I look to Amelia and am relieved—and proud—to see she holds her face even. Because Anwar getting way underpaid for our deck only adds insult to injury.

“We’re all saving to go to college. We have a fund from what we earn here,” Rowe says. “Rosa said if we help unlock the King and figure out how to find the other missing cards, she’ll split some of the sale between us.”

“Rosa went out to see if she could find something called a ‘toolset’ to determine the other coordinates,” Supriya adds. “We’re supposed to be solving this four-number sequence while she’s gone. We made some headway, but we’re stuck.”

Sherwin still looks displeased about how much they’ve told us, but the fact that he hasn’t totally shut them down must mean they really do need our help. I also don’t see the deck anywhere, so it must be locked up somewhere they think is safe.

“Want to walk us through what you have?” I ask.

“Well, I started us off using my math brain,” Rowe says, walking over to the board to explain her work. “We don’t know a ton about Perilli, but we know he always believed Pentacles stood for earth sciences. We here at Chills Coven believe science is basically the same thing as casting spells, so we broke it down like a spell equation. The four numbers must be distinct, be related to the Pentacles suit, and add up to the King, which stands for fourteen.

“That leaves us with the numbers one through thirteen. And since our lowest possible combination of numbers is one plus two plus three equals six, that rules out anything over eight, which would put us over fourteen. Then, accounting for the numbers needing to be distinct, that narrows it to just five options that add up to fourteen: 8 1 2 3, 7 1 2 4, 6 1 2 5, 6 4 3 1, and 5 4 3 2. Finally, accounting for every potential combination of the number order gives us twenty-four options per set, so a total of one hundred twenty possibilities.”

Rowe points to a part of the board where, indeed, 120 different number combination sequences have been listed.

“Next up, it was my turn to get spooky on it,” Sherwin says, taking over. “My darling Rowe misspoke a bit. Existing equations and recipes aren’t actually considered spells, because we have mastery over them. We define spellcraft here as any future science, the magic that we don’t yet fully understand. Astrology might be considered spellcraft by this definition, but I like to focus on Numerology. Even though numbers have no physical existence, they order every aspect of the universe.