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.

“Rule number two: the bad boys belong to me too.”

With that, the Crasher flung himself backward into the stream, dragging Dina face-first along with him.

Instead of hitting the bottom of the streambed again, they broke through the water’s surface into a roomful of air and light. Gravity changed direction, as if the surface were always down and never up, no matter which side of it they were on.

Their momentum from falling into the stream carried them back to their feet as they emerged from the water in the cottage’s bathtub.

“Jeff?” said Dina, once she had blinked the water from her eyes.

“Boss?” said Jeff, both embarrassed and relieved.

Jeff was naked again, or maybe still, and immobilized by dozens of logging chains. His hands were chained to the showerhead, and his feet to the grate of the drain, tightly enough that he couldn’t move in any direction. Another chain attached to the showerhead looped around his neck, keeping his air and blood supply tightly rationed, and ensuring that he’d pass out quickly if he tried to use his size to break the fixture and free himself.

The showerhead itself was positioned precisely over Jeff’s crotch, and as Dina watched, a droplet fell and struck his already prominent erection, sliding torturously down the underside of the shaft before getting lost in his pubic hair.

Dina reached for the taps behind him, to shut the water all the way off, but the Crasher held her back easily by the chain around her own neck.

“Really?” he asked, stepping out of the tub, onto the tile, and dragging her with him. “You thought I was just going to let you do that?”

He tossed his crosscut saw to the floor, so that he could hold her with both hands.

“When did you even-?” Dina started to ask.

“He’s fast,” Jeff explained apologetically.

It seemed that, around the water of Lake Abstinence, the Crasher was more than fast. He was instantaneous.

And Dina had given him fifteen whole minutes to work after she separated from the team, expecting him to spend all of it on stalking her.

Jeff’s wristband shifted from yellow to orange with the next drop that hit him.

“Thanks for those monitors, by the way,” said the Crasher. “Now I’ll know exactly when he’s as close to the edge as he’s going to get. When he’s in the ‘danger zone,’ where the slightest touch will set him off. Like, say, a sudden deluge from a massaging showerhead. I know, I know, it’s you and the other girls who have the deepest weakness for that particular guilty pleasure, but it’ll work well enough for him, by the time I get him there.”

Jeff gyrated his hips, trying to get out of the way of the next falling drop.

It still hit his erection, this time on the side, right at the crease behind the head. It slid its way down along that fold of skin. The whole appendage bobbed up and down, as if trying to shake it off a little faster, and Jeff’s muscles trembled, from his elevated hands down to his feet.

“You could try a trade, like the brave bad girl you are,” the Crasher spoke in Dina’s ear, holding her in place from behind, with the chain still pressing against her throat.

“What kind of trade?” she asked warily.

“Don’t play the naïve ingenue,” the Crasher shook her slightly. “You obviously came here already knowing rule number three: bad girls and boys who lose control, lose it all.”

Holding both ends of the chain in his left hand, he grabbed Dina’s hand in his right, completely trapping it in his tough webbing. He forced the phone out of it and onto the floor.

He brought her hand slowly, firmly, to her pussy, and held it there, just barely touching.

“If you cum, it’ll be the last thing you feel before me cutting you to pieces.” He stepped on the blade of the fallen saw for emphasis. “But if you do it for me on purpose, right now, I might consider letting your friend go before he breaks and joins you.”

He brushed her fingers over the vicinity of her clit, and then let go to run his soft, filmy palm over each of her breasts in turn. He squeezed a nipple between two fingers that felt both insubstantially flexible and impossibly strong.

“I’ll even help, if you want,” he whispered.

“Don’t do it, boss,” Jeff told her breathlessly. “I’m the one who went off script when I got out of eyeshot of the others. Besides, they need you more than me.”

Dina took advantage of the access to air, taking in slow, thought-clearing sips. In spite of the alarming turn this job had taken, she was still dangerously aroused herself.

“Where the hell are Laura and Kelly?” she asked.

#

Kelly held her headphones close and watched Laura groove to her own.

They were sitting across from each other at the small, square table in the cottage’s kitchen, with the card game box sitting unopened in the middle.

They had both pulled their clothes back on at the lakeside, without any towels, so Laura’s neat white blouse was sticking to her skin and showing the outline of her slightly overflowing pink bra.

Taking turns sharing their favorite music had been Laura’s suggestion, a way to distract themselves from the urge to touch each other while they waited for Jeff to get back from the bathroom.

