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redflagromance · 8 months

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Short Story Release: Duck Hunt (Maeve Le Fey Story- 8,122 words)

"I won't be making frogs." Maeve slapped the papers onto her end table, next to the lamp. "I appreciate you dropping these off, I really do. But I'm a little offended that you would even add that spell to my library requests unasked." She sniffed. "It's simply not to my tastes, Adelaide."

Adelaide followed her down the entryway, giving a cursory glance at the songbird peeping furiously for his attention in a golden cage.

"It's a classic for a reason." Her old classmate rolled his eyes, as if she was being unreasonable. "How can you call yourself a practitioner if you've never turned someone to a frog?" He turned away from the bird and fiddled with a ceramic on a display shelf. "People are starting to talk, Maeve."

"Why would I need to do that?" Maeve threw her hands up, sighing. "Why do they even care?" She shrugged off her coat and hung it on the hook. “Busy bodies, all.” She shot a disapproving look at the silly red bird beating its wings for attention.

Adelaide turned and shook his head piteously at her. "I suppose that if you don't know, you'll never know. Chin up darling, you have other skills. Eventually people will forget. Maybe you could make a point to show off something soon?" he suggested kindly.

‘They think I can’t do it? How ridiculous.’

Maeve took a deep breath and shook off whatever latent insecurity made her fear peer disapproval. She didn’t have to prove anything to anyone.

"I'm afraid of hyenas," Adelaide said. He was clearly trying to comfort her with some relatable anecdote. "I've been as far back as I can remember." His voice went quiet, his gaze distant. He was seeing some other time and place now.

Maeve tuned him out.

"It's probably just because a pack of hyenas ate my Father," Adelaide muses. "I wasn't old enough to remember, but I was there. The first time I saw The Lion King on Broadway, I lost my mind and killed 34-"

"Adelaide," Maeve interrupted tersely. "I appreciate that you're trying to cheer me up, but I'm not in a headspace for it."

He stopped talking entirely. He gave her a dazed look. He didn't seem entirely present.

She ignored that. "I'll see you tomorrow," Maeve said, hoping he'd take the hint and get out of her living room without their customary cup of coffee. She let out a sigh, because he was being kind. "Thank you for bringing this." She picked the spell details back up. He really did mean well. “I’ll think on what you said, darling. And I’ll see you at the reunion next month.”

Adelaide looked at her long and hard. He let out a sigh. His eyes softened with fondness. "Don't work too hard," he admonished. Then he left in a swirl of smoke. The distinctive aroma of his magic spread out through the room.

She closed her eyes and indulged in a deep, calming breath. Then she opened her eyes and gave the songbird a stern look. It had gone quiet and sullen when Adelaide left. “Don’t think I didn’t see that,” Maeve chided.

It peeped in response.

“So rude,” she muttered, and went to make something for dinner. She gestured sharply upwards with her left hand and the cookbook obligingly lifted to hover above the counter. She hummed and flipped pages, looking for the recipe that she’d chosen yesterday.

Music started for her, a pleasant background to the evening chore of preparing food. She was in a very good mood by the time that she had finished meal preparation, a ritual that soothed the rough edges of an irritating day at work. She plated a serving and put the rest away for her lunch tomorrow.

At said lunchtime Maeve opened the fridge at work anticipating culinary perfection- a particularly exemplary rendition of duck confit and a salad- but all she found was confusion.

“Where is my lunch.” She asked the universe flatly.

The universe didn’t respond, but the nosy man from the advertising department did.

“Oh, wow,” He said, coming up behind her. His hot ham breath was on her neck.

Disgusting.

“Looks like you’re the latest victim of the lunch bandito.” His pronunciation was abominable. Why were white men like this. This interaction was somehow worse than some contemptible peon stealing her lunch.

He was definitely doing his finger-guns thing. She shut the refrigerator door and walked away.

‘Someone is going to pay for this. For my lunch, and especially for Greg talking to me.’

Incensed, she went back to her office and flung herself onto her office chair. She stared at her laptop, musing over her options.

‘How long has this been going on? Greg implied that I wasn’t the first.’

She opened the anonymous HR complaints inbox, noting not for the first time the sheer number of complaints regarding the ply of the company toilet paper (unlikely to be changed).

Maeve would not say that she was particularly given to caring about the concerns of others, but she did like to think that she was competent at her job. She tended to review most suggestions on the same day, so it would have been bizarre to not have known about a, a- what did Greg call them?- a lunch luchador.

The only complaint that she could identify as being plausibly related was from four months ago. Faheema in Client Relations had had her tomato and peanut sauce salad stolen from the break room. Unfortunately, there were no suspects and the complaint had languished there.

‘That can’t be the whole story.’

Maeve leaned back and gently massaged her temples. ‘I should check back at the crime scene, and interview the witnesses.’

