Shotgun Sorceress

Shotgun Sorceress - By Lucy A. Snyder

part one


Suburban Outlaws


chapter one

A Kick in the Head


The festering mob of meat puppets in their tattered Sunday best shambled aside as I rode Pal down Main Street toward the stark white columns and broad marble steps of the Saguaro Hotel. There had to be a thousand bodies in the stinking brown sea parting before us. My skull was pounding, the July heat and hard West Texas sun nearly unbearable. I tipped my straw cowboy hat forward in a futile attempt to get some of the weak breeze on the back of my head.

And in a blink, Miko was suddenly there on the steps, Cooper and the Warlock strung up naked and sunburned on rough-hewn mesquite crosses to either side of her. As a small mercy, their limbs had been tied, not nailed, to the twisted branches. Their heads hung forward, insensible, as their chests shuddered to pull in shallow breaths.

The devil kitten in my saddlebag was purring loudly. It could sense the impending carnage.

You ready for this? I asked Pal.

“Ready for a slow, bloody, excruciating death followed by eternal damnation? Of course. What fun.”

Ignoring his sarcasm, I drew my pistol-grip Mossberg shotgun and racked a cartridge into the chamber.

“Give ’em back, Miko!” My voice was tight, shaky, a mouse’s outraged squeak at a lion.

She smiled at me, and all at once her beauty and power hit me like a velvet sledgehammer. If I’d been standing I would have fallen to my knees. I hoped I wasn’t getting wet; Pal would know and it would be a sprinkle of embarrassment on top of the disaster sundae I’d brought to our table.

“You know what I want,” she whispered, her voice floating easily over the distance between us. “Give yourself to me, and your men shall go free.”

A tiny part of me—the part that was exhausted, weary of fighting, weary of running—wondered if giving my body and soul to her would really be such a bad thing.

Oh, f*ck that noise, the rest of me replied. F*ck that long and hard.

But wait.

I’m getting ahead of myself … as usual.


I should have known my life would keep going merrily to shit. The previous Friday had been busier than a dam full of beavers on crystal meth. I’d run police roadblocks, battled dragons, and literally gone to hell and back as I rescued my boyfriend, Cooper, and his little brothers from a fate considerably worse than death. Every muscle in my body ached, and I was looking forward to getting some rest, if perhaps not much actual sleep. I’d seen some things that evening that would probably give me insomnia for, oh, the next decade or so. And there was the little detail that I’d put our city’s head wizard into a coma and killed a major guardian spirit. They both richly deserved it, but I’d broken about infinity-plus-one laws and surely the authorities were going to hunt me down with extreme prejudice. So I had prison and perhaps execution to look forward to as well. Yay, go me.

But, so far, it appeared I was safe for the night. I was definitely looking forward to the late dinner my witch friend Mother Karen was making for me and the other Talents who’d helped in the rescue. Whatever she had cooking in her kitchen smelled wonderful. And I knew my familiar, Pal, was plenty hungry.

I carried a platter of savory, steaming ham and a wooden bucket of water down Karen’s back steps out into the moonlit yard. It probably looked the same as most other backyards in the neighborhood: rattan furniture and a shiny steel gas barbecue on the brick patio, a wooden picnic table on the lawn, a scattering of oak and buckeye trees bordering the tall dog-eared plank fence ringed by softly glowing solar-charged lights. However, I suspected this was the only place in the entire state of Ohio sheltering a shaggy, six-foot-tall spider monster.

Who, based on the circles his clawed legs had torn in the turf, had spent the past half hour stalking his own posterior.

“Hey, Pal, I got your dinner,” I called.

He stopped going around in circles and blinked his four eyes at me, licking his whiskered muzzle uncertainly.

At least, I thought Palimpsest looked uncertain; as a ferret his emotions had been pretty easy to read. But now that his familiar form had become magically blended with his true arachnoid body … well, I didn’t exactly know what “happy” or “sad” or “puzzled” was supposed to look like on such an alien face.

“Having troubles over there?” I asked, setting the platter and bucket down on the picnic table.

“I … have an itch,” he replied gravely, his voice strange and muffled in my mind. Our telepathic connection was slowly improving, but that, too, was taking some getting used to.

“I could reach every part of my Quamo body and my ferret body,” Pal continued, “but oddly these new rear legs aren’t very flexible. I can reach my underside, but not my back.”