Both sets of headphones were synced to Laura’s phone, and right now they were listening to a sparkly pop ballad of her choosing.

Kelly couldn’t say it was reducing her urge to reach out and touch Laura, but it did give her something to think about.

The familiar belting voice and catchy refrain had her thinking about how she must have heard this song in the background a thousand times before, without quite believing that there were people who listened to it on purpose.

At the same time, the way Laura moved to it, dancing in her seat completely without irony, as if she were drawing power from every note, made this listening so different that the song might as well have been new.

Kelly wondered if Laura was mouthing the generic love note lyrics with such earnestness as a message to her, personally, or if that was how she always danced to it.

She wondered if joining in would shatter Laura’s image of her, of the stoically prickly cool girl.

She wondered if not joining in would disappoint her and push her back into her shell.

She wondered if it was possible to give an honest reaction after having had all the rest of those thoughts.

Laura opened her eyes after a few moments of getting particularly lost, and smiled self-consciously at Kelly.

Kelly’s head wanted to move.

She was going to let it.

She rocked it to the left, and was about to rock it to the right, making it clear that the first movement had not been a random bit of fidgeting that only happened to coincide with the beat.

A monitor alarm cut through the song, killing the rhythm.

Immediately, both Kelly and Laura pulled off their headphones and ran toward the noise.

“Jeff?” Kelly called out, knocking on the locked bathroom door.

There were several thumps on the inside of the door, someone pawing at the doorknob without being able to fully grasp it, before it finally unlatched.

Kelly jerked it all the way open

Dina lunged toward her for help and was pulled sharply away by some sort of leash. The other end of it was being held by a fish man who could only be the Crasher.

Jeff was squirming against another set of restraints in the shower. His wristband was the one blaring its alarm, though Dina’s was glowing red, about to join in at any moment.

“Last chance,” the Crasher was saying to Dina, while fingering her hard with one webbed hand.

Dina looked to Kelly.

“It’s hopeless,” she said. “He can teleport through water.”

Kelly nodded.

Next to her, Laura took off running with a purpose.

“It’s hopeless” was, of course, Dina-code for “It’s definitely not hopeless, and I’m about to slip you the info we need to win.”

Kelly began to remove her belt, in a posture of surrender.

The Crasher kicked the shower’s hot water tap, turning the massage head to full blast.

“Oh… god,” Jeff gave a strangled gasp before ejaculating into the pulsating warm stream, which would soon turn scalding hot.

The Crasher shoved Dina aside unfinished, picked up a crosscut saw from the floor, and stepped into the shower with Jeff.

“That settles that,” he said.

Just before the serrated blade of the saw could touch the skin of Jeff’s abdomen, Laura burst back into the room with two boxes of pancake mix from the kitchen. She tore them open and poured them both into the few inches of water collected in the tub.

The flour in the mix instantly absorbed the water it touched, including the deluge from above, turning it all into a dull batter.

The Crasher’s eyes widened in panic as he realized the smooth water surface he had been counting on as his escape route was gone.

He tried for the door, but Laura and Kelly were both in his path, Kelly with her hex-marked belt at the ready.

Dina shut off the shower and set to work freeing Jeff.

Laura reached her fingers under both her white blouse and pink bra and flashed the Crasher.

Even surrounded by existing nudity, the motion of revealing her breasts had the same power as ever.

The Crasher’s head turned, distracted, long enough for Kelly to fasten her belt around his neck.

The Crasher looked at her, irritated by her audacity, and tried to touch the belt with his strong, flexible hands.

The studded leather firmly repelled his interference, no matter how hard he tried to force his hands into contact with it.

He hissed like the trapped animal he was, as Kelly took his saw away and tied the loose end of the belt around his wrists, securing them behind his back.

She used the length of belt that stretched between the Crasher’s neck and wrists as a handle, to drag him into one of the cottage’s two bedrooms.

“You belong to me, bad girl!” he protested along the way.

#

Toweled off and dressed in clean slumber party clothes, all four Monsterbait Squad members lined up at the foot of the bed where they’d secured the Crasher.

His hands were still tied under him with Kelly’s magic belt, which kept him helpless enough that they’d been able to tie his feet to the bed with ordinary rope. The bed’s headboard and footboard were both made up of cage-like decorative wooden bars, so there were plenty of places to attach bindings.

Dina stepped a little way forward from the rest of the group.

“Good news,” she told the Crasher. “You’re about to get exactly what you’ve always wanted.”

