The pale glow of the streetlights lit the concrete underfoot as rain danced over its surface. A man shrugs his shoulders to raise his coat, tilting his head to divert the rain from his eyes with the brim of his hat.

He looks up as his footsteps guide him infront of an apartment building. Council flats, nothing fancy; the sort of place you lived in mostly because it was warmer than the underside of a bridge.

He pushed the double doors open, his thick-soled shoes clumping down the hall and carrying him up the stairs one, two, three floors as he cursed the lack of an elevator.

Apartment 18. This was the place. Not that he needed to guess, now that he was here; bright yellow police tape crossed the broken doorframe, and a cluster of bored and/or morbidly curious neighbours were testing just how far "KEEP AWAY" really was.

He shouldered his way; as gingerly as one could shoulder anything; through the bustle and ducked under the police tape. One thing he'd always noticed; act like you belong somewhere and nobody tries to stop you. Usually, anyway.

The inside of the apartment was no better than the rest of the building. "Bloodbath" might be an appropriate term. Or "Slaughter". Either way, he wasn't sure how much of the damage to the flat itself was the result of whatever had transpired and what was just the late occupants untidiness.

A police officer stood up from where he was and walked over to the newcomer.

"Hey buddy, this is a crime scene; you can't just walk in h-"

He was cut off by a very shiny and official looking badge being flashed in his face.

"Detective Rick Cole, Infernal Affairs." He said, with a voice that barked authority, percolated through several layers of gravel and smoke. "Any details on the vic?"

The officer; whose name, for reference, was Spitz; blinked briefly.

Cole waved a hand infront of the officers face.

"Hey, rookie. You in there?"

Spitz shook his head. He must have misheard...

"No definitive ID yet, sir, though the neighbours and the mailbox downstairs ccount her name as being 'Finnegan'. Apparently she wasn't familiar enough with any of her fellow tenants to give any of them a first name; and we haven't been able to turn up any useful clues either. Whoever killed her is long gone, and there's no signs of fingerprints or fluids... we're drawing blanks, here. Aside from the obvious, of course."

"The obvious, officer?" came the Detective’s reply.

"Well.. she was murdered, sir. The wound is in her back, after all, and with no weapon left behind, we can't see how it could be self inflicted."

"Rookie, if the 'but' hovering over the end of that sentence was any bigger it'd be inspiring poetry. What else?"

"There's no signs of a struggle, sir. The place is a mess but a lot of the damage looks like it's been here a long time. There's marks in the carpets from where the fallen furniture's just been lying for.. who knows how long."

"Right, right. I'm gonna take a look around. You boys keep doing what you do best." Said Cole, idly scratching the five o'clock shadow on his chin.

He walked the apartment slowly, eyes checking over every nook and cranny; with the exception of the bit with a dead person in it.

Spitz coughed the quiet cough of the wanton attention-grabber.

"Did you not want to look at the stiff , Detective?"

Cole looked up from an in-depth examination of the underside of a lamp.

"Why?"

Spitz looked to his partner, still knelt by the body, and back.

"Well, Detective, some would say it's somewhat key to a murder investigation." His partner chuckled. Cole forgave them both the moment of levity – dark humor was often all that helped a man keep his sanity in times like this.

Cole sighed and glanced over from the apparently fascinating lamp, his eye darting briefly from point to point on the victim's cooling body.

"Female, mid to late 30s, dead for about four and a half hours. Large open wound in the back just to the right of the 6th vertebrae. Apparent cause of death is traumatic blood loss mixed with shock. Did I miss anything, officer?"

Spitz stood dumbfounded for a moment, looking to his partner for help before turning back to the detective.

"No sir, that's pretty much everything. How did you..?"

"I listened to the radio report on the way over, genius.

Right, thought Spitz, the radio report. Did we give that much info on the radio? We must have. Yeah, I'm sure we did, he thought to himself.

“We’ll, uh, leave it to you then sir. Someone ought to keep the rabble from messing things up.”

