Veiled (31 page)

“
Yes! Can she stay with
us, momma? Can she? She is very nice!” Jonas insisted while tugging
on his mom’s dress.

The father smiled and swept
Jonas up and onto his shoulders.

“
Estelle, do you know how
to ride?” the man asked.

Estelle nodded shyly and
was helped up onto the horse. She turned in the saddle slightly as
they walked away, and smiled back at us.

We waved to her silently,
and watched her ride into her new life.

My pendant started emitting
light that shone in the darkness of the night.

“
I guess you are staying,”
I said sadly, as I looked at Alex’s inert pendant.

He smiled and wrapped his
arms around me. “I need to see this through, now that I
know…”

I looked at him
puzzled.

“
Go ahead. You can read my
mind now,” he said with a roll of his eyes.

“
No, how about you just
tell me.”

Alex wrapped one arm around
my shoulders and started back toward Henry’s place.

“
I was told that Estelle
was to be my great-grandmother, and that the child she is carrying
is Russell.”

My jaw just about dropped
off entirely. “Are you serious? So, so… that means
that…”

“
Russell will be my
grandfather,” Alex finished.

“
And who…”

“
I don’t know who my
parents will be yet,” he said, sounding a bit
disappointed.

“
So why are you sad? This
is good news. Most mortals get to spend a great deal of time with
their grandparents.”

“
I know…it’s just…I always
thought we’d be brothers.”

“
You’ll always have a
special relationship with him.”

“
I guess so. But I’ll have to obey
him.” Alex grimaced. “I hope I get back to Heaven before he leaves,
so I can give him a big thrashing…just so he doesn’t forget who can
always pin him first.”

* * * * *

Chapter 26

I was sent straight to
Spain, and I flew there filled with excitement, because this was to
be my first Guardian Angel Mission. The only odd thing about this
Mission was that my pendant didn’t say the name of the mortal I
would be watching over. It just said
“
Baby girl DeLeon”, so once at the
house I followed the sounds of a crying baby.

I was struck by the beauty
of the little baby, she couldn’t be more than a day or two old, and
she already had blond curly locks and shiny red cheeks. The odd
thing about her was her aura. It looked familiar to me somehow, and
so was the feeling I got when I was near her—like I knew her
well.

I watched over her for who
knows how long, focusing on that nagging feeling that I knew this
baby. Then it hit me. One day as she lay facing up, I could swear
she was looking straight at me, and her eyes… “For heaven’s sake,
this is Celeste!” I said out loud. There was no mistake about it at
all, this little creature housed Celeste’s spirit!

Now that I knew without a
doubt, my mind started racing. How could this be? I didn’t even get
to say good-bye to her before she left. I wonder if she thought
that I didn’t care. I wonder…I looked down at her and she smiled
back at me, and though her little mind was not mature enough to
think coherently, but I knew her spirit knew me and depended on
me.

No guardian angel was ever
as dutiful as I was. I stayed by her side, keeping a constant vigil
over her day and night. Her own parents were pretty much absent
from Celeste’s life. She was raised by her nanny and me.
Apparently, her parents were hoping for a boy, but due to some
complications during Celeste’s birth, the mother could no longer
have children and the father resented this.

“
At least you’ll get all
the pretty dresses you want,” I told Celeste, remembering how
strongly she felt about this particular point back in
heaven.

Celeste’s family lived in a
large house on a plantation, in the outskirts of Leon, Spain. The
rooms in the house were spacious and well furnished with solid and
old looking furniture, which only meant that their family had been
wealthy for a long time. Their wealth came from the wheat mill that
had been run by the family for generations.

Wealth never interested me,
but it had been important to Celeste, it was one of those things
that she really wanted and didn’t think she could live without. She
had been warned that wealth wouldn’t guarantee happiness, but she
didn’t care, she said that she would be happy no matter what. And
who could ever argue with her on that point? She always did have a
playful nature, and mortality wouldn’t change that.

And here she was now, the
only daughter of a wealthy family. The only problem was that her
parents were too self-absorbed to give Celeste the kind of
attention that she required. At least she had me, and Ester, her
nanny. Ester was a stocky, firm, but sweet woman who filled in very
well as the mother figure.

Her own mother, Doña Rosa,
was more of a token figure who only received her daughter in her
company, when she felt like it. She was a vane and shallow woman,
who spent inordinate amounts of time decorating herself. She used
the pretext of ill health to excuse herself from any and all
responsibilities, and spent almost all her time parading around
town.

Her father, Don Marco De
Leon, was pompous and proud, and also concerned with appearances
and looking grand and imposing to others. He somehow lost interest
in his pretty wife now that she could give him no more children, so
he filled his days with the minutia of his business.

“
What lessons will you
teach these people, Celeste? They are in for it, aren’t they? They
have no clue that their little child will grow up to be you,” I
said with a chuckle. “I hope they don’t change you. I hope you
win.”

“
Wow, nice place. Nothing
like Max’s house, he’s dirt poor,” Leo commented.

I recognized the voice at
once and turned excitedly.

“
Leo! What are you doing
here?”

He was looking around the
room, taking in all the details.

“
Are you Max’s Guardian
Angel?” I asked with interest.

“
Yes, I am. You know he’s
almost ten years old now.”

“
Really? That old? I
didn’t realize there was such an age difference between them. We’re
going to have to work hard at keeping him single long enough for
Celeste to grow up.”

Leo chuckled, and shook his
head. “You are just like Irene, always thinking about those
things!”

“
They loved each other!” I
said, insulted. “We owe them that much!”

