Murphy looked around at the other members of the Brighter Future Society. "Alright people, we're about to get company. The Feds have drawn the connection between Barone's attack on Arlington and all the murders that Special Investigations have pinned on him due to their bodies being found in the basement of the building he was renting. The head of their anti-HYDRA task force is coming here to talk with Sergeant Rawlins about the case we handed him.

"And this is a problem for us. The officer in question, a Colonel Glenn Talbot, absolutely despises SHIELD and has been using its infiltration by HYDRA as grounds to seize or arrest anything connected to SHIELD that he can find."

"Has anyone pointed out to him that the US Senate and the Cabinet were also heavily penetrated by HYDRA?" Daniel Carpenter asked.

"If they have, he hasn't done anything about it. Unfortunately, asking a fanatic to be consistent about things is a waste of time. In any case, we're going to have to lay low until he leaves, otherwise he's likely to make our lives very difficult. There's a very good chance that his people are going to want to talk with at least some of the people who were identified at Arlington. Butters, you're the most likely one, as they definitely know you were there, and you also did the autopsies on many of Barone's victims."

"I'll be ready," Butters said.

"Wait a minute," Bob interjected. "Hook me up to the internet. There's something I need to look up." After Butters connected him to a computer, Bob started muttering to himself. "Let's see... Talbot, Glenn. Colonel, US Air Force. Parents... grandparents... uh-oh."

"What's the problem, Bob?" Will asked.

"Glenn Talbot is the great-grandson of Major Archibald Talbot of the British Army."

"And this is important, why?" Murphy inquired.

"Because back in 1917, Major Talbot somehow pissed off someone on the spooky side, who cursed him and all his descendants. Ever since then, whenever a Talbot has ended up crossing paths with any kind of ghoul, goblin, vampire, or other monster, the Talbot has inevitably ended up being the first item on the menu. Dresden and I ran into this curse shortly after the loup-garou incident. He barely managed to save two kids out of a family of seven. Dresden broke the curse on the survivors, but this Talbot's descended from a different son of the Major than the branch in Boone Hill. It's possible that the Colonel wasn't closely related enough to have been effected by the counterspell. If that's the case..."

"Then anything falling under our jurisdiction that turns up in town this week will be trying to kill him. Terrific. Alright, let me dial up Pizza Spress. I'll see if I can get Toot-toot's people to keep an eye on the Colonel for us. In the meantime, we need to start hiding anything SHIELD related in case he wants to try looking around."

Colonel Glenn Talbot (Who would be a General as soon as Congress signed off on the latest bill about flag promotions) sat back in his seat as he was driven to the police precinct. "Is the local police likely to give us any grief over our taking over the Barone investigation?" He growled.

"I don't think so, sir." His aide replied. "It looks like they're about ready to declare their side of the investigation closed. When I talked with them last night it seemed that the only things they want from us before handing over what they have is a copy of Barone's death certificate so that they can officially state that their suspect is dead and have someone fill out some forms to ensure that chain of custody is maintained on their evidence. It shouldn't take me more than an hour to clear all the red tape."

"Good." Talbot didn't have the slightest idea what the connection was between an attempt to desecrate America's most hallowed ground and a bunch of dead bodies in Chicago's undercity, but he was going to find out. He probably could have gotten some answers out of some of the people who took down Barone, but they all left military custody before they could be properly debriefed thanks to a series of staggeringly unlikely coincidences - which he only considered to be coincidence because there was no way they could have been engineered by any means short of divine intervention. The only one he definitively knew the identity of was Barton, and his status as a hero of the Chitauri invasion made him bulletproof.

