A/N: Hi again! Thanks for reading! The song in this chapter, 'Carry Me Away', which also gives this story its title, is a song sung in English from the anime 'Kaiba'. If you search online you should be able to find the lyrics. I thought it fit the story very well, but I do not own it. Enjoy! :-)

CHAPTER TWO: THE RESCUE

Severus growled under his breath. How far had he been walking towards their footsteps without catching up with the Aurors?

He was surprised Lucius and the others hadn't come after him yet. Perhaps they had cornered some Aurors elsewhere outside of Hogwarts and were busy. Maybe it would be better if he left before they had to organize a search party. And yet if he lost his prey the Dark Lord's opinion of him would drop. And if he was able to bring them down his status would skyrocket. No, he would keep after them. They were only steps ahead, their thoughts silent but their footfalls loud and clear. He would find them.

Only a few more steps into the woods and the sound of scuffling overhead drew Severus's attention. He jerked his gaze upward, into the gnarled branches of the trees, just in time to see something scurry by, as well as those strange glittering silver threads still shining in the darkness. Some creature of the night, no doubt. He did not have time to linger, or to worry about the tricks his eyes played on him. He had other senses, and they were following the footsteps.

Ignoring the sounds of more scuffling, coming from behind him and seeming to pass him in the night, running ahead, he continued on.

There he was! Fawkes had spotted him, still in the woods, and safe, but storming forward with resolve as though on a mission. He didn't look so different than she remembered him from his school days. He was taller, and some of his scrawniness was filling out into the muscles of manhood, but he still had that lank stringy hair and long nose from his youth that his peers had so loved to cruelly tease him about.

To Fawkes, though, he had always had a strange sort of attractiveness about him. And those eyes, so dark and piercing, yet they had always held a sort of innocence as well. A loneliness, too. That would not change, no matter how much of a Death Eater he thought himself to be. He had not had an easy life. It had driven him to this.

Fawkes watched him plow through the brush, his feet making no noise. He had probably spelled them to – no, there was a noise. Human footsteps, echoing from no more than a quarter mile in front of Snape, but not moving forward, staying stationary, and not quite right. Not exactly the sound of human footsteps, but something familiar...

And then it hit her with a crushing agony the true meaning of Lord Voldemort's words to his two Death Eaters moments ago. His words that there were things in this forest. But he had not finished. He had not told them. He had not warned any of his Death Eaters about what he knew lived in these woods.

He had not told them about the acromantulas, and now Severus was walking straight into their nest.

Now that she knew what to look for she saw them, too. The spiders, en route to their central web from all over the forest, knowing that prey was approaching. They scurried through the branches towards the nest in rows, passing right over Severus's head without him even stopping to notice. The strands of their webs glittered in what little light remained this night, clustering thicker and more frequent the closer Snape approached their web, the 'footsteps' he was following really the spiders' plucking the silk strands, mimicking the sounds of human treads to near perfection, luring in their prey in the culmination of years of brilliant magical breeding.

And yet still Severus pressed on, thinking he was after his Aurors. He was still such a young Death Eater. Overconfident. Naïve. Even stupid.

The hunter had become the hunted.

Not if Fawkes could help it. There was still time. And, though she couldn't completely explain the sheer strength of her conviction and need, the last thing she wanted to see was Severus killed by those spiders. He had a greater future than that; she knew it in deep in her soul.

She called out to him, flying low over his head, but he marched on. Was he ignoring everything now? Did she just sound like any bird, squawking in the night? How could she get his attention?

Her song. That was the answer. He knew her song. Fawkes flew swiftly ahead and perched on a branch he would be ducking under very soon. She was not afraid of the spiders. After all, she had phoenix fire on her side. But it wouldn't be enough to save Severus from all of them if he made it to the nest. Which was why she had to act now.

Fawkes opened her beak and sang, one of her most beautiful songs, in the form of a phoenix lament that Severus would be certain to hear, that would touch him to his very core. It was a song she had sung when she was a girl, called 'Carry Me Away', when she had been imprisoned by Aldous and still held out hope of getting her life back, of being free. Severus had heard her sing it before.

