Four of five areas split my time living in Charlotte, North Carolina. The constant four were work, home, The Immortal Elf, or the Earl Grey Wolf coffee shop. Then, my time was split into fifths when I had girlfriends. But that was infrequent because I spent most of my Charlotte living as a bachelor, which was not always by choice.
I remember The Earl Grey Wolf was the same distance from my apartment as the Elf but in the opposite direction. I went there a lot, but less than The Elf. These trips were whenever I needed caffeine or to finish a writing deadline. Since I was always tired and worked for many newspapers and magazines (print media), equating to many vanilla bean lattes, they made a killer vanilla bean latte.
Writing articles and column assignments for a media employer has yet to happen at my apartment. I didn’t want to bring that business into my home, so I established a work-life boundary. I wrote either at my office desk or the Wolf, which I preferred.
The Wolf was continually busy but never felt crowded. There were always seats at a table or on their comfy couch to work. Star Trek: The Next Generation memorabilia spread throughout the shop, which I obsessed over as a fan of the science fiction franchise. The owners also filled the shop with local supernatural artwork and music made by supernatural bands. Most of their customers were supernatural beings. Now, I should mention that The Earl Grey Wolf was owned and operated by werewolves.
Their regular customers had yet to learn that this was a local business started by members of and for the supernatural Charlotte community. I went there briefly before Rosie (my former supernatural girlfriend) introduced me to the owners. They were a lovely couple.
There’s a lot of misrepresentation of werewolves in horror movies and comics. They showed them off as savage and scary. The ones I knew didn’t turn into bloodthirsty wolf-human hybrid creatures during full moons. They didn’t walk on two legs and killed anything with their fangs and claws. The ones I knew shapeshifted into normal-looking wolves whenever they wanted, like the ones we mostly see in zoos or nature documentaries. They kept their minds and values in wolf form. They were primarily friendly but could become as dangerous as wild wolves if necessary. So you still didn’t want to piss them off.
I’m very confident the werewolf owners considered me a regular, mainly while I worked for that Charlotte-based monthly arts and culture magazine, which will be unnamed. We covered local news, gave new restaurant reviews, published upcoming City concerts and theater event dates, etc. I hope you get the gist. They’re still around, but mostly digital these days.
I covered the Carolina Panthers and Charlotte Hornets because of my sports journalism background.
Working for the art and culture magazine was fun and had great perks. We got invited to a bunch of restaurant openings, saw a bunch of great bands and plays, got the chance to see an orchestra concert for the first time, and not to mention all the NFL and NBA tickets. All of which were free to us. They wanted us to write about their food and events because the magazine at the time was a top-rated community source for all the things mentioned.
This magazine was one of my three favorite publications to work for, and I worked for several top newspapers and magazines in the US. The perks were great, but what was great was that I, Larry Byrd, was lucky enough to be tasked with creating the monthly crossword puzzle and word search. I miss making those and am disappointed never to get the chance again. That assignment is why this magazine, which I cannot name, is in my top three.
The crossword puzzle was due on the third Thursday of the month. So, this week, I did the “across” clues on Sunday or Monday and the “down” clues on Tuesday or Wednesday. Of course, this schedule was very loose and flexible because, a lot of times, I just did the whole damn puzzle the morning of the day it was due.
The Wolf was usually a haven for me, but I must bring up one weird week.
While working on the “across” clues, I drank a vanilla bean latte. I had just written down the number six clue, “Captain Picard Patrick,” (sometimes I liked to squeeze my interests into the puzzles) when I heard a gravelly confident voice from behind say, “Stewart” and “The dogwood is the North Carolina state flower,” which I had written for the number three clue.
I turned around and only saw a guy wearing dark sunglasses, a Carolina Panthers hat, and a smoke-grey hooded sweatshirt with The Earl Grey Wolf logo. I quickly recognized the black and teal Panther logo and the steam in the shape of a wolf from a coffee mug logo. I hoped that wasn’t the guy who called out my answers. If so, how did he know them? He looked like a guy you would see on America’s Most Wanted, a rough-around-the-edges kind of looking guy.
When did this guy come in? I’ve been facing the entrance this whole time. I would’ve noticed his Panthers hat. You didn’t see a lot of professional or college sports gear in The Wolf for whatever reason. No one had been around me to get a look at my clues. So if he did, how’d he know my clues?
He stood up. My heartbeat started to pick up like it does when we think something terrible is about to happen. I looked away and then back at where the stranger was sitting, but he was gone—poofed into thin air. I quickly grabbed my stuff and hurried past my apartment to The Elf in case someone followed me.
A few days later, this situation happened again when I was sitting on the couch with my clipboard. I just wrote down the final “down” clue, “Rick, who played the key master in Ghostbusters (1984),” and heard the same gravelly voice say, “Rick Moranis played the key master.”
Crap, I thought.
A spin around the coffee shop revealed that the only other person there was the same guy from earlier in the week. He wore those dark sunglasses, the same Panthers hat, and the same Earl Grey Wolf sweatshirt. Who wears sunglasses inside anyway?
Something worse than crap, I thought.
The stranger doesn’t disappear this time. Instead, I watched him stand up from the table and walk over to the counter. I couldn’t hear the order. My anxiety was rising, and my heart was beating away. My body felt like it was sweating. I pretended to work as I continued to spy for the next few slow minutes. I looked up left again to where the stranger was waiting at the counter, but he had moved to where I didn’t know until I heard a presence on my right.
“I got you a vanilla bean latte, Larry Byrd.” The stranger knew my name. I gulped before turning my head toward his gravelly voice. Face to face, he held a coffee-to-go cup meant for me, but I was too afraid to grab it. He picked up on my condition, placed the cup on the table, and said, “Sorry if I scared you Monday, and sorry for scaring you now. I am called Nigel.”
Nigel was one of those werewolves I was talking about earlier. He was not one of the bloodthirsty wolf monsters represented in horror movies but more like the endangered red wolves we have on the North Carolina coast. He came to me that week with dire information about my future.
We sat on that couch in The Wolf for a while that evening. Nigel mostly talked, and I listened. He divulged that he got the crossword puzzle answers from a clairvoyant werewolf, and he used them as proof for me to believe the real reason he came to me that week.
It worked. I bought it. I trusted Nigel when I drank the vanilla bean latte before he revealed the reason.
He told me I would inherit an estate on the North Carolina Coast. He described that estate as an old homestead with an old farmhouse called The Lodge. He also talked about the acres of gameland where humans paid to hunt werewolves and other supernatural creatures on this property. This idea that people hunted his kind for sport gutted me.
Nigel didn’t know why or when I would receive the property but wanted to plead with me to change what had happened in the past. He wanted me to stop the hunts because I am the future heir to this estate. I assured him I would when I received the property. That’s why he tracked me down that week.
This night was the first time I heard of The Shadow Elm, the homestead’s name.
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