Fortunately for Jonathan's feet, it turned out the Campbells had left a medium sized metal tub in the yard behind the orphanage, and Abigail remembered seeing it and suggested it to Jonathan as an alternative to dangling his toes in their eating bowls. It was a bit of a trick filling it from a faucet, but with a significant amount of splashing, supplemented with a fair bit of cursing, Jonathan persevered and was rewarded with enough water for a warm foot bath.

It wasn't quite heaven, but it sure felt good.

While he was doing that, Abigail trotted off upstairs to start moving her things into one of the bedrooms, leaving Jonathan alone for the first significant amount of time since he'd been summoned.

For the first several moments, he reveled in the blissful quiet and feeling of the warm water easing the ache in his feet. But after a couple minutes of sitting doing nothing, he couldn't help but pay attention to his emotional state.

Despite the brave face he'd put on for Abigail earlier, he wasn't okay. Like a bundle of electricity in his chest, the stress that he'd been dutifully ignoring as he tried to distract himself with all the little crises that kept arising suddenly arced outwards. He bent over his knees, hands gripping them tight enough he vaguely wondered if he would bruise as some of the fear and sorrow he'd been bottling up slipped out and rocked through his system.

Torn from everything and everyone he'd ever known. Saddled with responsibility for a child, when he'd never needed to worry about anyone but himself before. A world that was simultaneously so familiar and yet so foreign that every little thing put him off balance. His one saving grace—magic—possibly killing him by inches.

A grating sob tore its way out of his chest, and Jonathan clamped down. This wasn't helping anything, Abigail absolutely couldn't see him like this…

Telling himself that just ticked the stress up a notch. His body quivered and trembled under his slew of emotions, and the best he could do was try to keep his hiccups and occasional sobs quiet.

He wanted to hide under a blanket. He wanted to burn this damn orphanage to the ground. He wanted to walk through the door and see his friends, eat a bowl of cup ramen—or really anything that wasn't a damn sandwich—sleep on his mattress, go to his job, just live a normal life.

And it was all out of reach, reduced to things he could only experience in dreams or fantasies.

Well, he supposed he could technically hide under a blanket and burn the orphanage to the ground. But even in his current state, that seemed like a poor life choice.

Jonathan lost track of time as he simply hung on and tried to outlast the tangle of emotions that were assailing him. Thankfully, Abigail didn't pop up out of nowhere, and at long last, when the water around his feet had faded from warm to tepid to room temperature, he took a shuddering breath and sat back.

He was through, for now. He'd probably not seen the last of these emotions, and honestly he still felt like crap, but now that they'd had their way with him for a bit, they'd subsided. Jonathan pulled his feet out of the tub, sluiced the water off them as best he could, grimacing at how pruney and cold his toes now were, and then stood.

It was time to track down Abigail. He had a whole mountain of problems he couldn't do anything about, but so help him he was going to conjure a pair of pants.

A little while later, Jonathan reveled in the feeling of a modern-day pair of jeans. Maybe magic was slowly killing him, but these pants? Completely worth it.

Over the next several days, Abigail and Jonathan fell into a routine. After conjuring breakfast in the morning, the two of them would continue combing the attic and grounds for useful items. So far the attic had been a bit of a disappointment, but they were able to scrounge up a working rocking chair, two buckets—one of which was so encrusted with grime that Jonathan stuck it right outside and promptly tried to forget it existed—enough funny-smelling, mismatched sheets for three beds, an assortment of books Jonathan couldn't read—Abigail perused a few, and informed him with a scrunched up face that they were excruciatingly boring old-timey fiction—and a large cache of paper, most of which appeared to be ancient receipts.

On the grounds of the orphanage, they were able to get into a shed which was still decently well-stocked with gardening tools and a large selection of firewood. Jonathan figured he could probably cook something in the wood stove now, not that there had been any reason to do so without any real ingredients. It was good to know they had a way to heat some of the building if the weather turned, though. Jonathan had asked Abigail how the Campbells had kept everything warm and received a blank stare in response. There weren't any vents or radiators, and very few of the rooms had a fireplace, so that was a puzzle.

A little before noon, Jonathan would conjure something useful before Abigail headed over to Mr. Geiller's for lunch and afternoon lessons in magic. Depending on when she returned, he would do a second conjuring of useful items.

So far these useful conjurations had included shoes for himself, soap, a spare pair of pants, a set of towels, a pair of pillows, a butane lighter, and a long strand of rope that he strung up as a makeshift drying rack for their clothes.

While Abigail was at Mr. Geiller's, Jonathan typically washed clothes, cleaned dishes, cleaned the living spaces they frequented most often, and practiced enlivening his magic. Although he was getting better and better with magic—to the point where he required very little effort to manifest the red smoke around Abigail, and was getting much more consistent activating hot water even when she wasn't around—he wasn't doing so well with the cleaning. Even with only two people using a fraction of the space and basically never cooking, it was still more than he was able to stay on top of. Sadly, he also didn't think he'd be able to hire help anytime soon, given his inability to make money.

