The Half-Assed Wizard: The Complete Series: Books 1-4: The Half-Assed Wizard, The Big-Ass Witch, The Dumbass Demon, The Lame-Assed Doppelganger

by Gary Jonas

  “Who?”

  “Robert A. Heinlein, the science fiction writer. He said gods tend to have the manners and morals of spoiled children. I’m sick of your shit, Apollo.”

  “Not as sick as I am of yours,” he said.

  I grinned and licked some blood off my lower lip. “You don’t like being challenged because you’re a pussy at heart.”

  He rose up and flexed. He had impressive muscles. I’ll give him that.

  But I now understood the way to focus my desire into my magic. It wasn’t just wanting something to happen. It was needing it to happen. And I finally realized that a want can be a need if you focus your magic with will power. I knew I needed to work on control, but I had this.

  I stepped to the side.

  Apollo circle-stepped to the side to match me.

  I grinned.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to go on tour with you.”

  “I don’t want you around anyway,” Apollo said. “As such, it’s time for you to die.”

  “No. It’s time for me to channel my inner Malcolm Reynolds.”

  “Who?”

  I focused my energy and threw my hands forward. I didn’t know if that was necessary, but I thought it would look cool. My blast slammed Apollo in the chest and he smiled, clearly thinking that was my only goal.

  But my more important focus was on the door directly behind him.

  It swung open and wind howled. My energy blast shoved Apollo backward. He staggered and tried to catch himself on the doorframe, but I whisked him away from the doorway, and channeled him right into the jet engine.

  The engine ripped him apart.

  It sputtered, but I motioned toward it and it revved back to its normal whine. I focused on the door and pulled it closed.

  I went to the cockpit, and put a hand on the pilot’s shoulder. “Have you got this now?”

  He rubbed his eyes and shook his head. “Yeah, I got it. Thanks.”

  Helen said, “Mmmm mmmmm mmmmmmmmm.”

  Kevin held her arms behind her.

  My magic faded and I wanted to sit down and take a nice long nap, but I forced myself to remain standing. I had to pretend I could do this all day. I took a deep breath, and started to walk over to her, but out of my peripheral vision, I saw the Mako Clansmen creeping toward me.

  I took a sudden step toward them and held my hands out like Bruce Lee. “You guys want some of this?” I asked.

  “No, sir,” they said in unison. “We, uh, well, we just wanted to let you know the stewardess—”

  “Flight attendant,” I said.

  “Yeah, that too. She’s waking up.”

  “Get her some water to drink.”

  “Yes, sir. Anything you say, sir.”

  I could get used to this.

  “Mmmm mmmmmm,” Helen said.

  I turned and walked over to her. “If I take out the gag will you start singing again?”

  She shook her head.

  I pulled out the gag.

  She worked her mouth around a bit. “You know Apollo isn’t dead, right?”

  “He’ll reconstitute, right? Benefits of being a god?”

  “That’s right.”

  I nodded. “He made it sound like he could do it in an instant, but his definition of an instant probably isn’t the same as mine. How long will it really take?”

  She grinned. “Hundred years or so.”

  “I’ll be long dead by then.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Hide better. You have time.”

  Helen looked confused. “I tried to kill you,” she said.

  “She sure did,” Kevin said, still holding her in place.

  “You failed.”

  “Aren’t you going to do anything to me?” she asked.

  “What, like a punishment?”

  She nodded.

  “Kevin pissed on you. That’s punishment enough.”

  “So is your pet demon going to let me go?”

  I grinned. “You have to promise not to use your siren song to kill anyone.”

  “What if they’re trying to kill me?”

  “Okay, I guess that would be an exception.”

  “What if they’re trying to kill someone else? Someone innocent?”

  “Yeah, I guess that would be another exception. How about this? Don’t kill anyone with your siren song unless it’s absolutely necessary because the bad guys are trying to hurt you or an innocent person or persons or whatever.”

  “No one is really innocent.”

  “You know what I mean. It’s not like I’m going to follow you around.”

  “Then I believe we’ve reached an accord.”

  “Okay, Kevin, let her go.”

  “Finally,” he said. “She’s really strong, and my leg was going to sleep.”

  Helen stood and held out her hand. After a moment, I shook it.

  “I think I’m going to freshen up a bit,” she said, pointing to the restroom.

  “Be my guest,” I said.

  She moved off to the restroom and I stumbled over to my seat. I dropped onto the cushion and closed my eyes, ready to nap.

  Kevin poked me in the side. “Hey,” he said. “Am I bugging you?” He poked me again. “Am I bugging you?”

  “Cut it out, dumbass.”

  “Look at me.”

  “If I open my eyes and you have your pecker out…”

  “Piss tank’s empty. Just look at me.”

  I opened my eyes. “What?”

  “What about me?” he asked.

  “What about you?”

  “You’re the only one who can send me home. Unless you want me to stick around.”

  “Oh, hell no.”

  “I could sure use a roll in the sack with my favorite demoness about now.”

  “You’re going to have to wait a bit.”

  “So you do want me to stick around.”