Shaking his head to clear his thoughts, Spitz made his way to the apartment door to try and disperse the onlookers before someone tried to grab a souvenir.

Cole scratched at the base of the lamp with a grubby fingernail, before looking up at the other officer knelt by the body, notepad in hand.

"Checked the vic's car yet?"

"Her car, sir?" Said the officer. His voice betrayed the shaggy, sparse attempt at a moustache that decorated his upper lip.

Cole lifted a set of keys from the bowl near where he was standing and shook them.

"Vic's got car keys, figure she probably has a car. Worth checking out, wouldn't ya say?" Said Cole, one eyebrow raised out of sight under the brim of his hat.

"Ah! Y-yes Detective!" the rookie officer stammered, grabbing them from mid-air as the Detective flicked them in his direction and quickly scurrying towards the stairwell in a disappearing trail of 'excuse me's and 'coming through's.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Cole looked around. Spitz was still dealing with the crowd, such as a gaggle of bored tenants could be called such; and the other would be downstairs for some time, since the closest place to park a car was a ten minute walk away.

Checking over his shoulder again, he spoke in a voice so quiet it barely registered as audible; though all hints of the earlier gravelly tones were gone.

"So, whaddya think?"

"I think this flat smells of dead whore, is what I think."

The voice - which sounded somewhat akin to a very irate Danny Devito after having his throat scrubbed vigorously with an iron loofah - came from a spot just above Coles left shoulder. With a puff of smoke and a brief flicker of flame, a tiny man-like creature, with a nose and ears better suited on a seaside caricature, popped into existence, and promptly scratched itself.

"Hey, be nice. She might have been an entirely nice lady, Git."

"Yeah, and I might be a fuckin' angel in a Halloween costume. Stupid bastard..."

The imp dropped from his shoulder in what might be called a glide by a more graceful creature; but from Git's stubby wings and portly frame was better referred to as a delayed flop.

He half jumped, half flew over to the body, landing directly next to the wound. Even as his clawed feet strode through the blood, he left no trail or footprints from his passing.

"Yep, it's Eldritch a’right. Practically reekin' of dark magics th' likes o' which man was not meant to toy with." said the little pot-bellied obscenity, waving a hand dismissively.

"For real, or are you just sayin' that to clock off early again?" came Cole's reply.

"Look, smokestack, I don't tell you how to down six whisky sours and still string a sentence together, so don't tell me I don't know from magic, alright? If magic was honey she'd smell sweet as a fresh baked roll, but it don't, so she just smells like dead bitch. Capisce?"

"Gotcha. Now get lost before one of those two comes back." Cole said with an insistent tone.

"Yeah yeah, fuck you too, buddy." said the foul-mouthed imp before vanishing in a second puff of smoke and flames.

Cole wondered what he’d done to be cursed with such an obtuse little shit for a familiar, and quietly made his exit from the premises, satisfied he’d seen all he needed to.

--

Striding back into the now-drizzling remnants of the nights rain, Detective Cole sighed and fished a cardboard packet out of his jacket pocket. Slipping a tobacco-packed cylinder from it's home, he raised it to his lips and cupped his hands infront of it - before something caught his ear. A sound that many would have passed off as one of the many ambient noises of a city at night, but to the right pair of ears - a pair like Coles, for example - a sound that was not quite of this world.

Cursing quietly as he tucked the unlit cigarette behind his ear, he half-jogged across the one-lane street to the other side and pressed himself against the corner of the opposite building. Peering down the alleyway, a passing observer might have noticed the Detective waving the fingers of his right hand in a surprisingly complex but clearly practiced pattern - before clenching them together and slipping into the darkness.

The alley lead to a small area sectioned off for the surrounding building's trash disposal, and Cole ducked into the empty yet discrete space provided by a nearby skip. In a nearby shadow, the source of his consternation revealed itself, as a forked tail briefly flicked out of the darkness.

Cole quickly extended his right hand and uttered a single, bizarre word that seemed to produce no echo in this otherwise reverberant space. The same could not be said for the string of obscene words that poured out of the same shadowy spot as glowing red lines snared themselves around a figure the approximate size of a human child.

