassment by blurting out the first thing on his mind. “I say, what’s the word that starts with H and goes with doom?”
Isaacs turned around and looked at Barney with one eyebrow raised. “Beg pardon, sir?”
“Oh, you know. It’s the herons of doom, except I don’t mean bally birds, it’s the—the whatsits—”
“Harbingers?”
Barney snapped his fingers. “That’s it! Harbingers of doom. I knew I could count on you. What a treasure you are, old man.”
What happened next was so strange that Barney wasn’t sure he wasn’t seeing things, but even after blinking multiple times, the phenomenon remained.
Isaacs was blushing.
Nine years they’d known each other, man and abomination, and Barney had seen Isaacs red from anger, pale with pain, and even a little blue about the lips with cold. Never, in all that time, had he ever seen him blush. Not exactly the blushing type, Max Isaacs.
And yet now, here in this kitchen in Fetter Lane, a blush had manifested on Isaacs’ face: faint, but decidedly there. Nothing but the palest pink flush over his cheekbones, a delicate hue—almost maidenly. It did not suit Isaacs at all.
Barney was hopelessly charmed.
Isaacs turned back around to tend to the bacon, which was just as well because Barney was staring. Possibly like a mooncalf. He poured himself a cup of tea and took a large sip, undoctored with either milk or sugar, as penance. The itching somehow worsened. Barney dug his fingernails into his thigh.
“Been thinking, Captain.”
Barney, desperate for a distraction, snapped his gaze to Isaacs. “Do tell, old man.”
“Victoria and Albert.” Isaacs finished assembling the sandwich and set it in front of Barney, then took a seat himself. The blush had dissipated, Barney noted with regret; in its place was a small frown and a resolute expression. “So. We done the necessary back at the chateau. Made it so they won’t turn each other into mince if they so much as catch a whiff of the other, and us along with them.”
Barney nodded and took a bite of the sandwich. Perfect, as usual. It was not quite enough to distract from the itching, but it helped. “Go on.”
“Thing is, we ain’t done much more on that front in years.”
Barney furrowed his brow as he chewed and swallowed. “How do you mean?”
“We’re stuck in place. Albert won’t kill Victoria as soon as look at her, but what if we could do one better, and get us all better acquainted?”
A small knot lodged in Barney’s stomach—excitement? Trepidation? Victoria shifted. Barney set down his sandwich and very determinedly ignored his neck, which had become excruciating. “True. We’re able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, but—” He shut his mouth abruptly. He’d almost said “we never touch,” but why would he ever need to touch Isaacs?
If Isaacs noticed the words Barney had bit off, he didn’t show it. “We shy past each other when we come too close, like we was a pair of nervy dogs—leastways when we don’t got mayhem and murder to distract ’em. That’s not really living, now, is it? So I asked myself: what do we need to do—”
“—to better accustom these two to each other?”
“Yes, but not only that. To accustom them to us. I want to see how far we can take these curses. We ain’t glued together, you and me, the way the curses are, but I’m your man, and I ain’t leaving any time soon. Albert’s come to terms with me, even if he don’t care for it. High time he came to terms with you, too.” Isaacs pointed emphatically at Barney’s chest. Victoria bristled; Barney held steady instead of flinching, but it was a near thing. Isaacs’ mouth was a grim, flat line; Albert was agitated, too. Barney’s neck, already on fire, flared into startling agony as Isaacs’ finger came within a hairsbreadth of touching his chest.
Barney broke.
It was not so much that his neck itched. It was that the sensation of itching possessed him and consumed his entire being—scoured everything out till only the urge to scratch remained. He had a vague thought that he should apologize to Isaacs, but all ability to form words vanished as he yanked off his tie, loosened his collar, and set his fingers on his neck, scratching with all the decorum of a flea-infested dog.
The relief was indescribable, verging on the sexual: the more he scratched, the more he wanted to continue scratching. The itch would abate for a brief, glorious moment, only to roar back, worse than before. In the first voluptuous, thrilling moments, he forgot where he was, who he was with, and why he’d bothered hiding the scar in the first place.
And then he came back to himself, abruptly and all at once. He stopped, fingers still dug into his neck. A light-headedness overcame him, akin to terror. He opened eyes he had not realized he’d shut, and looked across the table at Isaacs.
