Erasing Faith(53)

I snorted under my breath and Wes looked over at me disapprovingly. The woman chanted on, undisturbed.

“Do you think she’s casting a spell on us?” I hissed in his direction.

“Undoubtedly,” he whispered back.

After our turn on the dance floor, the same two girls who’d pulled Wes into the square had grabbed our hands and dragged us toward a vibrantly-colored tent on the edge of the festival grounds. Giggling at each other in a mischievous manner exclusive to preteen girls, they’d pulled back the draped entrance and shoved Wes and me inside without another word. And now, we were alone at the hands of a zillion-year-old gypsy woman who, apparently, doubled as a witch.

“Ala okaya, ohala okaya.”

Her chants continued as she reached sightlessly beneath the table and pulled out two stout green pillar candles. I watched as she wound a cord made from willow or some other thin-branched tree around the candles and tied them together in an intricate, ritualistic knot without ever breaking her chant or cracking open an eye to peek. Clearly, she’d done this before.

“Is she speaking Hungarian?” I asked.

Wes shook his head.

“Romanian?”

“No dialect I’ve ever heard.”

Great. There’d be no clues from that front, then.

The candles were now lit, flaming brightly and casting flickering shadows across the gypsy’s wrinkled face. Her chanting picked up pace and she held her palms up to the sky, shaking them in time with her spell. I half expected sparks to start shooting from her fingertips or, at the very least, a little bit of levitation off the floor. Maybe I’d watched one too many Harry Potter movies.

Wait, I take that back. There’s no such thing as too many Harry Potter movies.

Abruptly, the woman fell silent. I flinched involuntarily when she opened a set of bottomless gray eyes to stare across the table. Nearly a minute passed as she examined us with an unblinking stare, and I began to squirm in place.

It was safe to say she creeped me out.

Before I realized what was happening, she’d reached over and grabbed Wes’ right hand in one fist, then clasped mine in the other. She was pretty spry, for such an old lady. I didn’t fight her grip as she guided my hand over the open flame of the candle sitting on the table in front of me. Wes’ eyebrows were high on his forehead, but he allowed her to do the same. When we were both positioned palm-down over our candles — not so close that it burned, but near enough that I felt the flame’s warmth tickling my skin — the woman began to chant once more.

I locked eyes with Wes over the flames. “You think she’s enchanting us to give her all our money?”

One side of his mouth lifted. “Maybe she’s hexing us. Giving us an eternity of bad luck or an unstoppable sneezing condition.”

I giggled.

“Bah!” The woman yelled, instantly drawing my attention back to her. She was glaring at me.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

She gestured from my mouth to the flame, pantomiming for me to blow out the candle. She turned to signal at Wes, as well.

“Time to blow?” I asked quietly.

Wes chortled.

“Oh, come on. That one was too easy, even for your dirty mind.”

He grinned at me. “On three?”

We counted down together and blew out our candles simultaneously. Smoke began to drift up from the smoldering wicks. Grabbing our hands once more, the gypsy swirled them through the smoke, until the separate trails from each candle combined into a single ashy cloud. She muttered under her breath as she guided our hands, moving so rhythmically, I soon found myself mesmerized. There was something bewitching about watching our fingers move lazily through the dim light.

As the smoke dissipated, the woman positioned my hand above Wes’, palm to palm over the now-dark candles. It was utterly still in the tent as she reached down, unwound the willow cords, and began to wrap them around our lofted wrists, tethering us together.

I didn’t dare speak — she’d only scold me again.

“A szerelem vak,” the woman recited.

That sounded more familiar — less pagan, more Hungarian.

“A szerelem igazi,” she continued, wrapping the cords so tightly they began to dig into the flesh of my wrist.

I glanced at Wes and saw, for the first time, his brow was wrinkled in what looked like comprehension — and the beginnings of distress.

“A szerelem ?r?k.”

He glanced over at me and opened his mouth to say something, but the old woman’s voice boomed out once more.

“El?bbi egyedül. Ezentúl együtt.”

I looked at him with wide eyes, wondering why he suddenly looked worried. He’d been remarkably calm about this entire thing, up until she’d started speaking Hungarian.

“?r?kké.”

Her hands dropped to her sides and her eyes closed. She’d reached the end of her spell — the finality ringing in her tone made that much obvious. I stared at Wes, whose face was a mask of stunned disbelief, and then at our hands, which were now bound together in a beautiful knot. Only when the curtain behind us flew open and the two girls rushed in, giggling and smiling ear to ear, did I begin to realize something wasn’t right here.

This had been no normal spell or chant.

“Wes…” I whispered, looking up at him with alarm. “What just happened?”