Echoes of Magical Vengeance (Midlife Witchery #23)

The gods are dying in their sleep. The killer calls it retribution.
It's three in the morning when Artemis manifests at Pymm's Pondside looking like death warmed over. With divine power flickering like a faulty light bulb and dark circles that shouldn't exist on a goddess, she's begging for help with nightmares that are literally killing her kind and Fiona Shakleton knows their hard-won week of peace is officially over.
The goddess of the hunt has never asked for anything. She demands, expects, and occasionally threatens. But asks? Never. Which means things are properly buggered.
The nightmares aren't random—they're echoes of magical vengeance from a mystery cult the Olympians destroyed centuries ago. A cult that discovered how to make gods mortal and paid for that knowledge with their lives. Now someone is channeling their collective rage into a weapon, systematically executing the divine beings responsible for their massacre. And with each god that dies screaming in their sleep, the vengeance spreads, infecting anyone with supernatural heritage and threatening to tear reality itself apart.
As the Backside of Forty digs deeper, they expose an uncomfortable truth. The mystery cult wasn't trying to destroy the gods, they were only trying to hold them accountable. The Olympians killed them not for being evil, but for threatening divine supremacy. Which raises the question no one wants to are they fighting to stop mass murder or just protecting the powerful from consequences?
Fiona's still recovering from nearly losing herself to Roxy's corruption. Violet's phoenix nature is evolving in ways that blur the line between destruction and transformation. Aislinn's daughter is manifesting terrifying new abilities. And they're all being forced to choose between stopping a mass execution and acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, some gods deserve what's coming.
With two days until the new moon ritual that will kill every guilty deity simultaneously, the team must find a third option between revenge and impunity. Because if they fail, it won't just be gods who die—it'll be everyone caught in the crossfire when the boundary between mortal and divine realms shatters completely.
Retribution or responsibility. Murder or consequence. Sometimes the line between them is just semantics and desperation.
And the Backside of Forty is about to find out which side of that line they're really on.
Some nightmares hunt you. Others make you question whether you're the monster for trying to wake up.