A/N: Sorry it's taken me so long to get this one out. Also sorry that The Plan isn't exactly revealed herein. Seriously. It's coming. Eventually. I'm getting there. I promise.
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Chapter Four – Leila the Freak
OCTOBER 14, 2004
Leila sat at the reference desk on the bottom floor of the library, trying desperately to stop letting her eyes land on couples. What the fuck are all these couples studying together for? Aren't there any pissy little boyfriends and girlfriends on this stupid campus that aren't in classes together? At least all the fraternity and sorority pledges were initiated by now, so they weren't constantly coming up to her wanting her to sign off on their study hours, even though she had never seen them before and would guess that they had probably been snorting coke in the bathroom instead of studying. She sighed and looked at the clock again. Eleven-thirty on a Thursday night. Only another fifteen minutes before she could start herding the patrons up to the circulation desk and then out the doors. Another fifteen minutes before she had to face the fourth floor.
It was part of her job to close down the fourth floor of the library every night, the floor where the scholarly journals were housed. Only, over the past two months, she had been forced six times to forego fulfilling those responsibilities. Because, over the past two months, six women, all tall, thin, blonde sorority girls, had plunged from the fourth-floor windows to their deaths on the concrete below. There was no indication that any of the deaths had been suicides, but no one else was on the floor when it happened, and things like that don't just happen by accident. The police were stumped, but there was nothing they could no, with no leads and no suspects.
Leila rolled her eyes. Those girls probably got exactly what was coming to them. It had taken her all of three weeks to put the pieces together. It was obviously the angry spirit of Johanna Peters doing the killing. The girl had been a pledge of Pi Kappa Mu sorority in the sixties. Her pledge class had been forced to break into the library one fall night, only a week before they were to be initiated. It was one of their requirements to get through what was known as Hell Week. Well, Johanna had somehow ended up crashing through the window and hurtling through the balmy fall air to land on the stone steps in front of the library. It did not end well for her. Or for her sorority. They were kicked off campus for so long that by the time they came back, their membership had changed from blondes to red-heads. That would make no difference to poor Johanna, though. At least, Leila hoped, it wouldn't make a difference to Johanna, tucking a strand of curly auburn hair back into the severe bun from which it had escaped. Wouldn't it just beat all if Johanna confused Leila for a sorority bimbo and flung her through the window?
Leila Langford was about as far from a sorority girl as one could get and still be in college. Well, for one thing, she was a grad student, a semester-and-a-half away from her masters degree in Library and Information Studies. But even as an undergrad, Leila had been the kind of girl that sorority women laughed at. Painfully short, not a single curve to be found on her entire frame, horn-rimmed glasses, dressed like the librarian she aspired to be, couldn't tell you the difference between mascara and lip liner to save a nation. That was Leila. Always had been.
Her parents had died in a tornado, when she was three months old. They never even made it down the hall to get her out of her crib, crushed by the roof collapsing on their bed as they slept. She, meanwhile, by some miracle – or perhaps curse, she sometimes thought – had been found halfway down the block, not a scratch on her, still swaddled just as her mother had left her when she tucked her into bed. Her mother's mother had taken her in. By the time Leila arrived on her grandmother's doorstep, the woman was pushing seventy-five. Still in perfectly good health, but rather older than the typical guardian of an orphaned infant. But there was no one else willing to take the child, and Leila's grandmother would die before she saw her grandbaby placed in foster care. So, Leila grew up in a house that smelled like mothballs.
Leila had been seen as something of a freak from an early age. For one thing, her grandmother insisted on dressing her in garments that she had pulled from the back of her own closet, where they had resided since the early seventies. Contact lenses were out of the question. Young ladies did not rouge their faces unless they were looking for trouble. If a young man wants to court you, he may visit me to ask for permission, and if I know his parents and they are respectable people, then I will allow him to come to dinner at our home on occasion. Yeah. Leila was a freak.
