I was back on the streets of Baghdad, in the Sadr City district, and it was dark. Or maybe it was Fallujah or maybe it was both. The smells and the sights and the sounds from my deployment all mashed together as I sprinted from building top to building top, leaping over the gaps with the ease of a man strolling through a park.

On the streets below, IEDs exploded, men screamed, women and children ran for cover as small arms fire peppered the plaster and stone walls. Sectarian gangs roamed the streets, US soldiers patrolled in their Humvees, night vision goggles pulled down as they sped to the homes and lairs of insurgents.

Wherever I was, it was outside the Green Zone.

My claws tore into the plaster roof, digging for purchase before my powerful legs launched my body through the air over the alleys. Ahead, an apartment building rose above the surrounding city. I could smell the humanity teeming inside, could even see the heat their bodies generated. Still, I sprinted forward. I leaped through the air, my body moving as if it were on a program of its own, driven by just primal forces.

Claws at the ends of my hands and feet tore into the concrete of the wall and gained purchase as I climbed into the sky. I scaled straight up the structure like a squirrel, but making my own grips and toeholds in the rock like it was nothing but mud.

Story after story, I climbed higher and higher, the city spreading out below me in the black-out darkness, the stars arching over me in the vault of the sky.

What was I? Who was I? Why had I been having these dreams?

Still I climbed the impossibly high building, clouds racing past me in the night sky.

To my right, I heard incoherent babbling in Arabic. A woman screamed from the balcony as she looked out to my giant, hybrid form scaling straight up the building. She looked at me, her hazel eyes wide and staring, olive skin shining pale beneath the moon.

I flared my nostrils and sucked in a giant whiff of her scent. She wasn’t who I was searching for.

I heard another scream before she fled back inside her cramped apartment.

Ignoring her, I turned my attention back to the sky and resumed my climb. More floors than I could count later, I stood atop the dream apartment building. An endless urban word sprawled around me on all sides as I crouched atop the edge of the building, my claws digging into the concrete and steel.

I leaned back, raised my snout to the moon and pierced the night with my howling call.

“Peter,” said a familiar voice behind me. “Peter, this is you. This is who you are. Why are you denying it?”

I spun around, my fur raised and bristling off my body, my lips drawn back from my razor sharp teeth.

Dark red hair fell around her face like a curtain, but her blue eyes still pierced me from beneath the veil. “Peter,” she said again, her voice the most beautiful I’d ever heard. Her scent of lavenders and vanilla and blackberries and love filled my nose.

Vanessa.

My mate. She’d found me, finally, even as I searched for her. Across the world, across time, across space. I whimpered and jumped down from the ledge and rushed to her side in a blur.

She reached up, touched the fur covering my snout, and stroked it tenderly. “Oh, Peter. You don’t know, do you?”

I sniffed again, just basking in her scent.

Vanessa looked up into my eyes. “You’re trying to deny it, aren’t you? You’re trying to ignore this, pretend it never happened.”

I whimpered again, a whine building in my barreled chest, echoing and reverberating through me. Deep down, even in this form, I knew she was right. Even here, in this dream, she was right.

“Wake up, Peter,” she whispered, still stroking the side of my snout. Around us, the world began to fade, the apartment building slowly disappearing into the mists of my mind until we stood there together, suspended on nothing as the entire universe simply ceased to exist.

“Wake up, Peter. And be ready. Because there’s a storm coming.”

Gasping, a cold, chilling sweat covering my body, I sat up in bed. The sheets tangled around my arms and legs were damp, soaked through with my perspiration despite the bite of the cool air. I covered my face with both hands, the stubble of my five o’clock shadow brushing against the palms as I struggled for breath.

What had that been? It had felt like a dream, but it seemed like something else as well. Like some sort of hyper-real experience beyond time. Almost as if I’d been within myself, truly reliving some event that had never actually happened.

I swung my legs out of bed, put my head between my legs, and took deep breaths until I got back to normal. The whole time, my mind swirled with the fantasies and dreams. The nighttime smells of Sadr City, the sounds of riots and military convoys. I swallowed hard as I raised my head and thudded back onto my bed, arms akimbo.

My eyes traced unseen lines on the ceiling as I tried to piece it all together.

I’d been denying the truth all along, I realized. I was the hybrid Vanessa said we needed. I was the secret weapon we needed to fight someone like Jaeger-Tech.

And I had been all along. Even back when I was in the SEALs, hunting down insurgents in the city centers. Those that my buddies couldn’t find, I did. The ones the US military couldn’t pinpoint for justice, I found and created my own justice.

I knew that now.

The only question now was how did I awaken the beast inside me?