The work refrigerator betrayed no new information, save that her expensive glass container wasn’t there.

Neither was it in the sink, or the trash can.

‘The unsub must have taken the evidence with them.’ Maeve took out a tiny pad of paper from her pocket, and wrote ‘careful’ in it.

Of course, lunch was mostly over, so there was no one to interview in the break room.

‘I guess that means I have to go back to my contact.’ She mused. ‘Find other victims and witnesses. Walk the streets.’

She found Greg at his cubicle, drinking stale coffee. His oversized khakis billowed in the air conditioning breeze.

“Mr. Wilson.” She greeted, putting her hands behind her back. “Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”

He looked up at her, wide eyes filled with something she couldn’t discern. Fear? Hope? Guilt? Surprise at being accosted by an HR attorney?

“That- that would be fine.” He put down his green mug. It said ‘I’d rather be golfing.’

“How can I help you?”

“My lunch.” She stated clearly. “It wasn’t the first to be stolen, was it?”

He coughed.

‘A sign of guilt?’ She eyed him up and down. Greg would be a prime suspect, if contemptibility were a sign of the criminal element. He didn’t seem to be able to afford a full pair of shoes to go with his socks, which would explain his motivations in purloining paninis.

“No, ma’am. It wasn’t. It’s been happening for over six months.” He rolled over to part of his desk, where he removed a legal notepad covered in scribbles. “I think the first one was Niraj,” he gestures a few cubicles over, “but there’s been one almost every work day.”

Maeve did some quick mental math and the answer was appalling.

‘The depths of this unsub’s depravity knows no bounds. That’s over 120 lunches.’

“Why haven’t people been reporting this?”

She could tell from his flinch back that her tone had come out too sharp. Meave compensated with a smile.

Greg gave her a wavering smile in return and ducked eye contact. “No one wanted to bother you,” he said vaguely, with a smarmy grin that made it evident it was a joke at her expense.

Her immediate theory was that the lunch thief had somehow intimidated the cubicle peasants into silence. She dismissed that after a moment- they would have compromised their anonymity if they communicated. No, the answer was much more likely that she had some kind of reputation for being unapproachable.

She got no further with the mystery that day. The incident might have faded if it wasn’t for the fact that when she warily opened the shared refrigerator the next day, her butternut squash risotto with porcini mushrooms and chicken was not in it.

“I am going to take a life,” Maeve said through gritted teeth. She ignored the sudden sound of a chair scraping and someone leaving the room. Someone coughed. She stalked over to the sink to look for her container– there it was, along with yesterday’s. She picked it up and made a sound of disgust. “Neither one of them have been washed.” Her voice came out incredulous. “This- this animal kept the first container in the office, unwashed, for 24 hours?”

She absolutely had to unmask this vile and petty bandit.

Maeve stalked back to her office and wrote up a scathing email. Then she deleted it and wrote another one, addressed to the entire company, with sugary sweet concern for whoever had eaten her lunch. She’d just found out that the sauce in it had been expired, after all, and anyone who ate it should seek medical attention immediately. She hit send and waited.

She did not have the kind of reputation that made people dismiss her as a threat. Whoever had eaten that was probably feeling fear for their life right now. Any minute now, someone would confess, or ask for permission to go to the doctor for a sudden stomachache.

Any minute now.

Minutes dragged on into hours and Maeve had to admit that whoever had robbed her had done something far more insulting than steal from her. They had dismissed her as a threat.

With that poisonous thought in her mind, Maeve found herself tempted to put a little something extra in the next day's lunch.

She refrained after remembering that the pattern indicated that it was likely she would be eating her own lunch tomorrow.

It wasn’t a targeted attack: the thief selected victims randomly.

After making that assessment, it was absolutely infuriating to open the fridge door at lunchtime and discover once again that her lunch was not inside. This time there was, again, no storage container in the sink or garbage.

“It’s in their desk,” Maeve muttered to herself, punching in an order for delivery with unnecessary force. “That little freak has my storage container in their rancid desk.”

They were definitely targeting her now.

…It was legally inadvisable to actively poison her own lunch, as well as a waste of a good container.

‘My only option is surveillance.’

It took a few days for the equipment to arrive and for the mail personnel to deliver it to her desk.

She reviewed the instructions multiple times, and waited for the end of business hours.

As usual, the feral masses fled the building at exactly five. She stalked back to the crime scene with a box of cameras and wires.

She was furiously drilling a hole into the wall when she heard someone call out to her from behind.

“Ma’am.” Someone said, vaguely threatening.

She turned around, one hand on the ladder for balance.

The security guard turned a gruesome shade of pink at the sight of her face. “I’m sorry ma’am, but do you have permission to do this?”

She waved her drill at him. “I’m a lawyer. This is all very above-board, I assure you.” Then Maeve leaned down at him. “I have noticed that you have been remiss in your duties. This lunch thief”, she spat, “has been allowed to run amok in this place for far too long. I am merely putting it right.”

