One quick Iris Message to Chiron ensured that the Party Ponies would be riding out to pick up the demigods and return them to their homes. As for the fauns—as Jason had begun to call the satyrs since regaining his Roman memories—they had their own magical methods of travel and would not require the aid of the centaurs.
"I can't do it," Sean said for the third time. This came as no surprise to Jason, who had been hearing Sean change his mind back and forth about going to the Roman camp. "I want to go home to Iris."
Jason patted the poor guy on the back. "No one is asking you to make a decision now. I'll talk to the others and see if maybe some people want to ride the eagle to Alaska. We can drop you off at Iris' place. If you change your mind… well, you're living under the care of the messenger goddess. You can always call us."
Sean grinned sheepishly at the prospect of returning to his home and friend. "I think I must have died around twenty years old. With a father like mine, there's no way I could have lived that long unless I was a pretty good fighter. From what I hear, you could fight well even without your memory, just because your body knows what it's doing. So I figure, my muscles will remember how to yield a sword when the time is right, training or no."
Jason nodded, "I thought you might say that. But doesn't that make you wonder if you might remember some other stuff, too? Like manipulating water?"
"I don't know," Sean replied. "Maybe my powers will return in a life or death situation, but they obviously didn't return in my last life or death situation. If it didn't happen then, they might never come back. I'm okay with that, though. I've gotten a pretty good idea of what the life of a powerful demigod is like lately and I'm not a fan."
"I don't blame you there," Jason laughed. He beckoned Leo and Piper forward and within a few minutes, Jason had convinced them to take the eagle to Alaska with him and Sean.
"I'm coming with you," Reyna stepped in on their conversation, surprising everyone.
"Don't worry about it, we have it covered," Piper informed her coldly.
"No one asked you, Barbie," Reyna replied in an equally mean tone, then directed her next statement to Jason. "I haven't seen you in months. I don't care if I sound possessive, you're my best friend and I'm not letting you out of my sight again."
"Umm…uh," Jason muttered stupidly. It was like his personality had been split in two and was playing tug-of-war over his tongue.
Piper glared at him in his indecision. "You know what? Don't worry about it, Jason. We can take Sean to Alaska all by ourselves."
"That works for me," Reyna said. "That means you can come back to the Roman camp with us."
Piper inhaled sharply and turned around, abandoning the others. It made Jason crazy to see her that way, but he didn't know how to please her and Reyna at the same time.
"Reyna… please," Jason said, exasperated.
"What?" she asked him, pretending not to know. She studied his face for a moment. "Jason, do you like her?"
"Whoa!" Leo cried, who had been standing awkwardly next to Sean the whole time. "At that's our cue to get out of here!" He grabbed Sean by the shirt and practically dragged him away.
"Well?" Reyna questioned accusingly.
"I… this isn't a good time, Reyna." Jason tried to walk away but she caught him by the arm.
"Look," she began, "if you like her or something… I don't care. Juno told you a long time ago that your future was too important to waste away your life on stuff like that. For a while… I thought maybe that could change, but now I see I was wrong. Your life really is bigger than stupid romances. The fate of the world might depend on you, my life included, so don't screw it up."
On that happy note, she turned around and left Jason standing there, feeling absolutely horrible about himself. He'd heard a lot about demigod powers and stuff, but there was one ability that doesn't receive nearly enough attention: the ability that every girl is born with, mortal or not, to make a guy feel like a pile of dirt in a matter of seconds.
"Jason!" Sean called from atop the large bird of prey. "Are you coming or not?"
Jason nodded and ran to the eagle. "I'm coming." He climbed up onto the creature behind Piper. "Sorry," he mumbled to her.
"Just shut up," she replied. With that, the bird spread its giant wings and took to the skies. With Clarisse's blessing, it seemed only a matter of minutes before the bird began to drop.
"This isn't Iris' cabin," Jason observed.
"No," confirmed, Sean. "The cabin is still about twenty miles northwest of here. Why are we stopping?"
"You don't think the eagle could be running out of gas?"Leo wondered.
"He's a bird, not a car, Leo," Piper chided.
"No, I know," he clarified. "I just mean could he be tired? Maybe he's stopping to rest."
Jason looked down at the poor eagle for the first time. He must have been exhausted from all of that flying. It had been selfish not to give him a break before taking off on yet another trip across the country. "I guess we'll have to hitchhike the rest of the way," Jason said.
"Right, because everyone is just going to jump at the idea of giving four mysterious, dirty teenagers a ride. You do realize we look like we're up to no good?" Sean pointed out.
"Do you want to get home or not?" countered Jason. That shut him up. "We need to find a major road or something." As he spoke the eagle thumped onto the ground and the four of them slid down.
"The easiest way to do that is to cut through those glaciers, there. We can find a city and maybe I can get to a phone to call Iris. Unless you guys have some drachmas and I can call her right here," Sean said.
Jason felt in his pockets but knew they would be empty. How could he have been so stupid as to forget something as trivial as a drachma? He looked around and saw that Piper and Leo were wearing the same guilty expression as he was. "Through the glaciers, it is."
Piper glanced nervously at the icy formations. "That looks treacherous. We'd be walking on ice over water. There's no guarantee how stable it would be." As if to prove her point, a hanging chunk of ice cracked off of the rest of its body and plunged into the icy depths far below. Jason shuddered. He could fly well enough to keep himself from falling, but he wasn't sure he could save the others if they fell. "Is there another way?" Piper asked Sean.
"Thirty miles east we can hit the Canadian border."
"Four powerful demigods in the wilderness?" Jason pointed out. "The chances that we don't get ambushed are pretty slim. Why don't we get a closer look, at least?" Piper and Sean nodded, but Leo looked strangely stiff. Jason suddenly remembered Leo's last experience walking across ice—he had melted a bridge in his excitement and nearly killed himself and Jason's sister, Thalia. "If it doesn't look good, we don't have to do it. We can bunker down and fight off monsters until the eagle is ready to move again," Jason added for Leo's sake.
Leo's cheeks pulled up at the corners in a thin smile, almost a grimace. "Let's do this," he said in his most Leo-esque voice.
Together they trudged through the brush until the air seemed to drop twenty degrees and they knew they had hit the ice (as if the slippery ground hadn't been a proper indication). Jason studied the glacier and saw an easy foot path. The ice looked thick and strong, like it had been forming over centuries.
"I say we go for it," Jason said with a chuckle. Since when did challenging situations become easy for demigods? He took a step forward and found that there were plenty of footholds. It wasn't even hard to balance since everything was covered in snow. Though he sunk thigh-deep, walking was hardly even a chore.
Sean followed after Jason, and Piper dared the snow third. Leo took a hesitant step toward the glacier. It steamed in his presence, but there was enough ice that if he moved quickly it didn't matter. Leo walked so fast he left a steaming trail behind him and Jason had to hurry to keep up.
They had almost reached the edge of the glacier when trouble finally arose.
"No," Leo muttered at the sight before him.
Jason could understand Leo's distress, because standing in their way were three old, disgusting women.
"Hello dears," said the one with the mossy old tooth.
"The way we see it," said the one with the eye, "you lost us a great deal of money when you defeated Hypnos. He paid us to cart those demigods around."
"We want revenge," the third woman said. She was holding a long, rusty dagger of gold. That wasn't the worst part, though. The worst part was how the knife was pointed right at the neck of Daisy Allen.