“Maybe you just need to do some yoga.”

Through the valved spiracles on his abdomen, he blew noisy chords that sounded like a child randomly banging on the keys of an organ. Laughter? Oh-please snorts? I’d only known Pal for a week, and already I had to get to know him all over again.

“That doesn’t help me at the moment,” he said.

“Horses back into trees and fence posts to scratch themselves,” I replied. “You’re tall enough to stand on tippytoes and scratch yourself on the low limbs of that oak over there.”

“How dreadfully undignified.”

“Or you could just roll around on the grass.”

“And that’s more dignified how?”

“Oh, hush. It’s not like anybody can see you back here,” I pointed out. “Otherwise you’d have flipped out the neighbors already and the cops would probably be here.”

Long ago, Mother Karen had put her house and its yards under a camouflage charm to keep her foster children’s magical practice sessions out of sight of the neighbors. So at least there would be no panicked suburbanites dialing 911 to report a monster prowling through Worthington.

I glanced up at the sky, half expecting to see a Virtus silently descending, ready to smite me like a curse from Heaven. One of the huge guardian spirits had already tried to do a little smiting earlier that evening. Mr. Jordan, the aforementioned now-comatose head of the local Governing Circle, had convinced the Virtus that I was committing some kind of grand necromancy instead of simply trying to rescue Cooper. I’d defended myself, not expecting to win the battle, but win I did.

It was still hard to believe: I had killed a Virtus. Nobody was supposed to be able to do that. Not with magic or luck or nuclear weapons or anything. It was as if I’d thrown myself naked in front of a speeding freight train in a desperate, stupid attempt to halt hundreds of hurtling tons of iron … and had somehow stopped it cold.

Miracles had abounded that evening. But I doubted the Virtus Regnum would see me as anything but a threat. They’d be coming for me, and from what I’d seen so far, they were as merciful as black holes.

I squinted up at the dark spaces between the stars, wondering what lurked there.

“Speaking of things that shouldn’t be seen by mundanes, how is that working for you?” Pal asked.

“Huh?” I looked at him, confused.

He nodded toward the gray satin opera glove on my left arm. “The gauntlet. Is it keeping your flames contained?”

“Yes, Karen and the Warlock did a good job enchanting this,” I replied, looking at the thin curls of smoke that were trailing from the cuff of the glove, as if I’d used it as a place to stash a still-smoldering cigarette. So far, that was the only sign that the lower half of my arm was a torch of hellfire, courtesy of my having to plunge my arm into the burning heart of the Goad, the pain-devouring devil that had imprisoned Cooper and his family.

“It slips down a little sometimes—I might have to find some double-sided tape or superglue to hold it in place.”

Sheathed in the glove, my arm functioned more or less normally, but still had a squishy unreliability. Fine finger movements were still difficult. And that wasn’t surprising, considering that my hand was boneless, fleshless, nothing but diabolic flame. I’d had to rely on a natural talent for spiritual extension to give it any kind of solidity; Pal had referred to the ability as “reflexive parakinesis.”

And it was pretty close to true reflex. My crysoberyl ocularis—a replacement for my left eye, which I’d lost the week before in a battle with a demon—still hurt a bit, and I was constantly aware that I had a piece of polished rock stuck in my head. But a couple of times that evening, I had completely forgotten that my left arm was no longer entirely flesh. And fortunately I hadn’t dropped anything important as a consequence.

“With luck we may be able to find someone to remove the underlying curse, and you’ll have your regular arm back,” Pal said.

I frowned. Everyone was treating my flame hand—and its power—like a curse. If I were an evil person, somebody bent on destruction and domination, my hand would have seemed almost purely a gift from the gods. With that kind of power literally at my fingertips, so what if having a fiery hand presented a few practical problems? That would be like complaining that you had to move a few boxes out of your garage to make way for the new Porsche. Or in my case, the new tank with a seemingly unlimited supply of surface-to-air missiles.

I was pretty sure I wasn’t an evil person. Though I’d certainly made some decisions I regretted—crushing a couple of Mr. Jordan’s men under the Warlock’s Land Rover was currently at the top of my growing list—I’d been trying to do the right thing at the time. Evil, certainly, was bad. But the power in my hand had saved us all from the Virtus, hadn’t it? I was getting pretty annoyed that everyone seemed to think I ought to be in a hurry to get rid of it.

