Read Online The Single Undead Moms Club (Half Moon Hollow series Book 4) by Molly Harper - Free Book Online Page B

Go!” foam fingers. “You know, there are times when I’m really glad the childe I got had already graduated by the time I turned him. I’m not sure I would have survived all this. You’re well suited to it, though. You haven’t flinched once.”
    I grinned. “Thanks, Jane.”
    “Libby!”
    Casey Sparks, a petite brunette with a sassy pixie cut, was bustling down the hall toward me.
    “Friend or foe?” Jane whispered.
    “Friend,” I whispered back, adding, “Ish.”
    Of all the parents I knew through school, I was probably closest to Casey. We’d worked together on the raffle committee for the Pumpkin Patch Party, the school’s annual fall festival and biggest fund-raiser of the year for the PTA. Working that thing was like serving in the armed forces together. It changed a woman.
    Casey and I occasionally met for coffee, and when I got sick, she’d brought some casseroles over to the house. With my symptoms and her four kids, that was about as much as either of us had time for. And honestly, I didn’t know how to offer more.
    Casey threw an arm around my shoulder and squeezed me tight. I hugged her back with a fraction of my strength for fear of hurting her. Leaning away from the potential temptation of her pulsing throat, I ran through the list of things I was supposed to be doing—breathing, blinking, smiling—and tried to do them at a regular, human pace.
    “They must have the air-conditioning cranked up pretty high—your hands are freezing!” she exclaimed.
    My smile stretched tight. Actually, the air-conditioning was struggling under the body heat of so many people walking through the building while the doors were standing open. Everybody else’s forehead had a fine sheen of sweat. I supposed Casey was trying to be polite about my less-than-stellar immune-system-slash-everything-else. “Well, the system must be catching up from being off over the summer.”
    “Wow, you’re looking really good,” Casey said, holding my hands and stepping back so she could survey me. “That new treatment seems to be a little easier on you. Have you been taking supplements or something?”
    Remembering the horse-pill iron supplements I’d choked down that morning, I said, “Yep, vitamins and supplements. Health shakes. That sort of thing.”
    Synthetic blood was a sort of smoothie, right? A meaty, metallic smoothie.
    “Well, you look great. So did Danny get Mrs. Roberts this year?” she asked. The highly coveted first-grade teacher was a miracle worker with behavioral problems. Her class reading-comprehension test scores were through the roof. And she’d managed to make the first grade’s Earth Day play interesting three years in a row. All the parents wanted their kids to be in Mrs. Roberts’s class, so much so that the school stopped taking assignment requests as a matter of policy.
    “No, he got Miss Steele,” I said quietly, nodding toward the empty classroom. “I’m sure he’ll be fine. I was when I was in her class. How about Peyton? How is she liking her last year of Sunnyside?”
    Peyton was Casey’s youngest, a pink-obsessed princess obsessed with the Little Mermaid. She had cried, cajoled, and attempted bribery to get her mother to let her skip a year at Sunnyside preschool, Danny’s “alma mater,” so she could join her oldest siblings at big-kid school. Casey was a stronger woman than I, because I don’t know if I would have been able to say no to that level of cuteness. Or whining.
    “Mrs. Bloom,” Casey said, her pink-glossed lips bending into a frown.
    I winced. Danny and Mrs. Bloom had not gotten along well when she’d been his teacher. Mrs. Bloom seemed to be of the opinion that four-year-olds should be seen and not heard, which was an odd stance for someone who spent all day talking to four-year-olds. “Well, I’m sure it will be fine.”
    “When Danny had Mrs. Bloom, you told me I should pray for her retirement or a falling cartoon safe before Peyton got to the