Once Abigail returned, they would eat dinner together and talk. This typically involved an extended rant about Mr. Geiller, who according to Abigail spent more time chewing her out than actually teaching her anything useful. The lunches he was serving her were also typically populated by strange, non-sandwich dishes, which did not make Abigail happy. Jonathan made the mistake of retorting once that at least she had lunches to eat—he was mostly subsisting on leftovers from the prior meals, or piggy-backing snacks alongside the breakfasts he conjured—and she bombarded him with lurid descriptions of the weird fruits and such that she'd been subjected to.

Then, about a week after his summoning, Abigail didn't wake up in the morning.

Jonathan didn't think anything of it, initially. Both of them tended to get out of bed just whenever they awoke naturally, so that morning he got out of bed, noted that Abigail was still tucked into her blanket nest, and went to take a walk around the orphanage to raise his body temperature while doing his enlivening magic practice.

A couple hours passed, and Jonathan was getting quite hungry, so he finally decided to go and wake her.

"Rise and shine, Abigail!" he called as he entered the dormitory they were sharing. She didn't respond, and he walked over to her bed and shook her, then peeked in the blankets.

She looked awfully pale, and although she was asleep her face was kind of scrunched up like she was in pain.

"Abigail? You alright?" Jonathan patted her cheek. She was like ice! "Abigail, Abigail I need you to wake up! Come on, kiddo!"

After far too long, she finally frowned, stirred, and cracked her eyes. "Jonathan…?"

"Hey, you don't look too good, Abigail. How are you feeling?"

"'M exhausted," she slurred, and her eyes slumped shut.

Shit, this was not good. "Abigail, are you sick? Come on, I need you to stay awake for a bit here."

Her eyes slitted open again. "Wha?"

"I don't know what sickness looks like in your world, Abigail. Do you feel like you have a cold? Is that a thing? What are you feeling?"

"Too many questions. I'm cold, and…tired."

Really, really not good! "Abigail, I'm going to bundle you up in a few more blankets, and run over to Mr. Geiller's house real quick, okay? Try to stay awake for me, please?"

"Mm."

Good enough. Jonathan grabbed the top blankets from his own bed and tucked them in tightly around Abigail, then booked it out the door and down to the first floor. He threw on his shoes and ran for Mr. Geiller's house.

"Mr. Geiller!" he shouted, as he raced through the archway leading into the neighbor's yard. "Mr. Geiller, damn it, get out here!"

The man in question stumbled onto his porch in a ratty bathrobe and once more brandishing his medallion. "Damn it, boy, did you not listen when I told you to stay off my property?!"

"It's an emergency! There's something wrong with Abigail! She wasn't waking up, and when I went to get her, she was extremely cold and lethargic even though she was wrapped up in a bunch of blankets."

"Anthrax take it, I didn't expect her to start to fade so soon."

"Do you think—wait, you were expecting this?!"

"Simmer down, boy. I didn't think she'd get hit so hard quite so fast, but I forgot how young she is."

"What's wrong with her?!"

"She's over-extended. I've been feeding her foods that are good for magic replenishment—" Huh, maybe that explained some of Abigail's unhappiness with the lunches Mr. Geiller served "—but you must be drawing more than I expected."

"Wait, this is somehow my fault?"

"Stupid, maladjusted demons," Mr. Geiller muttered very much not under his breath. Jonathan glared at him. "No, it's not your fault, per se, but you remember how you made a contract with Abigail? Ever wonder what made that binding?"

"Um, no, actually. I made that contract a few minutes after being whisked out of my world and facing down some sort of demon monster thing, so I kind of figured it was just magic."

"Well, it is magic, right enough. The reason demons don't just go wreaking havoc after being summoned is because they can't exist in our reality without a contract. The contract constrains them in unnatural ways, but it also connects them to a living being—their summoner—and ensures that they are able to persist alongside mortals instead of naturally returning to their realm."

"But I'm a human! I'm not from the Infernal Abyss!"

Mr. Geiller waved a hand—the hand he was holding his medallion in, which made Jonathan tense—then frowned and stuck the medallion in the pocket of his bathrobe. "We still haven't determined what exactly you are, but even if you're a full-blooded human you still manifested through a demonic summoning ritual, and the contract is baked into the ritual. You're bound by it just as tightly as any ordinary demon. Look, the important thing here is that the higher level of demon summoned, the greater the strain on the natural magic of the summoner. That's why you don't see summoners calling up hordes of demons and overrunning countries or what-have-you. They'd die first."

"Abigail is dying?!"

"Calm down! We're all dying! She's just doing it a little faster than she should. I'll come take a look at her, but I expect she has at least a few days if we don't do anything, and probably more if we do. This isn't the end of the world."

Jonathan ground his teeth together. "Then let's go! And it kind of is the end of the world for me, since if she dies I end up in the Infernal Abyss which I hear is not very human-friendly!"

"Oh, huh, that's true. You should still take a deep breath and calm down, though. You're not doing yourself any favors there."

"I'll be at the orphanage, caring for a sick nine-year-old whenever you're ready to join us," Jonathan managed to force out through grit teeth, then spun on his heel and started jogging back to Abigail.

He'd be damned if he was going to let Abigail die, even if that meant wrestling Mr. Geiller's medallion away and gaining his help by force.