Lake Abstinence might have been the most romantic locale the Monsterbait Squad had ever been called to. The smooth, sapphire-blue water, thick pine forests, and quaint wood cottages arranged around the shore made it seem like the perfect spot for a vacation with one or more very special friends.
It was hard to believe, just looking at the place, that no one had been able to enjoy even the most gently provocative fun here in nearly thirty years, without attracting the attention of an entity the locals called, “The Crasher.”
Almost as soon as she had parked the van beside their assigned cottage, Dina lined her team up in the small, disused parking lot.
“Laura, run us through the brief one more time,” she directed, all business.
It was best to remind everyone of the stakes before they could get too swept up in the scenery.
Laura pushed her glasses up her nose and brought up a checklist on her tablet.
Jeff folded his hands behind his back and gave her his full and formal attention.
Kelly sighed impatiently but listened too.
“Various reports on the Crasher describe him as a water ghost, a selkie, or possibly a merman,” Laura said, absently touching her stylus to her pink lip gloss. “But based on the symptoms of the infestation, it seems more likely we’re dealing with a sex revenant taking an aquatic form.”
“Which means usual precautions apply!” Dina cut in. “Keep your wits about you. No undressing or physical contact without my go-ahead. And most importantly, no one orgasms until we get this situation under control.”
She stared back and forth at Jeff and Kelly, who both smiled innocently, and even at Laura for good measure, who nodded.
“If you do orgasm near Lake Abstinence,” Laura continued, “the Crasher gains absolute power over you, and no one’s ever left alive after that. Granted, none of them had the expertise or support we do, but there’s no sense taking that risk.”
“I don’t care how long the job takes,” said Dina. “Everyone here is tough enough to wait for the afterparty. You wouldn’t be on the Monsterbait Squad if you weren’t.”
Jeff dipped his square jaw in a nod and subtly flexed his arms as he moved to cross them in front of his chest.
Kelly didn’t respond directly, but she did pick that moment to take off her coat, showing off her studded belt stamped all over with hex marks for containing dark magic.
As usual, her plain black outfit, and the thorny vines tattooed along both arms, made her own tacit promises of toughness.
Aesthetics could lie, of course.
Laura, the softest, most girlish-looking of the group, usually had the coolest head, but Dina had chosen every member of her team wisely. They would all live up to their parts, no matter how difficult or frustrating.
“Monitors on,” Dina directed.
With a few more sighs but no arguments, all four squad members, including Dina herself, strapped on their waterproof wrist monitors and tapped the button to sync them to Dina’s phone. From one screen, she would be able to keep track of everyone’s GPS location and level of physiological arousal.
When any of them got in trouble, she’d be able to mobilize the rest of the team to intervene in moments.
“He’s a talker,” Laura returned to her notes about the Crasher himself, tucking her blonde and magenta hair behind her ear. “Lucid, likes to take his time. He’s territorial, and just the presence of pretty people will have raised his hackles.”
“Monster needs to get some,” Kelly snorted.
“Yes,” Laura said straightforwardly. “And we’re the only team brave enough to give it to him right.”
“Damn right!” Jeff reached up both hands for high-fives, and all three women eventually humored him.
“The most likely source of the Crasher is the logging camp that was here before the lake was artificially created,” Laura explained. “It was remote, men-only, and, by all accounts, repressed as hell. That’s definitely enough frustrated sexual energy to leave behind a revenant. He’ll try to dictate the terms of how we do him, of course. So, prepare yourself for some dark dirty talk, and expect to be punished if he gets his hands on you. And he will get his hands on at least a few of us before we figure out how to beat him, that’s just the reality.”
There was a moment of silence as they all braced themselves for anything and everything this might mean.
“If things get hairy, just remember why we’re here,” said Dina. “When we leave Lake Abstinence, the locals and visitors will be free to be fearlessly sexy.”
“Tell the mayor to start planning a renaming ceremony,” said Jeff.
#
The group settled into the cute, slightly musty cottage, which looked like it had not been rented out for many years. The local tourism board had explained that they planned to completely redo the place when and if the Monsterbait Squad could make it safe, but as things were, there had been no sense in making the investment.
