The first warning is not a scream.
It's a pressure in the air, heavy enough to bend glass.
When a teenage boy is branded with a glowing spiral that burns straight through his soul, every mirror in his house cracks inward-revealing a corridor lined with chains and a hooded figure waiting on the other side. The Circle, the world's most elite psychic strike team, arrives within minutes... but this attack isn't possession.
It's a claim.
And Malachar-the entity speaking through the boy-knows each of them by shape, not by name.
As spirals ignite across the city, reflections lag behind their owners, and shadows smile with borrowed faces, the Circle races to track the intrusions. But every anchor they destroy only teaches Malachar how to build the next one faster. Each attempt is a rehearsal. Each breach, a lesson.
The spirals evolve.
The mirrors breathe.
And the ground itself begins to listen.
Charlotte Reigns sees the corridor everywhere she looks. Chains sway inches from her face. A hooded presence follows her in every reflection, offering her a place in its world of mirrors and unmaking. Sebastian feels every echo of suffering stitched into the glyphs, their grief heavy enough to drown him. Jaxson is stalked by his own shadow. And Kieran-already marked-is being rewritten from the inside out.
Malachar doesn't want a doorway.
He wants a vessel.
And the Circle is running out of candidates.
As corrupted glyphs evolve into spiraling maws across the rail yard and the river bends sideways under Malachar's command, the city begins to twist into one massive symbol-a spiral designed to collapse the Veil itself. If completed, every tether Malachar has ever touched will snap tight at once, turning thousands of people into anchors... or into something far worse.
To stop him, the Circle must learn an ancient flaw built into the earliest spirals: a sequence that can break the pattern from within. But every time they use it, Malachar learns. Every attempt risks turning the break against them.
And at the center of the nightmare, the corridor waits-chains humming, mirror doors awakening, and the hooded figure tracing a spiral in the air as if inviting Charlotte to step inside and close the door behind her.
A psychic entity born of unbound grief.
A city becoming a mouth with too many teeth.
A team pushed toward sacrifice with every breath.
The Circle has faced monsters before...
but never one that learns them.
Perfect for fans of The Conjuring, Stranger Things, Inception, and paranormal thrillers rooted in lore and psychic warfare, THE SPIRAL WITHOUT MERCY delivers relentless tension, evolving supernatural threat, and the unbreakable loyalty of a team fighting a force that rewrites reality from the inside out.
