~Chapter 13: Welcome!~

Avery had stopped crying a while ago and now they were back at the restaurant that the police had left to go deal with a murder of one Mr. Alexander Cooper. Haydn was busy setting up a magic circle around the table where Evelyn had been taken, he placed a few magic orbs that looked like marbles on the edge of the circle at each tip of the eight-pointed star – an octagram). In the middle of the circle, he laid out Evelyn’s favourite clothes.

After he put a few odd items on the circle, he was ready to set up the spell. Avery murmured softly, “Hey Haydn, thank you for just now.” He looked at her and nodded with a slight smile, “You’re welcome, Avery.”

He walked around the outside of the circle, chanting the magical spell and concentrated his magick on the eight orbs on the outside of the circle. The magick could be seen transferring from the orbs into the lines of the octagram to the centre of the circle. Watching from the sidelines, Avery muttered a quick apology to Eve as the clothes in the middle started glowing and soon burned brightly in a purple fire. Once the clothes were fully burned and the spell was finished, Haydn stood still for a few silent minutes.

When he finally opened his eyes, he said, “I know where she is but we need to be quick.” With a snap of his fingers, all the magical items were gone and he hastily smudged the lines of the magic circle with the sole of his shoes before he took off into the night, the zombie following a step behind.

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When Evelyn regained her consciousness, she was greeted with an insistent pounding of her head like the world’s worst hangover. She groaned, hoping that she could return to her painless sleep. However, the longer that she was conscious, the more she became aware of the stinging sensation on her wrists. Everything was blurry when she opened her eyes, so she tried to move her hands to rub the drowsiness out of her eyes, only to find that she couldn’t. Her hands were bound at an awkward angle behind her and she was laying on the cold hard floor.

She blinked hard a few times to try to clear her vision and as her vision cleared, so did her hearing. She could now hear the monotonous muttering of gibberish words around her and see figures dressed in black-hooded robes who stood evenly-spaced in a circle around her. She was only able to see the pulsating essence around one of the figures and instantly recognized him as her kidnapper.

She shuffled in place and pushed off from the floor to try to sit up. Once she had achieved that, she turned her body in a tight circle to assess her situation – there were a dozen of the black-hooded figures around her, all their faces shrouded in shadows. They were in a spacious dark room, cluttered sparsely with crates and the ceiling was high with flickering light bulbs hanging off of them. The musty scent of sea salt and old things used to be stored in the area hinted that they were located at a harbour warehouse.

She was placed in the middle of a chalk-drawn magic circle, in the midst of a magical ritual or spell. Her hands were bound painfully tight with rough ropes, yet her legs were surprisingly free of any bindings – her captors had probably not bet on her waking up in the middle of the ritualistic spell. However, she wasn’t certain whether her chance of escaping would be high, considering that she was cornered by twelve supernatural beings and she was also donning a pair of high heels. Whatever ritual or spell that was currently being performed onto her; Evelyn seriously hoped that she would not have to partake in – maybe her guardians would show up in time again to rescue her… One could always hope, anyway.

As the blonde tried to stand up in place, the essence of the dark-hooded figure flared ominously, signalling that they were nearing the end of their spell. Just then, a loud booming noise resonated throughout the warehouse. Evelyn had previously thought that it was the result of the spell until she heard the heavy thudding of footfalls getting louder. Her dwindling hope started burning brighter in her heart at the thought of her best friend and the reluctant Faerie arriving to save her.

Then came another vicious flaring of the dark essence around the hooded figure, and the sudden appearance of dark magick swirling around in the air which knocked the human back down onto her butt, securely binding her in place. She struggled frantically against her magic binding futilely and a moment of shame struck her. She disliked this feeling of helplessness, of suddenly being pushed into the role of a damsel-in-distress when she had mostly been self-sufficient since her adulthood. She wanted to be the heroine of her own story – not the weak human against all the supernatural forces, she wanted power…

As if that thought alone unlocked a Pandora’s box, the black-pink essence surged forth and flared magnificently. A brilliant sizzling noise sounded as the essence burned both the magical and physical bindings away easily. The blonde almost wanted to cheer when she could finally manage to stand up. But it was already too late, the spell had been completed – the dark essence hooded-figure grinned evilly and his essence expanded exponentially for a brief moment. Then, a constricting power pressed down on Evelyn, sucking out all the air from her lungs and suffocating her, she gasped for air that was not there.

When Evelyn truly felt like she was dying of suffocation, she finally caught a glimpse of Avery and Haydn just arriving at the scene. She could distantly hear Avery shouting out her name as if she was underwater before she lost her consciousness for a short moment. She struggled to regain her consciousness but it was a losing battle, although a male voice that sounded vaguely like the Faerie’s managed to slip through into her mind, telling her, “Never look into a demon’s eyes.” It felt like an out-of-the-body experience as she felt herself being sucked into a vacuum before she finally lost the battle for her consciousness.