He had been having mixed success with his mission. He had had considerable success in securing all of SHIELD's public and semi-secret assets, which was the main reason he was now up for promotion. Then things had started going wrong. He had taken the Providence Base in Canada, but everyone there managed to escape. He had failed to stop a HYDRA attempt to kidnap several flag officers - which ultimately was thwarted by SHIELD agents he had been unable to catch. He still wasn't quite sure what the tape recorder left on the grave of a retired SHIELD agent killed during the HYDRA uprising was about. At least he had been making some progress acting on the intelligence gathered from a captured HYDRA agent after one of the people brought in for his role with the tape recorder incident somehow managed to utterly break the man using a sound system, a well, some stage makeup, and a bowl of soup. Talbot was tired of setbacks. He was going to get to the bottom of what Barone had been up to and use it to unravel as much of HYDRA as he could.

Talbot was so busy thinking about the tasks that were immediately at hand that he didn't take the time to look out the window and enjoy the scenery. If he had, he might have noticed a wake in the river his car was driving alongside. A wake that was easily pacing his car.

Upon reaching the police station, Talbot set his aide to taking care of the paperwork while he went to speak with the officer in charge of the investigation. Looking at the piece of cardboard with the officer's name written on it on the man's office door rather than a proper nameplate, Talbot surmised that the man wasn't highly regarded within the department.

Sergeant Rawlins rose from his desk as the Colonel entered. "Colonel Talbot?" He asked. "I've been expecting you."

Talbot went straight to business. "What can you tell me about Samuel Barone?"

"A few days ago we got an anonymous tip about a warehouse he was renting. The officer we sent to follow up discovered that the building had been recently broken into - probably by whoever sent in the tip - so he went in. When he found all the dead bodies in the basement, we launched a full investigation.

"From what we can tell, somebody had been kidnapping people, interrogating them, and dumping the bodies in the undercity. Since the oldest of the bodies had been killed maybe a day after Barone signed the lease, we tagged him as our primary suspect and sent out a BOLO. Then we got the news that he'd been killed in Virginia."

Talbot's eyes narrowed. "And how exactly did all these people manage to get kidnapped without anyone noticing until some thief stumbled onto their graves?"

"Do you have any idea how many people go missing in a city the size of Chicago every year, Colonel? Hundreds. And most of them turn out to have fairly innocuous explanations behind them, like a husband who didn't come home to his wife because he spent the night with his secretary in a motel. And there was absolutely no connection between any of the people we found in that basement. We couldn't even find proof that any of them had ever met each other before being kidnapped."

"Do you have a list of who was kidnapped and what he was questioning them about?"

"There's a list of all the people we were able to identify in the case file. We also managed to find a stack of interrogation transcripts at the crime scene. We weren't able to find any connections between the victims or the things they were questioned about, but if this Barone really was working for HYDRA, it's possible there wasn't any to find. They could have had him gathering information for a half a dozen totally unrelated plots. We also found a journal filled with insane rants about being a master of the dead and a road map that we've since identified as being of Arlington County."

Talbot's lips curled up in a predatory smile. "We'll taking custody of the evidence you've gathered, Sergeant. The CPD might not have been able to get anything out of it, but the DIA has a lot more resources. With a little luck we'll be able to figure out what they're planning to hit with enough lead time to have a company of Marines waiting for them when they arrive."

Rawlins returned the smile. "Good luck with that, Colonel."

Sergeant Rawlins watched the Colonel leave his office and meet up with his aide, who presumably had all the files from the Barone case packed in his briefcase. As they left, his cellphone vibrated. Rawlins looked at it and saw he had just gotten a text from an unknown number.

TALBOT IN DANGER

Even though Rawlins didn't recognize the number, he knew who had sent it. It was the same person who had tipped him off about Barone's charnel pit and all the slavery rings that had popped up lately. Murphy might have been forced out of the CPD by a dirty cop in IA, but she was still doing the job. And if she was sending him a warning, it meant that the Colonel was in trouble right now. He hurried after his visitor.

It was obvious what the danger was the moment he made it outside. Standing in the road was a man. Or something approximately man-shaped, at least. It had grey skin, and flukes like the dorsal fin of a shark protruded from its spine. The lumps on its skintight black and yellow bodysuit pulsed as it scanned for its target. As its enormous red eyes focused on its prey, it opened its mouth to reveal more teeth than a human mouth could hold, all of them sharklike.

