Three men, two enormous and one small, waited in their hideout for their boss to arrive.

“We should call our gang ‘the Slashers.’”

“Nah, we should go with ‘the Thunder-Killers.’”

“There are only three of us, and you’re both idiots, I don’t need a special name for two stupid idiots,” said the third, a small, slender man.

“But when we get famous, we gotta have a name, right?”

“No.”

“How ’bout the ‘Jail Breakers’?”

“What? We ain’t in jail. Not yet at least.”

A knock came at the door, and, before they could answer, a frail old lady let herself in.

“Would any of you like some cookies and milk? I brought them over, since I know how hungry you get,” said the heavily wrinkled woman.

“Thank you, Mrs. Crass,” they said in unison.

Mrs. Crass was their landlord, cleaning lady, cook, and the leader of the small gang. As far as the men could tell, she was also completely insane. She tolerated no vulgarity. According to her, she absolutely abhorred violence. She enforced her rules by slapping offenders with her wooden cooking spoon, cursing, and plotting the occasional murder. The men had learned to tolerate their crazy leader, since she had never steered them wrong.

“Did you get it?” she asked.

“We got it, Mrs. Crass, just like you said,” the huge thug answered, dumping the box onto the floor with a thump. The smaller grunt winced, as the big thug laughed. The box let out a loud growl.

“Oh, my, isn’t it lovely,” she said, looking at the blackened box, as if it were a delicate vase. She then casually walked over and soundly smacked the thug across the temple with her wooden spoon.

“Didn’t you think that it should be handled with care? Hmm? You dimwitted worthless sack of vomit.” She smacked him across the head with the spoon again for good measure.

The sight of the elderly lady reaching up to hit the monstrous man with a wooden spoon caused the other large man to snicker, which rewarded him with a spooning across the knuckles.

“Well, at least you got it, and you managed to get it here without breaking it or opening it. That, in and of itself, is a miracle,” said Mrs. Crass with a broad grin.

She put down her spoon and brought the thugs milk and cookies on three separate small trays. All three sat in a row on chairs a bit too small for two of them. They each dunked their cookies in the milk. She really did make fantastic cookies. Even street thugs could appreciate that.

“So whatcha gonna do with it, Mrs. Crass?”

“Do with it?” squeaked Crass. One could never tell when she would have a mood swing or just smack someone with a spoon for no reason. She smacked the man for no reason.

“I’ll find out if this weapon is worth three years of searching, hiding, and stealing. If it is, then I’ll kill the man who ruined my life. I’ve spent decades hunting him, but he always gets away. Well, now I finally have something that he can’t squirm away from,” she said.

The three goons looked at each other. They all shrugged. They rarely understood their leader’s actions.

All three thugs watched as Mrs. Crass carefully handled the black box. She opened it and pulled out a cage. The cage appeared to be made of silver, but the bars glowed faintly as well. The thugs pushed against each other behind Mrs. Crass, trying to peer in the cage. Despite the fact that they could see through the bars, no light penetrated the cage. A pair of half-crescent slits peered from inside.

“Kill the candles,” she said.

The sudden blackness made even the hardened thugs nervous. As their eyes became used to the darkness, a nervous feeling oozed into all of them, like spiders inching down their backs. It took a while to identify the phenomenon, but it finally dawned on them: the thing absorbed light. Normally the goons were too stupid to get nervous, but something felt wrong, very wrong. All four of them continued to stare.

Mrs. Crass collected herself first. “Do you agree that you are trapped?” she whispered to the cage.

The thugs looked at one another in the dim light. She looked at the cage when speaking.

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A voice came from the darkness of the cage. “Aye” was all it said.

“Do you agree to transfer your servitude to me if I release you?” she asked, sweat trickling down her temple.

“What be your demands of servitude, mum?”

“Three tasks of my choosing,” said Mrs. Crass.

“One!” shot back the caged thing.

“Two tasks, then you get your freedom,” said Mrs. Crass.

A low growl came from the cage. The cage strained outwardly but remained intact.

“I agree.”

“Do I have your oath? Your oath as a bozrac that you will obey until the tasks are completed?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Mrs. Crass trembled as she slowly unlatched the box. Two glowing small golden crescent-shaped eyes came out of the cage.

The eyes then moved in a blur of speed and appeared next to one of the small glasses of milk. A lapping noise ensued, though they could see only the strange golden glow of the two half crescents.

“It’s been a bitter year of entrapment. It’s a long year when you can’t have a spot of milk.” It sounded almost cheery.

Mrs. Crass uncharacteristically gasped. The thugs had never seen her scared or excited. She seemed both. She had always acted like a senile, crazy, cantankerous old biddy as long as they had known her. For some reason, her excitement made them nervous.

“You are the bozrac?” she asked reverently.