Once the team had finished stowing enough granola bars, pancake mix, and spare clothes to last through an arctic winter, Dina ordered them down to the shoreline, just in time to watch the sun set over the water, turning it a dazzling pink.
“Skinny dipping commences… now,” she said, tapping her phone in its waterproof case to start its stopwatch. “Clothes off, friendly touch permitted.”
As one, all four squad members stripped out of their clothes and placed them on the ground among the trees, near the water, but not quite near enough to keep an eye on while they swam.
Laura held her monitor behind her back as she watched her teammates walk naked into the water, and then followed them.
As well as transmitting data to the app, the light on the side of her wristband changed from baseline blue to slightly elevated green as she watched Dina and Jeff stretch their athletic, statuesque bodies and dive confidently forward to swim. Their movements were effortless and nothing like the dogpaddling Laura knew she herself would use to stay afloat.
Her light escalated to yellow when she looked to Kelly.
Kelly’s narrow, wiry form was decorated all over with artwork that Laura had always wanted to memorize and study for its secret meanings, one inch at a time
Today, she noticed the way the tree on Kelly’s lower back extended its roots down her hips.
Laura’s light switched to a pale orange. She turned to look at the forest and breathe for a moment, until it switched back to yellow.
The first few days were always the hardest in any project that required monitoring and sexual denial, the first few hours most of all.
Laura tried to be a good second in command to Dina and a good example to the others. She’d gotten good at hiding her difficulties, but just the thought of having no access to relief if she got too excited caused her a simmering panic, which made her counterproductively… excitable.
Laura would have responded to Kelly’s naked skin any day, but with the wristband on, she felt hypersensitive to everything else as well.
When she finally stepped into the lake, the last of the four, the water itself felt like a teasing caress, cool enough to shock her nerves awake, but not cold enough to numb them.
The light went orange again as she submerged, and then finally retreated to yellow, but no lower.
“Get splashing, you two,” Dina reminded Laura and Kelly, while Jeff lifted her out of the water and tossed her playfully back in.
Laura tossed a handful of water tentatively at Kelly, trying to put on an enticing enough show for a monster, without making it more enticing than necessary for herself.
Today, it was impossible. There was no way around the frustration, only through.
“Was that supposed to be a splash?” Kelly taunted, before using her whole arm to send a wave at Laura’s face.
She followed up by wrapping her arms around Laura’s shoulders, waiting for a quick nod, and then dunking her all the way under.
When they both surfaced, Kelly smiled with one corner of her mouth and jerked her head in the opposite direction from where Dina and Jeff were playing.
Laura nodded and followed Kelly at a slow paddle. The bottom of the lake dropped away sharply under them. They stopped, treading water, a good thirty feet away from the others.
“I figure this might be the closest we get to privacy on this job,” Kelly explained in a whisper, wiping away the black streaks of her running makeup. “Dina left her phone on the shore, and she can see that we’re safe, so as long as we don’t get worked up enough to set off the alarms,” she touched her own wristband, “she’ll probably let us be.”
“You have terribly low standards for privacy,” Laura joked, washing a few pink streaks from her own face.
“No, I don’t,” said Kelly. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Laura wrapped a hand around the now very orange light on her wristband, kicking twice as hard to stay afloat, and waited for Kelly to continue.
“I was thinking,” said Kelly, “that after this job is over, we could take a break while Dina plans the next one. Get a hotel room for a few days. Just the two of us. No wristbands. No life and death stakes. Just seeing what happens.”
Laura reflexively squeezed the wristband harder, sure by the thumping in her chest and the tingles between her legs that it was glowing red.
“I mean,” said Kelly, “unless that’s not something you’ve wondered about every damn time we’ve done this.”
“No, I mean, yeah,” Laura stammered. “I have, I just…”
Kelly noticed through the water how hard she was holding the band. “Is this that hard for you already?” she asked, cracking into a grin. “I’m flattered. Do I make Miss Sweet and Perfect lose her composure?”
“I’m not perfect,” Laura muttered. “I just do the work, even when it’s hard. Like all of us.”
She was about to go on to explain about the first few hours being the worst for her, but her train of thought shattered when Kelly swam a little closer. The waves she created along the way jostled Laura’s breasts, almost as if she were touching them.
Laura dropped her eyes to those spectacularly detailed thorn tattoos along Kelly’s arms.
