He was back in Iraq. Again.

But this time, he could feel the beast inside himself. The beast inside him that wasn’t even supposed to exist. Something beyond what he knew any shifter was capable of.

He moved across the building tops, powerful legs launching his nearly bipedal body twenty, sometimes thirty feet, through the air from rooftop to rooftop like some kind of superhero.

But, as he caught the smell of human flesh below, of the human sweat and fear coming off them in waves, he knew he was no superhero. No, he was more a monster than anything else. Eight feet tall, a long wolf tail behind him. Like the wind, he ran on all fours over a wider rooftop, bounding over a fifteen-foot wide alley like it was no more than hopping over a crack in the sidewalk.

He came to a halt across the street from his target, his claws digging in as he peered down into the building with eyesight like he’d never experienced, a stronger sense of smell than he’d ever imagined in even his wolf form.

He’d tracked them by smell alone, his nose like a radar as he homed in on their bomb-making lair. The residual smell on the car bomb that had taken out an Iraqi checkpoint had pointed him right here. His prey was close, and he tightened his claws into the concrete edge of the building, the porous construction material crumbling beneath his strength.

They were right there. The insurgents. No more than ten of them. Easy pickings.

He could already taste their blood.

The glass came down around him like razor sharp hail as he shattered it with his body. He huffed deeply, his wolfen nostrils flaring at the end of his long snout, the smell of cinnamon, turmeric, and ginger filling his senses as screams of horror erupted from the insurgent’s throats.

Peter awoke, his brow damp, cold sweat trickling down his cheek and matting his hair to his scalp. “Shit,” he groaned as he glanced over at the alarm clock. Three o’clock, almost on the dot.

The dreams had been coming more frequently. When they’d first begun, months ago just after Jake found Elise, the nighttime visions had been subtle as the fog coming in off the ocean. He’d awaken the next day, strange memories emerging from the haze as he’d eat breakfast or sip his coffee on the back deck. After a month or so, they began flashing into his mind like a flare grenade, invading his mind’s eye and his sense of smell. The smell of spices, the taste of the blood.

He sat up in bed and took a deep, shuddering breath as he swung his legs out placed his bare feet on the cool hardwood. He stayed like that for a moment, trying to collect his thoughts.

Recently, the dreams had become even more intense, forcing him awake. Like now. Always, it was the same. Memories of a time he couldn’t recall during his waking hours. Memories that were so real, he almost believed they were true.

But could they have been? Could he have gone to that apartment he’d been seeing in his dream, dealt with those insurgents in that way?

He shook his head. He’d never been to the apartment in his dream. And he certainly hadn’t been there in some hybrid man-wolf form, out of control with blood lust.

A sudden image of blood and gore, limbs filled his head, though, and he shivered. He shook his head again, dispelling the pictures in his mind.

No, he’d remember something like that. There was no doubt in his mind that he’d recall it. And, furthermore, he knew the man-wolf, the loup garou, or rougarou, wasn’t real. Not even shifters believed they existed. A shifter shifted between a man and a wolf, nothing more, nothing less. Peter’s own father had told him that, and he’d been the alpha of the Frost pack before they were all murdered. If he, a shifter steeped in the old lore about the shifter clans, packs, and powers, didn’t believe they existed, then that was as good as fact to Peter.

So those dreams being a reality were impossible.

He got up, pulled on a robe, and padded out into the kitchen to grab a glass of water. He stood there, drinking it, the memory of blood and cinnamon still in his nose and on his tongue. Peter drained the water glass before he bent down and opened up one of the cabinets, pulling out a bottle of scotch he kept for rainy days. The whiskey was for medicinal purposes, if anyone ever asked, and he poured himself three fingers in the bottom of his empty water glass, then headed out to the back patio.

The sliding door hissed quietly as he slid it open, and suddenly he was out in nature, the cool air hitting where his open robe didn’t cover his chest and legs. He took a deep breath of the Colorado mountain air and tried to clear his thoughts. The clarity didn’t come, though, and he took a sip of the amber liquid in his glass, the medicinal drink burning the whole way down. He took another deep breath and let it fill his lungs.

“Good thoughts in,” he muttered like a mantra, “bad thoughts out.” It was something he’d had to learn to do in order to deal with his anger at his family’s unjust killing. To deal with his anger and despair at losing Vanessa.

But as he sat there sipping his whiskey, trying to push these phantom memories back into the hole they’d risen from, his eyes drifted out over the landscape of his property. His vision caressed the shallow rise of the valley floor, the spruce and aspens that dotted his little piece of the valley that Enchanted Rock called home. But, just as he followed the rise of the nearby mountain with loving care, his eyes stopped.

A flash of blinking lights streaked across the sky, just across his field of vision, and seemed to hover over the north end of the valley. They weren’t perfectly stationary in the air, but they didn’t move erratically either. They just seemed to wobble back and forth. Red, green, and yellow against the starry sky.

He swallowed a mouthful of scotch and set the glass down on his deck’s railing. He smirked a little. He knew exactly what it was, but any rube out there might think it was swamp gas or a UFO. He strained his ears with his supernatural hearing so he could pick up the sound of the rotating blades of what was clearly a helicopter.

Peter’s smirk dropped, though, as he realized he couldn’t hear anything. Not at this distance. Back in the sandbox, he could always hear the Black Hawks when they were en route for extraction, almost from hundreds of miles away on a clear night like tonight.

But this?

Nothing.

Not a peep.