Haydn could only watch with a pale-faced complexion as Evelyn was sucked out of thin air, he knew where she had just been teleported to and he could already see it in his own head where he would eventually end up too – an image of himself on the guillotine.

Avery could only perform simple spells and she was no expert on powerful magical spells. Thus, as far as she was concerned, Evelyn had just died right in front of her eyes and she could not do anything about it. The poison immediately took over her body, transforming her into her most primal self with glowing blue eyes and veiny blue skin. Her hair also lost its usual vibrant red, turning into a midnight blue colour. Her teeth turned into sharp canines and her nails lengthened and strengthened into the sharp dark blue talons. Then, she dropped her sword and leapt at the first magician in her sight with her hands and teeth as her weapons of choice.

Since the wizards had only just finished their spell, most of their magick had been depleted and quite a few of them reacted slower than usual. Avery had caught her first victim off guard and tore into his neck from behind with her sharpened teeth and ripped it off. She immediately moved on to her next target and slashed open another man’s guts, spilling his innards all over the place. His short scream of pain alerted the unaware magicians and they quickly reorganized themselves for battle.

For a few moments, Haydn was just watching on the sidelines as Avery fought in mad rage against the now ten mages. He knew that when a zombie turned into their most primal selves, there was no getting them back until they had finished what they had started. And for Avery, that was to kill all that stood before her who had taken her best friend away. She barely cared and probably could not even feel the pain from the bashing she had just received not too long ago. He could tell the redhead that Evelyn was not dead yet but in her current state, she would not even be able to hear him. Plus, the human was almost as good as dead to Haydn now, the chances of her surviving for long was very slim. He thought with the amusement of a man on death row that they could possibly still be able to salvage her body, if lucky. He had already lost his reason to fight and he contemplated walking away from this combat and waiting out his final days.

And he did, he walked away… but he stopped when he heard a deep pained growl from Avery’s anger-muddled brain that could no longer form words. In a zombie’s blind mode, they only knew what they wanted to do without caring about the consequences, they could not feel emotions except for the one emotion that triggered them, it was usually either anger or anguish, or both. They became stronger, faster and better at ignoring pain but they were also generally dumber when transformed – they could not strategize or plan their next moves, all they would want was to destroy.

Somehow, this dumb, passionate and attractive woman who was extremely loyal to her friend made Haydn falter. He couldn’t believe that in this short time, he had allowed himself to trust this woman and now, he felt like he had a responsibility in watching her back. He groaned and grumbled loudly to himself, “Ah, screw it! I’m a dead man anyway, might as well…”

He turned back to go assist the zombie who had managed to slot a place for herself in his cold dead Faerie heart. When he finally jumped back into battle with his quarterstaff, there were only eight mages left and Avery was severely injured, her right lower arm was missing and most of her left leg was burning in bright flames. A blade was plunged into her heart but she just kept moving like the soldier that her kind was born to be. A mage was just about to bludgeon her brains out with a spell but Haydn jumped in to intercept and absorb the spell with his staff.

He joined in the fray with a flurry of jabs to the mages, his staff was aflame with a medium level fire enhancement spell. In the back of his mind, he remembered that he needed to extinguish the fire eating away at the stupid zombie’s leg before it ate her alive. Or as alive as a zombie born in hell could be anyway.

With the Faerie’s expertise in magick and the zombie’s brute force, they were able to quickly dispatch the worn-out wizards. It was hardly much of a noteworthy battle – they had gone through much harder ones than this. Although Avery’s activated zombie mode did make things a little more difficult, the Fae-man literally had to dodge some of her wilder attacks. 

Once the duo had taken down their enemies, Avery planted her ass heavily onto the floor, fully depleted of adrenalin and poison-powered energy. The Faerie followed suit and sat down behind her, leaning his back lightly against hers. They were literally bathed and sitting in a pool of their enemies’ blood, though, neither appeared to care.  

Even while she was bleeding badly, the zombie was also regenerating slowly and the blue pigmentation was quickly draining out, returning her appearance into her more human-like self. Although her eyes had stopped glowing too, the emptiness in them remained.

They remained silent for a long while before Haydn sighed loudly and asked, “Why do you even care so much for a human anyways?” With a few tears slipping out of her eyes and her voice soft as the whispers of the wind, she said, “There’d not be me, if not for her. She brought the light back into my life so now, I live and I fight for her.”

Her eyes now fixated on a past only she remembered, she narrated the memory in soft whispers and whimpers while Haydn leaned against her back, taking in one last hurray before he would surely die in the hands of a demoness.

