We couldn't get everyone together until nightfall since Samuel and Elena couldn't come over during the day. Ethan, Riley, and Clara helped me get the team's house ready for the reinforcements to move in, ridding the rooms of any vampire hunting paraphernalia, and filling it with as many blankets as we could get our hands on. There were five single beds and one double bed in the house, which still wasn't enough to house Anna, Alice, and their twenty odd vampires. We couldn't conjure up more beds, but blankets were cheaper and easier to source. It wasn't perfect, but it was all we could do for now.

When that was done, night finally fell and Samuel and Elena joined us, I gathered everyone in the kitchen – well, half in the kitchen and half in the living room. Even that was a squeeze, and I felt an unexpected prick of claustrophobia in the packed-tight space.

Expectant faces stared back at me, the people who'd come to fight this war with me. These were the people that I had to lead now.

I faced them, linking my hands behind my back and hoping that I looked like someone capable of leading, and not like a teenage girl who was starting to wonder if she was in way over her head.

"You all know why you're here," I said.

There was a rumble of agreement. Anna and Alice had been honest with their recruits; they knew exactly what the situation was.

"We are not going to wait for Rachel to strike against us. We're going to flush her out before she can make her next move," I said.

"How are we supposed to do that?" said a male vampire, standing close to the front of the crowd. "I thought you'd already tried that."

"Samuel and Elena" – I indicated them with my hand in case anyone had forgotten who they were – "did everything they could to find where Rachel might be hiding. They put out feelers through all their friends and acquaintances in town, but no one ever seemed to know anything. So it's time to take this a step further. Between us all, we number twenty-nine. We can scout this town a lot better than two can."

I pictured Dalwick as an underground rabbit warren, a labyrinth of places where Rachel could run and hide. Then I pictured me and my forces as ferrets, plunging into that warren and cutting off all her escape routes until she was forced into the light. We'd never had enough people to attempt something like that before, but now we did. Now we could run this bitch into the ground.

"But what if no one will talk to us?" the vampire asked.

"They will once we explain exactly what Rachel is planning on doing. Before you all arrived, we didn't know the extent of Rachel's schemes. Local vampires didn't get involved because they thought this was our problem. But it's not our problem anymore – it's everyone's. The vampires of Dalwick cannot hide from it and they cannot pretend it's not happening. We have to recruit them. We have to bring them over to our side, join together with them so we can all flush Rachel out. She can hide from us, but she can't hide from all the vampires of this town. We will find her."

Before now it had never occurred to me to try recruiting other vampires to my cause like this, but if Rachel could do it, so could I. She was trying to turn my own cause against me, so I was just taking a leaf out of her twisted book.

"But what if she's not in Dalwick?" said another vampire.

Clara spoke up. "She must be. The way she can come and go so fast – she couldn't do that if she was living out of town. Besides, someone like her never wants to be too far from the chaos they're causing. She likes to watch it all unfold; it's part of the fun for her."

"We're not just restricted to Dalwick. We can recruit outside the town," I said. "There's nothing to stop us from approaching vampires in neighbouring communities and asking them to join us – we need all the support we can get."

"They won't all want to help, not even when they know what's at stake," said the vampire who'd originally spoken. "There are vampires out there who agree with Rachel – that humans are just cattle for vampires. What do we do about them?

"If we have to, then we propose a truce, a working partnership. There may be vampires out there who see people as cattle, but hopefully most of them are smart enough to know that cattle can fight back. A war like the one Rachel's planning isn't going to benefit anyone. They still might not listen to us, but it's worth trying."

A murmur of agreement rippled through the crowd, and several heads nodded.

"Two days," I announced. "I need everyone to go out and spread the word. Let other vampires know what Rachel is planning and how it is going to affect them. Let them know how we are going to stop her. Any vampires who want to protect their way of life should meet in two days at –" I paused, racking my brains for a suitable meeting place. A light-bulb went on in my head. "At Greylark Asylum."

I didn't expect other vampires to simply take the word of strangers and immediately agree to join me. I needed them to understand who I was and what I wanted, and how Rachel's plan would affect everyone.

I needed to meet with them and properly rally them to my side. Only then would I have the recruits I needed to become the ferret and run Rachel into the ground.