“I want blood and bone!” the Crasher raved, thrashing on the bed. “Suffering and solitude! I want to punish your unworthy urges in ways you’ll never forget, and put a stop to all your filthy pleasure!”

“No,” Dina said calmly. “You want it for yourself.”

The Crasher shut his eyes against the four differently gorgeous figures in front of him, and shook his head against the pillows in a frenzy of denial.

“You don’t deserve it,” Jeff told him sternly. “Not after all the harm you’ve caused.”

“But lucky for you,” said Laura, “the Monsterbait Squad is on a specialized mission of mercy.”

The Crasher opened the outer lids of one eye, unable to disguise his interest.

“We’re here to fuck you well and hard,” Dina confirmed, “and transport you to a monster rehabilitation ranch. All you have to do… is beg.”

The Crasher shook his head even harder, struggling against his leg restraints with indignation. “I don’t believe this.”

“It might sound a little petty,” Kelly acknowledged in her usual unconcerned deadpan. “But the belt needs your earnest verbal consent before it progresses beyond short-term holding mode. Once you say the words and mean them, it will strip all your magical abilities and hold them for safekeeping until your rehabilitation director determines that you’re fit for release.”

“I will not give you the satisfaction,” said the Crasher. “I will never allow anyone satisfaction.”

“Okay,” said Dina. “Well, if you don’t, we do have to put you down, like regular monster hunters would. Can’t leave you to keep terrorizing people. But I seriously doubt it’ll come to that. Everyone… Truth or Dare. Jeff, get the bottle.”

“You’re all sick!” the Crasher groaned, arching his back.

Jeff retrieved the empty vodka bottle from the gear bag, kept for over a dozen missions because of its perfect shape.

The four sat in a circle on the floor, at the foot of the bed.

“All restrictions are suspended,” said Dina. “Everything is fair game.”

She took the bottle from Jeff and gave it its first spin. It landed with its neck toward Laura.

“Truth,” said Laura.

“How far has your illicit fraternization with Kelly gotten so far?” asked Dina.

Laura’s face flushed almost as bright as her hair, even though Dina’s tone was indulgent.

“Not far. We haven’t even kissed outside of work yet. But that might change,” she smiled shyly at Kelly, “when we’re done here.”

The Crasher made a gagging noise, which the squad all ignored.

Laura spun next, landing on Dina.

“Truth.”

“Are you trying to come up with an excuse,” Laura asked her, “to monitor and restrict Kelly and me full time, to keep us always hungry for each other, so we’ll make better bait?”

“It crossed my mind,” Dina admitted. “But instead, I’m going to wish you luck, and quietly think up ways to discipline you if you alter our squad chemistry.”

“What have you come up with so far?” Laura asked, eyes subtly sparkling through her bashfulness.

“Wait for your next turn,” said Dina, grabbing the bottle and spinning.

It pointed to Jeff.

“Dare.”

“Show us your headstand splits,” Dina said immediately.

The Crasher sat up in bed at this point, to watch. He was obviously trying to do it silently, but between his bound hands and the ancient box spring, it was impossible.

The squad pretended not to notice.

Jeff took a few moments to limber up, placed his hands on the floor, and lifted the rest of himself into a free-balancing headstand. In a slow, controlled movement, he spread his legs in a sideways splits, forming himself into an uppercase T with a perfectly flat top.

Dina led a round of applause, and managed not to burst into laughter at the Crasher’s expense.

Like a pair of stage curtains, the parting of Jeff’s legs had perfectly framed the Crasher’s face, with his jaw fallen open, his eyes wide and fixed on Jeff’s package.

It was hard to miss in his pajama bottoms, and even more so in this position.

The Crasher’s expression aimed for rage, but without the power to back up that rage, it fell into a sort of introspective horror.

The heavily bulging webbed skin that protected the Crasher’s own crotch folded itself open, releasing a desperately straining penis. It was filmy and mottled all over like the rest of his skin, and a bit narrower than the average human man’s.

The Crasher contorted himself, trying to retract or hide it, but it would not cooperate.

Jeff brought his legs back together and lowered them in the direction of the bed, landing in a backbend before springing to his feet.

He was the first to acknowledge the Crasher directly since the game had begun, tossing him a wink before sitting back down and spinning the bottle.

“Dare,” said Kelly, as soon as it landed on her.

“I dare you to…” Jeff tapped his chin for a moment’s thought, “find a safe way to fuck that saw.”

“Done.”