“I should go back inside before they all start dinner without me,” I said. “And anyway, your ham’s getting cold over here … Did you want anything else for dinner? Karen’s got pie.”

“Let me start with the ham and see how it sits first,” he replied. “Wanting to eat something and being able to digest it are two different things.”

I looked up at him; surely he’d get bored or lonely staying out in the yard all by himself. “I could see if one of the others knows a shrinking spell so you could come inside with me and have dinner at the table.”

“Thank you, but I’m quite all right.”

“You sure? I mean, someone in the house has to know a good spell.”

He blew another chord and reared up on his back legs. In his ferret days the motion would have meant slight indignance, but in his new form it made him seem monstrously threatening. I had to stifle my prey-monkey instinct to run.

“I know a good spell, actually,” Pal told me. “The only silver lining to my current situation is that I am finally the proper size. I’d rather not be … diminished again unless it’s necessary.”

“Okay, suit yourself. Let me know if you change your mind.” I left Pal to his dinner and went back inside to the guest bedroom.

Cooper lay thin and pale under the covers, dead to the world. Dark curly bangs obscured his eyes. He’d lost a scary amount of weight during his time trapped in the hell; he’d always been on the wiry side, but now I could see every rib, every bump on his sternum. I wanted to crawl into bed with him and hold him close.

Instead, I gently shook his bony shoulder. “Wake up, time to eat.”

He grunted and pushed away my hand. “Don’ wanna. Wanna sleep.”

“C’mon. Potions only go so far—we gotta get some real food into you. We can sleep after.”

“Where’s Smoky?” he mumbled. “I can’t feel him.”

My stomach dropped. I hadn’t yet told him that his white terrier familiar died the night he was pulled into the hell. Smoky had been with him for years. And the loss of a familiar wasn’t just the loss of a steadfast companion—Cooper’s magical power had taken a hit, too. Even if my boyfriend was so heartless as to want to run right out and find a new familiar, he wouldn’t be able to do any better than a dumb toad or mute alley cat. It would be another set of eyes, but nothing more: no intelligent advice, no friendship, no boost to his Talent. The Regnum controlled all access to the modern, intelligent familiars. And we were now outlaws.

I just didn’t know how to break the bad news. “He, um … he’s not with us.”

Cooper seemed confused. “You left him at the apartment?”

I took a deep breath. “He didn’t make it. The night you disappeared … he got killed. It was quick. I don’t think he suffered.”

A bit of a lie, that; being torn apart by a demon was quick but certainly not easy. I felt horrible about Smoky dying, because it was my own damn fault for not knowing what to do.

Cooper’s features twisted in pain and sorrow, and he covered his face in his hands, pressing the heels against his eyes, I guessed to try to keep himself from crying. “Dammit. Poor little guy.”

I wanted to weep, too, but if we both started with the waterworks we probably wouldn’t stop for a while.

“Hey, everyone’s waiting on us; we better get to the dining room.” I hauled him up into a sitting position and helped him pull on a black Deathmobile T-shirt.

“This isn’t mine,” Cooper said, staring down at the flaming death’s-head-motor band logo.

“It’s Jimmy’s,” I replied, referring to Mother Karen’s eldest foster son. There are spells to create clothing, but fewer and fewer Talents have bothered with that kind of magic since the Industrial Revolution made fabric cheap. “Your pajama pants are his, too. All our stuff is shrunk down in a safe-deposit box at the bank, so you may be wearing his hand-me-downs for a couple more days.”

He blinked bloodshot eyes at me. “Why’s our stuff at the bank?”

“The farmers wouldn’t pay me for the rainstorm, so I missed rent and we were getting evicted. Also that rat-bastard Jordan bugged the apartment, so I figured it was best to pack up and go underground for a while.”

“Benedict Jordan? He bugged our place? Why?” His eyelids were starting to droop again. Mother Karen’s healing potions tended to put you right under until they’d done their work.

“He wanted you to stay gone in the hell. You’re the secret half brother he was scared everyone would find out about. Because then everyone would find out that his father was a bat-shit crazy murdering son of a bitch and people would start questioning his family’s authority or some crap like that.”

“Whoa, wait … he’s my brother?” Cooper suddenly looked wide-awake.

“Yep. Same mother, different father. Thank God. The Warlock, sadly, is his full brother.”