“
I suppose so. Besides,
she’ll kill me if she ever found out that it was me who dropped the
ball.” He pointed to the helpless looking child who was presently
taking a nap.

I laughed. “So, tell me
about Max. What is he like?”

Leo shrugged. “Just like
Max, he’s very smart and has learned a lot in spite of the fact
that he can’t to go to school because he is so poor. His mother is
a widow and he is the man of the house. They are very religious and
Padre Fernández, the town’s priest, likes him a lot. He is like a
father to him…and I have read his mind.” He looked at me with a
meaningful look.

“
Yeah, so…what is he
thinking?” I encouraged.

“
Padre Fernández wants Max
to go into the Seminary, so he can get a good
education.”

I was aghast, that couldn’t
be allowed to happen. If Max became a priest, then he would never
marry and that would devastate both him and Celeste.

“
We can’t let that
happen!” I rose suddenly.

“
Well…this is why I came
to find you. It’s not as simple as that, Tess. We have to think
about it carefully.”

I shook my head. “No, it is
simple. The priest would no doubt be open to listening to Angels.
We have to convince him otherwise, before he proposes anything to
Max and his mother. Besides, how will his mother manage without
Max? You said so yourself, he is the man of the house now, he needs
to support his mother.”

“
The priest will find a
way of compensating for that. Besides, she is very religious, she
would consider it an honor to have her son become a
priest.”

“
Oh, this is terrible.” I
began to pace the room. This was not how it was supposed to happen.
I didn’t feel bad just for Celeste and Max either, I was feeling
bad for all of us. What cruel twists would life throw at us? What
if we ended up living right next door from our soul mates, but we
still could not end up together? That would be the cruelest thing
of all.

“
Stop, Tess,” Leo demanded
with authority. “You worry too much.”

I looked at him
bewildered.

“
I can read thoughts too,
remember?” Leo said.

“
I know…it’s
just…”

“
Listen, Tess, we have to
look at the situation in the long term.” He peered into my eyes,
and continued once he saw that I was ready to listen. “Celeste is
ten years younger. She will not be eligible to marry for at least
fifteen years. In that time, Max could get an education and become
someone who Celeste would respect and look up to. Let’s say…her
priest.”

“
Oh…you are good,” I said
with admiration. “But Max is a very serious guy, he may not go back
on his vows that easily.”

“
I know. We’ll cross that
bridge when we come to it. But we do have to take into account the
fact that they have loved each other for a long time, which has got
to be hard to ignore. Besides, she will be hard to ignore,” he
added with a wink.

Leo and I got to work on
our scheming right away. We analyzed all the possible scenarios and
we settled on the one where Max got an education. After all, he
would never learn any other languages if he didn’t get an
education, and he had to find a way to develop his Gift of Tongues.
An education as a priest would give him access to all the languages
he would want to learn and more.

Meanwhile, Celeste grew
rapidly—being who she was she managed to charm even her
self-centered parents. By the time she was eight, Celeste knew
exactly how to work her parents to get anything she wanted. I
worried for her, though. I could see how this life could spoil her
and turn her into a self-centered woman, just like her mother, and
that was not the Celeste I knew and loved. As her Guardian Angel I
wanted to protect her from this possible outcome, but it was up to
her to listen to me, and that was the tricky part.

To compensate for this, I
made it a habit to talk to her every day, after she fell asleep. I
hoped that my words might be heard in her subconscious mind, and
she would dream of the things I talked to her about. Ester, her
nanny, gave me the idea early on. She would often say to Celeste
when she put her to bed, “Que sueñes con los angelitos”,
dream with the angels
. So
I gave her dreams, dreams of the heaven that she had just left. I
would tell her about all the fun we had together—exploring other
worlds, looking at the distant stars, training with the Cherubs,
flying on the back of a Seraph named Dayspring, and helping other
people.

I could tell she was
listening, I could read her mind, and when she was awake she would
play that she was an angel and she even named a toy horse
Dayspring.

I continued to influence
her dreams as she grew up. I told her all about Max and who he was,
and what he looked like. I told her about how she rescued him from
the Cast-outs and how he could speak a bunch of different
languages. Any new information I got on Max, I would pass it on to
her and she would dream about it.

I was happy with her
progress, though I thought she was a bit too spoiled for her own
good, but it couldn’t be helped. Her parents were overindulgent and
there was nothing I could do about that. Celeste got the best of
everything, including a private education. She was a good student
and caught on quickly to new concepts, but her passion was Botany,
and drawing was her quest. She would practically inhale any book on
those two topics and though she didn’t have a natural talent for
drawing, she enjoyed the task immensely, and was determined to
override her lack of talent with practice.

Her favorite pastime was
the cultivation and grafting of roses. It wasn’t an employ that
Doña Rosa approved, so Celeste had to enlist the help of the Ester
and the gardener to do this. It was a well orchestrated sham that
kept everyone happy
.

Don Marco didn’t even know
that his daughter liked roses or drawing and even if he was
informed about it, he would have dismissed it as an insignificant
detail.

Life went on smoothly for
Celeste until she turned fourteen. Doña Rosa decided to inform her
husband that Celeste should have a beau in time for their
daughter’s Quinceañera party. And as it was in most cases, this
beau was to be promised to her as her future husband.

Don Marco thought about
this task purely from a business perspective, not a sentimental
one. He wanted to make a good match, not for Celeste, but for
himself. Whoever married Celeste would get his plantation and mill,
complete with a collection of valuable jewels that dated all the
way back to the Colonization of America.