Hilda and Zelda (13 page)

"Forget that, Griselda," said Hilda, her wand
at the ready also. "You are coming along with us and paying for
what you've done. You crossed borders, you brought danger to people
in this world and you are meddling in affairs that are not
yours."

"So ask me if I care!" Zelda slammed down a
bolt of fire that set a house ablaze.

William reacted by putting out the fire an
instant later, leaving only a blackened front on the house that
otherwise had burnt down completely in the fierce flames.

Zelda stared at William. "You insolent. How
dare you?"

"Oh, that's easy," William said.

"William, be careful, she's-"

Before Hilda could end her sentence, William
had shot a spell at Zelda's broom, making it break up into a
hundred pieces.

A hundred pieces of broom proved to be far
less effective than a whole broom: Zelda started falling towards
the ground, screaming and throwing magic wildly around herself.
Afterwards, Hilda and William did not know how the evil witch
pulled it off, but on her way down she managed to summon all the
pieces of her broom and formed a whole broom of them again. The
broom was near her and Zelda got on it, only several feet over the
ground.

Hilda and William intensified their
protection and not a second too soon: the barrage of nastiness
Zelda shot at them was overwhelming.

"She's good," William said as they warded off
the stones, fire, tar and dirt that was flung at them.

"You weren't bad yourself," Hilda said as she
tried to slam the remains of a car into Zelda. The evil witch
however was too fast for that and the car only hit a house. "Nice
try to break up her broom. Next time-" she flung herself and
William aside as half a car came up to them "-make sure the
broom-bits burn."

Hilda grabbed the car-parts and diverted
their course so they could fall down somewhere without hurting
people.

William in that time tried to hit Zelda
again, a stream of fish heads and dirty water flowing from his wand
in her direction.

Hilda joined his efforts, effectively washing
down fish parts on the evil witch in such a way that Zelda could
not even see them anymore. Loudly screaming, Zelda flew off, and as
the magical couple stopped their fish-rain, they were certain that
they saw Zelda was drenched.

"Well, I think that we have just scored a
point, William," Hilda smiled.

"Yup, I firmly believe so too," the wizard
said.

"Might be nice if we clean up the fish down
there," the witch said. "You seem to have a natural affection for
fish entrails, don't you?"

William burst out laughing as they flew
downwards to clean up the mega fishmarket they had created. After
removing the smell and the fishy bits, they repaired the street
again. After all that, Hilda called it the end of the day.

They flew along the street, in the direction
where they had seen Zelda fly off. Hilda did her best to pick up
traces of the magic that always remained for a while after a witch
flew by.

"Damn, I lost her," Hilda muttered at a
certain point.

"This way, sweetwitch," said William,
pointing into a street.

"And how do you know that? Can you pick up
magic better than I do all of a sudden? Simply because you have
lived in this crazy world for so long?"

"No. I just follow the smell of the
fish."

"Oh... shush you." Hilda glared at him, then
slowly made her broom go into the street that William had pointed
out. She decided to let William take the lead and follow his nose.
Alas, after a few streets the fish smell, as well as the wet trail
on the ground, ended.

"Looks like Zelda cleaned herself up here,"
William said, looking around.

Hilda also looked at the buildings. Then a
smile happened on her face. "Maybe, William, maybe. But she is
around here somewhere... I feel her."

From the top floor of an abandoned office
building, Zelda looked down into the street at the two people on
brooms. "I'm gonna get you two. Soon. And that's a witch's
promise."

Hilda and William were satisfied with the
achievement of the day. They went back to repair one more street
and then they went back to their new temporary home in this world.
They took another extensive detour to make sure nobody followed
them.

The magical couple ate something and then
talked about their following steps to try and catch the wild witch,
until the night was all around them.

It was way past midnight when Hilda woke up
William.

"What?", he wondered why he was dragged away
from his dreams.

"Something funny going on outside," Hilda
said, quietly.

William listened intently, and indeed, he
also heard things that one would not expect there overnight. The
sounds were many. Men talking, cars driving around, loud
laughter.

The two got up, dressed in their normal
attire and slipped out of their shedly home. Once outside, the
noise was much louder, there even was music and some singing as the
sounds of large objects being put back and forth became
obvious.

Their brooms lifted William and Hilda into
the sky, from where a strange and intriguing view was laid out
before them. The place they had seen to be a truck garage was
brightly lit. Many cars, among which a few trucks, were parked
inside and outside of the large building. Men in dark clothes
walked around in the lights that came from headlights and flooded
out of the garage. The noise of the object being moved came from
small wooden boxes and crates that were taken into the garage,
coming from one of the trucks. These things were replaced by other,
similar crates and boxes.

The men who were busy with the whole
enterprise seemed carefree, and had not a worry in the world of
someone discovering or seeing them.

"Doesn't look like a big deal to me, Hilda.
They are offloading and loading."

Hilda frowned. "It is strange that they bring
in boxes and take out the same ones. I bet my wand that there is
something fishy going on down there."

They moved easily and unobserved through the
dark. The roof of the building had several large venting shafts
through which the witch and the wizard could peek down into the
well lit hall.

"Of course, Mr. Harmon," a voice rose up
through one of the shafts, "things are all in order here. We're
taking out the boxes as we talk, and the other ones are going in
soon, so the shipment should be on its way in about an hour. No,
not sooner as there are too many small things, sir, no option for a
forklift this time."

William spotted the talking man. He sat at a
desk, feet on top of it and a mobile phone in his hand.

"When the guys from the museum ship things in
larger crates, Mr. Harmon, then the swap is much faster. No, sir.
Yes, sir. Right, sir, Mr. Harmon." With that the call was ended.
Phone-man got on his feet and started yelling directions to his
mates, followed by a series of the most bizarre and
incomprehensible threats if they were not careful with the goods.
Apparently Mr. Harmon, whoever he was, wanted a good deal of care
unleashed over the objects that the guys from the museum had sent
on.