“O-Okay then.”

The guard left in a hurry. No one evidently dared to check into whether she did have the authority or permission to install cameras, which was the first bit of luck Maeve had had all week.

Once they were installed, all she would have to do was watch and wait.

Maeve resentfully checked the recording from the previous day, rewinding and rewatching over and over again to try to catch sight of her container as hands moved in and out of the fridge. But it was no luck- she hadn’t managed to capture any definitive proof. It was difficult to determine at what time the unsub was striking, and there was significant traffic in the break room at all times of day.

She scowled as yet another office worker got their coffee and then stepped back to hang around in the aisle, blocking her view. They seemed unaware of the woman who was obviously waiting for them to move. Her blood pressure rose and she gritted her teeth, fighting her anger.

Why? Why were so many people that way? There was perfectly adequate seating.

Not for the first time, she considered moving her camera. But the only answer was patience. So she set her jaw and admitted that it would take at least one more day.

The options for camera placement had been limited. It would have been ideal to put it three feet from the refrigerator: except that the thief would see it immediately.

The unobtrusive placement she'd settled on had a direct line of sight to the fridge - as long as no one was standing in the way or there wasn't a tall person sitting at a certain table. That should be fine. What kind of lunatic spent their time standing around cluelessly in the walking path?

Apparently, one of the most beloved traditions of office workers was lurking in the walkway clutching their instant coffee. One of them was swaying back and forth on the recording she was watching at the moment. Maeve felt her hand curl into a fist.

She rewatched Angelica sip coffee on the monitor, taking over half an hour for a paid coffee break that she seemed to nurse beyond reason. Good for Angelica, honestly. She wasn't paid enough: Maeve had checked.

‘What I have managed to discover is that a large number of workers are avoiding work in the break room.’

But that wasn’t her concern. Frankly, she didn't give a damn about squeezing productivity out of office workers. She wasn’t one of the managers. Her concern was not with the cubicle jockeys escaping the crushing oppression of open plan offices, but of weightier merit. And she was failing at identifying the culprit.

‘I will find this thief if I have to comb through every inch of this office campus.’ She gripped her own coffee mug tightly. Her coffee was certainly cold by now, but she drank it anyway.

The office grade coffee left a sour aftertaste in her mouth and a film on her tongue. It was even more contemptible cold, but her sorry detective work merited sorry coffee.

She sent the next update, cc'ed to the President and Vice President, as per her habit. She didn't mind that they didn't respond.

Every day, it was the same. She would bring in lunch -unpleasantly textured, overly spicy, bland- the criminal devoured them all. Maeve would find her containers in the sink over the next few days, unwashed.

She considered seeing if DNA was left behind, and trying to see if the culprit could be identified that way.

It did seem likely that the kind of monster that would do this might have DNA on file with the authorities, but she didn't have access to any DNA databases in her capacity as an HR representative.

It made her think about criminal profiling, though. Everyone who'd had food taken was a young woman.

…That meant that he'd been in the room watching people either put their food in or eat it, she realized. In order for there to be a type of victim, the lunches couldn't be randomly selected.

He'd been grocery shopping. Looking at a menu.

And that, Maeve realized, implied free time.

She didn't know what that meant, but it wasn't something she'd forget.

The problem was beginning to interfere with Maeve’s actual work. Stacks of policies up for review were threatening to topple over her desk, erecting skyscraping monuments to corporate thoroughness.

But it was hard to care about that right now. Maeve hadn’t had a proper lunch in three weeks. She was tired of ordering in or waiting until after work. She was also tired of making lunches she was never going to eat, even if they were inedible.

‘I could always just stop bringing in my own lunch.’ She glared at the empty fridge accusingly. It wasn’t like she’d truly expected her lunch to remain. ‘Or I might put a mini fridge in my office.’

But both of those options were intolerable. The lunch thief would just be forcing her to either continue to not eat, eat foods that she did not want to eat, or buy a fucking fridge just to avoid them. And even if she solved the problem for herself, this godforsaken cyst of a person would just steal from someone else.

No. She had to solve it. She could crack this case.

The cameras had identified a few general trends. There was a general group of peons that came in around 10:15 for coffee refills, and then it was consistently busy from 11:00-1:00PM.

‘I’m going to check the fridge at half hour intervals, to see if there’s a pattern as to when the thief strikes.’

The next day, she clutched the steering wheel just a bit too tight on her way in. She wasn't even at work and the tension was ruining her mood. She hit the brakes at a crosswalk, eyes glancing over to check for children among the pedestrians by sheer force of meticulous habit.

There was a gaggle of elementary students laughing in an uneven pack on the left. She kept some attention on them in her peripheral vision as she went through the intersection.