“Huh.” Cooper stared down at his knees, his eyes unfocused as if he was remembering something long forgotten. “Benny’s … Benedict Jordan. Ain’t that a kick in the head.”

His expression abruptly changed, darkened; I could tell he’d remembered something else, whether from his childhood or hell I had no way of knowing. “That f*cker.”

He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, stood up, and started to pace the room, agitated and furious. “Oh, this is just great. Ol’ Benny knew what was going on right from the start. Could have kept me from going to hell, or tried to. Or he could have helped you and the Warlock out. But instead he tried to cover everything up. He screwed over my brothers and me to protect his family’s reputation. As if we weren’t his family, too.”

I stepped toward him, concerned. “Calm down, honey—you’ll make yourself sick. You need to rest.”

Cooper looked at me. “Please, please tell me you kicked his ass. Otherwise I’m going to have to, and I’ll probably end up killing him and anybody who tries to stop me.”

I gently pulled his head down to mine and planted a kiss on his nose. His anger seemed to fade, his sudden burst of energy fading with it.

“Oh yes,” I told him. “I’ll probably go to prison for it, but his ass is well and thoroughly kicked.”

My mind flashed on Jordan lying broken on his desk, his hand a horrible burned mess. My stomach twisted into a knot, but I angrily forced my guilt back down. I would not feel bad about giving that creep a taste of his own magic.

I helped Cooper down the hall toward Mother Karen’s dining room. The scents of garlic steak, fresh rolls, and sweet potato pie wafted through the air. Cooper’s stomach growled loudly.

The Talents who’d helped bring Cooper’s infant brothers to Mother Karen’s house were already seated at the long cherrywood dining table. Oakbrown and Mariette sat across from Paulie at the far end. Mother Karen and Jimmy were ferrying plates of food in from the kitchen. The Warlock and Ginger sat across from each other at the near half of the table, arguing.

“I am tolerant,” Ginger protested, twisting a lock of her red hair around her index finger. “But fundies get on my every last nerve. It’s like they think the free expression of female sexuality is going to cause the Apocalypse or something. They’re totally threatened by it, and it’s stupid. I hate stupid.”

“Ginger-pie, it doesn’t matter what the mundanes believe, does it?” the Warlock replied. “How do their beliefs touch us? The fact is, they don’t. It’s been centuries since they were a real threat to us. We don’t have to deal with them if we don’t want to.”

“But what about the Talented kids who get born into mundane families?” Ginger asked. “What about them? Are we just supposed to let them swing in the wind when their crazy stupid parents decide they’re possessed by Satan and go all Spanish Inquisition on them?”

“We take care of our own,” the Warlock said, looking up at me as I helped Cooper into the empty chair beside Ginger.

“Maybe,” I replied, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice. “Not all Talents are in a hurry to do the right thing, not even for their own kids.” I moved around the table to sit across from Cooper in the chair to the Warlock’s left.

“You were in a rough situation with your mundane family in Texas, right?” the Warlock said. “And your Talented relatives got you out of there, didn’t they?”

“Yeah. My stepfather was going to have me locked up in a mental institution, but my aunt Vicky found out and brought me to Columbus. She was really cool,” I said, swallowing against a fresh swell of sorrow and guilt. No matter how much I told myself that Vicky’s suicide wasn’t my fault, my heart just wouldn’t believe it. “But for what it’s worth, my stepfather isn’t religious.”

Or at least he hadn’t been when he sent me away; for all I knew my stepmother had finally converted him.

“See?” the Warlock said to Ginger. “Jackasses come in all faiths.”

Mother Karen set a platter of halved, medium-rare flame-broiled rib-eye steaks down on the table beside Cooper, who immediately perked up.

“Oh, man, those look so good. Thanks, Karen!” He forked a half steak over onto his plate, waited for Ginger to get hers, then pushed the platter toward me and the Warlock. “Want one?”

“Of course!” I speared one of the garlicky, buttery slabs of meat for my own plate, cut off a perfectly cooked corner of the steak, and popped it into my mouth.

