Jake's father disappears while working on mysterious experiments with the obsessive, reclusive Oberon Venn.Jake is convinced Venn has murdered him. But the truth he finds at the snow-bound Wintercombe Abbey is far stranger ...The experiments concerned a black mirror, which is a portal to both the past and the future.Venn is not alone in wanting to use its powers. Strangers begin gathering in and around Venn's estate: Sarah - a runaway, who appears out of nowhere and is clearly not what she says, Maskelyne - who claims the mirror was stolen from him in some past century.There are others, a product of the mirror's power to twist time. And a tribe of elemental beings surround this isolated estate, fey, cold, untrustworthy, and filled with hate for humans.But of them all, Jake is hell-bent on using the mirror to get to the truth.Whatever the cost, he must learn what really happened to his father.