X would be playing in San Diego in three days, and the universe offered no indication of what had happened to Ryan. Lia had written poems for the kids at school until calluses marked her fingers, and she was fresh out of ideas.
In the early morning hours before sunlight emerged, young surfers rode their bicycles through the dark and quiet streets of Coronado, their surfboards tucked under their arms. Wide awake a good two hours earlier than usual, Lia faced waves of another kind: fear and uncertainty. The sinking truth was that while everyone else had drunk a fresh batch of a chimera’s potion, she was exactly what she knew herself to be: a fraud, her poems as worthless as a bucket full of pennies with holes in them.
For four long weeks, she’d written invocation upon invocation to Exene,