Isaacs was staring at the scar, his mouth crimped tight. Barney set his hands down as a flush crept up his face.
“Sorry,” he said. “Dashed awkward. Don’t know what came over me.”
“How did—” Isaacs blinked and looked away into the distance before turning his gaze back on Barney, this time looking him dead in the eyes. “Did I—”
“Woke up with it,” Barney said with strict truthfulness. His face felt as purple as the scar, but now that the secret was out, nothing to do but brazen it out.
Isaacs nodded. His eyes moved from Barney’s neck to his face and back again. Barney gripped the edge of the table. The dangling collar made Barney feel absurdly exposed. Naked. Might as well be twirling his prick in Isaacs’ face.
Worst of all, the scratching had done nothing to alleviate the itch. His neck was now blazing. Every beat of blood under the surface of the angry skin made it throb. Absolute agony.
“You got that from Albert,” Isaacs said. “In the dream.”
Barney contemplated playing ignorant, but then drew a deep breath, told himself to stop being a bloody coward, and said, “Yes.” His gaze moved to Isaacs’ mouth, and then shot away as if scalded. Victoria chittered and roiled, and Barney realized he needed to slow down his breathing or she’d think they were in for a fight, and then they’d be in a proper pickle.
Isaacs kicked the chair back on two legs and crossed his arms, glaring ferociously at Barney’s neck. “It was real, then, what happened.” He licked his lower lip. “All of it.”
Barney shrugged. He was gripping the edge of the table hard enough that he was shocked it hadn’t cracked yet—fantastically tough stuff, wood. “Real enough, but—” He cleared his throat. Talking was a ticklish business, especially when one was an utter duffer, and it felt enormously important to get this next bit correct—if not in every particular, then at least in its general shape. He tried to gather his thoughts, such as they were.
“It might have been real,” he finally said, still groping for the right words, “but it was still a dream, and people often do things in dreams that they wouldn’t do while awake, because dreams are safe, see—not that this dream was especially safe, given”—he twirled a finger at his shoulders—“so I suppose some dreams are in fact dangerous, or, in any case, our dreams in particular present hazards not usually present in other people’s dreams, but nonetheless—what I mean to say is that dreams are often nonsense and people sometimes do nonsensical things in them, regardless of safety—”
“Captain,” interrupted Isaac, his eyes very dark. Barney was grateful; despite his best efforts, he’d rather lost his way after the third or fourth thingum. Clause? Phrase? “I believe I owe you an apology.”
“No no no,” Barney said immediately. “Not at all, old man, that was what I was trying to get at, see? You have nothing to apologize for. In fact, I was working myself up, rather slowly and very badly, to apologizing to you. It was my dream and you didn’t do anything I hadn’t—”
Barney choked. He could not quite say, out loud, “been dying to do, myself, for years.” This was the kitchen in Fetter Lane. They were no longer floating on that punt, swaddled in that sweeping silence.
Isaacs sat forward with a scraping crash. “What a load of bollocks,” he said. “Sir,” he added.
Barney gaped. Isaacs did not give Barney time to recover, and continued, heatedly: “That dream weren’t yours—it was ours. I was in it, too. It was me that branch bashed in the back. It was me swallowed all that godawful water when I fell in—the bed was soaking when I woke up, did you know that? God only knows what would’ve happened if you hadn’t pulled me to safety. Might be I would’ve woken up. Might be you would’ve found me dead as a doornail with a river’s worth of water in me lungs.”
“But,” Barney protested, “what I did, in the dream—I made everything go—and then I made you—”
“What, when you made the world go all quiet, and sent Victoria and Albert to sleep? I don’t know what you bleedin’ did, or how you bleedin’ did it, but that don’t make the dream yours, and it definitely don’t mean you bleedin’ made me do anything, any more than me making you a bacon sandwich every morning forces you to eat it!”
“Well, you don’t have to,” Barney interjected indignantly. “You made it for me, and it’s always perfect. I want to eat it.”
Isaacs clutched his head. “Captain. What I’m telling you is, I was in the dream, too. I wasn’t some—some character or dolly you was pushing around. That was me in that dream. Me. Everything I did, I meant to do. Just as Albert did what he meant to do, and near as dammit ripped your head off before I forced meself awake. D’you take my meaning now?”