In her rearview mirror she saw the next car come up the block and barrel through the intersection without stopping at the sign. They caught up with her right away and clearly hit the brakes hard, jerking when they slowed suddenly.

She saw the driver lift a hand and gesture at her in irritation, mouth moving as they doubtless raged.

The muscle in her jaw twitched with tension. She glanced at her speedometer to confirm that yes, she was driving at the limit.

So. That asshole was speeding in a school zone and blowing through stop signs.

"You know what I do to men like you?" Maeve asked her empty car, all coiled tension and tightly leashed violence. She flexed her fingers on the steering wheel and considered it: they'd pass her, legally or not, as soon as she gave them the chance.

She could follow them. They wouldn't notice. Anyone who didn't notice stop signs and children in a school zone was too self absorbed to realize they were being followed. It might make her late, but she had flex time. She could just arrive at work later. It wouldn't be the first time.

Maeve was sorely tempted, her blood rising with the thrill of the hunt.

It took real, punishing self control to flick on her turn signal at the normal place. She turned away with only a lingering glance at the bad driver in her rearview mirror.

She had to get to work on time to put her bait in the fridge at the normal time. She was already hunting down one piece of human refuse. Besides, that kind of thing required resources that she hadn't yet freed up.

Her iron self control got her to the break room by 8:00 am. She put the container in the fridge and gave it one last resentful look before she closed the door. It wasn’t even appealing to her anymore. She’d made this food to punish an asshole. It wasn't enough retribution, but it made her feel a little better.

The lunch was fish, cooked in ghost pepper sauce and served with leftover pasta. She'd gotten the fish on sale and then left it in her fridge for two days.

‘Honestly, I hope they eat this. I can’t.’

When she checked the fridge later, it was still there. And at nine, and nine thirty. Perhaps they had some self respect after all.

At ten it was gone. She made a note in her notebook. She hoped it caused vicious indigestion.

The next day, her lunch was gone at ten thirty. It seemed like a general pattern might emerge.

The trend held on Friday- her lunch disappeared sometime between ten and ten thirty.

She went into the weekend feeling victorious. Monday. This would end on Monday. She’d do a stakeout from 9:30 or so, until she caught the thief red handed. She couldn't just camp out in the break room and stare all day; not while catching up on her workload. But she could spare one morning.

It was not to be. At 9:30 on Monday, Maeve found herself staring at the empty space where her lunch (a phoned-in effort of three boiled eggs and a quick pickled salad) ought to have been. It was already gone.

The rest of the week made it clear that there was truly no pattern. This maniac took her lunch anytime from 8:05 (within the amount of time she’d used the break room bathroom on Tuesday), to 11:45.

That tickled at her hind brain. There was something familiar about that… Oh. She'd thought before that the thief must have a lot of leisure time in order to wait in the break room and choose victims. But the times that the food went missing was a clue too. No one who was being managed could just go wandering around the building at any time in the morning. Breaks were staggered to prevent congestion.

That meant that the thief wasn't being managed. The thief might be a manager.

That would narrow things down a lot. She printed off a few pages of company headshots of all managerial staff in the building.

When she took the document with her to the head of security, he got an uncomfortable look on his face. "I don't think that we can send someone to watch the break room for managers," he said in a steady, soothing tone.

"Why not?" Her tone came out sharper than she wanted. Maeve compensated with a little smile.

"Because," he said slowly, "no one will enjoy their breaks if they think that security has been deployed to watch them taking their breaks."

She rolled her eyes and left the security station in a huff. Something had to be done. This couldn't go on.

It was ridiculous and undignified. She'd never been hounded in such a petty way before. The effect that it had on her was surprising.

Her sleep started to suffer. She didn't enjoy cooking as much as she had before. That was infuriating, since she had deliberately cultivated the skillset as part of her routine. Spending a long time cooking quality food had made her feel proud of herself: now she just felt annoyed, constantly bothered by the hovering reminder that someone was toying with her.

She wasn't going to waste gourmet ingredients on live bait for some asshole, so she either had to eat leftovers or adjust all of her recipes for single portions. For weeks, she wasted time making a lunch that she knew she would never eat. It made her shake with a sort of helpless fury in her own home. This person was stealing more than food: it was her time and labor, her peace of mind and some of her dignity.

Maeve could feel her tight grip on her life slipping. It was on the fourth week of this unending nightmare that she realized that she’d nearly missed a meeting while waiting for lunch delivery in the lobby, and she hadn’t even ordered.

‘Enough is enough.’ She slammed a briefcase full of files onto her desk and gritted her teeth. ‘I’m going to find this person and deal with them myself. They're going to regret toying with me.’

The next morning, she packed up her laptop and brought everything to the break room, setting up at the table closest to the fridge.

