The Luna Trials

Author’s Note: While I believe this story is something special, it’s shared here for free and isn’t formally published, so it won’t be perfect. Just a gentle reminder to be kind and enjoy!!💐💐💐

LAKIN ASHWOOD- AGE 10

I was not supposed to follow them. Not today, not ever, not according to my brother. But rules had never stopped me before, especially rules that kept me away from Conrad Calloway.

The forest behind our house was humid with early summer warmth, shafts of sunlight breaking through the canopy like golden arrows. Birds flickered between branches, and somewhere nearby, water dripped steadily from a moss-covered stone. If I listened closely, I could still hear my mother calling me back for chores, but her voice faded the deeper I pushed into the trees.

I ducked under a curtain of fern fronds and padded over damp leaves as quietly as I could manage. My sandals were silent, my breath held in my chest, my entire ten-year-old body focused on one mission: follow them without getting caught.

Them meaning my brother Ryker and Conrad Calloway.

Ryker was the one who always said no. Conrad was the one who never minded.

I trailed behind them as they wound along the narrow trail that led to the clearing they used almost every afternoon. Ryker walked with his usual bruiser confidence, broad shoulders, heavy steps. Conrad, almost fourteen, walked differently. Lighter, smoother, as if he had already learned how to hide his strength in the quietest places.

My gaze locked on him like it always did. Maybe it was admiration. Maybe it was curiosity. Maybe it was the way my stomach fizzed whenever he so much as glanced my direction.

Not that he ever looked at me anymore.

Ryker shoved a branch aside, talking loudly about something or other, but Conrad only hummed, his attention already scanning the forest. He was like that, always watching, always listening, always calculating things I didn’t understand. He seemed older. Sharper. Almost wolfish already, even before his first shift.

“Lakin,” Ryker called suddenly without turning. His voice snapped through the trees like a twig underfoot. “Go home.”

I froze mid-step, fingers tightening around the rough bark of the nearest oak. My heart thumped so hard it seemed louder than the cicadas humming above me. Had he heard me already? How? I had been quiet. I was always quiet. Somehow Ryker’s ears worked like a wolf’s even though he was still years from shifting.

I held my breath, hoping if I didn’t move he might think he imagined me.

“I know you’re back there.” His tone sharpened, annoyed in that older-brother way he had perfected. “Seriously, Lakin, go do something else.”

Heat crept up my neck. He always did this. Always chased me away like I was a stray pup without a place. The embarrassment stung more than the words. I knew why he said it. He thought I would get hurt. He thought I wasn’t strong enough. He thought Conrad and he belonged to the world of real training and real wolves and I… didn’t.

For a moment I considered turning around. My mother would still be in the kitchen, humming while she kneaded dough, unaware her youngest was being exiled from the fun yet again. Maybe I should just go back. Maybe I should stop trying to belong where I clearly didn’t.

“Let her follow.”

Everything inside me went very still. I inched around the tree trunk, breath held tight in my throat.

Conrad lifted his arm to swipe away a thin web hanging between two branches, and as he did, he turned just enough that his gaze swept toward me. His eyes, that clear storm-gray even at fourteen, found mine instantly. It was like he had known exactly where I stood the entire time. Something eased across his face, the barest pull at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. More like he was sharing a quiet secret with me, one I wasn’t sure I had earned.

“She’s quieter than you think,” he added.

My heart rattled in my chest so violently that I pressed a hand against it, afraid it might shake the leaves around me. If Conrad could feel what I felt in that moment, he would take that back immediately. I was not quiet, not on the inside. Not when he looked at me like that.

Ryker groaned loudly. “She’s going to get herself hurt.”

Conrad shrugged without looking at him. His sandy blond hair slipped forward over his forehead as he stepped deeper along the path. His voice softened, just enough to make my breath catch.

“I’ll protect her.”

He said it like it was no big deal. Like protecting me would be as natural as breathing. Like he meant it.