They stared at each other across the table, the silence humming as Barney digested Isaacs’ words. The itching, which had subsided as they’d argued, flared up again, but the discomfort was a distant thing, faint and easily ignored. Barney was far too preoccupied working out all the implications of what Isaacs had said.
“Everything you did,” Barney repeated slowly, “you meant to do.”
“Yes.”
“All of it?”
“All of it.”
“Oh.”
Isaacs drummed a restless tattoo on the table. “You see now,” he said, his voice tight, his eyes hot and intent on Barney’s face, “why we should maybe work to get them curses better used to each other.”
“Yes, I do see, ah, the utility,” Barney said, nodding. His mouth felt like the Sahara. He took a sip of tea, but it didn’t help. “You have my full support. In case there was any doubt.” He looked at Isaacs’ hand on the table, and remembered how it had felt in his dream. The urge to touch Isaacs—to press those restless fingers into stillness, to snatch them from the table and bring them to his mouth—was unbearable.
Victoria churned under his skin; the smell of snakeskin and hot stone became overwhelming. Barney sat on his hands and leaned back on his chair for good measure.
“How do you propose we go about it?” he asked Isaacs.
“Well,” Isaacs said, a gleam in his eyes, “I got some ideas.”
###
Barney, hair still slightly damp from the bath, sat on the edge of the bed and clutched Isaacs’ shirt in his hands.
It had been a long, hard day, and a long, hard fight. The Lozowski twins had needed their help with an outbreak of entities haunting the sewers by Ludgate. Isaacs, with characteristic bluntness, had dubbed them shitbeasts. It was as good a name as any.
Victoria had not cared in the least about the stench or the filth. She had reveled in the wholesale slaughter, and perforce part of Barney had, too. Albert, as Isaacs had put it, had been happy as a pig in shit.
The experience had been less delightful for the humans. Barney’s worries that the revelations of the morning would have made it impossible for him to keep his hands off Isaacs had turned out to be unwarranted after all. Even after the Lozowskis took them to a pump and hosed them down, the stench kept them well away from each other and ensured that every passer-by had given them a wide berth. Saul had taken one whiff of them when they’d returned and immediately insisted that they burn their clothing. Barney couldn’t blame him.
But now here he was, back in his room, all clean and mostly no longer smelling like unspeakable things. Directly on the other side of the wall was Isaacs, also clean, and likely also no longer smelling like unspeakable things. A vision seared through him of Isaacs with drops of water trickling down his bare chest, the small dots chasing each other down before joining and becoming rivulets that ran farther and farther down—
Victoria hissed and stirred. She had been quiet and sated after the day’s exertions, but as Barney’s agitation grew, so did hers, and she knew only of one reason to be roused.
They’d talked about this just that morning at the kitchen table, too. Or Isaacs had, while Barney had nodded along, beet-red and speechless. “Don’t know about you, but I’ve stopped before I finished every time I wanted to”—and here Isaacs had made a demonstrative hand gesture. “Too afraid I’d get too excited and kill someone, or smash the room. But now I’m wondering: what if we didn’t stop? What if we see how far we can push it?”
But the main thing Isaacs had wanted them to try was to slowly accustom the curses to their presence, starting with their scent.
“I say, are you proposing that I sniff at you, old man?” Barney had asked, even as small prurient thrill had run through him.
“No,” Isaacs had replied with a sharp little grin. “Or—not yet. I reckon a dirty shirt will do.”
His proposal, in short, had been to sleep with each other’s unwashed shirts. “Wear it, if you can,” Isaacs had said, and then leaned back on his chair and given Barney’s body a slow, thorough once-over that left Barney blushing like a schoolgirl. “Don’t know as you can fit in one of mine, but I’ll be swimming in yours.”
And now it was time. Barney had felt a little ridiculous as he caught the shirt Isaacs had thrown at him after they’d both finished washing up. He felt even more ridiculous now with the shirt bunched up in his fists.
This was the first step, he reminded himself, of hopefully reconciling Victoria and Albert to touching each other—or more to the point, to Barney touching Isaacs. Isaacs had thought of this, because he was a thinker. Barney—Barney was a doer.
Time for him to do.
Feeling extremely silly, which did not seem to impede his prick’s interest in the proceedings in the least, Barney brought the shirt to his nose.
