Moonlight bathed the garden in liquid silver as Sarah's slippers disappeared into dew-kissed grass. Lucas's calloused fingers tightened their grip on hers, his pulse thudding against her wrist in harmony with her own frantic heartbeat. Each snapping leaf, every rustling branch was the whisper of Emily's silk skirts brushing against Thomas's boots two centuries ago.

The ancient oak stood over them, its gnarled roots pushing up through the earth like fossilized arteries. Sarah's other hand flew to her mouth.

There, carved deeply into rough bark, their initials wept silvery sap:

E.B. + T.E.

The heart engulfing them was not smooth like knife-cut tag, but living—the bark had enfolded the letters, cupping them as scars.

Lucas exhaled a hard breath. "I dreamed this." His thumb traced the grooves, coming away slick with wetness. "Except in my dream." He turned Sarah's palm over and pressed her fingers against the carving.

The world whirled.

—Emily's back against twisted bark, Thomas's chest against hers as his pocketknife scraped wood—

—"'"Now we'll always be together,'""

he whispered against her mouth—

—The sweetness of his laugh, the cinnamon-sweetness of stolen wine on his lips—

Sarah gasped when the vision released her. The initials glowed gently now, the sap shining in moonlight.

Lucas drew in gasping breaths. "You saw it too."

She hadn't time to answer before the wind sprang up. The branches of the oak shuddered and shed a torrent of acorns that beat upon the ground like hail. One broke open at Sarah's feet and revealed not a nut but a roll of parchment curled inside the shell.

Lucas seized it, his hands extending long fingers of darkness as he unfolded the yellowed paper.

"Midnight at the ruins," penned the message in Thomas's familiar script. "Take the locket and the pistol. Burn the letters."

Sarah's locket now seemed to weigh a ton around her neck, its warmth seeping through her gown like a scald. The pistol they'd buried—had the earth already spurned it?

A twig cracked outside in the darkness of the garden.

They whirled as a body to stare at a shadow curl away from the trees—a woman in a long cloak, her silvered hair shining in the moon. Dr. Voss raised a rusted key.

"The chapel ruins," she said, her words weighed down by centuries. "Where they executed him. Where it ends. Where it begins."

The oak limbs creaked above them, showering them with glistening sap that stuck to their skin like liquid stars.