Rachel's expression didn't change as I approached her. Hatred glittered in her eyes and showed in the twist of her lip, but she wasn't wearing her usual smug smile.

My eyes dropped to her nails, sharpened into claws, and a rush of hate almost stopped me in my path. She'd killed Ava. Every savage, violent part of me screamed to kill her, beating my brain with furious fists and demanding that I go to the house, get a knife, come back out here and cut Rachel's throat.

Except that she'd probably kill me before I got that close to her.

She watched me as I drew near, but her posture never changed; arms hanging loosely by her sides, fists unfurled. She looked relaxed, but I wasn't fooled. She could leap into action at any minute.

So could I.

I stopped a metre or so away from her, close enough to hear, but not so close that that she could lash out and catch me by surprise. My hands itched with the urge to take a swing, but I kept them firmly at my sides. There was no point starting a fight here, not when Rachel was stronger than me.

Silence stretched between us for a few solid minutes before Rachel finally spoke. When she did, it wasn't what I expected.

"Do you love him?" she asked.

"Excuse me?" I'd been prepared for many things, but the randomness of the question caught me completely by surprise.

"Luke. Do you really love him?" Her voice was curiously even, inflectionless, offering me no clue as to what might be going through her mind.

I threw caution to the wind. What Rachel could do with this information I didn't know, but I wasn't going to deny my love for Luke. It was love that had brought us to this point, and it was love that would see us through the storm.

"Yes. I really, truly do."

Disgust winged across her face, curling her lip even more. She looked me up and down as if I was a revolting specimen that she could hardly believe was occupying the same planet as her. Which pretty much summarised how she saw me.

"I came to Dalwick to destroy you, little vampire hunter, but I realise now that Luke is an even greater abomination."

I fought to keep my expression neutral, even as rage shifted and swelled inside me.

"I believed there was hope for him, but his continued defence of you –" Rachel shook her head. "He is a traitor to his own kind. He is a traitor to the world I'm going to create."

I tried to pretend that this was just some other vampire I was talking to, and not the woman who had killed my mother and countless others, and threatened everything and everyone I held dear. There was the slimmest, most fragile chance that I could try reasoning with Rachel, but the only way I could do that was by not thinking about everything that she had done.

"Why does it have to be this way?" I asked. "I believe that one day humans will be ready to know about vampires, but when that day comes it won't be with a spray of blood and violence. Both humans and vampires can learn to live and work together."

Rachel spat at my feet. "Humans are vermin."

It was worth a shot.

Coldness claimed my face, hardening my eyes, and edging my words with frost. "Maybe so, but we're vermin who vastly outnumber vampire-kind. If you want to start a war, you'd better make sure it's one you can win."

Really, it was the vampires I was most worried about in this scenario. If war did break out, a lot of humans would die, but my kind would recover. I wasn't so sure that vampire-kind would. If their introduction to the human world was them trying to wipe us out, humans would never trust vampires. Any alliance, any future world where humans and vampires lived in harmony, would be blasted into oblivion. Vampires as a race would be hunted to the ends of the earth, slaughtered for crimes that they might not even have committed. It would be the hunting I was so familiar with, only on a global scale.

Rachel obviously didn't think so; she just sneered at me.

"Rachel," I said, and my voice was ice. "If you go near Luke, I will kill you. I will slice you into tiny pieces and smash your skull."

A monstrous grin stretched across her face, filling her eyes with hellish light and showing off the sharp points of her fangs. None of my threats fazed her in the least. "I'm going to enjoy killing Luke. I won't do it right away, of course. I've still got your dear Daddy hidden away, and I'll have fun forcing Luke to feed from him."