  “No. I need to rest so I can call up my magic again. I’m so tired I can barely keep my eyes open.”

  “Want me to tell those shark guys about that?”

  “If they eat me, you’ll never see your demoness again.”

  “Not true. You die, I go home.”

  “Think about that for a moment,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Do you really think my father would give you a fail-safe option like that?”

  Kevin blinked. “Uhhhh.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “I’ll keep the shark guys busy.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Now, it’s nap time.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Sometime later, Kevin woke me up. “How rested are you?” he asked.

  “Huh?” I said. “I don’t know. Where are we?”

  “New York.”

  “Already?”

  Kevin nodded. “Helen deplaned a few minutes ago. She wants to talk to you by the limousines.”

  I wiped sleep from my eyes. “I think I could sleep for another twelve hours.”

  “Sounds like you’re back to normal then.”

  I stretched.

  The Mako Clansmen helped the flight attendant down the aisle. One of them stopped next to me and pointed at her. “Hey, boss, she’s doing much better now.”

  “Good deal.”

  “Just want you to know we’re holding up our end of the bargain.”

  “Good to know,” I said and gave him a thumbs-up.

  Kevin grinned. “They think you’re going to kill them if they disobey you.”

  I nodded. “Cool.”

  “And I want you to know that if you don’t send me home now, I’m going to fart in your face.”

  “Dude!”

  “I’m serious,” Kevin said. He hopped up on the seat, turned around and aimed his ass at me.

  I scraped my teeth over my cut lip. “Get off me, dumbass,” I said and shoved him. With my new-found focus, I was able to make contact. Kevin fell off me, and face-planted on the floor.

  I
could grow to like this magic stuff.

  He picked himself up, brushed himself off, and frowned at me. “Real mature.”

  “And farting in my face is mature?”

  He cocked a thumb at himself. “Nuisance demon.”

  “You know what? I don’t think I could have fought off Helen without your help.”

  “You couldn’t have,” he agreed. “But don’t for one second think that means I want to keep hanging out with your lazy ass.”

  “Yeah, I know. You have a demoness to bed.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I can’t believe I’m going to say this out loud, but I think I’m going to miss you.”

  “That’s a one-way street, Brett. I’ll never think about you again. Stop with the chick flick shit and send me home so I can bang that demoness.”

  “She’s probably shacked up with a different demon by now.”

  “So she can bang both of us.”

  “All right,” I said. I summoned my magic. “Thanks for your help, Kevin, and I hope I never see you again.”

  “Right back at you, dipshit.”

  “Focus on the bed of your demoness,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m already there,” he said. And a few seconds later, he was.

  Well, I think he was. I didn’t go there to verify it. I just cast him into the place he wanted to go. Once I understood how to do it, the magic was surprisingly easy.

  Helen was waiting, but I wanted to grab my guitar first. I looked around. It wasn’t in the overhead compartment, so it had to be at the back of the plane because it wasn’t shoved in with the luggage. I walked back there and saw the tank that had held the shark dudes.

  Michael floated in the glass tank submerged in water. He pounded on the panes and pointed to the top.

  Shit. I’d forgotten he was there or I’d have rescued him before I took that nap. Good thing vampires don’t have to breathe. I unlocked the tank and opened it.

  He rose out of the water.

  “Thanks, man,” he said.

  “You’re all healed,” I said.

  “Broken bones are nothing to me.”

  He climbed out of the tank and shook his hands, then his head. His hair flipped back and forth. I held up a hand to block the water from getting in my eyes.

  “Dude!” I said.

  He wrung out the front of his shirt. “I smell like salt water.”

  “Are you all pruney?”

  He held out his hands. They weren’t pruned. I guess being undead had its privileges.

  “So what’s the situation?” he asked. “Did you smooth things over with Apollo?”

  “He’s out of the picture. I’ll fill you in later. Go ahead and change clothes. I’ll meet you out by the limos.”

  “We’re in New York?”

  “Yep. Oh, and bring my guitar. It’s around here somewhere.”

  “You got it.”

  I deplaned into a cloudy day in New York. A glance to the sky told me it was going to rain soon. I hoped Michael came out before then or he’d get all wet again.

  Helen leaned against one of the limos off to the right. I crossed the tarmac to join her. “Is this goodbye?” I asked.

  “Depends on how you look at it.”

  “I look at it like this,” I said and made a goofy face like Benny Hill.

  She smiled, but didn’t laugh. “Too many immature boys around me of late,” she said. “It gets tiresome.”

  “Sorry.”

  She nodded. “Thanks for not destroying me for a hundred years.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “You’re more welcome,” she said.

  “How so?”

  She opened the limo door, grabbed an iPad off the seat and turned it on. She handed it to me.

  The Billboard website was open to the Billboard Hot 100. I expected to see Apollo’s song at the number one spot, but it wasn’t even on the chart. Sitting at number one was “Napping My Life Away” by Bret Michaels.

  “Um, Bret Michaels is the lead singer of Poison,” I said.

  “Clerical error. They’d never heard of you or Michael, so they thought it was a misprint. They’ll have it corrected inside the hour.” She gave me a wink. “I made a call.”

