Page 53 of Dark Witch Resurrection

"Can you feel this?" she asked after doing something he couldn't feel.

"No," he rasped.

She paused what she was doing, stepped away from him for a moment, and then returned with a cup.

"I will start by wetting your lips." She poured some water on a white square of fabric and rubbed it over his lips. "Better?"

He licked his lips, the water tasting fresh on his tongue.

"Yes. Can I have more?"

The medic smiled. "Do you usually drink water?"

"Yes," he replied, wondering about the odd question.

The doctor nodded, her eyes narrowing as she studied him with a gaze that seemed to see straight through him. "I am going to raise the back of the bed to bring you to a semi-reclining position. There will be a whizzing sound when I activate the mechanism. Ready?"

Too tired to say the word, he blinked once.

"Here it goes." She pressed something, and then, with a soft whirring sound, the back of his bed began to lift, the angle shifting until he was propped up in a semi-reclined position.

The medic put in the cup a strange, tubular device bent at one end and held it out to him with an expectant look on her face. "Suck gently," she instructed. "I only want you to wet your mouth. You can swallow a little, but not a lot. Your stomach can't handle anything more than that right now."

He did as he was told, drawing the cool, clear water into his mouth and letting it sit on his tongue for a moment before swallowing it. It felt strange, almost foreign, as if his body had forgotten how to perform even the most basic functions.

When the medic took the cup away, the prince looked up at her, his eyes searching her face for some hint of familiarity, some clue that might help him piece together the shattered fragments of his memory.

"How can you understand me?" he asked.

The device that translated their strange language into the one he understood did not work in reverse. It did not translate what he had been saying to them.

The female pushed her flaming hair behind her ear, revealing a small device lodged inside her ear. "This translates for me," she explained, tapping it with one slender finger. "The same way the teardrop translates for you." She tapped the pendant that hung around her neck.

So, they had two kinds of translation devices—one for hearing and one for talking.

Interesting.

But even as he marveled at the ingenuity of the gadgets and wondered how they worked, the thought that bothered him was that he still didn't know who he was.

They called him prince, but a prince of what?

What had happened to him that made him unable to remember his own name?

40

JASMINE

The prince was awake, and his eyes were the brilliant blue she remembered from the moment he'd opened them.

Jasmine's heart was pounding so loudly that she had no doubt Bridget and the prince could hear it, but she didn't care.

This was the moment she'd been waiting for.

She wasn't a medical professional, but it seemed to her that he was out of the coma for good. He was keeping his eyes open and talking in whole sentences.

It would have been nice to hear his real voice and how he sounded in his own language, but she didn't dare defy Kian and take the earpieces out. They were staying no matter what, but not because she feared the prince's compulsion. She just didn't want to give anyone an excuse to kick her out of the room.

Her prince was still painfully thin, but he was breathtaking, with his chiseled features and regal bearing, his skin smooth and unblemished despite the ravages of time and stasis. Julian had cut short the tufts of long hair that had stayed attached to his head through thousands of years of stasis, and the bald spots were starting to sprout new hair.

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