A cool wind whipped through the forest as Severus tailed his victims, and with it a hauntingly beautiful melody that made him slow to a momentary stop. It had been a while, and he had been ignoring the wind and the scuttling of forest creatures in the branches, but this was new, and made him look up. The song was familiar, and felt as though it were coming from both deep inside of him and right in front of him.

Yes. There, on a branch ahead, was Fawkes the phoenix, headmaster Dumbledore's pet bird. Severus had fond memories of this creature, though his memories of the headmaster were quite a bit less than fond. If they took over Hogwarts he had, he now realized, hoped Fawkes would see their superiority and come over to their side. But she was loyal to the headmaster...

"Fawkes, what are you doing here?"

At his question, Fawkes's feathers puffed up with joy, a warm fire rising in her chest. He had stopped, he had acknowledged her. And his eyes held no malice now. He looked hardly any different than he had as a little boy telling her about his awful father. There was still a connection between them.

She took off from the branch and flew down to land on the leaf litter in front of him, taking a few steps forward, cooing and nodding her head off in the other direction, trying to tell him he had to go home. Go back. Get out while he still could.

Baffled, Severus watched the large red bird cock its head at him, rustling the ground with its feet and making the noise Severus had tried so hard to conceal from his prey. "Shush," he admonished the bird, holding a finger to his lips. What rotten luck this was. "I don't have time to play right now." He turned to continue through the forest after the footsteps, intent on walking around the interloper.

Fawkes could only watch in dismay as Severus scolded her like he would a foolish pet, and continued onward. He couldn't keep going. The clicking sounds above her indicated that the spiders were getting restless, anxious. Once he made it to the nest they would be on him so quickly Fawkes might not even have time to heal him with her tears.

She could already feel those tears of sorrow. She could not lose him. Not Severus. In this moment she knew he was as dear to her as Albus was, maybe even more so. It was time for desperate measures. She burst into flame and flew ahead of him, matching and then surpassing his pace as he picked up speed and tried to get away from her. She had to save him.

She stopped in front of him, hovering in the air, a majestic sight, she knew, with her flames engulfing her body. They felt stronger, warmer, and fiercer than they ever had before. It was her conviction. If she could not stop him she would grab him and Apparate him away from here whether he liked it or not. But he might come back. What could she do? He needed to know why she was taking him away. Maybe there was some way she could make him understand.

"Severus!" The strangled cry that escaped her lips was not a squawk, but a voice she hadn't heard in what felt like eons. She could still feel the flames around her but something had changed. She reached for him, not with a wing, but with a hand, with fingers. And he stopped and stared. She had done it. She had gotten through to him, she knew she had. And this time, somehow... it had been something only she could do.

"Merlin..." Severus could only form that one word when he saw the raven-haired beauty standing in front of him. He did not know what had happened, but Fawkes the phoenix had chased him through the wood in a fierce pursuit that had surprised and confused him, and then in a burst of flame she had transformed before his very eyes into this young woman, perhaps a bit older than him but certainly not old. And now she was staring down at her hands in wide-eyed contemplation, her expression one of soft wonder. He could not stop looking.

Fawkes could not believe her eyes, but it was true. The spell had been broken. The tears welling in her human eyes... she did not know whether they were tears of joy or of desperation. After all, Severus was still the spiders' intended victim, if she did not do something to stop it. "Severus, please, you must leave this place."

"Who are you?"

"You know me," she took a few hesitant steps toward him, reaching out again, afraid he would run around her once more, but he did not move. She was surprised at the steadiness in her human legs after nearly a millennium of non-use. "I'm Fawkes. Your friend. If you'll have me as one. If you'll listen to what I have to say. I've been trapped in the body of a phoenix for nearly a thousand years, and now you're the only one alive today who even knows. But you can't stay here. You must go home."

"You're Fawkes?" He did not seem to be registering her pleas yet, only her transformation. "I always thought... you were a boy."

"Severus, this is hardly the time for gender confusion!" She didn't know whether to be insulted, amused, or frustrated. Frustration won out. "You have been following a false trail for miles now! The acromantulas are after you!" Without thinking, she reached to take his hands in hers, clutching them close, surprised at their warmth, especially when she was still surrounded by the fires of her transformation.