Suddenly, I was thrashing on a cold, wet floor, my mind filled with nothing but terror and the desperate desire to flee, but there was a rope around my hind leg, and a man lunged onto my head and rammed a steel restraint over my muzzle, pinning me to the concrete. The air stank of blood and offal. Oh God, I had to get up, I had to get out, but another man with a long knife brought his blade down on my exposed throat, and there was a hot, bright pain as my arteries poured out, steaming in the foul air, and the men on the other end of the rope heaved and grunted and jerked me flailing into the air as the bladesman slashed me again to finish the job—

I spat the meat back onto my plate, holding my forehead, my mind still humming from the horror of the steer’s death. My skull felt as if the terrified beast had kicked me square between the eyes.

The Warlock stared at me. “What’s the matter—whoa, dude, that’s just wrong.”

I looked down at my plate. The spat-out piece of steak was twitching like an epileptic slug. It reminded me of the dead animals the Wutganger demon had reanimated.

Ginger peered at the chunk. “Huh. Zombie cow. How’d you do that?”

“I—I don’t know,” I stammered, looking over at Cooper. He, too, had spat out his steak, but his was unmoving, nothing more than cooked muscle. Shuddering, I scooped my twitching piece off my plate and hid it under my napkin.

“Did you feel that?” I asked Cooper. “The men, and the knife?”

“Yeah,” he croaked. “Anyone want the rest of this meat?”

“What are you talking about?” the Warlock asked. He hadn’t yet started on his dinner.

“Try your steak,” I said, then looked at Ginger. “You, too. Please.”

They both cautiously cut off small pieces and tasted them.

“Seems fine. Great, in fact. Better than Peter Luger’s,” the Warlock said.

“Mine, too,” said Ginger.

“Try mine,” I said, pushing my plate toward the Warlock.

He cut off a piece, sniffed it experimentally, ate it. “It’s the same. Delicious. What’s the matter?”

“I … I felt the steer’s death,” I said. “So did Cooper, I think.”

Cooper nodded, still looking gray.

“You what?” Mother Karen stepped out of the kitchen with a bowl of broccoli.

“You get your meat at a kosher butcher?” I asked. Karen nodded. “Yes, there’s a place on North High. Why?”

“Their slaughterhouse sucks … they need better workers,” I said darkly. “That was no damn fun for the cow at all. In fact that was pretty f*cking terrible.”

Mother Karen looked horrified and helpless. “Kosher slaughter is supposed to be very quick and humane, just takes a few seconds—”

“Three seconds of getting your throat cut is a damn long time,” I shot back. “Why the hell aren’t they using magic? It’s not like there aren’t plenty of Jewish wizards. Any decent Talent could put ’em right to sleep, no pain at all.”

“That would still be a really crap job,” the Warlock said, sounding uncomfortable. “I don’t know anyone who’d want to do that—”

“Moses on a moped! They could enchant the knives, the rope, the damn slaughterhouse itself!” I exclaimed, the pain in my head a buzzing sting like a wasp trapped behind my eyes. “This shit should not be going on in a world with magic. Period. The steer was born to be meat, fine, I get that, but his death shouldn’t have been like that.”

“Nobody’s death is ever much fun,” Cooper said, rubbing his temples. “But then nobody’s birth is, either.”

“So why did this happen? What’s going on?” I asked him.

“We can’t expect to do a resurrection without some lingering side effects,” Cooper replied.

“A res—…” My voice failed for a moment when I realized what he meant. “No. That’s not what we did. Your—your brothers, they were alive, we just, you know, brought them back from the hell …”

“They were alive when they went in, yes,” Cooper said quietly. “But look at me. I was only in there a few days … they were in there for years …”

He trailed off.

Oh God, what had we done? A resurrection was considered one of the most taboo kinds of sorcery. The ritual demanded black magic that stained your soul like nobody’s business; or at least that’s what I’d always heard. Oh God.

“But they’re fine now. Right?” Feeling my heart slamming in my chest, I looked from Cooper to Mother Karen. “The babies are fine now, right?”

“Well, yes,” Mother Karen replied. “They seem fine. Ish.”

“Ish? Fine-ish? What does that mean?” I demanded.

“Well, you know, they clearly have a few problems we’ll need to deal with; nightmares and such—”

“But they’re not demons, right?” I stared at the steak lump still twitching under the flower print napkin. “They’re not … undead or something, right?”

“No, no, of course not,” Mother Karen said. “All things considered, they seem very healthy.”

“Getting the kids out of there was the right thing to do,” Cooper said firmly. “And anyone who thinks it wasn’t can lick my left one.”

