The fields of snow were spread out below us and though the sun was shining, we all hastily put on our jackets. Except for Alyssa who claimed she didn't feel the cold. Kaia pulled out the skis and boots, showing us how to stamp our feet into the foot holds and activate the pressure locking that would ensure we wouldn't lose a ski halfway down the mountain.

"I'm just going to go and grab us some chairlift passes." She told us. "Practice what I taught you; pizza, chips."

I looked at Jazz in confusion. "Chips?"

"French fries?" She said, then showed us how to keep our skis parallel when we wanted to travel and turn them in in a triangle when we wanted to stop.

Chris eyed the slopes and gulped, his sandy hair hidden under a beanie Kaia had leant him. "I think I'm gonna die."

"I think we all are." Jasmine said, unclamping herself from her skis and sitting on a nearby outcrop of stone, eyeing up the tourists zipping down the slopes with an almost scary intensity, raven hair blowing into her face.

"Well that's cheerful." Lizzie grumbled. I didn't know when she had become the expert of cheerful but it didn't exactly reassure me.

We fell into another deep and depressing silence - I was getting a little annoyed by those - until Chris scooped up a handful of snow and pelted Jazz in the back.

"Hey!" She protested and Chris got a return one in the face. He aimed for her stomach but missed and caught me in the foot.

"You are so asking for it!" I growled and soon we were all pelting each other with badly formed snowballs. Alyssa stood off to one side, fallen into her own world again. Chris heaved another handful at me but I ducked and the clump sailed past me, nailing Alyssa in the face. She blinked, startled, and her face turned angry scarily fast. Not the joking kind of angry but the serious I-want-your-head-on-a-stake kind of angry. She growled and a dark snowstorm brewed within her eyes as she thrust a hand at us and I felt a huge weight crash down on me as everything went dark.

---

I lay spluttering on a patch of concrete that until just recently been a patch of snow, freezing water was dripping from me. The others lay gasping around me too and when I finally found the strength to lift myself, I found Alyssa and Kaia staring up at a tall white column of snow...

Notes

Too tired to write more so I'm leaving it there! Have fun reading Blood of Olympus everybody and I hope you don't find it as traumatic as I did! :)

-Phoebe :)