Adam jabbed Kris in the side with an elbow to interrupt him and said, "Okay, so I am giving you fair warning here, the next time you say one word about how I deserved it, or how sorry you are, or for that matter just spend your interview time going off on how awesome I am, I am going to be so totally overcome with love for you that I am going to have to kiss you."

The tentacles looked almost like jewelry, sort of iridescent-shiny blue and purple, speckled with pale silvery spots, and they wound around Adam's wrists and up into his palms and coiled there, like small glittery snakes.

"So what's the problem?" Elizabeth asked. "They won't talk to us unless we sing first," John said.

Kris wasn't brand-new at the substitute gig, but it was still a little unsettling to walk into the office his first day at the new school, and have the secretary look him up and down and say, "Oh, you are going to be eaten alive."

Kris stopped taking slaves to his bed after his father died; he let them think it was grief, and then he let them think it was the burden of ruling, but he'd hated it all along.

It just wasn't like that.

"Megan!" Kris said. "He's my TA. I'm not going to—"

Adam jabbed Kris in the side with an elbow to interrupt him and said, "Okay, so I am giving you fair warning here, the next time you say one word about how I deserved it, or how sorry you are, or for that matter just spend your interview time going off on how awesome I am, I am going to be so totally overcome with love for you that I am going to have to kiss you."

The strategy had not included getting drunk himself and losing all sense of timing and being the tawdry and expensive rebound sex.

"At least we don't have to do the walk of shame?" Adam said.

pirates!

Kris just laughed. "Do you get—we're talking twenty thousand pounds at least just to clear the debts?" "Yes," Anoop said. "There's a way." "Who do I have to kill?" Kris said, dryly. "Not kill," Anoop said. "Marry."

"I thought it was going to be an ice cream maker or something," Kris said.

Megan had been calling them zombies from the get-go; after the third one, while Adam was busy puking his guts all over the sidewalk, she went around to all of them and hissed, "Listen, they're zombies, do you get it?"

Adam pushed himself up and loomed up over Kris, his eyes heavy-lidded in glitter and shadow, predatory and smiling. Written for queenbitchfest, inspired by "Ziggy Stardust".

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." — Hunter S. Thompson