Kelly went to collect the fallen crosscut saw and brought it back to the bedroom, examining it. The wooden bar that formed the handle was smooth, with ridges on one side to provide grip for the fingers. It only connected to the blade at the top.

This looked pretty simple.

Kelly dropped her black sleep shorts and panties, flipped the saw upside down, and held the handle out to Jeff, who had already gotten the lube out of the gear bag before she could ask for it.

When it was ready, she slid the handle carefully inside her, taking in a few pleased breaths as the grip ridges rubbed along her G-region.

The sawblade stuck out in front of her, serrations pointed upward. The end of the blade closest to her was capped with another length of polished wood, meant to protect a hand at work. It was spaced at just the right distance from the handle for her to grind her clit against it.

She held the blade steady from underneath with both hands and smiled slyly as she thrusted her hips against the wood.

If this didn’t qualify as fucking a saw, there was no such act.

But when it came to Truth or Dare, Kelly had never been one to do the bare minimum.

“You still have the next couple songs I put on the playlist?” she asked Laura.

With a few taps of Laura’s thumb, the room filled with a woman’s powerful rock scream and a heavy electric guitar riff.

The others watched, cheering, as Kelly danced and strutted for them. There were gasps and cackles when she stuck the sawblade between the bars of the bed’s cheap footboard, and began sawing into the top railing with her thrusts.

“What is this?!” the Crasher shouted, as Kelly broke all the way through the railing, sending a spray of sawdust across his ankles. She then started on a new section, a little closer to where she would need to cut if she meant to free his left leg.

After several minutes of obvious enjoyment, Kelly looked to Dina. “May I finish, boss?”

Just for fun, Dina made Kelly wait a good ten seconds, even though she had already decided that, with Jeff safe and the Crasher contained, there was no harm in it.

“As long as you don’t forget what we’re here for,” she said.

Kelly nodded and peeled off her red-glowing wristband. Just as the second song reached its bridge, she stuck the blade deep between the bars at the exact middle of the footboard.

The tip of the saw nudged one of the Crasher’s bound legs.

He had gone back to closing his eyes and trying to ignore their company, but this forced him to pay attention, spread his legs farther, and inch backward as much as the ropes allowed. Once he did, the blade was just barely too short to touch his crotch.

Keeping the saw right there, pointed at him, Kelly dragged it back and forth, grinding against it with each inward thrust, until she reached a satisfied cry of release.

The song wound down while she recovered herself, holding eye contact with the dumbfounded Crasher. Then she pulled the saw from the bed, still leaving it anchored inside her, and walked around to stand beside him.

He rolled away from her, as far onto his side as his restraints allowed.

He couldn’t get quite far enough to rub his pulsing erection against the mattress.

“What do you think, monster?” she teased, swinging her hips to tap the flat of the blade against his ass. “Think you’ve earned a ride on the world’s worst strapless strap-on?”

“Okay!” the Crasher cried. “I want it!”

“What?” Kelly snorted. “A ride on the world’s worst-”

“No,” the Crasher moaned. “Maybe! I want to be touched! I want to be part of your disgusting games. I want relief from this endless yearning! Please!”

Kelly pulled the saw out of herself and dropped it, turning serious. She examined the unchanged belt, on full display on the Crasher’s back.

“We’re going to need you to be a little more specific,” she told him.

“I want you to fuck me!” he spat.

“One of us?” Kelly asked. “All of us?”

“Any of you, all of you, just do it!”

“Do you submit to rehabilitation?” Kelly prompted.

“Yes, fine!”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to go back to the way you were? Pretend that none of this ever happened?”

“No!” the Crasher moaned.

He must have been telling the truth, because the enchanted belt began to glow, and sank through his skin, releasing his hands.

The only visible trace that remained was a collar, made from the same leather as the belt, and stamped with the same hex marks on the sides.

#

“You know, we were ready to give you a full week to get to this point,” Dina told the Crasher, while she untied his legs.

He had no retort for this. He only arched his hips up off the bed slightly, silently pleading with her not to make him wait that long.

Dina stripped off her wrist monitor, so that it wouldn’t announce the limits of her own patience. She nodded to Laura and Jeff to do the same.

“I think we’ll start you out with a chance to make amends,” Dina said. “Laura, you’re looking a bit left out, would you like to do the honors?”

With a smile, Laura stripped from the waist down, leaving her lacy shelf camisole in place, and took a seat at the head of bed, behind the Crasher.

