Origin of Magic (Dragon's Gift: The Protector #3)(33)

I climbed out of the sleeping bag and stretched my sore muscles. “Come on. We’ve got to get a move on.”

“Excited?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I gazed out at the rising sun, hope filling my chest. “Last week, I knew nothing about my family. Not even if they were alive or dead. Nothing. I’ve been desperate to know for ten years. But now, I have parents. And Ademius.”

“That is a good streak of luck.” Ares smiled.

“Yep. And I’m going to keep it going.” I called upon my magic, conjuring a breakfast of cheese sandwiches and water. I handed one off to Ares.

“Cheese sandwiches for breakfast?” he asked.

“Cheese for all meals.”

“Thanks.” He bit in. Chewed. Swallowed. “You’re a good cook.”

“Only with the conjuring. And cheese.” I ate my sandwich quickly, then conjured a simple nylon backpack. I crouched down and bundled the sleeping bag up into a tiny packet. I’d been careful to conjure one of those compressible ones. I hated leaving trash behind, so I’d just carry it out of here, along with our used water bottles.

“You don’t want to use your destroyer power to clean up?” Ares asked.

“No.” I shoved the sleeping bag into the backpack. The destroyer magic felt too dark inside me, more so than ever. Was that because I was becoming more in tune with the Life magic and the two couldn’t coexist easily? Though it was controlled and no longer making me ill, I didn’t like using it. “I don’t want to use it more than necessary. And I should save my power anyway.”

“Fair enough.” Ares reached for the backpack and swung it onto his back.

“I don’t mind carrying it.”

“It feels like a feather on my back. Literally.”

“All right, Superman.”

Ares grinned. “Just a vampire. But I’ll take the title if you insist.”

I laughed and punched him playfully on the shoulder. “Lets get a move on.”

We set off across the desert, following my dragon sense toward the mountains in the distance. The sun blazed down, making me wish that Ana and Bree had been able to stick around with their buggy. Too bad I couldn’t conjure a car. I was getting close—all that practice with fixing up Fabio and his siblings was giving me enough of an understanding of a car’s inner workings that I should be there soon.

But for now, we were on foot. The ground was too uneven for a bike, so we were stuck with walking for at least two hours. In the blazing sun.

Yuck.

“I think we’re almost there.” I pointed ahead of us, to the mountain that loomed in the distance. There was a massive rock at the base, like a huge flat boulder that had rolled down the mountain and settled at the bottom.

When we neared, it became clear that the rock had been placed there intentionally to block something. An entrance, probably. Hider’s Haven was in there. Or through there. Hard to say.

I eyed the massive rock in front of us. It had to weigh several tons, no question. “Well, that’s not going to be fun.”

“We have to move it to get to the path beyond?” Ares asked.

“Yep.” I inspected it. Magic shimmered around the stone, a haze of white that indicated a spell could remove it. “There must be some kind of password to get by.”

“Perhaps that’s what Ana and Bree meant when they said it would be difficult to get in without an invitation.”

“Makes sense.” I examined every inch of the stone, then started checking the mountain around it, looking for some kind of clue. When I helped Cass and Del on their jobs, we sometimes had to figure out riddles to get through the tricky parts of tombs and temples. Usually, I was pretty good at them.

But this time? “I’ve got no idea how to get through.”

“I’ll try to move it.”

“It weighs thousands of pounds.”

“True.” Ares approached, eyeing the slab of stone. I could almost see the calculations going on behind his eyes. He rubbed his hands together, then crouched at the edge of the rock and gripped a small crevice. He heaved upward.

Ares strained, veins standing out at his neck as he grimaced. The rock shifted, scraping against the mountain. It lifted a centimeter off the ground. Two centimeters.

Sweat rolled down Ares’s temple. His face turned red. He grunted. The stone lifted another few centimeters, then dropped to the ground.

Ares cursed and stepped back. “Too big.”

Hmmm. That left me then.

I probably couldn’t destroy the whole thing with my magic—this was about a thousand times bigger than the dishrag I’d obliterated in practice a couple weeks ago. But I had to try.

I called upon my magic, stepping forward and pressing my hand against the stone. I shuddered, not wanting to call upon the destroyer magic, but forcing myself to. It felt weird, especially once the power rushed up inside me, but I focused on pouring the magic into the stone. It rushed out of me as a breeze, filling the rock.

Slowly the stone cracked, a fissure crawling from the top to the bottom of the enormous rock. The slab didn’t crumble away—I wasn’t strong enough for that—but the crack grew slowly.

I focused, feeding more of my power into the stone, envisioning it splitting in two. Finally, the crack crawled all the way up to the top. It was now in two pieces. Hopefully I could destroy at least one.