They Let Me Bleed Out for My Sister's Show novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: First Monday

At the territory hospital, her parents arrive with Cora livestreaming. Ivy plays the saved transcript out loud and refuses her mother's vial for the first time. The paramedic reads her panel and says she should have been dead.

At 8:58 on Monday morning, my parents walked into my hospital room with a camera.

My sister Cora held the phone up on a little stand, and a red LIVE badge glowed in the corner.

"Say hi to my brave big sister," Cora told it, in her sweet streaming voice. "She had a scary accident, and we're here to cheer her up."

The viewer count in the corner read nineteen thousand.

My father stood at the foot of the bed in his gray suit. My mother set a canvas bag on the tray table and smiled at me.

"You look tired, honey," she said.

I had a drip in my arm and twelve stitches in my leg, and I had not slept.

The paramedic from the storeroom was standing by the window with a tablet.

His jacket said Rafe Dunning. I had not thanked him yet, and I did not like that he was seeing this.

"Visiting hours don't start until ten," the nurse said from the doorway.

"I'm Russell Garrick, the director of Garrick Clinic," my father said. "I'm on the territory council. We'll only be a minute."

She stepped aside.

My father turned to the room with his calm, sorry face.

"I want to apologize for the confusion on Saturday," he said. "Our emergency system sorts calls by severity, and Ivy's was logged as low. That was the system's judgment, not mine."

"It was an unfortunate delay," my mother added.

Cora's viewers started typing hearts into the corner of the screen.

I pressed the button on my wrist monitor.

"It's saved," I said. "Every call is. You taught me that, Dad."

The recording played through the little speaker.

My father's voice came out first, level and kind. "Logged. Keep pressure on it and stay put."

Then my mother. "Four brands are watching this stream."

Then my father again. "He stays with Cora. Stop tying up the channel and do what I told you."

Nobody in the room moved.

"The system's judgment," Rafe said quietly, and nobody answered him.

Cora's face had gone white. She pulled the phone off its stand and turned it toward the wall.

"I'm so sorry, everyone," she said to it. "I think we're going to end the stream."

Her thumb shook as she hit the button, but the counter did not drop to zero until she had done it twice.

My father smiled at the nurse.

"She is confused from the wolfsbane," he said. "The exposure affects memory. You know that."

"The recording has your voice on it," the nurse said.

"Which is why I'm so concerned about my daughter's recall of the rest of it."

I almost admired how smooth it was.

Then he did the thing he always did and turned to me, tender, and spoke as though I were the one making a scene.

"Come home when they release you, Ivy. We'll sort this out as a family."

"No," I said.

It was a small word. I had never said it to him in that voice.

My mother stepped up to the bed and opened her bag.

She took out a rubber tourniquet, a small glass tube and a needle in a sterile wrapper.

"It's first Monday," she said gently. "We'll do it here, so you don't have to come in. Hold out your arm."

I had held out my arm for her every first Monday since I was ten.

She said it was for the clinic's monitoring records. She said every family member kept a baseline.

Cora had never given one.

I looked at the tube in my mother's hand, and then at my own arm, where the drip already ran in.

"Not today," I said.

My mother's smile stayed exactly where it was.

"Of course," she said. "You've had a hard weekend. Rest."

She put the tube away very slowly and did not look at my father.

Rafe took one step away from the window.

"Mr. and Mrs. Garrick," he said, "the patient has asked you to go. The nurse can show you out."

My father held his eyes for a second, then buttoned his jacket.

"We'll talk at home," he said to me.

They left, and Cora went last.

She stopped in the doorway with her phone against her chest and looked back at me.

She looked like she wanted to say something, and then my mother called her name from the hall, and she went.

The room felt larger without them.

My heart was pounding so hard I could see it on the monitor.

"You didn't thank me," Rafe said, "and that's fine. But you should know what I just read."

He turned the tablet around.

It was my blood panel, in tight columns, with the wolfsbane line highlighted in red.

"That level should drop a grown male in twenty minutes," he said. "You were awake for forty-seven."

I stared at the number.

"Ivy," he said, "what are you?"

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