He probably didn’t think twice about the comment. It was just something older boys said when they thought they were invincible and unbreakable and responsible for everything in their orbit.

But the words landed inside me like a spark on dry leaves.

Heat crawled up my neck so quickly I had to look away. My face burned, my ears burned, even the tips of my fingers tingled with the sudden rush of warmth.

I waited until they moved again before creeping after them, my fingers wrapped tightly around the tiny wooden charm in my pocket. The wolf I had carved that morning was crooked and lopsided, and I had sliced my thumb open twice trying to make the snout right, but I finished it. Or finished enough of it.

Because today, I was going to give it to Conrad. He was leaving in a few days for Alpha training. He was leaving two years earlier than anyone expected, and something about that felt like a door swinging shut in my chest.

If I didn’t give it to him now, I might never get the chance.

The trail opened into the training clearing, sunlight spilling across the soft earth. The center was dominated by a massive old maple tree, its trunk wide enough that Ryker and Conrad used it as a sparring post when parents were not around to scold them.

Ryker tossed his shirt aside and stretched his arms. “Ready?”

Conrad stepped forward and rolled his shoulders. The sun caught the faint sheen of sweat on his skin from their walk, painting him in warm gold. It was unfair, honestly, the way he looked. Boys were not supposed to look like that. Certainly not boys only a few years older than me.

But Conrad was not like other boys. Not anymore.

Something in him had shifted this summer, even before the real shift came. His jawline had sharpened, losing the softness of childhood. His eyes had grown clearer, darker at the edges, like storm clouds gathering behind glass. And when he moved, there was a quiet power beneath every step that made it hard to look anywhere else. Almost like his wolf, still dormant, was already pacing inside him, waiting to break through.

He looked like someone meant to lead.

I climbed onto one of the maple’s low branches for a better view. The bark scraped the backs of my thighs, but I didn’t care. From up here, I could watch without Ryker snapping at me for being underfoot. I felt high and important, like a lookout perched above the world.

Below me, they began their drills. Footwork first. Quick, precise, rhythmic. They darted in and out of imaginary combat lines carved into the dirt by a hundred afternoons of practice. Then came strikes, each one cutting through the air with a dull, satisfying rush that stirred strands of my hair even from where I sat.

Ryker was strong. He always had been. But Conrad… Conrad was something else. He moved like he already knew the outcome of every strike before it happened, like he could see Ryker’s motion half a second early. Every shift of his weight was deliberate. Every dodge clean. Every hit landed with the certainty of someone far older than fourteen.

I leaned forward on my elbows, mesmerized. I tried to memorize the way he moved, tried to understand how he always seemed one step ahead. How he never looked caught off guard. How he fought like the world slowed for him and only him.

The branch beneath me groaned in warning.

I froze for a split second, then dismissed it, scooting forward another inch for a better angle. I had done this a hundred times before. The branch always creaked. It always held.

Until it didn’t. The bark split beneath my foot with a sharp crack. My foot slipped. My stomach dropped. The world tipped sideways, sky and trees blending into a dizzying whirl of green and gold.

I didn’t even have time to scream. The air rushed past my ears, cold and fast and merciless. I braced for the ground, for pain, for the horrible crunch of my body hitting earth.

But I never hit it.

Instead, strong arms collided with me in a sudden, jarring embrace. They wrapped around my waist with flawless, instinctive precision, stopping my fall so abruptly that the breath punched from my lungs. My body slammed against a warm, solid chest that smelled faintly of pine sap, summer sweat, and something else I had never noticed before, something I would later recognize as uniquely Conrad.

My fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt without thinking. He held me tightly, one hand splayed between my shoulder blades, the other gripping my waist like he was afraid of letting go.

His breath came fast from the effort. Mine didn’t come at all.

Conrad.

His name burst through my mind like a spark catching dry leaves. His hands were firm around my waist, steady and sure, holding me as if he had known exactly where I would fall. As if he had been ready for it. His grip didn’t tremble. Mine did.