By middle school, she had started dabbling in the occult, just searching desperately for any escape from the world in which she lived. Some people read happy novels about happy people and their happy lives. Such nonsense merely depressed Leila. She wanted real solutions to her problems, not just temporary reprieve. So she researched spells, chants, hexes, anything to make her less of a pariah. Nothing worked. She believed that it could work. She just didn't have what it took to make things happen. Still, she enjoyed learning about magic, and other aspects of the supernatural as well. She thought perhaps her grandmother's attic was haunted, but she never got up the nerve to really try to find out. Besides, if there was a ghost up there, it didn't seem interested in bothering her as long as she didn't bother it, so she kept her distance.
By the time she escaped to college, she was so set in her ways that it didn't really matter anymore that people thought she was a freak. She was a freak, and she didn't know how to change it, and she told herself that she didn't care enough to try. Maybe she didn't. It still hurt, though. She graduated with a bachelors degree in Classical Studies. Her grandmother lived just long enough to see it happen, although she was still livid that Leila had elected to go to college instead of getting married. Leila wondered how exactly the woman expected her to find a husband when she was a complete social misfit, and she wasn't allowed to date anyway. Her grandmother's last words to her were, "At least I got to see your cousins Marla and Maeve get married and give me a few great-grandbabies." Leila just nodded sadly and waited for the old bag to die. They had never gotten along. She had never gotten along with any of her family. They were all perfect apple-pie people. And she was…well, she was Leila. Leila the outcast.
The only place where Leila shone was in the library. Despite her…odd…tendencies, she was really very good with helping people find the answers to questions. And she was organized to a fault. She was born to be a librarian. Either that, or those stupid school-teacher skirts her grandmother had always made her wear predisposed her to the reference lifestyle.
Leila was pulled back to the present by a sight that had been periodically making her toes quiver for the past two days. A tall man in his mid-twenties with dark hair and sultry eyes strolled in the front doors, directly across from her desk. As usual, he had with him an older man, also strikingly handsome. Leila assumed it to be his father. They had come in a couple of days before, asking about the fourth floor. About the girls. She had figured they were just playing at detectives, so she fed them the same tired lines the newspapers had reported. No signs of foul play. Tragic accidents. Condolences to the families and friends. Blah, blah, blah.
The younger guy, who had introduced himself as James Hetfield, had actually flirted with her a little when he asked her about the deaths. She was no fool. It was easy enough to see that flirting was second nature for this man, he wasn't actually interested in her. Duh. Who would be interested in Leila the freak? Definitely not this sex-god. Anyway, the guys had gone up to the fourth floor to look around, and she had watched as shortly later they walked back out the front doors of the library. She hadn't seen them again until tonight, but she had thought about James. Often. How could she not? The man was absolutely delicious. Way out of her league – not that there were any members of the opposite sex who weren't – but she could still look, right? So, she was excited to see them walk into the building again. This time, though, they didn't stop to chat, just headed straight for the elevators. The father didn't even glance in her direction, but James nodded to her as he passed by, and she fought the urge to giggle girlishly. But then, a patron came over to ask a question, and it was actually a good question. So Leila focused on her job, and lost track of time.
Suddenly, she realized that it was a few minutes until midnight. Closing time. The reference section, fortunately, was already empty, so she didn't have to try to evict any stragglers. She assumed that James and his father had left while she was helping someone else, and felt a pang of sadness that she hadn't gotten to see her minor crush again. She had no clue if he'd ever be back to the library. Shrugging her shoulders – not like she had a chance with him, anyway – she decided to forego the elevator, and headed up the back stairwell to turn out the lights on the fourth floor, hoping against hope that Johanna wasn't planning on tossing her to her death that night.
As she opened the doors on the fourth floor, she heard males voices, and headed in their direction to let them know it was time to clear out. But before she got to where she could see them, she made out what they were saying.
"Dad, the body was cremated. The only reason she can still be here is if there's something of hers left that holding her here."
"I realize that, but it could be anything. A lock of her hair that her boyfriend or her mother kept on a locket, a voodoo doll that somebody made of her…it could be anything. We need to at least try to cleanse the building before we go disturbing those people."
"And if it doesn't work?"
"If it doesn't work, we'll just have to keep at it. Maybe see if she left some unfinished business we can help her with."
