After leaving the not-thing behind, he’d found a girl in an alcove, then a boy in the foyer, and now he was licking his wounds on a chaise on the main level of the opera house. He was a sight to behold, covered in blood that belonged to a collection of people (including his own), black jeans dirty enough to leave dust wherever he sat, boots doing the same on the floor. He had no shirt, since the not-thing had used it as a medical triage kit, and his lightly furred chest was a mess of blood and drool. His obscene, corkscrew curls were sticking to his back, shoulders and face, thanks to a fine lather of sweat that covered his entire body.
He still hurt, but he was satiated, and that was enough for him.
He was considering a nap when, suddenly, the pain in his throat became unbearable. There was no warning, and there was no grand transformation. He didn’t even feel his body returning to normal. One moment he was the Wolf, and the next he was himself.
He wasn’t a healthy man, even on a good day. A cocktail of drugs and a steady diet of booze meant he’d shot his liver and kidneys to hell and back, and even the healthiest man couldn’t handle blood loss the way a wild animal could. The wound at his neck, an inch deep and nowhere near scabbed over, began spurting again as soon as the neck it inhabited became considerably smaller, and the only thing Evan could do was raise a hand to it sluggishly.
All the desires of the wolf, the hungers, they were all gone again, and Evan felt the loss more sharply than he felt the absence of blood in his veins. Years of nothing, of not wanting anything with any force, not even that next drink, washed away in one night of wolfish hunger. He could feel the memory of it, of that hunger, and now it was gone again, and he couldn’t stand it.
It was Eames that managed to get the bloody fool off the couch and, being Eames, he opted for his own door and his own world to recover. His body, unfortunately shared all of Evan’s failings (a hardship of sharing it with the other man), but he could contact Arthur once he was through the door, and Arthur would look after matters. That’s what pointmen did, after all, when things went terribly wrong on a job.
Eames felt certain this counted as things going terribly wrong.