"Okay, we're on," the Doctor said, taking Rose's hand and pulling her to her feet. On the dance floor, the man- vampire, Rose thought reluctantly- had apparently finished his snack and was leading the girl towards the back of the club. The Doctor began a haphazard charge through the throng, drawing more than a few outraged and startled exclamations from the patrons. Rose, holding tightly to his hand, followed closely behind.
As they barged their way past the dancing couples, a hand descended on the Doctor's shoulder, turning him about. On the other end of the intervening arm was a burly, red faced man with an expression of displeasure prominent on his features.
"Hey, buddy, why don't we show a little courtesy here?" he asked in gruff tones, tightening his grip on the Doctor. The Time Lord sighed deeply, then raised his head to stare the man directly in the eye.
"Right at the moment, I don't have the time," he said, taking a firm hold of the man's wrist. He made a complicated motion with his hand, and with very little fuss the man was spinning through the air, to land with a thud on his back. Someone screamed, but the Doctor was already off again. Rose leaned forward and hissed in his ear.
"What the hell was that?"
"A martial art I picked up from the Venusians a few hundred years ago. I'm one of the only people with two arms who can use if effectively." Rose shot an askance glance at him. She was never sure if he was being serious or not.
"Oh right, okay, so you've been to Venus as well then?" she asked, sarcasm dripping from her voice.
"Well, why not? It's not nearly as unpleasant as your scientists make it out to be. Lovely people, the Venusians." Rose shut up.
As they reached the back of the club, the Doctor was apparently trying to look in every direction at once. There was no sign of their quarry, and the Doctor cursed under his breath. Rose tapped his shoulder.
"Door?" she suggested, indicating a sturdy wooden door recessed into the wall a short distance away.
"Ah. Yes," the Doctor said. "I was just coming to that." They approached the door and he turned the handle. Locked. The Doctor fished into his pocket and produced the sonic screwdriver, which whined faintly as he thrust it into the keyhole. After a few seconds there was a click and the door swung open. The Doctor grinned at Rose and pulled her through behind him.
They emerged into a thoroughly damp alleyway behind the club, cluttered with rubbish. Their vampire was still nowhere to be seen. Running to the mouth of the alley, the Doctor stuck his head out and peered in both directions. Turning back to Rose, he shook his head.
"Damn," he said, simply.
"So, remind me again why we want to go looking for vampires?" They were back in the TARDIS, in a sitting room Rose was confident hadn't been there the day before. The Doctor was rummaging in an old fashioned chest. His voice reached her slightly muffled by the wood of the container.
"Because they shouldn't be here."
"Well, that's a bit of a given, isn't it? They're vampires."
The Doctor sat up. "No, you don't understand. Back before the … unpleasantness of the Time War, my people fought a huge war with the Great Vampires, and eventually managed to defeat them. Mopping up their descendents was something of a priority after that."
"Oh, and of course you lot were infallible. Couldn't you have missed a few?"
"I don't think so. My people were very, what's the word… enthusiastic about it."
"How'd you mean?"
"They tended to go in for time looping entire planets, or sometimes just erasing the planets from the timeline entirely, to stop the spread of the Vampiric curse. Erring on the side of genocide, you might say."
Rose covered her mouth. "That's horrible."
"I know." The Doctor sighed. "I managed to get rid of the last of them in San Francisco some time ago, although obviously without resorting to such extreme measures. Or at least, I thought they were the last." He thought back to those events. Temporally speaking, they had occurred less than a decade from where he sat, but to him they were a lifetime ago. Then, he'd had rather a lot more hair and wide eyed innocence. He'd been so sure there couldn't be anymore…
"Well, it looks like you were wrong. So, are you going to give me Vampires 101?" she asked, half smiling at the absurdity of the comment.
"That's a good point. Well, a lot of what legend says is actually true. They drink blood, they're vulnerable to sunlight, and they can't stand the allyl component of garlic."
"What about stakes through the heart?"
"Can't stand those either. They have a fairly incredible cardiovascular system, can heal most wounds almost instantly, so you need to be fairly extreme. Hard to heal a wound with a large bit of wood in your heart." He paused, thinking. "Oh, and decapitation works too."
"Oh, that is cheery. 'Hi, you're a vampire, here's my cunningly concealed axe', kind of thing?"
"No, no, I want to try and avoid violence for now. We'll go back tonight and see what we can turn up." He turned back to rummaging through the chest.
Rose blanched. "So I don't get any protection at all?"
"You've got me." He watched the unamused look on her face. "Oh, all right then. Ah, found it!" He pulled something out of the chest and brandished it in the air. The look on Rose's face didn't change as she stared at him.
"No? Okay then," he shrugged, tossing the garlic necklace back into the box. "Here you go then." He tossed her a length of wood, nearly a foot long, sharpened at one end. She smiled.
"I'm touched. My very own stake. No one's ever given me one before…"
They stood in the queue outside the club, Rose shivering with the cold. Slowly the line advanced to where red light spilled out into the dark from the open door. As the bouncer waved them past, the Doctor gave her hand a squeeze.
"Okay, we're on."