sky blue pink
Ric Perrott has spent his life telling stories—first as excuses to his mother, then in lines of code, and now with words on the page. A lifelong gamer, musician, and voracious reader, he finally decided it was time to let the dice roll and share the tales that have been questing through his imagination for decades. The Family is his debut novel from Mirelune Press.
When he’s not writing, Ric can be found strumming a guitar, holding a controller, or losing track of time in a fantastic book. He lives in Florida with his family, a Goldendoodle named Milo, and more unfinished ideas than he’ll ever honestly admit to.
sky blue pink
Missouri, 1991. Willow Mitchell spent eight years turning her runaway sister into a legend.
Morgan was the girl who climbed into a boy’s pickup with her hair wild in the wind and never looked back. Now Willow’s fresh out of high school and going nowhere, which is right where her mother wants her. When a package arrives from Louisiana, she is left holding what remains of Morgan—who has a favor to ask.
Coming Soon From Mirelune Press in Paperback, eBook, Hardcover and Audiobook formats
sky blue pink
Willow
I was fifty-seven minutes into my first shift at the Dairy Queen when the chocolate soft serve wound up in my pants.
Not a metaphor.
From the belt to the cuffs, my brand-new khakis looked like I’d suffered a spectacular bathroom emergency. My fingers were still wrapped around the handle of the machine when I turned to Rita.
“Well, that’s one way to make an impression,” she said, not glancing up from the register. She’d been running this place forever, and everything I needed to know about her was tattooed on her right forearm: a dripping cherry-topped sundae surrounded by pink stars and the phrase Fudge it! Life’s a Swirl in the kind of cursive only found in a sixth-grader’s diary.
I didn’t move. A red-and-white paper hat squashed my bramble of blonde curls, while chocolate pooled in my sneakers. An eight-year-old customer laughed so hard, she choked on her strawberry Twizzler, and I had what my guidance counselor called a moment of clarity: Five years from now, I’d still be pulling soft serve while everyone else got the hell out of this town.
Jeffrey barreled over from the fryer like he’d witnessed a crime and nearly slipped in the chocolate puddle. Above his head, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face glared down from a promotional poster, all sunglasses and determined jawline. Terminator 2: Judgment Day—Coming Soon. Someone had pasted a Blizzard cup over the shotgun.
“What did you do?” he whined.
I looked at the cone in my other hand. Then at my pants. Then back at him. “I pulled the handle.”
“Did you prime it first?”
“Prime it?”
He stared at me like I’d violated the first law of soft serve, then looked to Rita. “You showed her how to prime it, right?”
Rita didn’t stop counting singles. “May have left that part out.”
“May have?”
“Willow’s a smart girl. Figured she’d figure it out.”
That coming from an old friend of my mother’s who once told her I had “more curiosity than sense.” She wasn’t wrong.
The kid was still wheezing, and now her mother was laughing too. She wore a faded red UMSL sweatshirt that was probably ten years old, and I wondered if she’d graduated or bought it at the Goodwill. The cone dripped onto my wrist, lopsided and sad. I walked it over to the counter.
“On the house,” I said.
The girl’s hands shot out and grabbed it before I could change my mind. Her mom blinked.
Jeffrey’s voice went up an octave. “Is she allowed to do that?”
Rita finally glanced over. The cone. My pants. The chocolate now spreading toward the register in a slow, unstoppable tide. “Jeff, fix the machine.”
“But—”
“Fix it.”
He muttered and yanked open the side panel.
The girl licked her cone and shouted, “Thanks, Willow,” like we were best friends.
Her mom steered her toward the door, still grinning. “Good luck, honey.”
It wasn’t clear if she meant with the job or with life, but I appreciated the sentiment either way.
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The Family
When book-smart and broke Esther Holland is recruited into the Family—a secret sorority where beautiful women master the art of deception. She is christened “Star,” and plunged into a world of glamour and luxury, but when an assignment goes wrong, she uncovers the organization’s dark secrets. Armed with only a notebook and her talent for noticing what she shouldn’t, Star learns that in the Family, asking the wrong questions can be deadly.
Available in Paperback and eBook formats
The Family
Prologue
The stupid purple pen was dying again. Esther shook it harder this time, and the ink sputtered back to life. It came from the cheap plastic set her sister had given her last year on her fourteenth birthday. None of the pens had ever worked that well, but she loved them anyway.Amber light from her bedside lamp bathed the room in a golden warmth. Fantasy paperbacks lay scattered across the floor, spines cracked and pages softened, while a pink Bluetooth speaker sat next to her on the bed, playing a lo-fi indie song.
She paused and stared at the ink-smudged paper. She’d written the same sentence and crossed it out three times: How do you tell someone you miss them if you’ll never see them again?
A faint tink at the window caught her ear. Soft at first, like rain, but then sharper, more insistent. She set her notebook on the pillow, jumped down, and stepped to the sill.
Outside, barely enough moonlight fell over the rusted fire escape for her to make out the hooded figure crouching there. A face peered at her from the shadows.
Her heart thumped.
The figure waved.
Esther didn’t care if her mom heard. She threw the window up so hard it rattled, then crawled halfway over the ledge before Amelia could say, “Careful, you dork.” She landed in a tangle, knees banging against metal and hair whipping in her eyes. But none of that mattered because Amelia was back. In the flesh, and her arms wrapped around Esther like the strongest safety harness in the world.
“Missed you too, Sprout.” Her voice was rough and more alive than the memory Esther replayed every night in her dreams. She squeezed tighter.
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Pick Up The Pieces
For ten years, they’ve been voices through headphones—friends who’ve never met. Now their Dungeon Master is dying, and three strangers are crossing states for one final session. Some stories are too important to leave unfinished.
Available in Paperback and eBook
Pick Up The Pieces
Roll For Initiative
The campaign binders fill the top shelf of my study. Vol. 1: The Ashen Prophecy. Vol. 4: The Sundered Throne. Seven volumes in total, the last one still half-empty. I run my fingers along their worn spines, Eldyrane’s complete history recorded in careful script. My hands shake more now, and my wedding ring jostles around when I reach up to straighten them. A task that once took a few minutes now demands the better part of the morning. The cancer has taken my strength, my weight, and my future. But these stories remain unaffected.
The doctor says I’ve got weeks, maybe a month. Time to organize my affairs, but not to finish what matters. I pull my cardigan up around my shoulders. To think, this sweater used to feel tight on me, now I could probably wear it like a straitjacket.
My office is filled with the scents of the medicinal teas Ellen insists will help and the musty perfume of books I’ve collected over decades. The morning light refracts through the stained glass, illuminating the room with colors that dance like the ethereal sprites I once described to the guys.
I pull open the drawer where I keep my dice. They rattle against each other, that familiar, hollow sound that once signaled possibility. Now they sound like bones.
“And so the Silver Conclave falls,” I say to myself. “Its towers crumbling into the Endless Sea as Lord Vathek’s laughter echoes across the waves…”