People edged around her anxiously over the next hour, filling up their coffee mugs quickly and escaping to their cubicles in a way she knew was atypical from her study of the cameras and several office sitcoms. No one lingered foolishly several steps away from the coffee station, blocking the walkway.

She watched and waited for her patience to be rewarded. But no one came. At two in the afternoon, she left.

The next day, she considered her options. The thief had not struck when she had placed herself directly in the break room.

‘Then again, I was visible from the doorway. They probably saw me and chose not to steal. Perhaps they didn't even enter the room. If I want to observe my prey without detection, I should sit further away and decrease suspicion.’

The nature of her job made it very difficult to do in a public setting like the break room, which meant that Maeve was forced to only do reports instead of bringing out private files. She waited and waited, glancing up from her computer every few seconds.

Time drug on, and her nerves were shot. Maeve felt fried, tired, and hungry. She wanted to leave. Patrick from accounting kept trying to make bad puns in her direction. He'd seemed to misinterpret her behavior as an attempt to make friends with the other workers.

Movement by the doorway caught her attention, as someone in an obnoxiously colored jacket shuffled in. They crossed the room, pausing by the coffeepot to leave their mug with a careless clatter before making their way to the fridge.

It caught her attention. It wasn't criminal, but it was a little antisocial and selfish to leave your dirty dishes around.

Her intuition was humming at her. She watched intently as this person opened the fridge and removed a small glass container. She felt a heart-stopping thrill.

It was him.

The thief didn't even pause before turning to refill his dirty mug with coffee. He looked totally unbothered and casual, as if he did this every day. He wasn't in the least bit worried.

‘That’s mine! He's actually holding my food. There's no way to explain that.'

She quickly closed her laptop with a nasty little smile and got up, crossing the room in a graceful lope. She managed to insert herself between the long legged thief and the break room door just as he was about to exit with his coffee and her lunch.

He barely avoided walking directly into her. Instead of looking at her face, he tried to step around her. She side-stepped to block him.

“Hello.” She smiled, poisonly sweet. She was so close to vengeance. “Is that my lunch?”

“Hey.” The man just looked at his phone, and barely addressed her at all. “Nah, it’s mine.” He sounded so casual. He was blowing her off.

“That is clearly my container.” Maeve said sharply. Her tone rose a little. Of course it was hers. She'd paid extra for the customized design on the glass. "That's a ridiculous lie when I actively watched you try to steal my food." She put a hand up for her food. "Here." She waited.

He sighed as he lowered his phone. He lifted the container with the braised duck she’d made last night, and finally made eye contact with her. He stuck out his lower lip in a mocking pout for a moment before he responded. “I don’t see your name on it. That’s one hell of an accusation, miss.”

He was… amused. He was fucking getting off on this power play.

The sheer fucking gall of it stole her breath for a moment. She'd caught him holding her property, and he didn't think she could do anything about it.

‘I made that food. The rest of it is still in my fucking fridge at home. I could fit that duck breast back in like a puzzle piece.’

“Give it back.” She said, low and slow. Anyone could hear the danger in her voice. Even people who had no idea that she was a witch knew she was intimidating.

“Why would I do that? It’s my lunch.” Then he chuckled at her, and walked around her. She was frozen stock still. “You should be careful of who you accuse of things, miss. I’m an important man and you don’t want to get in trouble.”

Her heart rate was through the roof and her whole body was tense with fury. She turned to watch him go, blood thumping in her ears. Had that really happened? She'd caught him in the act and he'd condescended to her? He didn't even glance over his shoulder.

She'd never been dismissed like that. Never.

She had a furious and helpless lightning realization: this was why the other women hadn't complained about the theft. They'd known that they were powerless to stop it. People just had to accept this vile, selfish behavior, because it was coming from someone above them.

'And it's because I'm a woman. He thinks he can do this to me because I'm a woman.'

Well. The unpleasant joke was on him. She wasn't an office worker. She was a lawyer. She'd go over his head. The company owner was a family friend: whatever caché this shitstain had wouldn't outweigh her position and connections.

He was going to regret the way he'd treated the office workers. Even if empathy was beyond him, he'd know that he fucked up by stealing from her.

“I am going to find out who he was," Maeve said to herself, icy cold in the chatter of the break room. He didn’t look familiar. "He's not from this department."

She would know. She'd been studying pictures.

“I think he’s a programmer.” Someone said quietly, and Maeve swiveled her head around in time to see a cubicle worker’s face disappear behind their mug. Whoever it was didn’t matter.

“Does anyone know his name?” She asked. No one met her eyes, but everyone shook their heads.

"He said he's a team lead," someone offered.

People had been watching that confrontation. A few weeks ago, she might have been mortified to be disrespected so publicly. But it wasn't the first time, she realized. That was probably why the complaints had stopped: someone had seen this man steal, and he'd threatened their job the way he'd tried to threaten hers.

