The Gathering

The Descendants

XXXIII. The Evening's End

The Witch-house settled into nighttime quiet. Floorboards released the day's heat with soft pops. Doors closed along the corridor. Water ran in distant bathrooms. The old structure creaked and sighed, wood grain shifting around its occupants.

Mia and Lora had chosen adjacent rooms on the second floor—close enough to call out if needed, separate enough to process alone. They'd developed this pattern over decades of touring: together for performance, apart for recovery.

Mia sat on the edge of her bed, still dressed. Her phone's screen cast blue light across the worn bedspread. The fabric smelled faintly of cedar and dust. David's message remained: Not yet. Soon. Build first. The house will show you. She had read it perhaps fifty times since receiving it. The words stayed fixed. The meaning did not emerge.

A soft knock at her door.

"It's open," Mia called, expecting Lora.

Emma Kraft stepped into the room. Her spine held its particular straightness—shoulders squared, chin level, hands positioned at her sides. In her right hand, she held her modified phone-scanner device. Its screen glowed pale green in the dim room.

"Mind me asking a question?" Emma's voice was carefully modulated.

Mia rose and opened the connecting door to Lora's room. Her sister appeared immediately, reading Mia's face with the fluency of six decades.

"Emma has something," Mia said.

The three women arranged themselves—Mia on the bed, Lora in the room's single chair. Emma remained standing. She had not been offered a seat and had not thought to take one. The radiator ticked as metal cooled.

"Sure," Lora said. "What's the rush?"

"I got the preliminary DNA study of 'a friend.'" Emma held up the device. Its screen displayed data visualizations—bars and graphs that meant nothing to either sister. "The analysis is incomplete—full results require equipment I don't have access to here—but I've identified enough markers to draw initial conclusions."

"And?" Mia prompted.

"Suffice it to say, it's not entirely human."

The words hung in the air. Mia's hands tightened on the bedspread's edge, fingers pressing into worn fabric. Cotton threads shifted under her grip.

"Meaning what, precisely?" Lora asked.

"Meaning close to human, but very weird. The genome contains sequences I can't find explanations for. Structures that don't appear in any population database. Markers that suggest—" Emma consulted her device. "Hybrid origin. Something that looks human, functions as human, but carries additional genetic material from a non-human source."

"Like what? Alien?" Mia's voice carried an edge.

"I don't have a classification. The additional sequences don't match anything in terrestrial biology as I understand it. But—" Emma looked up from her device, meeting Mia's eyes directly. "There's something else. The human component of the genome shows distant relationship markers. To you."

"To us?" Lora sat forward. "Both of us?"

"The markers are consistent with shared ancestry. Very distant—ten generations back, perhaps more. But the relationship exists. Whoever 'a friend' is, they share a common ancestor with the Wilds family line."

The room's radiator ticked. Mia's mind moved through genealogies she had never bothered to memorize—farm families intermarrying across generations, branches splitting and rejoining, the tangled roots of rural New England heritage. Her fingers had gone numb where they pressed into the bedspread.

"Ten generations," she said slowly. "That's... what? Three hundred years?"

"Approximately. Assuming standard generational intervals."

"So someone related to us, three centuries back, had a child with something not human. And that line continued. And now one of their descendants is orchestrating—" Mia gestured at the walls around them. "All of this."

"That's one interpretation," Emma agreed. "The data supports it."

Lora had gone still. Her hands rested flat on her thighs, fingers spread. The room smelled of old wood and dust and the faint metallic tang of Emma's device. "Emma. The non-human genetic material. Can you characterize it at all? Any distinguishing features?"

"Several anomalies. Unusual telomere structures suggesting extended cellular lifespan. Markers associated with enhanced sensory processing. Sequences that appear to affect neurological development in ways I can't fully interpret." Emma consulted her device again. "And one other thing. The mitochondrial DNA—the maternal line—shows the same unusual telomere patterns that I detected in both of you."

The sisters exchanged glances.

"You scanned us?" Mia asked.

"This morning. Non-invasively. I apologize for not requesting permission, but I needed baseline comparisons." Emma's tone carried no real contrition—she was stating facts, not offering apologies. "Your cellular degradation rates are approximately one-eighth of normal human aging. I attributed this to your Otherworld exposure. But now I wonder if the causality runs differently."

"What do you mean?"