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Every single zombie was born in Hell, as its finest soldiers, nearly indestructible. Each of them was born to live the life of service for a high-ranking demon or demoness. The highest achievable rank by any one zombie is to become the royal guard captain. And that was little Avery’s dream, following all her predecessors and her father.

Approximately 20 years ago, a young Avery was riding on the shoulders of her father, laughing gleefully in her small high-pitched voice. The joyful laughter of her father followed her as he carried her around the huge castle garden maze. “Mama,” screamed the little voice when she spotted her mother watching them from a distance. Without a care in the world, she pushed down on her father’s head and leapt off from his shoulders. This caused her to carelessly tumble onto the soft grass but she rolled herself up without any signs of pain and sprinted into her mother’s arms. Her mother spun her a few times and held the young Avery tightly to her own body.

Her father walked up to the pair, “So you are leaving now?”

“Yes, my darling husband. I promise we’ll be back in just a year and it will almost be like we never left at all,” She pecked her husband’s cheek when suddenly little hands grabbed her face and insistently brought her lips for a kiss on tiny lips. Then said little hands grabbed her father’s face just as insistently and brought him for a kiss on tiny lips too. Satisfied, she told her father, “I am big enough to go to see the humans now! I will protect mama and we’ll be back.” She puffed her chest out proudly and her father patted her head adoringly.

“Very well then, my big zombieling, I entrust the safety of your mother to you.” Then turning to his wife, he informed her, “I have to get back to my station, or else I will never be promoted to captain.” Little did they know, it would be the last time her mother would see her father.

Her mother then took her, with their luggage, to one of Hell’s gates to the human realm. Both her mother and little Avery had been so excited for this promised trip that they did not notice when they were being followed.

Avery remembered little of what happened from then until the day of the ambush. They had a whirlwind of travelling from one continent to the next before they finally landed in the state of California where the ambush took them by surprise.

On a warm summer night, her mother held her hand as they strolled through the park leisurely. When suddenly, the larger hand holding hers tensed and she could feel herself being pulled to a stop. She looked up at her mother to find in astonishment – a broad sword impaled in her mother’s chest and another zombie brandishing a spiked club, a few seconds away from bludgeoning her mother’s brain out.

After that minute second of tension, her mother moved just in time to avoid getting her entire brain smashed. However, a small portion of her skull was cracked open, revealing her tender brain within. When her mother pushed her away from the battle, pleading for her to escape, one of the men tried to run after her. But her mother whirled around fiercely and Little Avery watched for the first time, hidden behind some bushes, a zombie’s transformation into their most primal mindless self, meant only for the destruction of their opponents.

Her mother wailed and fought back mightily against the couple little Avery later recognized as her uncle and his husband. Her father’s younger brother, always walking a few steps behind, hidden in her father’s large shadow and forgotten. Avery watched, frozen in her spot, not daring to take a single breath when her mother plunged both her hands into and through her uncle-in-law’s chest and head. Each of her hands held one precious zombie organ and squeezed hard. In that short moment of distraction and weakness, her uncle Jared managed to puncture his hands into her mother’s broken skull and clenched around her brain.

Tears streamed down from all of their eyes, all for reasons of their own. Her mother for never getting another chance to see her husband and daughter again, and very possibly failing to save her child. Her uncle Jared for losing his dearest husband who had always made him feel like he was finally seen for himself. His husband, half with tears of joy and sadness – joy for helping Jared achieve a part of his longtime dream and sadness for having to leave him so soon and unable to see Jared become the captain himself. Avery, poor little Avery, frozen in her spot in the bushes, big fat tears streaming down her face, witnessing the moment when light slipped from her mother’s eyes.

That was also the first time Avery felt it - the cold, cold zombie poison pumping into her veins. First turning her skin pale blue, illuminating her veins, followed by the glowing of her eyes, then the bleaching of her hair, replacing the colours with that of the poison – midnight blue. Finally, her nails and teeth lengthened and sharpened into points.

She could not remember anything from then on, all she knew was that she had lost her mind just as the thunderclouds overhead came down with a vengeance. She screamed the most anguished scream one had ever heard at the same time a deafening thunder struck nearby and she leapt from her hidden spot onto her unsuspecting, snivelling uncle’s back. Her powerful jaw easily broke into her uncle’s skull, destroying half of his brain and the nails of her hands digging into the flesh of his shoulders.

Jared screamed in pain then, but as the older, more powerful zombie, he was easily able to shake her off him. Even with half a brain, he was able to plunge his hand into her little body, twisting her heart out and flung her far into a distant boulder, cracking her delicate skull. He stalked towards her near lifeless body, lifted her up by the collars of her little dress and flung her away with all his strength. The impact was so bad that the loud crack of her skull against the side of the ditch could be heard from where he stood three hundred feet away.