She’d start with the website development team. They were only a floor down.

The unfortunate thing about massive streaming businesses is that they have an infestation of programmers. Maeve had to click through hundreds of faces before she found the rat-faced dillhole that had stolen her lunch and lied about it to her face.

“Raymond Atwater, meet your doom.” She whispered in victory at the screen. Evidently he was a team lead for the server security team.

What was obscene was that his team was in an entirely different building. This asshole had gone across campus to steal her lunch.

To be clear, he'd walked out of his office, through the office pool, out into the lobby of his own building, across two parking lots and a decorative garden, through the lobby of her building and up the elevator to the 9th floor, all to steal her fucking lunch. And he'd done that almost every day for 3 and a half weeks. What was wrong with him?

‘Maybe he got caught in his own building.’ She mused, before sending a quick exploratory email to the HR team in his actual building, as well as the HR heads in the buildings closer to it. They might have more information.

She wanted dirt. Filthy dirt. And as much of it as possible.

In the update to the president, she happily included the footage and Raymond's name.

The response from the HR head in Raymond's building was fast, professional, and immediately confirmed that he was a problematic employee.

Maeve frowned at the email, rereading one line in particular.

"Management has been disinterested in pursuing suggested corrective measures for multiple instances of problematic behavior," the rep had written. Maeve glanced back up at the head of the email to jog her memory of the other woman's name, Kimberly Lianson.

"I would recommend a meeting with his head of department, Mr. Patel, and perhaps part of the executive team, since Mr. Atwood's actions have had an impact across the campus."

"I can do that," Maeve murmured to her screen. She sent off an inquiry with the company President's secretary about meeting availability. Most people needed to wait a week or two. But for Maeve, the secretary made time.

Two days later, she met Kimberly Lianson outside the meeting room. The older woman's eyebrows shot up.

"Would you like any help preparing for the meeting?" Maeve said, instead of a greeting.

Kimberly's face relaxed. She smiled. "That would be very helpful, thank you. Could you get the door?" She shifted her burden to the side and shook one hand free so that Maeve could access the key dangling from her wrist and open the door.

She pushed it open and strode in first to find the light switch.

"Thank you so much for putting all this evidence together," Kimberly started. She blew a little strand of sweaty hair off of her face. "I really start to wonder if they'll ever be willing to punish a manager, but I'm hopeful."

Maeve let out a surprised laugh. "He's guilty," she said. "I have him on camera stealing from me, and notes about everything I can see that he stole. The dollar value actually becomes rather substantial."

Kimberly's warm smile became a bit fixed. "Well." She glanced over Maeve's shoulder for a moment. "I think it's an uphill battle, if I'm honest."

Maeve stared. "There's enough complaints against him to wallpaper my office."

Kimberly's lips went thin as she pressed them together. "Yes," she finally said. "He does a very important job and makes the company a lot of money."

That was such bullshit that she couldn't speak for a moment. When she could control herself again, Maeve took a deep breath. "Well, I do a very important job as well," she said. "I'm confident that we can present the facts and get some justice."

Kimberly was obviously not convinced.

Maeve didn't mind. She'd see.

They finished setting up for the meeting and were ready before the head of information and security and the company President arrived, obviously finishing up some funny conversation. The president clapped Mr. Patel on the shoulder before he took in the room, amusement crinkling his eyes.

"I hear that there's a presentation." He took a seat. "About a, uh- somewhat difficult engineer."

Maeve smoothed the front of her skirt as she took a seat. "Yes, Ms. Lianson has a presentation prepared to make things shorter. Thank you so much for coming, Mr. Conway, Mr. Patel."

"Yes, it's about Atwood, isn't it?" Mr. Patel didn't return her greeting. He glanced over at Mr. Conway. "Brilliant man," he explained casually. "Steps on some toes, but he gets results."

"Interesting," Maeve cut him off. "Ms. Lianson, if you wouldn't mind?"

She sat with her fingers folded precisely on her lap as Kimberly listed the types of complaints leveled against Mr. Atwood from his department and others. She had a still image from Maeve's camera of Atwood taking one of Maeve's lunches: and two other photos of him with different lunches. Because apparently he'd been stealing more than one lunch per day.

As Kimberly spoke, Mr. Patel fidgeted, pulling at his collar and fiddling with his cuffs. He tapped at his watch at one point, peering at the second hand. He didn't touch his stapled papers.

Maeve hated him. He obviously didn't care about this.

"When confronted about the theft, Mr. Atwood lied and insinuated that confronting him for the theft would mean retribution." Kimberly seemed resigned.

Maeve felt very tense.

The President was a family friend. He wasn't much more interested in the facts than Atwood's department head was. But that didn't matter. He wasn't going to let someone treat her that way.

When Kimberly wrapped up, Mr. Conway was the first to break the ice. He shifted in his chair and tapped his fingers on the table as he spoke. "Well, what are you expecting to happen?"