The shirt mostly smelled like starch and a whiff of laundry soap and that indefinable smell that cotton took on when one went out into the fresh air—not that “fresh” was how one would characterize London’s air, what with it being thick enough to cut with a knife most days. He felt a small pang of disappointment, which was absurd; Isaacs was a man, and he sweated like one. Barney simply needed to sniff harder, or in a different spot.
Barney turned the shirt in his hands until he located the armpit. He brought it halfway to his face, lowered it, said “Christ” into the empty air of the bedroom, and then, finally, brought it fully to his nose.
And there it was. It smelled like sweat there, but in a completely different way than Barney’s—not as strong, and less rank. A decidedly animal smell, but not without its sweetness, too.
Underlying it all was the faintest whiff of sulfur, and the scent of the beach at low tide.
Victoria did not care for it. She did not care for any of it at all. She disliked it so very much that she gave an enraged shriek and hammered at him, once, very hard. Hard enough to distend skin and flesh and bruise bone, but not hard enough to break out.
Barney thrust the shirt away and bent over double, clasping his middle as if it would make a shred of difference if Victoria decided she was done being compliant. He breathed as deeply and slowly as he could, braced for Victoria to attempt to manifest again, and thought back to the river in his dream. The conviction he’d felt, and the power that had rung through him. The stillness; the sweet balm of relief.
Calm down, old girl, he repeated to her, over and over as he clung to that sense of calm and quiet. No danger here. I fed you well today, didn’t I? It’s only an old shirt.
It worked—after a fashion. The boiling fury subsided, though she roiled and chittered restlessly. Barney sat up slowly and retrieved Isaacs’ shirt from the floor.
“There’s nothing to fight here,” he said out loud. “It’s only a shirt. You’ll have to get used to it, old thing, because we’re sleeping with this, or something like this, for the foreseeable.”
Victoria hissed, the silent sound reverberating unpleasantly in his skull.
“We’re sleeping with this shirt,” Barney repeated firmly, as if addressing a balking recruit, “and that’s all there is to it.”
In the end Barney didn’t attempt another snootful of Essence of Isaacs again—all for the good, really, because it had riled up all sorts of other bits besides Victoria. Instead, he settled for tucking the shirt loosely under his chin. At least his blasted neck no longer itched.
The smell of Isaacs wafted up to him, but only faintly; as for the scent of Albert, or what he had presumed was Albert, he couldn’t smell that at all. That, he thought, was the key. Start by accustoming her to Isaacs, bit by bit, and once that was accomplished, work on reconciling her to Albert. Both at once was too much.
It felt oddly intimate to lie in the dark, surrounded by the smell of the one man who shared Barney’s fate. Intimate, and not a little prurient, evidenced by the fact that he was hard as a spike, even in the face of Victoria’s hissing and grumbling.
Thing was, he couldn’t stop thinking of Isaacs wearing his shirt to sleep. The shirt that smelled like Barney, which meant some of the scent was rubbing off on Isaacs’ skin, too.
His shirt. His shirt on Isaacs’ bare skin, wrapped around everything Barney wanted to touch but could not—that lean, tough boxer’s body, with the finely-muscled back, the sinewy forearms…
Barney would never have thought that one day, he’d be burningly jealous of an old shirt, but here he was, squirming in the dark and picturing—well, all sorts of things. He’d never seen the point of indulging in this sort of fruitless musing. Either something was there for the taking, or it wasn’t and he was better off never thinking about it again. He had firmly written off Isaacs as being out of his reach, for any number of important reasons, but now Isaacs seemed to be very much interested in being reached at, except of course Barney couldn’t, and neither could Isaacs, and that small yet insurmountable gap between desire and reality was driving him to a fever pitch.
His shifted to his side, which pressed the shirt against his cheek, and moved his hand down to his prick. He’d not touched it beyond the perfunctory motions required by bodily functions in a long time. He’d tried a spot of self-abuse once, not long after they’d arrived at Fetter Lane. Not two minutes into the proceedings, Victoria had manifested and destroyed the bed. Barney had claimed a nightmare and not bothered trying again.
It felt strange to touch himself like this, with nothing but pleasure in mind. He barely brushed his fingers against the soft, loose skin. Felt its heat radiating against his fingertips. In the dark, it was almost possible to imagine that he was touching somebody else, or that the hand touching him wasn’t his.