"TALBOT!" It bellowed as it charged.

The two soldiers reacted immediately. Drawing their guns, they immediately opened fire on the shark man, with Rawlins not far behind. The bullets barely slowed the thing down. It wasn't bulletproof, but it was apparently tough enough that they didn't penetrate far enough to do much damage. Rawlin's mind turned back to some of the many lectures that Dresden had given while examining the evidence from some of their stranger cases. At one point he had mentioned that some things were more vulnerable to cold iron than hot lead. He'd gotten into the habit of keeping one reload of steel-jacketed bullets around for emergencies.

It took a handful of seconds for him to change magazines in his sidearm. Those seconds were all it took for the monster to close. Talbot's aide interposed himself between the creature and his commanding officer, a selfless act which simply forced it to go through him. The thing's teeth looked like a shark, and they were apparently sharp like them, too. The man found himself picked up by the neck with his enemy's teeth and thrown several feet. Then it turned upon its true target.

Gunfire rang out as Rawlins finished switching out his ammunition and resumed shooting. The new bullets performed far better than the old ones did. The beast staggered, howling in pain. Taking advantage of the distraction, Talbot snatched up the briefcase from where his aide had dropped it in his death throes and ran for his car. The shark man tried to chase after him, and did succeed in ripping off the car's rear bumper before it sped away. Tossing the mangled metal aside, the monster ran off in pursuit.

Rawlins lowered his gun. He was out of steel-jacketed bullets, and while he was certain it could be caught while on foot, cornering that thing would likely be about as safe as cornering a rabid wolverine.

"What was that?" Asked another officer who had been attracted to the sounds of gunplay.

"I have no idea." Rawlins admitted as he looked out across the street.

"Well," Murphy said. "Now we know what the Fomor will send if Octokongs won't cut it."

"Land sharks." Will muttered. "I thought they only existed in old episodes of Saturday Night Live."

"Apparently not," Butters joined in as he examined a picture of the shark man.

"Where's the Colonel now?" Will asked.

"He's currently holed up at Naval Station Great Lakes." Murphy said. "Under normal circumstances, that might be a good place to defend - it's the only military base in the Chicago area. Unfortunately, when the person trying to kill you is amphibious, the last place you want to hide is someplace with a beach. Sooner or later the land shark is going to show up to deliver a candygram."

"And we can't warn the Colonel about this without inviting a lot of awkward questions about how we know this." Daniel said.

"Not to mention that this thing appears to be very hard to take down. Superhuman strength, and while it wasn't bulletproof, its apparently tough enough that we'd need bigger guns than we have available to kill it."

"Actually..." Butters mused. "I think I see a weakness in this thing. Bob! Wake up. We need to mix up a potion."

Talbot opened up his aide's bloodstained briefcase and removed a thick folder.

"I want everything in here scanned and sent to DIA headquarter, stat!" He ordered. The clerk he was yelling at saluted and hurriedly got to work.

Talbot didn't know what was in those captured files, but whatever it was, it had to have been something good for HYDRA to go through such efforts to stop him from getting them. It also meant that he was doing enough damage to them for him to be considered a threat. Good.

As the papers were scanned, Talbot picked up the ones the clerk was done with and started looking through him. There was the map of Arlington, as the sergeant mentioned. That confirmed that this was connected to the cemetery attack. Nice to know. Unfortunately, none of the interrogation transcripts provided enough context to know what Barone or his superiors were planning to do with the information gathered, at least not by themselves. Maybe the analysts would be able to find something once they cross-referenced these with the take from some of his previous operations.

Talbot set aside the transcripts and picked up the crime scene report. Description of where the bodies were found, strange ash all over the floor, crude homemade radios, two dozen refrigerators with traces of human DNA in them, none of which matched any of the bodies... This Barone must have been a very strange person.

