Mick handles unusual cases. He works alongside a four-thousand-year-old demon who has taken up residence inside his head — an arrangement neither fully chosen nor easily undone, but one that has proved, over the years, more useful than not. He is not easy to unsettle. Then a young woman starts appearing in his flat, night after night: silent, desperate, pressing her hands flat against her thighs, trying to say something he cannot hear. She is not dead — which is what makes her unusual. She is displaced: her life force separated from her body, burning slowly through reserves that will not replenish. To reach her, Mick finds a medium: Jade, seventeen years old, blind, and in possession of an ability so precise it changes everything. What the young woman is trying so urgently to communicate turns out to have nothing to do with herself.
Across London, Detective Reeves is looking at bodies. No cause of death. A mark burned into the skin of each victim — old-looking, methodical, absent from every medical record — that her specialist consultant, Dr. Emily Hendricks, recognises from fragments in archive texts she had hoped never to find confirmed in the material world. Two investigations running on separate tracks through the same city, accumulating evidence that neither team yet understands connects them. The Displaced is the story of what happens when they do.