However, since Jared was already exhausted and severely injured by then, he could only watch as her lifeless body got washed away down the stream of murky waters. He had thought then that she was dead, so he returned to his sister-in-law’s and husband’s side. He picked them both up, returned to Hell and reported thus to his brother, Avery’s father.

“Your wife and daughter were attacked by a pack of rabid hellhounds who had followed them out from Hell. I foresaw something bad happening, so my husband and I went to track them down. But when we showed up, Avery was already no more and your wife was barely hanging on. We fought bravely… I lost my husband.”

The news was received as badly as could be predicted, Avery’s father nearly went mad with despair and his promotion was delayed while Jared was promoted to replace his brother until his brother could recover.

Meanwhile, along the stream passing through a flower field out in no-name town Oregon, little Avery, with her empty eyes of hopelessness, was discovered by little Evelyn. The then-five-years-old Evelyn thought she had found an injured animal that looked oddly human, she cared for the injured, non-responding and hardly-breathing girl. Changing her clothes, wiping her dirty body, trying to feed her food or water were some of the things Evelyn did for Avery. Many things Evelyn knew and many more that she didn’t, but just a niggling thought in her head told her that no one was to know about this mysterious creature she found.

Since Avery was too heavy for a little human girl to carry, she had somehow blackmailed her brother to build her a little wooden shelter in the flower field for her. With the poison still pumping strongly through her veins, Avery could only hear snippets of “You’re alright now, I’m here”, “Grow big and strong, Blue” and other variations of those phrases. Avery could also feel small moments of boundless warmth when the blonde had embraced her unresponsive body, slowly melting away the poison in her system. Nearly a year into Evelyn’s kind treatment, Avery’s wounds and scars had all healed and the poison had finally receded enough from the zombie girl’s body that she could finally move.

When Evelyn had witnessed ‘Blue’s’ first movement, she let out a squeal of joy, having finally revived her ‘Blue’. Then, after Evelyn discovered that ‘Blue’ could finally eat, she brought lots of food for her, so that she could recover properly. Another two months passed, most of the poison’s effect on Avery’s body was gone, making her look more human each day.

However, due to Evelyn’s constant disappearance to the flower field with so much food. Her parents soon found out about ‘Blue’s’ existence and told Evelyn that she could not care for a person as if she was caring for an animal. When they separated Evelyn and Avery, Evelyn bawled big fat tears and shouted many “I hate you’s” to her hippy parents. It was then that Avery said her first words since her mother’s death, “It’s ok, Eve, I will see you again soon and next time, I will be the one to protect you.” With those parting words, a part of Avery’s essence left her and surrounded Evelyn, sealing Avery’s promise to the blonde toddler.

When they ended up sending Avery to the authorities, they could not find any missing child report fitting her description. Thus, she ended up in the orphanages where she was quickly adopted into a loving family with the Cooper’s.

It was seventeen years later when Avery was reunited with Evelyn, in which her adopted brother, Alexander Cooper had hired her to work as his personal assistant and Evelyn had just started work as a clerk. When their eyes met once again, Avery was mildly disappointed that the human had not recognized her. But then again, Avery would not have recognized Evelyn too, if it wasn’t for her pale blue essence surrounding one Evelyn Princess Summer.

After Avery’s wistful retelling of her side of the story, Haydn sighed loudly and groaned in pain as he stood up and dusted himself off. He turned around to see Avery’s defeated form seated on the blood-soaked floor.

“Come on,” he encouraged. When he received no response, he huffed in frustration, “What if I told you that Evelyn is not dead yet and if we don’t hurry our asses, she might very well be.” Avery’s head snapped towards him so fast, she would have gotten a whiplash if she had been human. Her eyes were opened wide, unblinking as she stared at him hopefully.

“Come on, zombie, let’s go save your human, shall we?” Haydn allowed himself a rare actual smile to grace his face and held his hand out to Avery. She eagerly accepted his hand and he helped the injured woman up. She barely winced when straightening herself and asked, “Do you know where she might be?”

He gave another long-suffering sigh, “I have a very good idea of where she might be…” Grimacing slightly, he muttered, “We are heading to Hell, so prepare yourself.” 

Hello everyone. Yes, it's been 2 weeks and so another update. 

Plus, I have bad news for y'all, some of you may know this already and most of you probably don't know. So, the news is: This will be the last update for awhile. 

I am still writing yes, but! I started this story a long time ago and this part here is the place I stopped writing my draft a long time ago. Meaning, this is the last of my edited draft. Starting from here on out, it'd be rough draft which I would not be posting until I finish the entire rough draft and edited them. It will be a while before I get to finishing all that, so y'all gonna wait a long time for update now.  

For now, the rough draft would only be available to patreons. So, for non-patreons, please be patient and wait for me to finish the rough draft *sweat sweat*

I will see you's again in... well, however long it takes to finish this story *looks away* Bye~