My control almost shattered, but I seized it with both hands and held on. I absolutely could not afford to attack Rachel. She wouldn't do me the favour of killing me yet, but she could still hurt me. I needed to keep my strength for when it was finally time to face her. And that time wasn't now, not with the army she was raising still out there somewhere. Madeleine's rogues had scattered when she was killed, cowards without someone to lead them, but Clara was right – we couldn't bank on that happening again. An army was more organised and less gutless than a handful of rogue vampires. And we had no idea how many vampires Rachel now commanded.

"You're not going to win, Rachel," I told her. "I am going to kill you."

The blonde vampire held out her arms. Artificial light from the streetlamps winked at the points of her sharpened nails. "Take your best shot," she challenged.

Her usual smug grin was creeping around the edges of her lips.

"Not tonight," I said. "I am going to kill you, but not tonight."

I turned and walked away, and the mad vampire didn't follow me. I should have felt triumphant, but there was just a sick, hollow feeling inside me. Rachel was letting me walk away because it tied in with her plan to destroy me. It wasn't enough to simply kill me, not when I still had friends and family to lose, not when I could still suffer.

And Rachel had her sights set on the person I loved more than anyone else in the world.

If I let that in, it would shatter me, so I had no choice but to harden my heart against it. Rachel wasn't getting anywhere near Luke. She wasn't getting near anyone. She was not hurting anyone else ever again.

Why I did what I did next, I'll never quite know. I'd been determined to walk away from her without saying another word, but something suddenly surged up inside me, and it took me over until I almost wasn't aware of what I was doing. Maybe it was the subconscious echo of Clara's words just minutes ago; her grim reminder that the plan I'd put together might not be enough – not to truly end this, once and for all.

I found myself whipping around and stalking back over to Rachel. "You want a challenge?" I snarled, thrusting my face into hers. "How about a little pre-war warm-up, how does that sound?"

Something in my mind was screaming at me, trying to get me to shut my mouth, but it was as if something stronger than logic had taken me over, something fierce and reckless and wild.

Rachel arched a pale eyebrow, intrigue plain in her eyes. "What did you have in mind?"

I'd thought once that her weakness was arrogance, but maybe that was too simple. Her weakness lay in the twisted nature of her own mind, her unyielding belief in what she was doing. I had to find a way to work that to my advantage.

"A fight."

That smug smile curled her lips again. "I've already offered you that chance tonight and you threw it back in my face."

"Not a fight between you and me, a fight between our people. Your side versus my side," I said.

Rachel sneered, but that intrigue still danced in her eyes.

This wasn't a decision that I should make by myself, especially not considering the lives I could be putting at risk, but the wild thing inside me continued to override logic. In Rachel's eyes I was offering a game, a temptation she couldn't resist.

"What's the problem? Think you can't take us?" I said.

Her smile didn't falter, but it hardened at the edges. "What do either of us have to gain from this?"

"You know that I'm going to do whatever I can to stop you from starting a war."

She smirked. "You're going to try."

"Whatever. I'm offering you a deal, a fair fight between my people and yours. If we win then you accept that there will be no war. You can continue your campaign against me if you like, but you will leave the rest of Dalwick alone. You will stop trying to drag vampires out of hiding."

Still the vampire smiled, but her eyes were like chips of ice. "And what do I get if I win?"

"An open road to the future world that you want to build."

Her eyebrows furrowed; obviously that wasn't the answer she was expecting. "I don't have time for riddles, little vampire hunter."

"If you win, then me and my people will be dead and there'll be no one left to oppose you."

Rachel snorted. "You make it sound like you're actually a threat to me."

I matched her sneering smile with one of my own. "I am. I've stopped you before and I'll do it again." I wanted to add a jab about me shoving her face into a fire three weeks ago, but I managed to refrain. We wouldn't get anywhere if I antagonised her.

"Why should I agree to this?" Rachel said.

Maybe I could still use her arrogance against her. "Because you believe you can win. You're so firmly convinced of your own superiority that your brain can't entertain the possibility that you might lose. So really this isn't even a gamble for you. If you're convinced that vampires are so much better than humans then prove it by fighting us, one-on-one."

