Once we’ve resettled—with what can only be described as truly transcendent cups of coffee—the Coven stepsisters walk us through Perilli’s latest puzzle. True to Pentacle form, Perilli hid the King card in a large circular box, one made to look like a coin. On its face, there’s a pentacle set with five points. The fifth point at the top is the King of Pentacles, while the other four points have combination-style locks with scrolling numbers from 1 to 14. In the center of the pentacle is a list of instructions on how to open the coin box:

Find the four distinct Pentacle Arcana numbers that add up to the King and tell his story in the correct order. Tampering with the box or locking in an incorrect combination will destroy the card.

Once again, Perilli wasn’t kidding around with his homemade self-destruct mechanism—it must have been some kind of secondary, sculptural engineering art form for him. The back of the lockbox does indeed house a canister of some acidic liquid, probably the same kind that Amelia said was in the Princess of Cups maze tank. It makes me wonder why Perilli didn’t have a similar mechanism for the Prince of Wands, but then I think that card was far better hidden than the Princess and the King, both of which were also readily accessible by Perillians.

“You’re right,” I say, trying to seem surprised. “That is pretty out there.”

“How did you even find the lockbox?” Amelia asks, seeming innocent enough.

“Well a bunch of us who follow Perilli visit this little treehouse out in the woods. Supriya especially likes to keep it full of her flower arrangement experiments,” Rowe explains. “It was one of the places where Perilli liked to paint, so we always expected there was a card hidden there—especially because there’s a locked compartment on a platform inside that no one knew the keycode for.”

“So what changed?” I ask.

“It was all Rosa, really,” Rowe continues. “Some dude called her out of the blue, saying he inherited the final deck from his grandfather. Rosa thought he was a fraud, but then, as collateral, he gave her the coordinates on the cards that led to the treehouse, which also had the code to open the platform compartment.”

Anwar may have stolen Amelia’s story along with the deck, but at least he had the decency not to sell us out. Otherwise, this visit definitely would have gone much differently.

“Fast-forwarding,” Sherwin jumps in, shooting the clearly more loose-lipped Rowe another mean mug. “Rosa agreed to buy the deck and the dude dropped it off this morning. Total dreamboat, but probably not very bright. Rosa bought the deck from him for a fraction of what it’s worth, at least to the right buyer. It’ll be worth even more if we can unlock the King of Pentacles.”