"According to company policy, he should be terminated immediately," Maeve answered immediately. "In light of the fact that he's causing disruptions in three different departments with impunity despite being made aware of the unacceptability of his actions, he doesn't meet the standard for employees."

Mr. Patel let out an incredulous scoff. He waved a splayed hand around the room. "Over a few missed salads?" he said incredulously. "Don't you think that's a bit dramatic?"

"It does seem petty," Mr. Conway agreed, shaking his head. "The whole thing- he should write up an apology." He rubbed his hands together as if to wash them of this affair. "He's clearly immature, but no real harm was done.

Maeve stared at him. Making someone apologize is what one does with naughty children.

"This is a case of theft. Theft is a fire-able offense, and the dollar amount Mr. Atwood has stolen from employees is in the thousands."" Kimberly said, a little stiff. "Regardless of what has been stolen, Mr. Atwood has been stealing from other employees for years. This is not to mention the multiple complaints of harassment and creating an unsafe work environment."

"Snacks," Mr. Patel dismissed. He let out a sigh. "I'll increase the budget for snack food in our department so he isn't roving around for food."

"Good man," Mr. Conway said, and stood up cheerfully. "Well, thank you for your time, ladies, keep up the good work." He winked at Maeve. "Your cooking must be something! Your mother would be proud." He left with a little chuckle at his own joke.

Maeve was too furious to speak. If she opened her mouth, actual venom was going to spurt out. She stood dangerously still as the two men left the office.

A sigh from Kimberly broke the spell. "As I said," she started ruefully, "an uphill battle." She gathered up her materials.

She managed a stiff nod.

The older woman looked sympathetic. "I know," Kimberly said. She let out a sigh and rifled a hand through her hair. "That was frustrating. You could always go to the police." She gave Maeve a wry look. "I don't know that it would be much more effective." Then she walked out of the room, balancing the precarious stack of folders that neither Mr. Conway or Mr. Patel had bothered to even open.

She felt like her legs were numb in her expensive shoes. The red bottoms wobbled awkwardly on the carpet as she stood still and tried to process what had just happened.

The shame won out after the door closed behind Kimberly, and she exhaled a painful held breath. At least there was no one in the room to see her like this. Ungainly and unbalanced, Maeve walked to her office in a haze. People walked by her, clutching papers and mugs. She hugged the wall and averted her eyes.

'Maybe they'll do something about it,' she lied to herself. The elevator dinged above her head, but it sounded dull and remote. The lie coiled in the bottom of her stomach like a viper. She carefully stepped into the elevator, mindful that if she acted too out of the ordinary, people would make it the subject of gossip.

She tried again to console herself in the quiet of her office. 'At least he might stop.'

He'd changed buildings after the last few complaints, anyway. It seemed likely he'd move on to a new victim. Then Maeve could hold her head high enough in her building, and pretend that that meeting didn't happen. She could fix it.

Her lunch wasn’t missing the next day. Maeve ate it, thankful for the return to her routine. But it tasted like nothing.

She'd forgotten to season it properly. Maeve ate it mechanically, bite after bite of bland pasta.

Something worse happened in the afternoon.

It started with the little ‘ding’ sound her computer made when an email landed. Maeve put down the files she’d finally started working on, and clicked on the notification.

It opened an entire email from that skunk, Raymond. It started out banal enough.

“I’m sorry”

‘A good start, if a little lackluster in the begging he should be doing.’ She thought sourly, before starting on the rest. The viper in her stomach twisted.

“- if you were offended that I enjoyed your cooking. You are a decent cook, and I thought that the opportunity I provided you for someone else to try your cooking might improve your abilities while providing me with a quick lunch. I am, after all, very busy- I have 50 people under me”

‘No you don’t, you twat, I can see the personnel files. Why are you lying to me?’

“And my time is very valuable. Someday, if you work hard, I’m sure you will understand. As for feedback, I have to say that some of the food was better than others. You make a competent risotto, but you need to work on how you prepare fish. Hopefully you can improve.’

She had to look away from the computer for a long moment. The rage and embarrassment were bubbling up again. She felt nauseous.

“The President said that I needed to send you an email to resolve this misunderstanding. If you have any questions, please let me know. I’ll try to get back to you within a few days, as my schedule allows.

Thanks,

Team Lead Ray”

“You’re not my team lead,” she uttered, feeling petty and filled with bile. “In fact, you’re a fucking loathsome little worm. An utter wretch, a thieving pile of donkey mucus.”

The air in her office began to feel a little claustrophobic from her own malign energy, so Maeve took a second to breathe and lean away from her computer. Her stomach roiled.

“So, they won’t be doing anything about him.” That should have been less surprising after that awful meeting. Maeve would have thought that her history with the President and his family might merit a little more consideration.

