Here's your monthly bonus chapter dedicated to twilight. Thank you for supporting me for so long.

Amber stared out over the woods. She wasn't really thinking about the things in front of her even when she could have watched two birds fighting over a perfect place to build a nest.

"Are you okay?" a voice asked, for the third or fourth time. This time, something managed to penetrate Amber's bubble of deep thought, and she turned to see her best friend standing there. Lauren was older, even if the difference was only a few months, and Amber had always felt better from talking to her. It had been Lauren who finally made her feel better when she was worrying about all the people in monster attacks in other countries. Lauren's words had made her think enough to try cheering her Mom up when she needed it.

"Sorry, I was just thinking."

"About the superhero thing?"

Amber nodded slowly. She'd told Lauren the truth, when all the others said she shouldn't. It had helped a bit, but she didn't know how much she could really say.

"Is something wrong? You're acting more and more grown-up lately, and it's a bit scary. I don't want you to forget how to have fun, you know."

Amber managed a smile this time. A lot of their friends had been a bit mean, telling her that she was a loser because she spent all her time thinking about crazy things that couldn't be real. Amber had never really cared, so long as Lauren was there to listen to her stories. Lauren always seemed like she knew everything, like she was a little bit more mature and she had all the right answers. But lately, Amber could see herself acting more adult than her friend. Like every time she remembered some of Orsertro's memories, she was remembering how to be grown-up too, and forgetting how to be a girl.

"I'm sorry. Seems funny when you say that. I was always the one who needed to grow up, and now I can't help it. It's just tough, Mom won't let me see –"

The explanation was cut off by a crash, and a chorus of screams that were almost familiar now. Maybe it could have been a gas explosion, or people yelling for a thief to stop, but Amber knew it wasn't. She knew the sound of someone terrified out of their wits, too frightened even to run.

"Was that..." Lauren gasped, her head turned back towards the school buildings. It was the middle of their lunch period, and there should be nobody inside. But the teachers would still be somewhere, and someone was screaming.

Amber growled now, and put her feet back on the ground. The swing she'd been sitting on spun in place for a moment as she marched towards the building. She knew that the odds of monsters attacking the same place more than once were very low, if they'd been picking places at random. She knew this wasn't random, though. This was a monster coming for her.

* * *

In the darkness of the crystal throne room, Violet appeared. She was always the first here. A heartbeat later, she called in Jack and Alex from whatever intangible recess they occupied. Violet sometimes wondered if they didn't even exist until she called them here; if by thinking of them she was calling them out of her imagination. But there was no time to think like that today, when she needed them to be here because one of the living members was calling.

Amber appeared for an instant, and turned to look at Violet in the seat beside her. "Were you expecting a monster?"

"I can feel it," Alex shook her head, "It's like a wave of energies, exploding as I try to focus on it. A second ago there wasn't even any suggestion of a crack, let alone a trace of one slipping through. Is it already manifest?"

"Yes. Can Mel and Arnie get here? Let them know as soon as you can."

"I'm calling them now," Violet confirmed. She was a little nervous, but not nearly as much as she'd been the first time one of these meetings turned into a council of war. "Do you need Jack to fight it?"

"We need to make a battle plan first," Jack shook his head, "We can't just dash in. Wait until we can see the shape of the thing, and then–"

"Violet," Amber interrupted him, "I need you as soon as one of the others knows there's a monster. Right?" and then she vanished, back to the waking world.

Violet didn't say anything. She'd had to protect Amber a little when she first came here, a kid too young to really understand what they were doing, but there was something now that didn't quite fit. When she had to, Amber acted like her ancestral spirit had just stepped into her body and taken over. It was exactly what they needed when it came to fighting monsters and saving innocents, and when you looked at it like that it was really something to be glad of. But both times it had happened so far, it had seemed so strange to the others. The little girl who was such a dreamer, with a head so full of imagination she couldn't poke the real world with a ten foot pole, suddenly becoming a perfect soldier. It was like their friend had disappeared.

