Path expressions are ubiquitous in XML processing languages. Existing approaches evaluate a path expression by selecting nodes that satisfies the tag-name and value constraints and then joining them according to the structural constraints. We propose a novel approach, next-of-kin (NoK) pattern matching, to speed up the node-selection step, and to reduce the join size significantly in the second step. To efficiently perform NoK pattern matching, we also propose a succinct XML physical storage scheme that is adaptive to updates and streaming XML as well. Our performance results demonstrate that the proposed storage scheme and path evaluation algorithm is highly efficient and outperforms the other tested systems in most cases.