After that came a series of autopsy reports on the victims. These appeared to be fairly straightforward, though Barone must have been a genius interrogator judging by the times of deaths. Some of these people had apparently died within an hour or so of their last being seen alive. Wait a minute...

Half of the autopsy reports were done by a M.E. by the name of Waldo Butters. One of the people reported at the incident at Arlington was a medical examiner by the name of Butters. That seemed a bit unlikely to be a coincidence.

Returning the papers to the stack, Colonel Talbot left to make a few phone calls.

Butters wasn't sure why he had been called to Naval Station Great Lakes, and now that he was there, he wasn't exactly sure what he could do next. He didn't dare bring Fidellachius with him, or Bob. The same went for most of the magical devices he had invented, many of which he couldn't actually use without Bob around anyway. That just left him with the potion he and Bob had mixed up, and he really hoped that nobody asked him for a sip of his 'lemonade'. Drinking the contents of that Snapple bottle he was carrying would likely be horrifically fatal.

And that was without the problem of convincing Talbot that the land shark would be coming again. From what Murphy had said about the man, he wasn't the type to believe in certain unpleasant truths like the existence of a hidden world that even SHIELD had failed to notice and that a being from that world had cursed his family a century previous. Not to mention the basic fact that trying to explain about the Fomor would invite questions about how he knew about them, which would ultimately lead to the Colonel either digging into the Brighter Future Society or sending him to the insane asylum for another mandatory observation period.

Circumstances intervened before the interview could begin, rendering his problems a moot point.

Two men looked out over the lake. Guarding the station's docks and boats was a dull job, but it had to be done. It didn't matter that unless it was sent by Canada (Which hadn't been hostile to the US since before it gained independence, though there was currently some tensions about some Air Force Colonel running an operation in their territory without telling them first) or gone through the St Lawrence Channel (Which would mean that everyone would have known it was coming for a week by now), no foreign nation could even attempt to get a ship to Chicago was irrelevant. The watch had to be maintained, especially at a training facility. The next generation of the country's sailors would be learning from their example, so they had to set a good one.

One of them noticed some motion in the distance. He raised his binoculars to get a better look.

"Joe?" The man asked.

"Yeah, Frank?" The other replied.

"It looks like there's something out there. Looks kind of like a shark fin."

"A shark fin? In Lake Michigan? That's ridiculous. You don't find sharks in the Great Lakes. " Joe scoffed.

"I know, but that's what it looks like."

"Come on! Even if a shark found its way into the St Lawrence, it would have died before reaching the Erie Canal, much less Lake Michigan. Sharks are saltwater fish. They can't survive in freshwater lakes."

"It doesn't just look like a shark fin, its also moving this way." Frank did a double-take. "There's no way anything natural could be moving that fast. Think we should call this in?"

Joe never got a chance to respond. The shark fin erupted from the water, revealing itself to be on the back of the shark-like monster that savaged him the moment its feet hit the dock.

Frank didn't hesitate. He grabbed his radio and started calling in. "Post Five! Post Five! We are under attack! I repeat, we aaaAARGH!"

Frank didn't get a chance to repeat his message.

Butters had just parked his car when the alarms started going off. Upon entering the building he was supposed to report to, he immediately found himself with an escort.

"What's going on?" He asked.

"The station is under attack," The escort said. "We'll need you to stay someplace secure until we get the all clear. I'm afraid whatever business you had here will have to wait."

Butters was taken to a guarded interior office. He wasn't the only one there. Several officers were also waiting there. The ME wasn't exactly versed in military uniform protocol, but several of them looked like they weren't Navy uniforms.

"Wait here, Dr. Butters. We'll let you know when it's safe to leave." With that, the escort left.

"Butters, is it?" Inquired a middle aged man in one of the different uniforms. "I'm Colonel Talbot. Glad to see you could make it."

"Not a problem, Colonel," Butters said. "May I ask what the Air Force needs with a middle aged medical examiner?"

"I believe that you recently examined some bodies that were allegedly killed by a Samuel Barone. The Department of Defense believes that Barone was involved in matters that represented a potential threat to national security when he died. As such, there are a few things I'd like to ask you about that case."