Victoria growled and agitated, but not in any serious way. “Easy, old girl,” Barney said out loud, and then huffed out a small laugh when he realized he was addressing his prick as much as he was the curse grafted to his soul.
He closed his eyes, moving from darkness to a warmer, more absolute darkness, and closed his hand around himself. He moved slowly, so very slowly—brought his hand up at a snail’s pace, and stroked down with equal slowness. He always did like a firm grip, so he kept his hold loose and his touch gentle.
Still, it had been long enough that every time he reached the sweet spot directly under his head, he could not restrain a gasp of pleasure. A few more strokes, and Victoria hissed, the smell of snakeskin and hot stone flooding his nostrils.
Barney immediately slackened his hand and slowed his breathing. “Easy,” he said, voice unsteady. “It’s just us. Just us.”
When she finally settled, Barney resumed his stroking. He wondered if Isaacs was doing the same, in the dark and quiet of his own bed. Surrounded by Barney’s smell, the way Barney was surrounded by Isaacs’. The one piece of each other they could have.
The thought of Isaacs touching himself made Barney’s breathing go all funny. Was he thinking of Barney, too? Something deep within him clenched with pleasure even as Victoria chittered uneasily; he eased his grip until he was barely touching himself, the only contact his thumb on the soft, spongy slit. He was leaking. Rather copiously, in fact. He ran his palm through the moisture, smearing a thick, slippery stripe across it, and then closed his hand around himself again.
It was astonishing how much better it felt, all because there was a bit of slip. He’d forgotten that, somehow, despite discovering at the tender age of fourteen the wonders of pulling himself off with the help of soap and a bit of water, and for years after had possessed surely the cleanest prick in all of England. Every instinct shouted at him to squeeze harder, to move faster; his cock ached and jumped in his hand, begging for more.
He refused to give in, all too conscious of Victoria’s unease. Up and down he stroked, slow and easy, his mind filled with Isaacs. He was leaking enough now that his hand was making wet, obscene noises. Was Isaacs making this same noise, too? The thought had Barney biting off a whimper. The walls, alas, were too thick for stray sounds to be audible. He remembered, with a strange pang of longing, the hole in the wall at the chateau. What if he could talk to Isaacs while he did this? What if he could hear Isaacs pleasuring himself?
Or watch him through the peephole?
Too much, too much. He released his cock entirely, chest heaving, Victoria on the edge of revolt. He didn’t touch himself again until she settled, and even then used only the lightest of grips.
His release quite ambushed him. Every time he approached the precipice, Victoria would protest, and every time Victoria protested, Barney would stop. But each time the edge would loom closer, even as Victoria’s objections grew less strenuous, as if she were beginning to resign herself to the fact that danger was not, in fact, imminent, despite Barney’s feelings of urgency.
And then he did not stop quite quickly enough. Silliest thing, really. He barely had his fingertips on himself, but it was enough—more than enough: the pulsing began deep between his legs, and then he was shooting off, stripes of hot come splattering on his belly and hands. Pleasure he had not felt in years and that he’d resigned himself to never feeling again blazed through him. His hand tightened convulsively to milk every drop out of his body; he bit down on a pillow to muffle his shout.
As he slowly calmed down, body still quivering with the occasional aftershock, he realized that Victoria was behaving oddly. The smell of snakeskin and hot stone was sharp in his nose, and he could feel her moving about, but she had not manifested, and she was quiet.
He lay still for many minutes, attempting to discover what, exactly, she was feeling, and came to the conclusion that she was, for lack of a better word, drunk. Her agitation felt clumsy instead of malicious, and in place of the seething hatred for everything living was…not contentment. Confusion, perhaps.
Barney began to laugh. “Did you like that after all, old girl?” he asked the air. Victoria didn’t give so much as a hiss.
Still chuckling, he contemplated rising from the bed for a washcloth, but he didn’t know if he could trust his limbs, now utterly rendered to jelly. The sheets were already a disaster; what was a bit more mess? He wiped his hands clean on them and shifted to the dry half of the bed.
As Barney rearranged the shirt around his neck, a sense of wellbeing, or something that passed for it, washed over him. It was not until he began the long, gentle slide to sleep that the word came to him for what he felt.
Peace. For the first time in seven years, wrapped in the scent of Isaacs and with his balls aching a little, he knew a small measure of peace.