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"You know what I hate about your creepy ghost stuff?" she said comfortably, lifting up one leg and stretching it behind her crane-like -- Jace never really got perturbed at all. "What if the ghost's just like, all chillin', and you're just being an a*****e sending it to hell or something? What if it's the ghost of a guy and he just wants to hang around in chimneys and stuff?"

Secretly she really wanted the dagger.

"Yeah, I bet all the chick ghosts just want to see you in the nudey and laugh at your big fat butt," said Jace, but it seemed a little weak -- she chained up her bike outside the shop and stuck her hands in her pockets, and trailed after Antony like a little baby duckling.

"I'm not tied up with boobs," she said eventually. "It's just -- stupid, like, remember how much more fun we had when you and Iggy were my age? Remember how we were gonna go find the Holy Grail? Now you just kill ghosts and weird stuff happens to you and you're all a loner."

"Strawberry'n cream with jimmies," she said, dissatisfiedly, "and nuts and chocolate sauce and sprinkles." She was already rummaging in her pocket for change. Obviously her preference was still not to see the icecream underneath the weight of all the toppings. "Why are you coming to eat icecream with me when you're all a big important loser now?"

That shut her up for a few moments. Jace sat in front of him and dug into her icecream immediately: the silence around them was a little awkward after his admission, and she stopped herself from saying anything mainly by shovelling icecream into her mouth as fast as she could.

She pushed a few long spikes of red hair out of her forehead. Eventually, she said: "You and Iggy and Rel are mine, and Iggy likes everyone, so Iggy kind of doesn't count, I guess. Chris is Rory and Wisp's friend. You and Rel are, you know... like, mine."

She spooned icecream into her mouth and sucked at the jimmies absently. She seemed desperate to colour her tongue psychedelic colours. "You're all growing," she said sullenly, "only I'm left. And -- okay you can't tell Uncle Jack but M.B. has, like, started to go on really retarded blind dates. It is so ********. She is like ninety, why does she want to go on blind dates? And you guys are all going to get dating obsessed. You're already, like, kind of a *****."

The silence was even sullener. "No," she said. Then she brightened and added -- "Rudolfo totally hit on me. What was with that? I nearly puked nine times out my nose."

He was being nice to her because he was afraid he would lose her. The feeling was strangely empowering, but it was also strangely frightening: the fact that Antony would go to lengths to preserve a tiresome friendship, do things he probably wouldn't enjoy, the fact that Antony wasn't bulletproof. Antony wasn't an adult. Yet. Antony was not impenetrably all-powerful.

"Let's go to your place and spar out in the back yard," she said, "with knives and s**t!"

Maybe it was mutual.