And so Butters found himself answering questions about Barone's operations in Chicago. The hard part was not letting on about the fact that he was one of the people responsible for the police finding out about them.

"I'm sorry, Colonel." Butters said after a particularly loud alarm drowned out most of one of his questions. "Could you repeat that last question?"

"I said, where were you on the night Barone died?"

After asking the Colonel what night that was, Butters said "I spent the night with my girlfriend Andi. Why?"

"Because a man named Butters, who claimed to be a medical examiner, was present when he died. I don't suppose you would know anything about that?" Talbot inquired suspiciously.

Butters flinched at a particularly painful blare from the alarms, then hurriedly came up with a way to divert the other man's suspicions. "Are you saying I was in Virginia that night? That's not possible. I had shifts the nights before and after Barone died. And my boss hates me - if I'd missed either shift, he'd have fired me on the spot. And I haven't been on a train or plane in years. Unless there's some other way to get halfway across the country and back in a day and a half, there's no way it could have been me."

Talbot looked disappointed that his theory was so easily disproved. Changing topics, he asked "Some of Barone's papers indicated that he thought he could control the dead. Did you see anything that might be connected to that?"

Butters laughed. "Necromancy? The last time Chicago had anything connected to that was nearly ten years ago. One Halloween someone broke into the Natural History Museum and stole two saddles and a dinosaur skeleton. They were all retrieved halfway across town the following morning. The Midwest Arcane said that the only logical explanation was that two necromancers resurrected Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex and took her for a joyride." He shrugged. "Tabloids. What can I say?" The Colonel smirked in agreement.

Then a guard burst into the room. "We need to move everybody, now!"

"What's happening?" Talbot demanded.

"The attacker appears to be after you, sir. It's heading this way. We need to get you and the others away while we break some heavier weaponry out of the armory."

The group was lead outside. As they traveled alongside a sidewalk that had been torn up in preparation for repaving, a scream rent the air. They all turned to see the land shark mangling another victim. The creature then sniffed the air and turned towards them.

"I smell the blood of the Talbots." It charged.

Talbot may have spent most of his career flying a desk rather than a plane, but that didn't mean that he was soft. His gun was out and firing before his attacker had taken two steps. Several others joined him.

Butters looked around. The potion he had brought with him should be able to disable the Fomor creature's suit, weakening it enough to be beaten, but how was he to use it without people seeing him use a magic potion? His eyes eventually settled on a forklift carrying a pallet of powdered cement, obviously intended for repaving the sidewalk. Wedging the potion bottle between two of the heavy bags, he fired up the engine.

"Hey, land shark!" Sir Waldo Butters, Knight of the Cross yelled at the monster as it was about to maim another victim. "CANDYGRAM!"

The forklift couldn't go all that fast, but it had enough momentum behind it to make it a threat. It knocked the creature back, forcing it to drop its latest victim as it was buried in a cloud of cement dust. Butters jumped out of the forklift before the impact, and took advantage of the Fomor servitor's distraction to drag the wounded man clear and start applying first aid.

As he tied up the last bandage and got up to move to one of the other wounded, Butters saw that the potion had worked. The lumps on the creature's suit were no longer pulsing. It was breathing far more heavily, and moving much more slowly. Seeing its sudden weakness as easily as Butters did, the soldiers redoubled their efforts. Finally the creature fell to the ground.

As Butters tied a tourniquet around a man's mangled arm, Talbot walked over to his enemy. "You wanted me so badly? Here I am." Then he put a bullet through its eye.

Butters continued to do what he could for the wounded until ambulances arrived to take over that problem. Then Talbot approached him.

"Butters? You're supposed to be a coroner. I want you to take that thing apart and tell me what the hell it was." He ordered.

Butters nodded. "Let me make a call to my boss to explain first, and I'll get right on it."

A couple of hours later, Butters presented a recording of the autopsy and his report to the Colonel and the Captain in charge of the Naval Station.

