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"Do you have a name?" Aaron asks, after an hour and a half. The demon hasn't stopped moving for even a second of that time.
The demon shakes its head. "As a rule, demons do not."
"I'm not going to keep calling you the demon. Give me something to work with here."
It blinks twice, though it doesn't look up from its writing. "Um, Alexander is fine."
Aaron nods. Alexander the coffee demon. It fits, in an odd sort of way.
But then, everything about this is odd.
xxx
Alexander isn't going away.
Most demons leave the site of summoning within a day, to go back to the infernal realm from whence they came. (In Aaron's experience, this usually means, "I don't know where I'm going either, but don't follow me.") But it's been a week, and to all appearances, Alexander is here to stay.
Aaron actually doesn't mind that much. His homework load is halved now that he has the literal energizer bunny in his dorm and willing to help him, and Alexander doesn't take much effort to deal with; sit him at a desk and provide paper, pens, and the occasional cup of coffee, and he's fine for a day straight. It's just really weird that he has a demon for a roommate.
Eh. Stranger things have happened to Aaron before. He deals with it.
xxx
It's amazing what the human mind can get used to, provided with constant exposure and time. After a month, Aaron barely even registers Alexander's presence.
This becomes something of a problem when the school's bureaucratic error is fixed and Aaron finds himself with not only Alexander, but also an actual human roommate.
James Madison walks into their shared dorm on the first day of the new semester and stops dead in the middle of the room. "What is that?"
It takes Aaron a moment to figure out what he's referring to. "Oh, that's Alexander. I summoned him by accident a few months ago. He's a little weird but you get used to him."
Madison skeptically raises one eyebrow, but doesn't say anything.
Yeah. Can't say he blames him.
Alexander is a skeletal figure, with coffee-bean skin and glow-in-the-dark eyes and fire instead of hair, who is currently muttering to himself in what could be either Spanish or Hebrew but is probably a mixture of both, while writing furiously. Aaron would be skeptical too.
xxx
But Aaron was right. Madison does get used to him, and it barely even takes two weeks.
He walks into his dorm to find the two of them collaborating on an essay — "A set of essays," Madison explains, "we've got the Federalist Papers as a working title but we aren't really sure yet."
Aaron just sits down at his own desk and gets working on his homework. He'll ask later.
xxx
…except he doesn't.
Aaron goes to sleep that night, and the next morning Alexander is gone, a faint smell of coffee and brimstone and a stack of handwritten papers that's as tall as Madison the only evidence he was ever there.
Aaron misses him more than he ever expected to.
xxx
Years go by. Alexander becomes a story to tell at bars, a memory that sometimes Aaron is half-certain he imagined.
Madison publishes the Federalist Papers, keeps the working title. Aaron does read them; they're brilliant. Alexander was brilliant.
Aaron deals with it, moves on in the only way he knows how — he's sarcastic and flippant, cracks jokes about the coffee demon he summoned in college who wouldn't go away, how he's half-scared Alexander will pop up out of the blue with a "Missed me?" and another stack of essays.
The people around him laugh, but they don't listen hard enough to tell that he's only half joking.
xxx
The advantage to being a summoner is that sometimes your children are summoners too, and the advantage to being the father of one Theodosia Burr is that she's intelligent enough to notice things most people wouldn't.
Aaron comes home from work to find his eight-year-old daughter sitting on the kitchen floor, in front of a pentagram made of coffee beans.
Sitting across from her, talking animatedly about taxes, is Alexander. His hair has gone from red fire to blue fire at some point over the last ten years, but it is unmistakably him.
He is not holding a stack of essays, but when he sees Aaron, he does half-smile at him and say, "Miss me?"