It didn't take long for the vampires to organise themselves into small groups. Samuel, Elena, and Luke went with them, but Anna suggested that the humans should stay behind as this would all sound better coming from fellow vampires. I wasn't convinced – after all, the vampires we were trying to reach would have to fight alongside humans, including former hunters – but I had to trust that they could handle this. Volunteers arriving at Greylark and listening to what I had to say was all that mattered.

That didn't mean I was happy about being left behind. I especially wasn't happy about Luke going out without me, even though I'd had to go out without him plenty of times.

After the last vampire had gone, I was left in the kitchen, pacing up and down in an attempt to relieve my frustration. Clara sat at the table, happily sharpening her knives, while Ethan and Riley took charge of sticking frozen pizzas in the oven. I hadn't even thought about eating, but as soon as the smell of tomato sauce and melting cheese filled the air, my stomach loudly growled.

Even so, I could only manage a couple of bites. I was too bundled up with nerves.

"They'll be okay," Clara said, not looking up from her knives.

The scraaaape of metal against whetstone should have grated on my nerves, but the familiarity of it was oddly soothing.

"That's not the point. I should be out there with them."

"You'll get your chance at Greylark." Clara suddenly stopped what she was doing, and pinned me with a serious look. "Kid, you know I support everything you're doing, but you need to be aware of the reality of the situation."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

Riley and Ethan paused halfway through washing and drying up, watching us both.

"Maybe with enough help we can run Rachel into the ground, but what about the army she's started to raise? We may not be able to hunt them down individually, and we can't count on them losing their nerve like Madeleine's rogues did. This is bigger than that. Even if your plan works and we get Rachel, that doesn't necessarily mean this thing will be over. I just want you to bear that in mind."

My mind raced. In two days time, every vampire we'd been able to recruit would be arriving at Greylark and I'd be expected to give them all a rallying speech that would cement their faith in me and my cause. I'd have to persuade them to join us in hunting down a psychotic vampire who was willing to kill anyone that got in her way. If that wasn't hard enough, everything that Clara said was true – killing Rachel didn't necessarily stop the war she was trying to ignite.

My mouth felt suddenly dry, and the pizza in my stomach turned to cement. Talk about pressure.

"I...I need to get some air," I mumbled, and headed for the door.

I slipped outside and shut the front door behind me, leaning against it and closing my eyes. Confusion was a drum-beat echoing through my head. I thought I'd done a pretty good job with rallying Alice and Anna's reinforcements – I must have done since they were all out there doing what I'd asked – but it still stung that Anna thought they had better chance of convincing other vampires if I wasn't with them.

But I had to remember that this wasn't just my fight. Rachel had focused on me to start with, and she was doing this because of me, but it wasn't all about me, not anymore. I couldn't lose sight of that. Rachel's plan threatened humans and vampires equally – it was their fight as much as it was mine. But I would still be the one who faced the vampires in Greylark, who ensured we had their allegiance, temporary though it might be.

I would still be the one who finally killed her.

Cold awareness prickled at my skin, tiny needles digging in. Primal instinct screamed through my head: look up, look up.

I looked up.

Darkness pooled in the places between the streetlamps that lined the street, thick clusters of shadows that abruptly stopped at the edges of yellow light beaming down from the lamps. There wasn't enough light to illuminate the whole street, so the figure standing on the other side of the road seemed half-wrapped in shadows. But even the darkness couldn't cloak the golden colour of her hair, or the twisted flash of hate in her eyes.

Rachel didn't move, she just stood on the pavement opposite my house, watching. There was no way she couldn't see me, and tension stretched through me, building inside my muscles.

Why was she just standing there?

Not that I wanted her to do anything, but somehow her standing there doing nothing was more intimidating than her attacking. I couldn't guess what was going through her head. I didn't know if she'd seen the reinforcements leaving the house, or if she'd begun to guess what was going on.

It was almost like she was waiting for me to come to her.

Okay, I thought. I'll bite.

It was crazy to approach her in the middle of the night without any backup, but all I'd have to do was yell for help and Ethan and Clara would come rushing out. And I had the strangest feeling that, for once, Rachel wasn't here to fight. She was here to talk.

Crazy though it was, I wanted to see what she had to say.