Breath brings back to life

They finished and they slit her throat and left her for animals to devour.
It was no longer before. The dream had ended.
Aina drifted into a snug and warm place like the heat under her wool blanket on a chilly morning, and she felt a stranger’s heartbeat nearby. It drummed big, hollow notes, like a horse’s. Was she in a womb? Had she died, and passed through gates, and become a person again, only not yet fully formed? Or was she being born an angel in some newer, stranger place?
She never found out even though she wished to. Something seized her center like a small, bright thread and tugged. At first, gently. Then, it pulled upon her like a swift river and dragged her from the cozy nest. Death was a threshold made of fire, she discovered, and though great comforts lived on either side, Aina now understood that it hurt to move through it, whether going forward or back.
She was cold. Blood was smeared on her face and an incredible ache in her throat pinched off a scream; she touched her neck by reflex, and felt the tight weave of fine stitches. The same night sky spun above her, the moon dark, but the stars shifted. From the temperature of the blood—her own blood—and the movement of the sky, she had been dead for at least an hour. She lay on her back on something so frigid it burned, a sheet of white, and specks of the stuff floated down through the desert air. Snow. Aina had only seen it in books brought by the missionaries, and yet here it was so beautiful that it hurt to look at.
The Great Spirit knelt over her, its body a hooded veil outlined by the drifting snow, and somehow she knew that the Spirit had made the snow, and it seemed very alone in their small patch of white frost in the middle of a vast desert.
“Did you save me?” Her voice came out a raspy whisper because of the threads through her neck.
It nodded. Its chin was pale like the missionaries, but its eyes held no white; the scleras were black as deep skies with irises of blue fire. Blood wreathed the snow beneath its hands.
She had never hated the foreigners, but their bodies stained the patch of snow and she knew the Great Spirit had hated them for her. And it hated better than she ever could, cleaner and hotter, and for the first time in her life Aina felt no fear, because the most dangerous thing in the world had already decided in her favor.
“I came for you,” she rasped. “My brother. So ill. Trade me for him, please. I will go with you to Hell if you save him.”
It reached down and took white snow into its hands, which were bandaged in shadow like the rest of it, and exhaled until the water melted. Its breath hung, a cloudy mist in the air, and the snow became a gleaming pool that reflected more starlight than it should have. It drained the water into a canteen, which it passed to her, and Aina understood. The water carried the Spirit’s breath, a rare gift that would save him.
But the expulsion of power caused the Spirit to collapse into the snow. Its fingers splayed there. She could see how it stooped, bent-backed, weakened, and wondered just how much of a god’s power was required to drag her back through death’s gates. So, too, was the moon gone, and she knew the Spirit was always strongest when the moon rode high. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
The first shot rang from the dark. The bullet struck the Spirit’s shoulder and Aina was shocked at the solid thud. Though it didn’t appear to wound the Spirit, it loosed a beastly growl and pointed out into the desert. “Flee,” it said, in a voice like rough sandstone. Rough, yet spoken from what appeared to be a feminine jaw.
“They will hurt you! They’re monsters!”
It climbed to its feet. “I am the one who eats monsters.” It turned toward the men—more of them than before. Undaunted, it charged its prey, loosing an otherworldly howl that rattled Aina’s courage.
And so Aina ran and carried the water back to her sick brother, unsure if the Great Spirit could hear prayers, but saying one instead to any god who would listen: put wings to her feet and aid the Great Spirit in working its terrible will.

Prologue, Page 4-5


Ryn woke bound and powerless. Her brain felt sticky from the drugs. She smelled lifeless plastic, tasted the iron tinge of human artifice on her tongue. A prickle of urgency tensed the muscles in her legs. They had her in a machine. In a whirling, thundering abomination, bound to a gurney, and two of them prodded her with fingers covered in man-schemed rubber. The stench of their gloves caught in her throat and alien hands probed her wounds.
Wounds.
It was a type of sacrilege, to be harmed by such temporary creatures, but dragging the village girl called Aina back from death had been no small feat; and she had given the mortal a second gift of breath to carry home to her dying sibling. Giving life back was the hardest thing she could do and she’d never dared it twice in a row before. That was why Ryn had fought with no more strength than a mortal, why her power had yet to return.
At least she knew Aina had succeeded. She had sensed the expulsion of her power across a vast distance, felt in that moment how her life force had punched into the heart of Aina’s brother. Ryn was glad. Though she disliked mortals as a rule, Aina had the clean scent of rain on her skin—free of the stink that oozed out the pores of the species. Whatever the price, paying it had freed the little village girl who Ryn had watched from the time she’d swelled her mother’s womb. Now Aina, too, would have time to grow old.

Chapter 2, Page 18