Jared Thompson

Rise of Aleister

CHAPTER 1 “No, Paige, the red candle goes in that corner! Why do I feel like I’m talking to myself here?!” Craig whined, ringing his pudgy hands together before pushing his glasses back up his pudgy face. At 16, he was already dumpy, short hair sticking out in seventeen different directions, his sallow skin pockmarked with old and new acne scars. Paige, on the other hand, was a study in extremes, balancing out the sweaty teenager’s neuroticism with cool detachment, a look of almost comical long-suffering crossing her features as she rolled her eyes, moving the candle the scant few centimeters necessary to defuse Craig’s agitation. Running her fingers through neon green hair, the young girl stood, the piercings in her nose and ears catching the glow of candlelight. “Anything else, sahib?” she spat at him, all of her animosity toward an entire gender buried in those three words. “Easy, Paige.” Everett Hall stepped out of the shadows on the other side of the sigil on the floor, carrying a container of partially congealed cat’s blood and a paint brush. “You wouldn’t want our resident expert to start having fits and cutting himself, would you?” This last was said with just a hint of irony, the tall eighteen year old’s eyes shifting to slightly to a far corner of the room, gleaming maliciously under the dyed black hair that draped across his face. With pale skin and black lipstick, the eerily skinny teen looked uncomfortably like a walking corpse, and his personality wasn’t much better. The object of his attention, Brandon Jackson, lifted one arm, flipping the older boy the middle finger. As he did so, the frayed sleeve on his dark hoodie pulled back, showing a crosshatch of very fine lines, telltale signs of a troubled youth spent at the bad end of a straight razor. Chrissy Franklin, looking like a cross between a drug addict and a model for a Halloween costume advertisement, stepped out from behind Brandon’s right shoulder, her purple lips twisted into a grimace of dislike. “Back off, asshole. Brandon hasn’t done anything to you.” Everett laughed, his crooked yellow teeth showing sickly in the candlelight. “Precisely! What has that walking suicide watch done for anyone here?” Turning, Everett finished the sigil on the floor, an odd goat’s head inside of an inverted pentagram. “Anything else you need, Dough Boy?” Everett’s gaze crossed to Craig, and the nervously pacing teen jerked slightly at the animosity in his older compatriot’s voice. “…n..no. No. We’re good here. We just need to gather the rest of the ingredients, and we can begin.”