The Clock That Tick Tocked: Book One of the Shadow Auction Series

THE CLOCK THAT TICK-TOCKED
Shadow Auction Series: Book One
by Alden Cross

Some clocks tick forward.
This one remembers backward.

Fourteen-year-old Eli Grant doesn’t believe in haunted heirlooms, hidden vaults, or secret auctions selling things that shouldn’t exist. He just wants to survive another shift at his family’s fading auction house without getting yelled at by his sister, Ivy, or disappointing his grandfather again.

But when a strange children’s clock—Lot 27—is sold to a bidder who doesn’t blink, something shifts. Literally. Eli’s sketches start changing on their own. Time ticks in reverse. And the spirals showing up in his drawings don’t feel like art. They feel like… echoes.

Then he finds the invitation.

Scrawled in invisible ink and slipped into his sketchbook, the black Spiral card pulls Eli into a world he was never meant to see: the Shadow Auction, an underground relic market dealing in memory-bound objects and Spiral-warped artifacts. Among masked bidders and forbidden vaults, Eli sees it again—the clock—but this time, it’s not just strange. It’s alive. And it might be the last thing his mother touched before she vanished for good.

Now hunted by masked collectors, haunted by visions of a woman he can’t remember, and warned by people who definitely know more than they’re saying, Eli’s pulled deeper into a war he didn’t start. A war between secret factions—Society archivists, Vaultbound defectors, and Spiralborn operatives—each trying to claim control over the most dangerous relics on Earth.

And at the center of it all: Eli himself.

As the Spiral inside him begins to awaken, time fractures, memories collapse, and Eli discovers the truth his family buried: he wasn’t just born into the Spiral.

He might be bound to it.

The Spiral doesn’t choose you because you’re ready.
It chooses you because you’re fractured.

Perfect for fans of Stranger Things, The Night Circus, and The Maze Runner, The Clock That Tick-Tocked is the first relic-charged novella in the Shadow Auction Series: a cinematic, fast-paced, emotionally rich YA fantasy-thriller saga about memory, identity, and the secrets we leave behind.