Past Life by C S Winchester Page A

shouldn't have come,” she said, backing towards the door. “I'm sorry I disturbed your... Sorry I disturbed you.”
    “ Oh, come on, Frankie,” she heard him call after her. “I was only illustrating a point.”
    But she was too embarrassed to stay. She pressed the call button on the lift and prayed that Dante wouldn't follow her out. Thankfully he didn't, and she released a sigh of relief as the lift began it's downward journey.
    She felt like a fool. Was she really missing sex so much that even Dante turned her on?
    No, she thought rationally, Dante was quite likely to turn her on regardless of when she last had sex. He was a very attractive man and he knew exactly which buttons to press. But he had been playing with her and she didn't like that feeling. She wasn't his toy, his pet human, and she hated the fact that she hadn't been strong enough to stop him.
    She breathed a sigh of relief as she stepped into the sunlight outside, since there was no way that Dante could follow her out here.
    She paused and leaned against the building for a few moments, mentally kicking herself for letting Dante get under her skin, then kicking herself once again as she realised that she hadn't even asked him what she'd gone there to ask.
    Well, it was too late now, because there was no way she was going back in there. As she headed back to her car she began formulating a new plan of action. She pulled a hair band from her bag and began scraping her hair back into a messy pony-tail. She needed a secure computer but her home terminal was out of the question while her parents were there, so she called HQ in London and asked them to inform Redford Barracks that she was coming. Their secure communications room would have a computer that she could use.
     
    Frankie quickly wrote a report on the incidents to date and the information she had gleaned about the perpetrator, which she then emailed it to her boss, marked 'urgent'. Since she thought the puppy-killer might have spent time in America, her message also asked him to contact their American counterparts, to see if they had reports on file of similar incidents over there.
    Next she called Clara, a local witch she had met on a previous case, and asked her to keep her ears open for any information. Then she phoned Mark, a shapeshifter, and asked him to ask around his friends, reasoning that shapeshifters might well pay more attention to incidents of murdered animals than a regular human would.
    Finally she sat back and wondered what to do about asking the vampire community. Her reason for asking them if they had heard anything was the same as asking the shapeshifters; since the animals were drained of blood, that could well peak a vampire's interest. Unfortunately, she only knew how to contact two vampires. Alex, her ex-boyfriend was out, because she didn't want to offer him any encouragement, and the idea of talking to Dante again wasn't something she even wanted to contemplate for a few days.
    Besides, asking them was a long shot to begin with, plus they wouldn't really consider killing animals to be a serious crime and so they might not take her seriously. Other MI5 operatives didn't have the vampire option open to them, because they didn't know that vampires existed, and as such she reasoned that it was probably okay to leave them out of this case.
    Instead she began looking through the MI5 supernatural database for references to animal abuse, sacrifice, longevity and Hades. Her search brought up over two dozen cases and she began the tedious process of looking through them all.
    At four o'clock she took a break and called Will, who updated her on his progress. They didn't have much, only two witnesses who may have seen the killer. One report was someone walking near the home of one of the pets, the other a description of someone walking near one of the the entrances to Corstorphine Hill. Neither witness gave a good description but the information, along with an appeal, would be on the