Book excerpt: On a snowy night in February, at the improbable point in Lower Manhattan where Waverly Place intersects Waverly Place, a photographer named Leo meets Veronica for the first time. Starkly beautiful, mysterious, aloof, she leads him into a world where illusion blends seamlessly with reality—a luminously transformed city where powerful underground streams crisscross beneath the streets, a city of dragonpoints and Tibetan mysticism where real time is magically altered. Ten years have passed since Veronica’s father, the famous magician Albin White, disappeared while performing a dangerous feat of time travel before a packed theater audience. White’s disappearance was no accident: he was sabotaged by his apprentice Starwood, who interfered at a critical moment and sent him hurtling into the past, free to explore other eras but with no means of returning to the present. Until Veronica finds Leo…