  “What happened to Apollo’s song?”

  “When you kicked him into the jet engine, all the magic he worked went with him. Our contracts are gone. His song doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “But my song was engineered by his guy.”

  “Thomas? He’s a regular engineer. No god magic in that. You have the number one song in the nation, Brett.”

  “Cool.” I thought occurred to me. “If his magic is gone, Michael can’t walk in the daytime.”

  Helen pointed back to the plane. Michael went down the stairs with a blanket over his head to keep the sunlight off. “Looks like he figured that out on his own.”

  “Good.”

  “Well, I’m going to enjoy a night on the town, but first I want to get a hotel room and get freshened up. I smell like demon piss. Will you and Michael join me?”

  “Any chance I’ll get lucky?”

  “Landing the number one song isn’t lucky enough?”

  I shook my head. “No, it’s not.”

  “Then you’d better bring your A game.”

  “I can do that.”

  She climbed into her limo, and left me standing there feeling like a million bucks. I gave her a salute as the limo pulled away. Thirty seconds later, I realized she hadn’t told me where to meet her.

  I guess luck has its limits.

  THE LAME-ASSED DOPPELGANGER

  by Gary Jonas

  This one’s for Mel, who suggested it

  .

  CHAPTER ONE

  Clues your father is a dick:

  1. He says, “I’m proud of you, son,” and gives you an all-expense paid vacation to the island paradise of Fiji.

  Yeah, I know that’s counterintuitive, but that’s because my father’s dickishness sometimes disguises itself so it will have greater impact in the future.

  2. You come back from said vacation a few months early, slip your key into the lock on the front door and discover the lock has been changed.

  Yes, I said, a few months early. Maybe that helps to underscore the depths my father will go to bend you over the barrel and have his way with you. Okay, not you. He doesn’t know you, and if he did, he wouldn’t give a shit about you. The only person he cares about is himself.

  So the changed lock was a clue, but the bigger clue came next.

  3. A stranger opens the door to the house you’ve been living in, and you have this conversation.

  “Can I help you?” the middle-aged Hispanic woman asked.

  “Hi,” I said. “Are you the new maid?”

  Side note: don’t ever ask that question unless you already know the answer.

  I don’t speak much Spanish, but I knew the cuss words, and evidently, so did the Hispanic woman.

  “Lo siento,” I said. “Do you hablo the English?”

  “I hablo the kick your skinny ass. Get off my porch, pendejo.”

  She swatted at me with the broom. I took bristles to my shoulder before I ducked, grabbed my suitcase and raced back to my car under a shower of Spanish curses.

  4. You try to call your old man and get the following message: We’re sorry; this number has been disconnected or is no longer in service. If you think you have reached this number in error, please check the number and try your call again.

  Like pressing a programmed number into a cell phone to make a call you’ve made many times before is going to be helped by checking the number again. Yeah, yeah, that’s for the stubby-fingered folks who stab the wrong numbers when they actually have to type them in, but that wasn’t my situation, so there was no reason to check the number or to assume it had been reached in error.

  No. The son of a bitch had changed his number intentionally to avoid me.

  5. You call your cousin, and she says, “Hey, ther
e. Are you slipping back to your old ways?”

  “Huh?”

  “I mean, you could just walk across the hall.”

  “What are you talking about, Sabrina?”

  “Oh, did you step out without telling me?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Across the hall, silly. Oh my God, the masseuse has amazing hands. I owe you big time.”

  Across the hall? Masseuse? “Um, this is Brett.”

  “No kidding. Talk to you when my session is over. If I can walk.”

  She hung up. I stood there on the sidewalk in the East End Historical District of Galveston in front of the house I used to live in, and stared at the damn phone after talking to my cousin who used to live in the same damn house, and she thought I’d set up a massage therapist for her? Had she found my secret stash and smoked it all?

  6. You stop by Something’s Brewing, a metaphysical bookstore run by a witch your father is paying to train you in magic, and she stares at you dumbfounded, and you have this conversation.

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You tanned overnight. Is that a magic thing or did you use one of those creams?”

  “Uh, this is weeks of lying in the sun on the beach.”

  “And what’s with those clothes?”

  I looked down. I wore tennis shoes, shorts, and a Paradise is Fiji T-shirt. “What about them?”

  “Oh, honey, don’t tell me you’re backsliding.”

  Her black cat, Isis, raced out of the back, but hit the brakes when she saw me. She growled and hissed.

  “What’s the matter, Isis? It’s just Brett.”

  The cat hated me, so the growling and hissing was normal, but Lakesha being surprised at that hissing was new.

  I looked around for the ghost of Rod Serling. He had to be here somewhere providing voiceover for the real life Twilight Zone I was trapped in.

  “Are you all right, Lakesha?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Your reaction to Isis hissing is freaking me out.”

  “She hasn’t hissed at you in ages. I don’t know what’s gotten into her.”

  “Uh, maybe it’s because I haven’t seen her in ages.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “Did you start smoking weed again? I thought you gave that up.”

  “Why would I do that?”