Mandalee didn’t stay long after that. Stepping outside into Dreya’s grounds, she immediately called for her giant albatross to give her a lift back to Shyleen.
Cat couldn’t let her go, though. Not without risking saying something more.
“Mandalee, wait, please,” she pleaded. “Just for a minute. I want you to do one last thing for me.”
“You can’t be serious,” Mandalee scowled.
“No, not like that. Please, hear me out.”
Mandalee folded her arms.
“One minute.”
“Our sympathic link. Please don’t sever it. You know it’s not a tracker. It won’t tell me where you are or what you’re doing, and I promise I won’t use it to contact you. Just keep it there. Just in case. I know you have no reason to believe me, but I swear in the name of friendship if you ever need me, or want to talk, I will be there.”
“For what it’s worth,” Dreya put in, “I have adjusted my shields so they will permanently allow full communication between you, should you wish it.”
Mandalee considered for a moment and finally nodded her assent. “OK, as you say, in the name of friendship.”
Catriona’s relief was plain for all to see, as she grabbed hold of that lifeline of hope.
“Also, in the name of friendship,” Mandalee said, “some advice. I know you won’t listen to me, but I’m saying it anyway.” She glared at Dreya the Dark as she said, “This one might be acting all reasonable at the moment because you’ve got something she’s interested in, but never forget what she is. She’s a Dark sorceress with a lust for power, and she would betray you in a heartbeat if it were to her advantage.”
Far from being offended, Dreya agreed, “You’re right, I would,” she said, then with a smile at Catriona, she qualified the admission, saying, “but it would have to be the advantage of a lifetime.”
Cat stared at Dreya with an open-mouthed expression, as if she’d just heard a declaration of love.
“Ugh!” Mandalee grunted, shaking her head in bewilderment. “Unbelievable!” she spat in disgust.
The gigantic bird landed, and Mandalee mounted up.
Cat leapt forward, trying to explain, but Mandalee was done and with a simple telepathic request, the giant albatross took to the sky, winging away.
Catriona wept for her lost friendship, burying herself in Dreya’s soft black robes as the sorceress helped her inside and closed the door. To Cat, that felt symbolic, as if a door had just closed on a huge, important part of her life. She could only pray that one day, it might just open again.
*****
It took several days for the druid healers to restore Shyleen to full health and vitality, but soon she was ready once again to take on the demons of the world by her human friend’s side. Mandalee, however, had other ideas. Although the leopard was out of immediate danger, the demon hunter’s fear had morphed into a seething anger. These feelings drove her to move south to new hunting grounds, many leagues from the Black Tower and any memory of her old friend, Catriona. She also began to rethink her whole approach to demon hunting.
She'd been doing it professionally for a few years, now, and it wasn't exactly a niche profession. Thousands of demon hunters were out working every day, all across the world and stretching back an unfathomable distance into the past. All that time, effort and risk by an uncountable number of people, and what did they have to show for it? Were there fewer demons now than ever before? No. Were people now any safer from demon attack than their ancestors? No. OK, there might be no way to stop demons from coming up through the planes of reality any more than they could stop Daelen StormTiger and his kind from wreaking their brand of havoc upon Tempestria. But demons didn’t just appear – not all of them, anyway. Wizards were responsible for summoning many of them.
It wasn’t just Black robes, either, despite what some might say, but White robes, too. They usually claimed to be acting in the name of some imagined ‘greater good,’ but that was just an excuse. Red robes tended to do it only for purposes of study, but although that information had proved valuable to demon hunters, despite their best intentions, sometimes the demons got free. Then once again, people were put in unnecessary danger. If a demon killed someone, were they any less dead if it was released accidentally rather than deliberately? No.
It had to stop.
Demon hunting was futile by itself, Mandalee concluded. It was treating the symptom while ignoring the cause. Demon summoning had to stop, and since nobody else seemed to want to make that happen, Mandalee would have to do it herself.
This was the moment, gentle reader, that Mandalee the demon hunter became Mandalee the White Assassin, although the title would not come into common usage for some time. She sought out training to hone her fighting skills, as well as her unique, synergistic relationship with nature, generally, and Shyleen, specifically. Together, the pair became a force to be reckoned with.
Before long, she added a new weapon to her arsenal: a Pureblade. A sword blessed and sanctified by White clerics. It was a gift from the clerics of a temple whom she had saved from a demon attack. She loved her Pureblade. It was a thing of beauty, her most prized possession.
The first time she put it to use wasn’t a contract from a human, but something Mandalee heard about from animals that were fleeing the scene. As a Cleric of Nature, Mandalee could freely converse in most of the primary animal languages and quickly learned about a ‘bad man’ who seemed to think it was fun to let his ‘pet demon’ loose on the village. It had already killed and injured many people and animals, and the wizard showed no signs of growing bored.
The demon hunter’s response was to get very drunk, armed to the teeth and rush to the scene. Mandalee and Shyleen tore into the demon first because the wizard had it on a tight magical leash. If they killed the wizard first, the demon would be free and only become that much more dangerous. Mandalee’s White cleric magic was physically painful to a Dark wizard, so she was able to keep him at bay until the demon was no more. Then she turned on him. He assailed her with spells, but he wasn’t quick enough to track her movements. The wizard didn’t seem to think it was quite so funny when he was the one about to be hurt and killed.
He begged for mercy, but Mandalee was unmoved by pity. She resolved to grant as much mercy as he had shown the innocent people of his village. For a moment, though, she did hesitate to deliver the killing blow, and the wizard lashed out, thinking to escape. The firebolt that flew from his panicked fingers was not well-directed, however, and did nothing more than singe a small patch of Shyleen’s fur. But it was enough. Enough to trigger the memory of the last time, when that magical blast had almost split the leopard in two. The vision flashed through Mandalee’s mind, along with her memory of screaming for help from a ‘friend’ who would never come.
Never again. From now on, she vowed, it would be Shyleen and Mandalee against the world, and the world didn’t stand a chance as long as it tolerated people with power endangering those with none. That was the last time she would hesitate to kill in defence of those innocents. Never again.
The wizard’s last few breaths were agony until that blade skewered his heart. He would summon no more demons. He would harm no-one else ever again, and if she could repeat this action enough times, then maybe one day there would be fewer demons.