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.