Free Light Up the Night by M. L. Buchman Page B

adopted and of a whole different race, but still they looked somehow alike.
    Kee was Trisha’s height, but with all of the curves Trisha had never grown. As a matter of fact, she was so generously built that Trisha wondered if that’s where the rest of her own figure had gone. With sun-kissed skin and almond-shaped dark eyes, she was clearly an exotic mash-up of the American melting-pot gene pool.
    The kid was starting to come into some shape, though it was too early to tell how she’d finish. Her skin was significantly darker. Uzbekistani, someone had told her. Refugee.
    They both wore dark T-shirts. Kee’s showed a large handgun. The words “Protected by Smith & Wesson” stretched over her breasts. Dilya’s sported a large feather, a sparkling magic wand, and Hermione’s words, “Wingardium Leviosa.” Protected by magic. Both wore dark jeans and sparkly red sneakers. Their hair was even the same length, though Kee’s was straight and pure black, and her adopted daughter’s ruffled its dark brunette waves down to narrow shoulders.
    The two of them gazed at her, dark eyes and soft green ones.
    â€œYou okay?”
    Fine. But her throat wasn’t working and the word didn’t come out aloud.
    She nodded. She was fine. It was just her blood that wasn’t. It still roared about her veins in ways that it really wasn’t supposed to. She turned to change as Kee did the same.
    But Dilya drifted over to stand beside her.
    â€œWhy is your hair that color?” Her voice was a strange mix of modern English and the hint of a roll on the r that must come from her native language. It also had a lilt to the end of the sentences that went up, but not like a question, even when it was a question.
    Dilya reached out a tentative hand and Trisha tipped her head down. The girl stroked a hand over it.
    â€œIt feels thinner than mine.”
    â€œRed hair is thinner.” Trisha tucked it back behind her ear. Maybe she’d let it grow again. Regular Army kept it short; jawline was the lower limit. But this company of Night Stalkers wore their hair more like their customers. SEALs and Delta often went undercover, so many of them had longer hair or beards. Billy’s dark hair was almost long enough to catch in a short ponytail, though his cheeks were clean-shaven. Even standing here, she was aware of how soft his hair had been against her palm.
    â€œIs it color or were you born with it?” Dilya was still inspecting her carefully. “Like Ron in Harry Potter? Does your whole family have red hair?”
    â€œOnly my mother and me.” The problem was that she was the spitting image of her mother. Everyone had always commented on it since her first memory, until she became only a shadow of her mother and was expected to grow up that way. Wow, that sure hadn’t worked out the way her mother had planned.
    Dilya looked at Kee and then back to Trisha. With an idle hand she tugged on her own hair, as if testing its length.
    Kee was watching them closely. Assessing Trisha. Was she an overprotective parent? Or was there something else going on here?
    Trisha peeled down to her underwear and stepped into the fire-retardant flight suit. It weighed about thirty pounds with all of the armor plates. One of the drawbacks to flying a Little Bird with no doors was not having a lot of protective armor around you unless you were wearing it. But since she’d worn it almost every day of the last half-dozen years, it felt more unnatural to be in civilian clothes, so light it was as if she was prancing around naked.
    Before she zipped up the flight suit, Dilya was holding her arm near Trisha’s stomach, comparing the color.
    â€œYou are so white.”
    Indeed, while the girl wasn’t African dark, there was a startling contrast.
    â€œIt comes with the red hair.”
    â€œIf I make my hair red, will my skin turn white?”
    Trisha had to blink at that one.
    Kee had