Read Birthright: Book I of the Temujin Saga for Free Online Page B

glow enveloped his body again. As the glow faded away, so did Jiri.
    *****

Alan Walker threw the door open and stepped onto the porch wearing only a pair of plaid pajama pants. He scowled behind his thick, sandy-blond beard and looked around the yard. “Damned kids.”
    Probably the Butler boys from down the road; they had nothing better to do than bother decent folks in the middle of the night. He turned to go back into the house, but stopped when his toe nudged something on the porch. He looked down, noticed the bundle, and reached down slowly to pull back the corner of the soft blue blanket. His heart skipped a beat when he saw the face of little Alexander, who had woken up from all the commotion, staring back at him.
    “Alan! Who is it?”
    “Janice, you’d better come down here!”
    A few moments later, Janice Walker appeared behind her husband, her hands clinging to the bathrobe worn over her flimsy nightgown. She peered timidly over her kneeling husband’s shoulder, but her apprehension instantly turned to glorious delight as her eyes fell on the infant.
    She knelt to pick up the bundle. As his wife smiled and cooed at the baby, Alan stepped out farther onto the deck and searched for any sign of who may have left the baby. There were no tires crunching on gravel, no retreating taillights, no revving engine.
    Nothing.
    “Who left him here?” asked Janice.
    “No clue.” Alan scratched at his disheveled beard. “There was nobody here when I came to the door.”
    “Well, where’d they go so quickly?”
    “I don’t know, dear,” said Alan, growing annoyed. “Don’t you think I’d tell you if I knew?”
    “Well,” said Janice. “Let’s get this little guy inside where it’s warm.”
    “Right.” Alan followed his wife inside and closed the door behind him. “You check the kid out, and I’ll call Sheriff Challis.”
    Janice whirled around and stared at her husband, mortified. “ The sheriff? Why?”
    “Janice, this is a matter for the police. Somebody abandoned this child. Doesn’t that bother you?”
    “Well of course it does, Alan, but….”
    Alan sighed and laid a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “I know you want a baby, honey. I do, too. More than anything. But this is not the way to….”
    Alan’s voice trailed off as he saw the first tears trickling down his wife’s soft, pale cheeks. Janice had been crushed when the doctor told them about Alan’s condition. They had tried all kinds of fertility methods, but nothing worked, and after nearly ten years of marriage, they had yet to be blessed with a child. One look at his wife’s face and Alan Walker knew that he had lost the war.
    “Look,” said Alan. “We’ll figure out what to do in the morning. No sense in waking the whole county. Right now, let’s just make sure the kid’s okay.”
    The joy instantly returned to Janice’s face and she laid the baby on the kitchen table. When she unwrapped the blanket, a white card fell to the floor. Alan knelt to pick it up. Written in a strange script was a single word:
    ALEXANDER
    Alan flipped the card over, but there was nothing printed on the back. No explanation. No reason for abandoning the child. No reason for choosing them. Nothing.
    He handed the card to Janice. She smiled at the simple message and giggled softly when she noticed that the baby had fallen back to sleep in her arms.
    “Alex,” she said. “I like that name.”
    “Now, Janice,” Alan scolded, “don’t you go getting too attached. In the morning, we’re going to call the sheriff and sort all of this nonsense out.”
    “Of course, Alan.” Janice rocked the sleeping infant. “We’ll sleep on it.”
    *****

At that same moment, over six thousand miles away in a small Mongolian village south of Ulaanbaatar, a twelve-year-old boy looked up from his studies with a very troubled expression. Ink dripped from the tip of his quill onto his forgotten history lesson.
    The tutor, alerted to the youth’s distraction by the