"Perhaps you didn't acquire these traits in the Otherworld. Perhaps you were taken to the Otherworld because you already carried them. Latent markers from an ancestor who had... contact... with something not entirely human."

XXXIV. The Implication

Mia stood and walked to the window. The glass showed the Witch-house's garden—overgrown but not neglected, illuminated by whatever light the house chose to provide. Her own reflection floated there, superimposed on darkness. Nineteen years old forever. Sixty-two years of memory behind unchanged eyes. The glass was cold under her fingertips.

"We always assumed the Seelie changed us," she said. "Ten years in Faerie, learning their ways, absorbing their... whatever it is they have. We came back different. We assumed that was the cause."

"But we came back," Lora said. "Others who enter the Otherworld don't. Or they come back wrong. We came back ourselves, just... adjusted."

"Because we were already compatible." Mia turned from the window. "That's what you're suggesting, Emma? We had Fae blood before we ever crossed over?"

"I'm suggesting the genetic evidence supports that interpretation. Your ancestor—ten generations back—may have had a relationship with a Fae entity. The resulting lineage carried dormant traits that only expressed fully after Otherworld exposure."

"Like a lock and key," Lora murmured. "We had the lock. The Seelie Court provided the key."

"An imprecise metaphor, but functional."

Mia returned to the bed. The mattress dipped under her weight. Springs creaked. "So 'a friend'—this person who's been watching us, preparing this house, manipulating Fischer—is what? Our cousin? Some kind of distant relative who's also part Fae?"

"The genetic relationship is real. The Fae component is speculation based on your known history." Emma lowered her device. "But if 'a friend' is indeed part-Fae, it would explain certain capabilities. Extended lifespan, allowing long-term planning. Access to adjacent spaces like this house. Knowledge of Otherworld matters. And—" she paused. "A familial interest in your wellbeing."

"Familial." Mia tasted the word. "A relative we've never met, manipulating our lives for decades, is being familial?"

"Family takes many forms. Not all of them comfortable."

Lora had gone quiet. Her shoulders had drawn up, arms crossed over her chest. Now she spoke, each word measured.

"Mia. While we were in the Otherworld. The Seelie Court. Do you remember—"

"Don't." Mia's voice cut sharp. "Whatever you're about to say, don't."

"We have to consider it."

"No we don't."

Emma's gaze moved between the sisters. Her expression shifted—analytical processing interrupted by something she could not immediately categorize. She set her device on the nightstand. The screen went dark.

"What aren't you telling me?" she asked.

The sisters exchanged another glance—this one longer, laden with communication that excluded Emma entirely. Whatever passed between them ended with Mia's shoulders dropping. Her hands unclenched. She drew a breath that smelled of old wood and copper piping and Emma's machine oil.

"Ten years is a long time," Mia said finally. "Even in a place where time moves differently. We... formed connections. Relationships. Some of them were—" She stopped. Her throat worked. "We were young. We thought we were dead, or dreaming, or mad. The Court was beautiful and terrifying and interested in us. In what we could create."

"They loved our music," Lora added. Her voice had dropped low. "The Seelie. They said we sang with voices that remembered the old ways. That our songs carried something they'd been missing for centuries."

"And they showed their appreciation," Mia continued. Her voice had flattened, gone toneless. "In various ways. Some of them physical. Some of them... more than physical."

Emma held silent for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was carefully neutral. "You're suggesting that during your time in the Otherworld, one or both of you may have had intimate relations with Fae entities. And that these relations may have produced offspring."

"We're suggesting it's possible." Lora's face had lost color. "We don't know. Time worked differently there. Memory is... fragmented. But there were moments. Connections. And when we returned—"

"We returned alone," Mia finished. "Just us. No children, no partners, no evidence of anything that had happened. We assumed we'd been preserved somehow. Kept unchanged. But if we had children there, children who stayed when we left—"

"Then ten generations of Fae-Wilds descendants would be entirely possible," Emma said. "Fae aging is non-standard. What seems like centuries to us might be a handful of generations in Otherworld terms."

"And one of those descendants," Mia said, her voice dropped to a whisper, "might have developed a particular interest in the family they never knew. The mothers who crossed back and never returned."

The radiator ticked. Outside, something moved in the garden—a shadow, a suggestion of movement. The three women sat in silence. The bedspread smelled of cedar. Emma's device lay dark on the nightstand. Mia's hands had gone cold.