The Summoning by Carol Wolf

clean pair of jeans and a shirt, gave my hair a few licks and went out to see what the demon was up to. The living room smelled heavenly. The table was set. The kitchen smelled… different.
    Barefoot, dressed in his jeans and his big new blue silk shirt, open at the throat and the baggy sleeves rolled up, and wearing an apron I’d never seen before covering him from chest to knees, he stood in my kitchen hovering over three pans on the stove. It seemed, too, that we now had a toaster. He’d washed his hair, and trimmed it as well. It looked neat and soft, curling a little just at the ends. He smelled really good.
    Coffee was brewing in a brand new coffee brewing gizmo. His air of happy industry evaporated as I walked passed him without a word, opened cupboards, pulled open the fridge, looked in a larder I’d never used for the source of the new smells. He flattened himself against the cabinets, smiling a stupid, scared, fake smile. There was food everywhere. The fridge was full. There were green things in the bins.
    “What have you done?” I asked him.
    He straightened up a little. “I went grocery shopping. It’s just down the street.”
    “I know where it is,” I said. “With what money?”
    “It’s there on the table,” he said, pointing with a brand shiny new cooking implement whose name I did not know. He followed me to the table. There was a pile of bills laid out, mostly hundreds, some twenties, a ten, some ones, and a little change. On top of them were some receipts. “I spent a hundred and seventy dollars and sixty-three cents,” he said. “That’s the rest of it.”
    “The rest of what?” I asked him.
    “The money from Tommy’s wallet,” he reminded me. “Last night? There was eight hundred dollars in it.”
    “Eight hundred…?”
    “It’s all accounted for.” He backed away to the stove, made things sizzle, made more heavenly smells.
    He was distracting me. I said, “Is that breakfast?”
    “If you wish.”
    I wandered back out to the table. “That money isn’t mine,” I told him. “You stole it fair and square.”
    He turned back to me. “It is yours. Everything I have is yours. I’m not allowed to have anything of my own.”
    “Is that another one of your rules?”
    He gave another of his shrugs and turned away, got out plates, started dishing things onto them. I went and sat down, shoving the money and receipts into a pile at the end of the table. “I didn’t make the rules,” he said, with an edge. He put a brimming plate in front of me. “But I certainly know them.” He set a mug of hot coffee by my hand. The food smelled really good.
    I was torn between defending my Spartan and ascetic space, and the glorious smells that wafted from the plate in front of me. “You’re just taking over here, aren’t you?” I might have sounded more sincere if my mouth wasn’t already full.
    He smiled. “You’ll get used to it.”
    It would certainly be easy to get used to him. The coffee was almost not bad. And gods, he could cook. “Where’s yours?” I asked him.
    He brought his plate then, stripped off the apron and sat down across from me in the place he had taken the previous night.
    I sipped my coffee and dug in to the egg-and-shrimp thing with yellow sauce dripped over it, leaking mushrooms and tomatoes and peppers. There was crunchy buttered toast, and fried potatoes with onions and something else in there that he’d put on my plate, and slices of banana in a dish with a sugary brown sauce. I eyed him as he joined me. “What, you were going to eat in the kitchen?”
    “It’s usual,” he told me, a little prickly, picking up his fork.
    “On the floor? In the corner? With the rats?”
    He put his fork down again. “If you wish.”
    “Don’t be an idiot.” I took another bite. “Oh gods, this is good.”
    He ducked his head and had some himself. “I wondered,” he said with diffidence, “if you only ate meat… but last night… and the