Absence Of Light: Ryan's Story
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About this ebook
Ryan McGregor’s whole life changed the day he met Serenity Richards.
Not only did he learn the truth about who and what he really is, but he found a love in her that he never even knew was possible.
But she’s missing now and with each day that passes without her, the darkness threatening to take hold. Showing him the very part of his life that he’s been doing everything in his power to escape.
Everyone has a story, a life lived before a person or event comes along, leaving their mark on it and changing it forever.
In Love United you met the man desperate to leave his mark on the world. The hybrid that was so affected by love that he went against everything he had ever known or believed in.
This is his story. The story of Ryan before Serenity.
And the story that years later that threatens to leave him living in a world without the one thing he desperately needs.
The light.
Melyssa Winchester
Melyssa Winchester is a mother of four from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. When she’s not knee deep in adolescent awesomeness, she’s falling in love, one book boyfriend and girlfriend at a time. She is a lover of all things romance and will forever believe in a real and true happily ever after.When she’s not off being a mom or writing you can find her doing one of two things. Reading or buried under the covers watching Supernatural, Sons Of Anarchy or Veronica Mars.Melyssa is currently working on Through The Storm (Count On Me #7), along with Tempered Grace (Love United Series #6) and the standalone title Remembering Sunday.You can find her on the web, either at her personal site, Facebook (which she just might have an obsession with) or Twitter (@WinchesterBooks) where she talks incessantly about her kids, her writing and all things book boyfriend related.
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Black & Blue The Space In Between Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Fall Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRemembering Sunday Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
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Absence Of Light - Melyssa Winchester
Absence of Light
Ryan’s Story
Before The Light #2
Absence of Light (Ryan’s Story)
Before the Light #2
By
Melyssa Winchester
Smashwords Copyright| 2014 Melyssa Winchester
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names; characters; places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Cover Image Copyright: Karelnoppe @ Shutterstock
Cover Image Design: Melyssa Winchester
Never think about something wrong you did in the past. Always look forward with your head high. Have no regrets.
– Jared Leto
Prologue
Back Where It All Began
Idle hands are the devil’s playthings.
Serenity has been missing for over a month and despite my claims to the contrary, there is nothing but truth in the above statement. I’ve been doing everything I can to keep myself grounded, going so far as to stay away from everything, but it doesn’t help. I can feel myself slipping.
In moments of absolute quiet, like what I find myself in now with no outlet, I’m forced to remember things better left forgotten. A time in my life that I wish I could just close my eyes and wish away. I can never do that though and as the memories are starting to prove, it isn’t just one particular time in my life that I want to banish. It’s all of it.
At least the life I lived before Serenity Richards came to be a part of it.
You see, I’m not your average guy. I might be able to walk and talk like one, even look like on, but under the surface there is so much that will always separate me from every other human walking the planet.
I’m not one of them. I’m not one of you.
Wait, that’s not coming out right at all. Let me start over.
I’m human, for the most part. I was born to a human mother and lived in the same house pretty much my entire life. I did the same things every other kid on the block did, but there’s something that lives inside me that isn’t visible in anyone else.
I’m part demon.
I know what you’re thinking. This guy has completely lost his mind and honestly, I don’t blame you for thinking it. Trust me, I wish this was me making up a bunch of horseshit and feeding it to you. The reality is, there isn’t a damn bit of this that’s made up or part of some elaborate ruse designed to pull the wool over your eyes.
I am what I have admitted to being. No matter how much I wish it wasn’t true and that things had happened differently.
It started when my mom decided she was sick and tired of being lonely and went trolling at the bar. At least that’s how she tells it every chance she gets. She had been determined to head out with a few of her girlfriends, get drunk off her ass, meet some random guys and end the night possibly hooking up with one of them.
Yeah I know. My mother, she’s a real saint.
She did what she set out to do, but she got a whole lot more than she bargained for in the process.
Enter Daemon, my sperm donor or the way the rest of the world views it, my father.
To hear her tell it, he appeared like any other human guy would. He chatted her up for a while, eventually pulling her away from her friends and getting her to focus her attention solely on him. I’m pretty sure knowing my mom, it wasn’t all that hard for him. She never did have much of an attention span. I have no doubt when faced with a guy that looks the way my father did, she had no issue at all walking away from her friends in order to garner one on one time with him.
As she predicted before she even got to the bar, she ended up spending the night with Daemon. It was only in the early hours of the morning that she learned just who she’d laid down with.
Most would think learning that you just ended up spending the night with a demon, a being made purely of hell, would be enough to scare you off, but most people aren’t my mom. Instead of running, she embraced it. That’s where it all started though I didn’t realize it until years later. By embracing Daemon so easily, she had decided my fate before I even came into existence.
In an attempt to appear like the best damn demon lover she could be, my mother invited her paramour to come live with her, accepting that he would need to be in and out at all hours and would sometimes bring unsavory people and things home in an effort to feed the hunger that lived inside him. For a while according to her, it worked too. Daemon came and went as he pleased and she put up with all of it. At least she did until the day I came into the world.
