Page 39 of Dark Witch Resurrection

He arched a brow. "Do I need to spell it out for you? We have humans living in the village. It's very easy to take advantage of them."

"Right." She scrunched her nose. "Maybe that's something we should leave to Edna. Did she ever approve a search or something along those lines?"

Kian snorted. "Clan law predates all the fluffy laws of today. If I suspect someone is taking advantage of a human or a minor, I don't need a search warrant to break down the door."

Syssi's eyes became hooded. "Why does that make you so sexy to me?"

He cast a glance at Allegra. "Is there a chance you can put her in front of the television to watch the Wiggles?"

Syssi laughed. "I could, but I told Amanda I would meet her at the playground."

He leaned closer to her. "Call her and postpone your playdate. It's Saturday. Tell her that you overslept."

30

JASMINE

"Good morning, Bridget." Jasmine handed the doctor a large cappuccino and a bag with a warmed-up chocolate croissant. "Enjoy."

The doctor smiled. "Thank you, I will." She took both to her office while Jasmine headed to the prince's room.

"Good morning, my prince." She leaned over and gently kissed his cheek.

He was still unconscious, and he didn't react to the kiss, but something told her that he could feel it. It was probably her imagination, but it seemed like his lips curved up a little.

Yeah, she was hallucinating.

Sitting on her chair, she put the coffee on the floor and bit into the croissant. After Kian had told her that she was part of the team and that her job was to talk to the prince and princess and stimulate them with her acting and singing, he'd also reminded her that the credit card he'd given her was still at her disposal and she could buy whatever she wanted with it. He had still advised against using her cards, to be on the safe side.

It was nice to stop at the café in the lobby and get coffee and something to eat. She would have ordered delivery from a supermarket and cooked proper meals, but not if she was the only one to cook for.

Margo and Frankie had started training in the Perfect Match center, Ella had returned to the village, and Gabi was busy working or visiting her family there. The gods spent most of their days in the bowels of the keep, working on the salvaged equipment, and she had no idea where they were getting their food from. Maybe they ordered deliveries, collected them at the guard station, and ate them where they worked.

Talk about dedication.

Pulling the teardrop from her pocket, Jasmine regarded it with suspicion.

She was not tech-savvy, and it took her time to adapt to new gadgets. She already had the earpieces, which she had to wear all day long, and now she needed to program the teardrop so it would sound like her.

It was important that she did that before the prince woke up.

He was used to the sound of her voice, or so she hoped, and when she used the teardrop to translate for her, it would confuse him if it didn't sound like her.

In fact, perhaps she should start talking to him through the device while he slept. If he could hear her, it would be good if he could also understand her.

Activating the device, she spoke a few lines from a play, but even though it got the tonality right so that it didn't sound flat, it still sounded strange and distorted. Then again, she'd recorded herself speaking enough times to know that she sounded different to herself than she did to others and that the way her voice resonated in her head was not the same as how the outside world perceived it.

Which gave her an idea.

She pulled out her phone and recorded herself speaking to have a baseline.

Next, she recorded the teardrop's output and compared the two. It was the start of a long, painstaking process of training the device to reproduce her voice accurately. She recorded herself repeatedly, listening to the playback and making tiny adjustments until the words that came out sounded more like her own.

It was a tedious task that required patience, persistence, and a willingness to listen to her voice until it began to sound like a stranger's. But Jasmine was determined and refused to give up until she had achieved the perfect balance of tone and inflection and the near-perfect replication of her own cadence.

Even then, however, the device had its limitations. When Jasmine tried to sing, the teardrop spoke the lyrics, translating them into the harsh, guttural sounds of the Kra-ell language without any of the melody or rhythm that made music powerful. She remembered then that William had told her to deactivate the device when she wanted to sing.

Jasmine considered transcribing the lyrics herself, trying to capture the essence of the songs in the alien tongue. But as she listened to the Kra-ell words that the device produced, she realized it would be impossible. The language was too different, too foreign to her ears and her understanding.