Cole tilted his head at the voice, before groaning and reaching into the darkness - extracting a creature of bizarre appearance by the dirty collar of its' shirt and holding it infront of his face. With a box-like torso and almost perfectly spherical head, the creature could have, with a lot of work and a good disguise, passed as a particularly odd human child - until you saw it up close, anyway.

"Rigby, what the actual bloody hell are you doing here at this time of night?"

The creature - a goblin - grinned nervously, struggling in vain against it's bindings as it tried and failed to match the Detective's glare.

"...looking for a late night snack?" it offered, before flinching as the Detective tightened his glower at them.

"You do realise this is adjacent to a murder scene, right? Your 'late night snack' would have tampered with evidence."

The creature identified as Rigby shrugged as best it could in it's current situation. "Oh go off Cole, none of the fuzz would have known any different.'"

"I am 'the fuzz', Rigby, and I would have known. Or not known, and missed something." He paused for a moment, before continuing. "Either one's bad, is my point."

"Well yeah but you're different to them lot, ain't ya?"

"Not as much as you might like, Rigby."

"More than you fancy too, I'd wager." the creature grinned, a maw full of needle-thin teeth extending near from ear to ear.

Cole sighed and dropped Rigby to the floor before snapping his fingers - the glowing bindings around them melting away like so much vapour.

"Spare us a mote, Detective? I'm right bloody Marvin, if I don't say so myself." Rigby proferred, hands together and held up towards Cole. The Detective shook his head and waved a finger, a wisp of blue-ish smoke coalescing and drifting down towards the creature's outstretched hands. The goblin grabbed up at it, snapping it out of the air and as it wriggled in their grip like a fat, smokey grub, stuffed it into it's needle-filled mouth with a slurp.

"Pfeh, you've done better."

"Yeah, well, I've cared more, too. Come to think of it, Rigby, you didn't answer my question." Cole said as he looked down at the goblin.

"Yeah I did, I told you so. I was hungry. Smelled magic, so I figured I could score an easy meal."

"Rigby, the vic's apartment is three floors up, and I know this isn't your usual skittering ground. How'd you know there was magic here?"

"I keep forgettin' you humans can't smell it like we can. What a dull existence you lot must lead."

"Rigby, I'm about two steps off of banishing your arrogant little arse if you don't stop testing me."

Rigby stepped back with a whimper and cowered slightly.

"Hang on guv, bit harsh isn't it? Look, I can't tell you Adam from Eve but I can tell you from magic, and that flat up there bloody well reeks of it. Surprised you didn't run into nobody else up there, honestly."

Cole ruminated on the possibility that Git had been less than forthright with the details - an entirely likely possibility - and waved a hand dismissively at Rigby.

"Nope, just you.What's it smell like, if you don't mind my asking?"

"Ooh, complicated answer there, guv. It depends on the par-tickler variety of magic at hand, see, and-"

"Short version, Rig." the Detective interrupted. Rigby sighed and rolled their eyes.

"Sulfur, if you must know. It's an acquired taste but I'm quite fond of it on occasion. Yours smells like fag ash, for the record, which is bloody repulsive but it fills the hole well enough."

"Ash? Seriously?"

"I'm a goblin of my word, Detective. Like a dive bar's card room on a friday night when everyone's trying to avoid going back to their ball and chain."

Cole shook his head in disbelief and stared back up at the apartment.

"What's that much magic doing involved in a stabbing?"

Rigby snorted derisively, and Cole looked back and down at them. "What?"

The goblin looked from Cole, to the apartment, and then back to him.

"A stabbing? Seriously? I think you need to go 'ave another look, 'Detective'. Should know better than to trust your eyes by now, I'd'a thought. Least... your human ones, that is."

Cole blinked, staring at the goblin briefly before snapping his attention back to the apartment and cursing quietly. He strode back out of the alley at pace.

"Yeah, 'ave a good night yourself, ya curt bugger." Rigby called after him, before shaking it's head and waddling off into the shadows.