"Yeah, I'll tell you what her unfinished business is. It's killing the people that let her die. Too bad she doesn't realize that those people aren't still hanging around here waiting for her to come and off them." Leila heard James sigh heavily. "When will people learn to stop remodeling buildings where people died? That's the best way I know of to wake a restless spirit and make it start throwing hot sorority chicks out of fourth-floor windows."
Leila smirked a bit. It figured that a guy like James would be into the "hot sorority chicks." She quickly ducked behind a bookshelf as she heard steps coming toward her. James walked past, and she heard his father go off in the other direction. She could distantly hear him start to chant, and James did the same in the corner to which he had gone. She couldn't quite make out the words, but it was definitely Latin, and it sounded like…an exorcism? No way. Were these two idiots actually playing at exorcism?
Leila was trying not to laugh at their antics, when the lights suddenly began to flicker and the temperature dropped dramatically. Oh, fuck. You geniuses have managed to piss off Johanna. We're all in for it now. She peeked her head around the corner, just in time to see an alarmingly transparent figure appear just to the right of James. Leila recognized the woman from the pictures. Tall, blonde, blue-eyed, curvy, beautiful Johanna Peters, dressed in clothes that were probably the height of fashion in the sixties, when she died. She didn't look happy. Huh. I guess their exorcism must be working, otherwise she wouldn't look so miffed. James caught sight of Johanna coming toward him and raised a shotgun that Leila hadn't seen in his hand. Oh, yeah? And what exactly are you planning on doing with that, buddy? You gonna kill her again? He fired the gun directly at the spectral figure's head, and oh shit, did this psycho seriously just fire a shotgun at a ghost inside a university library? But the ghost screamed in fury and dissipated. James finished the ritual, then went to another corner of the room, where he repeated the process. Leila observed his father doing the same before taking the opportunity to sneak back out to the stairwell, carefully checking to make sure that neither man caught a glimpse of her.
She stood for a moment, breathing heavily. Well, knock me over with a fucking feather. Those men just exorcised a ghost from the scholarly journals section of my library. She slowly crept back down to her desk to try and figure out just who the hell this James Hetfield character was. It took her all of a minute and a half to complete her research. And James Hetfield sure as hell wasn't the guy she had met. Not unless he had somehow made himself a good fifteen years younger and decided to give up his lucrative career as the lead singer of Metallica. Fuck, I knew that name sounded familiar.
As she sat, trying to make sense in her head of what had just happened, she heard hushed voices coming from around the corner. "So, do you think it worked?" That was 'James.'
"I don't know, Dean. I get the feeling it did, though. We'll stick around a few days, just to make sure." Dean? Well, now we're getting somewhere.
"Works for me. I think I'll hit the bars and see if there aren't some hot sorority chicks that need consolation over the loss of their dearly departed sisters." Jackass.
The men turned the corner, and Leila hurriedly closed the Metallica fansite she had been inspecting. "Gentlemen, the library is now closed," she informed them. "If you have any materials you'd like to check out, you'll need to take them up to the circulation desk right away."
The father spoke. "No, I think we're done here." Dean shifted the bag he carried further onto his shoulder and smiled disarmingly at her. Her heart skipped a beat.
"Good night, then," she said, struggling to keep her voice steady.
The men walked out the front doors. She followed, on the pretense of needing to lock the doors, but watched to see them climb into an old black Chevy Impala. Leila wasn't really into cars, but she recognized quality when she saw it, and this car was definitely something to write home about. She noticed that Dean was walking with a new bounce in his step. Probably excited about getting to console the hot sorority chicks. Leila rolled her eyes, but there was something about him that she found absolutely irresistible. And it wasn't just his looks, either, although they definitely contributed. There was something in his eyes, in the way that he interacted with his dad, in the way he ran his fingers along the top of the car before opening the door to climb behind the wheel. And the fact that he had just rid her building of an evil spirit definitely gave him some brownie points in her book. She wasn't quite ready to let this rather exceptional man walk out of her life just yet. It looked like Leila, for maybe the second time in her life, was about to hit the bars.