The man growled. Those girls were closer than he had thought. He wasn't quite ready to go back. He had no intentions of returning to that blasted camp, and he knew the gods would try to make him. It aggravated him more than he wanted to admit that with all that had happened, he could never forgive them. He was a forgiving person, but what they had done, was beyond the realm of being fixed by any means. Unless he could ensure that he wasn't going back there, he didn't want to return yet.
"There! I see movement mi'lady!" came a shout from behind him. He immediately took to the trees and found cover in the higher canopy.
"Where did he go? I just saw him," the girl who had shouted, the man's very own cousin, asked.
The goddess looked around with her eyes and senses. "He's still here. I can feel it, but I cannot sense him. He very good at hiding his aura, something no ordinary demigod can learn, let alone master to this degree."
The man smirked. It wasn't every day that a demigod, a male no less, received a compliment of that level from Artemis, even if it was unintentional. He shifted ever so slightly, moving his weight into a better position to take off. Artemis' gaze snapped to his hiding spot. The man's eyes narrowed. With such a small movement, there was no way that she should have registered it.
"Let's spread out girls. Set up a five hundred meter perimeter. I don't want him escaping if he did move further than we thought."
The man was under no delusions that this was a ruse to get the Hunt of the way. She was up to something and he wasn't sure he wanted to find out. The girls moved out of a normal mortal's hearing range, though the man could still hear them moving clear as day, even with them being silent to just about any other creature.
"You can come out now. I know you are there. I can't quite see you, nor sense you, but I felt your movement. You forget that I'm also the goddess of the forest, and I can sense the changes within it."
A low sigh came from him and he dropped from the tree. "And what of it, Goddess of the Hunt? Even standing here in front of you within your reach, you couldn't catch me, let alone keep a hold on me long enough to take me in."
"I had a suspicion it was you.....Perseus."
The man, Perseus, recoiled ever so slightly. He had no idea how she knew it was him just from him standing in front of her. "Why do you assume that's my name?"
"You have the same air about you as he did, an air of protection and loyalty. No matter how much you try to change or hide it, your base morals will always show you for who you are. I've learned to read that quite a bit. More so since I first met you," she explained.
Perseus cursed under his breath. There was little he could do to get out of this situation now without running. "Percy?" came a voice, slightly stunned, and very pissed off. "Perseus Jackson?! I ought to fry you where you stand, Kelp Head!"
The man turned to look at his cousin. "Been a long time, Thalia."