The word 'swap' had gotten William's
attention, and he mentioned that to Hilda, who nodded.

"It did not look right. They are doing
something that's... not right." She drew her wand. "Care to go and
change their minds?"

With a grin, William got out his wand as
well. Then they flew up and found a large window, high up in the
wall, from where they could see the interior of the garage.

Against the far wall they saw two stacks of
boxes and crates. The men took stuff from a truck to the left stack
and then picked a similar box from the right stack to be taken back
to the truck. Well, that was more evidence than the two people on
brooms needed. There was some very slick art theft going on.

Hilda grinned as she pointed her wand at the
stack of fake crates, the ones that were stowed as replacements. In
a few moments that nobody paid attention to them, she shrunk the
stack to something that would fit in a pocket. Half a minute later
one of the dark clothed men came in again with a box. He walked up
to the one visible stack of boxes and stopped.

"Hey, Carlo!"

The man who had been on the phone came
sauntering in. "What?"

"Where's the other bunch of stuff?"

Carlo pointed casually. "Right- hey, where's
the other stuff?"

The man that had yelled out put down the box
he had in his hands and started looking around. The stack of boxes
that were to be the replacements had shrunk so much that it had
fallen into a black shadow cast from the lights above, so the two
men did not see the miniature packages.

"Do you think we can do some more fun here?",
Hilda asked William.

William nodded. "I think we can trouble them
a bit by letting the air out of the tires of all the trucks." He
had once seen how much work it was to change one tire of a big
truck, so doing that to all tires would certainly create a lot of
work for the men in the garage.

They changed position, high over the area.
Darkness was their ally, and gravity became one as they let the air
escape from the rubber circles that allowed the trucks to move. At
first none of the art thieves noticed that something out of the
ordinary happened with the trucks, as all were busy looking for the
missing crates.

Only as a few men came out and noticed that
the two trucks were lower on their feet, there was an alarm going
into the garage. William and Hilda then blew up the tires of the
trucks, making the heavy vehicles slump down to the street, going
nowhere for the time being.

Guns appeared in hands, flashlights went
round the area and suddenly the men were not making any sound at
all. Hilda and William calmly watched the men spread out, searching
the area for the insolents that had ruined their evening. The men
were clearly used to this, as they did not make a big fuss. Also
their weaponry was more than sign.

"Do you know what these metal things do?",
Hilda asked William. She was not at all aware of the deadly
firepower that the guns packed.

"I do, and yes, I'll take care of them,"
William nodded. Through their link he sent images as well as he
knew, about the guns.

Hilda grinned. She understood what her wizard
was trying to tell her.

They divided the area in two and at their
leisure went on to disable the guns. Gunpowder changed into mud,
springs changed into straw and mere minutes later the fire-arms of
the men were rendered useless, unless they wanted to throw them at
someone.

The magical couple returned to the garage,
where only three more men were looking for the crates. As Hilda and
William pulled up by the window, one of them had clearly just found
the small package that had been the fake load for the trucks. He
stood in the warehouse part of the building, something small on his
hand, pointing and yelling at his comrades.

Marco, the man with the phone, ran upto the
man with the lost boxes in his palm. Hilda nodded and mumbled a
spell. A second later, the two men lay buried under the boxes and
crates that suddenly had returned to their original sizes.

Number three came running in, to find his
mates covered in boxes. William decided that a few of the boxes
that were not too damaged could just as well jump up and knock out
the third man.

With that taken care of, the magical couple
was confident that the rest of the group of men was ready to be
rounded up. They moved their brooms around to the front of the
garage, where the two trucks stood as stranded whales, the only
difference being that whales did not need flat tires to be
stranded. And whales lay, they would not stand.

They touched down on one of the trucks and
took their time to look around over the group that was still
attempting to find people that were not there.

"Hey. Are you looking for us?" Hilda threw in
her natural diplomacy that sometimes made William whince.

Diplomatic or not, her words had the desired
effect. All guns were pointing at the magicals within two seconds,
aims were taking and trigger fingers were ready to blow the two
strange people to the next kingdom of their choice.

"Before you think about calling on your boss,
let me tell you that he is under several crates and boxes, and for
now indisposed," Hilda said to the men on the ground. "And your
guns are useless, so you are free to try them on us."

This invitation did not go by without a dozen
attempts to fire, all ending in nothing except curses and arms
thrown to the ground.

"Good boys," Hilda said, clapping in her
hands. "Now all just line up, so we can tie you together and make
it all painless for you."

The good boys however had a slightly
different idea about this part of the plan. As if they had
practised this, they started climbing the trucks in couples, so
they could charge towards the two strange people from four
sides.

William shook his head. "Too bad, we offered
a painless option." Then he and Hilda drew wands again and made
ropes appear from them, ropes that rapidly snaked themselves around
the legs and arms of the art thieves. The couples of thieves became
tied to each other faster than they could see it happen, and fell
where they were standing. The sound of the men falling onto the
metal roof of the trailers was accompanied by ouches and
oompfs.

"Painful," Hilda commented as she made her
broom float up. She and William flew upwards and into the garage,
where the three men, still knocked out, were lying. They too were
tied up and put in front of the building along with their partners
in crime.

William searched Marco's pockets, found the
phone and called the police. He told them about the collection of
criminals they had gathered and tied up, including what they had
heard of the swap of museum artefacts and then hung up, After
switching it off, he put the phone in his pocket. Then they lifted
off again and flew to the entrance of their home and went to sleep.
The police would take care of the rest, as soon as they had found a
way to get to the former military camp.