"The deceased was someone who was either modified to the point where he can no longer be considered a human being, or was never human to begin with." He began.

"Are you talking surgery?" Talbot asked.

"Not possible," He shook his head. "To change a human into something like this would require so many operations that the body would be a solid mass of scar tissue. This is either a case of genetic modification or a member of a totally unknown species. I can't say which.

"The most obvious difference from a human being is that the deceased had a second respiratory system, which was centered around its gills. This is actually the reason why it had such trouble breathing after I hit it with the forklift."

"How is that?"

"The lumps in the suit it was wearing were miniature pumps. The suit as a whole was intended to keep water flowing through its wearer's gills. After the impact, the cement dust," along with the potion he had added to the pallet for that purpose "Got into the suit through damaged parts, and turned the water being pumped around into semi-solid gunk that jammed the pumps. The creature was forced to breathe with its lungs alone, and it couldn't adapt to that fast enough to prevent it from getting killed. It would have been similar to what somebody who lives on a coastal plain and then moved to the Rockies would go through until they adjusted to the thinner air."

Talbot nodded, noting down a weakness for future exploitation if he ran into another one of the things.

"In addition to the gills, the subjects musculature and skeletal structure were significantly enhanced." Butters continued. "It was probably designed or evolved to help it withstand water pressure while diving, but having internals strong enough to survive being under an estimated maximum of more than a mile underwater indefinitely made its body dense enough to account for its enormous strength, as well as its considerable durability. It would probably have trouble handling extreme temperatures, though - its body is optimized for retaining body heat in the ocean depths, not getting rid of it.

"Overall, there's only two possibilities for the deceased's origins. Bioengineering, or new species."

"And which is your preference?" The captain inquired.

"Both have problems associated with them. If this was the result of genetic engineering, then somebody out there is leagues ahead of anything that's been published in any medical journal that I've ever heard of. But if this is a new species, it invites two questions. Why has nobody seen one this side of Splattercon before now? And why would a new species care about the Colonel?" Butters knew exactly why that might be, but it wouldn't be an explanation either of his listeners would believe, "The first can be waved away by claiming that they only recently developed the suits, and didn't want to spend much time on the surface without them. The second I can't answer."

"It seems more likely that an enemy of the Colonel's knows someone who can make monsters than some race of monsters that the Colonel's never heard of deciding that he's an enemy." The captain mused.

Colonel Talbot immediately seized on that. "Dr Butters, is there a chance that this creature could have been made by HYDRA?"

Butters knew the answer was no, but couldn't explain why, so he did his best to answer it the way someone who didn't know about the Fomor would. "To make changes as massive as these, you'd need three things. The first is access to knowledge about gene splicing leagues in advance of what is known to anyone openly working in the field. The second is access to a great deal of money, and the third is a facility to do such work in total secrecy. HYDRA would definitely have the latter two. I can't speak for the first, but it's possible."

Taking the maybe as a yes, the Colonel continued. "How many more of them are there?"

"There's no way of telling that without more information. Obviously, if you can make one of something, you can always make more if you have the resources. What resources you'd need to make a land shark and how much of them are available are things I honestly don't know."

"You said these are amphibious. How fast could they travel underwater?" The captain asked.

"Given how muscled the thing is, I wouldn't be surprised if it could top forty miles an hour in a sprint. I'm not sure how long it could sustain that, though."

"That's not good," Seeing Talbot's inquiring glance, the captain continued. "That's faster than anything in the fleet. You saw how much damage one of these could do, and if Butters hadn't accidentally found a way to cripple it, the body count would have been much worse. A squad of these could catch up to a destroyer, board it, and possibly overwhelm the crew. At the very least they'd be able to cause enough havoc to ensure that they couldn't support whatever mission they'd be on."

"Captain, why don't you write up a list of ways these creatures could be used in an attack?" Talbot suggested. "Once you have that, I can set up a task force to work out ways to counter them."

