Page 35 of Charmed By Apollo

The corner of his mouth tugged up. “We do make a pretty good team.”

“So? Can we go in and have breakfast with the vampires now?”

“Fine,” he relented. “Let’s go.”

“Thank you for the lovely spread,” Apollo said as he finished off the plate of eggs, sausages, and toast one of the castle staff had brought in for him and Geri. “And for being such good hosts.”

Just as the vampire leader promised, they were welcomed warmly to breakfast inside the castle. The dining room looked surprisingly normal—at least, it was in the sense that it matched what Geri would have imagined such a room in a castle would look like—tall ceilings, crystal chandeliers, and a long, ornately-set table in the middle. The rest of the interiors, at least what they had seen when they walked in, looked typical too. In fact, the only thing out of the ordinary inside Bran Castle were its occupants. The rest of Marley’s coven—three men and three women—were all dressed like they were all going to Woodstock.

Marley, who sat at the head of the dining table, responded. “You’re very welcome, both of you. And we’re glad to have you.”

“Bran’s not exactly a swinging place,” one of the female vampires, a willowy, dark-skinned woman who had introduced herself as Harmony, said. “It’s probably been decades since we had non-vamp company.”

“Oh?” Apollo. “Why’s that?”

“We keep to ourselves, but it’s probably our bad rep,” Marley said with a chuckle.

“This really is amazing,” Geri said as she mopped up the remaining egg yolk from her plate with her toast and popped it in her mouth. “Um, I hope we’re not being rude.”

“Rude?” The vampire leader asked. “How?”

“Because we’re the only ones eating,” she said. “But—oh, you don’t eat. Or do you?”

Marley grinned. “Of course, we do. I mean, we drink to sustain ourselves.” He shook a small silver bell on the table beside him. A few moments later, several members of the castle staff came in and placed large wine glasses in front of all the vampires filled with a ruby red liquid.

Apollo turned pale. “Is that…blood?”

Several of the vampires gasped, and Marley, who was about to take a sip, put his glass back down on the table. “Are you talking about human blood?”

“Y-yes?”

“Oh no,” Marley shook his head. “Drinking blood is lame.”

“Lame?” Geri asked

“Like, uncool, you know.” Marley tsked. “Why, we’ve never even fed from real people or tasted real blood.”

“Blood is grody, man,” said Artho, the curly-haired young man on Apollo’s right said.

A murmur of agreement came from the rest of the coven.

“Wait, so vampires don’t drink blood at all?” Geri wrinkled her nose.

“Oh, we do—I mean, we used to,” Marley began. “But now we use blood substitutes. Looks like the real thing, tastes like the real thing—at least I’m told—and has the necessary nutrients to keep us alive. The vampire community had been using it for years.”

“So that’s not real blood?” Apollo gestured to the wineglass in Marley’s hand.

“For all intents and purposes, it is blood, but it just didn’t come out of a human or animal. See, back in the 1950s, after World War Two, many of the vampire community became tired of the death and destruction. Many of us served, albeit discreetly, in the Allied forces. But, we lost a lot of our kind.”

“But aren’t you immortal?” Geri inquired.

Marley chuckled. “Another misconception, I’m afraid. Vampires have very long lives. Eventually, we do grow older, just at a very, very slow pace. And we can be killed the usual way—stake to the heart, sunlight, and of course, we can’t exactly come back from being obliterated by explosives, which is how many of our kind died during the war.”

“So, how did you develop this blood substitute?”

“One of our vampire scientists, Dr. Will Rodrigo, found a way to create a blood substitute that could sustain us. Since then, all vampires switched to it, and anyone created after 1955, like us, has never even tasted real blood or bit anyone.”

“We call it Improbable Blood,” the pretty, petite blonde named Sapphire, who sat next to Geri, said.

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