They Let Me Bleed Out for My Sister's Show novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Storeroom
Pinned under a collapsed shelf, Ivy hears her father downgrade her emergency call to protect her sister's livestream. She presses the public button, accepts a scholarship and takes her name off the family emergency list. Then her mother texts that her monthly blood draw is due.
At 2:14 on Saturday afternoon, my father moved my emergency call to the bottom of the clinic's queue.
My wrist monitor printed the time on its little screen, so I know it was exact.
I was on the floor of the old medicine storeroom with a steel shelf across my right leg.
That morning my mother had handed me the storeroom key and a cup of tea.
"Just you, Ivy," she'd said. "It's a quick restock."
I said yes, because I always said yes.
Then the shelf came down. Its old silver trim went through my calf, and a vial of wolfsbane broke on the concrete beside my face.
My wolf went silent. I had never been without her in nineteen years.
I raised my wrist and pressed the call button.
"Ivy Garrick, old storeroom. The shelf is on my leg. Silver in the calf, wolfsbane in the air, my wolf is gone. Send a doctor with the antidote."
My father's voice came into my earpiece a moment later, level and kind.
"Logged. Keep pressure on it and stay put. Someone will be there soon."
I tore open the first-aid pack with my teeth and wrapped the gauze around my leg.
By the time I tied it off, the cloth was black at the edges.
Nobody came at ten minutes.
At twenty, the basement was colder, my fingers had gone numb, and I still couldn't feel my wolf.
Then the family channel opened on my earpiece, and I heard why.
My sister Cora was on a sponsored livestream upstairs, and she was breathing too fast.
"Mom, I can't slow down," she said. "What if it goes wrong on camera?"
"It won't," my mother said softly. "We're live, sweetheart. The sponsors are waiting for the first flash of gold in your eyes."
"Your father is bringing the emergency kit to the stage right now," she added.
The emergency kit was the clinic's one case of antidote.
I pressed the button again.
"Is the antidote coming to the storeroom?"
The channel went quiet.
"Cora is having a panic attack," my father said. "The kit goes to her first. You studied poison response, Ivy. Rinse the wound with water."
"The pipe is broken under the shelf. I'm still bleeding. The wolfsbane has already shut my wolf down."
"One whiff of wolfsbane won't kill you," my mother said. "Four brands are watching this stream. If Cora loses control on camera, the whole clinic is embarrassed."
I looked at the blood coming through the gauze.
So my sister looking pretty on camera counted for more than my body healing itself.
"Then send the doctor with one syringe," I said.
"He stays with Cora." My father's voice turned cold. "Stop tying up the channel and do what I told you."
The red light on my monitor went out.
My access to the clinic's emergency system was gone.
When Cora was nine, a silver buckle on the training rack burned her paw the first time she shifted.
I was ten, alone in the room with her, and my parents decided I should have pulled her away faster.
After that the house had a rule: the weaker you are, the more help you need, so you go first.
Cora always went first.
I told myself I would earn my turn by being the one nobody had to worry about.
On my monitor, my heart rate was falling.
I put my thumb on the red public button, the one that sends your vitals straight to the territory hospital, and held it down.
Forty-seven minutes later, a paramedic pried the door open with a crowbar.
He was tall, with tawny hair and a navy jacket that said Rafe Dunning on the chest, and he looked at the broken vials and my leg and swore.
"Your family runs this clinic," he said. "Where is the antidote?"
"Upstairs, on a stage," I said. "With my sister."
I woke in a private room at the hospital with twelve stitches in my calf.
The silver had stopped my healing for now, and the nurse said the wolfsbane in my blood needed watching.
She handed me my phone and said she had not been able to reach my guardians.
There was an email on the screen.
Northmere University's emergency-response program was offering me a full scholarship, and all it needed was my confirmation.
My father said the clinic could not run without me keeping the records. My mother said Cora's channel was expanding and she needed me to check the safety notes for every public shift.
I had been planning to turn it down.
I had always believed that staying was the price of being their daughter.
I typed: I accept.
Then I opened the family emergency list on my phone and took my own name off it.
The phone buzzed before I had put it down.
It was my mother.
She did not ask whether I was alive.
She wrote: Your monthly blood draw is due Monday at nine. Don't be late.
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