Regardless of what they meant, Laura found something hypnotic about their very existence, the thought that had gone into them.
No one spent painful hours decorating a kitchen sponge, or a bare mattress under its sheets, something functionally necessary but best kept hidden whenever possible.
That was how Laura was used to thinking about most of her own body, basically everything but her head and hands. The way Kelly clearly didn’t think that way, and never treated Laura as if she should, was magnetic.
Weightless in the water, the soft, feminine curves of Laura’s own body felt almost as pretty as Dina always told her they were in pep talks. For the moment, she didn’t feel the urge to hide from Kelly’s closeness.
Kelly reached out and brushed the back of her fingers against Laura’s face.
The alarm on Laura’s wrist beeped loudly enough to be heard from under the water, echoed by a siren sound coming from Dina’s phone on the shore.
“Too much!” Dina called to them.
Laura and Kelly backed away from each other, Kelly smirking and shrugging.
“Think about it,” she mouthed at Laura as she turned to rejoin the rest of the group.
“Rein it in, and get in jousting position!” Dina ordered.
Laura returned to the shallows, her face red, though not quite as red as the flashing light on her wrist.
Jeff put a hand over his mouth, obviously just as amused as Kelly was at the idea of Miss Sweet and Perfect being the first of the four of them to hit the danger zone, for once.
Laura felt that this wasn’t entirely fair. None of the rest of them had had to field a proposition the coworker they’d been lusting after for months.
But she didn’t wish Kelly had held back, either.
When the alarm stopped and her light reverted to yellow, Laura stood across from Jeff in chest-deep water.
Jousting position.
She took a breath and knelt down below the surface, so that Kelly could climb onto her shoulders.
Holding Kelly’s muscular legs to keep her stable, Laura stood back up to face Jeff again.
Dina was now perched on his shoulders.
With their combined height, Jeff and Dina towered at least a head above Laura and Kelly.
“We’re screwed,” Laura stated.
Kelly slapped her shoulder. “Speak for yourself.”
“Play your best game anyway,” said Dina. “Or you’ll be playing the next round backward.”
The thought of Kelly sitting backward on Laura’s shoulders, with her naked pussy against Laura’s face, while they could do absolutely nothing more in that position than joust, was simultaneously thrilling and dreadful.
Laura planted her feet.
“Three… two… one…” Dina counted. “Go!”
The two pairs charged and met in the middle. Kelly and Dina shoved with all their strength, each trying to unseat the other. After jabbing a few times at faces and collarbones, they both managed to grab each other’s hands in a momentary deadlock.
Laura found herself locking eyes with Jeff, as they both strained to stay standing and hold their passengers stable.
Jeff dipped his head to her in a nod that would have been polite at any other moment. Under the circumstances, it was more of a brag that he was comfortable enough to spare attention for polite nods.
Laura countered with an equally polite smile.
Jeff took a step forward, increasing Dina’s leverage. Laura had to take a step back to keep Kelly’s legs from pulling her over backwards.
Kelly squeezed Laura’s neck briefly with her thighs, then pointed the toes of her left foot down and outward.
Laura got the message. She waited for Jeff to take his next step forward, and then lunged abruptly in the direction Kelly had indicated, ducking her own head under the surface.
She opened her eyes in the cool, clean water, and distinctly saw Dina’s long figure hit the water first, overbalancing from an attack aimed at empty air.
Kelly dismounted seconds afterward, slipping into the water behind Laura and hugging her from behind. Laura could tell that she was laughing by the vibrations in her chest, though she couldn’t hear it from under the water.
The moment Laura would have surfaced to join Kelly in celebration, another arm clamped around her neck, scaly and sharp.
Moving faster than any human could in the water, whatever was attached to the arm dragged Laura at least twenty lateral feet away from her teammates before she could even begin to fight.
She choked out the air in her lungs, which was already drained of oxygen. The surface was getting farther away, the pressure of water on her ears more intense. She managed to get her teeth around a piece of cartilage, where the crook of an elbow should have been, and bit down as hard as she could.
The creature behind her withdrew with a pained release of bubbles, and retreated as quickly as it had appeared.
Laura kicked her way to the surface, coughing up water and rubbing the now-raw skin around her neck. The others were shouting, asking if she was okay.
