Stockton

Fifth Ward to South Bronx- that was the move Rashid Stockton’s mother made and it doomed him. Young Rashid never had a chance. His life was the time between hustles. All around him the brick walls depicted ghetto art commemorating one dead street hero or another. That’s how Rashid came to view life. It was the quest to have as many people know your name as you possibly could before you died in a hail of bullets and some graffiti tagger sprayed your face up as a monument on the side of a liquor store. Rashid never would have been one of those community heroes, however. Mistaking infamy for reverence, he began early on the career of a small-time pimp and pusher. While he may have died with the requisite car chase and gunplay, no one would have missed him. By 11, he was running crack to the crackheads on government disability whocouldn’t leave theirprojects. By 16, he was practically the godfather of his Hunts Point housing project, pistolwhipping would-be toughs twice his age. He surrounded himself with vicious lieutenants, all of whom acknowledged that he was even nastier than they could summon the nerve to be. Rashid moved out of his mother’s apartment when he was 18. He didn’t last a year on his own before coming to the attention of the Sabbat. Rashid’s sire Embraced him during a minor crusade of his own one that ended in his Final Death. After a skirmish with police over a drug deal gone awry, Jeffrey Mullins found himself on the run from a dozen police cruisers and an APB. Mullins took refuge in the basement of Rashid’s apartment building during the day, planning to head out of town and lie low the next night. Rashid and a few of his boys went into that basement to cut cocaine, and when Mullins rose, he found his temporary haven full of dope dealers hard at work. Laughing at his “good fortune,” Mullins killed all of them except Rashid, whom he Embraced with the intention of forcing to sell the coke and then taking the cash for his own. Rashid calmlj listened to what he was told to do, finished cutting the coke, beat Mullins into paste with a length of pipe, and sold the cocaine as a Cainite. Without a mentor to explair his condition to him, Rashid attracted curious Sabbat ir a few nights. His mercenary nature and brutal personality earned him a bishop’s recommendation to the Black Hand Rashid acclimated slowly to the assassins’ society, no1 being used to taking orders or killing without some finan. cia1 need. Before too long, though, the sect managed tc overwhelm him with its propaganda. Rashid had neve] had too much mental fortitude, relying on viciousnes: instead. Given purpose, Rashid became an ardent sup. porter of the Sabbat. His superiors in the Black Hanc placed him in the Love’s Easy Tears pack because of ifi own rising political visibility. The pack had already yielded a templar and garnered numerous accolades fighting againsl the Ventrue Michaela’s fledgling coteries; it seemed to be a rising star to which the Black Hand could attach theii own figurehead and acquire status. Not a year after Rashid joined the pack, though, t h c Camarilla made its move into New York. To his credit Rashid survived better than several of his packmates. Tc the pack‘s detriment, however, it wasn’t enough, anc Love’s Easy Tears had to content itself knowing only thal it had helped a few prominent Cainites escape to plan 2 fight for another night. Such has been Rashid’s purpose since the fall of thc city. He strongly supports Hester’s urge to rebuild the pack and use it to establish the Sabbat once again as the dominant sect inNew York. Where he disagrees with her however, is in tactics. While Hesterwatches the Camarill; CHAPTERTHREE: ALL THE BEAL~R~L 101 Cindred and cripples them as they rise to power, Rashid vould prefer to wage the holy war on all of them and kill hem as they turn up. He and Hester argue frequently h u t plans; he claims that the sooner they act, the sooner he city returns to the Sabbat, and she claims that if all they io iskill every Cainite they find, they’ll never actually stop :he influx of new vampires into the city. For the time ,eing, they compromise, with the members of the pack zalously murdering one “Kindred” and then reporting Jack to Polonia with the status of another. The whole iffair frustrates Rashid, who’s voiced his desire to start a Jack of his own, in league with Hester’s reformed Love’s Gsy Tears but independent of it.