“Give us a minute, and we’ll go with you,” Tristan told Jax.
Jax returned to the water, and when he was out of sight, I quickly removed Tristan’s shirt and put my own clothes on. When we reached the bank, Jax the person was gone, but the crocodile hovered under the water’s surface, only his eyes and a slice of forehead showing. He swung his large head to the right, motioning for us to follow him. Though the croc was still a bit frightening, even knowing it was Jax, I was glad he changed—he may not have been embarrassed by his nakedness, but I was. We followed the croc half-way around the pond to its feeder stream and up the stream to a tiny shack.
Tristan and Jax caught fish from the stream, and we grilled it over a fire for dinner. It took a couple prods from Tristan to get Jax talking, but once he did, he chatted incessantly about his life in the bush. I didn’t have to listen to his thoughts—he told us everything and then some. He stayed in the bush because it made living easier as an Amadis shifter; in other words, if he wasn’t around people, he wasn’t tempted to eat them. He was changed by a Daemoni were-croc that bit him when he was a teenager out in the bush by himself. A warlock, who we figured out to be Charlotte, converted him, and he lived in Kuckaroo for a while. But full moons made control difficult, and he eventually moved out on his own.
He rarely saw people and preferred it that way. A female were-eagle visited him during new moons only, when he had the most control over his instinct to eat her. He’d learned to live entirely off the land, usually eating as a crocodile because it made the hunting easier, but when he needed supplies, he went to the nearest Norman town. He only visited Kuckaroo every few years. Except for the eagle, none of them came to visit him, and he hadn’t seen or sensed Daemoni since shortly after his own turning. He called the surrounding area within a two-hundred-kilometer range his home and knew it as well as he did his little one-room shack. He told us a handful of other Amadis shifters lived similarly in the Outback.
He asked about my face, and Tristan shared the story of my brief encounter with the kangaroo. Jax laughed for several minutes. We told him we were on the run from Daemoni, but little else about our situation. Now that we’d reminded him, he said he remembered hearing some of our story—the reason for the Daemoni’s desire to have us, Tristan’s capture—but hadn’t heard about Tristan’s escape.
“I don’t trust any authority, including the Amadis, but you two seem all right,” Jax said. “Anytime you’re in my part of the bush and need anything, just sing out and I’ll find ya.”
“And your maker? Is he still around?” I asked, not particularly wanting to run into him.
“You mean ‘she,’ and she’s dead. After I converted to Amadis, she attacked me, and we went into a death roll. She gave me a lot of these scars, and I gave her death. I’m the only one of my kind now. If I were on the registry of animals, I’d be labeled as extinct.”
Jax divided a pile of hides and blankets into two, creating two beds—one for Tristan and me and one for himself—in front of the fireplace. I didn’t get a real bed, but it was still much better than being outside in the wilderness.
“Sorry, princess, it’s the best I have,” Jax said with a wink.
I told him it was fine. Tristan must have warmed to him during the evening—he didn’t growl this time at Jax’s wink. But he did put me on the opposite side from Jax, placing himself between us, and kept his arm tightly around me through the night.
According to Tristan, by saying “Australia,” I’d sent us to both the best and worst place for our escape. Before meeting me, Tristan spent nearly twenty years hiding from the Daemoni by blending into Norman society. He said the hard part was shaking them in the first place. It would be fairly easy by becoming lost and “vanishing” somewhere in the great Australian Outback. If we could give them the slip here, we could go just about anywhere, including the States. The problem with Australia, though, was getting off the continent—the few