When Laura had enough breath to speak, she simply said, “He’s here.”
#
They were right on schedule.
Shortly after Laura was grabbed, Dina sent her, Kelly, and Jeff back to the cottage, with instructions to get dressed, drink exactly one beer each, sit at least an arm’s length apart from each other, and play an adult card game while they waited for her.
As they left, Dina retrieved her phone from her pile of clothes and sat naked in the shallows, monitoring her teammates’ status through the waterproof case. She definitely needed to keep an eye on whatever was going on between Laura and Kelly today, but for now, everyone was in the green-to-yellow zone. Mildly hot and bothered, nothing to worry about.
Dina counted fifteen more minutes before leaving the water to get dressed herself.
Just as she’d hoped, her clothes were not where she’d left them.
“Guys? This isn’t funny!” she shouted, knowing full well that her teammates were both innocent and out of shouting range.
The Crasher had chosen her, easy prey separated from the herd, just as she’d intended.
She began the walk back to the cottage, taking a slightly circuitous route along one of the scenic paths, which traced the shoreline and cut through the trees.
When the path took her back within arm’s reach of the water’s edge, an arm burst from the surface and wrapped its clammy, webbed fingers around her ankle.
Dina stole the briefest look at the Crasher. Only the part of him extending from the water was roughly human-shaped. What was under the surface, barely visible in the dark, looked like a cross between an alligator and an otter, with the added fins of a fish.
Then she screamed, high and vulnerable, and took off running into the forest.
No monster she’d ever met could have resisted pursuing.
The Crasher was no exception, but he didn’t need to run after her in the way most of them did.
The edges of Lake Abstinence were full of little streams that extended into the woods, and the path Dina had chosen led her right to one.
The Crasher was already standing there in the water, waiting for her. Everything above his ankles was now in the shape of a naked human man, more or less. The webbed skin remained between his fingers, and under his arms. Similar flaps covered a significant bulge between his legs. His skin was as thin and pale as a lamprey’s in most places, and spotted like a salamander’s. He was splashed with asymmetrical patches of scales, some iridescent like a salmon’s, some huge and spikey, like an alligator’s. Frills and fins of scaly cartilage hung from his scalp in the rough shape of shoulder-length hair.
In his left hand, he held a length of chain with a dull hook at the end, which he immediately swung at Dina so that it caught around her waist, as if she were a log for hauling.
In his right hand, he held the handle of a crosscut saw.
“How many of you do I have to teach this lesson to?” he asked, in a low voice with the echoes of waves captured within it.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Dina said, innocent and breathless. “There’s only one of me.”
He pulled the chain to reel Dina to the edge of the stream, making her stand in front of him, their faces inches apart.
“But there are millions like you,” said the Crasher. “Bad girls. Bratty. Hedonistic.”
He took a deep breath in, smelling the skin of her neck, with the lake water slowly drying on it.
“Dirty,” he murmured. “Disgusting.”
Dina could hear his mouth watering, as if she were the most delicious temptation he had ever set eyes on.
She was fairly confident from the Crasher’s file that he wouldn’t or couldn’t do her serious harm as long as she didn’t cum within his range of influence, and certainly not this early into toying with her.
But there was always a margin for error, when you were building case files from local legends.
No matter how long Dina worked as monsterbait, there was always a flicker of fear when the time came to stake her life on the research. She used that flicker to make her performance all the more convincing.
“Please,” she said sweetly. “Just let me go.”
“I might,” said the Crasher. “If you’re a quick learner. But the world will understand that there are rules in my lake, if I have to tutor each and every bad girl myself, one at a time.”
“Rules like what?” Dina asked nervously.
“Rule number one,” said the Crasher, “bad girls who bring their filth into my waters belong to me. Who do you belong to?”
“…Please,” Dina repeated.
The Crasher yanked downward on the chain around her waist, forcing her to her knees in the dirt, and spanked her once, hard, with the flat of the saw. The blade made an ominous wobbling sound in the air, preparing for another one.
“Who do you belong to?”
“You!” Dina cried.
She stole a glance at her own wristband, as the light rolled over from green to yellow.
Nobody got into this job without a certain amount of taste for what the monsters could dish out. Even at her most anxious, the thrill Dina got out of it wasn’t all bad.
