Disclaimer: I don't own Angel, Buffy, Prison Break, or anything else I might be borrowing from. Because, yeah, this universe keeps getting more and more complicated.

Author's Note: Thanks to Imzadi for the review. You rock my world, hon. Also, I did some research for this chapter: "Questioning the Delphic Oracle" by John R. Hale, Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, Jeffery P. Chanton, and Henry A. Spiller.

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"Do you realize what you have done?"

The Oracle felt the wood beneath her cheek crack as Gabriel slammed her into the top of her own desk. Yes, she'd gotten the desk from Goodwill, and it was made from ply wood and particle board, but it still hurt like hell. She thought she felt something in her cheek give as well, but she immediately pushed that thought from her mind. Focus. She had to keep her focus, or she was going to lose everything.

"Do you realize who that woman was?" Gabriel bellowed in her ear, then loosened his hold on her collar, slightly.

Cass took a deep breath—the first he'd allowed her since dragging her into her own office and slamming the door shut behind them—and then swallowed. "Dr. Sara Tancredi."

"The daughter of Governor Frank Tancredi, one of the last few American politicians to remember the true meaning of justice. The doctor herself was a drug addict who was inspired to clean up her life. There were plans for them, Oracle. Not the kind of grand destiny plans that you would understand, but plans nonetheless." His nails were digging into the back of her neck, cutting sharp enough to draw blood. She could feel it oozing down her neck and across her throat. "Now, thanks to your stupidity, she's dead."

Gabriel let go of her neck, seizing the back of her shirt, using it pull her up from desk, and flinging her across the room. The back of her knees hit the front of the couch, and she sat down hard. She hadn't realized that her boss had this kind of fury in him. He'd always seemed so serenely arrogant. If he'd been especially hard on her, she'd always attributed it to her having come over from the ranks. Most of the Higher Powers in HR were handpicked humans who had died nobly or special spirits designed for this sort of thing.

She was just an oracle. A kid who somehow ended up in the hands of the priestesses at Delphi. They'd exploited the seer's powers she'd been born with. Day in, day out, she'd sat in that temple, breathing in the pneuma that filled the natural cavern. They'd fed her enough to sustain her, barely. The only men she'd ever seen were those that came to seek the wisdom of the oracles. Amnesia accompanied the trance the pneuma put her in, so she didn't even know what she said as she sat perched on her little three-legged stool above the cracks in the earth.

It'd dragged on for years. How many, she had never been able to tell, but it had come to a sudden end. A party of particular prestige had come to the temple—a king, a high priest, somebody of importance—and the priestesses had forced her down into the bowels of the earth, despite all of the omens that said that day was particularly bad for prophecy.

She'd been told, when she died, that an evil spirit had possessed her. Punishment for trying to force a prophecy from the Powers That Be. It was only in recent decades that modern science had told her just what the pneuma was—ethylene—and that her death had simply come from a bad high. At some point, in her thrashing, she must have vomited and gotten some in her lungs. Pneumonia and death and then the chance to do something really worthwhile—the PTB always offered the opportunity to seers post-mortem—followed.

She'd chosen to join Michael's army because she wanted to make a mark on the world than rather just sit and watch it go by. Unfortunately, the Army of Light hadn't mobilized since before she was born.

Now, Cass realized with disgust, she'd definitely made a mark. She'd gotten an innocent woman killed. Her shoulders slumped as she hung her head.

"You will have to be punished, you understand this?" Gabriel said as he stepped in front of her. The Oracle could see the toes of his polished wing-tips on the edge of her vision. "I knew you were a liability from the moment your application for transfer crossed my desk, but we were so short-handed with the two near-Apocalypses in Los Angeles and the closing of the Hellmouth in Sunnydale. I decided to take a chance on you, but apparently I should have trusted my first instincts." With a gentleness incongruent with his previous rough handling of her, he lowered his hands to her shoulders. "For your crimes against humanity and this office, I strip you of your powers. I deny you the immortality granted to you when you crossed over the threshold of death. I leave you as you were—mortal and weak."

Power pulsed through his hands and slammed into her. Being struck by lightning was surely painless compared to this. Her bones vibrated, her blood boiled, her teeth throbbed with the sheer force of it. The Oracle threw back her head and screamed.