This part below was more or less the first thing I wrote on this book, but took place very late in the book’s chronology, kind of an “All is Lost” moment. By the time I reached this part of the manuscript, writing through the story in mostly chronological order, it became clear that I needed to change a lot of things around. Some character beats and dialogue remain the same in the final version, but this first draft was different enough to where I thought it would be worth sharing now that the book is released. Warning: contains SPOILERS for a key plot twist; I advise against reading this post if you plan to read Hunter Healer King 3 and have not done so yet.

I hurried into the room. If I stepped on any of the dead leeches Victor had gunned down, I didn’t notice. The only thing on my mind was whether Maxim was still alive or not. There were no leeches in the next room; it was as if they had all swarmed through the door and into Victor’s line of fire. At the far end of the room, there was a hook on the wall, and Maxim was suspended from it on a rope tied around his wrists over his head. He was ghastly pale and barefoot, dressed only in torn, blood-splattered trousers, and a tattered shirt dyed with old blood stains. His hair had faded strangely; I would not have been surprised to see gray threads among the brown, after what looked like a terrible ordeal, but his hair was now a uniform dull gray-brown color.
I grabbed a chair, one of three that stood around a table near the door, and dragged it over beside Maxim. I climbed on the chair, stood on tip-toe, and put an arm around his body. It was only then that I felt him breathing, and knew for certain that he was still alive. I raised my other hand and tried to cut him down.
It was a slow, messy business and I cut his hands by accident once or twice. There was good news from a certain point of view: the cuts didn’t go through any tendons, and didn’t seem to be bleeding very much, and he wasn’t conscious to feel it. Once I had his arms free, the job got more complicated. He had lost a lot of weight in the short time since he’d been captured, but even so, climbing down from the chair without dropping him was clumsy work.
By this time, Victor and his father Jerome had entered the room but they stayed close to the doorway with Victor’s rotary gun and its wheeled mount between them and me. They watched me drag Maxim towards the table and chairs, with one of his arms draped across my shoulders. Neither Maxim’s uncle nor his cousin made the slightest move to help me.
“Have you gone mad?” Jerome hissed. “Do you want to become a leech yourself?”
“What are you talking about? I always knew you were a bastard, Jerome, but I never figured you for a coward.” Jerome didn’t usually look at people but I suddenly realized that he was staring at Maxim with horror and disgust in his face.
“Remember, dear cousin-in-law elect, that Father can see what other people cannot,” Victor told me.
“Maxim was once the brightest light among us, but now his light is fading, with darkness bleeding out of every wound in his body,” Jerome said grimly. “Once his light is extinguished, he will become a leech, and we will have to destroy him.”
“I always thought you were crazy,” I told Jerome, “But now I know it.”
“Crazy? Not necessarily – just making assumptions based on incomplete data.” Victor said. “Sit Maxim down in that chair, woman, and I’ll make a closer examination.”
“So kind of you,” I muttered.
Victor smiled one of his cold, smug smiles. “My pleasure. I never pass up an opportunity to prove Father wrong.”
I settled Maxim in the nearest chair, taking the time to position him at an angle where he wouldn’t fall forward and plant his face in the table top. Victor stepped back into the outer corridor and came back with a spent brass casing. He propped Maxim’s upper lip up with the blunt end of the casing.
“Hmm. Very nasty,” Victor said.
I’d seen enough of Maxim smiling to know what his teeth looked like: blunt topped, blindingly white, and slightly irregular in a charming way. Now they were as sharp as sharks’ teeth, but narrower, the fangs of a leech. For a moment, it felt like my heart stopped. When I could speak again, I said: “No! It can’t be!”
“It most certainly can,” Victor retorted. “Do you think that I don’t know my own business?” He put one thumb underneath Maxim’s eyebrow, and forced the eyelid on that side up. The Maxim I knew had beautiful eyes, the color of the top of the summer sky. This Maxim had eyes of a color between palest gray and dirty white, with only a faint hint of blue.
Victor let the eyelid drop. Maxim sighed quietly, as if in pain, and his eyes opened under their own power. He looked at me.
“You came,” he said, and his weak smile was both horrible because of the fangs, and beautiful because I could see his heart behind the fangs.
“We came too late,” Jerome said grimly.
“Probably, Uncle, but it’s the thought that counts.”
“Are you saying there’s nothing to be done?” I demanded. “What about quicksteel?”
“Well, on the one hand, there’s never been a case where it worked on someone who was in the middle of becoming a leech,” Victor mused. “On the other hand, I’ve never had the chance to try it, and I daresay none of the ones tried to heal such a case had my knowledge of the human body.”
“Your arrogance remains unmatched, my son,” Jerome grumbled.
“I wonder where I learned it, Father? In any case, it would be instructive to try. We’ll hide his face and take him to the cave where the Armor is kept. The Armor is the nearest source of quicksteel.”
“Thank you,” Maxim said. He stretched out his hand to his cousin, but Victor did not take it.
“You don’t have to be in prison,” I protested.
He looked sad at that, and when he spoke again, he was trying to hide those awful teeth. “I do indeed need to be in prison, dear heart. I don’t know how much longer I will be…myself.”