If he couldn’t hear them, that meant one of two things. Either it was a UFO, which not even a man who could shift into a wolf believed, or it was a stealth helicopter. He’d heard rumors from his buddies still at the Pentagon that something like this was coming, a stealth helicopter that would be even quieter than the modified Black Hawks SOCOM had used when they’d inserted Seal Team 6 to take down Bin Laden. But the guys had told him it was always in development, that the prototypes had only been shown to the military and hadn’t been picked up for production yet.

He grabbed his glass, finished off the last finger and a half of liquor. It burned all the way down, but didn’t help his nerves.

What if Jaeger-Tech, the company that Jake had implicated in the killing of Mary’s pack, had managed to get hold of one of those prototypes? Or several? He’d seen the pictures Jake had. Jaeger-Tech had military grade hardware, and they had trained soldiers to operate their equipment.

But, no, the Department of Defense wouldn’t ever authorize that.

Would they?

Unless, of course, the Pentagon didn’t know about it. Jaeger was about as under the radar as any multinational conglomerate could get, it seemed. With as little information as they’d been able to dig up on what they sold, who they did business with, and who they employed, they might as well have been a James Bond organization.

And, if Frost Security knew about Jaeger-Tech, it was reasonable to believe Jaeger knew about Frost. Had he been mistaken in thinking that their existence in Enchanted Rock had gone unnoticed? That they’d been able to live out here in relative anonymity, just doing their security work during the day and running the pack at night?

And now, here they were. Hovering just beyond his property. In sight of his house. If he’d been in his wolf form, his hackles would’ve been raised as he let loose a growl at these interlopers on the fringes of his territory.

Mouth dry, Peter licked his lips as he watched the nearly silent helicopter break from its hovering pattern and fly off behind the mountain, almost like it had realized he spotted it. Staring at where it used to be, willing it to never reappear, he slowly began to shake his head. Empty whiskey glass in hand, he headed back into the house. He turned and went down the hall to his bedroom, intending to grab his phone, but stopped outside Mary’s door.

He listened to her breathing, to its easy, even, slow rhythm. Not a care in the world penetrated her deep slumber, not a worry about half-recollected myths and ghostly memories disrupted her sleep. She was as innocent as any seventeen-year-old shifter girl could be. The worst she’d ever hurt was a rabbit or a deer, nothing more than game.

Peter’s heart felt heavier and heavier the longer he stood there. He’d never had children, and Mary was as close to his as he’d get. They’d even started cooking together, and she’d become a full-fledged, albeit smaller, member of the pack after he’d plucked her from her foster home in Edmund, Oklahoma the year before.

If Jaeger-Tech was coming for the pack, that meant they were going to get a second chance at Mary. And, innocent as she was, she didn’t deserve to be hunted down like some vermin.

He took a deep breath, resumed his course to the bedroom, and grabbed his phone from the nightstand. He needed to call Jake, needed to tell him he’d changed his mind about Lacy. That, in her downtime when she wasn’t working on Zeke Rogers’ case, she was going to be assigned to hunting down these Jaeger-Tech bastards.

And then he’d pull the whole team in. No matter what it took, they’d find these bastards. They’d put all their operational knowledge together, pinpoint their enemy, and they’d strike.

He paused, phone in hand as he was about to call Jake. A veritable ton of realization fell on his shoulders, causing him to slump down on his bed.

But what if he was wrong? What if that wasn’t Jaeger-Tech that had just been hovering within sight of his cabin? What said they had that kind of equipment at their disposal?

Jaeger-Tech wasn’t the only one flying out here. It could have just as easily been someone else. What about the US Military? They had plenty of bases in Colorado, particularly Air Force bases. Maybe this was just an experimental aircraft that they were testing out in the mountains, to examine its capabilities and push it under extreme conditions? After all, his friend at the DoD had said something like this was coming down the pipeline. Hell, that was the only way Peter even knew about its existence.

He bit the inside of his lip and tried to make sense of it all as he stared down at his phone. There were too many questions, too many variables for him to consider. Especially at a little past three o’clock in the morning on just a few hours of sleep.

And the lack of sleep had certainly been getting to him, especially as the dreams had gotten worse. Just the other day when he’d been in the office with Jake, he’d reacted with genuine, misdirected anger. And then when Matt had screwed up and gotten spotted by that crazy old lady, he’d called him up and bitched him out like he wasn’t anything more than a PFC in boot camp. Admittedly, Matt Jones had screwed up. Like FUBAR screwed up. But Peter, normally the reserved and calm, almost frigid leader of the group, had just snapped.

They weren’t in the military. Matt was still a member of his pack. And, more importantly, he was a friend. Peter never should have unloaded on him like that.

He took another deep breath and turned off his phone’s screen before setting it back down.

He was letting his fear control his actions. Letting his anger, from some perceived intrusion into his territory, control his reaction to the problem. He’d never had this problem before not even with his father. In the past, he’d refused to come at the world from a place of anger or fear. Once you lost control of your own focus, the opposing force had already won. They’d put you off-center, and that’s when you began to make moves that would prove to be your downfall.

What had begun this change? Had it been growing closer to Mary? Had it been the shifters in his pack finding their own mates, and the old memory of what he’d once had coming back?

Whatever had caused it, he’d pull Jake into his office in the morning, as soon as the ex-homicide detective set foot in the building. He’d tell Jake to start investigating suspicious flight patterns and landings in the surrounding area, just like what he had done with Edmund. Then they’d get Lacy to start researching. Jake had been right; it was better to be safe than sorry, and Peter had been wrong.

It was as simple as that.

Peter laid back down, his hands beneath his head as he stared up at the barely illuminated ceiling. He knew he should close his eyes and try to get some sleep, but try as he might, he just couldn’t seem to shut them against the reddish glow of the alarm clock.

It turned out that the whiskey and the breather out on the deck hadn’t done much for his nerves after all.