She paused midstep. The red bandanna was in her hair today, and I was half tempted to reach out and touch it. "What?"

I paused. Ever since that day last week when we'd climbed out of the well, our relationship had been in a holding pattern. We'd been together-but not officially dating, as if neither of us wanted to disturb the status quo. I had avoided asking her out again because I wasn't so sure she wanted to date a guy who was related to a creature that ate people.

I mean, that's not the kind of thing you put on the family tree.

But if there was one thing the past couple of weeks had taught me, it was that life was too short and too weird to spend it not taking risks.

"Do you a" I paused. "Do you a"

She grinned and parked a fist on her hip. "Don't tell me, Cooper Warner, that you're afraid to ask me out after all you've gone through?"

"Of course I'm not afraid." But I hesitated again. Would she really want me after all this? Want to kiss me? Want to be with me?

"Well?" She arched a brow. The crowds of Maple Valley High kept moving around us in a wave. Faulkner came up behind me and bounced off my back.

On purpose. In the way only an obnoxious older brother could. Tor favor, hermano, " he said, then looped an arm around Sh.e.l.ley.

"Hey!" I said to him.

He grinned. "Check your pocket, dude. Su padre le dio un regalo."

Him and the Spanish again. I was about to deport him. "What?"

He rolled his eyes. "Dad gave you a gift. Said if you flunk your Hamlet paper, he's taking it back. Told me to tell you that you, of all people in his cla.s.s, should get Hamlet." Then he tugged Sh.e.l.ley closer and whispered something in her ear. She giggled and leaned into him before the two of them headed down the hall.

I dug in my back pocket, where Faulkner had reverse pickpocketed me, and pulled out a shiny new cell phone. A grin spread across my face so wide, I thought it might explode. "I never thought I'd say this, but my father is cool."

Megan smiled. "He's always been cool. Your mom, too."

"Yeah." I nodded. "They're not too bad for parents."

The warning bell rang. Megan arched a brow again, still waiting for me to get to the point.

Oh yeah, that. I had, like, thirty seconds to ask her before someone else did. "Will you go to the Freshman Fall Dance with me on Friday?" The words poured out of me in a jumble. "And be my girlfriend again?"

She grinned. "I thought you'd never ask, Cooper." Then she stood on her tiptoes and gave me a kiss. And sent my world into a tailspin.

This had to be the best day ever.

I hurried off to my next cla.s.s, still thinking about Megan, not really paying attention to anything else. I headed down the hall by the front offices and nearly ran into Sergeant Ring.

"Cooper. A word?"

I ducked into the princ.i.p.al's office with Mike's dad while the gossip mill got busy in the hall. Seeing me get pulled into the office with a uniformed cop would be enough to keep people talking about me for a year.

"We found your stepfather," Sergeant Ring said as soon as the door shut behind us, taking a seat on the corner of Mr. Hinkley's desk. Mr. Hinkley wasn't there-probably out busting tardies. "At the bottom of the well."

"Was he a ?" I let the sentence trail off. The last time I saw Sam, my mother and I had called the fire department as soon as we had left his land. But by the time the firefighters arrived, it was too late. The fire had moved extremely quickly, and the entire Jumel grounds were burned to a crisp-the woods, the winery, the McMansion, everything. Strangely, the inferno hadn't spread beyond the bounds of the Jumel property. It had taken them nearly a week to sort through the rubble.

Mike's dad nodded. "We found the skeletons of his workers down there, too. Looks like he might have been respon sible. He must have realized we were putting two and two together with the disappearances and leaped to his death."

"He had been acting really weird lately." Understatement of the year.

Sergeant Ring leaned in closer. Human lie detector. He stared at me for a long, long moment before drawing back. "And that well-it wasn't like a regular well. It had a tunnel in it. Very odd."

I shrugged. "I don't know. Sam never told me anything. He didn't like me much."

Sergeant Ring just nodded. He ran a hand through his hair. "Hey, that wine from your stepfather's office-it was bad or something," he said. "Tasted like c.r.a.p. Made me sicker than a d.a.m.ned dog. I swore off drinking after that."

"Really?"

"Yeah. I had some last night, and I tell you, I don't know why people said that vineyard was so good, because that stuff was awful." He closed the gap between us, back in menacing-cop mode. "You are going to keep that between us, though, right?"

"Yeah, sure." Mike's dad had drunk the wine last night. After all of this had ended. Maybe everything had been true, and once the Jumel legacy was over, the wine spoiled, too. If it sobered up Mike's dad, hey, maybe there was one bright side to this whole thing. I toyed with the dictionary on the shelf. Tried to act cool. "Did you, ah, find anything else down there?"

"No. Just your stepfather and the skeletons of the dead babies he'd 'lost' and the six missing workers. Nothing else. I'm sorry about your stepfather." Mike's dad went on about contacting my mom for funeral arrangements or something, but I wasn't listening.

There'd been no other skeletons, no other bodies.

Meaning they hadn't found the creature.

Had he disappeared, like the vine man I'd obliterated on the stairs, when he died?

Or had he survived?

My gaze went to the window. The warm day suddenly felt cold. No one could have survived that fall, the stabbing by Sam, the fire a Could he have?

But he had lasted two hundred years, when any ordinary thing would have died a No, he was dead, I decided and started to turn away.

My new cell phone rang, and I dug it out of my pocket. Who could have the phone number already? Even I didn't know the number. I flipped the top and put it to my ear. "h.e.l.lo?"

Silence.

"h.e.l.lo?"

And then a sound started. At first I thought it was the chatter of static, the hum of a bad connection. But the noise intensified and began to grow in volume, and a chill ran down my spine.

There was only one sound like that in the world. The quiet, evil undertow of- Laughter.

A. J. WHITTEN is a pseudonym for New York Times bestselling author Shirley Jump writing with her teenage daughter, Amanda. A shared love of horror movies and a desire to spice up the Shakespeare stories that are required reading in high school led to their collaboration on The Well. Learn more at www.ajwhitten.com.

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