"Acromantulas?" he drew his head back a bit, his gaze reflecting disbelief, though he did not pull his hands away. "I was following Aurors. If you really are Fawkes, then you'll understand when I tell you that I have a mission. If you let me complete it I promise to ask the Dark Lord to spare Dumbledore's life when we take over."

"Severus," her voice cracked a little as she shook her head rapidly back and forth. Why didn't he understand? Was it because of his youth? Fawkes had been transformed at the age of twenty-eight, and so she was older than her dear companion now, perhaps more capable of thinking critically where he could not. "You were a good student. I'm sure you know about their abilities. How they pluck the strings of their webs to mimic the sound of human footsteps and lure in their prey. There is a large colony living here in the Forbidden Forest. You saw their webs. They are crawling around in the trees above us right now. You are the victim Severus, not the Aurors. You must escape with your life."

"Impossible!" This time he did draw his hands away, taking a few steps back from her, though not bolting. Thank God he wasn't bolting. "If there were acromantulas living in this forest the Dark Lord would have warned us. Acromantulas aren't even native to this part of the world."

At Severus's declaration the girl sighed, her eyes, as dark as Severus's own, flicking down to the ground as she shook her head. "Severus..." Her voice saying his name was sweet, like one of her songs, if she truly was Fawkes. Even more confusing, Severus found himself regretting letting go of her hands. He did not allow many women to touch him, not since Lily had left, something Bellatrix Lestrange found no end of amusement in and took advantage of whenever she had a chance. But this woman...

"You're being fooled," she met his gaze again, the conviction in those eyes reminding him of her phoenix fire. She still seemed to subtly glow in the dark night, the fires taking time to dim around her new form. "Your Dark Lord doesn't care for you the way you think he does. He's known about the acromantulas ever since he was a student at Hogwarts. He's the only reason Rubeus Hagrid was expelled and prohibited from performing magic. The spider was Hagrid's pet, blamed for the deaths in the forties, but it was a lie your master concocted to protect the truth and his own involvement. Dumbledore believed Hagrid, and they allowed the acromantulas to live here. I know. I was there. I saw everything. If you don't believe me just look up, and not for a split second, really look. Use your wand. They're there."

Severus opened his mouth, about to ask why he should bother believing anything she said, but he could not bring himself to do so. He retrieved his ebony and, ironically, phoenix feather wand from where he had replaced it in his robe pockets, and muttered a quiet Lumos minima. The soft glow that emanated was just enough for him to look up into the trees.

It was then that it all invaded his senses at once. His ears picked up the excited clicking of their chelicerae, his eyes met their eight glowing ones and their furry, immense bodies as they scuttled by, some stopping to watch him as though already drooling for his flesh. And the threads, the ones he had thought were tricks of his mind in the dark, they were strewn from tree to tree in tangled masses of webs.

He stepped back, but the trees were everywhere, and he felt fear. True fear such that he hadn't felt in a long time, since he had developed his confidence in his powers as a Death Eater. But no lone wizard nor even a pair such as he and Fawkes were match for an army of spiders such as this. He spun back to face his companion. Meanwhile the spiders seemed to be biding their time as they watched, probably thinking they had two human meals now. "But the Aurors-"

"They must be long gone by now," Fawkes interrupted, reading his thoughts.

"Probably when I was no longer able to sense their minds..." he realized this with great trepidation. How long had he been following the spiders' mimicry, oblivious to the true danger he was in? He gaped at Fawkes. "You saved my life. Why?"

"Because I had to. Because... only I could do it," she answered mysteriously, but her eyes were damp with tears. She shook her head to clear her thoughts and reached for his hand again. "We have no time to waste. Apparate away with me. Please."

He felt safer just with her hand in his, and for a moment the complicated details of the situation escaped him. He nodded, and in an instant their bodies were being squeezed through Apparition Space, Non-being, Everything, and they emerged outside the Hogwarts gates, their surroundings as quiet as if nothing had happened tonight in the first place.