Sidekick Saturday [15] SHIFTER!!!

Sidekick Saturday is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by Jaclyn at JC's Book Haven. There are many secondary characters that are as great as the primaries. In some cases, the sidekicks actually steal the show and you like them better than the heroine or hero. Maybe they didn't have enough page time for how great they were. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Choose a sidekick *or someone other than the hero or heroine* that you would like to put in the spotlight that fits in this week's type
• Share a picture and information about the character
• Give the title and author of a book the character can be found in
• Please don't include too many spoilers when describing why the character is such a great sidekick
• Put your link in the Linky thing and comment

(By U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)
I choose Ben from Patricia Briggs' Mercy Thompson series.

(gdcgraphics [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

He's awful, the most sexist character I've read where he's not the bad guy and yet he's won me over completely. I just love him. He's one of the most loyal to Adam in the pack, plus he loves Warren and Kyle. That's right, he loves them even if he'd never put it like that. He's particularly on my mind right now because I'm 2/3 through Frost Burned, the 7th book in the series (and it's so good). He hasn't had much opportunity in this installment to throw out the "c" word, but that doesn't mean he's worked through his issues.

I posed this challenge to my mom and sister. So my sister...first she suggested a shifter in the second book of her Kelly Meding series. That's how she put it, like that is information. I grilled her, she repeated herself. I told her she's fired. I bugged her about it later, but she went back to her first and only pick. I suggested Perry from the C.C. Hunter Shadow Falls series. She was real excited about that choice, but I saw the stubborn glint in her eyes. So her pick is some nameless hot shifter in the second book in a series I haven't read. (She's aware my brattiness carried over from our conversation to this post.)

My mom struggled because the only paranormal books she reads are mine. I even wrote a shifter series, but it was during my divorce and let me tell you it's bloody and the men do not fare well. Then her eyes lit up, "Does the person have to shift into an animal?" She chose someone from Soul Bender who truly shifts into something else. Can't say who without it being a spoiler.