My old man’s free ride had come to an end now that there was a new mouth to feed. She expected things of him that most human men can’t even live up to. As much as I hate him, I gotta say, he did the right thing splitting, demon or not. It’s half the reason I did the same thing when Lucifer came for me. Living with my mother was not easy.
I don’t remember much of the early years, only having her memories and Lucifer’s to go on, but it seems right from the minute she pushed me out, she hated me. People speak of living in hellholes. Well I can honestly say, after all the time that’s passed, I had my first experience living in one before I was even born. Corinne McGregor didn’t have a mothering bone in her body and even now, twenty-three years later, she still doesn’t.
According to Lucifer, the minute she was given the okay to bring me home, he watched over me because he didn’t trust the woman his confidante had laid down with and after everything I’ve learned since, I can see why. At first I thought he watched over me because in the end he knew he would use me, but that wasn’t the case. If he wanted to use me he was going to have to make sure that I lived long enough for it to happen.
Corinne was a smoker. She always had one of those things hanging from her lips. I didn’t need Lucifer or even her to tell me about that, I’d seen it enough in all the old pictures I found. What I didn’t know was that practically from the time she brought me through the front door of our house, she was using those smokes to burn me. At first it wasn’t anything intentional, just ashes falling as she was feeding me, but as time went on, she physically put them to my skin, making sure I knew, even as a baby that I was a mistake and not wanted.
I’d like to say it gets better with time, but let’s face it. I’m a half demon for a reason. There’s a reason that when Lucifer finally came calling, I took off like a bat out of hell.
Living with Corinne, it never got better. All she could see from the day I was born was Daemon. What he was, what he put her through with everything she willingly accepted from him, and most of all, she saw his leaving. I was a constant reminder of what she had lived through and in the end lost.
I’m not supposed to exist. I’m not saying that because my mom wishes I was never born. I’m saying it because it’s fact. When a demon lies down with a human, there has never been a documented case of a child being born from it. There’s something in the DNA I guess that makes it so that a demon can’t conceive. Whether it works for the angels in the same way, I suppose I’ll eventually learn considering what I am, but a demon, they can’t do it.
When my mother announced she was pregnant, Daemon had been the one to tell her that. He had spoken out about her being a harlot, a whore, a woman that despite her claims of love for him, would still step out and sleep around. Considering what he was to begin with, I always found this part of her story funny. None the less, he’d told her flat out that I didn’t belong to him. Even after I was born and the truth was there plain as day in my eyes, he couldn’t see past it and believe the truth.
They had created something that should never exist.
They created me.
This is the part of being so alone that I hate. I’m remembering everything about my life before Serenity blew her way like a hurricane into it. I’m remembering the darkness and when that happens, it brings the hunger and anger to the surface and they fight against the control I’ve managed to create until it’s a constant power struggle inside me. I don’t want to think about these things, but I don’t have a choice.
Until Serenity comes back, I’m going to have to live with the constant reminder of the way I was before her, and even what I could be again if for some reason she’s never found.
I’m Ryan McGregor, human-demon hybrid and this is my story.
Chapter One
The Beginning
When I think about my life, especially the earlier parts, I have a hard time remembering what happened before I turned four. I can remember a whole hell of a lot after that, a lot of which I wish I didn’t, but it all seems to begin for me at four.
Waking up that morning, my birthday no less, the scent of burnt toast wafting its way through the vents straight into my room, I just knew it was going to be a day different than the others. It wasn’t going to be different because it would be the day my mom showered me with presents and told me how lucky she was to have me. No, I knew even then that the likelihood of that happening was slim to none. The reason that day was different is because of the conversation I walked in on when I finally made my way downstairs.
*****
Corinne, you are ill equipped to handle the boy. I know what you think of me, but would you please give some thought to what I have asked?
I may not be mother of the year, but there’s no way in hell I’m letting the likes of you or even Daemon get your hands on him.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard her like this. She’s upset, but the man standing across from her doesn’t seem to be at all bothered by it. In fact, the way he’s standing, he looks relaxed, almost as if he expected this to be her response. I’m not sure what he’s asking, but whatever he’s selling, I’m buying.
I want him to take me away.
You said yourself that his powers are growing at an alarming rate. One that a being such as yourself cannot keep up with. I do believe it’s time that you give him over to us, so that we may work with him. Nurture the gifts that continue to grow so that one day he can take his rightful place at my side.
Did you not hear me, Lucifer? Ryan won’t be going anywhere with you.
I do not need your consent, Corinne. I am merely here in an attempt to do right by you and the boy. You are aware of what runs in his veins just as I am. You merely want to keep him with you so that you have an outlet for all of your hate and I cannot allow that.
She laughs and I don’t understand why. I didn’t hear him say anything funny. Who is this man my mom called Lucifer and how does he know us? Better yet, what does he mean by gifts?
You have no idea what I’m dealing with!
That is where you are mistaken. I understand quite well what you are having to endure, just as I understand what the boy himself endures each and every day while being under this roof. You are aware of Daemon’s power. It cannot come as a surprise that one born of him would show the same level, even at this young an age.
"Do not speak his name again! I will not allow you to speak of him in such a cavalier way. I know what he means to you, but where is your precious confidante