His breath brushed the top of my head, warm and uneven, still catching up from the sudden lunge he had made to reach me in time.

“Lakin.”

My name sounded different on his tongue. Rougher, strained, pulled from a place he normally kept locked away. “Are you hurt?”

I tilted my head up, dazed and breathless, my fingers still twisted in the front of his shirt. His face hovered above mine, all sharp angles and fierce tension. His storm-gray eyes, usually calm and unreadable, were darker now. They looked like clouds gathering before a summer storm, heavy with everything he would never say out loud.

“I don’t think so,” I whispered. My voice sounded small, even to me.

Only then did he let out a breath, shaky in a way that startled me. Conrad Calloway did not do shaky. He never hesitated, never stumbled, never looked anything but steady and sure. But he had been afraid. I saw it plain as daylight.

“You could have broken your neck,” he said sharply. The edge in his voice wasn’t anger at me, I knew that instinctively. It was anger at the fall and how close it had come. “What were you even doing up there?”

Before I could answer, branches snapped and Ryker burst into view with leaves tangled in his hair and a look of raw panic carved across his face, his voice already rising as he called my name and demanded to know what had happened while he sprinted toward us with reckless urgency. Conrad did not release me right away. His hands hovered at my waist for a suspended moment, as if he needed one extra heartbeat to convince himself that I was standing on solid ground and truly safe, and only then did he lower me with slow care, steadying me until he was certain my feet were firmly planted beneath me. My legs wobbled anyway, soft and untrustworthy from the fall and, if I was honest, from the way his arms had felt around me.

“She fell,” Conrad said, and though his voice was even, a tightness pulled at its edges. “But she’s fine.”

Ryker rounded on me with frustration overtaking the initial fear in his expression, scolding me for climbing too high and accusing me of messing around in a way that would eventually get me hurt, the kind of hurt that would leave our mother blaming him, and he spoke faster and faster as if the words had been building inside him for hours. Before the rest of his rant could spill out, Conrad moved. It was nothing dramatic, only a single step forward, a subtle shift that barely disturbed the air around us, but it redirected everything. One moment Ryker’s anger was aimed squarely at me, heat and frustration pointed like an arrow, and the next it collided harmlessly with Conrad’s broad shoulders instead.

“She is fine,” Conrad repeated, his voice dropping lower, steadier, firm enough to leave no space for further argument. “Let it go.”

Ryker scowled but backed off, snatching his shirt from the ground and muttering something about me being a pain as he stomped toward the opposite side of the clearing. I barely heard him. I stood very still, trying to steady my own breathing while my entire body hummed as if lightning had passed through me. My palms tingled from the memory of Conrad’s shirt beneath my fingers, my cheeks burned with a heat I was sure he could feel even from a few steps away, and every breath filled my lungs with the scent of pine and adrenaline and something sweeter that I was not brave enough to name.

My heart was tangled in the moment he had caught me, held me, kept me from hitting the earth. No one had ever caught me before. No one had ever reached for me with pure instinct rather than hesitation or annoyance, and the memory of those few seconds replayed with such vivid clarity that it felt as though I were still suspended in midair, weightless and safe, wrapped in the strength of his arms.

Conrad shifted, his gaze dropping toward the ground between us, and I followed it, only to feel a rush of embarrassment tighten my chest. The wooden wolf charm I had carved lay half-buried in the grass, bent and crooked from the fall, its flaws glaring in the bright afternoon light.

“No,” I whispered in mortification, reaching for it before he could see how terrible it looked, but Conrad crouched first. He picked up the little carving with unexpected gentleness, turning it over in his hands as if it were something fragile. His thumb traced the uneven snout and the crooked paws, pausing on the jagged edge where the tail had nearly snapped off, and in his hands the charm looked even worse, its imperfections impossible to ignore.

“You made this?” he asked, and something in his voice had softened, something quiet and cautious, as though the question meant far more to him than he wanted me to realize.

I swallowed. “It’s not very good.”

