The Silver Tongued Devil Chapter 7: Chapter 7 - Zoned for Wolves

Read chapter 7 of The Silver Tongued Devil by The Vilkas on NovelPedia.

Waking up hurt in all the familiar ways and three new ones. The cot under my back was too narrow and too hard to be my bed at home. The air tasted like old coins again—cold, flat, the kind that had been sitting in stone for a long time and only moved when somebody opened doors and dragged trouble through. My left eye ached like someone had tried to pry it out with a screwdriver and then gotten bored halfway. For a second, I just watched the dim gray bar of light cutting across the ceiling from the slit window. The last clear thing I remembered was Merrik’s bad‑wolf joke landing, my own laugh answering it, and then the mailbox in the corner of my sightline snapping upright like it had just punched in for a shift. Text. Clean as a tax notice. Behavioral data sufficient : Integrated participant. Level Index: 3. Resources partially restored. Linguistic channel —stabilized. Then the pressure had hit, hard and bright behind my eye and down my spine, and everything folded up. So. Blackout, not nap. I rolled onto my side. Every sore spot weighed in at once—ribs humming, shoulder tight, legs heavy—like my body had been waiting for a chance to file complaints. When I tried to swallow, my throat scraped like I’d been gargling dust. I flexed my fingers. Right hand: stiff, but serviceable. Left wrist: a different story. The instant I tried to bend it past a shallow angle, a bolt of grinding pain shot up my forearm. Not the sharp, electric wrong from when it first broke on the road. This was deeper, the gummy resistance of something half‑fixed and then ignored for too long. I brought the wrist up where I could see it. The bruising had gone from angry purple to ugly yellow, the kind that said the system had done its part and then clocked out. It looked almost normal. It just didn’t move that way. I eased it side to side, small arcs. Tendons in the back of my hand pulled like over‑tight wires. Bones clicked in ways that did not inspire confidence. Joints hate being babied. Any roofer over forty could tell you that. Stop using something after an injury, and it freezes for good. I didn’t know if that rule held in whatever nightmare OS I was running now, but I wasn’t betting on the mailbox sending a friendly patch. “Okay,” I breathed. “Physical therapy it is.” I braced my left forearm with my right hand and rotated the wrist another notch. Pain flared, bright enough to blur my vision. I rode it out, counted three slow breaths, then tried again. Small circles. Flex, extend. Something deep in the meat complained. The mailbox in my peripheral vision pulsed its lazy four‑count. Watching. Logging. “Write this down,” I told it. “Patient extremely unhappy with customer service.” A low sound answered me from the doorway. Not words. A questioning grunt. I turned my head too fast, and the room slid sideways before it snapped back into place. Merrik stood in the frame, shoulder against stone, spear upright by his side. The lantern on the little table burned lower than I remembered, wick turned down to a tired ember. “How long?” I asked. The words came out in English. They landed in my head in his language, smooth as a second thought. Merrik’s brows drew together. “Half a watch,” he said slowly. “Maybe a little more. You dropped like a sack of stones. I thought you were dead until you started snoring.” “Good to know I still impress.” I winced as the next rotation of my wrist sent a new spike through the joint. “Snoring, huh? That’s the dangerous part.” His gaze dropped to my hand. “You hurt it again?” “Still hurt it.” I forced another small circle. “Apparently, if you let something sit through three mystery upgrades, it complains.” He didn’t catch every word; I could feel the spots where the understanding slid, little gaps my brain papered over. When I said “upgrades,” though, he flinched as if I’d made a comment about his mother. “Whatever that was,” he said, sidestepping the word but clearly with venom, “do not do it again in here. You went stiff, then sl