Not a word passed between us as we studied each other, patiently waiting to get back in shape. Belie’s third student looked like a young woman with red hair (Titian, my inner crew specified uselessly) and wide blue eyes set in a pale face with a sharp nose and no freckles. Her hair was buzzcut to remind me of Ripley in the third Alien film, reminding others in my head of Sinead O’Connor in her Pope-picture-ripping days. Her clothing was all black and felt off in a way I couldn’t quite specify, summoning no easy comparisons even to my staff of onboard souls. Whatever the fashion was, it wasn’t popular with humans – so this was a vampire who didn’t mingle with the living very often.

The sword also told me that, of course. It was a huge and curved thing with a black hilt that did not gleam, a ‘falx’ according to Nancy Belmont and a few of my history enthusiasts. The concave edge was sharpened, while the convex edge might block or bludgeon. It was a weapon of the Dacians, a people who had fought the Romans in the land now known as Romania.

I was face-to-face with some serious vampire heritage, even if the hunter was younger than most. She had some powerful and accomplished older relatives to impress.

The damage caused by my heel-scuff to her face was vanishing rapidly, the left side of her face uncrunching and uncracking, her teeth growing back.

My cheek wound wasn’t healing right. I saw a speck of St. Elmo’s fire on the tip of her blade. I pressed the flap of cheek-skin back into place, wishing I had a stapler. It stuck like a wet leaf on a windshield but it was still loose, not truly repairing. That was a special sword, taking the deeper blood each time it touched.

Her last tooth popped back into place. She could run and heal fast.

She shifted one millimeter forward, unblinking and silent. I jumped backward over the boxcar behind me, slipped under the car in the next row, and then started elbow-and-kneeing it down the length of the train with my back covered. I needed more time to think. She had become visible just three steps away – was that toying with me, giving me a sporting chance? Or was her stealth-mode limited, giving me just enough time to screw up her ambush strikes with the falx? So many questions, only so many more seconds until the next clash.

I heard something land on the boxcar above me, and rolled right fast just before that blade pierced through wood and metal and then into the gravel where I had been lying an instant before. It was like she could see through the metal walls and floors – and if she had some magic to cloak herself until she was very close, I wasn’t about to rule that out either.

I got up from my roll and slammed the side the boxcar as hard as I could with both hands. The metal bang was deafening, hopefully worse for her inside, and the car’s wheels on my side lifted, the loose hitches front and back coming undone. I had actually knocked the thing over – but my purpose was the loud sound ringing in her ears as it struck the hard semi-frozen ground, covering my escape. A very temporary escape, but thinking-time is a vital thing.

I took to the air, soaring as I had flown over the tree tops these last few months, landing with minimal weight on a cabin roof and then leaping over a metal fence, leaving the trainyard for the industrial complex of buildings to the yard’s north. I zoomed across a large empty expanse of asphalt; then I stopped, turned and looked furiously for anything – a shadow, a bubble, a Predator shimmer, anything. She had to be coming at me from this general direction.

I couldn’t see a damn thing. She wasn’t even disturbing the sand and grit on the asphalt.

This time she didn’t take measured steps for a precise decapitation strike that could go in a dueler’s textbook. She knew her invisibility couldn’t defeat my eyes up close, so she became visible at the same distance travelling much faster this time, hurling herself at me with the falx aimed to cleave my head down the middle. But now she had no control once she was in the air, none of that instant adaptation that had almost cost me the first time, and I dodged the strike completely, not bothering to try for a hit.

I stopped in a crouch, looking hard. I saw her land, turn, look at me where I had slid, and then vanish like a mirage again.

Fuck this. I leaped up to the engineering building’s roof, running around vents and pipes, ignoring doors leading down. I needed a more confining environment that would make the next strike’s direction easy to predict, or something like rain or floating dust that would show her coming … none of these things seemed easy to find right away. The industrial area below might be a good maze, but she could probably look through the walls and she could strike through them. I needed thicker barriers, brick, concrete … something that would have been easier to find back in Toronto.

I threw myself off the top of the building, landing in the extended empty parking lot on the other side. I got an idea as I came down clumsily in my haste without diminishing my weight, breaking pavement in two places, noticing the sound of the impact radiating out from my feet and bounce off the telephone poles, the sides of buildings and parked cars beyond the lot.

I snapped my fingers, as if arriving at a solution, though that was the solution.