“Goblin” meant more than just the ugly little creatures from the fairy tales, of course. Alana had read about them in the Compendium. Every culture had a different name for them, but they were all more or less describing the same thing: the vermin of the supernatural world, a vicious little predator that lived alongside humanity, hiding in caves and holes, coming out at regular intervals to feed. It picked off the weak and the small who wandered away too far, and carried them back to its lair, where it stored them like meat in a slaughterhouse, which is where the stories of the “Goblin Markets” came from. Easily written off as a bad dream or a cautionary tale until it began to rack up a body count.

A goblin was clever, if not smart. It was good at taking things apart, working nails or screws from boards, unlocking doors, untying knots. It dug tunnels. It would stalk its prey carefully and cover its tracks. It was small, but a dozen times stronger than a full-grown man. And it would hide from hunters like Alana.

The authors of the Compendium speculated that goblins probably started as human beings. The things from the Other Side could inhabit almost anything and turn it into a monster. But once here, it had to follow the same physical laws as all living things, to eat and reproduce. For both food and a place to lay its eggs, goblins preferred the same thing: people.

Alana hoped it was still only feeding on the Petersons. That was the lesser of two evils.

She picked up the boards and began stacking them to one side.

Underneath, she found the hole in the subfloor, leading to the crawl space. And there, in the dirt and broken cement of the foundation, she saw the tunnel where the goblin had dug its way into the Petersons’ home.

The air from below rose into the house and hit her in the face, making her gag.

That was another thing the fairy tales never mentioned about goblins. They smelled like raw sewage left in the trunk of a car with a dead body in the middle of the summer.

The sword began to glow again, more brightly now. It was time to hunt.

She took her last, deep breath of clean air, then dropped down and began to crawl.

The walls of the tunnel were smooth, the dirt packed hard as stone as she made her way through. It pitched steeply downward, going beneath the houses of the neighborhood, the storm drains and concrete pipes, then the old landfill that had been flattened by bulldozers when they built the subdivision.

The air grew much colder, and more stale. The tunnel widened. Alana hesitated. She could hear something up ahead in the dark.

Crying.

It was one of the Peterson boys. He wept softly to himself, like a much younger child mourning a broken toy or a skinned knee.