The Warlock cleared his throat nervously, as if he was trying to change the subject. “So, well, maybe this side effect is just temporary. Maybe it’s something you just have to push through and then it’ll be over. Try the steak again, Jessie.”

“Uh-uh, I don’t really—”

“C’mon, try it. Can’t have your pudding if you don’t have any meat,” he wheedled.

Maybe he was right. I cut off a half-inch piece that was mostly crispy fat—I supposed fat wouldn’t do much if it reanimated—and pressed it to my lips and tongue.

Immediately I was hit with the same kick-to-the-head overload of terror and pain. It was utterly horrifying … but also strangely exhilarating, like riding a roller coaster or downing a shot of strong whiskey.

No. No, no, no, I was not getting a thrill from the poor creature’s death. I quickly spat the piece out into my hand and dropped it on top of the napkin. It shuddered weakly.

I stuck my fork in the rest of my steak and flipped it onto the Warlock’s plate. “All yours. I’m not going there again.”

“Well,” Ginger said, “look on the bright side. You could help millions of kids with dead goldfish.”

Something about Ginger’s whimsy grated me to my core. I glared at her. “Very funny. I’m so glad this amuses you.”

Ginger shrank back in her chair and said precisely the wrong thing: “Maybe you’ll get used to it?”

A sudden fury took me. I stood up, whipped off the opera glove, and shoved my fiery hand toward Ginger. “Were you asleep earlier? Did you not see what I’m capable of?”

The others stared at me, shocked into silence.

“Did you see or didn’t you?” I snarled.

“I saw,” Ginger replied in a small, frightened voice, staring at the flames snapping inches from her face.

“So do you think it’d be hilarious if I got used to this horror and got a real taste for death? Do you?”

In my rage, my hand was losing shape, blossoming into a huge rose of fire. I could imagine scorching Ginger’s pretty face right off, burning her down to teeth and charred bone. “I think I could learn to love eating all kinds of things if they really pissed me off.”

Ginger was quaking in her seat, looked as if she was going to burst into tears.

“Jessie, for God’s sake stop it!” Cooper rose from his chair.

The fire flared brighter along with my anger, the flames turning purple. I’d saved his life, and now he wouldn’t back me in a fight?

“Set your skinny ass back down, honey,” I growled, my words thick with my long-buried Texas drawl.

The Warlock gripped my trembling flesh arm. “C’mon. Ginger didn’t mean anything by it. We’re all friends here.”

“Please calm down,” Mother Karen said, gripping the bowl so tightly it looked in danger of shattering.

I went cold at the fear in Karen’s eyes.

What the hell am I doing? I quickly dropped down into my chair, my heart pounding and cheeks hot.

“Sorry about that … don’t know what got into me,” I muttered as I pulled on the glove.

Ginger stammered, “Excuse me,” and fled the table, apparently heading toward the guest bathroom. Cooper shot me a look of mixed concern and irritation, then he and Mariette quickly followed the frightened girl.

The remaining Talents all sat in silence.

I completely jacked that up, I thought miserably. The pooch done got screwed. There didn’t seem to be any way to recover from it. Maybe I should leave the table, too, and commiserate with Pal in the backyard.

“Well, that happened,” the Warlock finally said. He nudged my elbow. “Want some potatoes?”

“Sure,” I sighed, taking the bowl of buttered, parsley-speckled russets from him. I spooned a few spuds onto my plate, and then cautiously forked one up and bit into it. Instead of a punch of agony, there was a slow, alien discomfort: the sting of rootlets being torn from the soil, the ache of broken eye-sprouts, the dull pain of a knife slicing through cold white flesh.

“How is it?” Cooper emerged from the hallway and sat back down at the table, acting as if nothing had happened. Mariette and Ginger weren’t with him.

“Unpleasant. Tolerable,” I replied. “Who knew taters felt so much pain? Meals are just going to suck all the way around for a while, I guess.”

“There’s always fruit,” Cooper said. “The plants want something to eat those.”

“With our luck, we’ve probably been cursed with deadly strawberry allergies,” I grumbled.

“Then consider the wide, wonderful world of tofu,” the Warlock said. “Soybeans are fruit, too.”

“Yay. Tofu.” I mournfully eyed the platter of untouchable rib eyes. “Please pass the broccoli …”