Khalid Sadaka, the youngest child, only son, and anomaly in a string of primly cultured older sisters, spent the first ten years of his life brooding in his Syrian hometown. While Sabah, Majida, and Ayeh were busy charming the public eye to death with their finesse, mystery, and elegantly fitted scarves, the Sadaka boy was the hollow-eyed kid who slunk around at the back of group photos and at the edge of family gatherings. Little of this changed when Khalid Sr. found a job at an American construction firm, plucking up his entire family off the serpentine, dusty streets of Damascus and plunking them all back down in the shiny steel skylines of Detroit, but it did get better in one way: he made friends. If one could call them friends. He was closetly violent rather than closetly studious, so at least he had a 'weirdo bully' rather than a 'nerd' stigma going for him.
He continued to defy parental expectation after he graduated from high school, deciding to throw his lot in with the U.S. Marine Corps. His main excuse was that he needed money for a college education his family wasn't able to afford for him, which was true, but he actually had little intent of ever going on to college. Joining the military was, besides a great way to cause teeth-grinding problems in his Israel (and all her allies)-allergic, Ramadan War veteran of a father, a chance to finally slip away and see the world while indulging in the primitive bonus of flaunting testerone in the name of one's country. He soon got to experience way more of either than he wanted to. An overseas deployment of his unit took him back to the Middle East, where his path would become intertwined with service under the leadership of Emile Danko; he would be at the man's side throughout most of the years of his enlistment. Among trailing over stepping stones to other locales in the area, he was present for the bloody accident in Angola, which was the very first time he ever opened fired on— and killed— civilians, as well as several previously friendly members of his squad.
The following few weeks were devoted to recovering from physical injuries he had sustained from the incident, namely a bullet in his wrist and various deep, child-mouth-sized chunks of flesh bitten out of his left forearm that required skin grafts; psychological reconstruction was a different story. He quietly served out the rest of his terms of his enlistment, which didn't have long remaining after Angola, but any possibilities he had been entertaining of reenlisting for a second go were dropped. It was sympathetically surmised by that he would head back home, maybe whiling away years to come in therapy sessions at a veterans' care center, but he once more surprised at least a few people when he went job-hunting at a private military contractor instead. Whatever instigating friendly fire had done to his personality, it hadn't done anything to dent his already built-up impassivity to blood; if anything, he now claimed he wanted more money for it.
Thus began his career with Triple Canopy, Inc, a paramilitary company which— like Blackwater— had a reputation for hiring a motley cluster of third-world nationals, former insurgents, and mercenaries of the most unsettling types around. Khalid found himself right at home among them, carving his own niche in an already long, suspected record of questionable behavior among some of his peers. Beyond what became the usual routine in Amman, Jordan, and then Baghdad, there was only one event that he cared to set aside in his mind as noteworthy, and it was neither directly related to his job nor came until many years later.
Sometime in mid-2007, he received news from an old friend back in Detroit, one he hadn't heard from since he had left the States the first time. It came in the form of a webcam video, flowing in on the flood of murmurs the outing of the Evolved had created worldwide: one recording a conversation with another mutual buddy. As Khalid watched, a curvy brunette he surmised was the girlfriend came into view and began berating the man kneeling in front of the screen in boxers, an escalating argument he couldn't quite hear thanks to the fuzzy sound quality of the recording. Then: several seconds he had to rewind. And rewind again. And again. The brunette's eyes picked up a flaring bronze glow in a final shriek; the man began smoking out of his eye sockets, his skin rubberizing from more than sweat by the time what was a slow, internal charbroil erupted into crackling licks of flame. Guttural yells. There were eight more minutes Khalid did not watch. He would learn later in a scientific report that the woman possessed the ability to set mammalian adipose cells ablaze, similar to lighting off dry, flammable straw with a wick.
When somewhere across the ocean, Danko left Homeland Security to form his own little militant cell in Humanis First, his timing couldn't have been better. Khalid was one of those rung up again with an offer to come back to active service, something which was only all too happily accepted. He left his post with Triple Canopy with grim alacrity, relocating to New York to take up a job again at the Hunter's side. In the process, he's earned his own informal moniker he has come to embrace with a smirk: the Bloodhound, due to the notoriously cold efficiency (and tenacity) which which he has become known for hunting the Evolved. He will find you, you freaks. :(