At the end of the day, it obviously meant nothing. Or worse, that that doddering twit thought she was a whining child. Whose mother would be 'proud of her cooking'. It made her feel sick.

Something she'd heard yesterday came to mind, unwrapping a painful present of context.

'The President implied he hadn't heard about this before.' she realized. 'I've been sending updates on this for weeks. They… didn't read them. Any of them.'

Maeve’s outlook on her employment really began to shift at that moment.

'They didn't care about my work. And they don't care about my position. About me.'

She took a look at the pile of HR complaints and considered her options.

‘I’m going to ensure that this is the worst mistake they’ve ever made.’

She turned back to the computer screen, still lit up with the offending email.

“And I’m going to start with you," she promised venomously.

Two weeks later, she was waiting on a bench under sun-dappled leaves in the local park. It was earlier in the day than she would have usually been off work, and she was enjoying the chance to relax and commune with nature. The birds were singing, the breeze was blowing, and the sun was shining its beneficence upon her.

She watched the ducks in the pond bobbing in the warm water, while a bird yammered endlessly next to her. Some elderly couples and a young mother were slowly walking around the lake, while some speedwalkers marched around the paths single file. She waited for all the passersby to face the other direction.

A particularly large bird scream in her ear disrupted her sense of peace, and made her ears ring.

“Oh, shut it.” She turned to the bird in the birdcage. It peeped at her, seemingly furious. “I’m about to release you anyway.”

She opened the cage and reached her hand in, delicately lifting the bird out of the door. She whispered something onto the wind, and threw it up into the air.

Its wings outstretched as it reached heavenward, before curling down around it in a shimmering golden light. Within a second, a dazed man in a red running suit was standing in front of the bench. He blinked blearily at her, before swaying. His legs gave out beneath him, and he collapsed on the dirt path.

She left him there.

“Good luck explaining to your sand volleyball friends why you were missing for three months, you ass.” His hand moved, but it was going to take him a while to remember how to use those limbs again. Doubtless someone would report a man collapsed on the running path within a few hours, and the police would return him to his grateful family. Pat would never remember where he’d been, and couldn’t explain his absence. All he’d remember would be the new, bone-shattering aversion to running red lights in a school zone.

The tinny quality of a personal bluetooth speaker heralded her quarry.

As ever, she was well-timed. Just as Pat began to snore into the dirt, a familiar figure jogged around the bend of the lake. His long legs worked lazily, eating up ground in the middle of the path. He barely seemed to register the other people, prompting one of the elderly men to take a doddering leap off of the path, before Ray clipped the side of a stroller with his right thigh.

Maeve watched as the woman tried to tear into him, but Raymond, Team Leader Extraordinaire, seemed very convinced that she had been in his way, being that she wasn’t entirely off the public sidewalk.

He huffed at her, and then left, diverting up to the otherwise abandoned path Maeve was sitting on.

She idly ran her fingertips over the wire frame of the birdcage next to her. The sun had made it almost uncomfortably warm.

Raymond only stopped in front of her when he tripped on Pat’s unconscious body.

“What is that doing there?” He asked, sounding disgusted.

It somehow inspired more contempt for him than she had previously possessed.

‘Anyone remotely decent might wonder if he was alive or okay, you infested carcass.’

“Hello Raymond.” She rose, and stretched out her arms. “Lovely day.”

“Uh, yeah.” He looked at her without any comprehension. This muppet faced buffoon had stolen her lunch for over a month, and didn't know what she looked like outside of the office.

It rankled more than it should.

“Do you happen to have a fever, a cough, or any symptoms that would lead you to believe that you might have the flu or another illness?” She asked, businesslike. Her hands were at the ready.

“Of course not.” He had the audacity to look offended. “And where do you get off asking me that? Who-”

She waved her fingers and concentrated. His long white shirt became wings, and he shrank. And shrank.

In the span of a few moments, a confused white duck was standing on top of Pat’s back. She pulled her waiting phone out and snapped a picture, and sent it to Adelaide with the caption 'Look what I found in the park!'

Then she tilted her head, mentally measuring the waterfowl's dimensions.

“I probably should have made you a songbird.” She sighed, grabbing the duck with both hands. He made a weird sound in response. “I was just thinking of those beautiful ducks on the pond. Now you’re too big for the cage.” She stuffed him in anyway, working with the fresh transformation limpness. It would be more difficult to deal with him later, when he’d figured out how to be a duck. Then again, nothing she’d seen would have led her to believe that Ray was capable of learning.

She shoved the cage into the newspaper-lined backseat of her classy black car, and left the park without a second glance.

NOTE:

This was originally posted on my Patreon, where I am continually writing other character stories for Deplorably Devoted. Check it out here!

#deplorably devoted to you #deplorably devoted #short story #Maeve Le Fey #love interest short story

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