A strange purring noise came from the direction of the milk. “I am a bozrac. I don’t believe I am the last, but, even for those of us from the abyss, we are few. I am Finneus. My friends call me Finn. I can’t say that gnome was all that friendly to me. He kept me in that bloody box for over a year.”

“Well, Mrs. Crass is surely your friend, Mr. Finn,” she said.

The eyes blinked.

Mrs. Crass felt an icy chill pass through her chest and stopped breathing for an instant. The creature had passed through her.

“Well, don’t you just have the nicest of words, Mrs. Leynstra Crass? But why use me for the schemes you’ve planned?”

Mrs. Crass croaked out a nervous “Oh.” No one had used her first name, Leynstra, for years. She had worked quite hard to make that name disappear. She had not uttered her own first name to a soul in over three decades, yet the creature had plucked Leynstra out of her mind as easily as an apple from a tree. She collected herself. The creature continued.

“I agreed to two requests, and then you’ll release me. I’m bound by oath, however much I’d like to break it. So tell me your two requests, or shall I extract them myself?” Finn asked.

The thugs sat quietly in the back of the room, too anxious to breathe. The darkness and confusing conversation was more than one of the thugs could handle. He ran to the fireplace, stirred up some embers, and relit a candle. He then relit the rest of the candles and let the glow grow till again he could see everything in the room. Neither Finneus nor Mrs. Crass said anything. The room looked exactly the same, except for the bozrac. When they looked at it, all but his glowing eyes remained hidden in blackness. The bozrac seemed to create its own darkness. Slowly the darkness around it dissolved and blurred. The inky darkness coalesced; a small black cat remained.

“Ah, material form, how quaint. You seem to know enough to keep your skin on the right side of your body. For now.”

“I have always thought it is better to prevent trouble than to deal with it once it is upon you,” said Mrs. Crass.

“Really? Obtaining me is a poor way to avoid trouble. Though you do seem to be cloaking your thoughts much better now. Perhaps you do know what you’re doing, but nobody is perfect. Right, Leynstra?” said Finn.

The goons stood dumbfounded, as the small cat and Mrs. Crass conversed. The cantankerous old lady never showed respect to anyone. The bozrac was nothing more than a cat? All that work and sneaking around for a stupid cat? Granted the cat could talk, but, still, it looked like an inky-black kitten, nothing more. Normally anything that even hinted at a lack of respect toward Mrs. Crass got a wooden spoon to the skull. Yet here she tried to walk quietly through a field of dry sticks with this creature.

“The instructions are to come only from me, not from these idiots,” she added quickly.

“I certainly hope so. They have only blank sheets where thoughts should hide,” he said.

“And you won’t hurt me as long as you are here?” she asked.

“I’ll try to play nice, but one oath a day is my limit,” he said.

“I’m serious, Finn. You may be out of your box, but I could make one request for you to go back inside, and that would be that. I’d ship you right to that gnome or worse. Now I want you to promise that you won’t hurt me,” she said, her voice quavering slightly.

The small fluffy cat vanished in a blur of black smoke, then appeared behind the thugs on the table, where it finished off another of their glasses of forgotten milk.

“As I said, I gave you an oath to release me, unless you would like me to bind it in blood?” asked the creature.

“With the promise you agree to all the conditions I’ve listed,” she said.

“Which one for the seal? Or did you bring three for me to have a selection? I’ll assume you’re not choosing yourself.”

“I have to choose now? But you haven’t done anything yet,” she said.

The thugs looked at each other nervously.

“I’ll make it easy on you. Which one of the louts dropped the crate on the ground?” he asked.

The thugs looked at one another. Two pointed at the largest of the three.

“Thanks, boys. Yah just saved your skins,” Finn said. The bozrac then pounced.

The man swatted at the little kitten, but his arms went directly through the creature. It was as if he were repelling fog. The head of the small cat melted directly into the man’s chest. The man screamed in agony and flailed on the ground. Each time his body rolled over the bozrac, its body would disappear in a puff of smoke, then reappear when he rolled onto his back again.

The thug rolled on the ground. The creature occasionally appeared from inside his chest, a sinister bloody smile on its face. The bozrac purred while killing the man, who gasped for air. Tears poured from his face. His body twitched in agony. He could not breathe. The other two goons normally would have thought it humorous—a grown man crying because of a small black kitten—but neither laughed. After two minutes, the small fluffy face of the bozrac emerged from the man’s chest. Blood dripped from the bozrac’s mouth.

“The deal is struck,” said the bozrac.

Mrs. Crass took control again, her usual anger pouring out at the two remaining thieves.

“You two just let Mrs. Crass do the thinking. Do what you’re told, and you’ll get everything you deserve. In the meantime, I have to figure out what to do.”