On a snowy night in February--at the improbable corner in lower Manhattan where Waverly Place intersects itself--a photographer named Leo meets Veronica, the beautiful, enigmatic daughter of an illusionist who has been swallowed up in time. Veronica is looking for an appetite, a savior. And she is soon leading Leo into a dangerous labyrinth of delights that winds beneath and beyond a luminously transformed city of underground streams, dragonpoints, and mystically altered time. At the frozen apex of an extraordinary winter, Veronica has enticed Leo into a wonderful, terrible world...and away from his ordinary life forever.