He lifted his eyes to mine with a gentleness that nearly undid me. “It is good.”

“No it isn’t,” I argued, heat rising up my neck. “The nose is wrong and the ears look like triangles and the tail is basically broken and the legs are weird and…”

“It looks like a wolf,” he said, his tone soft but immovable, leaving no space for me to shrink away from the compliment. “Truly.”

I could not tell whether he meant it or whether he simply wanted to soothe my embarrassment, but the way he spoke, the quiet conviction in his voice, loosened something knotted deep inside me that I had not realized I had been carrying. Before I could lose my nerve entirely, the truth slipped out in a rush.

“It’s for you,” I said, my voice barely above a breath. “Since you’re leaving soon. I wanted you to have something.”

He went very still. A muscle in his jaw tightened as if my words had struck a place he kept tightly guarded. Ryker called his name again from across the clearing, impatient, but Conrad did not turn. He did not blink. He simply watched me with an expression darker and more complicated than I understood at the time, as if he were sorting through thoughts too heavy to speak aloud.

“Thank you,” he said finally, the words soft enough to feel secret.

He slipped the charm into his pocket with deliberate care, not the careless tuck of someone who intended to forget it, but a slow and precise motion that made the tiny carving seem precious. He remained there for another heartbeat, studying me with an expression I could not decipher, something deeper than amusement, heavier than annoyance, older than either of us, something I would not have the vocabulary for until many years later.

“You scared me,” he said quietly.

His confession startled me more than the fall, because Conrad Calloway did not get scared. Not during training. Not during storms. Not even when Ryker dared him to leap from the high rope swing into the freezing river last winter. Fear was not something he ever admitted to anyone.

“I did?” I whispered.

He nodded once, quick and clipped, almost as though he wished he had kept the words to himself. “Do not climb that high again.”

“I won’t,” I promised, even though we both knew I probably would. I had always been too curious, too restless, too determined to keep up with boys who never slowed their pace for me.

For the briefest moment, something like a smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. It was so faint I might have imagined it if the sunlight hadn’t glinted across his cheek at the same instant.

“Yeah,” he said quietly, “you will.”

Something warm fluttered through my chest at the sound of it. Then he turned and walked back toward Ryker, slipping effortlessly into the rhythm of training as though catching me had been a minor interruption. But there was a noticeable difference. His movements were sharper now, his strikes landing harder, his stance tight with an intensity that suggested the fall had left its mark on him too, a residue of fear or adrenaline he needed to work out of his muscles.

I found my place on the fallen log at the edge of the clearing and curled my knees to my chest, letting the rough bark ground me while I watched them train. Every few minutes Conrad’s gaze flicked toward me, quick and subtle, simply checking that I remained safely on the ground. Each glance sent sparks through me, small bright bursts that drifted down and settled in the quiet places of my heart.

By the time Ryker finally called the session to an end, the sun had dipped lower in the sky, turning the forest gold. We walked home together through the glowing trees with our shadows stretching long over the moss-covered earth. Ryker stomped ahead, complaining about hunger. I walked behind him, replaying every second of the fall and the way Conrad had caught me before I could hit the ground.

And Conrad walked between us, silent and thoughtful, with one hand tucked into the pocket where the wooden wolf charm rested. He did not take it out. He did not hand it back. He did not tease me the way older boys often teased younger girls. He simply kept it. Maybe it meant nothing. Maybe he forgot about it the next day. Maybe it sank into the back of a drawer and never resurfaced.

But I remembered.

Because that was the day Conrad Calloway caught me in more ways than one, the day I learned what it felt like to fall and to crave the same arms catching me every time, the day something small and bright and terrifying shifted inside me. Even though he was already half outside my world, even though he would be gone in a few days and swept away to Alpha training and a life I would only hear about in scattered whispers and pack bulletins, even though he was never meant to be mine. I still remembered the way he held me and the way it felt, just for a moment, like he did not want to let me go.

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