Summoning

Her parents had met at the museum where he was an accountant and she was a tour guide. It was funny, that they were there, since he didn't like history and she was a certified foreseer. But they were there, and they met, and they fell in love, and she loved to hear about it.
They didn't talk about how her biological parents had met or how they had died in a car accident ten months after her birth, or why her current mother had demanded for them to be adopted as their child by the ridiculously complicated rules of an outdated government, when they were already her guardians.
Everyone thought she was their biological daughter, and why wouldn't they? It was true in their hearts, every one of their actions reflected it, and they never talked about her parents—her "baby parents"—she would think.
There was a sort of exception for that self-imposed rule: when her father was drunk, he’d say ‘I used to have a brother, you know’, and get a faraway look in his eyes.
She never thought much of it. She could see the longing, and the hope, but she thought that it was only natural. That if she had had siblings, she would love them a lot and would miss them and see the last path as an opportunity to see them again if they die first.
Not that anyone had siblings anymore. It was a child per couple, period. Even if they were forced to be legal guardians of a distantly related orphan, the law forbade them from having a second kid.
Her parent's hadn't been forced, of course. Her dad had offered, way before any of his siblings said anything about it and her mom had been delighted. Maybe they couldn't have a child of their own. Maybe they simply like her or her parents too much.
Whatever the reason, they had always taken good care of her. Her mother, more responsibly, always saying that they should stop sending her to classes for skills that were too expensive and useless in this decade. Her father, with the sentimentalism of those who miss the ways of their youth, sending her to those classes anyway, because it had been good for him and his siblings so it would be good for her.
Funny, how even then he didn't mention his brother, but still somehow managed to see him somewhere in the nothingness.
She didn’t think anything of that, either.
Even as she saw the summoning pictographs, it took her a second to understand why her dad was using the forbidden arts. It wasn't just the certainty of legal problems—he would be incarcerated and banned from using any form of magic—, it was the danger that always came with messing with forces beyond human control.
Then, as she finally noticed the pictos for brother and blood, she panicked and pushed him away from the symbols he had just finished drawing.
He called the name of his brother, but she thought for a second that it was fine: he wasn’t touching the drawing, so the ritual wouldn’t wake. Feeling the darkness in her lungs and the light in the pictograms, she remembered that she had her father’s blood too.
She wished she had said a better goodbye to… many people, actually, but specially her mom. And her dad.
Her dad.
She felt the cold of betrayal in her heart, but not the warm of the darkness embracing her.
“But… Why…?” her dad sobbed, running to inspect the symbols under her feet. “It's right, everything is right! And it did work, I saw it! Did you see it! I know you did, why did it stop? Why…?”
She ran away before he could fix whatever was wrong and try again. The inspectors were already at the door, ready to arrest her father—her father’s brother, actually—, and her mother was with them, with teary eyes.
One of the inspectors, a man as old as trees, looked at her intently for a minute as the others went inside and her mother sat tiredly in the front stairs.
“You are lucky, girl. You went through the old adoption rituals. Not only those modern things that are all ink and no magic, but the real ones; those rituals cut ties with your blood relatives, you know?”
She shook their head, but she had almost nodded, because that explained what had happened.
“Of course you don’t,” the inspector said, with a sigh. “Not many know or care for those things anymore.”
Of course they didn’t. The ancient ways were precisely that: ancient; remembered just by old people like that old man, and history lovers like her foreseeing mother.