I didn't add that I now had another twenty-two vampires to command, as well as the possibility of more if Anna and Alice managed to dredge up some recruits between now and the appointed meeting at Greylark in two days.

"What better way to demonstrate your superiority than by taking down the hunters who have already allied themselves with vampires?" I pushed.

That should hit a nerve. Rachel hated humans, but hunters most of all.

Rachel's jaw tightened, her lips twitching like she was tasting my proposal. "And I'm supposed to believe this is a legitimate offer? Do you think I'm stupid? This is a trick, and a poor one at that."

"No trick," I said, and meant it. "You said once that you kept your word; well, so do I. All I'm offering is the chance for our two sides to meet in battle. If I win then you call off your war. If you win, we'll all be dead anyway so it's not like we can stop you when you go ahead with it."

The vampire's eyes narrowed with what I thought was genuine curiosity. My muscles still throbbed with the urge to rip her face off, but beneath it was the hum of excitement. This was never what I'd planned to do, but maybe it was the answer that had been staring me in the face all along – one huge strike to end everything.

"Why now?" Rachel asked.

I shrugged. "I'm tired of playing your games. This has gone on long enough and we both know it. I know that you're planning on building an army so you can wage war on humankind, and this might be my only chance to stop you. I know it's a small chance, but I'm willing to take that risk. You know that I'm the one thing standing in your way, and you also know that I'm tougher than I look."

Rachel silently appraised me.

I knew what a dangerous game I was playing. I had to downplay my own chances in a battle against her, but not so much that she'd be suspicious of me. She had to think this was something she could win or she'd never take the bait.

"Of course when I win, you know that I'll make you and your friends suffer more than you could possibly imagine," the vampire said.

"If you win," I countered.

She responded with a smile that showed off her fangs. "Your insolence is almost amusing."

"It's one of my perks."

"Very well, little vampire hunter, you shall have your fight. After all, there's precious little fun killing a rat in a box. It's much more fun to watch it fight and squirm first."

If she thought her words would intimidate me, she was sadly mistaken. After having experienced firsthand what she was capable of, there would always be a part of me that feared her, but I would not let her intimidate me.

"Of course, I have my own conditions. I get to choose when this happens," Rachel said.

"Then I get to choose where," I quickly said. Much as I hated to give Rachel any ground, if I refused to even consider her conditions she'd never agree to this.

Her lips twitched, her eyes still narrowed like she expected trickery, but she nodded without further ado.

"Very well, little hunter. I'll be in touch."

She melted into the shadows, but for the first time she didn't seem like a ghost. She was just a vampire, flesh and blood. Yes, she was very good at escaping situations, and she was faster and stronger than any vampire I'd faced, but she was still just a vampire.

She could be beaten.

She could be killed.

I started walking back to the house, my heart racing. Neither of us were stupid – we both knew that the other was going to try and work this deal to our advantage. Rachel must have guessed that I was gathering reinforcements otherwise I doubted she'd have agreed to this. I might be the proverbial thorn in her side, but I wasn't arrogant enough to think that she considered me a genuine threat. But if I was gathering more allies – that turned me from single thorn into a whole bush of sharp points. Rachel would want to stamp us out before we got that far. This was where I had to count on her arrogance again. In her narrow-minded conviction that vampires were superior to humans, and that most vampires would share that conviction, it hadn't occurred to her that my reinforcements were vampires themselves.

She didn't believe that I'd given up hunting, despite what I'd told her, so she probably assumed that I was rallying other hunters to fight back against her. She had chosen to dictate when this battle would commence because it gave her time to gather more of her own vampires. Of course, it gave me time to do the same thing, which Rachel had to know – although she would think I was gathering human forces, rather than vampires – but that wasn't enough to dent her beliefs.

She believed that, no matter what, her side would be stronger than mine, because her side consisted of vampires whereas mine consisted of humans.

That conviction would be her downfall.