She called out: 'Good morning,' but received no answer.

Elsa's POV

If I wanted answers, real answers, I had to go back to where it all started.

At least, that had been the thought I'd had when I left the cabin. Now I wasn't so sure.

The clearing where I had first met Jack was deserted. Even the dead rabbit was gone.  The whole area had a really unnerving feel.

I crouched down and brushed aside some dead leaves.  Wolf tracks.  They were everywhere here.

Olaf sat down and barked.  The sharp sound stabbed through the silence and I flinched violently.

"Shh!" I hissed.  "I need to think."

"But he's right," a different voice whispered through the trees.  "You shouldn't be hear."

I jumped to my feet and reached under my cape where I kept the silver dagger as someone stepped out of the trees.  My heart slowly settled back into it's normal rhythm.

It was just Jack, looked tired and pale.

"So now you're the dog whisperer?" I asked, stowing the knife again.  Jack shrugged.

"Olaf and I have a simple understanding of each other's wants and needs," he said. "Besides, dogs are easy. It's you I can't understand."

"So that makes us even."

He snorted, the first time I had ever heard him laugh. Or at least close to laugh. But now he was smiling and that was something. That was progress.

"Why are you always in the woods, anyway?" I asked.

"Trees are better than people." He lowered his eyes, smile melting away. "Nobody wanted me around."

I wanted to bring that smile back. I wanted to see those eyes light up again as we shared a small joke.

Or maybe something else would be better than another smile.

"I guess I can understand that. Nobody wanted me around, either."

"Now that's hard to believe."

"Hey, not all of us can be mysterious good-looking forest guys!"

Oh shoot. Did I just say that out loud? He had a grin painted across his face again as he watched me fumble for something to cover up my slip. Say something! Anything!

"I've always been the weird kid," I said quickly. Jack tilted his head almost comically as he listened. "I never really fit in, you know? None of the other kids were like me and I think they hated me for it. And it really started to be a problem when the doctors came to school-"

"Doctors?" Jack interrupted. There was nothing comical about him now. I shrugged.

"Yeah, they wanted to try and figure out what about my environment made me so different. So they followed me everywhere for weeks."

"But why?"

"To find out why I was different . . ?"

"No, why were you different? What made those things so interested in you?"

I squinted. Things. He called the doctors things. He had a history with them, a bad one I'd guess. Another vague theory started to form in my mind. Not one about Grandma and Black and the wolf prints and the silver dagger, but one about Jack.

Maybe . . . maybe he was like me.

"I had a really strong sense of smell," I explained, watching him carefully for any reaction. There. He tensed up, like someone had shocked him with a jolt of electricity. "And not just like I could recognize spices and stuff. I could smell people. I could tell you who was in the room next to me or where they were going and where they had been."

Jack was watching me with a captivated and cornered-animal expression. I forged ahead.

"And I could hear things, too. From anywhere in the house I could hear my mom cooking, or my dad drop his pen, or my sister's pencil scratches as she did her homework . . ."

I stopped mid-sentence. Where had that come from? Sister? I tried to think back and remember what had made me say it, but that train of thought was lost in the mists of memory. I didn't have a sister. I never had. But for a second, for some crazy reason, I thought I'd had one back when my parents were alive.

"But you said the doctors only followed you for a few weeks," Jack prompted.

"Only until the weirdness went away," I agreed.  "They passed it off as hyperosmia and something else, I can't remember the name.  And right after that my parents died and I moved in with my Grandma."

"She made it go away."

"What?"  Now I was really confused.

"She made it go away," Jack repeated, eyes staring into the distance.

"What are you talking about?  Jack, are you like me?  Could you smell and hear things-"

Jack moved in a blur.  Within seconds he was gone, crashing through the woods to some unknown destination.

"-better than normal?" I finished lamely.  But he was gone.  Olaf watched me quizzically.

"It's like I asked all the questions and he got all the answers," I told Olaf as I scooped him up and rubbed his ears.  He barked a response as I walked into the woods, back towards home.