Instead, I tossed Kanesha the gun. “Shoot it, see if the bullets have any effect.”
Coyote was looking up at it. “It’s not one of ours. But you know that.”

I wasn’t sure what I knew, other than the strong sense of evil and darkness that told me it wasn’t, say, Thunderbird. “It’s a demon,” I said as I drew my sword. “What happens if we kill it here?”

“It’ll go back to wherever it came from.” Coyote was…hiding behind us.

It hit me. If he died here he would be dead. This was his home plane. If it could kill him…which was unlikely. But he was apparently going to let the people not from here fight it.

We were…or at least I was…taking less risk. “You start thinking about how it got here.”

It looked like a dragon bat thing…Kanesha got off a shot which didn’t seem to do anything.

I looked around. I couldn’t fly, and it probably had a ranged attack. No, definitely. It breathed fire, which caught in some of the trees.

Okay. I had to get up there with it somehow. I picked a tree further back from the lake and started to climb rapidly. I wasn’t cursing Coyote for his cowardice. He was a trickster, after all, and fighting monsters was what I did.

Especially as I suspected the monster’s presence had something to do with mine. Or maybe with how Loki had got here. It wasn’t one of theirs, but I wasn’t convinced…it wasn’t an actual dragon.

One of ours. It saw me on the tree and came in to flame. I had to trust my instincts. The tree below me caught fire, but I didn’t feel it.

I jumped. Twisted in the air and landed on the thing’s neck. Just like in a bad movie. I wasn’t even sure how I’d pulled it off. Maybe here I could do anything as long as I believed in it enough. My own fire, though, wanted to respond to the dragon’s. It veered out over the lake, but I felt the flames starting to form within me.

Oh no. I wouldn’t turn into that. Not here. And besides…we were over the lake. I ran up its neck, utterly unafraid of falling. I just had this feeling I didn’t have to worry about things here.

It tried to shake me off, and almost succeeded. I ended up clasping its neck with arms and legs, almost dropping the sword. The lake suddenly seemed to be a long way below, a fall greater than even somebody like me could survive.

I didn’t let it stop me. I thought I heard Kanesha’s voice, but I got to my feet again and thrust the sword into the base of the dragon’s skull.

It exploded into flame, everything did, the world did. I wasn’t aware that I was falling.

The only thought I had was that I had completely and utterly screwed this up.

Utterly.