“Turn over,” Dina told him. “And show her how sorry you are.”

It seemed to take the Crasher great effort to force himself to his elbows and knees, leaving his urgently ready erection hanging untended under him.

He lowered his head and extended a long, thin, muscular tongue to lick Laura’s waiting vulva.

Laura winced at first and held him back with a palm to his forehead.

“Here,” she pointed, tracing her favorite path around her clit with one instructive finger. “Gently.”

He tried again. Laura gave the others a shrug over his shoulder that clearly said, adequate for a first timer, and lounged back against the headboard, allowing him to proceed.

Kelly removed her remaining clothes, sat down next to Laura, and held her hand.

The Crasher looked up at her with wary curiosity, not pausing in his work.

“Giving me a second round so soon is a little above your grade level,” Kelly told him. “But you may touch my breasts, if you want.”

The Crasher tentatively reached up to caress her, his once-confident fingers clumsy with the unfamiliar kind of touch.

“Go ahead,” Dina told Jeff.

Jeff lubed himself up and climbed onto the bed behind the Crasher, kicking out a couple of the bars Kelly had mostly freed to make room for his feet to hang over the edge.

“Ready?” he asked the Crasher.

The Crasher paused, eyes wide, but eventually reached his hips backward, toward Jeff, toward any stimulation for his pleading nerves.

Jeff went slow, penetrating the Crasher millimeter by millimeter, stopping whenever he started to pull away in discomfort, and then proceeding when he relaxed. It took nearly a full minute before he had buried his dick completely in the Crasher’s ass, and he waited there about half a minute more, letting him stretch, before giving him a real thrust.

“Lucky you,” Dina told the Crasher. “After what you did to him earlier, he’ll last a good long time.”

The Crasher groaned into Laura’s pubic hair. There was both pleasure and distress in the sound, but by the way he was grinding against Jeff, the distress was still from what he wasn’t getting, rather than what he was.

As considerate a lover as Jeff was, he would never allow a monster to rush Dina’s plans. So, when the Crasher leaned his hips down to try to hump the mattress, Jeff pulled them firmly upright again and spanked his right cheek in warning.

The Crasher whined but did not dare stop his work on Laura long enough to speak.

Dina prepared herself, taking a vibrator bullet from the gear bag and fitting it into a specialized pocket at the front of a pair of open-crotched panties, and putting them on.

“I’m going to make this easy for you,” she explained to the Crasher, climbing onto the bed and sliding her body under his, face up.

Before he could get too many ideas about what he could do with her there, she locked her legs hard around his waist.

“Once I let your dick inside me, how long do you think you’d be able to use it at this point?” she asked him. “Five seconds? Maybe ten? I’m allowing you to make yourself useful for longer than that. Just rub these weird, fish man abs against the spot where you feel those vibrations, and let them do the work.”

In practice, the Crasher had to do even less than that. Jeff puppeted him through most of the rubbing. Each thrust from Jeff made the Crasher’s dick pulse helplessly against Dina’s ass, outside her panties, while his abs pressed the vibrator bullet against her clit.

Laura held the Crasher’s head in place for herself by his head fins.

Dina and Jeff shared a private smile, both noting and enjoying how much of her pleasure was coming from him, even with the Crasher sandwiched between them.

Kelly kissed Laura full on the mouth, right as she gasped with climax.

Dina was getting pretty close herself.

“Now!” she hissed at the Crasher, sliding herself a little farther down toward his hips, allowing him to shove that narrow, needy dick into her pussy.

He did so with an animalistic screech.

Her guess of five seconds was generous. With three wild, rapid pumps of his hips, the Crasher screeched again and fell limp on top of her.

By the time she’d signaled him, though, Dina’s orgasm would have been harder to stop than to follow through on.

She lay back under the combined weight of the Crasher and Jeff and let it come, the internal waves of pleasure blending ecstatically into the continued vibrations of the bullet.

The Crasher blearily tried to move, and had to be reminded with the touch of four different hands to wait for Jeff.

Jeff was the last to grunt, give one last thrust, pull out, and collapse into the pile of warm, contented bodies with a satisfied sigh.

“Well done, team,” Dina cheered and clapped her hands behind the Crasher’s head. “Laura, when you’re ready, call the ranch for a pickup team. Jeff, order pizza.”

***

Thanks for reading! If you had a good time, show me some love with your likes, favorites, comments, and/or follows, and let me know if you want to see the Monsterbait Squad bait some other monsters too.