The light progressed to pale orange, however, when she allowed herself to think about what would happen later, once she was the one with the upper hand.
She stopped those thoughts before her physical state could escalate further.
“Show me that you understand,” said the Crasher. “Kiss the water.”
Dina crouched forward on her elbows and brought her lips to the surface of the stream.
“Deeper,” the Crasher ordered, amusement creeping into his low voice.
Dina dunked her face all the way to the streambed, and was not at all surprised when the Crasher caught her by the hair on her way back up.
“I’ll tell you when you can breathe, bad girl,” he said, squeezing his handful of her hair tightly enough for her to feel the tension in her scalp. “I bet it’ll be the first lesson in self-control you’ve ever gotten.”
He brought the saw within her range of vision, to remind her it was there, and wobbled it slightly to make that eerie sound.
“Spend your breath on screams if you want,” he said, “but it won’t make me take mercy any faster.”
Dina sucked in the deepest breath she could before the Crasher shoved her head back under the water.
The side of the saw snapped against her bare ass again.
Not having access to air made it hard to stay as calm as she usually did under such treatment. She couldn’t focus on that soothing, in-and-out sensation of breathing. Even before she actually started to run low on oxygen, the difference was sharp.
The spanking continued, slow and deliberate, with no distractions available from the claustrophobic pain. Each time she thought it had been long enough that the next blow might not come, it did.
The light on her wristband, all that she could see in the dark water, shifted to bright orange. When the saw hit a little lower, touching her labia, she knew she had left a wet imprint on the side of the blade.
It had been years since she’d trained to resist asphyxia-induced sensitivity. Clearly, she was out of practice.
Just as she was wondering whether her alarm would go off before she lost consciousness, the Crasher finally wrenched her head upright, and she gasped gratefully at the cool air.
“You pass,” he told her, releasing her hair. “Run away. Tell everyone you know. Never come back, and never forget that you’re mine. Whenever you breathe air or drink water, it’s because I let you. And every time you even think about indulging your dirtier appetites, you’re going to wonder where I am, and whether I might still change my mind.”
He unhooked the chain from around her waist and gave her one more whack with the saw, to get her moving.
Dina got to her feet, dusting dirt off her knees and the case of her phone. She took a few steps back toward the cottage, and then made a decision.
“How can you be sure I won’t forget?” she asked sweetly, with a faint sprinkling of taunting.
Her wristband was still just below the red zone, she was out of breath and stinging and cold, and she wasn’t at all sure how the Crasher might decide to step things up. But the longer she kept his attention on her, the less of the burden would fall to her teammates.
Dina was nothing if not a conscientious boss.
The Crasher blinked, transparent nictitating membranes sliding across his eyeballs under the lids. He looked like he was trying to decide if she was sick or just incredibly slow on the uptake.
“How much more of a reminder do you think you’d need?” he asked.
“You could march me around the edges of your territory,” Dina suggested the most time-consuming punishment she could think of that would give her a chance to calm herself and study him better. “So I know exactly where not to come back to. And to make sure I think twice before ever taking off so much as my shoes again.”
The Crasher opened his mouth to say something, then made a small sound of understanding, and closed it into a smirk.
“You’re braver than most bad girls I’ve met,” he acknowledged.
“And you’re smarter than most revenants,” said Dina.
The Crasher raised the hand with the chain in it, and beckoned her back to him with two webbed fingers.
Dina came closer, stopping tantalizingly out of reach of where he stood in the water.
“You want to protect the others?” the Crasher asked her.
“Yes,” Dina answered plainly, in almost her everyday voice.
“It might be harder than you think,” said the Crasher. “Now that I’ve already gotten started.”
“What have you gotten started?” Dina asked, expecting him to tell her how much spanking her had whetted his appetite for the others.
“It has to do with rule number two,” the Crasher said, leaning the full length of his naked, sinewy body slightly forward from where his feet were planted under the water. He raised the chain slightly.
“What’s rule number two?” Dina asked, preparing to dodge a lassoing swing of the chain.
The Crasher gave the chain one twirl, building momentum, and then lunged, lifting one foot completely out of the water to close the distance. He wrapped the chain around the back of Dina’s neck, securing his grip on her.