* * *

The school's fire alarm was going off by now. Or a new siren, though the company that installed it hadn't given it an official name yet. None of the teachers had mentioned a 'monster alarm' as such, because they didn't want to scare the kids or make the parents think they were crazy. But everyone knew there was supposed to be something new to keep them safe in case a monster attacked, and the new alarm was supposed to be only part of it.

Amber ran towards the buildings. She still couldn't see what had triggered the scream, but she was sure it was a monster of some kind. Nothing else inspired the same kind of terror. Maybe it could be a demon; she still wasn't quite sure if they were the same things Orsertro and his friends had tried so hard to fight. But she knew that when one appeared, if she tried to remember the tactics he'd used against the demons, she knew everything she needed to know. She was pretty sure, as well, that she didn't need Jack's help to fight a monster, but that was based more on her feelings than anything she actually knew.

In the olden days, the demons had been monsters. The people in the old world had tried to create super-soldiers to fight their wars for them, pushing the best fighters into the world that only the dead were supposed to inhabit so they could pick up the abilities of long-dormant ancestral spirits. It had been a crazy plan, but before that civilisation fell they'd all been crazy. This wasn't something Amber had actually been able to remember, but Irvetrani, Roudi, and Belmadir had all been working on putting the facts together after their first incarnation on Earth. There was every chance that those ancient soldiers, left dormant outside the physical realm, had followed the Rainbow Knights to Earth, and started to force their way back into the world as soon as the Princess's attention wavered.

That was what made these monsters different. Because they weren't just rampaging, destroying everything in their path. The way they appeared, especially when they'd popped up in different places around the world as a distraction, meant there had to be some kind of intelligence behind the ravening beasts now. They didn't just want to kill, they were actually tracking down the Rainbow and using crude tactics. If they were demons, then the Enemy had some way of controlling them. And Amber really wanted to meet the Enemy again.

As she came closer to the building, she saw there were teachers there, making sure that everyone was running in the right direction. There didn't need to be, a roar from inside the building was enough to scare anyone. Amber was the only one running the other way, and the teachers were shaking in their boots, too frightened to actually stop anyone. All they could do was hold the doors open while anybody who was still inside got out, and tell the kids who came close to get to their lines in the yard, like it was just a fire drill.

Amber looked at them quickly, and decided she didn't want to get anyone into trouble, or worried about her. She reached out for the railing that separated the gravel path from one of the flowerbeds. It was strong metal, and she could feel the strong and weak points within the steel as soon as she touched it. She wasn't as good as Jack was at finding the weak spots, but she didn't need to destroy anything now. She could just use the power of creation, and make a metal pole into a different kind of metal pole. Not attached to the vertical bars; with a couple of ribbed parts that she could get a better grip on, and springier. She turned away from the teachers, hoping they wouldn't try to follow her.

Amber wasn't a very fast runner over any kind of distance. She hardly ever won a prize on sports day, except for the usual participation ribbon. But she knew that wouldn't make much difference anyway. When it came to fighting demons, there was no difference between the kid who couldn't even finish a race and an Olympic champion. Human power didn't come close to these monsters, and the weapons the army had wouldn't make any difference either. The only thing that could make a difference was an ancestral power, the kind of things that the Rainbow Knights didn't want to call magic. Skill could help, that was for sure, and when there was a demon around, all of Orsertro's experience came flooding back to help Amber move right. And the power she'd put into her pole was all there, a spring that could help her more than any normal thing could.

She easily vaulted onto the school roof, just in time to see the tiles bulge upwards and shatter, some kind of giant pig creature shrugging off concrete and metal like a kid buried in the sand. Amber knew she wasn't doing the right thing. To fight something like this she needed Jack's immortal spirit riding shotgun in the back of her mind. Or she needed time to prepare a proper weapon, or a trap, and she needed the other living Knights around her so that she wouldn't have the thing's full attention. But she wasn't planning on fighting today, as much as she knew the others would be angry about this.

She felt Violet's presence a couple of seconds later. It was still strange, a tingling feeling as the dead girl's reflexes overlaid onto her own.