His face was still turned toward the trail from where he had fallen to his death. She had thought his lifeless sight had been turned in that direction, too, but now his eyes seemed to be turned more toward her.

Jennsen curled her fingers around the hilt of her knife.

Jennsen.

"Leave me be. I'll not surrender."

She never knew what it was that the voice wanted her to surrender. Despite having been with her nearly her whole life, it had never said. She found refuge in that ambiguity.

As if in answer to her thought, the voice came again.

Surrender yourflesh, Jennsen.

Jennsen couldn't breathe.

Surrender your will.

She swallowed in terror. It had never said that before-never said anything she could understand.

Often, she would faintly hear it-as if it were too far away to be clearly understood. Sometimes she thought she could hear the words, but they seemed to be in a strange language.

She often heard it when she was falling asleep, calling to her in that distant, dead whisper. It spoke other words to her, she knew, but never so as she could understand more than her name and that frighteningly seductive single-word command to surrender. That word was always more forceful than any other. She could always hear it even when she could hear no other.

Her mother said that the voice was the man who, nearly Jennsen's whole life, had wanted to kill her. Her mother said that he wanted to torment her.

"Jenn," her mother would often say, "it's all right. I'm here with you. His voice can't hurt you." Not wanting to burden her mother, Jennsen often didn't tell her about the voice.

But even if the voice couldn't hurt her, the man could, if he found her. At that moment, Jennsen desperately wished for the protective comfort of her mother's arms.

One day, he would come for her. They both knew he would. Until then, he sent his voice. That's what her mother thought, anyway.

As much as that explanation frightened her, Jennsen preferred it to thinking herself mad. If she didn't have her own mind, she had nothing.

"What's happened here?"

Jennsen gasped in a cry of fright as she spun, pulling her knife. She dropped into a half crouch, feet spread, knife held in a death grip.

It was no disembodied voice, this. A man was walking up the gully toward her. With the wind in her ears, and the distraction of the dead man and the voice, she hadn't heard him coming.

As big as he was, as close as he was, she knew that if she ran, and if he was of a mind, he could easily run her down.