(JASPER'S POV)
It was like a thread of fire that had been cut and stretched and lost, and now, suddenly, it was back — stronger than it had ever been, blazing through my chest, so bright and so real that I actually pressed a hand to my chest like I could hold it in. Gilbert. Gilbert was here. Somewhere out past the black glass and the bruise-colored sky and the waking things, my mate was alive, and the bond between us was singing.
I had never been so grateful for anything in my entire miserable, dying life.
But the thread was thin. It trembled.
And beneath it — woven through it like a thread of poison in a rope — I felt the other thing. Pain. Deep, endless, ruined pain. The kind of pain I'd spent centuries learning to recognize on other people's faces and never once felt in my own heart until now.
Gilbert was hurt. Gilbert was badly hurt.
My heart — that stubborn, slowly-hardening, traitor of a heart — clenched.
'Gilbert.'
I reached for him through the bond.