"I'll do that. In the meantime, I think I'll schedule some oceanographic survey exercises. Our late friend was probably living in or near the lake. Let's see if we can find out where."

"Good idea. Doctor Butters?" The ME looked at the Colonel. "You saved the lives of a couple good men out there today, helped take down the thing that killed several more, and provided a very useful brief without wasting our time with nonsense about how shark men are clearly impossible when we've just killed one. Nice work. If your boss ever gets that excuse he wants to fire you, I'm sure that the military can find a use for you."

"I'll keep that in mind, Colonel."

Two figures chatted in the virtual world of Uru.

BlackCat: Apparently, the land shark was supposed to be the muscle for a new Fomor incursion before it got the urge to go Talbot hunting. Because it gave the game away early, my people were able to contain the incursion before they were able to start grabbing victims.

Lazarus: At least one good thing came out of that thing's rampage.

BlackCat: Possibly more than one, Director. The Navy now knows about the Fomor, even if they think they work for HYDRA. Sooner or later their surveys of Lake Michigan will find the Fomor capital, and then they'll likely break out the depth charges that you weren't able to give us.

Lazarus: How long do you think it will take for the Navy to contain them?

BlackCat: Quite a while. The Fomor have been bothering practically every coastal city on the map around the world. Once they start their war against the Fomor, it's likely to drag on for years unless they can pinpoint and destroy their cities. But unlike us, they actually have the ability to take the offensive on that front, rather than simply forcing a stalemate.

Lazarus: Which basically means that the Navy will be busy with the Fomor for the foreseeable future, and leaving us alone.

BlackCat: And if the Navy can take some of the pressure off of us, we can start tracking down other threats. The one thing I'm worried about is that Talbot is still cursed. We might have taken down one threat, but sooner or later he or one of his children will end up driving across a troll bridge or something, and the whole mess will start all over again.

Lazarus: Unfortunately, Agent Murphy, even if somebody could get him to believe that he's in danger from the supernatural, he definitely wouldn't accept such a warning from anyone connected to SHIELD. Until we can find a way to warn him that he'd believe, we'll just have to keep an eye on him. It's not like we don't have to do that anyway. Could you have Butters do that for us? Having an agent on his staff would be very useful.

BlackCat: I'm afraid Butters never officially signed up with SHIELD like the others did - he wasn't sure if it would be compatible with his duties as Knight of the Cross. In any case, even if he decides to take Talbot's offer, I doubt he'd consider spying on his ostensible employer to be appropriate behavior for the Knight of Faith.

Lazarus: Darn. Now, before you leave, I've received word that HYDRA is trying to secure a number of artifacts that SHIELD collected over the years and were never able to figure out the purpose of. I'd like your people to see if the paranormal world has any information about some of these old 0-8-4s that those of us in the normal world couldn't find...

A/N: The villain this time was inspired by Tiger Shark, an enemy of Namor the Sub-Mariner. The canon Tiger Shark was a human who was turned into a humanoid shark by a genetic engineering experiment gone wrong. I modified him to be one of the Fomor races.

The Talbot curse came from the Dresden Files graphic novel Ghoul Goblin. If you want to know what caused the curse, Major Talbot decided that his rank allowed him to cut the line for a table at a cafe in Cairo, and that his being British meant that he could summarily evict some locals from their table so he could be served. At least one of the people at that table wasn't really Egyptian (Or even human), and cursed his bloodline. He and his heirs started dying in unlikely accidents shortly thereafter. Unfortunately, there's no real way to explain the curse to Talbot without inducting him into the spooky side, so even though this attack is over, the curse is still there.

Murphy's handle of BlackCat doesn't come from the Marvel character. Her father used to be a member of a unit of the CPD known as the Black Cats, which was the predecessor to the Special Investigations unit that she once commanded. The origin of Coulson's handle should be obvious.

Given the date of this chapter's publication, I'd like to wish a happy birthday to our favorite wizard, Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Here's hoping you can actually enjoy it this year without needing to go out and save the world again.