Flying boulder

And from behind me came a deep, warbling, throbbing hum, like nothing I’d heard before.
My dad, the illusionist. I slipped the dark opal ring I’d gotten from Molly off my hand and palmed it.
Then I turned.
Hovering maybe twenty feet up, with his feet planted firmly on a stone the size of a Buick, was the Blackstaff, Ebenezar McCoy. One hand was spread out to one side for balance, fingers crooked in a mystic sign, sort of a kinetic shorthand for whatever spell was keeping that boulder in the air.
The other gripped his staff, carved with runes like mine, and they glowed with sullen red-orange energy. His face had twisted into a rictus of cold, hard fury. Flickers of static electricity played along the surface of the stone.

Peace Talks Chapter 31, Page 297


So as the old man sent the section of boulder at the Water Beetle, I lifted my staff, modifying the formula of my simple force-blow spell to send it in from the side instead of straight ahead, and smacked the projectile firmly in the flank as it got moving.
It streaked forward at an angle, wobbling and tumbling as a result, and smashed into one of the boats farther down the dock, plunging through the hull and part of the deck, straight on through the hold and out the other side, with such force that water splashed a hundred feet.
The old man brought his boulder around in a swooping arc, studying me through narrowed eyes, his voice bitter. “Now you learn that you don’t have to swing for the fences every time.”
“Yeah,” I said, studying him right back. The cleavemark where the boulder had been cut was a slightly darker grey than the surface—living rock, with water still inside, then. “Don’t tell anybody. You’ll ruin my maverick rep.”
He looked from me to the Water Beetle, chugging out into the open lake. “But you still ain’t using your brain.”
And he flicked a wrist and started sailing over me, out over the lake toward the boat.

Peace Talks Chapter 32, Page 302