The Claws of Evil - By Andrew Beasley Page 0,4

that hand, and then the form of a girl, fragile and lost.

It was Molly Marbank. Sweet little Molly Marbank, whose father worked with Ben’s father at the docks. Or at least he had until he missed seeing the beam that was swinging towards him, sweeping Mr. Marbank’s legs one way and his soul straight on to glory. After that Molly was orphaned and alone, and everyone assumed that she had gone to the workhouse.

Only Ben now knew that Molly was here, hand in hand with the Weeping Man.

The girl by his side, the Weeping Man rose to his feet and turned to leave.

And in that instant, Ben knew that he had been seen.

For the first time, Ben saw fully the face of death. The Weeping Man was much younger than he had expected: clean-shaven, square-jawed, with an almost aristocratic face, framed by tumbling dark hair. Ben saw soft cheeks, slick with tears. He saw a broad mouth, smiling. He saw a sword beneath the folds of the black coat, long and wickedly sharp. He saw eyes as deep and dark as wells. Ancient eyes, that had seen secret and terrible things.

And those eyes saw him.

The Weeping Man addressed him from the darkness. “I shall be coming for you, Benjamin Kingdom,” he said.

And then, at last, Ben could run.

Ben ran until his chest ached and each breath burned like a mouthful of hot coals. As his legs began to give way, he forced himself to put one more turn in the road between himself and the Weeping Man, before finally collapsing against a wall, exhausted and shaking.

That was a close one, he told himself.

His hands were tingling, he realized, a strange pins-and-needles feeling that was more than just the cold. He flexed his fingers, trying to make them feel normal again, but the odd prickling ache continued. It was something that he had experienced all his life: a throbbing, burning sensation that he couldn’t explain. All he knew was there were times, normally when he was angry or scared or stirred by deep emotions, when he thought that his hands might burst into flame.

He rolled his hands into tight fists as he thought about poor Molly, and they burned even brighter. He hadn’t raised a finger to save her.

Some friend he’d turned out to be.

He should have attacked the Weeping Man and rescued her. Maybe he could have distracted him somehow and given her a chance to escape? Or at the very least he could have shouted out; bought her another second of freedom.

Then he remembered the sword.

The sorry truth was that the only way it could have played out differently was for there to be two dead children instead of one. But truth or not, that didn’t stop Ben from blaming himself.

He still couldn’t get over the way that Molly had just upped and gone with the Weeping Man. Ben had been petrified and yet Molly had shown no sign of fear. On the contrary, the expression on her face had been one of absolute peace as she’d taken his outstretched hand. It made no sense to Ben. Most likely she had merely been numbed with cold and past caring.

All that Ben had been able to do for her in that final moment was to plead with her through his eyes: Don’t go, he had urged her. Don’t go, Molly.

It didn’t feel like enough to him. But he didn’t cry.

Ben had seen a lot of death already in his young life, but there was only one person that he mourned for. A sharp pain pierced his heart as he thought of her. A single tear appeared and for a second it lay on his cheek like a jewel before he scrubbed it crossly away.

That’s enough of that, he told himself sharply. He brushed himself down, set his billycock hat back on his head at what he considered to be a jaunty angle, and put some of the usual swagger back into his step. He might just have been scared out of his wits, but he still had his reputation to think of. He was Ben Kingdom, after all.

Soon Ben was back on the relative safety of his home turf and feeling more like himself, the burning in his hands gone for now. He paused in front of Ricolleti’s, the Italian grocery and provision store, and for a moment he studied his reflection, framed by cases of tinned meat and barrels of dark tea.

Ben was pretty much like all the other