Excerpt: Until We Meet, Again

“In order to start off the tale of our school, we need to go back almost five hundred years ago. A young lad by the name of Christopher St. Laurent was walking home from his apprenticing job at the local smithy when he was attacked. His attacker left him broken and almost dead. Young Christopher gave up all hope until a beautiful lady came by and took him to her house. He was unable to comprehend anything that happened to him, so when she bit his neck, he assumed she was just healing a gash on his neck. Instead, she was changing him into one of her kind, a vampire.
Days went by and he was going through the Change or the process of becoming a vampire. It’s an extremely painful and gruesome process. Many do not survive, but young Christopher did. With his senses recovered and heightened, he escaped as soon as he could and headed to his home. When he arrived he was greeted by a chorus of screams. His family didn’t recognize him in his new form. They chased him out town with torches and spikes. He ran as far away as possible until he passed out from hunger.
When he finally awoke, he could still feel the hunger deep in his stomach. He ate everything he laid his eyes on, but nothing filled the hunger. He finally saw a deer and ate it raw because he couldn’t be bothered to cook it. After had eaten every last piece of it, he realized he was not hungry anymore, but royally stuffed. It was at this moment that he finally realized what he had become. He had become the creature of his nightmares and of all those stories his mother had told: a vampire.
In the days following, he did everything he could to try to kill himself. He did not want to belong to a world where everyone hated him and where he hated himself. Christopher attempted jumping off of a cliff, burning himself alive, drinking poison, and stabbing himself multiple times, but nothing seemed to work.
He wandered around for days trying to get used to his new lifestyle. He encountered another of his kind and realized that there were better things he could be doing with his life. This other vampire had completed the change and now blended in with society. He told Christopher that the mortals suspected nothing.
When the visitor left, Christopher decided to find the next town and there he would try to do something with his life. He arrived in the town of Madeira a couple weeks later. He asked every mortal he came upon if there was any jobs open in the area and they all replied no. He kept asking around, but always got the same answer. He realized that this village did not have a school and he decided to open one on the mansion just outside of the village.
He had many students enroll and soon, the whole mansion was filled with classrooms and students. Mortals from all over were wanting to attend his school. It was around the late 16th century that he decided to allow only children of vampires to attend this school and thus St. Laurent’s School of the Arts was formed. Now do you understand Miss Hartley?”
It was at that moment that I blacked out.