The spirit was still kneeling in the grass when the ground began to shake.
It wasn't her doing. Jin knew that the moment he felt it. Her tremors had been soft and rolling, like breath moving through roots. This was heavier, and warmer somehow, a deep pulse that seemed to come up through the stones of the courtyard and the walls of the school at the same time.
Then the red lines appeared.
They spread across the courtyard stones like cracks filling with light, thin and glowing and red as embers, running outward from the base of the school's walls. They crawled up the brick of the building itself, traced along the edges of the windows, pooled across the paving stones toward the tree. Everyone in the courtyard turned to look.
